Jean-Léon Gérôme, Diogenes (1860) Oil on canvas, 99 x 75 cm Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, MD
Ancient Philosophy as Practice: Report on Pierre Hadot, “Spiritual Exercises” P. Winston Fettner (2004)
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Philosophy is commonly thought of as very abstract thought, concerned with reading and writing, and couched in technical language. That may be the fault of professional philosophers and the institution of the university. But beginning with Socrates, who never wrote but taught by conversation and example, philosophy had already become a matter of how one lives one’s actual life. “Stoics, Skeptics, and Cynics all proudly claimed him as their founder and looked to him as their exemplary sage.”1 Aristotle, too, devoted the Ethics and Politics to the real practice of human life, so that for the Greeks “[p]hilosophy did not consist in teaching an abstract theorymuch less in the exegesis of texts-but rather in the art of living. It is a concrete attitude and determinate life-style, which engages the whole of existence.”2 Hadot’s point is that the Alexandrian and Hellenistic philosophers were not theorists, but practitioners of philosophy. Their goal was to bring about “a transformation of our vision of the world, and…a metamorphosis of our personality” (Hadot, 1995:82). Philosophy is really supposed to be medicine for the soul,3 a “therapeutic of the passions” (Hadot, 1995:83), in which “healing consists in bringing one’s soul back from the worries of life to the simple joy of existing” (ibid. 87), a “divine delight” (ibid. 97). Those who practice spiritual exercises “make of their whole lives a festival” (ibid. 98) and feels “a profound gratitude toward nature and life, which constantly offer us joy and pleasure, if only we know how to find them” (ibid. 88). Here wisdom consists not in gaining new knowledge, but in developing techniques that get rid of thoughts, feelings, and actions that block our naturally occurring happiness. The idea of happiness as the recovery of a deeply buried natural bliss may have been picked up from the philosophers of India during Alexander’s campaigns there: Sayre…explains the appearance of the Cynics on the Greek philosophical scene as a consequence of expanding conquest of the Macedonian Empire. More specifically, he notes that with Alexander's conquests various Indian philosophies-especially the monastic and ascetic teaching of Indian Sects…became more familiar to the Greeks. 4 1
. David K. O’Connor , “The Seductions of Socrates,” First Things 114 (June/July 2001): 29-33 (http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0106/articles/oconnor.html, 09/06/04) 2 . Pierre Hadot Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault Arnold I. Davidson, ed. Michael Chase, trans. Blackwell, 1995 p. 83 3 . On medicine as a model of philosophical therapy, see Theodore James Tracy, S. J., Physiological Theory and the Doctrine of the Mean in Plato and Aristotle Mouton, 1969 4 . Michel Foucault Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia, “Parrhesia and Public Life: the Cynics” [Document 05:4] (Six lectures at the University of California at Berkeley, Oct-Nov. 1983) http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesiasts/foucault.diogenes.en.html
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A comparison with Indian philosophy is worthwhile because it prepares us to interpret both the Bhagavad Gita and Spinoza’s striking resemblance to Hindu monism in light of his relationship to the Stoics. For example, for the followers of the Hindu god Shiva, “Ordinary knowledge is a cause of bondage, mind being the creator of illusion,” and “freedom arises from the destruction of ordinary knowledge.”5 It’s interesting to see how negative and destructive are the spiritual exercises of the Greek and Indian philosophers. But to get rid of something harmful is to recover something good, the negation of a negation. That’s the meaning of the analogy to a statue in Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Animate Beings; like a sculptor, “you too must remove everything that is superfluous, straighten out that which is crooked, and purify all that is dark until you make it brilliant” (Hadot, 1995:100). In Plotinus, the goal of the spiritual exercises was “not merely to know the good, but to become identical with it, in a complete annihilation of individuality” (ibid. 101). But this annihilation of illusion and suffering destroys our self-imposed bondage, and allows the divine aspect of the self to recognize itself and to shine through. “This is compared to the luster of a gem which is hidden by dirt and which is made manifest by merely removing the dirt.”6 Bondage is caused by a misidentification of the self, so that liberation is self-recognition, “to know oneself in one’s essential being; this entails separating that which we are not from that which we are” (ibid. 90). “For the Samkhya school liberation is the realization that ‘I am not a part of the material world (prakrti)’. My true nature as purusa [the pure and contentless witnessconsciousness] is totally separate from the mind and body that I usually associate with my ‘self’…The idea then is to discriminate (viveka) [self from non-self]…’I am not that, this is not me’.”7 The Neoplatonist Plotinus refers to the divine as “The One;” in India, the all-pervading Soul was often personified: “Moksa (Liberation) is the attainment of similarity (Samya) with Siva,”8 and Shiva dwells in absolute bliss, creating, preserving and destroying the universe for enjoyment. And just as Plotinus urges us to aim at becoming identical with the good, so for the Saivites the higher form of liberation involves an emulation of Lord Shiva: 5
. Roger Worthington Finding the Hidden Self: A Study of the Shiva Sutras Himalayan Institute Press, 2002 pp. 62, 55 [Shiva Sutras 2.3 and 2.9] 6 . S. M. Srinivasa Chari Advaita and Visistadvaita: A Study based on Vedanta Sata Dusani Asia Publishing House, N.Y. 1961 p. 173 7 . Richard King Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought Georgetown University Press, 1999 p. 185 8 . Kanti Chandra Pandey An Outline of Saiva Philosophy Molital Banarsidass, 1954 p. 149
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Thus, Moksa [liberation] consists in the attainment of similarity with Parama Siva in respect of powers of knowledge and action. The powers are not new acquisitions. They do not come from outside; they are in the individual, but are obscured by impurities. Therefore Moksa is nothing but coming to light of what was obscured by the impurities: it is the…becoming manifest of the essential nature of the individual (Pandey, 1954:105).
We can see that the spiritual exercises necessarily involve theory as a part of practice, just as medicine requires a theory of the body’s composition as well as practical techniques. We can’t get away from having metaphysical assumptions about just what kind of being the human person is, and we have to have at least an implicit philosophy of mind if we are to reduce our selfimposed worries and sufferings. What is undergoing the suffering, and what is the nature of those things which make us suffer? For example, the Stoics regarded the soul as different from the body, following Heraclitus, whereas the Epicureans were materialists, following Democritus. So, for example, the Stoics did not fear death because of their view of an immortal soul within a living cosmos; but if “the world is a mere aggregate of atoms, as the Epicureans would have it, then death is [still] not to be feared” (Hadot, 1995:107). Socrates, in a skeptical moment, hedges any ontological commitment and yet obtains the same indifference to death: …if I disobeyed the oracle because I was afraid of death: then I should be fancying that I was wise when I was not wise. For this fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good… Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: - either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. [29a-b9, 40a9-41b5] (Benjamin Jowett, trans.)
Yet, like the Stoics, Socrates gives an account of the soul’s liberation from the body in the Phaedo. It would take a great deal of study to trace these different theories determine differences in the spiritual exercises of the Ancient philosophies. Foucault, who had used Hadot’s studies in his late work on Ancient philosophy, used the term “determination of ethical substance” to describe the place of ontology in ethical systems:
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Given a code of actions, and with regard to a specific type of actions…there are different ways to ‘conduct oneself’ morally, different ways for the acting individual to operate, not just as an agent, but as an ethical subject of this action… These differences can bear on several points worth considering. They concern what might be called the determination of the ethical substance; that is, the way in which the individual has to constitute this or that part of himself [or herself] as the prime material of his [or her] moral conduct.” 9
Last time we looked at Tom Wolfe’s paper on “The Boiler Room and the Computer,” and it was brought out that our theories of the self do have an impact on how we live; in this sense, theory is part of practice. For example, Aristotle classified different types of desires in the Nichomachean Ethics (1154a7-b20), “distinguishing between desires that are both natural and necessary, desires which are natural but not necessary, and desires which are neither natural not necessary” (Hadot, 1995:87), a classification later used by the Epicureans. But, there’s a relationship of intercausality between the disciplined life and accurate knowledge about the world, the self, and desire in which the more we progress in our spiritual exercises, the more clearly we will be able to discern the real nature of things, and the more clearly we conceive of the nature of reality and our place in it, the more effectively we can engage in our spiritual exercises. Therefore studying and reading could become parts of one’s spiritual practices, because gaining a new view of the world and the self is a cognitive process. Reading (anagnosis) and listening (akroasis) both appear in the lists of spiritual practices collected by Philo Judaeus (ibid. 84) and Philo (ibid. 86); “with the Stoics…the study of the dogmatic treatises of the school’s great founders was also an exercise intended to provide material for meditation” (ibid. 87). But Hadot regards meditation as “the practice of dialogue with oneself” (ibid. 91). Hence “the dialectical character of all spiritual exercises” (ibid.), for it is a distinctively human self, a linguistically and socially formed being, and not just brain and behavior, which are being cured. Mental health has to incorporate “the rhetorical and dialectical techniques of persuasion, the attempts at mastering one’s own inner dialogue, and mental concentration” (ibid, 102). If a mistaken self-perception is a source of suffering, who is perceiving and who is being perceived? “Dialectic must skillfully choose a torturous path-or rather, a series of apparently divergent, but nevertheless divergent, paths-in order to bring the
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. Michel Foucault History of Sexuality Vol. II, The Use of Pleasure Vintage, 1990 p. 26
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interlocutor to discover the contradictions of his own position, or admit an unforeseen conclusion” (ibid, 92). If we can gain control of ourselves and learn to distinguish and indulge only the natural and necessary enjoyments, we can more easily see the true nature of the universe and “reveal the sheer joy of existing” (ibid. 87). For the Stoics and Cynics, the good life involves staying very close to nature. Socrates recommends this minimal and naturalistic view of the good life in the Republic (Bk. II, 372a-d), when he describes his idea of a just state: Let us then consider, first of all, what will be their way of life, now that we have thus established them. Will they not produce corn, and wine, and clothes, and shoes, and build houses for themselves? And when they are housed, they will work, in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They will feed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle. And they and their children will feast, drinking of the wine that they have made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. And they will take care that their families do not exceed their means; having an eye to poverty or war.
But, said Glaucon, interposing, you have not given them a relish to their meal.
True, I replied, I had forgotten; of course they must have a relish-salt, and olives, and cheese, and they will boil roots and herbs such as country people prepare; for a dessert we shall give them figs, and peas, and beans; and they will roast myrtle-berries and acorns at the fire, drinking in moderation. And with such a diet they may be expected to live in peace and health to a good old age, and bequeath a similar life to their children after them. (Benjamin Jowett, trans.)
As normally practiced, Western medicine rests on unexamined materialistic assumptions about the self. The model of a person as brain and behavior is incomplete, and fails to address the social and existential sources of depression and anxiety. That may be one reason why the use of prescription medication seems to dominate psychology. But it seems that the most successful 6
treatment programs include one-on-one sessions with councilors and group therapy as well as medication. What if a person’s anger or depression is caused by their perceptions and theories of reality? Or, what if mental illness is the norm in our society? What if we as a culture suffer from a deep-rooted existential crisis, of which low serotonin might be an effect and not a cause? Maybe we suffer from anxiety and depression because we as a society fill our minds, bodies and environments with unnecessary things to fulfill unnecessary desires? On that theory, medication too often treats the symptoms but fails to address the illness; in fact, our materialistic ontology might then be an aspect of a medical ideology, concealing the consequences of our materialistic culture, and absurdly recommending material cures. The Socratic cure involves examining one’s own beliefs and practices to see whether our troubles actually lie within.
Notice that the scientific picture of human being tends to absolve us of freedom and responsibility and puts our personal well-being in the hands of experts. Like cognitive therapy, the Ancient philosophies instead emphasize the individuals’ responsibility for his or her own happiness, and treat not only the physical brain but aims at “a conversion (metastrophe) brought about with the totality of the soul” (Hadot, 1995:96). “Each in its own way, all schools believed in the freedom of the will, thanks to which man has the possibility to modify, improve, and realize himself…happiness consists in independence, freedom, and autonomy” (Hadot, 1995:102), in other words, in self-mastery. On this view, we are even responsible for our own beliefs.10 Conceived in political terms, it’s the well-governed, autonomous city that’s free, and the spiritual exercises were seen as a path from slavery to the passions to the rule of reason. Autonomy and freedom were seen as consequences of self-control, enkrateia. “Thus, all spiritual exercises are, fundamentally, a return to the self, in which the self is liberated from the state of alienation into which it has been plunged by worries, passions, and desires” (Hadot, 1995:103).
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. See John Heil, “Doxastic Incontinence” in Mind (Jan., 1984) Vol. XCIII, pp. 56-70
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