The Kinetic Philosophy

Back to the moves themselves!

Philosophy is a kinetic activity.

What does this mean?

It means that one takes a practice-oriented view on the fruits and deliverances of the philosophical life.

That is, instead of emphasizing alone the common outcomes of philosophical thinking—concepts, propositions, systems—one emphasizes the moves that make possible the concepts, propositions, and systems in the first place.

This view of philosophy calls us back to askēsis, or spiritual exercise, in the philosophical life, a concept that returns us not to any specific system of thought and world, but back to the moves themselves that enliven philosophical living.

In this view, philosophy consists in the shaping of thought and perception through practice. This shaping bears upon not only the intellectual content of our minds, but on the formation of our senses, the granularity of our feelings, and the skillfulness of our will and actions.

One finds here a view of philosophy larger than what reason alone can supply.

This is the concern of askēsis, a stance that sees the full orbit of philosophy from a different angle, one in which reason is circumscribed by a more encompassing set of faculties and practices—practices that pour into reasoning before reason gets going.

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, some verbal, others not.

One can think of the apophatic traditions in this regard, practices of via negativa, contemplative exercise, leisure, passivity, acts of remotion—the clearing away from thought of the words, concepts, and images that regularly populate our thinking.

It is often within these spaces of apophasis that new thinking can appear, making the interplay between askēsis and receptivity essential.

As Simone Kotva says, “Neither action nor passivity grounds spiritual exercise; it is the paradox of effort and grace that shapes it.” Askēsis, as a kind of spiritual exercise, operates in this dual domain of will and repose.

Here sensation, perception, thought, feeling, intuition, and contemplation reemerge as sites of philosophical attunement, not reductively as assistants or underlaborers to reason, but as constituents of their own to a fuller disclosure of Being.

Philosophy in this sense is a kinesis, a set of moves made in thought and soul. These movements are found in ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophers alike.

One can talk, then, about an askēsis of perception, the training of ways that phenomena are shaped as heightened appearances by the skilled perceiver—the forming and reforming of Being’s appearing into perception.

The differences in the appearance of Being’s givenness to perception amounts to differences in our stances and locations in regards to Being, but also in regards to our skills or practices of perception that refine and shape this givenness in more or less attuned ways, depending on the aims of our perceiving.

Being awake to this conversion of Being’s eruption into appearance—rather than to the reality of this or that appearance in particular—is the initial act that philosophical activity points to, not only as the turning away from appearance to reality but towards the awareness of the ongoing interplay between appearance and reality, which just is Being’s ongoing activity as presented to the minds of the living. 

Practice on this view is a pathway to understanding that doesn’t at first take full knowing as a prerequisite for transformation.

Philosophy as kinesis, then, means to adopt consciously different stances towards Being, stances cultivated by our practices, by our whole orientation to life.

This is the activity we call philosophy, a set practices for bearing witness to being

Back to the moves themselves!