Readers,
I’ve been quiet on the internet for sometime now, but in 2024 that’s going to change. I spent 2023 working on some highly interesting (and stealth) IRL projects, about which more soon. I also spent a considerable amount of time working towards finishing the manuscript that has occupied substantial swathes of my intellectual energy for the past several years. That work, titled Askēsis and Perception: Philosophy as a Way of Life, is approaching completion and I want to share a bit of that work with you.
You can download the 15-page introduction here.
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).
As I note in the introduction, 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.
I had to commit myself this past year to avoiding all other writing projects and academic events so that I could finish the manuscript in a timely manner, but I have missed writing here and elsewhere online. I’m also thinking about how best to share a work like this given the many ways one might distribute a scholarly offering such as this one in today’s networked social media world. I have some ideas on that front that I’ll share here soon, but one thing I will include in this post is a bibliography of links to the primary sources I used in this section of text.
I have charted a specific path through this terrain—and, indeed, one could choose many other routes of ascent—but this specific path is the one that I found the most interesting, and I want to share as many signposts through it as I can for those who want to explore the same territory. To that end, below please find links to the sources I drew from in the introduction. I hope you find them as enlivening and resourceful as I did. I am of course interested in sharing my own work with you all, but more than that I want to draw you all into what I think is a very important and long-standing discussion. These resources are meant to assist with that possibility.
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.
Books & Anthologies
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life and What Is Ancient Philosophy?
Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Ancients and Moderns (Eds., Michael Chase, Stephen R.L. Clark, & Michael McGhee),
Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, and Directions (Eds., Matthew Sharpe & Michael Ure)
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Historical Contemporary, and Pedagogical Perspectives (Eds., James M. Ambury, Tushar Irani, & Kathleen Wallace)
Andrea Nightingale, Philosophy and Religion in Plato’s Dialogues
Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject and The Courage of Truth
Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy and You Must Change Your Life
Ryan Duns, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age
Frances Yates, The Art of Memory
Simone Kotva, Effort and Grace
Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture
Francis E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms
William Desmond, The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being
Lloyd Gerson, Aristotle and Other Platonists
Grant Kaplan, Faith and Reason through Christian History
Papers, Essays, & Interviews
Pierre Hadot, “There Are Nowadays Professors of Philosophy, but not Philosophers”
Daniel A. Dombrowski, “Asceticism as Athletic Training in Plotinus”
Interview with Simone Kotva by Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, “A Conversation about Effort and Grace”
Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”
Matthew P. Evans, “Architectural and Spatial Features of Plato’s Gymnasia and Palaistrai”
Andrea Wilson Nightingale, “On Wondering and Wandering”