Practice, Perception, and Being: A Sequential Account
I want to take a moment and lay out—step by step—the view that anchors the project I set out to describe in Practice in Still Life.
Throughout the book’s introduction I suggest that practice (askēsis) reshapes our attention, and that this reshaping not only changes the way we see but who we are as perceiving beings and what our attention can bring to presence through practice.
My aim was to show how three things fit together: the basic givenness of whatever shows up to us, the perceiving person whose skills of perception can alter what and how things appear, and the independent reality we call Being, the origin of appearing, through which we can see that askēsis implies and discloses a region or environment of practice that both pre-exists and comes to presence through that practice.
By setting out these ideas as numbered statements, I hope to make each stage of the account transparent and open to thought and reasoned consideration. I made quite a big deal in the book of how reason, discourse, and logic alone make for a too thin reading of what philosophy is and does, but I also made the point that these aspects of philosophy are essential to the character of healthy philosophizing itself.
Thus, below I give you the same thoughts I shared in the introduction to the work but represented here as a series of injunctions that walk through my reasoning and where I think that reasoning leaves us in terms of a philosophy of practice and perception. I’ve tried to be quite general about these claims, but familiar readers will recognize that I draw quite a bit in the background from philosophers like William Desmond, Eric Perl, and Eric Voegelin in gathering these insights together (all cited and discussed more thoroughly in the book itself).
There are, no doubt, more points I have yet to secure here, but this list takes us someways towards a comprehensive account of practice, perception, and Being.
The Sequence
The account goes as follows:
The first thing awareness encounters is appearing itself: the sheer fact that “something is there” for awareness, whether as perception, thought, feeling, or memory, before any judgment, desire, or doubt can arise; this original showing is the foundation of all experience.
This appearing constitutes a fundamental “givenness”: the initial way in which reality presents itself to awareness before any analysis or judgment can begin.
Whether what appears is true or illusory, good or bad, right or wrong, it remains given: a basic givenness that precedes evaluation.
This appearing always occurs to someone; givenness is tied to a point of view.
We can call the structured field within which givenness appears to awareness the perceptual horizon. It encompasses the totality of implicit capacities, skills, and contexts that enable and shape how things can appear to us.
This perceptual horizon constitutes what phenomenologists call the lifeworld (Lebenswelt): the pre-theoretical, pre-reflective domain of everyday experience within which all points of view arise and take shape.
Our encounter with this lifeworld is grounded in what we can call aesthetic openness: our fundamental receptivity to phenomena prior to conceptualization, the way we are first touched by and responsive to what appears before we begin to analyze or categorize it.
The aesthetic dimension is not subjective preference alone but the primary mode through which reality initially presents itself to us, a receptivity that both precedes and exceeds logical categorization.
As insights gained through this aesthetic openness mature, they naturally seek expression and communication. Here reason, discourse, and logic emerge not as separate from but as growing out of this prior aesthetic engagement with phenomena.
Reason thus functions as our public test for claims, but it operates always within and upon the ground first prepared by aesthetic openness to the world.
Reason works only on what aesthetic openness has already delivered; therefore it always rests on this receptive foundation rather than standing independently.
Having established the primacy of aesthetic receptivity, we can now examine the structure of perception more deeply. Givenness and the perceptual horizon are distinct but inseparable: givenness is what appears within the horizon, while the horizon is the structured context that determines how anything can appear at all.
The relation between givenness and that which is given is complex. What appears is neither identical to reality itself nor entirely separate from it, but rather reality showing itself according to the skills of the perceiver.
The perceptual horizon is not static but dynamic. It changes through time as a mediating structure between the awareness that perceives, the givenness of what appears, and that which is given through appearance.
Since the horizon is dynamic rather than fixed, this raises the question of whether it can be deliberately cultivated through intentional practice.
Long‑term disciplines, such as meditation or artistic training, demonstrate that steady practice can refine perceptual capacities, attentional skills, and modes of receptivity, transforming how and what appears within one’s horizon.
These cultivated disciplines exemplify what the Greeks called askēsis, literally “exercise” or “training”: an intentional practice that develops and transforms one’s fundamental capacities for perceiving, attending, and understanding.
Askēsis, we can say, reshapes the perceptual horizon by cultivating the skills through which awareness encounters givenness, thereby changing which aspects of reality can become apparent and to what degree.
Ascetical exercises—such as contemplation, meditation, study, investigation, or memorization—operate by systematically redirecting habitual modes of perception, altering the conditions through which reality appears to awareness and of what can be given.
The turn toward philosophical askēsis often begins in moments of disruption. Surprise, beauty, disorder, or wonder can break up habitual patterns of thought, creating an opening where the familiar becomes different and the original givenness comes into question.
Philosophical practice then works to secure, clarify, and deepen this initial moment or encounter, developing it through disciplined attention rather than allowing it to dissipate back into the flow of ordinary experience.
While various disciplines involve forms of practice that transform perception within specific domains (arts, athletics, sciences), philosophical askēsis is distinguished by its orientation toward the general conditions of appearing itself rather than any particular content that appears.
Philosophical askēsis performs a distinctive phenomenological shift. It turns one’s attention away from “this particular thing” and toward the process by which anything at all comes into presence, making visible the usually invisible structures that enable appearance.
This shift in attention gradually reveals that appearance itself has necessary preconditions. Certain structures and capacities must already be in place for anything whatsoever to show up as meaningful to awareness.
When we pursue this inquiry to its foundations, we encounter what we might call the question of Being. Beyond all particular appearances lies the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing—the question of existence itself.
We can call this central concern of philosophy Being-as-such, which refers not to particular beings or entities but to the ground or condition of all appearance. It is the affordance that enables and sustains existence itself, considered not as an object among objects but as the very possibility of presence.
If appearing is to make sense at all, something independent of any one viewpoint must make such appearing possible. Being is thus ontologically prior, meaning it exists as the fundamental reality that grounds and enables all appearance, independent of our perception of it.
Yet in our everyday experience, perception comes first phenomenologically, meaning that in the order of how we encounter things, we always experience reality through our perceptual capacities first, and these capacities can be either limited or expanded by training.
Askēsis mediates between this ontological priority of Being and the phenomenological priority of perception by tuning receptivity to the grain of what is, acting on the ordering of the perceptual horizon itself.
The Greeks used the term metaxu, meaning “between” or “in the middle,” to name the intermediate realm where perception and givenness meet, neither purely mental nor purely physical, where awareness and reality intersect in the act of appearing, with aspects of both revealment and concealment.
Philosophical askēsis seeks to dwell in this metaxu so that the surplus of Being can both reshape perception and continually solicit deeper inquiry, drawing the practitioner into ongoing dialogue with what always exceeds complete comprehension.
A satisfactory phenomenological and ontological account—one that explains coherent experience and supports honest dialogue—must therefore hold together (i) givenness, (ii) the perceptual horizon that practice can change, and (iii) the ontologically prior Being that exceeds and enables perception as such.
The Conclusion
In my view, askēsis emerges as the mediating practice between Being’s ontological priority and perception’s phenomenological primacy. Through the deliberate shaping of attention that comes with disciplined practice, I believe we can cultivate a receptivity that allows phenomena to show themselves differently, more deeply, while acknowledging that something always remains concealed to this transformation.
Throughout Practice in Still Life, I return to this idea in different ways, examining how various philosophical and contemplative traditions have approached this intermediary space between the perceiver and what is perceived, sometimes dissolving it altogether in the direction of a new constitution between both. My hope is that by recovering this understanding of philosophy as transformative practice, we might find new ways to live thoughtfully in the metaxu, that shared space where appearing and what appears meet, each reshaping the other in an ongoing, open-ended encounter.
In this sense, we can hold on to the role of reason, discourse, and logic in philosophy—as we must—but we can do so with an attitude that recognizes an aesthetic surplus from within which this kind of ratiocination emerges and must return to, thereby also calling to mind the wider space to which philosophy addresses itself. This wider space, I contend, requires the training of different attentional faculties, many of which operate in a nondiscursive way (e.g., contemplation) or that otherwise proceed through the physiological redirection of the body (e.g., fasting) or in modes of attention of different kinds (e.g., aesthetic or artistic ones).
This gives us a larger and more adequate account of what philosophy is and does, without letting go of the standard call of philosophy to reason. Practice in Still Life is, then, about those multiple ways in which we practice philosophy in this wider sense, acknowledging that the surplus of Being calls us to modes of training that go beyond discursive explication and argument, and where we can think of askēsis as implying and disclosing this region or environment of practice that both pre-exists and comes to presence through that practice.
Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures, by A.E. Robbert, is out now in Kindle, paperback, and ebook formats. Consider buying a copy today. All proceeds go towards supporting the research and writing you find here at The Base Camp.
Beautifully written, clear, and an account with which I strongly resonate. I'll be sure to pick up your book and give it a read.
I'm thinking here of a kind of philosophical grasping (Begriff, be-gripping, con-cept) as a practical moment of perception, as the clarification and objectification of what is given, the synthesis of sensation and idea into representation. This kind of grasping is a moment in the ascetic chain here, but it's clearly only a moment. I wonder how you'd characterize the non-grasping movements necessary to do philosophy.