Practice in Still Life 9: The Shape of Thought to Come

An essay on immanence, transcendence, practice, and the problem of nihilism

Jan 09, 2026

Dear readers,

I have since last spring been serializing portions of my book Practice in Still Life. The pieces contained therein began as older essays, errant fragments, and conference papers or public talks I’ve given over the past 2–3 years. The below essay marks the final piece of that serialization. The piece started as a talk I was workshopping (in a few different iterations) a few years ago. You can find those original notes here.

I went back and forth about whether to publish this last piece. It’s quite long—coming in at 19K words—and so it definitely stretches past the limit of an online essay. I thought about about breaking it up into pieces, but that didn’t feel quite right, either, since the sections of the piece hang together tightly and cumulatively. I also had some reservations about posting the piece, since already now, less than a year after publishing it, I think I would have written it differently. And, indeed, I likely will write it differently in the future. I can see this piece growing into something else—probably a standalone book, with some of the themes further elaborated and refined.

Practice in Still Life is a laminated work on purpose, with the small fragments coming together into the longer essays, finally cumulating in the piece you’ll find below. In it, I wanted to pull on a thread that Pierre Hadot drew out from his exchanges with Michel Foucault, namely, that there is for Hadot something altogether missing in Foucault’s work on what the latter man calls “technologies of the self” or the “aesthetics of existence,” even as Hadot and Foucault share a sense that what needs recovering in philosophy today is askēsis, that is, spiritual exercises of transformation that complement philosophy’s regular emphasis on reason and discourse. What’s missing for Hadot? In a phrase, a robust sense of transcendence (or a participation in a “found” or “substantive” order, to borrow Charles Taylor’s language).

To explore this question, I drew Foucault down to Nietzsche, Nietzsche down to Plato, Plato back to Heidegger, Heidegger over to Nishitani, and all of them back to the more original sense of Greek paideia and the question of the Good. The essay grew out from the middle of this dynamic, giving it a meandering style that was essential for me to get clear on what, exactly, the stakes are here. And I think I succeeded in creating a dialectic of sorts among this busy intersection of philosophers.

Still, I would modify a few things in a future iteration of this piece:

I gave short shrift to the broader transitions from “substance” to “construction” (to borrow from Taylor again) vis-a-vis the metaphysics of practice, which I have started to pick up in more detail here. I think there is both a gain and a loss in this historical transition; this piece emphasizes the loss, which isn’t adequate.
I also don’t address the social or political ramifications of these changes, good and bad, as I started to do in this post, drawing on John Rawls and his work on the shift from teleological conceptions of the Good to procedural ones. A future version of this piece will be more attentive to these dimensions of the discussion.
Finally, since writing the piece, I have taken a much longer look at the question of Heidegger’s reading of Plato. I still think my conclusions below stand, but I hadn’t yet read a few key supporting texts (I’m thinking especially of Mark Ralkowski’s book Heidegger’s Platonism and Paul Friedländer’s reading of aletheia in his Plato: An Introduction, among several others). These only serve to strengthen my reading, which draws heavily from Eric Perl, but they do add needed color.

But, as it stands, I think the piece starts a conversation on how we might read philosophical practice in the context of what I take to be perhaps the key issue of importance today—the question of nihilism. If you find this piece interesting, you can find the other serialized essays here, covering nine of the 16 chapters of the book. You can also buy the book in paperback here. Enjoy.

– A.

The Shape of Thought to Come

Philosophical practice—understood as a form of spiritual exercise (askēsis)—directs itself not at any single image of philosophy, but at the activities that enliven the philosopher’s soul itself. Philosophy, in this view, consists in the shaping of thought and attention through practice—a shaping that influences not only the intellectual form of our minds, but also the aesthetic quality of our senses, the granularity of our feeling, and the moral skillfulness of our action.

This shaping emerges from the practicing life and responds to the imperatives set by the contours of each historical epoch, an epoch beset by a particular organizing background, however dimly or brightly apparent that background may be. Navigating this philosophical landscape requires understanding how different traditions have oriented themselves within this terrain and charted their paths through it.

This link between both practice and terrain is an important one, as it is not enough to look at practices themselves, divorced from their surroundings. We must understand how these traditions imply and disclose a surrounding region in which they find their footing and gain their grip. Indeed, one could argue that our grip on the terrain has loosened as of late, especially in regards to questions of transcendence and practice.

Today, modern philosophical life finds itself increasingly distanced from traditional forms of practice, making their approaches appear strange or inaccessible to us. As Charles Taylor has argued, this distance reflects a transformation in our shared frameworks of meaning. The background understanding that once made transcendent orientation not just possible but virtually inescapable in the West has given way to what he calls an “immanent frame” that structures our conceptions of self and world.1

This immanent frame constitutes a cosmic and social order that functions without reference to anything beyond itself—a self-sufficient natural order governed by impersonal laws, where meaning and value are understood as emerging from within human experience rather than from a transcendent source. This frame doesn’t necessarily deny transcendence outright, but renders it optional, no longer the default horizon against which all experience is interpreted. Where askēsis was once understood as a disciplined path toward this transcendence and transformation, modern frameworks tend to reduce such practices to merely psychological or therapeutic techniques for self-improvement.

This flattening of practice—its reduction to immanent self-cultivation divorced from any larger metaphysical horizon—reflects a deeper crisis in modern thought, one wherein the erosion of our capacity to find meaning beyond the bounds of what Taylor elsewhere calls “exclusive humanism,” a worldview that locates all value within human flourishing alone. When meaning is confined entirely within the immanent frame, we face the creeping suspicion that our attempts at meaning-making are in the end arbitrary constructions, lacking any foundation beyond our own temporary needs and desires, ultimately resulting in a kind of skepticism about shared meanings, if not an outright nihilism regarding their philosophical purchase. This crisis of meaning intensifies precisely through our attempts to ground value purely within the immanent sphere.

Indeed, this loss has made traditional contemplative exercises and spiritual practices seem like relics of a pre-critical or even primitive worldview. However, these more traditional approaches—with their integration of theoretical understanding and transformative practice suffused with a more complex picture of the relation between transcendence and immanence—may hold vital resources for addressing our contemporary challenges, especially as they relate to shared sources of meaning and practice. If we are to find our way forward, we must first understand what has been lost and what might be regained, and that is what I want to explore in this writing: Both the import of practice in philosophy and a sense for the realism of practice, by which I mean the link between practice and reality, or Being.

I want to foreground in this investigation the question of nihilism and our capacity to respond to it in our time. Nihilism—the erosion of belief in ultimate purpose or truth—presents a substantial challenge to philosophy today, as a transcendent ground for thought and practice is something we no longer take for granted. In contrast, for ancient, classical, and medieval thinkers, a more certain transcendent orientation provided a clearer foundation for philosophical practice and the sources of meaning and purpose it delivers. This loss of transcendent orientation has led to increasingly constrained forms of philosophical practice, culminating ironically in the very nihilism we seek to overcome, as we’ll see.

However, by developing again a more nuanced understanding of how transcendence and immanence relate through practice, we can uncover possibilities for philosophical transformation that preserve both this transcendent orientation and the richness of concrete experience, as displayed in the manifold richness of immanent becoming. In doing so, we may encounter the more original source from which the transcendent and immanent alike emerge and grow distinct, without collapsing the one into the other. By drawing, then, on age-old tensions among universality and contingency, timelessness and history, and freedom and determinism, in this essay we can begin to sketch future shapes of thought and practice, shapes that don’t simply enact a return to the past but participate in bringing forth new possibilities for philosophical life in our time. To this end, moving between themes found in Plato and Nietzsche and Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault, we can engage in an exercise in the timely repetition of timeless questions.

The discussion unfolds in four parts. We begin with Hadot’s biography, as the link between a person’s biography and their philosophy is often a strong one. For reasons we will explore, this link is especially prescient for Hadot, owing to his early rearing in the Catholic Church met in turn with his innately philosophical nature. His shared background in religious education and philosophical inquiry shows how spiritual practice shapes philosophical understanding and vice versa.

We then turn to a discussion of Platonic philosophy as an example of a traditionally grounded approach to philosophical practice, examining how the concept of paideia shapes both individual souls and social structures while orienting them toward transcendent truth. We’ll take recourse in this investigation to Martin Heidegger’s close reading of the Cave Allegory from the Republic, both because of what his reading discloses about the importance of philosophical movement in this imagery but also for how he positions Plato in this discussion as the originator of “metaphysics” itself, as we’ve come to understand it.

The third section takes up Nietzsche’s inversion of Plato, exploring what this inversion means for our sense of practice today. Here we bring Nietzsche into dialogue with Zen Buddhist thought through Nishitani Keiji’s reading of eternal recurrence—a reading that offers an alternative way of understanding practice beyond the standard opposition of transcendence and immanence. The question of nihilism in Nietzsche’s work—and his struggles with and against it—reemerges here.

Finally, we contrast Hadot’s and Plato’s sense of practice with Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s, examining how different metaphysical commitments lead to different conceptions of philosophical transformation and what this means for practice in our contemporary moment. This investigation will lead us to reconsider, through a series of close readings of these texts, whether the apparent opposition between transcendence and immanence might rest on a misreading of Plato himself. I will suggest it does, and subsequently, I will offer a different image of Plato’s philosophy that reads his work against both Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s criticisms of it. Eric Perl’s scholarship on Plato will be essential to this end, as it his reading of Plato that I will adopt and affirm as a viable context for practice today.

Throughout this essay, two questions emerge: What does today’s historical epoch demand of philosophy? And within what metaphysics should we interpret philosophical practices? I will argue that even a considered Nietzschean view of practice—his Platonic inversion, followed by Foucault’s appropriation of it—falls short of what is required of us when we think of the metaphysics of practice, especially in relation to the problem of nihilism, precisely because it remains trapped within an immanent frame that cannot secure meaning against its own dissolution. However, rather than adopting a simple binary between transcendence and immanence, we might find in this re-reading of Plato resources for understanding both their differences and their deeper unity. In the end, this essay offers a meditation on the role of practice in the vacillating worlds of transcendence and immanence, Being and becoming, and universality and particularity.

These tensions—between eternality and historical contingency, between universal truth and concrete practice—frame our central questions: In what kind of world do we practice philosophy? And how might practice itself help us navigate between these seeming oppositions? Plato’s philosophy, read anew through Perl’s interpretation, suggests that philosophical practice operates neither in pure transcendence nor mere immanence, but in the living tension between them in a space beyond the limitations of exclusive humanism—in a perspective that may provide the foundation for a renewed askēsis capable of addressing nihilism in our time. Rather than opposing transcendence to immanence, Perl’s approaches might reveal them as complementary dimensions of a single reality, accessed through different modes of attention and practice.

Pierre Hadot’s Life and Work

Pierre Hadot was a French philosopher and historian who lived from 1922 to 2010.2 His work has had a significant impact on our understanding of ancient philosophy and its practices. Born in Paris, Hadot’s early life was shaped by contrasting religious influences. His mother was devoutly Catholic, and she was determined that her son and his two brothers would enter the priesthood, while his father maintained a more skeptical, agnostic stance towards religion and the Church. This early exposure to both religious devotion and skeptical questioning would prove formative for his later intellectual development, particularly in his approach to understanding the relationship between spiritual practice and philosophical inquiry.

Raised in Reims, Hadot received a strict Catholic education and was ordained to the priesthood in 1944. This religious formation, despite his later criticisms of it, provided foundations for his scholarly career, including mastery of Ancient Greek and Latin, rigorous training in textual analysis, and an initial grounding in philosophical thought. Though he would eventually leave the Church in 1952 for reasons we will explore—a departure that significantly shaped his philosophical development—his early religious training left a marked influence on his thought. During the following years at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), he devoted himself to scholarship in Latin Patristics, developing the rigorous philological methodology that would characterize his entire career.

The dichotomy between religious devotion and philosophical questioning would play a formative role in shaping Hadot’s thinking. While his education was deeply Christian from a young age, Hadot himself felt an early disconnect from conventional religious life. Specifically, his concerns with the priests of his childhood were that their austere mode of asceticism and rote repetition of scripture felt lifeless and mechanical. His Christian education lacked the sacramentality that Hadot felt was at the heart of the religion. However, a pivotal moment in Hadot’s intellectual development occurred during his teenage years, when he had a series of experiences triggered by viewing the night sky—these were early intuitions that he belonged to a larger whole, a cosmos—and he says these experiences enacted a shift in him that made him a philosopher from that point on.

These early experiences of cosmic participation would also prove decisive not only for Hadot’s own philosophical development but for his later critique of self-referential approaches to philosophical practice. His insistence that genuine philosophical transformation must open onto these universal dimensions of Being stems not from abstract theory but from these concrete encounters with what exceeds merely personal or historical constructions—a point that would become central to his dialogue with Foucault about the nature and purpose of ancient spiritual exercises.

These early experiences of cosmic participation and involvement also prompted Hadot to begin writing, as an attempt to explain to himself what had transpired in these encounters. And here Hadot encounters the fact that life is full of significant experiences that cannot be spoken about or put into words. He says of these experiences, “I felt for the first time that there are things that cannot be said” and that “what [is] most essential for us could not be expressed.”3 These kinds of transformative but unsayable experiences will remain a theme for Hadot throughout his life, and it’s here in philosophy that he discovers something of unique value.

At this point in his intellectual development, Hadot finds himself connecting more deeply with the philosophy of existentialism and Martin Heidegger than he is with the Church, as this sense of developing an openness to Being was resonant with his own experiences. But it was in Henri Bergson’s philosophy that he first began to find a philosophical home. Hadot’s high school thesis on Bergson was titled, “Philosophy is not the construction of a system, but the resolution once made to look naively at the world in and around oneself,” a statement that describes these early philosophical leanings, as well as his later and more mature philosophical perspective.

During this period, Hadot maintained that experiences of cosmic participation and universal belonging were foreign to Christianity—a critique that, while understandable given his experiences, perhaps overlooked the rich traditions of such experiences within Christian thought. However, on Hadot’s telling, later in his education he would rediscover a connection with Christianity through its mystical tradition, found in figures like John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila, as well as through the Church’s historical inheritance from Neoplatonism. We could say that this turn in Hadot’s thought suggests both the limitations of his earlier criticism and the enduring resources within Christianity for thinking through questions of cosmic belonging and spiritual practice.

Hadot’s scholarly development was also significantly influenced by Biblical exegesis and his teachers’ emphasis on entering the “collective mentalities” of the people he was studying. This twin fascination with language and forms of mentality no doubt underscored his later fascination with Wittgenstein. Hadot was one of the earliest translators of Wittgenstein into French, and we can say that Hadot maintained a life-long fascination with language and its limits, on the one hand, and the nonverbal forms of life and practice that saturate it, on the other. In 1964, Hadot was elected Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he had his chair title changed from “Latin Patristics” to “Theologies and Mysticisms of Hellenistic Greece and the End of Antiquity.” His 1968 doctoral thesis, Porphyre et Victorinus, established his scholarly reputation in Neoplatonist studies. By the 1970s, his focus turned increasingly toward understanding ancient philosophy as a way of life, leading to his influential work 1981 work Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique.

In the end, Hadot would enter the priesthood but ultimately leave it for a number of reasons, including the Church’s views on the impurity of women, sexuality, and childbirth; the hypocrisy of Church officials regarding service to the poor; the politics of his local parish priests; the condemnation of Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary thinking in 1950; the development of what he calls a “martial theology” that seemed to Hadot divorced from the essence of Christianity; and then, finally, because he fell in love and wanted to marry, and this would mark his departure from the Church.

And so, we have here an intellectual and biographical portrait of Hadot that plays a substantial role in his later and mature philosophy. He is straddling the line between religion and philosophy at the outset of his life. His context is Christian education and the priesthood, but his attachment grows increasingly towards philosophy. He’s concerned with scholarship and exegesis and language, but also with mysticism and cosmology, and above all with practice as a kind of driving force of language and theory. He’s a Thomist and a mystic who reads Heidegger and the existentialists—all influences that would in the end make him a unique force in the twentieth century philosophical landscape.

With this background in mind, I want to explore one of the central concepts that animates all of Hadot’s work—that of philosophy as a way of life, rooted in spiritual exercise (askēsis). These exercises are centered on those “practices intended to effect a modification and a transformation in the subject who practice them.”4 Hadot’s concept of askēsis encompasses a wide range of practices, including:

Physical exercises (athletics and gymnastics)
Nutrition (diet and fasting)
Discursive practices (studying, reading, dialogue) 4. Aesthetics and art
Mysticism and intuition
Meditation and contemplation
Prayer

These exercises often involve a teacher and a student, fostering a sense of community as well as friendship. There’s also a synthesis here between knowing and caring, so that philosophy in this image is as much a type of medicine or therapy as it is a pursuit of truth or understanding. Philosophical discourse is in this sense a means of shaping the self, but also of overcoming the self, so that one might, in Hadot’s words, undo one’s own subjectivity, overcoming one’s own selfish needs and interests so that one might join the wider human community as a citizen of the world.

To look at just one specific example in more detail, these practices of self-overcoming are sometimes grouped under the phrase meleté thanatou, or “death exercises”—a practice of living by dying to one’s own self. More specifically, meletē means to study or meditate (indeed, our modern term “meditation” derives from this Greek word), while thanatou refers to death or dying. Together, meleté thanatou refers to meditations on death, though these practices aren’t all as literal as they sound and instead circle different kinds of death, including but not limited to physical death.

As Plato writes in the Phaedo, “In truth, those who practice philosophy correctly practice dying” (67e). These practices of death meditation take various forms throughout the Platonic tradition. In the Phaedo example, they appear as preparations for bodily death; in the Republic, as the soul’s upward stretch toward the divine; in the Theaetetus, through the philosopher’s “glance from above”; and in the Symposium, in the beholding of eternal beauty. What unites these practices is their power to decenter the individual—what we might today call the ego personality—in favor of a larger, more encompassing identity. Whether through literal death or philosophical transformation, each practice aims at the soul’s liberation.

For Hadot, learning to die through philosophy constitutes one of the primary spiritual exercises, it is, as he says, “a tearing away from everyday life. It is a conversion, a total transformation of one’s vision, lifestyle, and behavior.”5 By transforming perception to transform one’s being, or transforming one’s being to transform perception, spiritual progress can be made through exercise. These practices are properly understood as part of the philosopher’s effort at transformation, and much of Hadot’s writing is a historical working out of the role these practices played in philosophies ancient and modern, from Plato to Aristotle to the Stoics and the Neoplatonists to the works of Goethe, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and others.

He finds in spiritual exercise a uniting theme with which to read the history of philosophy. When we look at the full variety of these practices, we see that askēsis breaks down the dualism between intelligence and sense, and instead suggests something of a blended continuum of cognition, feeling, perception, and sensation. Shaping thought, attention, feeling, will, sensation, imagination, and aesthetic experience—the idea is that perception is itself made malleable through practice. Attention is a kind of art form cultivated through exercise, we can say.

In short, the ascetic exercises of philosophy are aimed at shaping the soul. In this sense, the soul has a shape that can be shaped, and askēsis is the name we give to these practices of shaping and transformation. Askēsis thus aims not at any one image of thought and world, but back to the moves themselves that enliven the philosopher’s being. In taking up the soul as their object, these exercises are properly spiritual in a sense that draws religious and philosophical practice closer together in a way that modern scholars are often uncomfortable with.

Despite the influence of Hadot’s work on our understanding of ancient philosophy and its practices, his approach has not been without its critics. These criticisms strike at the core of Hadot’s interpretation of philosophy as a way of life and raise important questions about the nature and purpose of philosophical inquiry. Let’s examine some of the main objections to Hadot’s perspective:

1. The Authenticity of Spiritual Exercises in Ancient Philosophy: Some scholars argue that Hadot exaggerates or even fabricates the role of spiritual exercises in ancient philosophy. They contend that while certain practices may have existed, Hadot’s emphasis on them as central to philosophical life is an anachronistic projection of modern concerns onto ancient texts. This criticism challenges the historical basis of Hadot’s interpretation and suggests that he may be reading too much into the limited evidence available from ancient sources.

2. The Nature of Professional Philosophy: A significant criticism comes from within the contemporary philosophical community itself. It could be argued that philosophy as a profession today isn’t primarily concerned with spiritual exercises in Hadot’s sense. Instead, it is asserted that the focus of professional philosophy is on rational argumentation, logical analysis, and the development of theoretical frameworks. This view sees Hadot’s approach as potentially undermining the rigor and objectivity that many consider essential to philosophical inquiry.

3. The Relationship Between Theology and Philosophy: Some critics, particularly those specializing in medieval philosophy, argue that Hadot misunderstands or misrepresents the relationship between theology and philosophy in the Christian tradition. They contend that Hadot’s view oversimplifies the complex interplay between faith and reason that characterized much of medieval thought and fails to appreciate the nuanced ways in which Christian thinkers engaged with philosophical ideas.

4. The Critique of Contemporary Academia: Hadot’s criticisms of modern academic philosophy have been seen by some as unfair or overly harsh. His use of Thoreau’s quote, “We have philosophy professors but no philosophers,”6 implies that contemporary academic philosophers have lost touch with the true spirit of philosophy as a lived practice. This critique has been met with resistance from those who see value in the specialized, professional nature of modern philosophical scholarship, as well as from those professors who (like Hadot) still hold a place for philosophy as a way of life, rooted in spiritual exercise.

These criticisms notwithstanding, there can be no doubt, as we’ll see in the section below on Foucault, that Hadot’s influence has been substantial, and that he survives each of these criticisms, as an increasingly extensive body of secondary literature shows.7 More importantly, these criticisms, while raising valid points about historical interpretation and academic practice, perhaps miss the deeper significance of Hadot’s project of recovering forms of philosophical practice that might address the needs of our time.

In this first section, we’ve explored Hadot’s life and philosophical development, tracing his journey from a Christian upbringing to his unique perspective on philosophy as spiritual exercise. Hadot’s concept of askēsis, encompassing a wide range of practices aimed at transforming the self, provides a framework for understanding philosophy as a way of life rather than merely an intellectual pursuit. This view of philosophy as a transformative practice sets the stage for our exploration of how similar ideas have been expressed throughout the history of Western thought, beginning with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, especially as it relates to the transformational potential of paideia.

Plato and Paideia in the Cave Allegory

When we think of paideia, we often picture the well-known Greek system of education designed to give students a broad cultural understanding, particularly geared towards public life and the formation of political virtue. Its role is the formation of the soul in the direction of justice—politeia and paideia are in this sense closely linked concepts in Greek thought. This educational system typically includes intellectual education, moral development, and aesthetic refinement, often associated with the formation of an elite class within society, and generally encompasses music, art, grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, gymnastics, and related disciplines.

Our modern notion of the humanities (from the Latin studia humanitatis) is recognizably descended from this concept. However, for our purposes, I want to focus less on paideia as a formal system of education and more on the etymology of the word as a kind of turning around or training in a circle. The real potency of the concept lies not in the educational system itself, but in the movement it describes. The etymology of paideia (most literally “child rearing”) is helpful here. However, the more complete phrase, enkyklios paideia, meaning “circular education,” shares its root with words describing a “turning wheel” or “training in a circle” (which also gives us the modern word “encyclopedia”). It’s this definition I want to explore.

To illustrate this concept of movement in thought, let’s examine a famous historical example of how paideia is deployed in philosophy: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Werner Jaeger provides a detailed analysis of the Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic that can help this investigation. The allegory on Jaeger’s telling begins with Socrates saying, “And now, compare our nature, from the point of view of paideia and lack of paideia, to an experience like this.”8 He then describes the famous scene of the prisoners chained in a cave, only able to see shadows cast on the wall by objects passing in front of a fire behind them. In this allegory, the cave represents the visible or sensible world of appearances, the fire corresponds not to the Sun itself but to its representation, and the ascent to the world above symbolizes the soul’s ascent to the intelligible world of reality. The key point here is that for the ascent to begin, a turning must occur. The ability to turn must be exercised (turning is a kind of askēsis, we could say).

For Jaeger, this movement of turning, this paideia, cannot occur in any direction whatsoever. It’s not just a turning around and round or a turning away, but a turning towards. This turning towards has a name that Jaeger identifies as a type of metanoia—a “conversion experience” or “turning towards.” Metanoia involves the soul’s redirection and reformation in both body and mind. In Latin, the prisoners in Plato’s cave undergo a conversio or “turning about” that’s also a turning towards. But what do they turn towards in this story?

They turn towards the Sun, or the Platonic Ideal of the Sun (itself a symbol of the Good). The Good, for Plato, is in turn the source of Being which makes possible the perception of individual beings. Jaeger emphasizes again that the essence of philosophical education is “conversion,” which also means “turning round.” As he says, “‘Conversion’ is a specific term of Platonic paideia, and indeed an epoch-making one. It means more specifically the wheeling round of the ‘whole soul’ towards the light of the Idea of Good, the divine origin of the universe.”9

We may here introduce the additional Greek term periagoge to signal the movement that has the prisoners in the Allegory of the Cave “turn around,” away from the representations on the cave wall and begin their ascent upwards to the outside world, but the word’s structure reveals a further meaning. Combining peri (signifying movement around or about) with agō (conveying guidance or leadership), it describes a form of guided travel—a transformative ascent that leads one “full circle,” so to speak. The term’s combination of guidance and circular movement shows why Plato chose it for this moment in his account. The word points to the physical act of turning but also to the guided, educational nature of this turning—a full reorientation that transforms the whole person.

Martin Heidegger, in his “Plato’s Doctrine on Truth,” further develops this view of paideia.10 A close reading of this text will furnish for us a deeper understanding of paideia in the senses we’ve begun to describe, as well as several concepts that will become important for us as we continue the overall investigation of this paper. Starting with the word itself, then, Heidegger writes:

Παιδεία [paideia] means turning around the whole human being. It means removing human beings from the region where they first encounter things and transferring and accustoming them to another realm where beings appear. This transfer is possible only by the fact that everything that has been heretofore manifest to human beings, as well as the way in which it has been manifest, gets transformed. Whatever has been unhidden to human beings at any given time, as well as the manner of its unhiddenness, has to be transformed. (168)

Heidegger’s analysis emphasizes that paideia engages not merely intellectual change but involves the reorientation of one’s being itself. Growth in knowledge in this way implies a decidedly ontological transformation—the knower becomes, in a certain way, a new being. Moreover, Heidegger identifies a unity at the heart of Platonic knowledge: “The guiding thought is that the highest idea yokes together the act of knowing and what it knows” (177). This yoking together of knower and known likewise points toward a form of philosophical understanding that transcends mere theoretical knowledge, suggesting instead a transformation that affects both the one who knows and what is known.

This unity of knowing and being clarifies the deeper significance of philosophical practice as a transformative endeavor. The conversion process manifests as the flowering of the individual’s essential nature, a nature whose source is a Platonic ideal. As he writes, “real education lays hold of the soul itself and transforms it in its entirety by first of all leading us to the place of our essential being and accustoming us to it” (166). Heidegger emphasizes here the distinction between paideia and its opposite, ἀπαιδευσία (apaideusia), the lack of formation, or more precisely, the inability to turn. In the state of apaideusia, one remains locked into place, unable to turn towards the sources of one’s own representations. This inability to turn, I would say, marks the space of idolatry, ideology, fundamentalism, and dogmatism—a state of unacknowledged ignorance as opposed to the space of acknowledged ignorance of Socratic philosophy.

The allegory’s significance here lies not in its static imagery but in its depiction of movement. As Heidegger emphasizes, “The ‘allegory’ recounts a series of movements rather than just reporting on the dwelling places and conditions of people inside and outside the cave” (165). These movements trace a double path: first out of the cave into daylight, then back from daylight into the cave, and it does so through four primary stages, says Heidegger. The initial stage finds humans dwelling in a state of direct engagement, “chained inside the cave, engrossed in what they immediately encounter” (168). Here, beings appear only as shadows—not shadows in a merely metaphorical sense, but as the way beings first present themselves to unreflective consciousness. The cave dwellers, in Heidegger’s words, “are so passionately attached to their ‘view’ that they are incapable of even suspecting the possibility that what they take for the real might have the consistency of mere shadows” (165).

From this condition, the second stage marks the removal of chains, allowing for a preliminary freedom of movement. Heidegger observes that “removing the chains brings a sort of liberation, but being let loose is not yet real freedom” (169). The newly unchained prisoners can turn in all directions, though their vision remains confused—they lack the essential capacity for proper assessment that emerges only through authentic liberation achieved through paideia. This observation deepens our earlier understanding of apaideusia as an inability to turn effectively, as paideia also implies directionality, or, we could say, the wisdom to know what to turn towards.

The third stage manifests what Heidegger terms “real freedom”—the ascent into the open where beings show themselves in their own “binding force and validity” (169). This realm of authentic unhiddenness emerges not through boundless space but through the binding power of clear limits and definite forms. As Heidegger writes, “Liberation does not come about by the simple removal of the chains, and it does not consist in unbridled license; rather, it first begins as the continuous effort at accustoming one’s gaze to be fixed on the firm limits of things that stand fast in their visible form” (170).

Finally, the journey out into the light outside culminates not in permanent escape from the cave but in a return—what Heidegger identifies as the fourth stage of the allegory. The liberated soul must descend again, “back to those who are still in chains” (171). This return carries mortal risk, as “the would-be liberator no longer knows his or her way around the cave and risks the danger of succumbing to the overwhelming power of the kind of truth that is normative there” (171). Heidegger gives as the archetypal example of this danger the fate of Socrates, whose death exemplifies the peril inherent in the philosophical mission of liberation through transformation.

Here Heidegger’s reading reveals the cave itself as having a complex structure. He asks: “For what else is the underground cave except something open in itself that remains at the same time covered by a vault and, despite the entrance, walled off and enclosed by the surrounding earth? This cave-like enclosure that is open within itself, and that which it surrounds and therefore hides, both refer at the same time to an outside, the unhidden that is spread out in the light above ground” (172). This analysis of the cave’s dual nature, as both enclosure and opening, introduces a tension between inside and outside—the immanent and the transcendent—that shapes philosophical practice. The cave in this sense represents not simply a prison to be escaped but a structure that inherently refers beyond itself while maintaining its character as enclosure.

We’ll return to the importance of the outside in the latter part of the essay, but for now we can say that paideia is this capacity for movement, for turning back to the sources of one’s representations, loosening them up for specific and directed modes of reconfiguration or transformation. Askēsis in this metaphor marks a set of practices that keep you, first, lucid and able to turn, but also second, able to ascend and descend. This is an understanding of philosophy as spiritual exercise that provides a set of enabling conditions that activate paideia and metanoia. The story itself, in turn, forms the backdrop against which we can understand the role of askēsis in philosophical practice. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the concept of paideia thus offer a powerful illustration of philosophical education as a process of turning and transformation. However, this Platonic view of reality and truth—especially in its commonly held two-world form—would face significant challenges in the modern era, particularly from thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche. As we turn to Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics, we’ll see how the very foundations of this worldview are called into question, forcing us to reconsider the nature and purpose of philosophical practice.

Friedrich Nietzsche and the End of Metaphysics

Having explored Hadot’s concept of askēsis and its exemplar in Platonic thought in paideia, we now turn to a figure who would radically challenge the metaphysical foundations upon which these ideas rest: Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s critique of traditional philosophy and his concept of “inverted Platonism” present a remarkable challenge to the notion of philosophical practice as a turning towards this transcendent truth, this outside. In this section, we will examine how Nietzsche’s ideas both disturb and reinvigorate our understanding of askēsis and philosophical transformation, whilst also keeping an eye on what might be missing or lost in this account.

We begin with John Sallis’s essay on “Nietzsche’s Platonism,” which provides a framework for understanding the relationship between Platonic thought and Nietzsche’s philosophy. Sallis positions these two thinkers along a single, giant interval that spans the history of Western metaphysics:

The interval is gigantic, this interval between Plato and Nietzsche, this course running from Plato to Nietzsche and back again. It spans an era in which a battle of giants is waged. . . . It is a battle in which being is at stake. . . . Along the historical axis, in the gigantic interval from Plato to Nietzsche, the contenders are similarly positioned for the ever-renewed battle. They, too, take their stance on one side or the other of the interval—again, a gigantic interval—separating the intelligible from the visible or sensible. . . . And yet, finally, with Nietzsche it seems that the battle has come to an end. From the Platonic beginning, from the inaugural staging, the history of metaphysics would have run its course, coming to its end at the moment when Nietzsche, the last metaphysician, confounds beyond hope the very interval at stake throughout that history. What was way up high is cut loose and drifts out of sight. There is no longer anything to drag down to earth, and in a sense nothing is required in order to remain true to the earth—nothing except the utmost insistence on the surface that remains once the gigantic interval is no more and the sensible has been twisted free of the intelligible.11

Now, what’s interesting here is that instead of proceeding with an exegesis of Nietzsche after the death of Platonism and metaphysics, Sallis does the opposite, and suggests that Nietzsche, for all this work, is still something of a Platonist. But what kind of Platonism is this? Nietzsche tells us in The Birth of Tragedy that his philosophy is an inverted Platonism: “My philosophy is an inverted Platonism: the further removed from true being, the purer, the more beautiful, the better it is. Living in Schein as goal.”12 That word Schein is German for “semblance” or “appearance,” but also, in keeping with Nietzsche’s celebration of it, the Schein also shines, it has its own brightness, its own source of light; it gleams a brilliance rooted in the immanence of becoming rather than through the supplementation of transcendent and eternal Being.

Here we see the Allegory of the Cave inverted—in this version of the story, it is Nietzsche who pulls us out of the cave of intelligibility and into the open air of Schein, the sensible world of appearances. We have, then, on Nietzsche’s account, inverted the priorities of Being, or, on his terms, of the Being that is actually a becoming. In this image, the distinction between appearance and reality—if we can hold onto it for a moment before releasing it—shouldn’t be construed along the lines of a more primary occluded reality of intelligibility that sits behind appearances, shaping them, generating them, giving them being and existence. Rather, it is the world of appearances—the world of Schein—that generates the fiction of a reality that stands behind it, organizing it. The so-called real world is, one might say, an elaborate—and often beautiful—fiction that emerges from the play of Schein.

Nietzsche’s move here is neither anti-metaphysical nor anti-realist, nor is it an abandonment of truth. Nietzsche more precisely wants to tell the truth about the truth. Nietzsche here unwinds the truth about the truth by positioning the reality of truthfulness as an emergent form—as a work of art, in its higher registers—of a creative will-to-power turning its own self-circumstance against itself to overcome itself. Each turning in history is a turning of wills against themselves and against one another, overcoming themselves through an unstoppable drive that seeks only its ongoing transformation by turning itself against itself to overcome itself.

The human part in this great drama, if one can manage it, is to will positive affirmation towards this ceaseless roil of turning. For there is no other option; rejoice or perish. Amor fati, as Friedrich says. There is much to explore here. I return to Sallis. “Let it be said,” he writes, “that [Nietzsche’s] story sets everything adrift: for it is a story of the ground in which all would be anchored begins to drift away, becoming more and more remote until it remains only something told of in a story, in the story that will have just been told.”13 Readers, I trust you can see here the multiple connections with Plato and with paideia that I mentioned earlier. We have already discussed Nietzsche’s inversion of the cave—the inversion of the priority among intelligibility and Schein—but the other perhaps more important connection recalls Nietzsche’s use of the notion not only of turning but of eternally re-turning.

If we follow Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism—a freeing of ourselves from the Platonic schema—then we may still be able to turn, but the bigger question remains open to us, to what should we turn towards and to what should we turn away from? I quote Sallis one more time: “A twisting free from Platonism into—what? Into a space lacking all the bounds, limits, and measure previously installed by two and a half millennia of Western thought; into a space—or, rather, an abyss—in which all bounds would be crossed out, all measure exceeded.”14 I want to recall one more time that in our discussion of paideia, the exercise of turning was paired with the experience of metanoia and periagoge, of guided conversion and a turning towards, in this case towards the Sun, which represents both the Good, and the ground of Being that makes beings visible and apparent. The Sun is of course precisely what’s missing in Nietzsche, and, as he diagnosis, from our modern existential condition more generally.

I’ll quote the infamous passage from “The Parable of the Madman” in The Gay Science:

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Where is God?” he cried; “I’ll tell you! We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again? Don’t lanterns have to be lit in the morning? Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition?—Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!”15

In Nietzsche, then, we certainly have a sense of paideia and a sense of turning, but nothing like the turning away from beings towards the common source of all Being, the Good, since here, in this new turning, we find that the Good, exemplified by the Sun, is missing—it has been wiped from the horizon, as Nietzsche says. I ask again, to what, then, do we turn? There are multiple directions we can take the discussion from here.

Michael Allen Gillespie alleges that for all his attempts to wrestle with the problem of nihilism, Nietzsche’s method entangles us more deeply within it.16 For Gillespie, the problem is that Nietzsche has internalized a deep and pervasive type of scholastic nominalism that began to dominate post-Reformation Europe. There can be no ontological account of which direction we should turn to from this stance, and therefore we are left after the death of God in a nihilistic mode of damaging and ineffectual thinking. Heidegger would likewise eventually conclude that Nietzsche’s will-to-power amounts to a thoroughgoing nihilism operating at a metaphysical register. In Heidegger’s own words, “Nietzsche’s metaphysics is not an overcoming of nihilism. It is the ultimate entanglement in nihilism.”17 In both accounts, there is in Nietzsche no transcendent outside—no Sun, no Good, no Ground of Being, save for the groundless ground of becoming—to orient our turning, and because of this we are left in the last analysis with nihilism, the very condition Nietzsche so presciently diagnosed and warned against.

But there are alternatives to this view, stemming from the surprising location of the comparative philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, speaking from and to a Zen tradition in renewed dialogue with Nietzsche. I’ll share just one exemplary quote from Nishitani’s The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism to illustrate this alternative:

The eternal recurrence may be called the intuitive experience of insight into eternity from within the world of becoming. The search for eternal life in another world that transcends the world of becoming is, of course, negated by Nietzsche in his radical pursuit of the nihility that such an other world hides from view. For him only the world in which all things are ever-changing flux remains. The world of flux, of impermanence, comes to be seen as the activity of bottomless will, an activity without any transcendent meaning or purpose; it becomes the play (Spiel) of bottomless will in the joy (Lust) of life which is absolute affirmation. That all things are ceaselessly changing and passing away is a source of suffering and grief; yet this suffering and its source can, just as they are, be transformed into joy. . . . When joy, the innocent play of life, wants itself, all phenomena of the world are dissolved into this joy and innocent life. This is the absolute affirmation of life, the form of life that affirms itself absolutely. There is the eternity in the midst of the transiency of becoming; there is divine life in a new and Dionysian sense, in a world without God.18

The results of this view are remarkable. Instead of turning us towards a specific goal or transcendent telos, Nietzsche gives us a different type of philosophical maneuver, a set of dance moves exemplified by Dionysian frenzy. There is here no point of metaphysical transcendence to aim towards. There are, however, celebratory modes of immanent transcendence achieved through self-overcoming, where overcoming is something more like ecstasis, which means to be or stand outside of oneself, transcending oneself to transform oneself on a horizontal axis, we might say. While this account salvages something in Nietzsche that is neglected in Heidegger and Gillespie, even Nishitani himself will argue that, in the last analysis, Nietzsche does indeed leave us wanting in regard to the question of nihilism.

For Nishitani, while Nietzsche comes remarkably close to his Buddhist thought—especially in the concepts of amor fati and eternal recurrence—he ultimately remains caught in what Nishitani calls a “relative absolute nothingness.” The eternal recurrence may indeed provide a way to experience eternity within the temporal moment, transforming suffering into joy through absolute affirmation of life. But this affirmation stops short of the more radical emptiness (śūnyatā) found in Nishitani’s Buddhism. Here śūnyatā represents, as Nishitani explains, “an absolutely transcendent field, and, at the same time, a field that is not situated on the far side of where we find ourselves, but on our near side, more so than we are with respect to ourselves.”19

This field where Being and beings alike appear in unison with emptiness at bottom—where things manifest in their suchness and stand on their own “home-ground” (that elemental mode of being where things are as they are in themselves), where each thing affirms itself according to its own particular virtus (that individual capacity each thing possesses as a display of its own possibility of existence)—distinguishes Nishitani’s emptiness from two positions.20 First, from those formulations of Western metaphysics that posit a stark two-world dualism between immanent and transcendent regions of Being (the position Nietzsche also criticizes), and second, from Nietzsche’s own attempted overcoming of this dualism through a wholesale rejection of the transcendent. Where Nietzsche proclaims that “God is dead,” leaving us in the depths of nihility, Nishitani’s path pushes through to an absolute nothingness that reaches beyond even the death of God.

Nishitani’s analysis in this way extends and complicates the philosophical trajectory we’ve been following. His critique aligns with but also deepens those offered by Heidegger and Gillespie, who as we just saw describe Nietzsche’s will-to-power as entangling us further in nihilism (through his elevation of human will-to-power as the ground of all valuation, thereby perpetuating rather than overcoming the metaphysics of will). It’s worth looking briefly at this extension, even as Nishitani’s engagement with Nietzsche evolved significantly over time. For example, in his early work, Nishitani found striking parallels between Nietzsche’s radical atheism and Meister Eckhart’s mystical breakthrough to divine Nothingness, seeing in both a reaffirmation of human existence achieved through thorough self-negation.

However, in his later work, Nishitani came to see Eckhart’s path as reaching further than Nietzsche’s, achieving a standpoint of absolute nothingness grounded in everyday life that Nietzsche’s thought could not attain.21 While Nishitani recognizes that Nietzsche’s thought—particularly in the notion of amor fati—contains moments of genuine transcendence through its synthesis of necessity (fate) and creative affirmation (love), this reconciliation remains trapped within the horizon of will, incapable of achieving the radical emptiness that would truly overcome nihilism. Nishitani’s critique of Nietzsche thus offers a path beyond both a two-world grounding of value in a bifurcated transcendence and the Nietzschean grounding of value in human will-to-power, even when complemented with the affirmative notion of amor fati.

This critique helps us better understand what’s at stake in Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism and his proclamation of the death of God—a radical departure from traditional metaphysics achieved by operating against this tradition’s own vocabulary. By prioritizing the world of appearances (Schein) over any transcendent reality, Nietzsche challenges us to reconsider what it means to “turn” in a philosophical sense. If there is no fixed point of orientation, no “Sun” to turn towards—just the eternal return of becoming—how can we understand and practice philosophy as a transformative exercise that makes spiritual progress? And should we follow Nietzsche where he leads us? I’m cautious, to say the least.

William Desmond frames this problem incisively through the metaphor of enchantment, noting that while there is “an urgency of ultimacy in Nietzsche that at times is overpowering,” we must grapple with how to “deal with a wizard or bewitcher, or indeed a seducer (Verführer), as Zarathustra is called.” The sense of Nietzsche we find in Desmond is one of real concern and outright skepticism. It’s worth thinking about whether Desmond is right in this worry, as for Desmond it’s possible that we are being misled more than we are achieving a deeper kind of liberation or freedom through Nietzsche. The question becomes if one can, in Desmond’s words, “divine that one must ward off the enchantment” and recognize “that the spell being cast on one is really a magic stupor from which one must struggle to wake up.” For Desmond, what proves decisive is the recognition of a theme we’ve dancing around up until this point—that “what one needs more than anything is someone or something other breaking in from the outside.” He elaborates:

Do I exaggerate when I say Nietzsche does have this strange effect: sending us to sleep, after first seeming to wake us up to ourselves? Charming us with the belief that at last we are waking up and no longer asleep in the nightmares of the millennia, even though waking up is only another sleep or dream? We look into Nietzsche and we seem to gaze into a magic mirror and we seem to see ourselves. We are persuaded to see ourselves as now budding creators, and so we feel irritated with anyone who will deprive us of the mirror and our unprecedented promise of originality. . . . Is this why so many have their own Nietzsche: a thinker for everyone and for no one? Before the magic mirror, we all crowd eagerly to admire our own untapped creativity. But as with most gazing into mirrors, this too is vanity— mostly.22

This question of the outside once more returns us to the heart of our investigation. While Nishitani’s Buddhist perspective offers one way beyond this impasse through śūnyatā—a field that transcends both traditional metaphysical dualism and Nietzsche’s attempted overcoming of it—the tension between transcendent orientation and immanent transformation remains in the contemporary debate between Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault on the nature of askēsis and its relevance to modern philosophy.

What’s at stake in their disagreement becomes clearer in light of our preceding analysis, namely, how we relate to notions of transcendence and immanence in terms of our practices. I will in the next section describe the stakes of Hadot’s differences with Foucault’s Nietzschean approach to practice. This will allow us to consider how we might, with Hadot, approach the question of transcendence differently. Such an approach may, surprisingly, align more closely the Platonic tradition that Nietzsche critiques (and that Foucault appropriates) with Nishitani’s own account of śūnyatā. In doing so, we can draw together the relation between immanence and transcendence in a way that will allow us to think both together in our accounts of askēsis in the twenty-first century. This approach can recuperate for us the essentialness of a subtle but robust account of the transcendent in a way that evades Nietzsche’s critique.

Hadot’s and Foucault’s Askēsis

We have been looking at how philosophical practice, understood as spiritual exercise, involves different philosophical commitments across the history of Western thought. Beginning with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we traced how paideia operates as a turning toward transcendent truth—a conversion of the soul toward the Good as the source of Being itself. This turning, as we’ve seen, is not arbitrary but directed toward a specific metaphysical end: the Sun, the symbol of the Good, that makes all beings visible and apparent. In Nietzsche’s radical inversion of this schema, we encountered a challenge to this entire metaphysical framework. Through his declaration that “My philosophy is an inverted Platonism,” Nietzsche proposes a world of pure Schein—of appearances that shine with their own light rather than receiving illumination from a transcendent source. Where Plato directed philosophy toward eternal forms, Nietzsche envisions reality as a self-creating work of art with no need for divine authorship or transcendent ground, lest that ground be the eternally returning ground of ceaseless becoming. I have argued that this transforms philosophical theory as well as the very nature of philosophical practice itself in ways we should ponder carefully.

The tension between transcendent orientation and immanent transformation that we’ve traced through Plato, Nietzsche, and Nishitani finds renewed expression in the interrupted dialogue between Hadot and Foucault regarding the nature and purpose of ancient philosophical practice. Their disagreement, viewed through this lens, concerns both different approaches to practice and deeper questions about how truth and reality can be secured against their dissolution into mere human construction, however extensively detailed and richly genealogical such constructions become.

When we look at Hadot’s and Foucault’s interpretations of askēsis, we find important implications for contemporary philosophy. Both thinkers were deeply interested in the concept of askēsis and its role in ancient philosophy, but they approached it from different angles. Hadot saw askēsis as a means of transforming one’s entire being, aiming at wisdom and virtue. For him, philosophy was a way of life, not just an intellectual exercise, aiming at cosmic participation. Foucault, on the other hand, was more interested in askēsis as a technology of the self, a means by which individuals could shape themselves in relation to power and societal norms. He saw these practices as ways of resisting dominant power structures and creating spaces of freedom. To be sure, Foucault, like Nietzsche before him, was, contra his less-careful critics, also deeply committed to ideals of truth, but in a different way than was Hadot.

We can look at these disagreements on two levels, as Hadot and Foucault differ in their accounts in both substantive and historical ways when it comes to understanding practice. For example, Foucault diagnoses a certain “Cartesian moment” in the history of philosophy wherein the transformations of the self, underwritten by askēsis, are replaced by the simpler and more universal requirements of the twin acquisition of knowledge and evidence. Foucault’s argument is that there is a point in modern philosophy, marked by Descartes, where acquiring knowledge without the need of a corresponding transformation of the self comes to prominence, a point where evidence replaces askēsis as the primary object of knowledge. At this stage, according to Foucault, “the history of truth enters its modern period” and truth becomes associated with knowledge (connaissance, in the French), rather than with the efforts of a practicing subject. This moment marks a shift in definitions of truth understood as practice (askēsis), or as the “return effect” of truth encounters, and towards truth understood as proposition (mathemata).23

These posts are part of the ongoing serialization of my new book Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures. If you find value in this work, consider purchasing a copy. All proceeds go towards supporting the writing you find here at The Base Camp.

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Hadot for his part is skeptical that Foucault’s reading in this area really captures the essence of Descartes’s philosophy and method. Descartes’s major work is after all titled Meditations, which Hadot reads appropriately as an explicit reference to the type of practice of self-transformation that askēsis implies. “Concerning these Meditations,” writes Hadot, “Descartes advises his readers to dedicate a number of months, or at least a number of weeks, to ‘meditate’ the first and second meditations . . . This clearly shows that for Descartes also ‘evidence’ can only be recognized on the basis of a spiritual exercise.”24 Descartes in this way belongs to an older tradition linking philosophy and spiritual exercises for self-mastery, attuning thought and action to moral and metaphysical truth.

While this difference in historical interpretation is significant, the core of their disagreement centers on Foucault’s interpretation of the Greek and Roman practices of philosophy as being centered on the self, on an “aesthetics of existence” as he calls it. While Hadot agrees with Foucault that these ancient practices were geared towards a conversion of the self, and that they incorporated a set of further practices designed to free this self from the determinism of external and internal conditions, with the goal of achieving happiness, freedom, and independence, he nevertheless felt that Foucault was missing a sense for how transcendent or universal perspectives are necessarily involved in these practices.

Hadot’s emphasis on cosmic participation in this sense stems not from theoretical commitment but from concrete experience—those early encounters with the night sky that reveal the person’s capacity to transcend purely personal dimensions. These experiences informed his critique of Foucault’s reduction of ancient practices to mere self-fashioning, suggesting that such an approach misses the very moments where philosophical practice achieves its most transformative potential—when personal experience opens onto universal truth. The inclusion of the universal, as a lived practice of physics, says Hadot, “implies a radical transformation of perspective, and contains a universalist, cosmic dimension, upon which, it seems to me, M. Foucault did not sufficiently insist. Interiorization is a going beyond oneself; it is universalization.”25

Hadot’s understanding of askēsis in this way encompasses both practical transformation and mystical experience, but in a way that remains deeply tied to nature and the cosmos as substantively aesthetic phenomena, an extension we do not find in Foucault, save for in his historical descriptions about these practices. Here we are concerned not with this history per se but with what we can discern about Foucault’s own commitments. Hadot’s emphasis offers a helpful contrast. While philosophical practice involves reshaping the self (as Foucault also insists), Hadot argues that this transformation opens onto transcendent dimensions of experience through what he calls “the mysteries of Nature itself.” Again, his own biographical encounters that we reviewed earlier in the essay with what he calls “the oceanic feeling”—those moments of cosmic participation triggered by contemplating the night sky—will, as we’ve seen, inform later in life his reading of ancient philosophy’s transformative potential. For Hadot, the universe in this sense is itself a work of art, a kind of poem, and philosophical practice involves learning to read and participate in this cosmic poēsis. As he writes, “The philosopher’s role is to mimic in the poiēsis of discourse, insofar as possible, the poiēsis of the Universe. Such an act is a poetic offering, or the Poet’s celebration of the universe.”26

This understanding of the aesthetic–cosmic dimension of life allows us to see Nietzsche’s position in a new light. To return to Nietzsche’s statement once more, “My philosophy is an inverted Platonism: the further removed from true being, the purer, the more beautiful, the better it is. Living in Schein as goal,” we can add that he’s not simply rejecting cosmic truth but relocating it within the immanent play of will-to-power and artistic creation. As Hadot notes:

Such was indeed Nietzsche’s great intuition, as early as his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, where he speaks of nature’s aesthetic instincts: he remained faithful to this concept throughout his life. The world is art through and through. It is a work of art that engenders itself; for in Nietzsche’s view, all creation of forms is art. Nature sculpts an entire universe of forms; she spreads forth an extraordinary variety of colors and unfolds a whole gamut of sounds within space. Human art is an integral part of this universe of appearance, and, as Nietzsche often repeats, it is this appearance that must be “adored.”27

This convergence between Nietzsche and Hadot on nature’s aesthetic character should not obscure their differences. Where Nietzsche’s conception remains rooted in the immanent play of will-to-power and artistic creation, Hadot’s understanding— shaped as it is by his deep engagement with Neoplatonism—points toward a transcendent dimension within nature itself. Keeping in mind these metaphysical differences, both thinkers share in this insight about the role of interiorization in philosophical practice. It is this emphasis on the interiorization of experience—not only in its passive encounter but also in its willful shaping—that makes attention into an art of its own. This art of perception is not set side aside as a unique fact apart from the larger passing of nature, but is a particular instance in its unfolding, where attention, as an art form, repeats in its own way the larger panoply of the artistic diorama that is nature’s varied, cosmic, and intimate expressions. In other words, the metamorphosis that thought undergoes in its coming to consciousness through acts of attentiveness is in sympathy with the surging metamorphosis found in nature at large.

Conversion experiences are often encountered in just these moments where the internal metamorphosis of the philosopher and the external metamorphosis of reality are felt deeply as instances of the same singular process. The human being can be thought of as the dyad wherein the eternal becoming of nature finds its expression through the deep particularity of an individual’s psychological life as it advances within the whole of nature through the artistry of its own personal expression. However, where Foucault would emphasize the aesthetic dimension primarily as self-creation and resistance to power, Hadot maintains that genuine philosophical practice must orient itself toward this larger cosmic poēsis.

In this sense, Hadot criticized Foucault’s interpretation of Greek askēsis, arguing that it was too focused on the self and missed the cosmic dimension of ancient philosophy. For Hadot, the goal of philosophical practices was self-transformation, and, moreover, a transformation of one’s relationship to the cosmos and to others. The risk of Foucault’s account for Hadot is that we reduce the cosmic and universal dimension of practice to a set of aesthetic transformations robbed of their deeper and more consequential metaphysical entailments. In Hadot’s words:

This is why, instead of a “culture of the self,” it would be better to speak of the “transformation,” “transfiguration,” or “surpassing of the self.” In order to describe this state, one cannot avoid the term wisdom, which, it seems to me, appears very rarely, if ever in Foucault. Wisdom is that state at which the philosopher will perhaps never arrive but towards which he aims, by striving to transform himself in order to go beyond his present state. It is a mode of existence which is characterized by three essential aspects: peace of mind (ataraxia), inner freedom (autarkeia) and, except in the sceptics, cosmic consciousness: that is to say, the process of becoming aware of belonging to the human and cosmic Whole, a sort of dilation or transfiguration of the self which realizes greatness of soul (megalopsychia).28

While Hadot is no doubt correct in his assessment of Foucault here, we need not frame this disagreement as a strict choice between cosmic attunement and resistance to power. Indeed, as far back as Plato, we find the question of truth and power intimately connected to this cosmic dimension—consider, for example, how the philosopher’s ascent in the Cave Allegory involves both a liberation from physical and social constraints and an orientation toward universal truth. Surely, we can say that Foucault is highly attuned to this same dynamic—especially in later works such as The Courage of Truth—but it seems to me that we can say, with Hadot, these more cosmic and universal dimensions remain in Foucault a site of second-order historical curiosity, rather than central aspects of practice for Foucault himself. At least, this is what his publication record implies.

These questions become even more pressing when we consider them in light of our discussion of paideia and philosophical turning, as the apparent choice between Foucault’s immanent critique and Hadot’s cosmic participation might itself be complicated by reconsidering Plato’s project. As we’ll see through Eric Perl’s interpretation, Plato’s work can reveal a vision more subtle than the typical two-world reading and its correspondence theory of truth implies. This reading of Plato that Nietzsche forcefully critiques must now be put to the test. Indeed, if Plato’s project is not to bifurcate reality into two distinct spheres but to better think them together as intimately involved and co-substantiating forces, then both Nietzsche’s inversion and Foucault’s subsequent appropriation of it may be less radical than it appears. At its heart is a conception of truth as alētheia (unhiddenness), which Perl argues is not just Heidegger’s but Plato’s own understanding of how truth becomes present.

This understanding of truth as unhiddenness pairs with a view of transcendence, symbolized by the Sun, that is beyond beings precisely insofar as it let’s them be seen in their beingness. Like Nishitani’s śūnyatā, this transcendence functions not as another thing among things, but as the luminous emptiness that allows beings to show themselves as what they are—not from a distance but on “our near side,” as Nishitani says. Nietzsche’s critique and Foucault’s appropriation thus miss something about how we are always “in the middle” (the metaxu) between Being and its showing, a view that secures both transcendence (in a robust, vertical sense), and immanence, both Being and becoming, without supplanting the immanent with the transcendent or the reverse. In the next section, we’ll explore how this understanding transforms our view of Plato’s imagery and allegories, particularly the “ascents” in his dialogues, which on this view represent not passages between different worlds but transformations in our modes of apprehension of one integral world, opening new possibilities for philosophical practice beyond both rigid dualism and pure relativism.

The Great Outdoors

We have been looking at how philosophical practice, understood as spiritual exercise, involves different metaphysical commitments across the history of Western thought. Beginning with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we traced how paideia operates as a turning toward transcendent truth—a conversion of the soul toward the Good as the source of Being itself. This turning, as we’ve seen, is not arbitrary but directed toward a specific metaphysical end: the Sun, the symbol of the Good, that makes all beings visible and apparent. In Nietzsche’s radical inversion of this schema, we encountered a challenge to this framework through his attempt to think Being as becoming and truth without recourse to a transcendent ground or source. Through our subsequent examination of Nishitani’s śūnyatā and the debate between Hadot and Foucault, we’ve explored different attempts to resolve this tension between transcendence and immanence in philosophical practice.

Now we must consider whether this apparent opposition might itself rest on a misreading of Plato that imports a more modern subject–object dualism back into his thought. As we’ll see through Eric Perl’s interpretations, Plato’s understanding of the relation between appearances and reality, between the sensible and the intelligible, might be closer to Nishitani’s non-dual view than to the rigid two-world metaphysics his critics often assume. This reframing has important implications for how we understand askēsis, suggesting possibilities for philosophical practice that neither abandons transcendence nor sacrifices immanence, but transforms our very mode of apprehending their relation through practice.

Plato’s conception of appearance and reality, especially as Perl understands it, provides the foundation for understanding this alternative reading. Perl’s reading suggests that Plato’s forms are not opposed to appearance but are precisely what allow appearances to manifest as meaningful, intelligible reality. We might see in this sense that rather than diminishing the value of the sensible world, transcendence actually enables and enriches immanent reality in its particularity, and particularity, in turn, offers uniqueness and difference to transcendence. This mutual saturation of transcendence and immanence means that forms don’t stand apart from appearances but thoroughly involve and illuminate them. The two are from this perspective different and complimentary ways of looking at the same more original whole—as one world engaged from two perspectives, the one emphasizing unity and the other multiplicity, the one securing universality and the other particularity.

If this is right, then the question becomes not whether to choose between transcendence and immanence, but how to understand their interrelation, especially as apprehended in perception and thought. As Perl writes in his Theophany, “A sharp dichotomy and dualism between sense and intellect, as two different cognitive faculties apprehending two different kinds of objects, is conventionally regarded as perhaps the most fundamental feature of Platonic thought. . . . But this is in fact a misunderstanding . . . a more careful examination reveals that in this tradition sense and intellect, with discursive reason as a means between them, constitute a continuum of modes of cognition, articulated by the degree of unity in which they apprehend reality.”29 Indeed, as Perl elsewhere explains, “All modes of cognition, from sense to intellect, are the apprehension of Being, that is, of form.”30

This reading suggests that the images of ascent in Plato’s dialogues represent not a passage from one world to another, but a cognitive ascent from one mode of apprehension to another, enabled by practice. As Perl explains, “The many ‘ascents’ in the dialogues, the images of ‘going to’ the forms or true being, express not a passage from one ‘world,’ one set of objects, to another, but rather, as Plato repeatedly indicates, the ascent of the soul, a psychic, cognitive ascent, from one mode of apprehension to another, and hence not from one reality to a different reality, but from appearance to reality.”31 Perl’s understanding, offered here in brief as a first pass, in this way sets up a foil for our larger discussion of transcendence and immanence.

I’ll begin this analysis with an exegetical thesis: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Nishitani all assume a certain reading of Platonic metaphysics that may itself be colored by modern philosophical assumptions. The two-world interpretation they critique in Plato appears to stem from two distinctly modern sources: first, the Cartesian cogito, and second, Kant’s critical philosophy, where knowledge depends on how objects must conform to the structures of human cognition and sensibility. While Kant’s critical philosophy inverts the older Platonic realism—where the subject’s faculties conform to the shape of real forms, rather than the reverse—we may nonetheless have imported this stronger subject–object dualism, reading it back into Plato in a way that is unwarranted by a more careful reading of his philosophy.

The risk here—and it applies to Nietzsche and Heidegger as much as it does to Nishitani—is that what we’re in fact doing when we say that the old metaphysics is just like the new critical philosophy in its stance of starting with a dualism of subject–objects (whether in the realist or critical senses), organized around notions of correctness or correspondence between the two, is perhaps a result of importing the modern setup of Descartes and Kant and reading these back into Plato. What we instead find in Plato, again as read through Perl’s interpretations, reveals a more subtle understanding of how Being manifests itself in appearance and of the relation between the two.

To explore this thesis, it’s necessary to revisit the latter part of Heidegger’s essay on Plato, since it is in these sections that he presents his arguments for a decisive transition in Western thought from truth as ἀλήθεια (unhiddenness) to truth as the correctness of mental representation (ὁμοίωσις). According to Heidegger’s interpretation, this transformation in how truth is understood reshapes not only our understanding of truth but marks the beginning of what we will later call “metaphysics.” This transition is important to understand if we are to rethink Plato along the lines that Perl suggests. The transformation begins with Plato’s conception of ideas and particularly through the role of the idea of the Good.

Heidegger writes: “The ideas are what is in everything that is. Therefore, what makes every idea be capable as an idea—in Plato’s expression: the idea of all ideas—consists in making possible the appearing, in all its visibility, of everything present” (175).32 For Heidegger, this passage demonstrates how Plato situates the ideas not merely as mental constructs but as that which constitutes the very Being of beings. The idea of the Good (τὸ ἀγαθόν) takes on a special status as “that-which-enables as such.” As he notes: “It brings about the shining of everything that can shine, and accordingly is itself that which properly appears by shining, that which is most able to shine in its shining. For this reason Plato calls the ἀγαθόν also τοῦ ὄντος τὸ φανότατον (518 c9), ‘that which most shines (the most able to shine) of beings’” (175).

This reorientation of truth around the idea’s capacity to make visible leads, in Heidegger’s reading, to a transformation in how truth operates. He traces this transition through several stages, showing how truth becomes increasingly tied to correctness of perception and judgment. This shift manifests most clearly in what Heidegger identifies as a passage where truth becomes subordinate to the idea, adjudicated by the correctness of human judgment, or, in his words: “The assertion of a judgment made by the intellect is the place of truth and falsehood and of the difference between them. The assertion is called true insofar as it conforms to the state of affairs and thus is a ὁμοίωσις” (178). For Heidegger, this move marks the moment when truth as correctness supplants truth as unhiddenness. He sees this transformation moving through the history of Western philosophy, from Medieval Scholasticism where, in Heidegger’s paraphrase, Thomas Aquinas declares that “Truth is properly encountered in the human or in the divine intellect” (178), to the dawn of modernity where Descartes asserts that “Truth or falsehood in the proper sense can be nowhere else but in the intellect alone” (178–179).

The consequences of this transformation extend beyond epistemology into the very structure of metaphysics. As Heidegger argues: “As a consequence of this interpretation of beings, being present is no longer what it was in the beginning of Western thinking: the emergence of the hidden into unhiddenness, where unhiddenness itself, as revealing, constitutes the fundamental trait of being present” (179). This shift creates the conditions for the birth of metaphysics proper: “Since Plato, thinking about the being of beings has become ‘philosophy,’ because it is a matter of gazing up at the ‘ideas.’ But the ‘philosophy’ that begins with Plato has, from that point on, the distinguishing mark of what is later called ‘metaphysics’” (180). For Heidegger, this emergence of metaphysics simultaneously marks the beginning of humanism, as human beings become increasingly centered in the philosophical enterprise through their special relationship to ideas and truth in juxtaposition to the earlier and more primary centering of Being itself.

The transformation thus sets the stage for the entire subsequent history of Western thought, including its culmination in modern technology and what Heidegger sees as the forgetting of Being. Heidegger suggests that this transformation remains “present” not merely as historical influence but as “the all-dominating fundamental reality—long established and thus still in place—of the ever-advancing world history of the planet in this most modern of modern times” (181–182). The forgetting of truth’s original essence as unhiddenness thus becomes constitutive of our modern technological world. Heidegger concludes by suggesting that only a recollection of truth’s original essence as unhiddenness might offer a way beyond this metaphysical tradition. However, he emphasizes that such recollection must “think this essence more originally” than Plato’s conception allowed.

No attempt to ground truth in “reason,” “spirit,” “thinking,” “logos,” or any kind of “subjectivity” can rescue the essence of unhiddenness, as these attempts themselves remain caught within the metaphysical framework inaugurated by Plato’s transformation (182). However, what we find in Plato through the Perl’s interpretation suggests a different understanding of how Being manifests itself in appearance—one that may escape Heidegger’s critique by showing how Plato’s thought maintains rather than abandons truth as alētheia.

Perl’s reading of Plato in Thinking Being directly challenges Heidegger’s account of this supposed transformation from truth as unhiddenness to truth as correctness. Where Heidegger sees Plato initiating a fateful shift away from alētheia, Perl demonstrates how Plato’s own usage suggests something quite different. Through a close reading of Plato’s texts, he shows how Plato’s understanding of ἀληθές (“true”) remains firmly aligned with its basic meaning of “unhidden”—that which is “available,” “accessible,” “in the open,” “there to be seen.” The forms themselves are “what is most true of things” (Phd. 65e1–2), functioning as the “looks” through which things become intelligible to thought (25). This is not merely a matter of terminology. The constant interplay between ἀλήθεια and λανθάνω/λήθη throughout Plato’s dialogues confirms that Plato characterizes not just propositions but things or beings themselves as ἀληθές (25n8). The implications of this reading are extensive.

Far from initiating the metaphysical tradition that leads to nihilism, as Heidegger claims, Plato’s thought might represent, in Perl’s words, “the antithesis of and the only alternative to nihilism” (2). His understanding of forms as the very “truth” or “unhiddenness” of things also suggests again a unity between thought and Being that precedes any subject-object division—a unity that manifests not through correctness of representation, as Heidegger suggests, but through the soul’s orientating practice toward Being itself. In this reading, Heidegger and Plato converge more than they differ, and this is important for how we are to read Plato today.

This convergence becomes even more significant when we consider Nishitani’s analysis of the Platonic theory of Ideas—for Nishitani, a one-time student of Heidegger’s, offers his own distinctive path beyond the supposed opposition between transcendence and immanence. Moving beyond both empirical observation and conceptual analysis, Nishitani positions his argument on what he calls “a field that transcends even the realm of reason where concepts are constituted” (126). The heart of Nishitani’s argument emerges in his critical engagement with Platonism. He acknowledges that “a realm of Ideas such as Plato had in mind might come near to what I am thinking of here” (126). This seems, at first, to align with the Platonic notion of transcendence. However, Nishitani identifies what he sees as an error in how Platonic thought is often understood. When we consider a transcendent Idea as some “thing” separate from its particular instantiations, or when we conceive of a world of Ideas as true realities existing somewhere apart from the sensory world, we remain trapped in a dualistic and limited intellectual reasoning.

Nishitani’s criticism parallels Heidegger’s concern about how Platonic metaphysics transforms truth into correctness of representation, but Nishitani pushes the analysis in a different direction. In Religion and Nothingness, instead of simply critiquing the Platonic position, he proposes what we might call a non-dual understanding. The transcendent Idea must remain self-identical with its particular manifestations in the world. The field where this identity occurs is what he calls “absolute nothingness,” which “has to be at one with the world of primary fact” (126). Nishitani argues that this primary reality is neither purely sensible nor purely ideal—it exists prior to and enables this very distinction. This represents a real challenge to the Western metaphysical tradition that emerged from certain readings of Plato’s thought. Rather than positing two separate realms—sensible and intelligible—Nishitani suggests that reality manifests as a unity that “pervades both the realm of the senses and the realm of reason . . . without belonging to either of them as such” (126).

This leads to Nishitani’s radical conclusion about the nature of world itself: “The ‘world’ of this primary fact is one. There are not two worlds, a sensory one and a supersensory one” (127). On a certain reading, this unity challenges not only Platonic metaphysics but the entire Western philosophical tradition that followed from it, including for example Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena, which shares a certain isomorphism with the two-world reading of Plato, registered here in its critical form as transcendental philosophy. For Nishitani, both the everyday world of extended environments and any supersensory world we might imagine behind it fail to capture “the world in its suchness” (127).

The power of Nishitani’s analysis lies in how it reveals that our very ability to conceive of these separate worlds—sensory and supersensory—depends on a more basic reality that we already inhabit: “The very fact that we can consider our extended environment to be a world, and then think up a supersensory world behind it, happens in the first place only because we are actually living in a world of primary fact” (127). This view suggests that the two-world separation of reality into sensible and intelligible realms, which Heidegger identified as a defining moment in Western thought, might be reconceived in a way that preserves both transcendence and immanence in their original unity. Having seen how Nishitani challenges the traditional reading of Platonic metaphysics, we can now appreciate the deeper resonance between his understanding of Being and appearance and our revised reading of Plato.

As Nishitani writes, “That being is only being in unison with emptiness means that being possesses at its ground the character of an ‘illusion,’ that everything that is, is in essence fleeting, illusory appearance. It also means that the being of things in emptiness is more truly real than what the reality or real being of things is usually taken to be (for instance, their substance)” (124). Whereas Perl argues for a continuity between sense and intellect—or appearance and reality—in Plato, Nishitani locates us in what he calls, significantly, “the middle.” In Nishitani’s own words, “Precisely because it is appearance, and not something that appears, this appearance is illusory at the elemental level in its very reality, and real in its very illusoriness. In my view, we can use the term the ancients used, ‘the middle,’ to denote this, since it is a term that seems to bring out the distinctive feature of the mode of being of things in themselves” (124).

Here I think we can say that Nishitani’s “middle” and Plato’s metaxu (or the in-between) share more than mere terminological overlap—in fact, it is likely the metaxu that Nishitani refers to in passing in this passage. Morover, their conceptual alignment shows us an unexplored kinship between these thinkers. In Perl’s reading of Plato, we are likewise “in the middle,” between Being and how Being shows itself, but the “showing” of Being cannot be other than Being itself; it is simply Being in the mode of appearance, an appearance that is always appearance for someone who has a particular stance, a particular set of skills of perception at relating to Being in its appearing. Compare this view to Nishitani’s own discussion of form and perception: “As noted above, the various ‘shapes’ that things assume on the field of sensation (the various sense-determined modalities of things) as well as the various ‘shapes’ that they display on the field of reason (whether as eidetic forms of things or as categories in the sense of ‘forms’ of discursive thought) are all the Form that things take insofar as they appear to us. They all show the way things are for us” (129).

Importantly, for Nishitani, this is not a limitation but rather demonstrates a deeper truth about the nature of reality itself. As he explains, “From ancient times the word samādhi (‘settling’) has been used to designate the state of mind in which a man gathers his own mind together and focuses it on a central point, thereby taking a step beyond the sphere of ordinary conscious and self-conscious mind and, in that sense, forgetting his ego. . . . In that sense, we might call such a mode of being ‘samādhi-being.’ The form of things as they are on their own home-ground is similar to the appearance of things in samādhi” (128). We might speculate along these lines about a connection here to the Greek concept of logos (λόγος), which likewise carries this double sense of gathering: both as the gathering together of thought and discourse, and as the gathering together of things themselves in their integrity and being. This understanding of logos, which we find both in Heraclitus and later in Heidegger’s reading of the Greeks, suggests that the gathering of mind and the gathering of reality are intimately connected—just as we find in Nishitani’s account of samādhi.

This convergence between Platonic thought and Nishitani’s understanding of śūnyatā grows even more clear when we consider their shared view of transcendence. In Plato, we could say, the Being of beings, or the idea of ideas, is the Sun, as we’ve seen. But this Sun, this essential and primary luminosity, is, precisely, beyond beings insofar as it gives beingness to beings (to borrow Heidegger’s way of speaking). It is that which shows things to be what they are without being alike to any of these things; it is the precondition of things being things, substances, to build upon Nishitani’s exploration and exegesis. And in this way, it is no-thing, an emptiness, but it is a luminous emptiness that gives things their shine, their ability to show themselves as things. This is why I say that Plato and Nishitani may in the end be much closer together than a more provincial reading of the former might at first disclose.

As Nishitani writes, “On that field of śūnyatā each thing becomes manifest in its suchness in its very act of affirming itself, according to its own particular potential and virtus and in its own particular shape. . . . The field of śūnyatā is nothing other than the field of the Great Affirmation” (131). Can we not say, then, that the Sun in Plato is at least similar to Nishitani’s śūnyatā? And further, is this Sun-emptiness something we find in Nietzsche, who so patiently and presciently diagnosed not just the setting of this Sun, but its wiping away altogether in the death of God? I’m inclined to agree with Nishitani: We do not find this in Nietzsche—expressly we do not—and the appeal to the eternal return (as we saw in Nishitani’s account of it) does not secure for us an equivalent idea, and this also bares on how we should understand Foucault’s taking up of philosophical askēsis in his peculiar way.

There is, to be sure, quite a lot of ground covered—both traversed but also lost—between Nietzsche and Foucault, where we could read Foucault as taking up certain Nietzschean themes (will-to-power, immanence, genealogy) but in a way even further reduced from what in Nietzsche might still be considered metaphysical dimensions. The point is, the context for the practices Foucault takes up have an even more skeptical and limited flavor than what we find in Nietzsche, a limitation that opens up Foucault to the criticism leveled against him by Hadot in a way that isn’t true for Nietzsche. This is now a difficult terrain of roughly tangled and competing ideas, but the primary issue is simple: The Sun was “wiped from the horizon” and Foucault is in this sense operating with a severely truncated view of philosophical practice, of askēsis. This truncation, I would say, goes by the word nihilism.

But if my analysis is right, then we can arrive at a view of Plato that undermines both Nietzsche’s critique and Foucault’s subsequent appropriation of it. The question before us is thus not merely historical but deeply practical: Can we engage again in a meaningful askēsis resupplied with a robust sense of transcendent orientation? I think the answer is yes. The question then becomes how we understand and relate to this relation itself—whether through Nietzsche’s celebration of immanent becoming or through what Perl identifies as Plato’s concern with securing “the existence of truth and the reality of being” against nihilism.33

Our investigation reveals more than a historical correction to how we read Plato—it points toward a rethinking of philosophical practice itself. The convergence we’ve traced between Perl’s reading of Plato and Nishitani’s understanding of śūnyatā suggests that the apparent opposition between transcendence and immanence is transformed when we properly understand how practice mediates our relationship to reality. Rather than abandoning transcendence, as Nietzsche and his followers would have it, or maintaining it as something wholly separate from appearance, we find in Plato a way of understanding transcendence as that which enables appearance itself, without undermining it, but enriching it and being enriched by it, as the two are, in fact, one, viewed from different perspectives.

Through Perl’s interpretive work, accented by a surprising convergence with Nishitani’s account of śūnyatā, we find in Plato, then, a more subtle and powerful understanding of how appearance relates to reality. This view suggests that askēsis need not choose between anchoring itself in transcendent truth or celebrating immanent becoming. Instead, philosophical practice might be understood as the cultivation of our capacity to apprehend the way transcendence manifests itself in and through immanent particularly—not as an external addition or supplement, but as the very condition of appearance itself, where appearances become, in turn, the site of unique and singular modes of original Being—expressed as the art works of existence itself.

Askēsis, then, is about shaping the shape of soul, and this shaping takes place within the ecology of greater Being, where apprehension and givenness are mediated by practice in relation to being. The being-together of soul and reality is anchored to and shaped by practice. As we’ve seen, Perl parallels Heidegger in translating alēthes (ἀληθές)—truth—as meaning “unhidden,” a definition that through Perl we’ve also seen is Plato’s own. As the true nature of an event shows itself through the “look” or “appearance” of its eidos, we should understand this showing or “unhiding” as at least in part a consequence of practice. We could say that askēsis is disclosive of a form’s unhiddenness—askēsis is the practice of unhiding. This reading of askēsis is placed in a larger philosophical context that rejects nominalism and nihilism alike as viable views of the real, but it also rejects a two-world binary of forms and appearances, seeing them instead as a variegated continuum indexed against the skills of perception we bring to bear on phenomena.

This understanding returns us to the Allegory of the Cave with which we began, now seen not as a story of escape from appearance to reality, but as an account of how proper philosophical practice transforms our way of seeing the real in appearance itself. I have risked here a certain overcomplication in discussion by introducing so many names—Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Nishitani, Foucault, Perl—but doing so has proved necessary to achieve our purposes. Each thinker contributes to reframing not only how we think of Plato and his purported two-world metaphysics—that often-maligned setup upon which Nietzsche spent much of his intellectual energy subverting and then overturning—but also how we should think of practice in the twenty-first century, in the wake of Nietzsche’s critique, but then also, and more importantly, in the resurrection of a philosophical world image we thought had been lost. If Perl is right, then Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics is misplaced, and we may think askēsis again in the terms of a more ancient realism, one that can take shape against the light of a breaking dawn, a newly rising Sun. In so doing, we may discover that it had been there all along.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, the concept of askēsis and the practice of philosophical turning have taken on different forms throughout the history of Western thought. From Plato’s paideia to Nietzsche’s eternal return, and from Hadot’s spiritual exercises to Foucault’s technologies of the self, philosophers have grappled with the question of how thought and practice can transform the individual and their relationship to the world. The challenge for contemporary philosophy is to navigate these perspectives and find a way forward that honors the transformative potential of philosophical practice while remaining responsive to the critiques of traditional metaphysics and the complexities of modern life. The shape of thought to come will likely emerge from this ongoing dialogue, as we continue to explore new ways of turning, new forms of askēsis, and new understandings of what it means to live a philosophical life in the twenty-first century. In reflecting on this exploration of askēsis and its place in philosophical thought, we can return to the central question that motivated this inquiry.

What shape might philosophical thought take in our current epoch? The challenge for philosophy today, as I see it, is to find new and old ways of turning alike, of practicing askēsis, that are genuinely responsive to our current situation while still maintaining a vital connection to the deepest insights of these ancient philosophical traditions. This may require us to reimagine what philosophical practice looks like in a world where the “Sun” of transcendent truth seems to have been wiped from the horizon, as Nietzsche suggests. Or, more likely, we may need to cultivate a form of askēsis that embraces both the Platonic turn towards the Good and the Nietzschean affirmation of becoming, a practice that can navigate between the cosmic attunement Hadot advocates and the critical self-creation Foucault proposes.

Indeed, I think we find such a synthesis already in Plato. The need for transformative philosophical practice seems as urgent as ever, yet the ground on which we might build such practices seems increasingly unstable. Perhaps the shape of thought to come will not be a fixed form at all, but a dynamic, adaptive process of continuous turning and returning, a philosophical movement that alternates between the timeless and the timely, the universal and the particular, Being and becoming. In this light, I see these notes not as a conclusion, but as an opening—an invitation to further dialogue, exploration, and most importantly, practice. For if Hadot’s recovery of askēsis teaches us anything, it’s that philosophy is not merely something to be thought, but something to be lived.

However this plays out, the shape of thought to come will be determined by more than our theories as we typically understand them, but by our ongoing practices of philosophical transformation as well. Such practices must work to refine our intellectual capacities while simultaneously cultivating our sensory awareness, deepening our emotional understanding, and developing our ethical judgment. But perhaps most importantly, they must find ways to honor both the immanent and transcendent dimensions of experience without falling into either pure relativism or rigid dualism. Our examination suggests that the opposition between these dimensions may itself be part of what needs to be overcome. The path forward, then, might lie not in choosing between transcendent realism and critical self-creation, but in developing practices that allow truth to manifest within experience while acknowledging its capacity to exceed purely human construction, all while finding a path between the eternal and the temporal, the universal and the particular, in the philosophical life. This is the challenge and promise that philosophical practice holds for our time.

See Taylor’s A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

The following biography represents a synthesis of available historical facts about Hadot’s life, collated with statements and responses Hadot gave in the interviews collected in The Present Alone is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, trans., Marc Djaballah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), especially chapters 1 and 2.

Hadot, The Present Alone is Our Happiness, 6–7.

Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 6.

Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, 103.

Pierre Hadot, “There Are Nowadays Professors of Philosophy, but not Philosophers,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19, no. 3 (2005): 229–237.

I’d recommend the Bloomsbury series Re-Inventing Philosophy as a Way of Life and the Brill series Philosophy as a Way of Life for a deeper exploration of these issues.

Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (Vol II: In Search of the Divine Center; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1947), 291.

Jaeger, Paideia, 295.

Subsequent page numbers to this text refer to Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” in Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 155–182.

John Sallis, Platonic Legacies (New York: SUNY Press, 2004), 7–8.

As quoted in Sallis, Platonic Legacies, 9.

John Sallis, Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 2.

Sallis, Crossings, 2.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans., Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 119–120.

Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1984), 342.

Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, trans., Graham Parkes with Setsuko Aihara (New York: SUNY Press, 1990), 54.

Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, trans., Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 91.

Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, 123–124.

On this evolution in Nishitani’s thought, see Bret W. Davis, “Nishitani after Nietzsche: From the Death of God to the Great Death of the Will,” in Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School, ed. Bret W. Davis, Brian Schroeder, and Jason M. Wirth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 82–101.

William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought: Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 204. Preceding quotations also appear in this section.

Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, trans., Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 14).

Pierre Hadot, The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as Practice, trans., Matthew Sharpe and Frederico Testa (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 232.

Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans., Michael Chase (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 211.

Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis, 208.

Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, trans., Michael Chase (Cambridge: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2008), 217.

Hadot, The Selected Writings, 230.

Eric Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007), 83.

Eric Perl, “Sense Perception and Intellect in Plato,” Revue de Philosophie Ancienne 15, no. 1 (1997): 16.

Perl, Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition (Boston: Brill, 2014), 38.

These page number citations to Heidegger refer again to his “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth.”

Perl, Thinking Being, 26.

John Minkowski

Jan 13

The word 'crisis' appears twice in one paragraph. This paragraph suggests to me that you think the arbitrariness of self-defined meaning (enabled by nihilism) is a crisis, if I'm reading it correctly. I would argue that the concepts evoked by 'truth', 'reality', and 'meaning' require a preferred observer. If a preferred observer does not interact, then these concepts are just as much self-defined as those of an enlightened nihilist.

(As an amateur observer, thank you for the synthesis.)

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