Saying and Showing

The introduction to my forthcoming manuscript, Askēsis and Perception.

Jan 05, 2024

I’m sharing here the 15-page introduction to my forthcoming manuscript, Askēsis and Perception: Philosophy as a Way of Life.

You can download the 15-page introduction here, or find the full text below.

What is this work about?

If you’ve been following along with me for the past few years, then you’ll know that the manuscript is about a single word, askēsis (exercise or training).

There are many kinds of askēsis, including fasting, prayer, meditation, contemplation, temperance, cultivation of the senses, study, skepticism, artistic mastery, philosophical dialogue (i.e., dialectic), and cultivation of virtue. In these senses, askēsis is a mode of training the self takes upon itself in order to change itself. This mode of self-shaping resembles the techné (art or technique) of the craftworker or tradesperson, but the emphasis here is not the work of carpentry or the skilled production of artifacts per se, but on the self, which, as we will see, involves both the making and unmaking of the self as an open, shapable whole, sensitive to transformation through practice. Philosophy in this sense is a kinetic activity, a set of maneuvers made in thought and soul, and these movements are found in ancient and contemporary philosophers alike. The work tracks different senses of askēsis in history, exploring how these practices are involved in transformations of our perception, how we come to see things. A key idea in the manuscript is that seeing and being go together, and this introduction sets up that discussion.

If you’re interested in corresponding with me about the manuscript, these resources, or anything connected to the two, feel free to reach me here:

ae.robbert@gmail.com

More soon.

Saying and Showing

The philosophical act transcends the literary work that expresses it.
—Pierre Hadot[1]

What can be shown, cannot be said.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein[2]

It is not something that can be put into words like other branches of knowledge; only after long partnership in a common life devoted to this very thing does truth flash upon the soul, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark, and once it is born there it nourishes itself thereafter.
—Plato[3]

This work begins with a contradiction. Its primary aim is to activate interest in and awareness of a single idea, askēsis (ἄσκησις). This Greek word means exercise or practice.[4] The English derivation is asceticism—a kind of severe abstinence or austerity[5]—though as we will see, askēsis and asceticism are not identical concepts.[6] In its original connotation, askēsis referred to the training an athlete would undergo in preparation for competition,[7] but its broader meaning applies to science, philosophy, and art. Indeed, there are many kinds of askēsis, including fasting, prayer, meditation, contemplation, temperance, cultivation of the senses, study, skepticism, artistic mastery, philosophical dialogue (i.e., dialectic), and cultivation of virtue. In connecting these different actions, it shows their commonality, not by making them identical in craft or aim, but by drawing to the foreground how each activity presupposes transformation.

In this sense, askēsis is a mode of training the self takes upon itself in order to change itself.[8] The self takes up this training in the direction of a certain modification, involving an increase in capacity for attention, interpretation, and awareness.[9] Pierre Hadot borrowed the phrase “spiritual exercises” from St. Ignatius of Loyola to describe the level of change in one’s being that occurs through askēsis, a change best likened to a process of conversion.[10] In other words, to become an artist, philosopher, or contemplative one must leave behind who one currently is, and one must do so not just in any manner, but along the path of an established lineage. However, this discipline is not always formulaic, systematic, or legible to the strict rule-follower of dogmatic training manuals, but neither is it a random or arbitrary path of development. Each of these practices follows a certain telos, a guiding light towards which the transformation must grow, a transformation tied to the training of perception, to certain ways of seeing tied intimately to corresponding ways of being.

Seeing and being are closely linked in the notion of askēsis, and here the contradiction shows itself, since the written or spoken word cannot capture the full story of this transformation, and in some cases, it can even occlude or hinder its occurrence.[11] The epigraphs to this chapter—from Pierre Hadot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Plato—all point to a single truth, namely, that philosophy, as a love of wisdom, exceeds in its insights the vocabulary that we might use to describe it. However, for Hadot, Wittgenstein, and Plato, the limits of language are not necessarily the limits of philosophy as such, especially when our topic of inquiry is the set of practices marked by askēsis, on the one hand, and the deliverances they make available, on the other. Indeed, the limitations of language may in the end prove beneficial to philosophical understanding, as an analysis of linguistic constraint can reveal something important about the philosopher’s relation to the world, and about what kind of world it is that we seek to understand. I think here of Rowan Williams’s question, “Does the way we speak tell us anything about the universe we are in?”[12] I will in the same spirit ask, does the way we practice tell us anything about the universe we inhabit? In other words, is the constraint of language—and the concomitant need of nonverbal practice—not itself a comment on the multifarious nature of reality and the ways we might seek to account for its plural modes of expressiveness? Askēsis is a response to this condition.

In this opening chapter, then, I want to raise to the foreground the contradictions set by writing about askēsis, not to resolve them, but to accentuate them, to show them as crucial components of the transfigurational space opened by askēsis and its tension with the now-commonplace discursive and conceptual emphasis placed upon philosophy today, especially as it exists in the current university system. Placing this tension in the foreground will disclose askēsis in its context, as part and parcel of the philosophies its practices help to realize, and it will show how askēsis, in its general shape, requires consideration not only of a broader conception of philosophy than its modern characterization allows, but also a historical exegesis bigger than philosophy itself. The tension between these practices and their verbal descriptions offers an opportunity for dialogue about the usefulness or not of language itself in the practicing life, and for how language, when used correctly, can aid in this process—as a practice of its own, and as part of spiritual direction.

To that end, these next chapters are structured around a series of concentric circles within the center of which askēsis can be said to sit, a center that I will argue draws together the roots of Western intellectual history in its engagements with Plato and Platonism, philosophy and contemplation, reason and its limits, askēsis and perception, and silence and expressiveness. I have a selected a specific route through this terrain to render visible a few prescient sites in the history of philosophy—broadly conceived to include those areas where philosophy shades into contemplation, religion, and aesthetics—that may remain occluded when traveling down other paths. To expand on the metaphor, this text is little more than a map and a compass, a description of territories marked with a few arrows hinting at possible directions for travel. The text is a tool for navigation, but the work must be pursued by everyone individually, traveling his or her own path. To be sure, this is not the only route through the landscape, and thankfully, these days the notion of philosophy as a way of life rooted in the spiritual exercises of askēsis is back in the headlines, and there are now many alternative paths to choose from.

Philosophy as a Way of Life

This phrase, philosophy as a way of life, re-entered the contemporary lexicon of anglophone philosophy with the 1995 publication of Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life, itself in part a translation of the original 1987 French work, Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique.[13] In addition to the subsequent translations of Hadot’s work published in English (a project still ongoing at the time of this writing), several anthologies bearing the same title have emerged,[14] each one an explicit reference to Hadot’s writing. These publications are joined by a book series of a similar name, Re-Inventing Philosophy as a Way of Life,[15] which is host to translations of Hadot’s own essays as well as to the traces of his influence, the history he draws from, and the alternative sources and traditions with which Hadot’s thought can be put into dialogue.

Simone Kotva’s Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy, for example, reads the tradition of French spiritualism—from Maine de Biran to Simone Weil—against the aforementioned Ignatian interpretation of spiritual exercise as principally organized around effort and will, showing how this tradition, in Kotva’s words, “anticipated but also challenged the approach to philosophy popularized by Pierre Hadot,”[16] by naming the importance of passivity and surrender for philosophical practice. These works and others emerged in the wake of publications by Michel Foucault and Peter Sloterdijk, both of whom draw from Hadot, generating much discussion and debate in turn.[17]

The present writing joins in this ongoing dialogue, and, in keeping with a certain Hellenistic tradition of linking personal biography to philosophical practice,[18] I will add that it is written from my own perspective as a scholar–practitioner. The philosopher on this view is less an academic in a conventional sense and more a pilgrim (a theoros), a visitor in foreign lands.[19] My emphasis on philosophy as a way of life—as a set of practices essential to philosophical deliverance—is not primarily academic, but biographical. I write as a practitioner and recipient of many (though certainly not all) of the spiritual, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical exercises that are detailed in this work. My training as a philosopher would mean nothing without these exercises, and whatever modest insight I have gleaned over the course of my years is entirely indebted to my participation in various physical, visionary, artistic, religious, and philosophical training regimes and experiences. The scholarship presented in this work is only a reflection of these experiences and practices, rendered into academic prose as a supplement to the broader spectrum of exercises themselves, to which askēsis refers. The intent is that the skillful use of scholarship may guide the practices that do not fit onto the page but are nevertheless referenced herein. In this sense, the work’s central method is not distanced observation, but engagement.

There is in this sense a close relation between theory and practice, especially if we read “practice” (praktikē) as a method or habit of action, a set of movements arrayed in patterns or forms that lead to acquiring skillful perception,[20] and “theory” in its original sense as theoria, as a specific and learned form of contemplative seeing or beholding.[21] On this understanding, the relationship between theory and practice in the modern sense is quite different from the relationship between praktikē and theoria in this older connotation. In the more recent view one sees two poles in a recursive relation, but in the older view there is a taxonomical relation, as genus to species, where praktikē and theoria complement one another as aspects of a fuller picture of the philosophical life, each holding their own gifts and potentials, the one informing the other. To quote Ryan Duns we can say, “Philosophical discourse without practice is empty, philosophical practice without theory is blind.”[22]

Askēsis, Scholarship, and Contemplation

While it may be true, as Hadot says, that philosophy transcends its own expression, the work of writing still plays an important role in the ascetic process of cultivation. Writing, as well as reading and studying, exemplify their own types of askēsis. We can take this idea one step further, as Simone Weil does, and say that the exercises of education can be thought of sacramentally, as implements that train our spiritual attention.[23] Weil sees the sacramental gifts of education working on two levels. First, they work in the sense that the difficulties of interpreting a text (or, say, grasping a mathematical proof) require achieving a precise quality of cultivated attention. Second, and more importantly, this type of attention works to train the same focus used in spiritual exercise, as for example in the practices of prayer or meditation.[24] These habits of attention drive the capacity to pay close mind to the life of the soul. The prayerful life is a studious life, and the studious life a prayerful one. The life of scholarship is in these ways already a life of spiritual exercise, wherein studious intention flowers out into sacramental attention.

In this sense, cultivating the arts of speech and writing invite their own kinds of transformations, as many writers and speakers already know. The Jewish Hellenistic philosopher Philo of Alexandria (b. ~25 BCE), for example, recorded a list of practices that bear specifically on scholarship, including research (zetesis), investigation (skepsis), reading (anagnosis), and attention (prosoche).[25] The need of these practices is readily discernible to anyone who carefully attends to the physical dimensions of study and scholarship. Consider the close and sustained attentiveness required of careful reading on a single subject, juxtaposed against the very different panoramic sweep of mind needed to view an era in history in its fullness. Both types of attention are necessary, as is the skill of knowing how to tactfully oscillate between the two. Think also of the aesthetic focus needed to rightly shape paragraphs and sentences, the consistency demanded of setting down a larger work that may pass the test of time, or the moral and cognitive self-awareness required to inhabit another person’s perspective—that of our friends but also that of our adversaries. Reading and writing alike require abnormal levels of concentration, to say nothing of the capacity for steadiness, attention, and preparation needed of such tasks, all balanced alongside the emotional and psychological comportment necessary to see the work to its end. It is not too much to say that studying is a meditative act, when understood in these terms.

These habits of attention, to use Weil’s language of spiritual development again, are today principally associated with the tools and techniques of reading and writing, that is, with the externalized forms of memory recorded in our books and libraries, extending down through our own literary expeditions, however minor. And yet, to limit attention in this way to its relation to the written word is to miss the crucial role of memory in the work of intellectual pursuit. This is the great theme of Frances Yates’s work on the history of memory practices, a description of those “inner gymnastics” that would allow the mind to hold together a complex sequence of ideas in awareness in ages that had no wide access to printing, paper, books, or writing. These “invisible labors of concentration” may seem less common today but they still play a central if understated role in scholarship.[26] Such practices of attention, evoked in memory practice, show again the type of training to which askēsis points, and to how closely allied are spiritual exercises of perception with the intellectual life, especially as these modes of paying attention are thought to reshape the soul of the person who engages in them. The image most descriptive of this process, says Yates, is that of the wax tablet.[27] The wax in question is the very constitution of the soul itself as it writes and rewrites itself into new shapes and capacities for attention and action. This is an evocative way of calling forth relations among attention, practice, and transformation, united here through meditations on memory. The objects of memorization—prayers, hymns, stories, speeches, histories—are brought into the soul for the sake of its reorganization, and for a sharing of this potency with a community of interested practitioners.

These examples—athleticism, exercise, attention, focus, memory, concentration, research, investigation—are principally forms of action and will, but askēsis requires something else besides acts of will to deliver its insights; in addition to will, askēsis requires openness and passivity, an allowance for a certain contemplative orientation.[28] Contemplation is also an act of will, at least initially, but it occupies a different tone. It is, in one definition, a “marking out of a space for observation.” It also means “religious musing” or “to gaze attentively.”[29] The suffix “templum” in the word is the same as in the word “temple,” which in a more literal and concrete way also “marks out a space for observation,”[30] as one might find in a monastery, retreat center, or library. This double sense of “marking out”—in one’s mind, meditatively, and in one’s physical space, concretely—is noteworthy insofar as contemplation’s opening move is not a different kind of thinking per se, but rather a suspension (epoché) of thinking as such, however partially accomplished.[31]

It is no coincidence that the Greek gymnasia and palaistrai served a dual function as places for athletic training and philosophical events and discussions—places that would often become the future sites of philosophical schools, including Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum.[32] Peter Sloterdijk makes the observation that Plato’s Academy mirrors this dual meaning of epoché, in the mind of the philosopher and in the architecture of the Academy, which was centrally a devotional space for the life of thinking.[33] Contemplation, then, is the marking out of space for deep thought, both internally, in the quiet solitude of one’s own inner life, and externally, in the deliberate arrangement of an environment that can afford the sustained, silent openness that is the precondition for generating thinking in the scholarly arena and beyond. Silence holds a space for repose, receptivity, and even grace that forms a crucial counterpoint to the willful side of askēsis. As Kotva notes, “Neither action nor passivity grounds spiritual exercise; it is the paradox of effort and grace that shapes it.”[34] Askēsis, as a kind of spiritual exercise, operates in this dual domain of will and repose.

The word scholar itself contains a similar double meaning. The Greek skohlē (from which the modern word is derived) notes a mode of “holding back, a keeping clear” but also a physical building for learning—the school or academy—much as the Latin schola marks a “meeting place for teachers and students.”[35] The word is further connected to notions of leisure, in the sense of free time, especially understood as the freedom from coercion, obligation, or unpleasant work.[36] This sense of free time is related to the freedom needed for sustained, undistracted thought. One is hard-pressed to find a better expression of this type of leisure than in Josef Pieper’s treatment of the topic. He writes,

Leisure is a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear. Such stillness as this is not mere soundlessness or a dead muteness; it means, rather, that the soul’s power, as real, of responding to the real—a co-respondence, eternally established in nature—has not yet descended into words. Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion—in the real.[37]

Here, leisure marks a passivity for attunement, for listening to the sound of the real. These practices center a receptivity in tune with eternality as opposed to the active and piqued engagement associated with the throws of the timely world. Pieper also introduces here another crucial aspect of contemplation and spiritual exercise; namely, that these are exercises organized not only by the mind’s relation to itself but by the mind’s relation to the world, to Being, to the whole of what is real, in the sense of a co-respondence with the ecology of Being and beings.[38]

One could say that askēsis is premised on the practitioner’s relation to Being. Indeed, in Plato’s Republic, at 486d, we learn that having this relation to Being is one of the philosopher’s essential characteristics. The mode of this relating is expressed in different ways, depending on the translation of the text we choose. Consider the following interpretations of the passage. The soul referenced here is the soul of the philosopher:

“Well, and do not all these qualities, which we have been enumerating, go together, and are they not, in a manner, necessary to a soul, which is to have a full and perfect participation of being?” (Jowett)

“The goal of philosophy, as Socrates claims, is to engage in the ‘theôria of all being.’” (Nightingale)[39]

“Well, then, don’t you think the properties we’ve enumerated are compatible with one another and that each is necessary to a soul that is to have an adequate and complete grasp of that which is?” (Cooper)

The relation to Being—or to “that which is” (in the last translation)—takes the shape of “participation,” “theoria” (or beholding), and “grasping,” in each rendition, respectively. These actions are described as essential to the philosophical life, and thus to any of the practices that we may consider “philosophical.” In other words, philosophy is a participating, beholding, or grasping in and of Being, that which is. Philosophical practices must engage with Being; they deepen the practitioner’s sense for Being and its subtle and innumerable qualities. I hold out as crucial to this primacy of Being a distinction between Being itself and the metaphysics, theology, or cosmology—the systems of philosophy, religion, or science—one might use to describe it. From the stance of theoria and participation, these systems are seen as creative representations of the shapes Being might take, without ever being totally coincident with Being as such. On this view, Being is taken as intelligible through systems of science, metaphysics, and religion without being reducible to any singular mode of intelligibility.[40]

Philosophy in this mode is a set of practices that enable theoria, or this bearing witness to Being, especially as made available by the leisure of contemplation and the philosophical arts of perception cultivated through practice. William Desmond describes the human as having a porosity to Being, that is, an open-ended and elemental receptiveness to Being—what Desmond calls our “primal participation”—from which everything else we do or experience originates.[41] Desmond sees as primary this receptivity in Being (passio essendi) to the secondary endeavor or attempt to be in a certain way (conatus essendi).[42] In other words, we must first have being before we begin to shape our being in a particular way, and this having being in human form is an openness to what is, an openness that also acknowledges that to be human is in some sense to be always already in the mode of a continuous shaping and re-shaping. The commitments of various philosophies on this view provide the coordinates for the open-ended shaping, or way of life, we might choose.

Askēsis in this basic sense is the shaping of the shape of one’s being in concert with receptivity to this greater Being. This mode of self-shaping resembles the techné (art or technique) of the craftworker or tradesperson, but the emphasis here is not the work of carpentry or the skilled production of artifacts per se, but on the self, which, as we will see, involves both the making and unmaking of the self as an open, shapeable whole, sensitive to transformation through practice.[43] The self is the wood that practice shapes through its efforts. Properly understood, then, skohlē, theoria (contemplation, theory), and leisure each supply the armature of an at once sacramental and intellectual attention to this vast space we call Being, which is the condition of our endeavoring to do as such.

Philosophy Beyond Dianoia

This detour into questions of contemplation and Being should not be seen as other than the activities conventionally thought to be within the purview of the intellectual life today. Indeed, scholarship, as a mode of askēsis, exemplifies the twin poles of Kotva’s effort and grace: The willful effort of the scholarly pursuit meets the repose and open-endedness of contemplation—the precondition for inspiration and epiphany so crucial to expressing real philosophical insight. In these many senses, askēsis is already present in the work of writing and scholarship. And yet, even as a closer look at the phenomenology of study reveals its nascent contemplative dimensions, this image of the scholarly life does not go far enough in recovering an adequate picture of the general question, what is askēsis? Certainly, one needs every intellectual resource available when addressing this question, including those used in generating discursive thought and propositional statements. Traditionally, these resources have been the province of reason (dianoia) and its expressions (logos),[44] and much contemporary and historical scholarship rightly emphasizes these areas as the privileged domain of philosophical study. Indeed, philosophy today is often understood as the content of philosophical systems—as the set of concepts, propositions, or insights that make up a philosophy.

A less common, but still influential, stance is to read philosophy as the maneuvers in thought or attention that give rise to those same concepts, propositions, or insights.[45] If one were to ignore the practices that make possible these forms of mental activity, then these intellectual products would before too long “dissolve like writing on water,” to quote Sloterdijk.[46] That is, without the appropriate systems of contemplative training, our own philosophical insights would grow opaque to ourselves, and the ability to generate them anew could, hypothetically, disappear in a generation or two. This is the concern of askēsis, a view that sees the full orbit of philosophy from a different angle, one in which dianoia is circumscribed by a more encompassing set of faculties and practices—practices that pour into reasoning before reason gets going.

The question I ask here is, if reason, as typically understood, generates discursive thinking and its products, then what acts upon the capacity to reason itself? The answer I put forward here is askēsis, practice. These practices may or may not be verbal in nature, but as this study will show, they flow into speech and discourse just the same. And, at the same time, the reverse can be said, as the practices of intellection also flow back into and inform the larger complement of human faculties, forming a circle of transformation. The point is to see reason—along with its careful attentional discipline of offering judgments, accounts, and arguments—as one among a set of interrelated practices. Philosophy in this sense is a kinetic activity, a set of maneuvers made in thought and soul, and these movements are found in ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophers alike.[47] Furthermore, these practices are found not only within the province of philosophy proper but also in religious, contemplative, and artistic schools the world over.

Portraits and Methods

The methods of this study will disclose the shape of this arc in different ways. One method is historical, as it tracks uses of the word askēsis across different time periods. Another is phenomenological, in that it attends to the shape of the practices themselves. A further method is to offer portraits of askēsis from the perspective of different existential stances and traditions, portraits that each cast askēsis in a unique light. The final method, which incorporates elements of all the others, is philosophical in the sense that, ultimately, the work will give a general theory or account of askēsis as it relates to perception. This philosophical approach reads the question of perception not only in an epistemological register but also in an ontological one—and it does so by taking the latter beyond its formation in propositional abstraction into the world of felt immediacy and participation in a fuller, transcendent context. The project is thus one of making sense of askēsis itself from these perspectives, drawing together the strengths of both theory and practice.

These general methods draw the work back into age-old debates over the nature of perception and its connection to body, soul, intellect, world, and more. Indeed, it also complicates the lines between philosophical life and contemplative, spiritual, or religious inquiry. To that end, the work considers carefully the nature of these relationships and the arguments for and against holding them closely together, as well as the reasons one might prefer to hold them apart. There can be little doubt that, historically, askēsis refers to a type of practice that prefigures ancient and modern divides between metaphysics and theology, or reason and revelation,[48] and the study will show that this status of askēsis being in many senses prior to these divisions sheds light both on how the ascetics, now and then,[49] conceived of their practices, and on how we contemporary philosophers may wish to rethink ours.

To these ends, I turn first to an examination of askēsis as it arises historically in the context of Plato and Platonic philosophy at large. Askēsis, as I will describe in the chapters to follow, is both older and more encompassing than the history that grows out of Platonic philosophy. However, Plato and Platonism, in their many conflicting interpretations, offer unique opportunities for examining the role of askēsis in philosophy, and so the philosophies that spring from both offer a natural starting point for this discussion. The next chapter is concerned with these themes, set against the multiple ways one can interpret the role of spiritual exercise in Plato’s epistemology and metaphysics. As I will argue in the coming pages, askēsis offers an opportunity to rethink Platonic philosophies in a more integral way that reframes the common dualisms that have beset interpretations of these works for too long. Through askēsis, as we will see, we gain not only a fuller picture of what is epistemically tractable in the philosophical life, but also a richer ontology, one that is as aesthetically, morally, and contemplatively informed as it is rationally accountable in the terms of a more mainstream philosophical image. This integration—of the aesthetic, the moral, the rational, and the contemplative—is what askēsis can afford the philosophical life.

[1] Hadot, “There Are Nowadays Professors of Philosophy, but not Philosophers,” 234.

[2] Wittgenstein, The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.1212

[3] Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, 341.

[4] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “askesis,” accessed February 28, 2023, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/11366?redirectedFrom=ask%C4%93sis#eid

[5] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “asceticism,” accessed February 20, 2023, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/11370?redirectedFrom=asceticism#eid

[6] See Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 82 and 128 on further differences between askesis and asceticism.

[7] Dombrowski, “Asceticism as Athletic Training in Plotinus,” 702–712.

[8] See Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, especially 6 and 189–211.

[9] Hadot describes the role of attention in practices of askēsis in numerous locations. See for example What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 136, 138, 159, and 192.

[10] Hadot notes the connection between Ignatian spiritual exercises and the term askesis thusly, “Ignatius’ Exercilia spiritualia are nothing but a Christian version of a Greco-Roman tradition, the extent of which we hope to demonstrate in what follows. In the first place, both the idea and the terminology of exercitium spirituale are attested in early Latin Christianity, well before Ignatius of Loyola, and they correspond to the Greek Christian term askesis,” Philosophy as a Way of Life, 82. This is not to say that Ignatian spiritual exercise introduced nothing new to the existing history of askēsis, nor that Ignatius simply appropriated a term already in use. Rather, as I will show in later chapters, it is the case that there is both continuity and transformation present in the history of askēsis, one that is especially pronounced in the transition from Greek philosophical to Christian religious modes of askēsis.

[11] This theme, found in apophatic and via negativa contemplative traditions, involves practices of unknowing—sometimes referred to as practices of “remotion,” or the removal of sensory or intellectual predications in the mind, such as those found in the works of the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th century work of spiritual direction and contemplative prayer with roots in the Christian mysticism and Platonism of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Practices of unknowing emphasize letting go of the words and concepts that structure our experience, especially of the divine. They are also present in modified forms in the philosophical work of Pierre Hadot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Plato. As such, they form a central component of the present discussion of askēsis, crossing as they do divides between philosophy and religion.

[12] Williams, The Edge of Words, 14/355.

[13] Davidson, “Introduction: Pierre Hadot and the Spiritual Phenomenon of Ancient Philosophy,” 2. Michael Chase reports that this work was itself the mature expression of an earlier publication that first appeared in print in France in Annuaire de la Ve in 1977 that also held the title “Exercices spirituels” (“Introduction,” 4). These publications are preceded by Hadot’s work on Plotinus, Plotin ou la simplicité du regard, first published in France in 1963, which also references the notion of spiritual exercise.

[14] These are Philosophy as a Way of Life: Ancients and Moderns (Eds., Michael Chase, Stephen R.L. Clark, and Michael McGhee), Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, and Directions (Eds., Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure), and Philosophy as a Way of Life: Historical Contemporary, and Pedagogical Perspectives (Eds., James M. Ambury, Tushar Irani, and Kathleen Wallace).

[15] The series is published by Bloomsbury Press.

[16] Interview with Simone Kotva by Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, “A Conversation about Effort and Grace,” para. 2.

[17] I am thinking here specifically of Foucault’s The Hermeneutics of the Subject and The Courage of Truth and Sloterdijk’s The Art of Philosophy and You Must Change Your Life, but one could list many other publications in addition.

[18] See Pierre Force, “The Teeth of Time,” 22.

[19] Nightingale, Philosophy and Religion in Plato’s Dialogues, 21.

[20] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “practice,” accessed May 10, 2023, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/149234?result=2&rskey=0wJQHN&

[21] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “theory,” accessed May 10, 2023, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200431?redirectedFrom=theory#eid

[22] Duns, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age, 133. Duns quote is a play on Kant’s famous statement, “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”

[23] Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” 105–116.

[24] Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” 108.

[25] Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 84.

[26] Yates, The Art of Memory, 16. I note with interest that Yates describes herself as “a historian only of the art [of memory], not a practitioner of it” (ibid., 19), which makes Yates’s treatment of memory quite different from the present treatment of askēsis, which I root, at least partially, in the empirical and phenomenological senses in which I have encountered the effects of the exercises grouped under its name. This is not to say that the method of the distanced historical observer is a lesser approach—far from it—but it does point to a difference of attitude that I believe is consequential insofar there is a feeling for practice that can only be held from the inside, as it were.

[27] Yates traces this image as it appears in Plato (in the Theaetetus), Aristotle (in De memoria et reminiscentia), the Scholastics (in Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas), and the Renaissance recovery of Plato and Neoplatonism, all places in which the wax tablet image recurs. Ibid., 32–36.[27]

[28] See Kotva, Effort and Grace.

[29] Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “Contemplation,” accessed February 20, 2023, https://www.etymonline.com/word/contemplation

[30] Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “Temple,” accessed February 20, 2023, https://www.etymonline.com/word/temple#etymonline_v_7714

[31] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “epoché,” accessed June 13, 2023, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/242750?redirectedFrom=epoche#eid

[32] Evans, “Architectural and Spatial Features of Plato’s Gymnasia and Palaistrai,” 31–34.

[33] Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy, 33.

[34] Kotva, Effort and Grace, 25.

[35] Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “Scholar,” accessed February 20, 2023, https://www.etymonline.com/word/scholar#etymonline_v_22904

[36] Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. “Leisure,” accessed February 20, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/leisure

[37] Pieper, Leisure, 50.

[38] I mean Being (on) and beings (ónta) in the general sense proposed by Aristotle. Being is the object of the science of metaphysics, of “being qua being” (to on he on) as opposed to a study of individual beings (ónta), which is the concern of the special sciences. In the Platonic and Neoplatonic senses, the One is said to be “beyond being,” where Being is apprehended by the noetic faculty but issues out into a divine transcendence that exceeds this grasp. I discuss the noetic capacity in more detail in the next chapter. See Greek Philosophical Terms, s.v. on, ónta, 141–142. By invoking an “ecology of Being,” I mean to suggest that practices of askēsis are enfolded into the larger diorama of Being and beings, creating a mutual reciprocity between practices and disclosures of, or engagements with, Being and beings.

[39] Nightingale introduces this quote from Socrates in her own words. She attributes the line “theôria of all being” to the Socrates of the Republic at 486d. The translation is hers. See Nightingale, “On Wondering and Wandering,” 36

[40] In an additional sense, we can say that cosmology, metaphysics, and theology are Being’s own expression of itself, as articulated in the mode of the human being’s practicing life, a point I will return to in the next chapter.

[41] Desmond, The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being, 28.

[42] Ibid., 115.

[43] I return to this theme of self-overcoming in more detail in chapters 4 and 5.

[44] Dianoia and reason share overlapping definitions. Here I distinguish them by defining dianoia as the faculty of understanding associated with reason and logos as the expressions—the descriptions, accounts, and definitions—of reason’s activity. See Greek Philosophical Terms, s.v. dianoia and logos.

[45] See for example Peter Sloterdijk’s work The Art of Philosophy where he advocates for just such a view of the history of philosophy.

[46] Ibid., 12

[47] See Sharpe and Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimension, Directions for one particularly detailed study of this line of thinking.

[48] I say this to note the sometimes under observed fact that Greek philosophers were already engaged in complex debates over atheism and materialism (e.g., in the philosophy of Democritus or as discussed in the Sophist) or nominalism and realism (e.g., in the Parmenides), to say nothing of the debates over the role of faith (pistis) in epistemic claims (e.g., as described in the Republic) or the import of religious practices, such as theurgy and prayer, in Platonism and Neoplatonism. See Gerson, Aristotle and Other Platonists and Kaplan Faith and Reason through Christian History.

[49] I do not mean prior in a historical sense. I mean prior in a practical sense that marks a transformation in a person’s being that must take place before the questions of philosophy or religion can appear and be considered in one’s own life. I take up this priority as a theme in the chapters that follow.

The Base Camp

Saying and Showing

The introduction to my forthcoming manuscript, Askēsis and Perception.

Saying and Showing

Philosophy as a Way of Life

Askēsis, Scholarship, and Contemplation

Philosophy Beyond Dianoia

Portraits and Methods

Further Reading