1. Video from my dissertation defense. I was happy to see a few dozen students, faculty, and alumni show up to the event, many of them participating in the Q&A after the examination. I didn’t ask all who were present if they’d be up for me posting the full video, so I’ve included just my opening presentation.

2. I’m continuing on with my experiments in coding and design. This time I built a digital essay of my defense talk. It’s just a single page of HTML, but I think it turned out quite nice. I like the idea that you can spin up a unique aesthetic reading environment for an essay without too much work. You can find the essay HERE. See below for a few screen shots.

A number of you know that I’ve been working on a dissertation for some time now, at points taking a year or more off in between drafts and revisions.

I’m happy to report that the manuscript is now done, and yesterday I successfully defended Askēsis and Perception: Philosophy as a Way of Life to my committee. I’d describe it as the longer, more technical version of the work I put out on this Substack.

I’ve included my presentation notes for the oral defense below.

— Adam Robbert, PhD

I think I’ll start with a few details. The dissertation I’ll be defending is titled Askēsis and Perception: Philosophy as a Way of Life. It includes five main chapters and an introduction and conclusion, coming in at about 75,000 words or just around 290 pages of text. I want over the course of my time to set up and defend four claims:

1. There is a view of philosophy that opens up when we look at it from the perspective of askēsis, one that both complements and challenges the contemporary view of philosophy as primarily a discursive project rooted in reasoning and conceptual analysis. This view holds onto these discursive elements but embeds them in a surrounding space of practices that work at the level of perception itself, and this requires expanding what we take philosophical training to be.

2. I want to link this broader view of philosophy rooted in askēsis to a particular account of perception and knowledge, one wherein both are approached as outcomes of different kinds of practice and that the test of these practices isn’t argument alone but includes the need of transformation and demonstration taken as a kind of reorientation that changes what comes to presence for us in perception in the first place.

3. I want to defend the idea that there is a particular form of askēsis that we today need to emphasize, and that this emphasis has to do with the nature of philosophical practice as having an ontological purchase. When we take up the idea of practice from a modern or postmodern point of view, there is a tendency to read these changes on the model of an internal or individualized psychological change alone. What we are less inclined to do, at least some of the time, is view these practices as having an essential connection to reality itself, and to how that reality presents itself to us in new ways on the other side of these practices.

4. Askēsis, in the sense I am using the term, invites us to expand what properly constitutes philosophical training to include a wider complement of faculties. Sensation, perception, thought, feeling, imagination, intuition, and contemplation reemerge on this account as sites of philosophical refinement and attunement, not reductively as assistants or underlaborers to reason, but as crucial constituents of the cultivation of perception as such.

What I want to show is that askēsis, so understood, is neither a preparation for philosophical insight nor a supplement to it, but the medium through which such illumination is achieved. In this sense, the practices of self-transformation that the philosophical tradition offers us alter what comes to presence for the practitioner as intelligible, and thus bear directly on the practitioner’s relation to reality itself.

Those are the main claims that I will be exploring.

But let me walk you through the text by starting with the title.

The key word here is askesis. The most basic translation we have for this word is exercise, as in the repetitive training an athlete would undergo to transform themselves for competition. Pierre Hadot borrowed the more precise phrase spiritual exercise from the Spanish Catholic priest St. Ignatius of Loyola to define askesis in a way that would include a wider variety of exercises, each engaged with the aim of personal transformation. These exercises include physical and sometimes nonverbal activities, including fasting, renunciation, solitude, meditation, contemplation, prayer, visionary experience, and aesthetic exercises related to art and artistry, but they also include a number of distinctly intellectual ones, such as research, investigation, reading, memory practices, and dialectics, as we find in Plato’s dialogues.

I spend the opening sections of the dissertation exploring these different senses of askesis we find in history—first by looking at how these practices inform the work of philosophers in general, and then by looking more specifically at how different schools deployed these exercises in their own ways. In the introduction, I look at Hadot himself and then his treatments of Plato, the Stoics, and Plotinus to give a sense for how askesis shows up in these contexts. I also introduce here a methodological problem that Hadot was keenly aware of. In many cases, these spiritual exercises were taught as part of an oral curriculum deployed in tandem with the written materials, lectures, and instruction of the school’s teacher. This makes the textual interpretation somewhat difficult, since we often rely on the reporting of students and the descendants of these schools to learn about the practices themselves.

Moreover, as we can already see, many of these practices have a nonverbal character not easily translatable into the written word. This tension—between nonverbal practice and discursive expressiveness—is alleviated by the fact that writing, reading, and studying are themselves among these spiritual exercises, when treated in a certain way. In addition, as Hadot is careful to point out, there is also much to be said for the work of philology, etymology, and genre when approaching these texts—but a tension remains here, and it is a tension that I hold throughout the dissertation; namely, that with askesis we are engaged in a work of translation of a different kind when it comes to the insights of the practices themselves thought alongside their lexical expressiveness.

For this reason, I open the dissertation with three framing quotes from Hadot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Plato. These read:

The philosophical act transcends the literary work that expresses it. (Hadot)

What can be shown, cannot be said. (Wittgenstein)

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)

If I said that I want to hold onto this tension rather than resolve it, it is because the relation between the saying and the showing, to borrow Wittgenstein’s phrase, is neither linear nor straightforward. And as Rick has been reminding me throughout this process, it is also true that acts of expressiveness in a sense also fold back onto our understanding, generating new insight through the act of creation itself. Hadot uses the phrase “reciprocal causality” to gesture at a similar idea in regards to the use of practice alongside the written commitments of a given school—the two form an entangled circle of mutual transformation. The task, as I see it, is to hold the two together.

In this spirit, my aim in the introduction and in chapter 1 was to show two things:

First, as Hadot notes, all the major schools of philosophy in antiquity had their own forms of askesis, and these practices were essential to what it meant to live a philosophical life, even as each school informed their practices with their own teachings and philosophical orientations.

Second, what I came to find is that askesis has a unique relation to perception, and this is where the second word of my title comes in. Now, if you look at the examples of askesis I gave earlier—especially in their modes of privation, such as fasting, renunciation, or solitude—we can see that askesis bears a strong relation to its modern English cognate, asceticism. Part of what askesis can involve is a strict self-denial, a rigorous austerity that often involves disciplining the body and mind in a certain way.

This is certainly a part of the word’s meaning, but askesis in the sense I’m using the word, isn’t just privative—a set of protocols about what not to do—but productive, and I mean that in two senses. (1) It includes a set of protocols about what you should do, and do often. And (2) more importantly for our purposes, it is productive in the sense that through askesis you are transforming who you are as a person, and through that transformation of becoming-different, you begin to see differently. The phrase I use in the dissertation is that seeing and being are linked. And this link offers us a first pass at how we can understand the relation between askesis and perception. Person transformation is also perception transformation. Perception transformation is also person transformation. In both cases, a kind of conversion of attention is involved—a turning around or redirection of our fundamental view of things.

In the dissertation, I explore the relation between askesis and perception by investigating more closely attention (prosochē) itself.

To look at a few examples, in Plato’s Symposium, Socrates is described as having “turned his attention to his own intellect” (prosechanta ton noun), a paradigmatic instance of the kind of deliberate reorientation that askēsis enables. For Plotinus, such a reorientation is possible because the soul occupies a median position among sensible and intelligible things alike, one capable of turning upward toward intellect (nous), downward toward discursive reasoning, or outward toward sensation. Attention, on the Plotinian view, determines which orientation is active, and askēsis is the discipline by which the practitioner gains facility in sustaining these orientations, which, as Plotinus observed, may “fatigue” the thinker without the necessary training.

In part inspired by Plotinus, Henri Bergson identified philosophy itself with this kind of “conversion of attention,” a displacement of awareness from practical urgency toward a perception of things as they are in themselves. It is this identification that led Hadot to describe the essential contribution of Bergsonism as “the idea of philosophy as the transformation of perception.” Askēsis, on this account, underwrites the capacity for attention, and attention in turn guides and transforms what perception can receive.

Along these lines, in the Christian monastic context, we can point to a range of practices ordered to this end, including vigilance toward intrusive thoughts (or logismoi), in which the practitioner learns to observe and redirect the movements of the mind as they arise; the cultivation of inner stillness (hesychia), which clears the interior space within which sustained attention becomes possible; and disciplines of simplification and renunciation—such as fasting, withdrawal, or solitude—which reduce the influence of what else might compete for the soul’s attentive capacity. These practices are not themselves the act of attention, but they prepare and deepen our capacity for it.

So, in terms of the askesis of attention, we have practices of attending and surrounding practices that in many ways serve to deepen, or guard, the capacity to attend.

Perception, on this view, is indexed to the skills and habits of the perceiver, in the sense that the perceiver must be formed into the kind of being to whom the character of a thing can present itself in a certain way. Indeed, when we look at the literature on askesis we find an emphasis on this kind perception directed both inwardly—at the interiority of our sensations, thoughts, feelings, and intuitions—and outwardly, onto the presence of the phenomena that show themselves on the other side of our cultivated perceptual capacities.

In this context, the theologian Thomas Merton offers a helpful description of asceticism, which speaks to its broad applicability across domains and to its connection to perception. He writes,

“[Asceticism] comes from the Greek askein: to adorn, to prepare by labor, to make someone adept by exercises. (Homer uses it for ‘making a work of art.’) It was applied to physical culture, moral culture, and finally religious training. It means, in short, training—spiritual training.”

That askēsis means both to labor and to adorn, to borrow Merton’s phrasing, indicates the subtle possibilities implied by ascetic exercise: To practice is to work, and through work, to make more elaborate, specifically to make one’s own perception more elaborate, or more adorned, in a certain direction governed by the aims of practice. Such an elaboration of perception need not always imply greater complexity, as the austerity involved can just as well point to a simplification of our focus.

As Patricia Dailey observes, ascetic practices across history have been concerned with the development of the inner and outer senses, in other words, with the development of perceptual ability, seen both as the introspective quality of attention to oneself and as the refinement of the body’s senses through practical transformation. In the so-called spiritual senses tradition, the cultivation of perception includes the five physical senses—sight, sound, touch, scent, and taste—each treated as pathways to a deepening and multisensory encounter with God and the divine.

Thus, in a very real sense, perception transformation isn’t at work on the levels of apperception, intellect, or conceptual reasoning alone, nor is it simply a matter of being able to reflect on an experience felt in sensation after the fact and then conjure up a deeper story about its meaning; it is, more precisely, the training of the senses themselves, so that what begins to show up for you in your everyday waking perception of things is transformed. Your sensibility is itself the medium transformed by your practices. In short, through askesis, we are engaged in the reshaping of the horizon of experience on purpose.

There is in this sense an aesthetics of perception conjoined with the ascetics of practice. I pick up this theme in more detail using Gabriel Trop’s work on poetry and artistry as its own kind of askesis, where again we find this theme that through creation both artist and art viewer are transformed. Trop in his work positions art as a way of life, an askēsis, as he says, “that continually modifies, often imperceptibly, the manifold patterns of being—whether they are perceptual, behavioral, or affective of the person who undertakes it.”

Taking the aesthetic in a more philosophical context, in the Enneads, Plotinus borrows Plato’s earlier metaphor in the Phaedrus of the soul being something like a statue that you shape and reshape through your practice and way of life. Likewise, the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing likens contemplative practice to a kind of woodworking or carpentry, except in this case, as in the image of the statue, the wood being worked on is you as a person, and the woodworker is the practice, shaping your soul into a new constitution, thus placing it into a new relation with the world. The author writes:

To put it more exactly, let that thing [the contemplative practice] do with you whatever it pleases and lead you wherever it pleases. Let it do the working, and you be the material it works upon; just watch it, and let it be. Do not interfere with it, as if to help, for fear you should spoil everything. You simply be the wood, and let it be the carpenter; you simply be the house, and let it be the master who lives there. (chapter 34)

I want to note a subtle detail here. If so far I have discussed askesis as a certain kind of willful activity, in the mode of a person actively engaged in a deliberate project of self-transformation, then here we can pause and observe that with contemplation another dimension shows itself. I would say, instead of acting and beholding, we transition into receiving and being beheld. However, as with the entanglement of saying and showing, we can point here to an entanglement of willing and receiving, as the contemplative posture involves both initiating a practice and then letting oneself be absorbed by it. I take up this theme in the dissertation by appealing to Simone’s work and her welcome rejoinders to Hadot’s often Stoic-inflected sense of askesis as willful, and sometimes individualized, self-transformation.

We have to think of effort and grace together, to borrow Simone’s title.

Since my time here is limited, I want to move ahead by saying that what I’ve just presented is what I think of as context-setting for the later chapters of the dissertation. In those later sections, I pick up several other themes that I will quickly summarize here: I haven’t mentioned the role of practice spaces—the gymnasia of the Greek philosophers in general or Plato’s Academy in particular. I haven’t mentioned Simone Weil or the role of contemplation in scholarship more specifically. I’ll leave that for another time. I’ll also leave aside the discussion surrounding my subtitle: philosophy as a way of life. Suffice to say I’ve included the phrase in the title as a nod both to Hadot and to the now burgeoning field of scholarship that goes under the same name. I would count both Jake and Simone as key figures in this field, to say nothing of the work of philosophers like Michel Foucault and Peter Sloterdijk who have joined Hadot in generating much discussion on the theme of askesis in a variety of journals, at least two book series by that name, and a growing number of organizations dedicated to this ideal.

Chapter 3 is dedicated to Eric Voegelin and what he calls reason in the noetic sense. There I show how the philosophical education (paideia) dramatized in Plato’s Cave Parable is itself a necessary component of askēsis, as is the turning of the whole soul (periagōgē), enacted in the dialogue as the prisoner’s turn away from the cave wall. I then take up Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Plato’s Seventh Letter, arguing that both can be read along the lines of this deeper sense of turning and transcendence.

In the chapter that follows, I treat askēsis from a historical perspective, examining how its classical vision changes under the pressures of modern social, institutional, and intellectual life. I draw first on Hadot’s account of philosophy’s transformation in the medieval and modern university systems. With Max Weber, I then show how askēsis in this period is progressively rationalized, interiorized, and instrumentalized, and with Charles Taylor I trace what he calls the transition from “found” to “constructed” orders, a movement that narrows a shared ontic horizon while also opening up new forms of freedom for individuals. I close with a portrait of Descartes as a figure who inherits the tradition of philosophy as spiritual exercise whilst enabling its transformation into a more disengaged and mechanized program of self-mastery.

Hopefully we can return to this material in the discussion, but what I want to do here in the second half of the presentation is make my way back to Plato. This will also let me offer my own account of askesis and perception from within the context of Plato’s philosophy, as I’m reading it.

There is much to say here.

Where I’ve left us so far is with a view of these exercises, in their various modes, as ends in themselves, performed for the sake of personal transformation. That is, as individual practices, they cultivate distinct and intrinsically valuable internal goods, insofar as they develop the person’s aesthetic, moral, and intellectual faculties. At the same time, these practices are also ordered toward a larger horizon that we have so far only briefly mentioned. Indeed, in many cases, these practices are said to reconfigure attention and perception so that the whole of the ordered cosmos could come to presence for the practitioner in a new way. In this sense, the various internal goods achieved through practice aid in the larger transformation of the way the person sees and experiences the world at large.

The Greco-Roman and Christian practices to which Hadot dedicated his life to recovering tied these individual transformative exercises towards a more conscious participation with this larger whole. As Michael Chase, Hadot’s student and translator, puts it:

These exercises, involving not just intellect or reason, but all of a human being’s faculties, including emotion and imagination, had the same goal as all ancient philosophy: reducing human suffering and increasing happiness, by teaching people to detach themselves from their particular, egocentric, individualistic viewpoints and become aware of their belonging, as integral component parts, to the Whole constituted by the entire cosmos.

In other words, askēsis is a spiritual exercise that results in a transformation of perception through the cultivation of a certain mode of being, one that in turn transforms the practitioner’s relationship to the greater Being in which the philosopher is embedded and of which the philosopher is a unique expression.

Hadot picks up this theme in several places. For example, Hadot identifies Plato’s Socrates as marking a certain distance from everyday human knowing and being. “One becomes aware,” writes Hadot, “of the superhuman character of wisdom: a divine and transcendent state, in relation to which human beings can only recognize the immense distance that separates them from it.” Likewise, in Aristotle’s works, we find, Hadot says, exercises of “thought and contemplation” that “seem beyond the human condition,” such that “wisdom is a state in which man is at the same time essentially human and goes beyond the human, as if the human essence consisted in being beyond itself,” a point I will develop in more detail below.

We can see in these perspectives a two-fold movement: first, a movement of detachment or distance, and second, a countermovement of immersion, or deepening, into the broader presence of the world. This turning of the person toward the cosmos is at once an expansion and a letting go of a relation to the world as something useful for one’s needs alone. In other words, it requires a letting go of the instrumental relation between self and world, instead finding in this new attitude the intrinsic value of the whole as a whole and of the individual beings that come to make it up.

Whatever shape this figure takes, whether aesthetic or philosophical, Hadot concludes, “it is within ourselves that we can experience the coming-into-being of reality and the presence of being.” Note that Hadot here references Being (on) in general, rather than this or that particular being (ónta), echoing the distinction made by Aristotle, for whom Being is the object of the science of metaphysics, or the study of “being qua being” (to on he on), as opposed to a study of individual beings, which is the concern of the special sciences. But note also that Hadot does not speak here of a “science” of being qua being, but the “presence of being.” Elsewhere he speaks of an “experience of world qua world.”

In both cases, Hadot accents an experiential or phenomenological component to the theme of Being and its coming to presence in human perception, a coming to presence delivered in part by the askēsis we have identified as central to philosophical formation, but also by a moment of profound differentiation, “a conversion: a radical rupture with regard to the state of unconsciousness in which man normally lives.” Such a conversion marks a turning around of the person’s life into a new domain of attention, an entry point into a new philosophical way of living.

One could say that askēsis is premised on the practitioner’s relation to Being through an encounter, one mediated by practice and experience. Indeed, in Plato’s Republic, at 486d, we learn that having this relation to Being is one of the philosopher’s essential characteristics. Consider the following translations 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 ‘theōria of all being.’” (Nightingale)

The relation to Being—or to “that which is” (in the last translation)—takes the shape of “participation,” “theōria” (or beholding), and “grasping.” These actions are described as essential to the philosophical life, and thus to any of the practices that we may consider “philosophical.”

If the philosopher’s askēsis, in Plato’s sense, culminates in a conversion toward Being as such, the Republic presses one step further. At 509b, Socrates insists that what orders and makes Being available to thought is itself beyond Being (epekeina tēs ousias). We find in the Reeve–Grube edition of the Republic, the following translation of these passages, calling forth Plato’s famous analogy between the Sun and the Good (as that which is beyond Being):

“What the good itself is in the intelligible realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things.” (508c)

“The sun not only provides visible things with the power to be seen but also with coming to be, with growth, and nourishment, although it is not itself coming to be.” (509b)

“Therefore, you should also say that not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being to the good, but their being is also due to it, although the good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power.” (509b)

The Good, in these senses, gives individual beings both their being and their intelligibility, while the Good is itself neither being nor intelligibility but something more primary than both. Theōria, as Plato conceives it, therefore consists in another double motion: it bears witness to Being and, in the same act, orients the soul toward what gives Being its order and truth.

In Plato’s language, it opens our seeing to the “beyond” of Being—not as another thing to grasp, but as the possibility by which beings are encountered to begin with. Thus the “beyond” of Being mirrors, ontologically, what we first described aesthetically and epistemologically as the “beyond” of the human “that goes beyond the human.”

Theōria is, in this sense, a transcendent beholding that mirrors, in the human being, the transcendent nature of the Good itself in comparison to intelligible forms more generally. Hadot’s account of askēsis as the transformation of perception presupposes this twofold orientation—as a receptivity to Being and a formation by the source that patterns it. Philosophy in this mode is a set of practices that enable theōria, or this bearing witness to Being, especially as made available by contemplation and the philosophical arts of perception cultivated through practice.

Askēsis in this basic sense is the shaping of the shape of one’s being in concert with receptivity to this greater Being. Without this orientation, askēsis risks becoming a practice of self-transformation alone—or, worse, even a means of self-enclosure—a discipline of subjective refinement without correspondence to the deeper structures of meaning and being in which the person is already embedded. Practice, in this more limited view, becomes unmoored from any measure beyond itself, and in doing so loses its intelligibility as philosophy, and with it, any meaningful purchase on reality. “The passion of the philosopher to make sense of things,” William Desmond says, “remains a futile self-transcendence, outside of some unsurpassable sense of the worth of the whole.”

It is this relation—between the practices of the person and the orderings of Being—that gives askēsis its philosophical meaning. Askēsis, in the sense I am arguing for, is a response to Being’s generativity, and the practices that emerge in its wake are themselves shaped by the modes of givenness they seek to receive. These practices, in their repetition and refinement, make possible a deeper participation in that which exceeds the practitioner, and this participation becomes a source of both transformation and understanding within our waking perception.

In the remaining portions of the dissertation, I continue to elaborate on what Plato might still have to teach us about practice and perception, but I have done so following a particular reading of Platonism that is worth spelling out before I close. There is much consternation surrounding Plato’s work and whether we can even speak plainly about “Plato’s philosophy” as such or, even if we could, if this philosophy, with its often bemoaned dualisms and hierarchies, is worth holding onto in the first place.

I think the answer to both questions is a resounding yes, but we must, on my view, do so in a particular way. Here, then, are six key points about Plato we ought to emphasize if we want to think about something called Platonism in the context of askēsis and perception in the 21st century.

I don’t have time to expound on each point, so I will leave each one as a claim we can explore further together, or which you can read more about in the dissertation.

1. “Platonism” so-called is older than Plato, a tradition he inherits and refashions rather than invents, and its commitments can be specified via negativa, through five negations. On Lloyd Gerson’s reading we reach Plato’s philosophical commitments through five negations, antimaterialism (reality is not exhausted by materiality, and forms are real), antimechanism (explanation cannot be reduced to blind motion or chance), antinominalism (universals are real rather than mere words or linguistic conveniences), antirelativism (knowledge of truth and goodness is possible), and antiskepticism (genuine knowledge of reality is attainable). Alongside these negative commitments, Gerson reads the Old Academy, especially through Speusippus, as continuing a program that sought to articulate a set of first principles, chiefly the One, the Good beyond Being that is its source, and the Indefinite Dyad. So understood, “Platonism” describes an instance within an older tradition that predates Plato, going back at least to the Pythagoreans, and that extends through Aristotle, the middle Platonists, and the Neoplatonists, all of whom share these negations and an affirmative engagement with the first principles while differing in emphasis and in the final status they assign them.

2. Reading Plato fully means admitting the unwritten teachings of the Academy alongside the dialogues, and this inclusion dissolves much of what makes the dualistic reading seem unavoidable. The issue is whether one accepts the “inner” teachings of the Academy in addition to the “outer” teachings of the published dialogues. On Sean O’Brien’s account Schleiermacher and Strauss both take a sola scriptura approach, where only what is written in the dialogues counts as valid testimony of what Plato thought (for Schleiermacher the “inner” is the protreptic genre of the dialogues themselves, for Strauss the ironic or hidden meanings staged within them). The Tübingen school, by contrast, treats the “inner” as the unwritten doctrines of the Old Academy, above all the first principles of the One, the Good beyond Being, and the Indefinite Dyad, with the dialogues pointing toward these teachings. I follow the Tübingen reading in treating the unwritten doctrines as essential to Plato’s philosophy, because they are precisely what generate an image of Platonism that does not fall prey to the strongly dualistic interpretation. Admitting these principles reframes the apparent two worlds as levels within a single order descending from one source, so the dualism softens into a continuity of degrees rather than a split between realms different in kind.

Dimitri Nikulin:

If one takes the testimonies about Plato’s inner-Academic teachings and discussions seriously, one is likely to find a picture of Plato quite different from the one Platonic scholarship has been presenting for the better part of the last two centuries. The simplistic two-world scheme—that of the ideal world of forms and the world of the becoming of bodily things—is simply not there. The ontological picture that arises from testimonies is more subtle, nuanced, sophisticated, and complex. However, such an interpretation neither contradicts nor ignores the existing texts of Plato but complements them and in fact clarifies certain points that remain either not fully spelled out, or only raised and slightly touched on, in the dialogues.

This interpretation of the corpus Platonicum, which draws heavily from the so-called Tübingen interpretation of Plato’s extant works, includes the existing dialogues, the Platonic letters, the several commentaries from Plato’s peers and students (principally Sextus Empiricus’s Adversus Mathematicus and Aristotle’s Metaphysics), and a variety of other testimonials descriptive of the “inner-Academic teachings” of Plato’s academy, the foremost of which have been published in a collection as the Testimonia Platonica. Together these sources constitute the “unwritten doctrines” of Plato, doctrines that, on Nikulin’s reading (in agreement with Gerson’s), complement rather than contradict Plato’s known texts published in the dialogues.

3. The distinction between the sensible and the intelligible in Plato describes not two worlds but a continuum of modes of apprehension, through which form is given and received in different ways according to our skills of perception. Eric Perl and James Findlay share the understanding that the sensible-intelligible distinction should be read not as an opposition between two worlds different in ontological kind but as a distinction falling within a single continuum, disclosing itself through different modes of cognition as the multiplicity of sense and the unity of intelligibility. All modes of cognition, from sense to intellect, are the apprehension of Being, that is, of form. The key lies in the words eidos and idea, whose root is the verb idein, “to see,” in the sense of “what one sees,” or an “appearance.” Form is therefore the “look” through which a thing shows itself, thought in tandem with the way it is given to awareness, rather than a separable entity residing elsewhere. Hence why Perl reads Plato’s “seeing” as close to what phenomenology calls intuition (Anschauung), the immediate togetherness of seeing and seen, the conjugal togetherness of thought and being. Read this way, Plato’s metaphysics is an account of the existential condition of being human rather than a theory of abstract entities.

Perl:

The distinction between sense and intellect, in short, is not a distinction between two classes of object, but rather between apprehending an intelligible nature as one and many.

If the levels of reality are levels of presentation and apprehension, then the many “ascents” in the dialogues, the images of “going to” the forms or true being, express not a passage from one “world,” one set of objects, to another, but rather, as Plato repeatedly indicates, the ascent of the soul, a psychic, cognitive ascent, from one mode of apprehension to another, and hence not from one reality to a different reality, but from appearance to reality. This, above all, is why Plato’s metaphysics is no mere “theory,” a postulation of abstract entities called “forms,” but is rather an account of the existential condition of human beings.

4. The body in Plato is not necessarily some prison to be escaped but an eidetically patterned field to be cultivated, so that the soul-body relation is one of calibration through training rather than disdain. Kevin Corrigan rejects what he calls the false picture of Platonism as abstract and unconcerned with (or even hostile to) embodied life, reading the “separating” soul of the Phaedo and the Symposium as an incarnate soul moving away from a single fixed point of view in order to see a world at all, and to see it intersubjectively. He describes Plato’s philosophy as a dynamic, coextensive continuum of an eidetically saturated sensible world, where body, mind, and soul come together in an integrative and eidetic structure. The body itself partakes of patterned form, but this form is realizable in multiple ways, requiring the shaping of askēsis to manifest. Coleen Zoller makes the complementary case from the side of practice, distinguishing a normative dualism from an austere one, and observing that it would be counterproductive for a Platonic inquirer to abhor or ignore the physical world of bodies and senses while undertaking to comprehend the forms, since the soul’s task is to organize and interpret the streams of input the body supplies. In both accounts the physical senses are to be refined rather than overthrown, and the dogmatic two-world dualism turns out on Corrigan’s account to be the view of the opiner, an expression of doxa rather than knowledge.

5. Appearance and sensibility are an indispensable medium of access to form, the first site at which the soul becomes responsive to the intelligible, so that the approach to forms runs through sensibility rather than away from it. This point follows directly from the readings of form and the body above. Alessandro Stavru has clarified in his work that the relation between phainesthai (the word means “to appear,” referencing how a phenomenon “shows itself”) and truth (alētheia) in Plato’s Republic is one of reciprocity and entanglement rather than opposition. On his reading, what Plato calls the phantasmata are not straightforwardly deceptive illusions but what he calls “divine” (theia) appearances that “guide the soul until it sees the best part of reality” (532c5–6). Stavru emphasizes that this disclosure is a gradual one, wherein Plato employs comparatives (alēthestera, “truer”) and superlatives (alēthestaton, “truest”) to indicate that things reveal different degrees of truth depending on “the amount of alētheia they unveil.” Thus, the “ascent” to the forms is not a leap out of sensibility but a movement through it, with each stage of appearing bringing the soul closer to a truer disclosure, through a repeated and deepening “acquaintance” with form. Returning to our earlier discussion of alētheia, we can see that without the appearing of things, truth “would not become visible at all.” Phainesthai and alētheia are in this sense mutually implicated in the soul’s journey toward intelligibility. In these gradations, Stavru says, we find again the metaphor of the sun, which in this sense is “the source of every possible alētheia.”

6. Far from initiating the slide from alētheia to orthotēs that Heidegger alleges, Plato holds disclosure and correctness together, so that the unhiddenness of form to a perception shaped by practice is what generates the correctness of whatever we then say about it. I pick up in the dissertation the work of researchers Eric Perl (on alētheia in Plato), Paul Friedländer (on the historical etymology of alētheia), Henry Wolz (on the pedagogical design of the dialogues), and Mark Ralkowski (on Heidegger’s changing reading of Plato from his 1930s to 1940s lectures) to explore Heidegger’s narrative that Plato subordinates truth as alētheia, the unconcealing of Being, to truth as orthotēs, the correctness of representation, setting the West on its course through the long forgetfulness of Being. What Perl, Friedländer, and Wolz are pointing to in different ways is a two-fold recuperation of Plato in light of the Heideggerian critique, which I would summarize in the following way:

(1) Heidegger is wrong, historically, that alētheia had a more original meaning and priority in the pre-Platonic Greeks that is lost, or begins to be lost, in Plato (there is more continuity here than Heidegger alleges). As Friedländer has shown, in placing alētheia and orthotēs in strict opposition, Heidegger misses that the ontological sense of alētheia (the unhiddenness of being) and the epistemological sense (the correctness of apprehension) coexist in Greek usage from Homer and Hesiod onward. For example, Hesiod’s Theogony already employs ἀληθές to designate “correctness of perception,” precisely the meaning Heidegger attributes to Plato’s supposed corruption of the term. Friedländer further argues that when Heidegger describes alētheia as “put under the yoke of the idea,” he converts a relation of conjunction into one of subjection; in Plato, however, idea and alētheia remain coordinated, with the idea serving as the source from which truth radiates in its threefold sense (the ontological reality of being, the epistemological correctness of apprehension, and the existential truthfulness of the knower)

(2) Epistemologically speaking, alētheia may have a certain phenomenological priority but it need not eclipse the importance of orthotēs in our philosophizing. Why? The event of some truth showing itself must come before the later statements that express it or evaluate it, but this should not undercut the importance of this kind of propositional labor. In Friedländer’s words, “For Plato, there is in ἀληθής [spoken truthfulness] and ἀλήθεια [truth as event] an equilibrium between the revealing truth, the unhidden reality, and the truthfulness which measures that reality by this truth. Plato did not corrupt the concept of alētheia, as Heidegger claims. Plato sharpened the concept, systematized it, and heightened it.”

Perl’s position is that in Plato we find a more complex account of truth than what Heidegger alleges. Rather than a fixed representation picking out a static idea residing in a separate elsewhere, forms on Perl’s reading are, as we have seen, the very “looks” or intelligible identities through which things show themselves to awareness in the flux of perception. Perl in this way recovers a Plato for whom alētheia remains central insofar as it represents a disclosure of truth as an event in reality (as opposed to a truth residing as a correct representation in the mind), one that requires the cultivation of a perceiver capable of receiving it. My contention is that askēsis, as a practice of transforming perception, alters our attunement to things, and thus to how they show themselves. This attunement to beings is made possible by alētheia, and this attunement is shapeable by practice. Askēsis is a practice of disclosure.

If we can accept these six points, I think this excerpt from my dissertation, which I will close with, becomes defensible:

In viewing the sensible and the intelligible as two facets of the same one world disclosed through different methods, that is, through different faculties that can be refined and reshaped through a variety of different practice regimes, we have not just a static correspondence of perceptual faculties with different strata of Being, as in the adequation or agreement between knower and known, but a correspondence that emerges out of and is then continually re-established through the transformation of perception. On this view, the emphasis lies on the practices, the modes of askēsis, which develop those faculties and are then generative of different styles of apprehension that receive Being in unique ways, each marked by different techniques of understanding.

The sympathy between knower and known is thus secured not as the simple pre-established harmony of Being’s givenness to consciousness, nor as the correctness of representation and idea, but as the ongoing re-establishment of a conversion of attention which gives Being to perception on the other side of practice.

In the final analysis, then, we can talk about askēsis and perception but we can also talk about an askēsis of perception, the training of ways that phenomena are shaped as heightened appearances by the skilled perceiver, the shaping of Being’s appearing into perception through practices of attention. The differences in the appearance of Being’s givenness to perception amount to differences in our stances and locations regarding Being, but also in regard 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.

Beyond these specific acts of perception, being awake to this convergence of Being’s eruption into appearance, rather than to the reality of this or that appearance in particular, is the act that philosophical conversion points to, not as only 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. Philosophy is the name for these preparatory exercises, and its education is the training of perception, broadly conceived.

Thank you. I will stop here. I look forward to the conversation.

I think it mostly works!

If you’ve been following my work over the years, you know I’ve tried my hand at independent publishing in a few different ways. The Side View offered essays online and in print. Practice in Still Life was self-published. This newsletter is an experiment in sharing scholarly writing online. I have a background in editorial work, and I think I have a decent eye for curating ideas, so the process of soliciting writers and editing and publishing essays is something I feel fit to do.

But I never could get my head around web design or coding. TSV’s website is fairly customized, and I still like the aesthetic I landed with, but it’s a massive bricolage of copy-pasted CSS code held together with the duct tape of plug-ins and visual editors. It’s under optimized and hard maintain. It took ages to build (weeks and weeks of nights and weekends) to get the site up and running. I could’ve done something lighter lift. I could’ve used a ready-and-set template, but I knew how I wanted it to look and I built it. The print and digital journal were just as hard to produce. For that part, I did end up hiring out to people who understood InDesign and print publication.

Practice in Still Life was similarly arduous. At the time I was putting it together, the AI models were, I think, in their third-moving-into-fourth generations. I thought maybe they could help with these same aspects of bookmaking, but that proved pretty unfruitful at the end of the day, and probably cost me time overall. Just to give you one example: I tried to instruct one of these earlier Claude models to format all the block quotations in the text in a certain way (setting the spacing, indentations, type size, and so on), and it (1) had a hard time separating and identifying the block quotes and (2) more seriously, it rewrote some of those same quotes. When I pointed this out to the model, it was of course forthright about the mistake, but it also commented back to me that the rephrased quotes still “conveyed the same meaning” (or something to that effect). Not ideal when you’re quoting and citing sources, to say the least.

What I was looking for in those earlier models is, basically, what Claude Design purports to do. And my initial experiments are promising.

In this first use case, I dropped in a chapter from my dissertation (written in Word, full of the normal trappings of a standard .doc file—double-spaced text, wide margins, no font styles, no running headers, etc.) into the workspace, wrote a prompt, and answered a few clarifying questions. The result: a formatted text file nearly indistinguishable from a university press print, downloadable in a variety of formats. Minor tweaks were needed throughout (most easily addressed), but it brought a very time-consuming process down to minutes. I did spend about 45 minutes before that just tooling around with the interface, trying different things, including creating a basic HTML-based web page from scratch, but once I got the hang of things, the process moved pretty quickly. Below you can see the result of this process.

The system isn’t perfect. What it outputs is something like a set of galley proofs that still need work. For instance, it made a few executive decisions around expression of terms (adding or removing italics I had already set) and the layout of my text (adding or removing paragraph indents for reasons I don’t understand, generating anomalous issues with page breaks). Still, it’s a real improvement over the models I tried in the past, which I found myself wrestling with to keep from overstepping in their editorial and aesthetic discretion, and the issues I did find were easily fixable in the interface.

Quite a lot of progress, honestly.

There’s another point worth mentioning: As many people have pointed out, this is still very much a skill- and taste-based process. I know a bit about the vocabulary of book design and typography (and a lot about the vocabulary for writing and editing in general), and I have no shortage of inspirational texts to draw from. I think this is an advantage when guiding a design tool like this within a domain I understand. I gather the same is true for coders using Codex or Claude Code. I plan to try my hand at those coding tools on some ideas I have, but I don’t expect to have the same level of facility there that I do with writing.

I’ll report back on that intuition.

The current version of Claude Design is still a research preview, and I’m interested to see where the finished product lands. As someone who never had the time, inclination, or resources to learn properly the various design tools needed to make websites and printed books, I see a lot of promise here. I could never quite afford to pay the experts what they’re worth for web design and typography, but maybe I can figure out how to put these newer design tools to use and have another go at publishing. I’m going to run some more experiments to see what the real workflow and limitations are here. Does Claude Design need to handoff to InDesign? Will it work inside of InDesign? Will it just make print-ready files I can send to press?

We’ll see. More soon.

Greetings, dear readers, here are a few recent recordings and write-ups that I’ve been meaning to collect in one place, all picking up a common thread of reflection on attention, perception, and the practices that shape both.

I’ve also included some supplementary reading that offers additional background on the ideas and themes at work in these talks. Slowly but surely, something more substantial is beginning to emerge here . . .

(Unrelated: This new drop caps feature looks good, no?)

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Recent links:

• “Attention as an Art Form” – My Imbue talk in San Francisco, part of their “Art of Being a Human Series” w/ Ashley Zhang, is now up.

• “10 Theses on Attention” – Ashley’s excellent write-up of that dialogue.

• “Attention Is an Art Form: Practice, Memory, and Orientation” – Video of my talk for the Toronto Society last fall. You can also find the transcript here. (I posted this link on social media before, but I neglected to share it here on the newsletter.)

• “Scrolling Is a Form of Prayer” – Mary Harrington puts some of my writing to work in her ongoing series on digital reading and inner life (with special attention paid to notions of cognitive sovereignty in our algorithmic age).

Further reading:

I’ve been working my way up to a more robust philosophy of attention, rooted in practice. These are a few of the preliminary pieces that informed the talks:

1. “Practice, Perception, and Being: A Sequential Account” – In this piece, I argue that perception begins within an originally given horizon of significance that precedes explicit reflection and makes skillful intelligibility possible.

2. “Attention Is First Philosophy” – I make the positive case, with illustrations from Aristotle, Descartes, and Merleau-Ponty, that philosophy begins in the disciplined act of attending to that more primary horizon.

3. “Attention Is an Art Form” – This essay develops the claim that attention is itself shapeable, and that contemplative practices of reading and writing—among innumerable other exercises—can transform the structure of perception.

4. “Eidos and the Art of Perception” – Next, I place all of these claims in a realist frame, suggesting that practice changes the relation between “appearance” and “reality” by shaping the conditions in which form—or eidos, that which comes to presence on the horizon—is disclosed in perception.

5. “Perceptual Learning and the Necessity of Form” – Through a dialogue with perceptual learning research, I then offer that the difference between novice and expert perception points beyond constructivism to the necessity of form, and ultimately, to a view of intrinsic value, rooted in theōria.

What I am circling in these essays is a kind of negative space, slowly taking shape, that suggests an approach to philosophy in which thought begins from our immersion in a world already charged with significance, and then from the disciplined attention by which that significance comes to presence in cultivated perception.

One entailment of this view is that philosophy is something more consequential than an interpretation or construction of reality but is the vehicle, or medium, through which reality comes to presence through our practices in the first place.

In short, practice bears on our relation to reality at the level of disclosure itself, shaping the conditions under which form appears in perception, giving us a picture of philosophy as the cultivation of perceptual intelligibility—a way of life ordered to the deepening of an attention immersed in a world of charged significance.

These pieces emphasize practice, attention, and orientation. There is a passing nod to the role of memory in these essays, but I have in view something more substantial along these lines in future work. Naturally, Bernard Stiegler has been on my mind as of late, and especially the way he links memory with technics.

So, I’m working my way over towards something of a quintet of ideas—practice, attention, orientation, memory, and technics. More soon.

In this piece, I argue that the classical philosophical tradition of askēsis and the contemporary literature on perceptual learning converge on a structurally similar insight; namely, that perception is constitutively open to formation, and that what becomes available to awareness depends in part on the training of the perceiver.

Drawing on Pierre Hadot’s account of spiritual exercises and Eric Perl’s reading of Platonic form, I develop an account of perceptual adequacy grounded in participation, which I define here as the event in which a thing’s intelligible identity is disclosed in the meeting of its form’s givenness and the perceiver’s cultivated receptivity. On this account, the perceiver does not construct what he or she sees but must be formed into the kind of being to whom the intelligible character of things becomes present.

I then place this philosophical framework alongside the ecological psychology of James and Eleanor Gibson and the related research on perceptual learning, showing that these contemporary accounts arrive independently at a compatible description of the same phenomenon. I argue, however, that the convergence also exposes a limitation in the research literature, even as it adds empirical justification.

My view is that without an account of form, contemporary research can establish that expert perception is more differentiated than novice perception but cannot ground the normative claim that it is more adequate in a philosophically robust sense. The classical account, I suggest, offers this missing sense through an account of alētheia, truth understood not as propositional correspondence but as the disclosure of a thing’s intelligible identity to a prepared awareness, and, with it, an understanding of perception that exceeds skilled or functional responsiveness alone.

I will conclude by noting that the fullest expression of perceptual formation is not practical mastery but theōria, the receptive beholding of intrinsic significance, and that askēsis is ultimately ordered to this contemplative end.

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I. Preparing Perception: What comes to presence for us as perceivers is downstream of our practices of attending.

Across my various research projects, I have argued that perception should not be understood as the passive reception of a pre-given world but as an achievement, one shaped by practice, and therefore by the kind of person the practitioner has become through that practice. The central term in this argument is askēsis, understood in the classical sense argued for by Pierre Hadot, referring to the constellation of exercises—intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and contemplative—by which the person is formed and reformed in the direction of a deeper and more adequate relation to reality.

The mediating term between these exercises and the perceptual changes I am describing is attention (prosochē), which the various strands of this tradition understood not as a mere narrowing of focus but as a sustained and cultivated orientation of awareness. To look at a few examples, in Plato’s Symposium, Socrates is described as having “turned his attention to his own intellect” (prosechanta ton noun), a paradigmatic instance of the kind of deliberate reorientation of perception that askēsis enables. For Plotinus, such reorientation is possible because the soul occupies a median position among sensible and intelligible things alike, one capable of turning upward toward intellect (nous), downward toward discursive reasoning, or outward toward sense. Attention, on the Plotinian view, determines which orientation is active, and askēsis is the discipline by which the practitioner gains facility in sustaining these orientations, which, as Plotinus observed, may “fatigue” the thinker without the necessary training. In part inspired by Plotinus, Henri Bergson identified philosophy itself with a “conversion of attention,” a displacement of awareness from practical urgency toward a perception of things as they are in themselves. It is this identification that led Hadot to describe the essential contribution of Bergsonism as “the idea of philosophy as transformation of perception.”

Askēsis, on this account, underwrites the capacity for attention, and attention in turn guides and transforms what perception can receive. Along these lines, we can point to a range of practices ordered to this end, including vigilance toward intrusive thoughts (logismoi), in which the practitioner learns to observe and redirect the movements of the mind as they arise; the cultivation of inner stillness (hesychia), which clears the interior space within which sustained attention becomes possible; and disciplines of simplification and renunciation—such as fasting, withdrawal, or solitude—which reduce the influence of what may compete for the soul’s attentive capacity. These practices are not themselves contemplation, but they prepare and deepen our capacity for it. What remains to be shown is what such cultivated attention is ultimately receptive of, and here the question of form becomes unavoidable, as we’ll see.

Perception, on this view, is indexed to the skills and habits of the perceiver, not in the sense that the perceiver constructs or projects what he or she sees, but in the sense that the perceiver must be formed into the kind of being to whom the intelligible character of a thing can present itself. What I have wanted to show is that askēsis, so understood, is neither a preparation for philosophical insight nor a supplement to it, but the medium through which such illumination is achieved. In this sense, the practices of self-transformation that the philosophical tradition offers us alter what comes to presence for the practitioner as intelligible, and thus bear directly on the practitioner’s relation to reality itself. However, what is at stake in this formation, as I want to argue in this piece, is not merely a change in responsiveness, but a change in perceptual adequacy—a deepening of the perceiver’s capacity to receive reality.

To pursue that claim, the purpose of this essay is comparative.

I want to place this philosophical account of askēsis alongside a body of contemporary work drawn from the literature on perceptual learning and affordances. To be clear, my claim is not that the classical philosophical account stands in need of empirical verification, nor that the cognitive-scientific account secretly depends on Platonic metaphysics in order to do its work. It is rather that a structurally similar insight emerges in both fields independently. That insight is that perception is trainable; that what becomes available to awareness depends in part on the formation of the perceiver; and that such formation yields a more adequate grasp of what is there to be seen. But this convergence, I will argue, also exposes a question the contemporary accounts do not principally set out to answer: What does it mean for perception to become more “adequate”? And to what, if anything, is such formation ordered toward beyond increasingly skillful responsiveness?

If perceptual formation is to count as an increase in adequacy, in some higher sense, rather than merely a difference in response, then we need some account of what perception becomes adequate to. It is here that the philosophical question of form returns, not as a rival to contemporary accounts, but as an ontological interpretation of the structured intelligibility to which they point, and as the ground of the normative claim they gesture toward but cannot secure on their own. It is also here that Eric Perl’s reading of Plato is essential, especially insofar as Perl reinterprets the common two-world reading of Plato that besets our reception of his work.

II. Askēsis and Alētheia: Truth on this account is not a property of our statements alone but an event that emerges in perception through practices of presencing.

If askēsis cultivates attention, and attention guides perception, then the question that remains is what such perception is ultimately receptive of. It is this question that Perl’s reading of Plato addresses. The philosophical account of form that underwrites my argument is drawn primarily from this interpretation, but I want to say something about what Perl is pushing against before turning to what his reading makes available.

The dominant reception of Plato in much modern philosophy has tended to read form as something radically separate from the sensible world, as a transcendent object toward which the mind reaches, and to which the body stands as an obstacle. On this reading, the body and its perceptions are seen as impediments to philosophical understanding, and askēsis functions primarily as a discipline of negation, a turning away from the sensible in order to gain access to what is purely intelligible—to “form” as it is commonly understood. What is troubling about this picture is that it makes the cultivation of perception, at the level of physiological sensation, philosophically irrelevant, if not actively harmful to philosophical speculation. The story goes that if form is simply elsewhere, no refinement of perceptual attunement can bring us closer to it and may in fact draw us away from it. My argument suggests we should reject this picture, and it is Perl’s reading that gave me the philosophical resources to do so.

For Perl, form, or eidos—the word carries the sense of “look” or “visible aspect”—is the intelligible identity through which a thing shows itself as what it is. It is not a mental image, not a concept projected by the perceiver onto neutral matter, and not an abstract universal hovering above the particular. It is, rather, the condition generative of things as they appear as what they are, the “appearance” through which a thing presents itself to a perceiver and makes it recognizable and distinguishable. I read Perl as saying that this is not a weakening of the Platonic commitment to form’s reality but a recovery of what Plato actually meant—that form is the structure of the showing of things, not a further realm beyond it, even if it is also that.

On Perl’s reading of Plato, then, form is real in the sense that it is prior to and independent of any particular perceiver’s grasp of it. The form of a thing is not constituted by the perceiver’s act of attending to it; it is disclosed by that act, in a participatory event in which the form’s intelligibility and the perceiver’s cultivated receptivity are both required, and neither alone is sufficient. Perception, on this account, is not a one-way projection of the mind onto a formless world, nor a passive receipt of data from a fully self-presenting reality. It is a relational event of disclosure, in which what shows itself and the one to whom it shows itself are both constitutively involved. I want to be clear that participation as I am describing it is not a form of constructivism. The form is not produced by the perceiver’s receptivity, nor is its intelligible character a function of the practitioner’s formation. It is rather the case that the form’s showing requires a perceiver formed to receive it. The perceiver’s cultivation is the condition of form’s disclosure, not of its existence.

What Perl’s interpretation opened up for me was the possibility of grounding the whole account of askēsis in a philosophically robust account of perception, one capable of saying something more than that formation leads to behavioral or functional success, though it does also do that. It also offers a particular notion of truth, understood as alētheia (truth as disclosure or unconcealment). This, I want to suggest, is a deeper, or at least more original, sense of truth than truth understood as propositional correspondence, precisely because it accounts for the prior perceptual condition under which correspondence first becomes possible.

For Perl, following Plato, alētheia, then, refers not first to the correctness of a proposition that corresponds to a state of affairs, but to the prior event in which a thing’s intelligible identity becomes present, or comes forward into perception, as what it is. Truth, on this reading, is not primarily something statements have; it is something that happens in perception, a disclosure of form to a prepared awareness, only later expressible in propositions that may or may not correspond to it.

If this is right, then the cultivation of sensible perception through askēsis is neither ancillary nor an obstacle to the philosophical pursuit of truth but is constitutive of it.

Philosophy, in this sense, involves more than the production of correct propositional judgments about a state of affairs; it also requires the formation of the kind of person to whom what is can show itself with greater depth and clarity. The field of sensibility thus appears not as an obstacle to philosophical understanding but as an entry point to be refined through practices of perception. Whatever else philosophy may be, it is also the cultivation of receptivity to form’s givenness, first in the immediacy of perception and then in the propositions that such perception makes possible.

Askēsis and alētheia, we can say, share an intimate link.

What I want to establish through this reading is that perceptual adequacy has a real interpretative standard. This means that perception can be more or less adequate, more or less fully attuned to what is there to be perceived, irrespective of our local projects and concerns. We might say that there is still a sense of correspondence at work here, but it is a more primary correspondence, one participatory and achieved rather than static and given, co-involving, to use Perl’s words, “the mutual togetherness” of seer and seen. And this is what I mean when I say that askēsis is the medium of philosophical illumination, rather than an adjunct to the more “primary” work of propositional correctness. Why? Because it prepares the perceiver to receive what was always already there to be seen with greater depth and clarity.

It is this account of form and perceptual receptivity that I now want to bring into conversation with the contemporary literature on perceptual learning, not because that literature stands in need of this philosophical account to perform its function of falsifiable description, but because it offers, in a distinct register, an empirically tractable description of the same general phenomenon, that is, the formation of the perceiver as a condition for fuller perceptual disclosure of what is perceived. I will then close by stating what I think is missing from this account.

III. Perceptual Learning: We have a contemporary empirical account that renders legible the link between practice and perception.

The tradition of perceptual learning research that concerns me here has its roots in the ecological psychology of James and Eleanor Gibson. I read the Gibsons as making a philosophical move that runs against the grain of the cognitivist picture in which perception is primarily a process of constructing an internal representation of the world from impoverished sensory data. On their account, what the perceiver picks up is real structure in the environment, not a model of it, and perceptual learning is the progressive attunement of the perceiver to that structure, which was already present before the learner was capable of detecting it. The learner does not construct the structure he or she learns to perceive; it is uncovered through the progressive activity of the perceiver, an activity that in turn yields additional detail, detail salient to the growing skill of the perceiver-in-action.

To refine this point, we might look at Kevin Connolly’s work, where he takes up and subjects this view to sustained philosophical analysis. On Connolly’s account, as I am reading him, the central contribution of this view is to establish perceptual learning as a philosophically distinct epistemic phenomenon, one that is irreducible both to the acquisition of propositional knowledge and to mere associative conditioning. What perceptual learning produces is a genuine modification of perception itself, not a change in what the perceiver believes or knows about what he or she sees, but a change in what he or she sees. The propositional view suggests that what is perceptually available across skill levels is more or less the same, and that what separates the expert from the novice is an additional layer of cognitive processing that interprets this more primary data in a more effective way. The perceptual learning view, by contrast, suggests that training and expertise reside in the more primary layer of perception itself. What the expert perceives is genuinely different from what the novice has available—the field of appearances has shifted through the practice.

If this view is right, then perceptual transformation is genuinely epistemic, though not necessarily propositional. The trained radiologist, the experienced wine taster, and the skilled draftsman do not simply know more facts about their respective domains than novices do. These persons literally perceive differently. What comes to presence for the expert is a more differentiated and structured whole, a configuration with a recognizable identity, while the novice encounters a less-differentiated field. In this sense we find a modern description of the older philosophical claim that training alters not only what one does with perception, but what perception itself can receive.

What I take to matter most here is that this literature gives contemporary expression to the older insight I began with—that perception is itself shapeable, that the perceiver must be formed, and that such formation yields a genuine increase in adequacy rather than simply a difference in response. In phenomenological terms, what we are training when we train perception is our capacity for intentionality, the inherent “aboutness” or “directedness” of perceptual awareness, which issues forth in a pre-reflective and synthetic way in our moment-to-moment encounter with the world as we engage it. What askēsis and perceptual learning both suggest is that training alters what one can discriminate and, more deeply, what shows up as salient within a lived world in the first place. Thus, for the expert, different affordances stand forth. New possibilities emerge. The world appears differently.

Intentionality is itself skill-inflected; intentionality is always skilled intentionality.

I would want to say, in a vocabulary closer to the classical tradition, that these contemporary accounts describe how a formed perceiver finds himself or herself addressed by a formed world. Practice does not fabricate that structure, but educates our receptivity to it, altering what can come to presence as significant, relevant, or real in our first-personal awareness. What Hadot describes as spiritual exercise, and what I have been describing as the cultivation of receptivity through askēsis, reappears here as the disciplined transformation of perceptual capacities through training. The vocabulary and disciplinary focus may differ, but the structural parallel between the two is evident. In both cases, perceptual achievement depends on the formation of the perceiver into someone capable of receiving a more articulate sense of what is there to be perceived in the arena of our seeing and doing.

IV. Beyond Responsiveness: What perceptual formation is ultimately ordered toward is not practical mastery but theōria, contemplative beholding.

What I want to press further, though, is the question of what it means for practiced perception to become more adequate to what it encounters in the world. What I find in the perceptual learning literature is an empirically tractable account of how perception is trained, of how salience is educated, and of how the perceiver becomes selectively responsive to increasingly fine-grained structures within a given domain. What these accounts do not principally set out to articulate, however, is the sense in which such increased adequacy might extend beyond improved discrimination and more skillful responsiveness into truth as disclosure. This is, on my view, what the classical account can add to the empirical framework. In the language of alētheia, what is at stake in trained perception is a fuller unconcealment of what is there as true, something that exceeds a more successful uptake of environmental structure, aimed at some utilitarian goal or expression of functional fitness (two aspects of perceptual learning we should hold onto, without finding sufficient and complete).

In other words, the contemporary empirical accounts tend to operate with a picture in which perception is understood primarily in relation to action, and in which the adequacy of perception is measured by the quality of the perceiver’s practical responsiveness within a specific domain. The governing concept is something like optimal grip, the state in which the perceiver has achieved maximal fluency of responsiveness to a given situation, usually understood, again, in some functional or evolutionary sense. The consequence is not that such accounts are wrong, but that they leave out a dimension the classical philosophical account identifies as central.

For if the telos of perceptual formation is practical responsiveness, then there is little conceptual space for a mode of perceptual achievement that is receptive rather than operative, little room for what the classical tradition calls theōria—a word whose root sense is “seeing” or “beholding,” and describes a mode of perception ordered not to action but to receptive attention, the reception of what shows itself as intrinsically significant rather than as practically salient. Theōria, in this sense, is the consummation of the attentive capacity that askēsis cultivates. It is the point at which attention, freed from practical urgency, becomes cultivated receptivity to what shows itself as itself without reference to our plans or needs. To absorb disclosure entirely into responsiveness, as these accounts tend to do, is to treat the showing of things chiefly as a prompt for our effective action. What falls from view is alētheia, truth beyond successful uptake and response but as the unconcealment of reality.

And here, I think, a normative issue presses into our inquiry. The perceptual learning literature can establish that expert perception is more differentiated than novice perception, but differentiation alone does not yield adequacy in a robust philosophical sense. I would say, “more differentiated” is a comparative claim about the perceiver’s relative goal capacities; “more adequate” is a claim about the perceiver’s relation to what is really there. The Gibsonian framework gestures toward real structure in the environment, but it tends to leave that structure ontologically thin, functioning as a placeholder for whatever invariants the organism learns to detect through its projects.

There is here a normative and contemplative horizon that the empirical literature does not furnish. Without something like form, understood as the intelligible identity of the thing as it is prior to and independent of the perceiver’s grasp of it, one can say that the expert perceives differently, but what one cannot say, except by appeal to behavioral success, is that the expert perceives better in a normative sense. On my view, what the Platonic account supplies is precisely this missing normative sense. The form of the thing is the standard against which perceptual achievement can be measured as genuinely normative rather than merely functional, and it is the reality toward which the perceiver’s formation is ordered toward as a telos that exceeds the perceiver’s own cognitive economy of wants, needs, or desires.

What I am proposing here does not replace these contemporary accounts, nor does it ask them to become something other than what they are. I want to understand them and put them to use at the level of their own insight but carry that insight into a different register. My sense is that what the classical account of form and alētheia adds is a way of describing what this perceptual education is ultimately an education for— the fuller disclosure of what things are, intrinsically. What I want to suggest, finally, is that theōria should not be understood as a second achievement that follows upon skilled perception, nor an additional layer placed on top of it, but is, in the final analysis, the deeper register of what perceptual formation was always ordered toward.

Thus, if askēsis is the formation of the perceiver’s capacity to receive the form of things, then the fullest expression of that capacity is something more than a refined responsiveness to practical solicitations but a beholding in which what comes to presence is received as intrinsically significant, as something whose self-showing is itself the end. In very simple terms, this mode of perception is aimed at becoming present to a thing’s intrinsic value. The contemporary literature, in its emphasis on responsive differentiation, can only take us part of the way toward this insight.

In contrast, the philosopher who has been formed through askēsis does not simply perceive more than the untrained perceiver; he or she is capable of receiving the disclosure of things as disclosure, the appearing of form as form, and in this reception the event of truth, alētheia, is consummated not as a proposition but as an act of contemplative attention. This is what it means to say that askēsis is ordered to theōria, and that the cultivation of perception is, in the end, a preparation for the beholding of what is, Being in its broadest possible sense.

Dear readers,

I have since last spring been serializing portions of my book Practice in Still Life. The pieces contained therein began as older essays, errant fragments, and conference papers or public talks I’ve given over the past 2–3 years. The below essay marks the final piece of that serialization. The piece started as a talk I was workshopping (in a few different iterations) a few years ago. You can find those original notes here.

I went back and forth about whether to publish this last piece. It’s quite long—coming in at 19K words—and so it definitely stretches past the limit of an online essay. I thought about about breaking it up into pieces, but that didn’t feel quite right, either, since the sections of the piece hang together tightly and cumulatively. I also had some reservations about posting the piece, since already now, less than a year after publishing it, I think I would have written it differently. And, indeed, I likely will write it differently in the future. I can see this piece growing into something else—probably a standalone book, with some of the themes further elaborated and refined.

Practice in Still Life is a laminated work on purpose, with the small fragments coming together into the longer essays, finally cumulating in the piece you’ll find below. In it, I wanted to pull on a thread that Pierre Hadot drew out from his exchanges with Michel Foucault, namely, that there is for Hadot something altogether missing in Foucault’s work on what the latter man calls “technologies of the self” or the “aesthetics of existence,” even as Hadot and Foucault share a sense that what needs recovering in philosophy today is askēsis, that is, spiritual exercises of transformation that complement philosophy’s regular emphasis on reason and discourse. What’s missing for Hadot? In a phrase, a robust sense of transcendence (or a participation in a “found” or “substantive” order, to borrow Charles Taylor’s language).

To explore this question, I drew Foucault down to Nietzsche, Nietzsche down to Plato, Plato back to Heidegger, Heidegger over to Nishitani, and all of them back to the more original sense of Greek paideia and the question of the Good. The essay grew out from the middle of this dynamic, giving it a meandering style that was essential for me to get clear on what, exactly, the stakes are here. And I think I succeeded in creating a dialectic of sorts among this busy intersection of philosophers.

Still, I would modify a few things in a future iteration of this piece:

• I gave short shrift to the broader transitions from “substance” to “construction” (to borrow from Taylor again) vis-a-vis the metaphysics of practice, which I have started to pick up in more detail here. I think there is both a gain and a loss in this historical transition; this piece emphasizes the loss, which isn’t adequate.

• I also don’t address the social or political ramifications of these changes, good and bad, as I started to do in this post, drawing on John Rawls and his work on the shift from teleological conceptions of the Good to procedural ones. A future version of this piece will be more attentive to these dimensions of the discussion.

• Finally, since writing the piece, I have taken a much longer look at the question of Heidegger’s reading of Plato. I still think my conclusions below stand, but I hadn’t yet read a few key supporting texts (I’m thinking especially of Mark Ralkowski’s book Heidegger’s Platonism and Paul Friedländer’s reading of aletheia in his Plato: An Introduction, among several others). These only serve to strengthen my reading, which draws heavily from Eric Perl, but they do add needed color.

But, as it stands, I think the piece starts a conversation on how we might read philosophical practice in the context of what I take to be perhaps the key issue of importance today—the question of nihilism. If you find this piece interesting, you can find the other serialized essays here, covering nine of the 16 chapters of the book. You can also buy the book in paperback here. Enjoy.

– A.

The Shape of Thought to Come

Philosophical practice—understood as a form of spiritual exercise (askēsis)—directs itself not at any single image of philosophy, but at the activities that enliven the philosopher’s soul itself. Philosophy, in this view, consists in the shaping of thought and attention through practice—a shaping that influences not only the intellectual form of our minds, but also the aesthetic quality of our senses, the granularity of our feeling, and the moral skillfulness of our action.

This shaping emerges from the practicing life and responds to the imperatives set by the contours of each historical epoch, an epoch beset by a particular organizing background, however dimly or brightly apparent that background may be. Navigating this philosophical landscape requires understanding how different traditions have oriented themselves within this terrain and charted their paths through it.

This link between both practice and terrain is an important one, as it is not enough to look at practices themselves, divorced from their surroundings. We must understand how these traditions imply and disclose a surrounding region in which they find their footing and gain their grip. Indeed, one could argue that our grip on the terrain has loosened as of late, especially in regards to questions of transcendence and practice.

Today, modern philosophical life finds itself increasingly distanced from traditional forms of practice, making their approaches appear strange or inaccessible to us. As Charles Taylor has argued, this distance reflects a transformation in our shared frameworks of meaning. The background understanding that once made transcendent orientation not just possible but virtually inescapable in the West has given way to what he calls an “immanent frame” that structures our conceptions of self and world.1

This immanent frame constitutes a cosmic and social order that functions without reference to anything beyond itself—a self-sufficient natural order governed by impersonal laws, where meaning and value are understood as emerging from within human experience rather than from a transcendent source. This frame doesn’t necessarily deny transcendence outright, but renders it optional, no longer the default horizon against which all experience is interpreted. Where askēsis was once understood as a disciplined path toward this transcendence and transformation, modern frameworks tend to reduce such practices to merely psychological or therapeutic techniques for self-improvement.

This flattening of practice—its reduction to immanent self-cultivation divorced from any larger metaphysical horizon—reflects a deeper crisis in modern thought, one wherein the erosion of our capacity to find meaning beyond the bounds of what Taylor elsewhere calls “exclusive humanism,” a worldview that locates all value within human flourishing alone. When meaning is confined entirely within the immanent frame, we face the creeping suspicion that our attempts at meaning-making are in the end arbitrary constructions, lacking any foundation beyond our own temporary needs and desires, ultimately resulting in a kind of skepticism about shared meanings, if not an outright nihilism regarding their philosophical purchase. This crisis of meaning intensifies precisely through our attempts to ground value purely within the immanent sphere.

Indeed, this loss has made traditional contemplative exercises and spiritual practices seem like relics of a pre-critical or even primitive worldview. However, these more traditional approaches—with their integration of theoretical understanding and transformative practice suffused with a more complex picture of the relation between transcendence and immanence—may hold vital resources for addressing our contemporary challenges, especially as they relate to shared sources of meaning and practice. If we are to find our way forward, we must first understand what has been lost and what might be regained, and that is what I want to explore in this writing: Both the import of practice in philosophy and a sense for the realism of practice, by which I mean the link between practice and reality, or Being.

I want to foreground in this investigation the question of nihilism and our capacity to respond to it in our time. Nihilism—the erosion of belief in ultimate purpose or truth—presents a substantial challenge to philosophy today, as a transcendent ground for thought and practice is something we no longer take for granted. In contrast, for ancient, classical, and medieval thinkers, a more certain transcendent orientation provided a clearer foundation for philosophical practice and the sources of meaning and purpose it delivers. This loss of transcendent orientation has led to increasingly constrained forms of philosophical practice, culminating ironically in the very nihilism we seek to overcome, as we’ll see.

However, by developing again a more nuanced understanding of how transcendence and immanence relate through practice, we can uncover possibilities for philosophical transformation that preserve both this transcendent orientation and the richness of concrete experience, as displayed in the manifold richness of immanent becoming. In doing so, we may encounter the more original source from which the transcendent and immanent alike emerge and grow distinct, without collapsing the one into the other. By drawing, then, on age-old tensions among universality and contingency, timelessness and history, and freedom and determinism, in this essay we can begin to sketch future shapes of thought and practice, shapes that don’t simply enact a return to the past but participate in bringing forth new possibilities for philosophical life in our time. To this end, moving between themes found in Plato and Nietzsche and Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault, we can engage in an exercise in the timely repetition of timeless questions.

The discussion unfolds in four parts. We begin with Hadot’s biography, as the link between a person’s biography and their philosophy is often a strong one. For reasons we will explore, this link is especially prescient for Hadot, owing to his early rearing in the Catholic Church met in turn with his innately philosophical nature. His shared background in religious education and philosophical inquiry shows how spiritual practice shapes philosophical understanding and vice versa.

We then turn to a discussion of Platonic philosophy as an example of a traditionally grounded approach to philosophical practice, examining how the concept of paideia shapes both individual souls and social structures while orienting them toward transcendent truth. We’ll take recourse in this investigation to Martin Heidegger’s close reading of the Cave Allegory from the Republic, both because of what his reading discloses about the importance of philosophical movement in this imagery but also for how he positions Plato in this discussion as the originator of “metaphysics” itself, as we’ve come to understand it.

The third section takes up Nietzsche’s inversion of Plato, exploring what this inversion means for our sense of practice today. Here we bring Nietzsche into dialogue with Zen Buddhist thought through Nishitani Keiji’s reading of eternal recurrence—a reading that offers an alternative way of understanding practice beyond the standard opposition of transcendence and immanence. The question of nihilism in Nietzsche’s work—and his struggles with and against it—reemerges here.

Finally, we contrast Hadot’s and Plato’s sense of practice with Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s, examining how different metaphysical commitments lead to different conceptions of philosophical transformation and what this means for practice in our contemporary moment. This investigation will lead us to reconsider, through a series of close readings of these texts, whether the apparent opposition between transcendence and immanence might rest on a misreading of Plato himself. I will suggest it does, and subsequently, I will offer a different image of Plato’s philosophy that reads his work against both Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s criticisms of it. Eric Perl’s scholarship on Plato will be essential to this end, as it his reading of Plato that I will adopt and affirm as a viable context for practice today.

Throughout this essay, two questions emerge: What does today’s historical epoch demand of philosophy? And within what metaphysics should we interpret philosophical practices? I will argue that even a considered Nietzschean view of practice—his Platonic inversion, followed by Foucault’s appropriation of it—falls short of what is required of us when we think of the metaphysics of practice, especially in relation to the problem of nihilism, precisely because it remains trapped within an immanent frame that cannot secure meaning against its own dissolution. However, rather than adopting a simple binary between transcendence and immanence, we might find in this re-reading of Plato resources for understanding both their differences and their deeper unity. In the end, this essay offers a meditation on the role of practice in the vacillating worlds of transcendence and immanence, Being and becoming, and universality and particularity.

These tensions—between eternality and historical contingency, between universal truth and concrete practice—frame our central questions: In what kind of world do we practice philosophy? And how might practice itself help us navigate between these seeming oppositions? Plato’s philosophy, read anew through Perl’s interpretation, suggests that philosophical practice operates neither in pure transcendence nor mere immanence, but in the living tension between them in a space beyond the limitations of exclusive humanism—in a perspective that may provide the foundation for a renewed askēsis capable of addressing nihilism in our time. Rather than opposing transcendence to immanence, Perl’s approaches might reveal them as complementary dimensions of a single reality, accessed through different modes of attention and practice.

Pierre Hadot’s Life and Work

Pierre Hadot was a French philosopher and historian who lived from 1922 to 2010.2 His work has had a significant impact on our understanding of ancient philosophy and its practices. Born in Paris, Hadot’s early life was shaped by contrasting religious influences. His mother was devoutly Catholic, and she was determined that her son and his two brothers would enter the priesthood, while his father maintained a more skeptical, agnostic stance towards religion and the Church. This early exposure to both religious devotion and skeptical questioning would prove formative for his later intellectual development, particularly in his approach to understanding the relationship between spiritual practice and philosophical inquiry.

Raised in Reims, Hadot received a strict Catholic education and was ordained to the priesthood in 1944. This religious formation, despite his later criticisms of it, provided foundations for his scholarly career, including mastery of Ancient Greek and Latin, rigorous training in textual analysis, and an initial grounding in philosophical thought. Though he would eventually leave the Church in 1952 for reasons we will explore—a departure that significantly shaped his philosophical development—his early religious training left a marked influence on his thought. During the following years at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), he devoted himself to scholarship in Latin Patristics, developing the rigorous philological methodology that would characterize his entire career.

The dichotomy between religious devotion and philosophical questioning would play a formative role in shaping Hadot’s thinking. While his education was deeply Christian from a young age, Hadot himself felt an early disconnect from conventional religious life. Specifically, his concerns with the priests of his childhood were that their austere mode of asceticism and rote repetition of scripture felt lifeless and mechanical. His Christian education lacked the sacramentality that Hadot felt was at the heart of the religion. However, a pivotal moment in Hadot’s intellectual development occurred during his teenage years, when he had a series of experiences triggered by viewing the night sky—these were early intuitions that he belonged to a larger whole, a cosmos—and he says these experiences enacted a shift in him that made him a philosopher from that point on.

These early experiences of cosmic participation would also prove decisive not only for Hadot’s own philosophical development but for his later critique of self-referential approaches to philosophical practice. His insistence that genuine philosophical transformation must open onto these universal dimensions of Being stems not from abstract theory but from these concrete encounters with what exceeds merely personal or historical constructions—a point that would become central to his dialogue with Foucault about the nature and purpose of ancient spiritual exercises.

These early experiences of cosmic participation and involvement also prompted Hadot to begin writing, as an attempt to explain to himself what had transpired in these encounters. And here Hadot encounters the fact that life is full of significant experiences that cannot be spoken about or put into words. He says of these experiences, “I felt for the first time that there are things that cannot be said” and that “what [is] most essential for us could not be expressed.”3 These kinds of transformative but unsayable experiences will remain a theme for Hadot throughout his life, and it’s here in philosophy that he discovers something of unique value.

At this point in his intellectual development, Hadot finds himself connecting more deeply with the philosophy of existentialism and Martin Heidegger than he is with the Church, as this sense of developing an openness to Being was resonant with his own experiences. But it was in Henri Bergson’s philosophy that he first began to find a philosophical home. Hadot’s high school thesis on Bergson was titled, “Philosophy is not the construction of a system, but the resolution once made to look naively at the world in and around oneself,” a statement that describes these early philosophical leanings, as well as his later and more mature philosophical perspective.

During this period, Hadot maintained that experiences of cosmic participation and universal belonging were foreign to Christianity—a critique that, while understandable given his experiences, perhaps overlooked the rich traditions of such experiences within Christian thought. However, on Hadot’s telling, later in his education he would rediscover a connection with Christianity through its mystical tradition, found in figures like John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila, as well as through the Church’s historical inheritance from Neoplatonism. We could say that this turn in Hadot’s thought suggests both the limitations of his earlier criticism and the enduring resources within Christianity for thinking through questions of cosmic belonging and spiritual practice.

Hadot’s scholarly development was also significantly influenced by Biblical exegesis and his teachers’ emphasis on entering the “collective mentalities” of the people he was studying. This twin fascination with language and forms of mentality no doubt underscored his later fascination with Wittgenstein. Hadot was one of the earliest translators of Wittgenstein into French, and we can say that Hadot maintained a life-long fascination with language and its limits, on the one hand, and the nonverbal forms of life and practice that saturate it, on the other. In 1964, Hadot was elected Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he had his chair title changed from “Latin Patristics” to “Theologies and Mysticisms of Hellenistic Greece and the End of Antiquity.” His 1968 doctoral thesis, Porphyre et Victorinus, established his scholarly reputation in Neoplatonist studies. By the 1970s, his focus turned increasingly toward understanding ancient philosophy as a way of life, leading to his influential work 1981 work Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique.

In the end, Hadot would enter the priesthood but ultimately leave it for a number of reasons, including the Church’s views on the impurity of women, sexuality, and childbirth; the hypocrisy of Church officials regarding service to the poor; the politics of his local parish priests; the condemnation of Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary thinking in 1950; the development of what he calls a “martial theology” that seemed to Hadot divorced from the essence of Christianity; and then, finally, because he fell in love and wanted to marry, and this would mark his departure from the Church.

And so, we have here an intellectual and biographical portrait of Hadot that plays a substantial role in his later and mature philosophy. He is straddling the line between religion and philosophy at the outset of his life. His context is Christian education and the priesthood, but his attachment grows increasingly towards philosophy. He’s concerned with scholarship and exegesis and language, but also with mysticism and cosmology, and above all with practice as a kind of driving force of language and theory. He’s a Thomist and a mystic who reads Heidegger and the existentialists—all influences that would in the end make him a unique force in the twentieth century philosophical landscape.

With this background in mind, I want to explore one of the central concepts that animates all of Hadot’s work—that of philosophy as a way of life, rooted in spiritual exercise (askēsis). These exercises are centered on those “practices intended to effect a modification and a transformation in the subject who practice them.”4 Hadot’s concept of askēsis encompasses a wide range of practices, including:

1. Physical exercises (athletics and gymnastics)

2. Nutrition (diet and fasting)

3. Discursive practices (studying, reading, dialogue) 4. Aesthetics and art

4. Mysticism and intuition

5. Meditation and contemplation

6. Prayer

These exercises often involve a teacher and a student, fostering a sense of community as well as friendship. There’s also a synthesis here between knowing and caring, so that philosophy in this image is as much a type of medicine or therapy as it is a pursuit of truth or understanding. Philosophical discourse is in this sense a means of shaping the self, but also of overcoming the self, so that one might, in Hadot’s words, undo one’s own subjectivity, overcoming one’s own selfish needs and interests so that one might join the wider human community as a citizen of the world.

To look at just one specific example in more detail, these practices of self-overcoming are sometimes grouped under the phrase meleté thanatou, or “death exercises”—a practice of living by dying to one’s own self. More specifically, meletē means to study or meditate (indeed, our modern term “meditation” derives from this Greek word), while thanatou refers to death or dying. Together, meleté thanatou refers to meditations on death, though these practices aren’t all as literal as they sound and instead circle different kinds of death, including but not limited to physical death.

As Plato writes in the Phaedo, “In truth, those who practice philosophy correctly practice dying” (67e). These practices of death meditation take various forms throughout the Platonic tradition. In the Phaedo example, they appear as preparations for bodily death; in the Republic, as the soul’s upward stretch toward the divine; in the Theaetetus, through the philosopher’s “glance from above”; and in the Symposium, in the beholding of eternal beauty. What unites these practices is their power to decenter the individual—what we might today call the ego personality—in favor of a larger, more encompassing identity. Whether through literal death or philosophical transformation, each practice aims at the soul’s liberation.

For Hadot, learning to die through philosophy constitutes one of the primary spiritual exercises, it is, as he says, “a tearing away from everyday life. It is a conversion, a total transformation of one’s vision, lifestyle, and behavior.”5 By transforming perception to transform one’s being, or transforming one’s being to transform perception, spiritual progress can be made through exercise. These practices are properly understood as part of the philosopher’s effort at transformation, and much of Hadot’s writing is a historical working out of the role these practices played in philosophies ancient and modern, from Plato to Aristotle to the Stoics and the Neoplatonists to the works of Goethe, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and others.

He finds in spiritual exercise a uniting theme with which to read the history of philosophy. When we look at the full variety of these practices, we see that askēsis breaks down the dualism between intelligence and sense, and instead suggests something of a blended continuum of cognition, feeling, perception, and sensation. Shaping thought, attention, feeling, will, sensation, imagination, and aesthetic experience—the idea is that perception is itself made malleable through practice. Attention is a kind of art form cultivated through exercise, we can say.

In short, the ascetic exercises of philosophy are aimed at shaping the soul. In this sense, the soul has a shape that can be shaped, and askēsis is the name we give to these practices of shaping and transformation. Askēsis thus aims not at any one image of thought and world, but back to the moves themselves that enliven the philosopher’s being. In taking up the soul as their object, these exercises are properly spiritual in a sense that draws religious and philosophical practice closer together in a way that modern scholars are often uncomfortable with.

Despite the influence of Hadot’s work on our understanding of ancient philosophy and its practices, his approach has not been without its critics. These criticisms strike at the core of Hadot’s interpretation of philosophy as a way of life and raise important questions about the nature and purpose of philosophical inquiry. Let’s examine some of the main objections to Hadot’s perspective:

1. The Authenticity of Spiritual Exercises in Ancient Philosophy: Some scholars argue that Hadot exaggerates or even fabricates the role of spiritual exercises in ancient philosophy. They contend that while certain practices may have existed, Hadot’s emphasis on them as central to philosophical life is an anachronistic projection of modern concerns onto ancient texts. This criticism challenges the historical basis of Hadot’s interpretation and suggests that he may be reading too much into the limited evidence available from ancient sources.

2. The Nature of Professional Philosophy: A significant criticism comes from within the contemporary philosophical community itself. It could be argued that philosophy as a profession today isn’t primarily concerned with spiritual exercises in Hadot’s sense. Instead, it is asserted that the focus of professional philosophy is on rational argumentation, logical analysis, and the development of theoretical frameworks. This view sees Hadot’s approach as potentially undermining the rigor and objectivity that many consider essential to philosophical inquiry.

3. The Relationship Between Theology and Philosophy: Some critics, particularly those specializing in medieval philosophy, argue that Hadot misunderstands or misrepresents the relationship between theology and philosophy in the Christian tradition. They contend that Hadot’s view oversimplifies the complex interplay between faith and reason that characterized much of medieval thought and fails to appreciate the nuanced ways in which Christian thinkers engaged with philosophical ideas.

4. The Critique of Contemporary Academia: Hadot’s criticisms of modern academic philosophy have been seen by some as unfair or overly harsh. His use of Thoreau’s quote, “We have philosophy professors but no philosophers,”6 implies that contemporary academic philosophers have lost touch with the true spirit of philosophy as a lived practice. This critique has been met with resistance from those who see value in the specialized, professional nature of modern philosophical scholarship, as well as from those professors who (like Hadot) still hold a place for philosophy as a way of life, rooted in spiritual exercise.

These criticisms notwithstanding, there can be no doubt, as we’ll see in the section below on Foucault, that Hadot’s influence has been substantial, and that he survives each of these criticisms, as an increasingly extensive body of secondary literature shows.7 More importantly, these criticisms, while raising valid points about historical interpretation and academic practice, perhaps miss the deeper significance of Hadot’s project of recovering forms of philosophical practice that might address the needs of our time.

In this first section, we’ve explored Hadot’s life and philosophical development, tracing his journey from a Christian upbringing to his unique perspective on philosophy as spiritual exercise. Hadot’s concept of askēsis, encompassing a wide range of practices aimed at transforming the self, provides a framework for understanding philosophy as a way of life rather than merely an intellectual pursuit. This view of philosophy as a transformative practice sets the stage for our exploration of how similar ideas have been expressed throughout the history of Western thought, beginning with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, especially as it relates to the transformational potential of paideia.

Plato and Paideia in the Cave Allegory

When we think of paideia, we often picture the well-known Greek system of education designed to give students a broad cultural understanding, particularly geared towards public life and the formation of political virtue. Its role is the formation of the soul in the direction of justice—politeia and paideia are in this sense closely linked concepts in Greek thought. This educational system typically includes intellectual education, moral development, and aesthetic refinement, often associated with the formation of an elite class within society, and generally encompasses music, art, grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, gymnastics, and related disciplines.

Our modern notion of the humanities (from the Latin studia humanitatis) is recognizably descended from this concept. However, for our purposes, I want to focus less on paideia as a formal system of education and more on the etymology of the word as a kind of turning around or training in a circle. The real potency of the concept lies not in the educational system itself, but in the movement it describes. The etymology of paideia (most literally “child rearing”) is helpful here. However, the more complete phrase, enkyklios paideia, meaning “circular education,” shares its root with words describing a “turning wheel” or “training in a circle” (which also gives us the modern word “encyclopedia”). It’s this definition I want to explore.

To illustrate this concept of movement in thought, let’s examine a famous historical example of how paideia is deployed in philosophy: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Werner Jaeger provides a detailed analysis of the Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic that can help this investigation. The allegory on Jaeger’s telling begins with Socrates saying, “And now, compare our nature, from the point of view of paideia and lack of paideia, to an experience like this.”8 He then describes the famous scene of the prisoners chained in a cave, only able to see shadows cast on the wall by objects passing in front of a fire behind them. In this allegory, the cave represents the visible or sensible world of appearances, the fire corresponds not to the Sun itself but to its representation, and the ascent to the world above symbolizes the soul’s ascent to the intelligible world of reality. The key point here is that for the ascent to begin, a turning must occur. The ability to turn must be exercised (turning is a kind of askēsis, we could say).

For Jaeger, this movement of turning, this paideia, cannot occur in any direction whatsoever. It’s not just a turning around and round or a turning away, but a turning towards. This turning towards has a name that Jaeger identifies as a type of metanoia—a “conversion experience” or “turning towards.” Metanoia involves the soul’s redirection and reformation in both body and mind. In Latin, the prisoners in Plato’s cave undergo a conversio or “turning about” that’s also a turning towards. But what do they turn towards in this story?

They turn towards the Sun, or the Platonic Ideal of the Sun (itself a symbol of the Good). The Good, for Plato, is in turn the source of Being which makes possible the perception of individual beings. Jaeger emphasizes again that the essence of philosophical education is “conversion,” which also means “turning round.” As he says, “‘Conversion’ is a specific term of Platonic paideia, and indeed an epoch-making one. It means more specifically the wheeling round of the ‘whole soul’ towards the light of the Idea of Good, the divine origin of the universe.”9

We may here introduce the additional Greek term periagoge to signal the movement that has the prisoners in the Allegory of the Cave “turn around,” away from the representations on the cave wall and begin their ascent upwards to the outside world, but the word’s structure reveals a further meaning. Combining peri (signifying movement around or about) with agō (conveying guidance or leadership), it describes a form of guided travel—a transformative ascent that leads one “full circle,” so to speak. The term’s combination of guidance and circular movement shows why Plato chose it for this moment in his account. The word points to the physical act of turning but also to the guided, educational nature of this turning—a full reorientation that transforms the whole person.

Martin Heidegger, in his “Plato’s Doctrine on Truth,” further develops this view of paideia.10 A close reading of this text will furnish for us a deeper understanding of paideia in the senses we’ve begun to describe, as well as several concepts that will become important for us as we continue the overall investigation of this paper. Starting with the word itself, then, Heidegger writes:

Παιδεία [paideia] means turning around the whole human being. It means removing human beings from the region where they first encounter things and transferring and accustoming them to another realm where beings appear. This transfer is possible only by the fact that everything that has been heretofore manifest to human beings, as well as the way in which it has been manifest, gets transformed. Whatever has been unhidden to human beings at any given time, as well as the manner of its unhiddenness, has to be transformed. (168)

Heidegger’s analysis emphasizes that paideia engages not merely intellectual change but involves the reorientation of one’s being itself. Growth in knowledge in this way implies a decidedly ontological transformation—the knower becomes, in a certain way, a new being. Moreover, Heidegger identifies a unity at the heart of Platonic knowledge: “The guiding thought is that the highest idea yokes together the act of knowing and what it knows” (177). This yoking together of knower and known likewise points toward a form of philosophical understanding that transcends mere theoretical knowledge, suggesting instead a transformation that affects both the one who knows and what is known.

This unity of knowing and being clarifies the deeper significance of philosophical practice as a transformative endeavor. The conversion process manifests as the flowering of the individual’s essential nature, a nature whose source is a Platonic ideal. As he writes, “real education lays hold of the soul itself and transforms it in its entirety by first of all leading us to the place of our essential being and accustoming us to it” (166). Heidegger emphasizes here the distinction between paideia and its opposite, ἀπαιδευσία (apaideusia), the lack of formation, or more precisely, the inability to turn. In the state of apaideusia, one remains locked into place, unable to turn towards the sources of one’s own representations. This inability to turn, I would say, marks the space of idolatry, ideology, fundamentalism, and dogmatism—a state of unacknowledged ignorance as opposed to the space of acknowledged ignorance of Socratic philosophy.

The allegory’s significance here lies not in its static imagery but in its depiction of movement. As Heidegger emphasizes, “The ‘allegory’ recounts a series of movements rather than just reporting on the dwelling places and conditions of people inside and outside the cave” (165). These movements trace a double path: first out of the cave into daylight, then back from daylight into the cave, and it does so through four primary stages, says Heidegger. The initial stage finds humans dwelling in a state of direct engagement, “chained inside the cave, engrossed in what they immediately encounter” (168). Here, beings appear only as shadows—not shadows in a merely metaphorical sense, but as the way beings first present themselves to unreflective consciousness. The cave dwellers, in Heidegger’s words, “are so passionately attached to their ‘view’ that they are incapable of even suspecting the possibility that what they take for the real might have the consistency of mere shadows” (165).

From this condition, the second stage marks the removal of chains, allowing for a preliminary freedom of movement. Heidegger observes that “removing the chains brings a sort of liberation, but being let loose is not yet real freedom” (169). The newly unchained prisoners can turn in all directions, though their vision remains confused—they lack the essential capacity for proper assessment that emerges only through authentic liberation achieved through paideia. This observation deepens our earlier understanding of apaideusia as an inability to turn effectively, as paideia also implies directionality, or, we could say, the wisdom to know what to turn towards.

The third stage manifests what Heidegger terms “real freedom”—the ascent into the open where beings show themselves in their own “binding force and validity” (169). This realm of authentic unhiddenness emerges not through boundless space but through the binding power of clear limits and definite forms. As Heidegger writes, “Liberation does not come about by the simple removal of the chains, and it does not consist in unbridled license; rather, it first begins as the continuous effort at accustoming one’s gaze to be fixed on the firm limits of things that stand fast in their visible form” (170).

Finally, the journey out into the light outside culminates not in permanent escape from the cave but in a return—what Heidegger identifies as the fourth stage of the allegory. The liberated soul must descend again, “back to those who are still in chains” (171). This return carries mortal risk, as “the would-be liberator no longer knows his or her way around the cave and risks the danger of succumbing to the overwhelming power of the kind of truth that is normative there” (171). Heidegger gives as the archetypal example of this danger the fate of Socrates, whose death exemplifies the peril inherent in the philosophical mission of liberation through transformation.

Here Heidegger’s reading reveals the cave itself as having a complex structure. He asks: “For what else is the underground cave except something open in itself that remains at the same time covered by a vault and, despite the entrance, walled off and enclosed by the surrounding earth? This cave-like enclosure that is open within itself, and that which it surrounds and therefore hides, both refer at the same time to an outside, the unhidden that is spread out in the light above ground” (172). This analysis of the cave’s dual nature, as both enclosure and opening, introduces a tension between inside and outside—the immanent and the transcendent—that shapes philosophical practice. The cave in this sense represents not simply a prison to be escaped but a structure that inherently refers beyond itself while maintaining its character as enclosure.

We’ll return to the importance of the outside in the latter part of the essay, but for now we can say that paideia is this capacity for movement, for turning back to the sources of one’s representations, loosening them up for specific and directed modes of reconfiguration or transformation. Askēsis in this metaphor marks a set of practices that keep you, first, lucid and able to turn, but also second, able to ascend and descend. This is an understanding of philosophy as spiritual exercise that provides a set of enabling conditions that activate paideia and metanoia. The story itself, in turn, forms the backdrop against which we can understand the role of askēsis in philosophical practice. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the concept of paideia thus offer a powerful illustration of philosophical education as a process of turning and transformation. However, this Platonic view of reality and truth—especially in its commonly held two-world form—would face significant challenges in the modern era, particularly from thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche. As we turn to Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics, we’ll see how the very foundations of this worldview are called into question, forcing us to reconsider the nature and purpose of philosophical practice.

Friedrich Nietzsche and the End of Metaphysics

Having explored Hadot’s concept of askēsis and its exemplar in Platonic thought in paideia, we now turn to a figure who would radically challenge the metaphysical foundations upon which these ideas rest: Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s critique of traditional philosophy and his concept of “inverted Platonism” present a remarkable challenge to the notion of philosophical practice as a turning towards this transcendent truth, this outside. In this section, we will examine how Nietzsche’s ideas both disturb and reinvigorate our understanding of askēsis and philosophical transformation, whilst also keeping an eye on what might be missing or lost in this account.

We begin with John Sallis’s essay on “Nietzsche’s Platonism,” which provides a framework for understanding the relationship between Platonic thought and Nietzsche’s philosophy. Sallis positions these two thinkers along a single, giant interval that spans the history of Western metaphysics:

The interval is gigantic, this interval between Plato and Nietzsche, this course running from Plato to Nietzsche and back again. It spans an era in which a battle of giants is waged. . . . It is a battle in which being is at stake. . . . Along the historical axis, in the gigantic interval from Plato to Nietzsche, the contenders are similarly positioned for the ever-renewed battle. They, too, take their stance on one side or the other of the interval—again, a gigantic interval—separating the intelligible from the visible or sensible. . . . And yet, finally, with Nietzsche it seems that the battle has come to an end. From the Platonic beginning, from the inaugural staging, the history of metaphysics would have run its course, coming to its end at the moment when Nietzsche, the last metaphysician, confounds beyond hope the very interval at stake throughout that history. What was way up high is cut loose and drifts out of sight. There is no longer anything to drag down to earth, and in a sense nothing is required in order to remain true to the earth—nothing except the utmost insistence on the surface that remains once the gigantic interval is no more and the sensible has been twisted free of the intelligible.11

Now, what’s interesting here is that instead of proceeding with an exegesis of Nietzsche after the death of Platonism and metaphysics, Sallis does the opposite, and suggests that Nietzsche, for all this work, is still something of a Platonist. But what kind of Platonism is this? Nietzsche tells us in The Birth of Tragedy that his philosophy is an inverted Platonism: “My philosophy is an inverted Platonism: the further removed from true being, the purer, the more beautiful, the better it is. Living in Schein as goal.”12 That word Schein is German for “semblance” or “appearance,” but also, in keeping with Nietzsche’s celebration of it, the Schein also shines, it has its own brightness, its own source of light; it gleams a brilliance rooted in the immanence of becoming rather than through the supplementation of transcendent and eternal Being.

Here we see the Allegory of the Cave inverted—in this version of the story, it is Nietzsche who pulls us out of the cave of intelligibility and into the open air of Schein, the sensible world of appearances. We have, then, on Nietzsche’s account, inverted the priorities of Being, or, on his terms, of the Being that is actually a becoming. In this image, the distinction between appearance and reality—if we can hold onto it for a moment before releasing it—shouldn’t be construed along the lines of a more primary occluded reality of intelligibility that sits behind appearances, shaping them, generating them, giving them being and existence. Rather, it is the world of appearances—the world of Schein—that generates the fiction of a reality that stands behind it, organizing it. The so-called real world is, one might say, an elaborate—and often beautiful—fiction that emerges from the play of Schein.

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Nietzsche’s move here is neither anti-metaphysical nor anti-realist, nor is it an abandonment of truth. Nietzsche more precisely wants to tell the truth about the truth. Nietzsche here unwinds the truth about the truth by positioning the reality of truthfulness as an emergent form—as a work of art, in its higher registers—of a creative will-to-power turning its own self-circumstance against itself to overcome itself. Each turning in history is a turning of wills against themselves and against one another, overcoming themselves through an unstoppable drive that seeks only its ongoing transformation by turning itself against itself to overcome itself.

The human part in this great drama, if one can manage it, is to will positive affirmation towards this ceaseless roil of turning. For there is no other option; rejoice or perish. Amor fati, as Friedrich says. There is much to explore here. I return to Sallis. “Let it be said,” he writes, “that [Nietzsche’s] story sets everything adrift: for it is a story of the ground in which all would be anchored begins to drift away, becoming more and more remote until it remains only something told of in a story, in the story that will have just been told.”13 Readers, I trust you can see here the multiple connections with Plato and with paideia that I mentioned earlier. We have already discussed Nietzsche’s inversion of the cave—the inversion of the priority among intelligibility and Schein—but the other perhaps more important connection recalls Nietzsche’s use of the notion not only of turning but of eternally re-turning.

If we follow Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism—a freeing of ourselves from the Platonic schema—then we may still be able to turn, but the bigger question remains open to us, to what should we turn towards and to what should we turn away from? I quote Sallis one more time: “A twisting free from Platonism into—what? Into a space lacking all the bounds, limits, and measure previously installed by two and a half millennia of Western thought; into a space—or, rather, an abyss—in which all bounds would be crossed out, all measure exceeded.”14 I want to recall one more time that in our discussion of paideia, the exercise of turning was paired with the experience of metanoia and periagoge, of guided conversion and a turning towards, in this case towards the Sun, which represents both the Good, and the ground of Being that makes beings visible and apparent. The Sun is of course precisely what’s missing in Nietzsche, and, as he diagnosis, from our modern existential condition more generally.

I’ll quote the infamous passage from “The Parable of the Madman” in The Gay Science:

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Where is God?” he cried; “I’ll tell you! We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again? Don’t lanterns have to be lit in the morning? Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition?—Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!”15

In Nietzsche, then, we certainly have a sense of paideia and a sense of turning, but nothing like the turning away from beings towards the common source of all Being, the Good, since here, in this new turning, we find that the Good, exemplified by the Sun, is missing—it has been wiped from the horizon, as Nietzsche says. I ask again, to what, then, do we turn? There are multiple directions we can take the discussion from here.

Michael Allen Gillespie alleges that for all his attempts to wrestle with the problem of nihilism, Nietzsche’s method entangles us more deeply within it.16 For Gillespie, the problem is that Nietzsche has internalized a deep and pervasive type of scholastic nominalism that began to dominate post-Reformation Europe. There can be no ontological account of which direction we should turn to from this stance, and therefore we are left after the death of God in a nihilistic mode of damaging and ineffectual thinking. Heidegger would likewise eventually conclude that Nietzsche’s will-to-power amounts to a thoroughgoing nihilism operating at a metaphysical register. In Heidegger’s own words, “Nietzsche’s metaphysics is not an overcoming of nihilism. It is the ultimate entanglement in nihilism.”17 In both accounts, there is in Nietzsche no transcendent outside—no Sun, no Good, no Ground of Being, save for the groundless ground of becoming—to orient our turning, and because of this we are left in the last analysis with nihilism, the very condition Nietzsche so presciently diagnosed and warned against.

But there are alternatives to this view, stemming from the surprising location of the comparative philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, speaking from and to a Zen tradition in renewed dialogue with Nietzsche. I’ll share just one exemplary quote from Nishitani’s The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism to illustrate this alternative:

The eternal recurrence may be called the intuitive experience of insight into eternity from within the world of becoming. The search for eternal life in another world that transcends the world of becoming is, of course, negated by Nietzsche in his radical pursuit of the nihility that such an other world hides from view. For him only the world in which all things are ever-changing flux remains. The world of flux, of impermanence, comes to be seen as the activity of bottomless will, an activity without any transcendent meaning or purpose; it becomes the play (Spiel) of bottomless will in the joy (Lust) of life which is absolute affirmation. That all things are ceaselessly changing and passing away is a source of suffering and grief; yet this suffering and its source can, just as they are, be transformed into joy. . . . When joy, the innocent play of life, wants itself, all phenomena of the world are dissolved into this joy and innocent life. This is the absolute affirmation of life, the form of life that affirms itself absolutely. There is the eternity in the midst of the transiency of becoming; there is divine life in a new and Dionysian sense, in a world without God.18

The results of this view are remarkable. Instead of turning us towards a specific goal or transcendent telos, Nietzsche gives us a different type of philosophical maneuver, a set of dance moves exemplified by Dionysian frenzy. There is here no point of metaphysical transcendence to aim towards. There are, however, celebratory modes of immanent transcendence achieved through self-overcoming, where overcoming is something more like ecstasis, which means to be or stand outside of oneself, transcending oneself to transform oneself on a horizontal axis, we might say. While this account salvages something in Nietzsche that is neglected in Heidegger and Gillespie, even Nishitani himself will argue that, in the last analysis, Nietzsche does indeed leave us wanting in regard to the question of nihilism.

For Nishitani, while Nietzsche comes remarkably close to his Buddhist thought—especially in the concepts of amor fati and eternal recurrence—he ultimately remains caught in what Nishitani calls a “relative absolute nothingness.” The eternal recurrence may indeed provide a way to experience eternity within the temporal moment, transforming suffering into joy through absolute affirmation of life. But this affirmation stops short of the more radical emptiness (śūnyatā) found in Nishitani’s Buddhism. Here śūnyatā represents, as Nishitani explains, “an absolutely transcendent field, and, at the same time, a field that is not situated on the far side of where we find ourselves, but on our near side, more so than we are with respect to ourselves.”19

This field where Being and beings alike appear in unison with emptiness at bottom—where things manifest in their suchness and stand on their own “home-ground” (that elemental mode of being where things are as they are in themselves), where each thing affirms itself according to its own particular virtus (that individual capacity each thing possesses as a display of its own possibility of existence)—distinguishes Nishitani’s emptiness from two positions.20 First, from those formulations of Western metaphysics that posit a stark two-world dualism between immanent and transcendent regions of Being (the position Nietzsche also criticizes), and second, from Nietzsche’s own attempted overcoming of this dualism through a wholesale rejection of the transcendent. Where Nietzsche proclaims that “God is dead,” leaving us in the depths of nihility, Nishitani’s path pushes through to an absolute nothingness that reaches beyond even the death of God.

Nishitani’s analysis in this way extends and complicates the philosophical trajectory we’ve been following. His critique aligns with but also deepens those offered by Heidegger and Gillespie, who as we just saw describe Nietzsche’s will-to-power as entangling us further in nihilism (through his elevation of human will-to-power as the ground of all valuation, thereby perpetuating rather than overcoming the metaphysics of will). It’s worth looking briefly at this extension, even as Nishitani’s engagement with Nietzsche evolved significantly over time. For example, in his early work, Nishitani found striking parallels between Nietzsche’s radical atheism and Meister Eckhart’s mystical breakthrough to divine Nothingness, seeing in both a reaffirmation of human existence achieved through thorough self-negation.

However, in his later work, Nishitani came to see Eckhart’s path as reaching further than Nietzsche’s, achieving a standpoint of absolute nothingness grounded in everyday life that Nietzsche’s thought could not attain.21 While Nishitani recognizes that Nietzsche’s thought—particularly in the notion of amor fati—contains moments of genuine transcendence through its synthesis of necessity (fate) and creative affirmation (love), this reconciliation remains trapped within the horizon of will, incapable of achieving the radical emptiness that would truly overcome nihilism. Nishitani’s critique of Nietzsche thus offers a path beyond both a two-world grounding of value in a bifurcated transcendence and the Nietzschean grounding of value in human will-to-power, even when complemented with the affirmative notion of amor fati.

This critique helps us better understand what’s at stake in Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism and his proclamation of the death of God—a radical departure from traditional metaphysics achieved by operating against this tradition’s own vocabulary. By prioritizing the world of appearances (Schein) over any transcendent reality, Nietzsche challenges us to reconsider what it means to “turn” in a philosophical sense. If there is no fixed point of orientation, no “Sun” to turn towards—just the eternal return of becoming—how can we understand and practice philosophy as a transformative exercise that makes spiritual progress? And should we follow Nietzsche where he leads us? I’m cautious, to say the least.

William Desmond frames this problem incisively through the metaphor of enchantment, noting that while there is “an urgency of ultimacy in Nietzsche that at times is overpowering,” we must grapple with how to “deal with a wizard or bewitcher, or indeed a seducer (Verführer), as Zarathustra is called.” The sense of Nietzsche we find in Desmond is one of real concern and outright skepticism. It’s worth thinking about whether Desmond is right in this worry, as for Desmond it’s possible that we are being misled more than we are achieving a deeper kind of liberation or freedom through Nietzsche. The question becomes if one can, in Desmond’s words, “divine that one must ward off the enchantment” and recognize “that the spell being cast on one is really a magic stupor from which one must struggle to wake up.” For Desmond, what proves decisive is the recognition of a theme we’ve dancing around up until this point—that “what one needs more than anything is someone or something other breaking in from the outside.” He elaborates:

Do I exaggerate when I say Nietzsche does have this strange effect: sending us to sleep, after first seeming to wake us up to ourselves? Charming us with the belief that at last we are waking up and no longer asleep in the nightmares of the millennia, even though waking up is only another sleep or dream? We look into Nietzsche and we seem to gaze into a magic mirror and we seem to see ourselves. We are persuaded to see ourselves as now budding creators, and so we feel irritated with anyone who will deprive us of the mirror and our unprecedented promise of originality. . . . Is this why so many have their own Nietzsche: a thinker for everyone and for no one? Before the magic mirror, we all crowd eagerly to admire our own untapped creativity. But as with most gazing into mirrors, this too is vanity— mostly.22

This question of the outside once more returns us to the heart of our investigation. While Nishitani’s Buddhist perspective offers one way beyond this impasse through śūnyatā—a field that transcends both traditional metaphysical dualism and Nietzsche’s attempted overcoming of it—the tension between transcendent orientation and immanent transformation remains in the contemporary debate between Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault on the nature of askēsis and its relevance to modern philosophy.

What’s at stake in their disagreement becomes clearer in light of our preceding analysis, namely, how we relate to notions of transcendence and immanence in terms of our practices. I will in the next section describe the stakes of Hadot’s differences with Foucault’s Nietzschean approach to practice. This will allow us to consider how we might, with Hadot, approach the question of transcendence differently. Such an approach may, surprisingly, align more closely the Platonic tradition that Nietzsche critiques (and that Foucault appropriates) with Nishitani’s own account of śūnyatā. In doing so, we can draw together the relation between immanence and transcendence in a way that will allow us to think both together in our accounts of askēsis in the twenty-first century. This approach can recuperate for us the essentialness of a subtle but robust account of the transcendent in a way that evades Nietzsche’s critique.

Hadot’s and Foucault’s Askēsis

We have been looking at how philosophical practice, understood as spiritual exercise, involves different philosophical commitments across the history of Western thought. Beginning with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we traced how paideia operates as a turning toward transcendent truth—a conversion of the soul toward the Good as the source of Being itself. This turning, as we’ve seen, is not arbitrary but directed toward a specific metaphysical end: the Sun, the symbol of the Good, that makes all beings visible and apparent. In Nietzsche’s radical inversion of this schema, we encountered a challenge to this entire metaphysical framework. Through his declaration that “My philosophy is an inverted Platonism,” Nietzsche proposes a world of pure Schein—of appearances that shine with their own light rather than receiving illumination from a transcendent source. Where Plato directed philosophy toward eternal forms, Nietzsche envisions reality as a self-creating work of art with no need for divine authorship or transcendent ground, lest that ground be the eternally returning ground of ceaseless becoming. I have argued that this transforms philosophical theory as well as the very nature of philosophical practice itself in ways we should ponder carefully.

The tension between transcendent orientation and immanent transformation that we’ve traced through Plato, Nietzsche, and Nishitani finds renewed expression in the interrupted dialogue between Hadot and Foucault regarding the nature and purpose of ancient philosophical practice. Their disagreement, viewed through this lens, concerns both different approaches to practice and deeper questions about how truth and reality can be secured against their dissolution into mere human construction, however extensively detailed and richly genealogical such constructions become.

When we look at Hadot’s and Foucault’s interpretations of askēsis, we find important implications for contemporary philosophy. Both thinkers were deeply interested in the concept of askēsis and its role in ancient philosophy, but they approached it from different angles. Hadot saw askēsis as a means of transforming one’s entire being, aiming at wisdom and virtue. For him, philosophy was a way of life, not just an intellectual exercise, aiming at cosmic participation. Foucault, on the other hand, was more interested in askēsis as a technology of the self, a means by which individuals could shape themselves in relation to power and societal norms. He saw these practices as ways of resisting dominant power structures and creating spaces of freedom. To be sure, Foucault, like Nietzsche before him, was, contra his less-careful critics, also deeply committed to ideals of truth, but in a different way than was Hadot.

We can look at these disagreements on two levels, as Hadot and Foucault differ in their accounts in both substantive and historical ways when it comes to understanding practice. For example, Foucault diagnoses a certain “Cartesian moment” in the history of philosophy wherein the transformations of the self, underwritten by askēsis, are replaced by the simpler and more universal requirements of the twin acquisition of knowledge and evidence. Foucault’s argument is that there is a point in modern philosophy, marked by Descartes, where acquiring knowledge without the need of a corresponding transformation of the self comes to prominence, a point where evidence replaces askēsis as the primary object of knowledge. At this stage, according to Foucault, “the history of truth enters its modern period” and truth becomes associated with knowledge (connaissance, in the French), rather than with the efforts of a practicing subject. This moment marks a shift in definitions of truth understood as practice (askēsis), or as the “return effect” of truth encounters, and towards truth understood as proposition (mathemata).23

Hadot for his part is skeptical that Foucault’s reading in this area really captures the essence of Descartes’s philosophy and method. Descartes’s major work is after all titled Meditations, which Hadot reads appropriately as an explicit reference to the type of practice of self-transformation that askēsis implies. “Concerning these Meditations,” writes Hadot, “Descartes advises his readers to dedicate a number of months, or at least a number of weeks, to ‘meditate’ the first and second meditations . . . This clearly shows that for Descartes also ‘evidence’ can only be recognized on the basis of a spiritual exercise.”24 Descartes in this way belongs to an older tradition linking philosophy and spiritual exercises for self-mastery, attuning thought and action to moral and metaphysical truth.

While this difference in historical interpretation is significant, the core of their disagreement centers on Foucault’s interpretation of the Greek and Roman practices of philosophy as being centered on the self, on an “aesthetics of existence” as he calls it. While Hadot agrees with Foucault that these ancient practices were geared towards a conversion of the self, and that they incorporated a set of further practices designed to free this self from the determinism of external and internal conditions, with the goal of achieving happiness, freedom, and independence, he nevertheless felt that Foucault was missing a sense for how transcendent or universal perspectives are necessarily involved in these practices.

Hadot’s emphasis on cosmic participation in this sense stems not from theoretical commitment but from concrete experience—those early encounters with the night sky that reveal the person’s capacity to transcend purely personal dimensions. These experiences informed his critique of Foucault’s reduction of ancient practices to mere self-fashioning, suggesting that such an approach misses the very moments where philosophical practice achieves its most transformative potential—when personal experience opens onto universal truth. The inclusion of the universal, as a lived practice of physics, says Hadot, “implies a radical transformation of perspective, and contains a universalist, cosmic dimension, upon which, it seems to me, M. Foucault did not sufficiently insist. Interiorization is a going beyond oneself; it is universalization.”25

Hadot’s understanding of askēsis in this way encompasses both practical transformation and mystical experience, but in a way that remains deeply tied to nature and the cosmos as substantively aesthetic phenomena, an extension we do not find in Foucault, save for in his historical descriptions about these practices. Here we are concerned not with this history per se but with what we can discern about Foucault’s own commitments. Hadot’s emphasis offers a helpful contrast. While philosophical practice involves reshaping the self (as Foucault also insists), Hadot argues that this transformation opens onto transcendent dimensions of experience through what he calls “the mysteries of Nature itself.” Again, his own biographical encounters that we reviewed earlier in the essay with what he calls “the oceanic feeling”—those moments of cosmic participation triggered by contemplating the night sky—will, as we’ve seen, inform later in life his reading of ancient philosophy’s transformative potential. For Hadot, the universe in this sense is itself a work of art, a kind of poem, and philosophical practice involves learning to read and participate in this cosmic poēsis. As he writes, “The philosopher’s role is to mimic in the poiēsis of discourse, insofar as possible, the poiēsis of the Universe. Such an act is a poetic offering, or the Poet’s celebration of the universe.”26

This understanding of the aesthetic–cosmic dimension of life allows us to see Nietzsche’s position in a new light. To return to Nietzsche’s statement once more, “My philosophy is an inverted Platonism: the further removed from true being, the purer, the more beautiful, the better it is. Living in Schein as goal,” we can add that he’s not simply rejecting cosmic truth but relocating it within the immanent play of will-to-power and artistic creation. As Hadot notes:

Such was indeed Nietzsche’s great intuition, as early as his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, where he speaks of nature’s aesthetic instincts: he remained faithful to this concept throughout his life. The world is art through and through. It is a work of art that engenders itself; for in Nietzsche’s view, all creation of forms is art. Nature sculpts an entire universe of forms; she spreads forth an extraordinary variety of colors and unfolds a whole gamut of sounds within space. Human art is an integral part of this universe of appearance, and, as Nietzsche often repeats, it is this appearance that must be “adored.”27

This convergence between Nietzsche and Hadot on nature’s aesthetic character should not obscure their differences. Where Nietzsche’s conception remains rooted in the immanent play of will-to-power and artistic creation, Hadot’s understanding— shaped as it is by his deep engagement with Neoplatonism—points toward a transcendent dimension within nature itself. Keeping in mind these metaphysical differences, both thinkers share in this insight about the role of interiorization in philosophical practice. It is this emphasis on the interiorization of experience—not only in its passive encounter but also in its willful shaping—that makes attention into an art of its own. This art of perception is not set side aside as a unique fact apart from the larger passing of nature, but is a particular instance in its unfolding, where attention, as an art form, repeats in its own way the larger panoply of the artistic diorama that is nature’s varied, cosmic, and intimate expressions. In other words, the metamorphosis that thought undergoes in its coming to consciousness through acts of attentiveness is in sympathy with the surging metamorphosis found in nature at large.

Conversion experiences are often encountered in just these moments where the internal metamorphosis of the philosopher and the external metamorphosis of reality are felt deeply as instances of the same singular process. The human being can be thought of as the dyad wherein the eternal becoming of nature finds its expression through the deep particularity of an individual’s psychological life as it advances within the whole of nature through the artistry of its own personal expression. However, where Foucault would emphasize the aesthetic dimension primarily as self-creation and resistance to power, Hadot maintains that genuine philosophical practice must orient itself toward this larger cosmic poēsis.

In this sense, Hadot criticized Foucault’s interpretation of Greek askēsis, arguing that it was too focused on the self and missed the cosmic dimension of ancient philosophy. For Hadot, the goal of philosophical practices was self-transformation, and, moreover, a transformation of one’s relationship to the cosmos and to others. The risk of Foucault’s account for Hadot is that we reduce the cosmic and universal dimension of practice to a set of aesthetic transformations robbed of their deeper and more consequential metaphysical entailments. In Hadot’s words:

This is why, instead of a “culture of the self,” it would be better to speak of the “transformation,” “transfiguration,” or “surpassing of the self.” In order to describe this state, one cannot avoid the term wisdom, which, it seems to me, appears very rarely, if ever in Foucault. Wisdom is that state at which the philosopher will perhaps never arrive but towards which he aims, by striving to transform himself in order to go beyond his present state. It is a mode of existence which is characterized by three essential aspects: peace of mind (ataraxia), inner freedom (autarkeia) and, except in the sceptics, cosmic consciousness: that is to say, the process of becoming aware of belonging to the human and cosmic Whole, a sort of dilation or transfiguration of the self which realizes greatness of soul (megalopsychia).28

While Hadot is no doubt correct in his assessment of Foucault here, we need not frame this disagreement as a strict choice between cosmic attunement and resistance to power. Indeed, as far back as Plato, we find the question of truth and power intimately connected to this cosmic dimension—consider, for example, how the philosopher’s ascent in the Cave Allegory involves both a liberation from physical and social constraints and an orientation toward universal truth. Surely, we can say that Foucault is highly attuned to this same dynamic—especially in later works such as The Courage of Truth—but it seems to me that we can say, with Hadot, these more cosmic and universal dimensions remain in Foucault a site of second-order historical curiosity, rather than central aspects of practice for Foucault himself. At least, this is what his publication record implies.

These questions become even more pressing when we consider them in light of our discussion of paideia and philosophical turning, as the apparent choice between Foucault’s immanent critique and Hadot’s cosmic participation might itself be complicated by reconsidering Plato’s project. As we’ll see through Eric Perl’s interpretation, Plato’s work can reveal a vision more subtle than the typical two-world reading and its correspondence theory of truth implies. This reading of Plato that Nietzsche forcefully critiques must now be put to the test. Indeed, if Plato’s project is not to bifurcate reality into two distinct spheres but to better think them together as intimately involved and co-substantiating forces, then both Nietzsche’s inversion and Foucault’s subsequent appropriation of it may be less radical than it appears. At its heart is a conception of truth as alētheia (unhiddenness), which Perl argues is not just Heidegger’s but Plato’s own understanding of how truth becomes present.

This understanding of truth as unhiddenness pairs with a view of transcendence, symbolized by the Sun, that is beyond beings precisely insofar as it let’s them be seen in their beingness. Like Nishitani’s śūnyatā, this transcendence functions not as another thing among things, but as the luminous emptiness that allows beings to show themselves as what they are—not from a distance but on “our near side,” as Nishitani says. Nietzsche’s critique and Foucault’s appropriation thus miss something about how we are always “in the middle” (the metaxu) between Being and its showing, a view that secures both transcendence (in a robust, vertical sense), and immanence, both Being and becoming, without supplanting the immanent with the transcendent or the reverse. In the next section, we’ll explore how this understanding transforms our view of Plato’s imagery and allegories, particularly the “ascents” in his dialogues, which on this view represent not passages between different worlds but transformations in our modes of apprehension of one integral world, opening new possibilities for philosophical practice beyond both rigid dualism and pure relativism.

The Great Outdoors

We have been looking at how philosophical practice, understood as spiritual exercise, involves different metaphysical commitments across the history of Western thought. Beginning with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we traced how paideia operates as a turning toward transcendent truth—a conversion of the soul toward the Good as the source of Being itself. This turning, as we’ve seen, is not arbitrary but directed toward a specific metaphysical end: the Sun, the symbol of the Good, that makes all beings visible and apparent. In Nietzsche’s radical inversion of this schema, we encountered a challenge to this framework through his attempt to think Being as becoming and truth without recourse to a transcendent ground or source. Through our subsequent examination of Nishitani’s śūnyatā and the debate between Hadot and Foucault, we’ve explored different attempts to resolve this tension between transcendence and immanence in philosophical practice.

Now we must consider whether this apparent opposition might itself rest on a misreading of Plato that imports a more modern subject–object dualism back into his thought. As we’ll see through Eric Perl’s interpretations, Plato’s understanding of the relation between appearances and reality, between the sensible and the intelligible, might be closer to Nishitani’s non-dual view than to the rigid two-world metaphysics his critics often assume. This reframing has important implications for how we understand askēsis, suggesting possibilities for philosophical practice that neither abandons transcendence nor sacrifices immanence, but transforms our very mode of apprehending their relation through practice.

Plato’s conception of appearance and reality, especially as Perl understands it, provides the foundation for understanding this alternative reading. Perl’s reading suggests that Plato’s forms are not opposed to appearance but are precisely what allow appearances to manifest as meaningful, intelligible reality. We might see in this sense that rather than diminishing the value of the sensible world, transcendence actually enables and enriches immanent reality in its particularity, and particularity, in turn, offers uniqueness and difference to transcendence. This mutual saturation of transcendence and immanence means that forms don’t stand apart from appearances but thoroughly involve and illuminate them. The two are from this perspective different and complimentary ways of looking at the same more original whole—as one world engaged from two perspectives, the one emphasizing unity and the other multiplicity, the one securing universality and the other particularity.

If this is right, then the question becomes not whether to choose between transcendence and immanence, but how to understand their interrelation, especially as apprehended in perception and thought. As Perl writes in his Theophany, “A sharp dichotomy and dualism between sense and intellect, as two different cognitive faculties apprehending two different kinds of objects, is conventionally regarded as perhaps the most fundamental feature of Platonic thought. . . . But this is in fact a misunderstanding . . . a more careful examination reveals that in this tradition sense and intellect, with discursive reason as a means between them, constitute a continuum of modes of cognition, articulated by the degree of unity in which they apprehend reality.”29 Indeed, as Perl elsewhere explains, “All modes of cognition, from sense to intellect, are the apprehension of Being, that is, of form.”30

This reading suggests that the images of ascent in Plato’s dialogues represent not a passage from one world to another, but a cognitive ascent from one mode of apprehension to another, enabled by practice. As Perl explains, “The many ‘ascents’ in the dialogues, the images of ‘going to’ the forms or true being, express not a passage from one ‘world,’ one set of objects, to another, but rather, as Plato repeatedly indicates, the ascent of the soul, a psychic, cognitive ascent, from one mode of apprehension to another, and hence not from one reality to a different reality, but from appearance to reality.”31 Perl’s understanding, offered here in brief as a first pass, in this way sets up a foil for our larger discussion of transcendence and immanence.

I’ll begin this analysis with an exegetical thesis: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Nishitani all assume a certain reading of Platonic metaphysics that may itself be colored by modern philosophical assumptions. The two-world interpretation they critique in Plato appears to stem from two distinctly modern sources: first, the Cartesian cogito, and second, Kant’s critical philosophy, where knowledge depends on how objects must conform to the structures of human cognition and sensibility. While Kant’s critical philosophy inverts the older Platonic realism—where the subject’s faculties conform to the shape of real forms, rather than the reverse—we may nonetheless have imported this stronger subject–object dualism, reading it back into Plato in a way that is unwarranted by a more careful reading of his philosophy.

The risk here—and it applies to Nietzsche and Heidegger as much as it does to Nishitani—is that what we’re in fact doing when we say that the old metaphysics is just like the new critical philosophy in its stance of starting with a dualism of subject–objects (whether in the realist or critical senses), organized around notions of correctness or correspondence between the two, is perhaps a result of importing the modern setup of Descartes and Kant and reading these back into Plato. What we instead find in Plato, again as read through Perl’s interpretations, reveals a more subtle understanding of how Being manifests itself in appearance and of the relation between the two.

To explore this thesis, it’s necessary to revisit the latter part of Heidegger’s essay on Plato, since it is in these sections that he presents his arguments for a decisive transition in Western thought from truth as ἀλήθεια (unhiddenness) to truth as the correctness of mental representation (ὁμοίωσις). According to Heidegger’s interpretation, this transformation in how truth is understood reshapes not only our understanding of truth but marks the beginning of what we will later call “metaphysics.” This transition is important to understand if we are to rethink Plato along the lines that Perl suggests. The transformation begins with Plato’s conception of ideas and particularly through the role of the idea of the Good.

Heidegger writes: “The ideas are what is in everything that is. Therefore, what makes every idea be capable as an idea—in Plato’s expression: the idea of all ideas—consists in making possible the appearing, in all its visibility, of everything present” (175).32 For Heidegger, this passage demonstrates how Plato situates the ideas not merely as mental constructs but as that which constitutes the very Being of beings. The idea of the Good (τὸ ἀγαθόν) takes on a special status as “that-which-enables as such.” As he notes: “It brings about the shining of everything that can shine, and accordingly is itself that which properly appears by shining, that which is most able to shine in its shining. For this reason Plato calls the ἀγαθόν also τοῦ ὄντος τὸ φανότατον (518 c9), ‘that which most shines (the most able to shine) of beings’” (175).

This reorientation of truth around the idea’s capacity to make visible leads, in Heidegger’s reading, to a transformation in how truth operates. He traces this transition through several stages, showing how truth becomes increasingly tied to correctness of perception and judgment. This shift manifests most clearly in what Heidegger identifies as a passage where truth becomes subordinate to the idea, adjudicated by the correctness of human judgment, or, in his words: “The assertion of a judgment made by the intellect is the place of truth and falsehood and of the difference between them. The assertion is called true insofar as it conforms to the state of affairs and thus is a ὁμοίωσις” (178). For Heidegger, this move marks the moment when truth as correctness supplants truth as unhiddenness. He sees this transformation moving through the history of Western philosophy, from Medieval Scholasticism where, in Heidegger’s paraphrase, Thomas Aquinas declares that “Truth is properly encountered in the human or in the divine intellect” (178), to the dawn of modernity where Descartes asserts that “Truth or falsehood in the proper sense can be nowhere else but in the intellect alone” (178–179).

The consequences of this transformation extend beyond epistemology into the very structure of metaphysics. As Heidegger argues: “As a consequence of this interpretation of beings, being present is no longer what it was in the beginning of Western thinking: the emergence of the hidden into unhiddenness, where unhiddenness itself, as revealing, constitutes the fundamental trait of being present” (179). This shift creates the conditions for the birth of metaphysics proper: “Since Plato, thinking about the being of beings has become ‘philosophy,’ because it is a matter of gazing up at the ‘ideas.’ But the ‘philosophy’ that begins with Plato has, from that point on, the distinguishing mark of what is later called ‘metaphysics’” (180). For Heidegger, this emergence of metaphysics simultaneously marks the beginning of humanism, as human beings become increasingly centered in the philosophical enterprise through their special relationship to ideas and truth in juxtaposition to the earlier and more primary centering of Being itself.

The transformation thus sets the stage for the entire subsequent history of Western thought, including its culmination in modern technology and what Heidegger sees as the forgetting of Being. Heidegger suggests that this transformation remains “present” not merely as historical influence but as “the all-dominating fundamental reality—long established and thus still in place—of the ever-advancing world history of the planet in this most modern of modern times” (181–182). The forgetting of truth’s original essence as unhiddenness thus becomes constitutive of our modern technological world. Heidegger concludes by suggesting that only a recollection of truth’s original essence as unhiddenness might offer a way beyond this metaphysical tradition. However, he emphasizes that such recollection must “think this essence more originally” than Plato’s conception allowed.

No attempt to ground truth in “reason,” “spirit,” “thinking,” “logos,” or any kind of “subjectivity” can rescue the essence of unhiddenness, as these attempts themselves remain caught within the metaphysical framework inaugurated by Plato’s transformation (182). However, what we find in Plato through the Perl’s interpretation suggests a different understanding of how Being manifests itself in appearance—one that may escape Heidegger’s critique by showing how Plato’s thought maintains rather than abandons truth as alētheia.

Perl’s reading of Plato in Thinking Being directly challenges Heidegger’s account of this supposed transformation from truth as unhiddenness to truth as correctness. Where Heidegger sees Plato initiating a fateful shift away from alētheia, Perl demonstrates how Plato’s own usage suggests something quite different. Through a close reading of Plato’s texts, he shows how Plato’s understanding of ἀληθές (“true”) remains firmly aligned with its basic meaning of “unhidden”—that which is “available,” “accessible,” “in the open,” “there to be seen.” The forms themselves are “what is most true of things” (Phd. 65e1–2), functioning as the “looks” through which things become intelligible to thought (25). This is not merely a matter of terminology. The constant interplay between ἀλήθεια and λανθάνω/λήθη throughout Plato’s dialogues confirms that Plato characterizes not just propositions but things or beings themselves as ἀληθές (25n8). The implications of this reading are extensive.

Far from initiating the metaphysical tradition that leads to nihilism, as Heidegger claims, Plato’s thought might represent, in Perl’s words, “the antithesis of and the only alternative to nihilism” (2). His understanding of forms as the very “truth” or “unhiddenness” of things also suggests again a unity between thought and Being that precedes any subject-object division—a unity that manifests not through correctness of representation, as Heidegger suggests, but through the soul’s orientating practice toward Being itself. In this reading, Heidegger and Plato converge more than they differ, and this is important for how we are to read Plato today.

This convergence becomes even more significant when we consider Nishitani’s analysis of the Platonic theory of Ideas—for Nishitani, a one-time student of Heidegger’s, offers his own distinctive path beyond the supposed opposition between transcendence and immanence. Moving beyond both empirical observation and conceptual analysis, Nishitani positions his argument on what he calls “a field that transcends even the realm of reason where concepts are constituted” (126). The heart of Nishitani’s argument emerges in his critical engagement with Platonism. He acknowledges that “a realm of Ideas such as Plato had in mind might come near to what I am thinking of here” (126). This seems, at first, to align with the Platonic notion of transcendence. However, Nishitani identifies what he sees as an error in how Platonic thought is often understood. When we consider a transcendent Idea as some “thing” separate from its particular instantiations, or when we conceive of a world of Ideas as true realities existing somewhere apart from the sensory world, we remain trapped in a dualistic and limited intellectual reasoning.

Nishitani’s criticism parallels Heidegger’s concern about how Platonic metaphysics transforms truth into correctness of representation, but Nishitani pushes the analysis in a different direction. In Religion and Nothingness, instead of simply critiquing the Platonic position, he proposes what we might call a non-dual understanding. The transcendent Idea must remain self-identical with its particular manifestations in the world. The field where this identity occurs is what he calls “absolute nothingness,” which “has to be at one with the world of primary fact” (126). Nishitani argues that this primary reality is neither purely sensible nor purely ideal—it exists prior to and enables this very distinction. This represents a real challenge to the Western metaphysical tradition that emerged from certain readings of Plato’s thought. Rather than positing two separate realms—sensible and intelligible—Nishitani suggests that reality manifests as a unity that “pervades both the realm of the senses and the realm of reason . . . without belonging to either of them as such” (126).

This leads to Nishitani’s radical conclusion about the nature of world itself: “The ‘world’ of this primary fact is one. There are not two worlds, a sensory one and a supersensory one” (127). On a certain reading, this unity challenges not only Platonic metaphysics but the entire Western philosophical tradition that followed from it, including for example Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena, which shares a certain isomorphism with the two-world reading of Plato, registered here in its critical form as transcendental philosophy. For Nishitani, both the everyday world of extended environments and any supersensory world we might imagine behind it fail to capture “the world in its suchness” (127).

The power of Nishitani’s analysis lies in how it reveals that our very ability to conceive of these separate worlds—sensory and supersensory—depends on a more basic reality that we already inhabit: “The very fact that we can consider our extended environment to be a world, and then think up a supersensory world behind it, happens in the first place only because we are actually living in a world of primary fact” (127). This view suggests that the two-world separation of reality into sensible and intelligible realms, which Heidegger identified as a defining moment in Western thought, might be reconceived in a way that preserves both transcendence and immanence in their original unity. Having seen how Nishitani challenges the traditional reading of Platonic metaphysics, we can now appreciate the deeper resonance between his understanding of Being and appearance and our revised reading of Plato.

As Nishitani writes, “That being is only being in unison with emptiness means that being possesses at its ground the character of an ‘illusion,’ that everything that is, is in essence fleeting, illusory appearance. It also means that the being of things in emptiness is more truly real than what the reality or real being of things is usually taken to be (for instance, their substance)” (124). Whereas Perl argues for a continuity between sense and intellect—or appearance and reality—in Plato, Nishitani locates us in what he calls, significantly, “the middle.” In Nishitani’s own words, “Precisely because it is appearance, and not something that appears, this appearance is illusory at the elemental level in its very reality, and real in its very illusoriness. In my view, we can use the term the ancients used, ‘the middle,’ to denote this, since it is a term that seems to bring out the distinctive feature of the mode of being of things in themselves” (124).

Here I think we can say that Nishitani’s “middle” and Plato’s metaxu (or the in-between) share more than mere terminological overlap—in fact, it is likely the metaxu that Nishitani refers to in passing in this passage. Morover, their conceptual alignment shows us an unexplored kinship between these thinkers. In Perl’s reading of Plato, we are likewise “in the middle,” between Being and how Being shows itself, but the “showing” of Being cannot be other than Being itself; it is simply Being in the mode of appearance, an appearance that is always appearance for someone who has a particular stance, a particular set of skills of perception at relating to Being in its appearing. Compare this view to Nishitani’s own discussion of form and perception: “As noted above, the various ‘shapes’ that things assume on the field of sensation (the various sense-determined modalities of things) as well as the various ‘shapes’ that they display on the field of reason (whether as eidetic forms of things or as categories in the sense of ‘forms’ of discursive thought) are all the Form that things take insofar as they appear to us. They all show the way things are for us” (129).

Importantly, for Nishitani, this is not a limitation but rather demonstrates a deeper truth about the nature of reality itself. As he explains, “From ancient times the word samādhi (‘settling’) has been used to designate the state of mind in which a man gathers his own mind together and focuses it on a central point, thereby taking a step beyond the sphere of ordinary conscious and self-conscious mind and, in that sense, forgetting his ego. . . . In that sense, we might call such a mode of being ‘samādhi-being.’ The form of things as they are on their own home-ground is similar to the appearance of things in samādhi” (128). We might speculate along these lines about a connection here to the Greek concept of logos (λόγος), which likewise carries this double sense of gathering: both as the gathering together of thought and discourse, and as the gathering together of things themselves in their integrity and being. This understanding of logos, which we find both in Heraclitus and later in Heidegger’s reading of the Greeks, suggests that the gathering of mind and the gathering of reality are intimately connected—just as we find in Nishitani’s account of samādhi.

This convergence between Platonic thought and Nishitani’s understanding of śūnyatā grows even more clear when we consider their shared view of transcendence. In Plato, we could say, the Being of beings, or the idea of ideas, is the Sun, as we’ve seen. But this Sun, this essential and primary luminosity, is, precisely, beyond beings insofar as it gives beingness to beings (to borrow Heidegger’s way of speaking). It is that which shows things to be what they are without being alike to any of these things; it is the precondition of things being things, substances, to build upon Nishitani’s exploration and exegesis. And in this way, it is no-thing, an emptiness, but it is a luminous emptiness that gives things their shine, their ability to show themselves as things. This is why I say that Plato and Nishitani may in the end be much closer together than a more provincial reading of the former might at first disclose.

As Nishitani writes, “On that field of śūnyatā each thing becomes manifest in its suchness in its very act of affirming itself, according to its own particular potential and virtus and in its own particular shape. . . . The field of śūnyatā is nothing other than the field of the Great Affirmation” (131). Can we not say, then, that the Sun in Plato is at least similar to Nishitani’s śūnyatā? And further, is this Sun-emptiness something we find in Nietzsche, who so patiently and presciently diagnosed not just the setting of this Sun, but its wiping away altogether in the death of God? I’m inclined to agree with Nishitani: We do not find this in Nietzsche—expressly we do not—and the appeal to the eternal return (as we saw in Nishitani’s account of it) does not secure for us an equivalent idea, and this also bares on how we should understand Foucault’s taking up of philosophical askēsis in his peculiar way.

There is, to be sure, quite a lot of ground covered—both traversed but also lost—between Nietzsche and Foucault, where we could read Foucault as taking up certain Nietzschean themes (will-to-power, immanence, genealogy) but in a way even further reduced from what in Nietzsche might still be considered metaphysical dimensions. The point is, the context for the practices Foucault takes up have an even more skeptical and limited flavor than what we find in Nietzsche, a limitation that opens up Foucault to the criticism leveled against him by Hadot in a way that isn’t true for Nietzsche. This is now a difficult terrain of roughly tangled and competing ideas, but the primary issue is simple: The Sun was “wiped from the horizon” and Foucault is in this sense operating with a severely truncated view of philosophical practice, of askēsis. This truncation, I would say, goes by the word nihilism.

But if my analysis is right, then we can arrive at a view of Plato that undermines both Nietzsche’s critique and Foucault’s subsequent appropriation of it. The question before us is thus not merely historical but deeply practical: Can we engage again in a meaningful askēsis resupplied with a robust sense of transcendent orientation? I think the answer is yes. The question then becomes how we understand and relate to this relation itself—whether through Nietzsche’s celebration of immanent becoming or through what Perl identifies as Plato’s concern with securing “the existence of truth and the reality of being” against nihilism.33

Our investigation reveals more than a historical correction to how we read Plato—it points toward a rethinking of philosophical practice itself. The convergence we’ve traced between Perl’s reading of Plato and Nishitani’s understanding of śūnyatā suggests that the apparent opposition between transcendence and immanence is transformed when we properly understand how practice mediates our relationship to reality. Rather than abandoning transcendence, as Nietzsche and his followers would have it, or maintaining it as something wholly separate from appearance, we find in Plato a way of understanding transcendence as that which enables appearance itself, without undermining it, but enriching it and being enriched by it, as the two are, in fact, one, viewed from different perspectives.

Through Perl’s interpretive work, accented by a surprising convergence with Nishitani’s account of śūnyatā, we find in Plato, then, a more subtle and powerful understanding of how appearance relates to reality. This view suggests that askēsis need not choose between anchoring itself in transcendent truth or celebrating immanent becoming. Instead, philosophical practice might be understood as the cultivation of our capacity to apprehend the way transcendence manifests itself in and through immanent particularly—not as an external addition or supplement, but as the very condition of appearance itself, where appearances become, in turn, the site of unique and singular modes of original Being—expressed as the art works of existence itself.

Askēsis, then, is about shaping the shape of soul, and this shaping takes place within the ecology of greater Being, where apprehension and givenness are mediated by practice in relation to being. The being-together of soul and reality is anchored to and shaped by practice. As we’ve seen, Perl parallels Heidegger in translating alēthes (ἀληθές)—truth—as meaning “unhidden,” a definition that through Perl we’ve also seen is Plato’s own. As the true nature of an event shows itself through the “look” or “appearance” of its eidos, we should understand this showing or “unhiding” as at least in part a consequence of practice. We could say that askēsis is disclosive of a form’s unhiddenness—askēsis is the practice of unhiding. This reading of askēsis is placed in a larger philosophical context that rejects nominalism and nihilism alike as viable views of the real, but it also rejects a two-world binary of forms and appearances, seeing them instead as a variegated continuum indexed against the skills of perception we bring to bear on phenomena.

This understanding returns us to the Allegory of the Cave with which we began, now seen not as a story of escape from appearance to reality, but as an account of how proper philosophical practice transforms our way of seeing the real in appearance itself. I have risked here a certain overcomplication in discussion by introducing so many names—Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Nishitani, Foucault, Perl—but doing so has proved necessary to achieve our purposes. Each thinker contributes to reframing not only how we think of Plato and his purported two-world metaphysics—that often-maligned setup upon which Nietzsche spent much of his intellectual energy subverting and then overturning—but also how we should think of practice in the twenty-first century, in the wake of Nietzsche’s critique, but then also, and more importantly, in the resurrection of a philosophical world image we thought had been lost. If Perl is right, then Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics is misplaced, and we may think askēsis again in the terms of a more ancient realism, one that can take shape against the light of a breaking dawn, a newly rising Sun. In so doing, we may discover that it had been there all along.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, the concept of askēsis and the practice of philosophical turning have taken on different forms throughout the history of Western thought. From Plato’s paideia to Nietzsche’s eternal return, and from Hadot’s spiritual exercises to Foucault’s technologies of the self, philosophers have grappled with the question of how thought and practice can transform the individual and their relationship to the world. The challenge for contemporary philosophy is to navigate these perspectives and find a way forward that honors the transformative potential of philosophical practice while remaining responsive to the critiques of traditional metaphysics and the complexities of modern life. The shape of thought to come will likely emerge from this ongoing dialogue, as we continue to explore new ways of turning, new forms of askēsis, and new understandings of what it means to live a philosophical life in the twenty-first century. In reflecting on this exploration of askēsis and its place in philosophical thought, we can return to the central question that motivated this inquiry.

What shape might philosophical thought take in our current epoch? The challenge for philosophy today, as I see it, is to find new and old ways of turning alike, of practicing askēsis, that are genuinely responsive to our current situation while still maintaining a vital connection to the deepest insights of these ancient philosophical traditions. This may require us to reimagine what philosophical practice looks like in a world where the “Sun” of transcendent truth seems to have been wiped from the horizon, as Nietzsche suggests. Or, more likely, we may need to cultivate a form of askēsis that embraces both the Platonic turn towards the Good and the Nietzschean affirmation of becoming, a practice that can navigate between the cosmic attunement Hadot advocates and the critical self-creation Foucault proposes.

Indeed, I think we find such a synthesis already in Plato. The need for transformative philosophical practice seems as urgent as ever, yet the ground on which we might build such practices seems increasingly unstable. Perhaps the shape of thought to come will not be a fixed form at all, but a dynamic, adaptive process of continuous turning and returning, a philosophical movement that alternates between the timeless and the timely, the universal and the particular, Being and becoming. In this light, I see these notes not as a conclusion, but as an opening—an invitation to further dialogue, exploration, and most importantly, practice. For if Hadot’s recovery of askēsis teaches us anything, it’s that philosophy is not merely something to be thought, but something to be lived.

However this plays out, the shape of thought to come will be determined by more than our theories as we typically understand them, but by our ongoing practices of philosophical transformation as well. Such practices must work to refine our intellectual capacities while simultaneously cultivating our sensory awareness, deepening our emotional understanding, and developing our ethical judgment. But perhaps most importantly, they must find ways to honor both the immanent and transcendent dimensions of experience without falling into either pure relativism or rigid dualism. Our examination suggests that the opposition between these dimensions may itself be part of what needs to be overcome. The path forward, then, might lie not in choosing between transcendent realism and critical self-creation, but in developing practices that allow truth to manifest within experience while acknowledging its capacity to exceed purely human construction, all while finding a path between the eternal and the temporal, the universal and the particular, in the philosophical life. This is the challenge and promise that philosophical practice holds for our time.

Dear readers,

I’m a big supporter of year-end inventories.

One inventory I especially like to do is take a look back at all of the essays, articles, and books I read over the past year. I find it gives one an aerial view of where one’s research and writing has been going, and where it should go, in the future.

In that spirit, I thought this year I would share with you all a mostly complete (but not exhaustive) list of the pieces that genuinely reshaped my thinking in 2025.

There are primary and secondary sources here, works new to me and revisited, both recently published and older texts alike.

I had two criteria for inclusion: (1) Did the work change my understanding of something important? or (2) Did this work make its way into something I’d written, am currently working on, or presented as part of a talk?

If you’ve been following along with my output over the past year, you’ll see some familiar listings below, but there are also a number of sources included here that have shaped my work in more subtle ways, and those are included, too.

What’s the point in sharing this?

Well, if you liked the essays and talks I posted in 2025, you may be interested in the source material. And that’s what you’ll find below, organized around these general topics and themes (with links included):

• Phenomenology, perception, and attention

• Plato, Aristotle, and the classical question of the Good

• Late antiquity, mind–body questions, and Plotinus

• Heidegger on truth, correctness, and Plato

• Bergson on duration and metaphysics

• Philosophy as spiritual exercise and formation

• Memory, perception, and ontology

• Aesthetics, form, and practice

• William Desmond’s philosophy

• Modern identity, secularity, and public reason

If I had thought about it more in advance, I would have kept a running catalogue of all the good online essays I read this year, especially the shorter pieces that don’t naturally land in a bibliography. That will be a goal for 2026.

For now, below is the core of what mattered to me in the world of scholarship in 2025.

I hope you all have a great new years, and I’ll see you in 2026.

Best wishes,

Adam

Phenomenology, perception, and attention

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “In Praise of Philosophy.”

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception (esp. ch. 3 “Attention and Judgment” and ch. 11 “The Cogito”).

• William James. The Principles of Psychology, Vol I (esp. on attention).

• Eleanor Gibson and Nancy Rader. “Attention: The Perceiver as Performer”

• Evan Thompson. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind.

• Evan Thompson. Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy.

• Iain McGilchrist. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

• Byung Chul-Han. The Disappearance of Rituals.

Plato, Aristotle, and the classical question of the Good

• Plato. The Republic (Grube–Reeve ed.).

• Andrea Nightingale. “‘Useless’ Knowledge: Aristotle’s Rethinking of Theōria” (in Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theōria in Its Cultural Context).

• Rafael Ferber and Gregor Damschen. “Is the Idea of the Good Beyond Being? Plato’s ‘epekeina tês ousias’ revisited (Republic 6, 509b8–10).”

• Gerhard Seel. “Is Plato’s Conception of the Form of the Good Contradictory?”

• Andrew S. Mason. “The Good, Essences, and Relations.”

• Carl Séan O’Brien. Plato’s Unwritten Doctrines.

• Vittorio Hösle. “The Tübingen School.” (in Brill’s Companion to German Platonism).

• Ryszard Stachowski. “On Conversion as ‘The Turning around of a Soul from Some Benighted Day’ (Plato).”

• Werner Jaeger. Paideia, vol. II (esp. the section “Paideia as Conversion”).

• Lloyd P. Gerson. From Plato to Platonism.

• Eric Perl. Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition.

Late antiquity, mind–body questions, and Plotinus

• Sophie Cartwright. “Soul and Body in Early Christianity: An Old and New Conundrum” (in A History of Mind and Body in Late Antiquity).

• Paul Kalligas. “Plotinus Against the Gnostics.”

Heidegger on truth, correctness, and Plato

• Martin Heidegger. “On the Essence of Truth” (in Pathmarks).

• Martin Heidegger. “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” (in Pathmarks).

• Martin Heidegger. “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (in Pathmarks).

• Taylor Carman. “Heidegger on Unconcealment and Correctness.”

• Jussi Backman. “All of a Sudden: Heidegger and Plato’s Parmenides.”

• Mark Ralkowski. Heidegger’s Platonism.

Bergson on duration and metaphysics

• Henri Bergson. “The Idea of Duration” (in Key Writings).

• Henri Bergson. “Introduction to Metaphysics” (in The Creative Mind).

• Henri Bergson. “Introduction II” (in The Creative Mind).

• Henri Bergson. “On the Pragmatism of William James” (in The Creative Mind).

• Keith Ansell-Pearson. “Bergson and Philosophy as a Way of Life.”

Philosophy as spiritual exercise and formation

• Pierre Hadot. “Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy.”

• Pierre Hadot. “The Sage and the World” (in Philosophy as a Way of Life).

• Pierre Hadot. “The Figure of the Sage in Greek and Roman Antiquity” (in The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot).

• John Cottingham. “Philosophy and Self-Improvement: Continuity and Change in Philosophy’s Self-conception from the Classical to the Early-modern Era” (in Philosophy as a Way of Life: Ancients and Moderns: Essays in Honor of Pierre Hadot).

• John Cottingham. Cartesian Reflections: Essays on Descartes’s Philosophy.

• Simone Weil. “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.”

• Charles M. Stang. “Writing” (in The Cambridge Companion to Mysticism).

Memory, perception, and ontology

• Mary Carruthers. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture.

• Frances A. Yates. The Art of Memory.

• Henri Bergson. Matter and Memory (excerpt in Key Writings).

Aesthetics, form, and practice

• Gabriel Trop. Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century.

• Jan Zwicky. “Introduction. What is Gestalt Thinking?” (in The Experience of Meaning).

• Goethe. “Dialogical Knowing. Excerpts from Goethe’s Writings.”

• Steve Talbott. “How Does an Organism Get Its Shape?”

• Josef Pieper. Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation.

• Josef Pieper. Leisure: The Basis of Culture.

William Desmond’s philosophy

• William Desmond. Being and the Between (esp. chs. 8–13; “Things,” “Intelligibilities,” “Selves,” “Communities,” “Being True,” and “Being Good”).

• William Desmond. “Flux-Gibberish: For and Against Heraclitus.”

• William Desmond. The Voiding of Being: The Doing and Undoing of Metaphysics in Modernity.

• William Desmond. The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being: On the Threshold between the Aesthetic and the Religious.

Modern identity, secularity, and public reason

• Charles Taylor. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (esp. Part II “Inwardness”: “Moral Topography,” “Plato’s Self-Mastery,” “In Interiore Homine,” and “Descartes’s Disengaged Reason”).

• Charles Taylor. A Secular Age (esp. Part I “The Work of Reform”; “Modern Social Imaginaries”; and selected readings on “excarnation”).

• John Rawls. “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical.”

In thinking more about my previous post on Charles Taylor’s account of the shift from “found” to “constructed” orders—this gradual relocation of moral and rational authority from a shared cosmic horizon to the management of inner representations—I revisited John Rawls’s essay “Justice as Fairness,” which, to my mind, makes the stakes of this transition helpfully explicit. For Rawls, and for modern people writ large, a pluralism of competing or incommensurable conceptions of the good is a basic feature of democratic society, and any political order that tries to secure unity by enforcing one comprehensive good risks reverting to an untenable form of authoritarianism that cuts against the modern ideal of freedom to choose a way of life.

In this sense, Rawls insists that “justice as fairness” is meant to be a political conception, not a metaphysical, epistemological, or theological one. In his words, it is offered “not as a conception of justice that is true,” but as a practical basis for “informed and willing political agreement between citizens viewed as free and equal persons.” To make that agreement possible, Rawls argues, we must bracket disputed philosophical and religious questions in our public justifications, not because they don’t matter, but because they matter too much, and because modern conditions make them politically irresolvable without coercion, owing to the state of modern pluralism.

At one point in the essay, Rawls, much like Taylor, notes this contrast using classical counter-examples. Rawls places Plato and Aristotle—and the Christian tradition as represented by Augustine and Aquinas—on the side of a “one rational good,” teleologically anchored and institutionally directive. In this view, the social order is just to the extent that it promotes this substantive good and organizes society around it (as best we can figure out what that means). In liberalism, by contrast, the task becomes designing fair terms of cooperation among citizens who may never converge on a shared metaphysical account of the good, even while remaining fully rational. Thus rather than a public orientation structured by an independent moral order, we get a procedural architecture for securing legitimacy without metaphysical consensus.

I think Rawls is right to fear the coercive temptation that arises when any one comprehensive doctrine claims the state as its instrument for organization.

He is also right, historically, that the Reformation and its aftermath changed the practical relation between substantive visions of the good and the procedural question of adjudication between competing claims. But I think we can construe the relation between procedure and the good differently than Rawls’s “avoidance” approach suggests by holding onto modern frameworks of procedural fairness while also admitting that public reason itself may be oriented (however implicitly) by something more than the management of competing preferences.

Indeed, if any substantive conception of the good as a “found order” is true, then it doesn’t matter, ontologically speaking, if we adhere to this conception or not (though it may matter morally, practically, aesthetically, and so on), as on this view the good would still act on us and through as an organizing factor in our lives in much the same way that an unknown planet would still affect the gravity of nearby bodies in space, whether we are aware of this unknown planet or not.

What I’m saying is, a substantive notion of the good doesn’t have a relation of dependence on our awareness or acceptance of its existence for it to be there.

If this is right, then a substantive conception of the good would not per se be at odds with a system which argues for the irreducible reality of a system of competing (or overlapping) goods. Instead, it would view the struggle to articulate and manifest the goods amongst incongruent claims as itself a manifestation of the good, one wherein the good is represented in the struggle to represent the good in the mode of free deliberation across differences. This does not mean that these competing perspectives need be afforded equal weight, nor that there is no shared, underlying good that might yet unify these relevant competing conceptions; it means, rather, that this effort to articulate the goods across perspectives is itself part of what the good is and does, since the good, in the classical conception, is the underlying illumination that makes the relevant discriminations possible in the first place.

In this sense, liberal democracy—at least in its healthy forms—is one of the means by which the good gains purchase in human social reality to the extent that its people are engaged in the conscientious effort to bring the good into being through action. Thus, rather than imagining procedural justice as a concession made in the absence of a shared and “found” good, we might see it as one of the characteristic practices through which the good appears under modern conditions, and does so precisely because it redirects the desire to settle ultimacy by force and renders possible a common life across real differences. On this view, procedural fairness is not the rival of a substantive good, but a civic form in which the struggle for the good becomes publicly inhabitable without collapsing into coercion.

I understand that my appeals here—to some kind of substantive illumination making possible various discriminations about the good—contradicts the metaphysical bracketing that Rawls is proposing, but my counter-proposal sounds plausible to me, and perhaps it also does to others who would, freely and rationally, choose to agree.

Greetings readers,

I’m just wrapping up another leg of my ongoing research and writing into the history and philosophy of askēsis (spiritual-philosophical exercise), this one centering on the changing senses of askēsis that we find in the literature between the late medieval and early modern periods.

In the piece, I start off by examining Pierre Hadot’s writings on how the emergence of the modern university system (originating first with Medieval scholasticism) greatly changed our sense of what it means to live “philosophy as a way of life” within these new institutional settings.

I move from there to explore the kind of “ascetic rationalization” that Max Weber diagnosis in his famous work on the protestant work ethic, before rounding out the discussion with Charles Taylor’s meditations on the shifting senses of aesthetics, philosophy, and science that are also transformed in these periods.

I want to share below a short section of this work on Taylor where I draw him out on what he calls the shift from “found” to “constructed” orders—that is, from an order discovered in a more-than-human reality to one increasingly understood as produced through our own representations—a move he accounts for by detailing an evolution that moves from Plato to Augustine to Descartes.

In the section I’ve excerpted here, I first draw from Michael Allen Gillespie’s account of the modern, “self-positing” subject (this sense that to be modern is to be self-making) before following Taylor as he describes these deeper shifts in worldview.

There is a moment in this discussion, centered on Taylor’s reading of Descartes, that I find particularly interesting, and that is where Taylor suggests that with Descartes, while we certainly still have a sense of philosophy as a way of life rooted in spiritual exercise—as we see, for example, in the Stoic influence on him—there is also a newfound emphasis on the construction and ordering of our internal representations that takes a much more prominent character.

I’m interested in how we can see in this move a shift to a sense of practice that is much more self-referential, much more focused on our having the “correct” internal representations (indexed against an increasingly mechanical view of nature), and how this movement gives us a picture of philosophical practice that is very close to our own assumed view of “spiritual exercise” today.

Indeed, if we think of “spiritual exercise,” “meditation,” or “contemplation” these days, we are prone to thinking of these activities as something like “mindfulness,” or a careful attention to our own inner life, an attention to the rising and falling of our own personal feelings, memories, and representations.

This shift, I am arguing, is captured well by Taylor’s account of the movement from “found” to “constructed” orders. I’m sharing this excerpt below because it helps bring into relief how this trajectory of ongoing internalization is accompanied by real gains (a few that I note in the piece: a greater sense of individual freedom, an increased sense of personal responsibility for our formation as people, and a heightened willingness to criticize our “received” senses of authority).

However, at the same time, I think this increasing internalization is worth contemplating more deeply in terms of what we lose when we think of practice in this way alone. The question I want to raise, and that this excerpt begins to setup, is whether a picture of practice framed primarily in terms of constructing and regulating our inner representations can really do justice to older accounts of askēsis as a participation in an order that exceeds us and draws us forward.

Part of what I want to suggest in this piece is that we need to recover something of an older sense of askēsis, namely, one where practice is centered not only on examining or constructing our inner representations, but on being drawn beyond ourselves and opened up by a more-than-human order that contemplative practices disclose.

And that’s what this excerpt tries to describe.

(An aside: I don’t make a point of it in this piece, but surely there is also an implicit connection between this increasing sense of constructed, internal orders that emerges at roughly the same moment when the scientific and industrial revolutions give us the ability to quite literally “construct” the world around us in a new and more profound way that is worth thinking about.)

Found to Constructed Orders

[ . . . ]

This nascent secular imaginary also saw the emergence of a new sense of individual agency—a self that sees itself as able to transform itself through its own will and through its own schemas of what a person is or should do,[1] without reference to intrinsic cosmic foundations, essences, or purposes, a marked difference from earlier asceticisms that were rooted in specific and universal teleologies of human development.

As Michael Allen Gillespie has argued, this emergent sense of a self-positing subject grows out of the late-medieval nominalist and voluntarist reconfiguration of God, above all in figures like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, in which divine and human freedom are no longer understood as participation in a given teleological order but as the sheer power to posit order through will and choice.

In this new image, modern people come to appear as more formally autonomous and charged with the task of designing and realizing their own identity and purposes. Rather than discovering themselves within a pre-given hierarchy of ends, modern people, on this account, encounter norms and roles as contingent possibilities to be adopted or rejected in light of their own projects. In Gillespie’s own words:

To be modern means to be ‘new,’ to be an unprecedented event in the flow of time, a first beginning, something different than anything that has come before, a novel way of being in the world, ultimately not even a form of being but a form of becoming. To understand oneself as new is also to understand oneself as self-originating, as free and creative in a radical sense, not merely as determined by a tradition or governed by fate or providence. To be modern is to be self-liberating and self-making, and thus not merely to be in a history or tradition but to make history. To be modern consequently means not merely to define one’s being in terms of time but also to define time in terms of one’s being, to understand time as the product of human freedom in interaction with the natural world. Being modern at its core is thus something titanic, something Promethean.[2]

Ascetic discipline in this context is no longer primarily a training in conformity to an intrinsic order. Instead, it grows oriented toward the person’s own, self-chosen goals.

There is, then, a routinization and calcification at the level of social structure—the newly rationalized paradigms of productivity—but an increasing sense of inner freedom previously unavailable before this period. I have emphasized a certain loss associated with these changes, but they have also yielded substantial gains. I would list examples that include a heightened sense of personal responsibility for self-formation, a new appreciation for ideals of equality and individual rights, and an expanded capacity to criticize arbitrary forms of authority.

Taylor characterizes the broader shift here as one from “found” to “constructed” orders, a change that reshapes how we imagine rational, scientific, and moral sources of identity, changes which we can now explore.

In addition to the economic and cultural transformations that underpinned these shifting conceptions of reason and asceticism, the scientific revolution itself re-organized the space of epistemic possibilities. “There is a deep change,” writes Taylor, “in what it is to live according to nature which separates the eighteenth century from its ancient sources.”[3]

To be sure, reason and nature maintain a privileged relation in this new image, but this relation slowly becomes, as I noted above, an increasingly instrumental one, wherein reason calculates its advantage in the terms of the mechanical systems it can manipulate for utilitarian gain.

However, as Taylor emphasizes, this is not simply a loss, as the same transformation also founds new disciplines of inquiry, the affirmation of ordinary life as a site of dignity, and a heightened sense of responsibility for how we shape the world rather than simply conform to its given order.

I want to pay special attention to how each of these shifts mark not the thinner transformation implied by a changing theoretical account in our knowledge of the world alone. They are, more primarily, shifts in our sense of phenomenological comportment with the world and with how the world shows up for us at all. This shift, I am arguing, is in part downstream of the changing senses of practice we have been exploring, and in what these practices can be said to deliver in terms of transformations in perception.

For Taylor, in each stage of this transition, ideas migrate from something found—an order discovered in the structure of things—to something increasingly seen as built or constructed within the mind itself, both in terms of how we justify our rational claims and in how we situate our lives in terms of moral sources of guidance.

Taylor tracks three decisive transformations, exemplified in the works of Plato, Augustine, and then Descartes, to tell this story.

Plato, he says, offers a substantive picture of rational attunement and moral nourishment. That is, for Plato, both our senses of reason and morality, when rightly ordered, point beyond ourselves as individual or private reasoners and into in a public landscape of shared cosmic sources for both. The key here, as we saw in our reading of the Republic (509b), is the periagōgē, which referred to the turning of the soul toward the Good, so that reason is here oriented by a luminous order it encounters rather than creates.[4] Taylor invokes this image of turning and conversion to underscore Plato’s substantive conception of reasons and morals. He writes:

In an important sense, the moral sources we accede to by reason are not [for Plato] within us. They can be seen as outside us, in the Good; or perhaps our acceding to a higher condition ought to be seen as something which takes place in the ‘space’ between us and this order of the Good.[5]

Augustine, who carries this centering motion inward without discarding its ontological grounding, emphasizes this same turning of attention. However, here the Platonic light of the Good becomes the inner illumination of God, and cogitare—meaning “to think, to consider,” understood etymologically as co-agitare, a “gathering-together”—comes to refer to the recollective movement by which the scattered soul is unified under the higher measure of God. In Taylor’s words,

Our principle route to God [for Augustine] is not through the object domain but “in” ourselves. This is because God is not just the transcendent object or just the principle of order of the nearer objects, which we strain to see. God is also and for us primarily the basic support and underlying principle of our knowing activity. God is not just what we long to see, but what powers the eye which sees. So the light of God is not just “out there,” illuminating the order of being, as it is for Plato; it is also an inner light.[6]

Here the movements Taylor is tracking begin to take clearer shape. The substantive account of reason in Plato organizes and centers the person into the shape of a pre-given order, and in Augustine this centering movement grows increasingly inward, whilst still linked to the broader, illuminated reality we find in Plato.

In Descartes, Taylor continues, this inward sense grows more radical as this centered inwardness begins to disengage from the larger cosmic horizon. Cogitare, in Descartes’s sense, now organizes and constructs representations within the subject alone. A sense of mastery through reason remains, but in this more internal sense. Thus, in a post-Cartesian world, periagōgē no longer means a conversion toward the Good, seen as a robust and pervasive reality, but at most as a turning toward the methodological norms of clarity and control that govern our own constructions.

As periagōgē is redefined in this way, the meaning of askēsis is likewise transformed, from a practice of participation in a more-than-human order to a discipline ordered primarily to the production and regulation of our own representations.

To be sure, while Descartes’s method and ontology take new shape, we still find underlying it a connection to older sources of moral and spiritual development, especially in their Stoic forms.[7] However, in this picture, what had been practices of attunement to an order already there become procedures for securing clear and distinct ideas, in the person’s private mentality. It is at this point in Taylor’s narrative—once the turn inward has detached itself from a substantive order—that modern reason becomes constructive rather than receptive. As Taylor puts it:

Just as correct knowledge doesn’t come anymore from our opening ourselves to the order of (ontic) Ideas but from our constructing an order of (intra-mental) ideas according to the canons of evidence; so when the hegemony of reason becomes rational control, it is no longer understood as our being attuned to the order of things we find in the cosmos, but rather as our life being shaped by the orders which we construct according to the demands of reason’s dominance.[8]

This movement in Descartes—of internalization and disengagement, on the one hand, and of mechanization and representation, on the other—whilst still accountable to a (reformed) objective world, nevertheless puts our practices into a tighter loop with our own constructed representations, rather than with the broader loop found in practices that push the person out beyond themselves (as we find in Plato and Augustine).

Viewed from the standpoint of practice, then, what is at stake in this sequence is a gradual redefinition of the very exercises by which one lives, moving from practices that attune the soul to a found order (Plato), through practices that interiorize that order as an inner light (Augustine), to practices that primarily construct and manage an intra-mental domain (Descartes).

The full detail of Taylor’s account lies beyond the scope of this section, but the structural shift is clear: where ancient and medieval frameworks imagined reason as attuned to an order already there, modern reason must forge its own order internally, guided by a practice of construction that no longer appealed to an ontic logos.

In a phrase, reason ceases to be a mode of participation and becomes a mode of production. I quote Taylor again, “Rationality is now an internal property of subjective thinking, rather than consisting in its vision of reality.”[9] One could say that askēsis, in this view, is increasingly displaced from the register of participation in Being to the register of the production and regulation of representations; the form of practice remains, but its ontological orientation is slowly inverted.

Recall that in the introduction and chapter 1, we saw that ancient accounts of theōria physikē and spiritual exercise understood practices, in part, as a set of methods through which the human being could, in a sense, “go beyond the human,” through an askēsis by which attention was expanded beyond merely private interests and was re-situated within a living, ordered whole.

In that frame, contemplative exercises do not simply regulate an already given subject by reordering his or her representations or actions; they transform the subject by aligning it with an ontic logos, so that to practice was to participate in a cosmic order that precedes and addresses us, calling us forward to practice. In this sense, Taylor’s account shows us that practice does not disappear in the modern period, but that the ontological anchoring of these practices is progressively transformed.

Practices persist, but they are increasingly ordered toward the internal construction and management of representations, toward the mastery of functional domains and needs, rather than toward participation in a reality that is received as ordered and whole in a fuller sense.

These are transformations marked by complex reconfigurations of the human sensorium, internal and external. Gone is the deeper sense that contemplative practices deliver insight into the nature of the real, to Being, and that they do so in a way that goes beyond the reductionism of the special sciences.

In Taylor’s words, “Under the impact of the scientific revolution, the ideal of theōria, of grasping the order of the cosmos through contemplation, came to be seen as being vain and misguided, as a presumptuous attempt to escape the hard work of detailed discovery.”[10] In this shift one sees how ascetical contemplation loses its grip on the reality that is its mooring.

What remains—and here the line of continuity is important for my argument—is a powerful sense that practice still matters but is now seen as the disciplined labor of inquiry and self-formation within an immanent frame, rather than as the exercise by which the human is drawn beyond itself into a more-than-human order. But gained, as we noted above, is a new capacity for individual transformation and capacity for investigation and inquiry.

Thus, far from rejecting ascetic practice altogether, we should see the scientific method as grounded in its own asceticism that reinforces through its practices and aims the disengaged stance that is essential to its epistemic method—and to the deliverances it makes available as scientific knowledge.

[. . .]

[1] Abbey, Charles Taylor, 206.

[2] Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, see especially 19–43 for the longer discussion. The paragraph on the modern subject is from the introduction, p. 2.

[3] Taylor, Sources of the Self, 278.

[4] Ibid., 123.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 123.

[7] Indeed, readers may notice in this account of a disciplined examination of representations a similarity with the earlier account of Stoic askēsis I offered in the introduction, where we also find a similar examination. However, Taylor is quick to point out the key difference between the two practices: “Rational mastery requires insight, of course; and in a curious way, Descartes follows the Stoics in founding his ethics on a ‘physics’ . . . But the insight is not into an order of the good; rather it is into something which entails the emptiness of all ancient conceptions of such order: the utter separation of mind from a mechanistic universe of matter which is most emphatically not a medium of thought or meaning, which is expressively dead,” Ibid., 148.

[8] Ibid., 155.

[9] Ibid., 156.

[10] Ibid., 213.

The structure unfolds in five stages:

1. The speaker puts forth a thesis or proposition to be defended or engaged through a set of prepared remarks

2. The first respondent offers a series of questions, concerns, or comments to be further explored

3. The second respondent does the same, with both respondents offering prepared comments to the primary speaker

4. The speaker responds to both respondents

5. A closing dialogue and discussion

The respondent today is Dr. Matthew Segall, who draws from Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy to defend the thesis:

“Contemporary Natural Philosophy Needs a New Theory of Forms”

Matt speaks for about 25 minutes or so, and then we move into the responses, followed by some closing discussion.

The whole session runs for about two hours, at the end of which we decide if we found Matt’s thesis compelling or not as stated.

As part of the prep for this session, Matthew shared with us his paper titled, “Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead’s Eternal Objects,” forthcoming in the anthology Whitehead at Harvard, 1925–1927 with Edinburgh University Press.

Dear readers,

I’ve been trying articulate a particular sense of philosophical practice (askēsis) as it relates to Plato’s much commented upon passage in the Republic, where he has Socrates say the Good is epekeina tēs ousias. That last term is translated variously as beyond “being,” beyond “essence,” or beyond “reality.”

Normally, I would try to shape this piece into a stand-alone essay, but I’ve been busy with other work projects as of late, so I’m dropping in the piece in media res for those interested. The larger context is a research survey I’m completing on the various senses—in Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and Epicurean philosophy, and in traditions of theōria physikē (natural contemplation)—in which askēsis can be seen to connect us with and disclose in more refined ways our comportment with the larger being that surrounds us and suffuses us.

Cheers,
Adam

If the philosopher’s askēsis, in Plato’s sense, culminates in a conversion toward Being as such, the Republic presses one step further.

At 509b, Socrates insists that what orders and makes Being available to thought is itself beyond Being (epekeina tēs ousias). We find in the Reeve–Grube edition of the Republic, the following translation of these passages, calling forth Plato’s famous analogy between the Sun and the Good (as that which is beyond Being):

“What the good itself is in the intelligible realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things.” (508c)

“The sun not only provides visible things with the power to be seen but also with coming to be, with growth, and nourishment, although it is not itself coming to be.” (509b)

“Therefore, you should also say that not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being to the good, but their being is also due to it, although the good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power.” (509b)

The Good, in these senses, gives individual beings both their being and their intelligibility, while the Good is itself neither being nor intelligibility but something more primary than both. On the one hand, this division between Being, beings, and their beyond marks a limit for metaphysics and cosmology alike (concerned as they are with beings alone), and, on the other, it indicates a practical telos for philosophical formation, one pointing to the need of a trained attention capable of orienting itself towards that which grounds both Being and knowing, without reducing that ground to one more item within the domain of beings.

Rafael Ferber and Gregor Damschen have explored the different possible translations of the phrase “beyond ousia” (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας) in this passage where Socrates says the Idea of the Good is “beyond ousia, surpassing it in rank and power.”[1]

In the first translation, ousia is understood as “essence.” On this reading, the Good is beyond essence, but still within the order of being. The Good would then be the highest being, more perfect or more real than other beings, but still a being among beings. This view sees “beyond” as a way of expressing superiority or transcendence in degree, not in kind, like a king standing above his subjects while sharing their nature, to use Ferber and Damschen’s metaphor.

They call this reading the “ontological” interpretation.

In the second translation, ousia is understood as “being.” Here, “beyond ousia” means beyond being itself. The Good is not one being among others, nor even the highest being, but the source or cause of all being and intelligibility. This interpretation continues in the Neoplatonic tradition—especially in Plotinus and Proclus—which takes Plato to mean that the Good or the One is beyond being, not as a super-being but as the transcendent cause from which all beings derive their existence and order.

They call this the “metaontological” interpretation.

Ferber and Damschen opt for the second interpretation—that the Good is beyond being—and they support this reading through a formal logical proof. The proof begins with an assumption: everything that is good is good by participation in the Form of the Good. If we were to say that the Form of the Good itself is “good,” we would imply that it participates in itself—that it causes its own goodness. But, they argue, a cause must be prior to its effect, and nothing can be prior to itself. Therefore, it is contradictory to say that the Good is itself a being that is good.

Since all beings are “good-formed” (that is, their being and truth derive from the Good), but the Good itself cannot be “good-formed” without self-contradiction, the authors conclude that the Good is not a being at all. It is beyond being, as its causal power extends even to the existence of being itself. In plain terms: Beings are good because they share in the Good. If the Good were itself a being, it would have to share in itself to be good, which is impossible. Therefore, the Good cannot be a being; it must be something beyond being—the ultimate source that makes beings be and makes them intelligible.

This reading, they argue, best fits both the logic of Plato’s argument and the deeper metaphysical structure that later Platonists saw in it, where the Good is the principle of being, not one being among others. The Good is, in this sense, “metaontological” and not merely “ontological,” to use Ferber and Damschen’s terminology.

Hans Joachim Krämer and Eric Perl have also offered their own exegeses and translations of these chapters that can further underscore these points.

For Krämer, the Republic’s turn to the Good at 509b is presented as the cause of the being and intelligibility of what is known, while itself “residing beyond being” (Krämer’s translation of epekeina tēs ousias).[2] Read this way, the Good is not the highest item within the domain of beings but the first principle by which that domain is ordered and knowable. Krämer also notes that the dialogue’s brevity here has an educational aim, which helps explain why the Academy’s “unwritten doctrines” later articulated the same role under the name of the One, while the Republic frames it as the Good for pedagogical and civic reasons.[3]

Perl translates the same passage using slightly different terms. He writes: ““the good is not reality [οὐκ οὐσίας], but passes even beyond reality [ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας] in seniority [πρεσβείᾳ] and power” (Perl’s translation).[4] Perl centers in his analysis how it is we should interpret the Greek οὐσία and ἰδέα— “intelligible form”—in the context of the “beyond” of “the Good,” which Plato also refers to as an ἰδέα, but one with a special nature that sets it apart from all other intelligible forms.

Namely, the Good, as an ἰδέα, is no one particular intelligible form but is rather the condition through which all intelligible forms come to be, in their being, and can be known, as perceived by the human being, in the act of theōria.[5] Theōria, as Plato conceives it, therefore consists in another double motion: it bears witness to Being and, in the same act, orients the soul toward what gives Being its order and truth.

In Plato’s language, it opens our seeing to the “beyond” of Being—not as another thing to grasp, but as the measure by which beings are seen correctly.

Thus the “beyond” of Being mirrors, ontologically, what we first described aesthetically and epistemologically as the “beyond” of the human “that goes beyond the human.” Theōria is, in this sense, a transcendent beholding that mirrors, in the human being, the transcendent nature of the Good itself in comparison to intelligible forms more generally. Hadot’s account of askēsis as the transformation of perception presupposes this twofold orientation—as a receptivity to Being and a formation by the source that orders it.

In these many senses—whether Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, or Epicurean—we can see that philosophical practices engage and make available new encounters with Being and, for Plato, with its beyond. Askēsis, as understood in this moment in history, has an essential relationship to these broader aspects of philosophical living. Further, one could say that it deepens 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 theōria and participation, these systems can be seen as creative representations of the shapes Being might take in thought, without being totally coincident with the “beyondness” of the Good 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.[6]

Philosophy in this mode is a set of practices that enable theōria, 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.[7]

Desmond sees as primary this receptivity in Being (passio essendi) to the secondary endeavor or attempt to be in a certain way (conatus essendi).[8] 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, marked by the human’s self-transcending character. The commitments of the various philosophical schools on this view provide the coordinates for the open-ended shaping, or way of life, one 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 person, which involves both the making and unmaking of the person as an open, shapeable whole, sensitive to transformation through practice.

The person is the wood that practice shapes through its efforts. Properly understood, then, skohlē, theōria, askēsis, and leisure each supply the armature of an at once sacramental and intellectual attention to this vast presence we call Being, which is the condition of our endeavoring to do as such.

To say that philosophical practice must engage with Being is thus to identify a condition for philosophy’s own flowering, a condition without which its transformative character cannot be sustained, as Pieper, Plato, and Desmond each argue in their own way. Askēsis, if it is to retain this philosophical integrity in its robust and historical sense, must be ordered toward the question of Being, and toward Being’s expression in its various levels of presentation.

Without this orientation, askēsis risks becoming a practice of self-transformation alone—or, worse, even a means of self-enclosure—a discipline of subjective refinement without correspondence to the deeper structures of meaning and being in which the person is already embedded. Practice, in this more limited view, becomes unmoored from any measure beyond itself, and in doing so loses its intelligibility as philosophy, and with it, any meaningful purchase on reality. “The passion of the philosopher to make sense of things,” Desmond says, “remains a futile self-transcendence, outside of some unsurpassable sense of the worth of the whole.”[9]

The significance of askēsis, in my view, rests in its capacity to bring the soul into attunement with these larger orderings that surround us and suffuse us. It is this relation—between the practices of the self and the orderings of Being—that gives askēsis its philosophical meaning. Askēsis, in the sense I am arguing for in this work, is a response to Being’s solicitation, and the practices that emerge in its wake are themselves shaped by the modes of givenness they seek to receive. These practices, in their repetition and refinement, make possible a deeper participation in that which exceeds the practitioner, and this participation becomes a source of both transformation and understanding.

[1] Ferber and Damschen, “Is the Idea of the Good Beyond Being?,” 197–204.

[2] Krämer, “Epekeina Tēs Ousias,” 39–64.

[3] Krämer, “Epekeina Tēs Ousias,” 41.

[4] Perl, Thinking Being, 58.

[5] Perl, Thinking Being, 58.

[6] 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.

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

[8] Desmond, The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being, 115.

[9] Desmond, Being and the Between, 511.

Just under two weeks ago, I spoke for The Toronto Society, finishing out their lecture series for the fall 2025 season. My host, Benjamin Perry, has a real mind for this kind of organizing, as you can see from the good turnout at Innis Hall, on the University of Toronto campus.

The talk centers on four major components—attention, practice, memory, and orientation—which together provide a framework for understanding how people, and their perceptions, are transformed through ways of living shaped by philosophy, aesthetics, contemplative traditions, and physical training.

I tried to be accessible and colloquial in this version of the presentation—this was a public talk given to a mixed audience, after all—but at some point I will have to formalize these arguments and perspectives into a proper article. (I also had to cut a few sections, owing to time constraints, so I may post those sections in a separate post soon.)

Below I’ve included a transcript of the talk, along with some of the visuals. I’ve also uploaded the slide deck for those of you who might want to check out the citations and quotes I used throughout the presentation. You can find it here.

I. Introduction

Thanks for that introduction, Ben, and thanks, really, for setting up this whole series. If you’ve never done anything like this before—even if you have the space, even if you have a good audience—it takes an enormous amount of work, not just to have the vision, but to sustain it. You need to have some kind of vision: Why are we all getting together? What are we doing? That takes a lot of work in itself, but just the day-to-day logistics of putting on events like this is quite a task. So thank you, Ben, for bringing me out, and thank you all for showing up tonight.

I think it bodes well for Ben’s mission here that it does seem like we have some interest in philosophy and the humanities in Toronto. This is my first time in the city, and it sounds like it’s the first time for some of you coming to one of these events. So we are, very much, strangers meeting for the first time. But I think throughout the course of this talk, hopefully we can come together around some of these ideas.

Attention is an art form. What does that mean? Ben mentioned a little bit about my background. My background is in philosophy, a fairly academic, scholarly background, but I’m particularly interested in what we could call a practice-oriented philosophy. I’ll explain what that means, but I think it gives us a different angle for talking about philosophy and for thinking about what philosophy means for us in our daily lives.

So throughout this talk, I’ll probably speak for forty-five minutes or so—give or take; I never know exactly where my mind is going to go—but I’ve prepared roughly forty-five minutes, and then hopefully we can have some discussion. Given that we are meeting for the first time, and that you are all coming from different places, backgrounds, disciplinary areas, professional contexts, and so on, I’ve tried to make the talk as self-contained as possible.

My warning to you is that there will be some technical terms—there will be some Greek terms—but don’t let that scare you if they’re unfamiliar. I’ve tried to make this a self-contained piece so that we can all have this conversation together.

So, the title: Attention Is an Art Form. I think we already saw a good demonstration of what I’m going to be talking about with Daniel, our wonderful cellist. I think he’s already left, but it was such a perfect introduction. Just watching him play, and then asking the audience: What did you notice? What did you pay attention to? What was he able to hear in those sounds, in that music, in those notes?

He was able to get into very fine detail: this note and this emotion, repeating a piece of the song over and over again. Compare that with what somebody in the audience hears—what a layperson hears. We’re listening to the same music, the same strings vibrating through the air. We all have the same basic apparatus in some ways, but what comes across to us is quite variable. It’s variable in detail, variable in meaning.

A lot of these things end up being quite personal: how we associate the sheer sensible phenomena with what it means for us. That variability, and the way experience comes across differently, is very much central to what we’re going to talk about. So, it ended up being a kind of serendipitous setup.

So, onto the talk. I’ve been working for the past several years on a specific vision of what philosophy is and does, rooted in the sense of transformative practice, practice as a way of living.

And the person who, in my mind, has done the most to recover this immediate philosophy is a French philosopher and historian named Pierre Hadot. Hadot dedicated his career to showing how philosophical practices and ways of living were actually central to delivering the insights, arguments, perspectives, systems, and critiques that we normally associate with philosophy in the academy—or philosophy in books.

If you’re not familiar with Hadot’s work, there he is [see below]. He was one of those figures who wrote so much and about so many different periods of time and thinkers—from the pre-Socratics and ancient Greece all the way up to contemporary philosophy. He passed away fairly recently. But if you were to ask me: What are the key contributions that Pierre Hadot made to contemporary philosophy?—I think you could point to five.

Pierre Hadot’s Contributions

1. Philosophy as a Way of Life, rooted in askēsis or “spiritual exercises”

2. Philosophy consists in repeatable practices that over time reshape our perception, our actions, and our understanding of the world.

3. The literary form of ancient works (dialogue, aphorism, commentary, letters) is central to the work’s transformative aim.

4. Revived interest in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, especially Plotinus and Marcus Aurelius

5. Restores a cosmic orientation—theōria physikē—as intrinsic to philosophical practice that attunes perception to the Whole (cosmos, physis, logos)

II. Practice

The first, which we’ve already touched on, is that for Hadot, philosophy is a way of life. This idea is rooted in the Greek word askēsis, which means “exercise” or “training.” In Hadot’s usage it often takes the form of “spiritual exercises.” Philosophy, for Hadot, consists in these repeatable practices that shape us. And the shaping itself is what’s important for him.

What do these practices shape? They shape and reshape our perception, our actions, and our understanding of the world—what the world is and what our place in it is—at a very deep level. That’s going to be the main focus here. But Hadot made many other contributions.

He is one of the key figures who taught us to rethink ancient philosophy by paying attention to the form in which it was written. Today, if you read academic philosophy, there’s typically one genre: an argument, a thesis, a series of propositions, and a conclusion. But Hadot’s point was that the genres or literary forms of philosophy are many, and those forms are deeply connected to the transformative work that philosophy does.

If you read Plato’s dialogues, the dialogue form itself is telling you something about what philosophy is and does. It is exploratory, a testing of claims, a back-and-forth that only works because the interlocutors are committed to one another. There is a kind of friendship in the dialogue that makes it possible. You can’t fully understand what Plato is saying unless you see that the dialogue form itself is part of the message.

Other genres include letters, commentaries, aphorisms. Hadot also contributed to the resurgence of interest in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy—Platonism, Neoplatonism, Stoicism. His book on Marcus Aurelius is a great example. There he makes the same point: if you read Marcus Aurelius, the writing seems repetitive, unstructured, even meandering. It doesn’t follow a clear, linear structure like an academic textbook. But there’s a reason for that.

Marcus is writing to himself. He has edges—problems he’s working through—and he needs to return to them again and again. The writing is not a record of truths already discovered, but a practice. He writes, rewrites, and repeats, because the work itself is formative. It’s not just that he once discovered the truth, wrote it down, and moved on. It’s a practice that has to be done again and again—and again and again.

That’s how he is reshaping himself through his writing. And if you don’t know that when you’re reading the text, you might find yourself thinking: What’s the structure here? What’s going on? It’s a bit of a mystery. It seems like a bit of a mess. But again, the genre is very important.

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The last thing Hadot emphasizes is this notion of a cosmic orientation, or a cosmic perspective, in light of these practices. When we see somebody like Marcus Aurelius—or Stoicism more generally—getting picked up again in our culture, we often see it framed, not always but often, as a kind of psychological self-help regime. It becomes individualized: about you, your interior life, your emotions, your decision making. It looks like a kind of therapy. And all of that is there, all of that is true.

But for Hadot, and for the ancients, what they really emphasized was the notion that many of these practices reconnect us with the cosmos, with nature, with the larger world around us—with Being. Philosophers like to talk about Being. There is a sense in which these practices get us back in touch with that larger dimension, or open us to it in new ways.

We have this Greek phrase theōria physikē, which you could translate literally as “contemplating nature.” But you could also translate it in a deeper way as something like “bearing witness to nature’s becoming.” The idea is that life has a genesis: evolutionary processes give rise to new forms, new shapes, new structures. Complexity increases. All of that is happening, and all of it has something to do with you as a person, as an individual. You are an expression of this larger process. And some of these practices are about attuning you to that cosmic dimension.

So, for example, we can talk about the logos in you—your reasoning capacity, the way you give speech to your thoughts, ideas, and perspectives. That’s yours; it’s unique to you. But then there is also the Logos—capital “L”—the cosmic Logos, the patterning and shaping of the cosmos itself. The cosmos has an articulation, a patterning to it. And that patterning has something to do with you, with where you came from, and with why you are the way you are. Some of these practices are about reconnecting with that dimension.

In the modern era and onward, I feel that this dimension has been largely shut off. Philosophy becomes more individualized, more interiorized. It becomes about you and your inner life. But that is not practice in Hadot’s sense.

So let’s look more specifically at this word askēsis. Some pronounce it askesis. Hadot defines it as “spiritual exercise.” But if we break the word down, we can track its history.

Askēsis (exercise, practice)

• The training and preparation an athlete would undertake to prepare for competition (from the Greek askēo, for “exercising” or “training”)

• Related to our word “asceticism” but includes a sense for positive transformation, rather than negative renunciation alone

• Asketikos “rigorously self-disciplined, laborious,” which is related to the noun asketes, a “monk,” a “hermit,” or a “skilled worker, one who practices an art or trade,” as well as to askein “to exercise, train,” but also “to fashion material, embellish or refine material.”

• Thomas Merton writes, “[Askēsis] comes from the Greek askein: to adorn, to prepare by labor, to make someone adept by exercises. (Homer uses it for ‘making a work of art.’) It was applied to physical culture, moral culture, and finally religious training. It means, in short, training—spiritual training.”

The root is the verb askeō (sometimes rendered askein), which literally means “to exercise” or “to train.” Taken literally, it refers to the training an athlete would undergo to prepare for competition—to build strength, endurance, and ability. That’s the most basic sense.

But the term also came to be used for other figures who were not athletes in the literal sense but who nonetheless undertook preparatory practices or disciplines. It was applied, for example, to monks or hermits living disciplined lives, and also to skilled workers and craftsmen. You could think of a woodworker, a sculptor, or a metallurgist.

There’s something about the practices of these figures that involves fashioning, refining, embellishing, transforming. The woodworker takes raw wood and, through skill, makes it more detailed, more elaborate, more beautiful. But in the philosophical context, the material being shaped is you as a person—your soul, your being, your perception.

And so, of course, you can also see the connection to the modern word asceticism. The similarity is clear. But it’s a little different from what we usually mean by asceticism. Asceticism often has a negative valence: withdrawal, renunciation, negation. That can be part of spiritual exercises, but there is also a positive dimension—a creative, cumulative, generative dimension. You’re not only taking away; you’re also adding, building, shaping through these practices.

I quite like this quote from the great contemplative theologian Thomas Merton. He calls attention to this idea that askēsis means “to adorn or prepare by labor, to make someone adept by exercises.” He notes that Homer uses it for the making of a work of art. You can see the connection again. The term applies to physical culture, moral culture, and finally religious training. In short, it means spiritual training. That gives you some sense of how I am using this word and what it means.

If you want to look at particular examples, you’ll find it’s difficult to close off what counts as a practice and what doesn’t. The list could get quite long. But I think this is a good list, and I selected it on purpose because it shows the range.

Modes of Askēsis

1. Physical exercises (athletics and gymnastics)

2. Nutrition (diet and fasting)

3. Redirecting desire and passion

4. Moral and ethical attention

5. Detachment

6. Meditations on death and dying

7. Discursive practices (studying, reading, dialogue)

8. Aesthetics and art

9. Mysticism and intuition

10. Meditation and contemplation

11. Prayer

12. Memory

At the top, you have physical exercises and nutrition. These are rooted in the physiology of the body. Diet and fasting, athletics, yoga, martial arts, wrestling—all of these practices shape the physical form.

In the middle, you see practices that redirect desire and passion. Here you can speak about desires and passions being rightly ordered—or misdirected toward things harmful to yourself or your community. These have a moral valence; there is an ethical dimension to them.

Then, further down, you find discursive practices—number seven on the list. These are also practices: studying, reading, dialogue, writing, publishing, presenting at conferences, making arguments. As we saw with Marcus Aurelius, he was writing and rewriting himself—writing and rewriting his soul. Today, when we think of philosophy, we tend to reduce it mostly to these discursive practices, as if the essence of philosophy were simply reading and writing. But in truth, even writing a sentence presupposes a way of life. That part gets underplayed.

We can also talk about aesthetics and art, and then the practices that verge into spiritual and contemplative traditions—meditation, contemplation, prayer, memory exercises. In ancient philosophy, these were not separated as neatly as they are today. Mystical experience, intuitive insight, and philosophical training were deeply entangled.

So, when I think about philosophy, I think about the whole spectrum of practices. These practices shape us in different ways, depending on the level at which we engage them. From this perspective, philosophy is not merely a body of doctrines, ideas, or arguments. It is a discipline of exercises that reshape perception at a basic level.

Askēsis modifies the structure of our perception and understanding. It trains us so that things show up differently than they would otherwise. Things come to presence because of our capacity to pay attention, because of the way our perception is structured, because of the sensitivity of our senses. All of these are trainable. They are malleable. And what shows up for us—even at the level of first-person sensory experience—changes through these practices.

This is what drives philosophy at its root. You can put insights into words afterward, and much of philosophy gets codified in that way. But the insights themselves often arise in other moments of practice. Philosophy’s primacy, in this sense, lies in the fact that we can shape and reshape ourselves—and by doing so, our perception of everything changes.

I want to share a quote with you that I think captures this sense.

This is the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth-century text of Middle English mysticism. I am quite enamored of this text. It is less a series of arguments than a handbook, an instruction manual on how to engage in the practice of contemplative prayer.

The author says this about practice, and he inverts the usual relationship between the practitioner and the action by putting the action first. The action is primary. He writes:

To put it more exactly, let that thing—the contemplative practice—do with you whatever it pleases, and lead you wherever it pleases. Let it do the working, and you be the material it works upon. Just watch it and let it be. Do not interfere with it, as if to help, for fear you should spoil everything. You simply be the wood, and let it—the practice—be the carpenter. You simply be the house, and let it be the master who lives there.

— Anonymous Author, The Cloud of Unknowing

In looking at all of these different practices throughout history—I work mostly in the Western tradition, though of course we could expand outward, since practice traditions exist all over the world—I came to see that attention is the central factor in each of them. Attention plays a central role in the vision of philosophy I am describing here.

If we accept my argument that perception is a skill that can be trained, then we can see that attention, in its more refined moments, is something like an art form. Our very mode of seeing is a craft, a work of art. Attention is an art form in this sense.

So, I want to spend the next part of the talk focusing on attention itself. We are going to pay attention to attention, as it were, because I think it really is the central piece of the whole dynamic. But it is not the only piece.

We have talked about practice—askēsis. We have begun to talk about attention. But the other two factors I want to introduce are memory and orientation. Taken together, we have four: attention, practice, memory, and orientation. Through the practicing life, these four come together in a very specific way.

This is, in fact, the conclusion. And that’s the nice thing about nonfiction: there is no surprise. I can tell you where we’re going, and you’ll see it unfold. By the end of the talk, these short phrases will, I hope, make sense:

• Attention directs perception.

• Practice deepens attention.

• Memory holds practice.

• Orientation gives direction.

That is the basic idea. But let us now look more closely at attention itself.

III. Attention

If you open a cognitive science textbook, or a book on the biology of perception, you will find that as soon as the topic of attention arises, a whole taxonomy appears—different kinds of attention, cataloged and classified from an empirical perspective.

I’m going to try to draw some of those perspectives out—not by giving you a list of categories, like “narrow attention,” “focused attention,” “field attention,” and so on. Instead, I want to look at the words themselves. That’s a very philosopher’s move, right?—to look at the history of the words.

So I am going to look at attention, what it means, and then draw on several examples from people in psychology, education, philosophy, meditative practice, athletic performance, and art—artistic practice more broadly. All of these different groups, including theology, describe attention in their own way. And if we look at how they talk about it, I think a few key words and key themes begin to stand out. Hopefully this will help us think more deeply about attention.

So—you need an etymology slide somewhere. Attention comes from Latin. The root sense is “to stretch toward.” However you think of your mind, or your soul, or yourself—whatever is doing the perceiving—it is moving out, stretching toward, selecting specific things. It’s not an undifferentiated field of awareness. Attention stretches toward, it directs.

Etymology

Attention

Latin attentionem (nominative attentio) “attention, attentiveness,” stem of attendere “give heed to,” literally “to stretch toward,” from ad “to, toward” (see ad-) + tendere “stretch” (from PIE root *ten- “to stretch”).

The action, fact, or state of attending or giving heed; earnest direction of the mind, consideration, or regard; esp. in to pay or give attention.

To Attend

To turn the mind to, give consideration or pay heed to, regard, consider; To turn the energies to, give practical heed to, apply oneself to, look after.

To watch over, wait upon, with service, accompany as servant, go with, be present at; To direct one’s care to; to take care or charge of, look after.

There is a sense of earnest direction of mind. That’s interesting—earnest. It carries a feeling tone. You give or pay attention.

And if we look at the related verb to attend, we find something more. If attention is a stretching toward, it is also a turning. The mind moves. It makes selections within the whole sensory diorama—the whole perceptual field—where not everything is given equal value at once. The mind stretches toward some things, recoils from others. That’s how we ordinarily think of attention.

But there’s another nuance. At its root, to attend also has the sense of watchfulness, of waiting upon something, even of service. To attend is to look after, to direct one’s care. That’s interesting: what you pay attention to is connected to what you care about. Attending and caring belong together. That’s worth holding on to.

Now, let’s look at some examples from philosophers, psychologists, and others. This is from William James, The Principles of Psychology. I think he gives a pretty good account of everyday attention, because—as he puts it—“everyone knows what attention is.” Great, I don’t need to be here.

Everybody already knows what attention is. But James says it is “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” That’s interesting, right? “Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scattered state of the brain.”

And then, further on, he says there are millions of things you could be paying attention to, but not all of them interest you. There is a sense of selected interest. “Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground, intelligible perspective—in a word.” And then again: the opposite is “this kind of gray, chaotic, indiscriminateness.”

I think this is generally a pretty good account of everyday attention. If you sat down and thought about it—what is everyday attention?—this gets close. But notice that many of James’s criteria are aesthetic criteria. The qualities of attention and the qualities of inattention carry with them an artistry. That’s how we actually understand attention if we think about it carefully.

Now, Eleanor Gibson—the great psychologist of attention and perception—adds another element. She spent much of her career in developmental psychology, studying newborns and toddlers, asking how the perceptual apparatus comes online as you grow and mature. She says that attention is always in relation to some task or goal. It is oriented to achieve some end. Attention is an active process, and it has this variable aspect of perceiving that we describe as more or less attentive.

So Gibson is introducing something new here. Beyond care, turning, and stretching toward, there is also this question: What am I trying to do? What am I trying to accomplish right now? Attention has a telos, an aim that draws it forward. That’s a good piece to hold on to.

Going a little deeper, Evan Thompson—who, in my opinion, has done more than just about anyone to explore the relationships among cognitive science, the phenomenology of perception, and the Buddhist contemplative tradition—adds still another dimension. He holds these three perspectives together in a very rigorous way.

Thompson says: “In seeing I attend to features of what there is to see. But I can also attend to how seeing feels, to what the activity of seeing is like for me, and to the ways it feels different from freely imagining or from remembering. I can become aware of features I do not normally notice, precisely because they usually remain implicit and pre-reflective.”

All of a sudden, attention is no longer only outward facing—toward things in your environment, things in your sensory field. He is pointing to a metacognitive move: you can pay attention to your own attention. You can pay attention to your feelings. You can pay attention to your thoughts.

That’s a different kind of attention, right? It’s the same focus, the same selective process—but it’s internal. It’s attention to yourself as you are perceiving and attending.

I think this relates to a quote from Iain McGilchrist, where he says that “attention is a moral act. It creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it and in what way. The fact that a place is special to someone because of its great peace and beauty may, by that very fact, make it for another a resource to exploit in such a way that its peace and beauty are destroyed. Attention has consequences.”

So here, in addition to inward attention, there is also a strong incursion of values into our sensory experience—into the phenomenological texture of perception itself. That adds two extra layers to the process of attention.

Simone Weil—who did tremendous work on attention, education, prayer, meditation, and contemplation—offers a related view. Her position is that what you are really doing in school is training attention. Whether you are proving a geometrical theorem, working through a difficult piece of literature, or studying art, every discipline is essentially training your attention. In this sense, the specific object of study matters less than the ability to sustain attention for a period of time. That’s quite interesting.

We can take this one step further. Evan Thompson again: here he speaks of attention as a cultural technique, especially shaped by ritual and religious practice. He says, “The cultural technique of deep attention emerged precisely out of ritual and religious practices. It is no accident that religion is derived from relegare—to take note. Every religious practice is an exercise in attention.” He goes on to describe how the repeated practice of focused attention develops attentional skills. Eventually, focused practice leads to one-pointed concentration.

Another example comes from the realm of art. Gabriel Trop argues that art is a form of askēsis—a form of shaping. In its archaic sense, askēsis means a form of exercise that continually modifies, often imperceptibly, the manifold patterns of being—whether perceptual, behavioral, or affective—of the person undertaking it. In other words, while you are working on a piece of art, the art is also working on you. There is a circular relationship of transformation.

Josef Pieper makes a similar point when he writes about leisure and contemplation. He says that in leisure, “the artist will be able to perceive with new eyes the abundant wealth of all visible reality.” Think again of Daniel, our cellist. The sensory awareness and detail available to Daniel in performance—the capacity to hear in ways that exceed what most of us notice—demonstrates this refinement of perception.

So whether we are talking about basic everyday perception, introspection, moral and ethical concerns, art and aesthetics, or meditation, we are talking about different modes of perception and attention, and about the ways these can be trained, refined, and even adorned—as in the case of art.

Cognitive scientists, for their part, have developed theories of perceptual learning that explain how these changes take place. I am not a cognitive scientist, but I understand enough of the basics to sketch the main ideas. The key claim is that there are two or three different ways to explain why a trained musician hears differently from a layperson.

One view holds that the trained person—the expert—receives the same sensory information as everyone else but has more concepts, more knowledge, and more distinctions available to describe what they hear. At this high-functioning level, they can make discriminations the rest of us cannot.

They have more concepts, yes, and that colors their experience in a more vivid way. But what perceptual learning research shows is that this distinction—between raw perception and added concepts—is not tenable. The entanglement between knowledge, concepts, perception, information, and understanding runs very deep, down to the most basic levels.

That’s why I keep appealing to phenomenological or first-person experience. That’s really what I mean: perception itself is structured differently once it is trained.

Perceptual Learning

1. Wine taster

2. Birder

3. Musician

4. Perfumer (“the nose”)

5. Vipassanā meditation

6. Philosophical perception

There are many examples. Take the wine taster, the sommelier. It’s not only that they’ve learned to name more bottles of wine or to use a complex vocabulary—though, of course, they do that too. They are actually tasting something different. Their sensitivity is heightened. Their sensibility has changed. The physical reality comes across differently.

Or consider birding. My father-in-law is a zoologist who spent much of his life in science education. He can spot and name every bird, describe its relationships, and give you a wealth of detail. I see a brown bird, a big bird, a small bird—maybe an “angry bird.” That’s about the extent of my perception. But for him, the details are immediately available. It’s not that he sees a bird and then consults a mental catalog before producing a label. The recognition is immediate, perceptual.

The same is true for musicians. Or take the world of perfumery. Did you know that “the nose” is an actual profession? These experts detect subtle layers in a fragrance that most of us simply cannot perceive.

We saw something similar with Vipassanā meditators. And of course, phenomenologists have been working in this space for over a century. In the style of Edmund Husserl, phenomenology involves bracketing what he called the “natural attitude”—the taken-for-granted way objects appear in the everyday world. The move is to step back and ask: Why am I attaching these meanings? Why are these shapes and forms showing up for me in this particular way? It’s a contemplative move. And it reveals dimensions of experience that would otherwise remain hidden.

Rock climbing provides another example. A trained climber sees holds, routes, and possibilities that a novice cannot. In this case, it can even be a matter of life and death.

The point in all of this is that attention is not simply one faculty among others. Attention is, in a real sense, first philosophy. It is where philosophy begins. And I mean that again in a very basic sense. Philosophers might even say that attention is not merely a mental state or a subjective mood. It is a structural—even transcendental—condition. It is the condition for meaning and significance to appear at all. It is the field within which anything shows up as mattering. In this sense, attention should be distinguished from personal psychological preferences. We are talking about the level of attending itself.

IV. Memory

Let me move ahead a little bit, since I also want to leave time for discussion with you all. So: attention and practice—we’ve seen how these come together. Are we all together on this? Making sense? Good.

The last two are memory and orientation. There are several ways to talk about memory. I want to bring us back to its role in attention, but let’s start with a few sources. These are some of the great resources for thinking about memory: Mary Carruthers, Frances Yates, and Henri Bergson.

Carruthers and Yates provide historical accounts of actual memory practices—techniques people used to transform and extend their memories. Bergson, on the other hand, gives a more metaphysical or phenomenological account of what memory is and does. I want to begin with practices, and then work toward Bergson.

One practice is lectio divina—a method of repetitive reading and recitation. It is a bit like Marcus Aurelius, writing and rewriting in order to reshape himself. But here the process unfolds in distinct phases. You read slowly, repeating and paraphrasing until key phrases stand out to you. You are encouraged to enter into a dialogue with the text, almost a conversation, and then to sit with it—to linger rather than rush to the next page. It is slow, repetitive, deliberate. The goal is to make the text a part of who you are through repeated engagement.

Another set of techniques involves the ars memoriae—memory palaces or architectural diagrams. These were laid out both physically and imaginatively. Remember, in a time before cell phones, audio recording, printing, or even widely available writing technologies, people needed systems to hold large amounts of information in their heads. So they designed these elaborate mnemonic diagrams.

These systems were more systematic than lectio divina. They were ways of mapping specific relationships among ideas. If you had a system of philosophy, or a system of mathematics or science, you could visualize it spatially in order to recall it.

And that is going to stick in your memory in a way that would not otherwise be possible. What I want to stress here is that when we think of memory—even in these practices—we often reduce it to recall: remembering facts, cramming for a test, trying to maximize retention. But that is not really what I am talking about. That kind of recall is only an effect.

Memory Techniques

Lectio divina (monastic reading as memory work)

• A four-stage practice: Slow reading and re-reading (lectio); pause and meditate on meaningful phrases (meditatio); enter into dialogue and conversation with the text (oratio); rest in the meaning of the text and let it transform you (contemplatio).

Method of loci (memory palace)

• The classical–medieval art of placing vivid images along a familiar architectural route (house, cloister, church) to store ideas in order.

Ars combinatoria (memory wheels & tables)

• Diagrammatic devices (Llull’s wheels, scholastic tables) that systematize relations among concepts so they can be recombined at will.

What we are actually interested in—just as we were talking about with attention—is not so much particular memories but memory as such, memory as a faculty. We are talking about training memory itself.

Let me give you an example. In Mary Carruthers’s work, she devotes quite a bit of attention to Thomas Aquinas and his memory practices. Aquinas, by all accounts, had an extraordinary memory. Now, there is scholarly debate about whether these stories are embellished, but something like them must be true—there are multiple eyewitness accounts of his abilities.

For instance, he would sometimes enter a meditative, contemplative, almost withdrawn state. Carruthers notes that he often looked as though he were asleep. His secretaries thought so. And then suddenly he would begin reciting long passages verbatim. In other cases, he was said to dictate to multiple secretaries at once, on multiple topics, in parallel.

Now, writing this talk feels like it took a lot of effort. But apparently Thomas could compose six talks simultaneously. That is remarkable. There is something almost transcendent about it.

Carruthers describes it this way:

That unceasing torrent, that clarity, as though reading from a book before his eyes, that quality of retaining whatever he had read or grasped, can be understood if we are willing to give his trained memory its due. Thomas himself stressed the importance of concentration in memory, and we are told many times of his remarkable power of deep concentration, often approaching a trance-like state in which he did not feel physical pain. Thomas communed with his memory constantly—certainly before he dictated—and only when he clearly had the understanding and the words required would he lecture or write or dictate.

— Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory

The impression is that when Thomas began to dictate, an entire essay or lecture would pour forth almost at once. Apparently, he would not begin writing until the whole work was mapped out in his mind.

I want to underline how important this is, especially for us today. I often hear people say: we have all these devices that can do memory work for us. We can write things down. We can record lectures. We can take notes, copy and paste, send emails. We outsource memory everywhere.

Now we have AI—ChatGPT, Claude, and so on. And I’ve heard people say, especially about these systems, that the important thing for education in the future will not be remembering facts. Facts can just be looked up. Claude can give them to us. ChatGPT can give them to us. Our job is no longer remembering facts, apparently. Our job is teaching ways of thinking, not memorizing.

But if the idea holds that memory itself—not episodic recall, but the sustained capacity for memory—is bound up with ways of thinking, then the ways of thinking available to you shrink drastically without it. That’s one practical outcome of this line of thought.

So let’s turn briefly to Bergson. He offers a phenomenological account of memory that brings us back to everyday experience. He says: “There is no perception which is not full of memories. In the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details of our past experience. We see insensible qualities, contractions, affected by our memory.”

My suggestion is that, yes, we need practice and attention. But where does practice and attending go? It goes nowhere unless there is memory. And this is not memory as recall. It is not the kind of memory a computer uses to retrieve a file or the way Google fetches a result. It is the transformation of perception itself.

Think of an image of a flower coming gradually into detail. If I am looking at a magnolia, I am already downstream of a rich, memory-saturated process. That is what enables me to say: that is a plant, that is a flower, that is a magnolia. Without memory of past plants, past flowers, past magnolias, I could not do this.

So when we talk about the elaboration of attention, the refinement of perception, the detail coming into focus, it only works through the triad of practice, attention, and memory.

V. Orientation

Now, let’s look at the last piece: orientation. We know vaguely what orientation is. Strictly, it refers to physical direction—north, south, east, west. How do I get around Toronto? I’ve never been here before, and I’m trying to navigate. But in a deeper sense, orientation means a person’s basic attitude, beliefs, and commitments. It includes existential questions: What is the good? What is the meaning of life? What are my religious or philosophical commitments?

• Orientation: A person’s basic attitude, beliefs, or feelings; a person’s emotional or intellectual position in respect of a particular topic, circumstance

• Disorientation: The condition of having lost one’s bearings; uncertainty as to direction.

• Reorientation: The action or process of reorienting; a fresh orientation.

These are all orienting mechanisms. Philosophical schools, as Hadot notes, provided their sense of direction. Traditions orient. Lineages orient. Texts, teachers, communities, religions, spiritual practices—in their healthy forms—all provide orientation. You are not the first person to try to orient yourself in the world.

But of course, we often find ourselves disoriented, or lost. We thought we were going in the right direction, and then suddenly we are not. An existential crisis calls for reorientation. It calls for rethinking fundamental aspects of how we have been living. And if you remember, attention itself has to do with turning—turning the mind.

That’s orientation, right? And it has to come from somewhere larger than ourselves. It usually arises from some transformative event.

Turning Around

• Conversion: From the Latin conversionem (nominative conversio) “a turning round, revolving; alteration, change,” noun of action from past-participle stem of convertere “to turn around; to transform,” from assimilated form of com “with, together” (see con-) + vertere “to turn”

• Redirection: The Greek periagōgē refers to the guided process (teacher to student) of “changing one’s direction” or “redirecting” one’s mind’s away from ignorance and towards the truth

Take the word conversion. I want to look at two terms here: conversio in Latin, and epistrophē in Greek. We might also mention metanoia—another word for conversion. What they all share is this sense of movement, of turning. Conversio is literally a rotation, a reorientation. So when we talk about a conversion experience, or a peak experience, or some transformational experience, we can understand it through this spatial metaphor: your attention is being called in a new direction.

The Greek adds a nuance: it is not just a change of direction, but a guided turning. It implies the presence of a teacher, a guide, or something that helps orient you. You are not spinning in circles; you are being directed to walk a certain way. There is training here, a developmental process.

And then there is another piece we do not often emphasize: the com- in convertere. The Latin verb vertere means “to turn.” Com- means “with.” So the word conversio also implies turning with. You are not turning alone. Against the modernist, individualist reading—where the isolated self must figure everything out—the term suggests something else. With whom are you turning? With your community. With your tradition. With your history. Or perhaps something even larger: with the cosmos itself, as in theōria physikē. You are not separate from that. The cosmos, too, may have something to share with you, if only you learn to look in the right direction.

So this is not an isolated, individual experience. Orientation, reorientation, conversion—all of these imply a turning that is shared, that is with.

And I want to leave you with one final image, one I am sure you all know. I think it ties everything together: attention, practice, memory, and orientation.

And I’m going to leave you with one final image that I’m sure you’re all familiar with, one that I think ties it all together—attention, practice, memory, orientation. I’m sure you’re familiar with this: the cave allegory. This is Book VII in Plato’s Republic. I’m sure you’re even more familiar with this particular image right now. This is the backdrop to however many thousands of me at this point. But you can kind of see this whole philosophy of attention playing out in the diagram.

So, you start off down here. These people down here are chained to the wall. They can’t move, right? Their attention is fixed forward. And what are they looking at? They’re looking at the shadows. You know that, right? You know the shadows aren’t real life. But it’s actually even worse than that: not only are the shadows not real life, the things making the shadows aren’t real either. These things are representations or copies of things that exist outside in reality.

If you’re down here, you’re twice removed—you’re in bad shape. This is a bad spot. The point is, you’re looking straight ahead, and your attention can’t do anything. But then, for some reason, at some point, you start to realize something’s going on. This isn’t quite right. Plato talks about these moments. He talks about wonder: philosophy begins with wonder. Plato and Aristotle both connect wonder to this moment in philosophy. But Plato also talks about eros—a love for truth, a love for wisdom. There’s something in you that’s trying to pull you in a different direction, right?

But here you can’t move. At some point, though, you break free of the chains, and you look back. You make that turning motion. This is literally the conversio—the turning around. You say, “Hey, those guys up there are making that. What’s up with that? Why are they doing that?” And once you see that, you can begin your ascent out of the cave.

This is the periagōgē: it’s not just turning around. It can be quite a tricky situation when you discover that this is some kind of illusion, some kind of falsity. I think of this as like the realm of ideology and propaganda, all of these kinds of things. Once you break free of that and turn around, you don’t necessarily know where to go. You say, “I know this isn’t true. I know somebody’s putting me on. I know they’re doing it to manipulate me for some reason. I’ve figured that out, but I don’t know where to go.” You can get stuck there, too. That’s not a great place to be either.

So you need the turning, but also the guided movement upward. And then you get out. Of course, the fire down there is supposed to be a copy of the sun, but it’s not actually. What is the sun? The sun is the possibility of perception itself, the possibility of seeing individual things at all. It’s not one of the things—it’s the thing that makes it possible for you to see.

But it doesn’t stop there. You could stop there, but in Plato’s story, and in many of the commentaries, you’ll find that you’re supposed to go back down. You’re supposed to go back down and let those other people know: “Hey, you’re being put off. This isn’t the real real. This isn’t the truth.” And of course, that’s what Socrates does. He goes up, sees the truth—he sees the Good beyond being—comes back down, says, “Hey, I think you’re being lied to,” and they kill him. So, you, traveler, beware. That’s the story.

The point is that you can see all of these different steps in the cave allegory: attention, practice, memory, orientation. I hope that makes sense to you. I went a little bit longer than I had planned to, but I think we still have some time for dialogue and questions.

If you found any of this interesting or meaningful, that’s the book Ben mentioned. You can scan the code or go to the website and find me there. I’d love to chat. I’d love to hear what you think—either through email (my email is on the site), or let’s just have a conversation. Let’s see what you’re thinking, and see what this stirred up for all of you.

Thank you.

If you found this piece interesting, consider reading these other essays for a deeper look at some of these themes and perspectives:

The “desert philosopher” Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345–399 AD) was one of the most significant Christian monks, ascetics, and theologians of the fourth century.

Born in Ibora, he began his career as a church intellectual and preacher in Constantinople. Following a spiritual crisis, he left his ecclesiastical career to pursue monastic life in Jerusalem, eventually settling in the Egyptian desert, first in Nitria and then Kellia (“The Cells”). There he devoted himself to uniting his philosophical training with Christian monasticism.

Like other desert monks of his time, Evagrius followed the model of Christ himself, who retreated into the desert for forty days of fasting and spiritual trial. These early Christian monastics saw the desert as both a place of spiritual testing and transformation, just as it had been for Jesus, and as a refuge from the complexities of urban life in late antiquity.

Evagrius taught and practiced during the height of the desert monastic movement, when thousands of spiritual seekers retreated to the Egyptian desert, establishing a tradition that would deeply influence Christian spirituality for centuries to come. In the desert, Evagrius found an environment that suited both his contemplative aspirations and his intellectual gifts. Between his hours of prayer and manual work, he wrote extensively about the spiritual life, developing nuanced analyses of human psychology and the contemplative path.

Evagrius is best known for his teachings on prayer, asceticism, and his analysis of logismoi, or “afflictive thoughts,” and noēmata, “virtuous thoughts.”1 Among the many thoughts he observed, Evagrius identified eight primary types of each. The afflictive thoughts include gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride, while the virtuous thoughts encompass temperance, prudence, poverty, joy, charity, patience, moderation, and humility. For Evagrius, these thoughts were not merely private mental events but had real effects both in the individual and in the world.

He explored the nature and effect of these thoughts, as well as their relation to one another, in several of his texts, including Eight Thoughts, The Praktikos, Chapters on Prayer, and Antirrhêtikos. These more preliminary works were aimed at monks early in their ascetic development. Unlike many of his contemporaries who lived in larger monastic communities, Evagrius chose to establish himself in a small philosophical circle, not unlike those formed by other fourth-century intellectuals.

From his desert cell, he served as both ascetic practitioner and teacher, developing a sophisticated approach to spiritual life that drew from both Christian scripture and Greek philosophical tradition. His unique contribution lay in uniting contemplative practice with careful psychological observation, creating what we might call a practical philosophy of inner transformation.

For modern secular readers, one of the most challenging aspects of Evagrius’s thought may be his understanding of demons as real spiritual entities that influence human consciousness. But to grasp his psychological insights, we must first appreciate how he saw the cosmos, as populated by various intelligent beings—human, angelic, and demonic—each capable of influencing the formation of our thoughts and mental states. This taxonomy was not seen as superstition but as part of a sophisticated understanding of how different forces shape human consciousness and behavior.

Evagrius’s analysis of these influences found its most practical expression in the Antirrhêtikos (“Counter-Arguments” or “Talking Back”), a handbook for monastics that outlines specific methods for combating demonic influence. The text demonstrates how demons operate at the level of our mental representations, working to manipulate memory, distort reasoning, and inflame the passions.

According to Evagrius, these influences are not random but follow identifiable patterns that can be studied and counteracted. Demons might attach themselves to our bodily nature, emotional life, or intellectual thinking, influencing not only the character of each but also the movement from one thought to the next.

For instance, after implanting impure thoughts, demons might introduce thoughts of anxiety to create a multiplicity of mental representations that makes prayer difficult or impossible. Or they might work through dream imagery, leaving impressions on what Evagrius calls our “ruling faculty” (hegemonikon) by putting into motion memories acquired through our past bodily experience.

The sophistication of Evagrius’s approach is found in his careful observation of how thoughts arise and can be transformed in consciousness. Through understanding the nature of mental representations, he developed specific counter-strategies: virtuous thoughts could be used to displace afflictive ones, and spiritual practices could redirect the mind’s attention toward contemplation.

This observation becomes the basis for his method.

One thought can intentionally interrupt another, and virtuous thoughts can be used to displace afflictive ones. Through careful self-observation and practice, the practitioner can learn to recognize these patterns of influence and respond with appropriate spiritual remedies. Here we might ask, how does one develop the capacity to observe and counter these subtle influences on consciousness?

In what follows, we’ll explore the key elements of Evagrius’s method for spiritual transformation. We’ll begin with his understanding of self-observation and mental representations. From there, we’ll investigate the specific nature of afflictive thoughts, showing how Evagrius’s psychological insights remain relevant for understanding human consciousness today. We’ll then turn to his practical methods of discernment (diakrisis) and observation (paratēresis), examining how afflictive thoughts manifest differently among lay people, monks living in community, and solitary hermits, as well as how they vary based on individual temperament and psychological disposition.

Finally, we’ll examine the relationship between practice (praktikē) and contemplation (theōria) in Evagrius’s system, showing how these two modes of spiritual development work together in an endless circle of transformation.

Throughout, we’ll see how these practices serve Evagrius’s ultimate aim: the cultivation of a mind capable of direct, intuitive knowledge of God. For Evagrius, the purified mind (nous) becomes “like sapphire or the color of the sky”—an interior Mount Sinai where divine encounter becomes possible.2

This transformation requires more than study or rational understanding alone.

It demands a complete reorientation of consciousness through prayer and practice, a gradual clearing away of mental images and representations until the mind achieves what Evagrius calls apatheia, a state of tranquility that makes possible the highest forms of spiritual perception. This is not philosophy as abstract speculation, but philosophy as a way of life, aimed at nothing less than making the human person a “place of God.”

Such an approach stands in stark contrast to modern therapeutic methods that aim at psychological adjustment or the management of symptoms—for Evagrius, the health of the mind was inseparable from its capacity for divine illumination through God, and psychological well-being could only come through a reorientation toward the transcendent.

Self-Observation and Mental Representations

Before we explore the specific nature of afflictive thoughts and their remedies, we must understand a central aspect of the Evagrian method: the practice of self-observation (nēpsis). One way to think of the Evagrian method is as a subtle phenomenology of the formulation of our mental representations as we form them, and whether we assent to them. The Stoics also have a similar method. For the Stoics, the examination of representations was primarily a matter of aligning one’s judgments with reason and nature. They believed that the cosmos was permeated by a divine logos or rational principle, and that human beings could achieve eudaimonia (flourishing or well-being) by living in accordance with this rational order.

Evagrius deploys an analogous strategy, but for him there is a much greater effort to track the subtle external forces that influence the formation of our representations—the autonomous “afflictive” or “virtuous” thoughts, respectively. For Evagrius, the cosmos is populated by different ends or aims (teloi, if you like)—beings, values, or ideas that draw our thought in different directions, some healthy and virtuous, others hazardous and corrupt. The manipulation of mental representations, the distortions of memory, the influence on the reasoning faculty, the intentional evocation of the passions, affliction through dream imagery, if not the total fabrication of dreams—these are the sites of attack at the level of the individual’s interior life.

Here is Evagrius in On Thoughts on the process by which we come to form representations of our own bodily and sensory life:

One should start from the proposition that the mind receives naturally the mental representations of sensible objects and their impressions through the instrumentality of this body of ours. Whatever maybe the form of the object, such is necessarily the image that the mind receives, whence the mental representations of objects are called copies because they preserve the same form as them. So just as the mind receives the mental representations of all sensible objects, in this way it receives also that of its own organism—for this too is sensible.3

In this passage, Evagrius articulates his understanding of how consciousness operates at the level of mental representation. The mind, he observes, doesn’t merely passively receive impressions of external objects, but actively forms representations of both the outer world and its own embodied experience. This dual movement of consciousness—simultaneously representing external reality and our own psychosomatic condition—becomes important for his practical methods of spiritual development.

When afflictive thoughts arise, they manifest as both abstract ideas and embodied experiences that shape our perception of the world and our awareness of our own physical and emotional states. Understanding this intimate connection between mental representation and embodied experience allows the practitioner to recognize how external influences can shape both their perception and their self-understanding.

We can see how this phenomenology of mental representation connects more generally to older Greek imperatives to “know thyself ” (gnothi seauton) and “care for oneself ” (epimeleia heautou). The process of observing how our mind forms representations itself becomes a path of self-knowledge, while the ability to guide them toward virtue embodies the practice of self-care. In this sense, we form representations of our own “self ” in each moment, though Evagrius (and the Greek philosophers before him) would have referred to the need to tend to the soul (psychē), or even the dynamism between soma (body), psychē (soul), and nous (mind) rather than to our modern notion of a “self.”

At the root of this practice lies an awareness of philautia—a term with a dual nature, one healthy and advancing of development and the other negative and morally stultifying. While it literally translates as “self-love” or “love of self,” in its negative connotation this term means something more like “self-obsession.” It’s a kind of inwardly possessed narcissism or solipsism cut off from the well-being of other people, the world, and, of course, God. As Gabriel Bunge describes it, this is “a state of being stuck in oneself that renders one incapable of love [agape].”4 Its positive connotation, on the other hand, refers to something more like self-compassion or care, embodying the practice of epimeleia heautou (care of the self ).

This type of paying attention is essential to developing our agency concerning the influences that shape our thoughts and is thus essential to our capacity for free will. It is not afflictive thinking by itself that leads us into malady but our decision to pursue those chains of reasoning. For if one cannot pay attention to oneself, then one will remain blind to the forces that shape and influence the construction of one’s own representations, and thus one’s actions and practices of betterment (or their absence).

Afflictive Thoughts

We’ve just looked at how Evagrius understood the formation and observation of mental representations, particularly his emphasis on self-observation (nēpsis) as a way of tracking how thoughts and images arise in consciousness. We can now examine more closely the specific nature of logismoi and how they operate.

According to Evagrius, logismoi are thoughts or thought patterns that can lead a person away from virtue. The verb logizomai means “to reckon,” “to calculate,” “to reason,” or “to consider.” In this sense, the logismoi involve a kind of internal, though distorted, reasoning process. In other words, when a logismos arises in the mind, it often presents itself as a rational argument or justification for a particular course of action or way of thinking. The logismoi, as “afflictive” thoughts, are (seemingly) rational justifications for pursuing self-harm or harm oriented towards other people.

These thoughts are seen as afflictive because they can lead us into spiritual and moral hazard if we follow their logic. They afflict us by clouding our judgment, stirring up disordered emotions, and leading us away from more virtuous decision making. For example, acedia (“despondency” or “listlessness”) is an afflictive thought or mood that presents itself as the rational observation or legitimate feeling that one’s efforts at whatever task are in vain—that progress is unattainable, that the goal isn’t worth it anyway, that there are better things to do (like, say, falling asleep). For Evagrius, the term arises in reference to the life and challenges of the monk living a monastic life, but we shouldn’t see the term as limited to monastics alone.

For lay people, acedia can manifest as a general sense of apathy and dissatisfaction with one’s spiritual life or daily responsibilities. Acedia can also prompt a pull towards worldly comforts and pleasures as a means of coping with spiritual emptiness. At its core, it represents a disengagement from the challenges and commitments of one’s life, both spiritual and practical, leading to a state of feeling stuck or stagnant, characterized by a lack of purpose, direction, and motivation.

The point is the whole feeling is ultimately a deception. When properly aligned, one’s tasks are worthwhile, the effort will yield fruit, and progress is attainable. In the Evagrian tradition, the goal is not simply to suppress or ignore these thoughts, but rather to learn to recognize them for what they are—false reasonings that need to be countered with wisdom and virtue.

The afflictive nature of logismoi is tied to their deceptive and disordered nature. They afflict us by presenting themselves as reasonable or justified, when in fact they are leading us away from healthy thinking and toward spiritual, psychological, or physical harm. The task of the spiritual life is to learn to see through these false reckonings and to align our thoughts and actions with virtue and goodness. This is done in a variety of ways, including through prayer and meditation, but also through cultivating counter-vailing feelings or actions—fasting counters gluttony, perseverance counters acedia, humility counters vainglory, charity overcomes avarice.

This requires a kind of inner watchfulness or discernment (diakrisis) and a careful observation (paratēresis), where we learn to spot the logismoi when they arise.

Discernment and Observation

When we look at the complexity of these thought patterns— their deceptive nature and their varied manifestations—an important question shows itself: how does one learn to recognize and counter them effectively? This brings us to Evagrius’s methods of discernment (diakrisis) and observation (paratēresis). These practices are central to his approach precisely because it’s not always obvious which category any given thought may fall into, hence the need for instruction, spiritual direction, and appeals to handbooks and traditions.

At the level of mental representations, Evagrius roots his strategy in a phenomenological observation. While the mind may associate one thought or representation with another, sometimes drawing excessive associations with the rapidity one feels in anxiety or psychological turmoil, the mind doesn’t, as a matter of fact, hold multiple thoughts together at once.

The mind holds only one representation at a time, even if in a fleeting way.

This stream of consciousness, of one thought leading to the next, offers an opportunity for the Evagrian practitioner. Namely, since only one thought can be held at a time, one thought can intentionally interrupt another. The method described in Antirrhêtikos is precisely this maneuver of guiding afflictive thought towards virtuous thought through intentional acts of association.

Kevin Corrigan picks up these theme in Evagrius, noting how thoughts can both “cut” or “be cut” by other thoughts.5 Elsewhere Evagrius describes this as the art of antirrhesis, which means both “contradiction” or “response.” The afflictive thought is contradicted or responded to by introducing a countervailing sentiment. For Evagrius, these responses are drawn from prayer, scripture, and psalm. Thus just as there are countervailing actions to afflictive behaviors, there are also thoughts that counter other thoughts. In this sequence of thoughts and counter-thoughts, one can see clearly the Evagrian appeal to martial metaphors.

One is engaged in combat with afflictive thought summed up in what Jacob Given aptly calls “tactical desert empiricism,” a “spiritual athleticism” suited to such combat.6 In this assessment a further fact grows clear in reading Evagrius. The logismoi manifest differently in different people, depending on one’s disposition and circumstance. Lay people, monks living in community (cenobites), and solitary monks (anchorites) all experience different types of afflictive thoughts.

For instance, lay people living out in the social world may experience the temptation of material wealth, but for the monk who has already renounced these possessions, the sphere of attachment to wealth and goods is mostly foreclosed, while the sphere of mental life is opened up greatly, making the battle a substantially more interior one, owing to the enhanced emphasis on prayer and meditation.

These afflictions also vary from person to person based on temperament. If for example you are an introverted, highly intellectual person, then the afflictions may take the form of rumination, distracted ideas, and negative thinking. In a very extroverted and gregarious person, they may take the form of obsession with gossip, status anxiety, or other social or interpersonal maladies. Or perhaps you’re the lucky type of person who experiences both.

Along these lines, Evagrius also included the two large categories of irascible and concupiscible passions. The irascible passions are related to the soul’s capacity for anger, aggression, and aversion. The concupiscible passions are related to the soul’s capacity for desire, appetite, and attraction. These passions also have healthy forms as courage, patience, and temperance, and charity and self-restraint, respectively. In this sense, it’s not that these larger categories are by themselves positive or negative.

Rather, Evagrius follows a distinctly Platonic understanding of the soul and its partitions, so that the rational faculty (logistikon), along with the irascible (thymikon) and concupiscible (epithymetikon) faculties are hemmed together, and work together, in more or less healthy ways, depending on their development through practice. Still, any one individual may be more prone to irascible or concupiscible passions in their unhealthy expressions, and this is what the practices seek to amend.

Here’s Gabriel Bunge on these points:

Lay people living in the world are tempted for the most part by concrete material things; those living together in a community and the cenobites, who live together in a narrow space, are tempted above all by their negligent brethren. There are all the small and large frictions of life in common, which indeed one is able to avoid far less in a monastery than in the world.7

The anchorites, on the other hand, who have given up not only material things, but largely also association with others, are tempted mostly by “thoughts,” that is, by all the images, representations, and so forth that are inevitably left behind in their memories, not only of material things but also of inter-human connections and their problems. These “thoughts” or memories represent the passions in their purest form, so to speak, detached from any direct concrete occasion. Evagrius declares pertinently that this struggle, “man against man,” is by far the toughest, since no human being can be as malicious as a demon.

In other words, the attack surfaces open to afflictive thoughts tend to grow more subtle, and more “interior,” as one travels further down the path of asceticism and renunciation, but they never disappear entirely.

Practice and Contemplation

These more subtle aspects of the monk’s development are present throughout the Evagriana, but they hold a pronounced place in more advanced texts, like On Thoughts, a deep investigation of the subtle emergence and interrelationships between different types of thoughts and their consequences. I recommend Robert E. Sinkewicz’s commentary and translation on this text for readers who want a deeper dive into this sophisticated psychology.8

Throughout On Thoughts, Evagrius is concerned with the way in which the logismoi shape the overall field of consciousness, influencing perception, emotion, and volition. His goal is not merely to catalog these experiences, but to understand their structure and dynamics, and to develop practical strategies for navigating them in the context of the spiritual life. At the same time, Evagrius’s work is not a purely descriptive phenomenology, but a normative one.

It is guided by a specific spiritual telos, the ideal of apatheia, or equanimity.

The phenomenological analysis of the logismoi is ultimately in service of this transformative goal, of reshaping the structures of consciousness in accordance with the ideals of the Christian life—namely, the cultivation of pure prayer, the liberation from passionate attachments, and the development of a contemplative vision capable of perceiving divine reality.

For Evagrius, these ideals aren’t abstract theological principles but represent concrete possibilities for human consciousness when properly purified and prepared. But the soul often has trouble entering into prayer and meditation under certain circumstances, and indeed some circumstances make both nearly impossible.

The ideal of apatheia is thus approached from multiple perspectives, but the practitioner advances towards this goal through the dual methods of ascetical practice (praktikē) and contemplation (theōria). Praktikē involves the countervailing maneuvers we discussed previously, and even before those, a set of preparatory plans that begin with anachoresis, the monk’s withdrawal from secular life.

This withdrawal is often accompanied by a series of life changes aimed at simplifying the monk’s world and can include things like keeping an ascetic diet, avoiding the accumulation of goods or wealth, abstaining from idle preoccupations, and holding to careful social associations.

I am neither a monk nor a renunciate anchorite, but even for a lay person like myself the benefit of some level of simplification of this kind seems evident. In any case, the withdrawal is placed in the service of affording the possibility of hesychia (stillness, or what Evagrius himself calls “a state of deep peace and inexpressible joy”). These practical actions are sometimes said to “guard” hesychia, making its manifestation and sustainment more likely. Hesychia, in turn, is something like the precondition for (or environment within which) contemplation (theōria) can occur.

The monks are in this sense setting themselves up for theōria through praktikē, and through theōria are attaining to deeper levels of insight and development that then modify future modes of praktikē. This cycle, some would say, is an endless progression into unconditional love (agape). As Evagrius puts it: “Agape is the progeny of apatheia. Apatheia is the very flower of ascesis.”9 And so the circle continues without end.

The Evagriana, introduced here in the briefest of forms, offers, then, a rich set of resources for individuals interested in pursuing a more deeply healing and contemplative life.10

The Endless Circle

We have been looking at key elements of the Evagrian path—from initial self-observation through the recognition of afflictive thoughts to the development of discernment. Through examining these practices, we’ve seen how nēpsis teaches us to observe individual thoughts alone but this entire process by which our mental representations form and shape our experience. We’ve explored how diakrisis and paratēresis help us recognize the way different influences manifest in our particular circumstances and temperament. And we’ve seen how the integration of praktikē and theōria enables an ongoing process of inner transformation.

What we see in this examination is Evagrius’s understanding that spiritual development moves in a circular pattern, much like the Desert Fathers’ understanding of prayer itself. Each new level of apatheia enables deeper contemplation, and each deepening of contemplation reshapes our practice. As with the desert tradition’s emphasis on constant prayer, this circle of development demands continual renewal of attention and practice.

The therapeutic wisdom of the desert monks recognized that spiritual healing isn’t achieved through a single breakthrough but through patient, persistent return to these basic practices. In this light, we can better understand why Evagrius placed such emphasis on the relationship between praktikē and theōria—they form an endless cycle of mutual reinforcement, where practical disciplines create the conditions for contemplative insight, and contemplative insight guides and deepens practice.

What we find at the heart of this endless circle, as we’ve seen throughout our examination, is Evagrius’s understanding of the progression toward unconditional love (agape). Like other Desert Fathers and monastic communities of his time, Evagrius saw how love emerges from the cultivation of apatheia, which itself grows from ascetic practice. But this asceticism goes beyond physical practices; it demands a rigorous psychic ascesis as well, a gradual stripping away of mental images and representations until the mind becomes capable of pure prayer.

Through this disciplined observation of thoughts, through the demanding work of inner transformation, the mind is gradually cleared of its attachments and images until it becomes what Evagrius, drawing on the Exodus account of Moses on Sinai, describes as “like sapphire or the color of the sky.” This is not a path of simple-minded self-improvement (as beneficial as that might be for other reasons) but of radical transformation, where the purified mind itself becomes the place of divine encounter—an interior Mount Sinai where, like the elders of Israel, one might glimpse the divine presence.

Title: Attention Is an Art Form​

Description: This talk begins with a simple claim: attention can be shaped and refined on purpose. To this end, we’ll look at how three factors—practice, memory, and orientation—work with attention to make such shaping possible. Drawing on ancient and modern thinkers, we’ll consider how the art of attention connects to the art of living and, in the process, how these activities transform who we are and what shows up for us in perception.

Ticketing information is HERE (mine is the fifth event in the series).

We shouldn’t think of philosophy and contemplation as separate activities.

They share a common root in askēsis, a disciplined mode of self-transformation achieved through intellectual and spiritual practice. Modern minds often uphold a divide between intellectual work and spiritual exercise, but if, as I contend in this essay, contemplative practice acts as a preparation for thought, and thought, in turn, can act as a preparation for contemplative experience, then this is a great mistake, as the divided view fails to see the affinity between these two modes of practice.

This diremption leads to distortions on both sides. On the one hand, a philosophy of pure thought becomes trapped in its own conceptual frameworks, while on the other, contemplation severed from intellectual discipline can lose its capacity for reasoned articulation in the public sphere of ideas.

Only in their unity do we find the full potential of each.

Along these lines, the separation of philosophy from contemplation represents both a historical break and a practical error. To understand what has been lost in this separation, we can look at how ancient and medieval thinkers understood these activities as intimately connected modes of practice, each informing and deepening the other. The Christian contemplative tradition develops this unity between philosophical and spiritual practice in a distinctive way—wherein the emptying of the self through contemplation creates the conditions for divine indwelling, transforming the practitioner beyond mere self-negation into a vessel for Christ’s presence.

This positive movement toward divine indwelling distinguishes Christian apophatic practice from other forms of contemplative self-emptying, especially in their secular forms, revealing how the paradox of using the self to overcome the self can lead, perhaps at first, to absence, but further along the practicing path, to a new form of presence. This transformation demonstrates itself most powerfully in the via negativa tradition (or “way of negation”), particularly through two important Christian contemplative philosophers: Dionysius the Areopagite, a sixth-century Neoplatonist writing in the mystical tradition, and the anonymous fourteenth-century English author of The Cloud of Unknowing, who developed these ideas within the lineage of medieval contemplative thought.

Their works show how the Christian contemplative tradition developed the concepts of agnōsia (“unknowing”) and agnōstos theos (“the unknown God”) into a systematic practice of spiritual transformation. Through their writings, we come to understand how contemplation operates as a craft that can be taught, like woodworking or sculpting. These practices are concerned with the epistemic limits and constraints on our ability to know, placed as they are as a hedge against our over identification with certain thoughts, feelings, or images—the central over identification being, perhaps, with the “self ” that initiates the practice to begin with.

Their insights illuminate not only the epistemological significance of contemplative practice, but also its relation to askēsis more broadly, especially in its distinctive dynamic of using the self to overcome the self. As these texts will show us, willing, knowing, and loving are intricately connected modes of spiritual and philosophical practice. What we receive from these works is an understanding of how these activities operate together in contemplative experience:

On this synthesis, we might say, where intellectual knowledge reaches its limits, the faculty of love reveals new possibilities for understanding through union rather than representation, through participation rather than observation.

By recovering these insights, we can better understand both the historical unity of philosophical and contemplative work and why this unity remains vital for contemporary thought. Such understanding becomes particularly urgent in our time, when the modern separation of thought from practice threatens to foreclose these possibilities for transformation altogether, making unavailable the larger metaphysical and theological comportment that together they can provide.

This relationship between loving and knowing becomes particularly significant at the end of this essay, where I explore how contemplative practice reveals love as a transformative mode of knowing that exceeds the conventional subject–object structure of philosophical epistemology.

Unknowing and Via Negativa

To see how this unity of philosophical and contemplative practice manifests in concrete spiritual exercises, we can turn to a few important texts in the Christian mystical tradition. The works of Dionysius the Areopagite and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing in this sense offer a deep analysis of the relationship between thought and practice, showing how intellectual and spiritual exercises intertwine in contemplation. In these accounts, we find a complex understanding of how practices aimed at transcendence can be systematically taught and developed.

The synthesis of philosophy and contemplation we are looking for lies in reconceptualizing contemplative instruction not merely as the transmission of technical skills, but as the cultivation of a particular kind of attention—one that can ultimately turn back upon and transform the very faculties through which it was initially developed—manifesting as a practice of unknowing, a methodical leaving behind of the senses, reasons, and thoughts of the body and intellect.

The systematic nature of this contemplative craft becomes particularly clear in the specific methodological instructions for contemplative prayer. At the heart of this practice lies a simple technique. One chooses a prayer word—such as “God” or “Love”—that functions as a symbol of intent for accepting divine presence within contemplative awareness. This method displays how even the most transcendent spiritual practices can be approached through concrete, teachable steps.

The method of contemplative prayer itself shows us this interplay between language and transcendence, between conceptual thought and its dissolution. Once the word is offered, the instruction is to sit simply and silently until distracting feelings, thoughts, or images arise, at which point the practitioner is advised to call attention once again back to the prayer word. The aim is to use the word as an invitation to interior divine action and as a method of retrieving attention by calling oneself back to silent presence. The Cloud Author’s words are instructive here:

Fasten this word to your heart, so that whatever happens, it will never go away. This word is to be your shield and spear, whether you are riding in peace or in war. With this word you are to strike down every kind of thought under the cloud of forgetting, so that if any thought should press upon you and ask you what you would have, answer it with no other word but this one. (chapter 7)

This reference to the “cloud of forgetting” introduces one of the text’s central metaphors. The Cloud Author employs the imagery of two distinct but related clouds to orient the practitioner in what might otherwise remain an abstruse spiritual terrain. The cloud of forgetting provides a concrete image for the systematic abandonment of all thought and desire that stands between the practitioner and God.

The second, the cloud of unknowing, offers a spatial metaphor for divine encounter itself—a darkness where the mind’s ordinary operations cease not in emptiness alone, but in presence as well. These two aspects work in concert. As thoughts sink beneath the cloud of forgetting, awareness rises into the cloud of unknowing where God, beyond all comprehension, may be encountered through love alone.

The Cloud Author deploys these images to outline the broader relation between thought and contemplation, where the virtue of contemplative practice acts as a preparation for thought and where thought, in turn, acts as a preparation for contemplative experience. I want to explore the epistemological significance of this relation through a discussion of the principal (consciousness, reason, and will) and secondary (imagination, sense perception) faculties of perception discussed in The Cloud Author’s text.

But I want to start by noting an apparent contradiction in the method of via negativa practices. The method in question here is of course apophasis (etymologically, “away from speaking”), and more specifically forms of apophatic prayer that deal in the denial or negation of forms, words, concepts, phrases, images, or characteristics attributable to God or the divine. Dionysius speaks in this context of a knowledge that exceeds understanding but also of embracing truth in a manner that surpasses regular speech and knowledge through a union that outstrips discursive reason.

The biblical account of Moses’s ascent of Mount Sinai serves as a foundational text for this tradition. Dionysius develops this story—drawing inspiration from Gregory of Nyssa—into a systematic theological framework, which later finds renewed expression in The Cloud of Unknowing. Each thinker in this lineage deepens the paradoxical insight that darkness becomes the condition for a higher form of knowledge. In Dionysius’s account of the ascent, he describes a progression that marks off distinctive spaces and times for the transformation of the whole person.

First, Moses undergoes purification and witnesses divine manifestations in light and sound. Then, accompanied by select priests, he ascends to contemplate not God directly, but the place where God dwells, a distinction that gestures toward the limits of both sensory and intellectual apprehension. Finally, Moses breaks free from the duality of seer and seen, plunging into what Dionysius calls the darkness of unknowing. What makes this mode of knowing particularly radical is its suggestion that true understanding requires a dissolution of ordinary knowledge but also of the very structure of subject–object relation itself.

In this state, beyond both self and other, one achieves union with the divine not through accumulation of knowledge but through its complete cessation, in a transformation that reveals the ineffable and invisible not as mere privations of speech and sight, but as markers of a distinct mode of understanding that transcends ordinary epistemological categories.

It’s not simply that the divine exceeds our typical modes of knowing, but that the very framework within which we typically understand knowledge—as something grasped by a subject about an object—must itself be transcended. Indeed, as he says, the aim of contemplative practice is “that which is beyond all perception and understanding (for this emptying of our faculties is true sight and knowledge)”1 and that “in the earnest exercise of mystic contemplation, thou leave the senses and the activities of the intellect and all things that the senses or the intellect can perceive.”2

The apophatic in this sense is a path towards emptying the self and its reasons into the darkness that transcends the senses and the intellect, but it is not emptiness alone; since, through this emptying, Dionysius says, we shape a “latent image” that reveals a “hidden statute.”3 This metaphor of sculpting is significant, appearing as it does across the contemplative tradition.

Plotinus, for instance, describes the work of self-transformation as analogous to that of a sculptor who “cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work.”4 The metaphor is instructive. In the same way that a sculptor reveals form through removal rather than addition, the contemplative practitioner achieves vision through a process of clearing away. Indeed, Dionysius himself takes up this image in The Divine Names, describing contemplatives as “like sculptors who set out to carve a statue,” removing “every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image” (chapter 2).

What we find here is an understanding of spiritual practice as originally aesthetic—not in any superficial sense, but in the sense that both art and contemplation work through the transformation of perception itself. On this account, the perception of the senses and the conceptual apparatus of the intellect are alike in being unable to grasp the divine, and this method of revealing the inadequacy of both types of knowing through their negation is what apophasis points to. But this negation is simultaneously creative. It sculpts a new way of seeing by removing the obstacles to vision itself.

Askēsis and Self-Overcoming

The metaphor of sculpting also shows us something peculiar about apophatic contemplative practice. The tools we use to carve away obstacles—the words and phrases of prayer—must themselves ultimately be abandoned. This apparent contradiction runs deeper than apophatic practice alone; it marks a central feature of ascetic practice as such. This suggests that ascetic practices have as one of their primary goals the overcoming of the self by means of the self.

This is the image of ascetic practice, or askēsis, that we find in the work of Pierre Hadot. Askēsis is on this view the vehicle through which the deliverances of philosophy, spirituality, and religion alike are achieved, not as embellishments or additions to an already-existing subject, but as acts of overcoming given through transformations in our being.

I believe the Cloud Author intimates this kind of askēsis when he writes:

To put it more exactly, let that thing [the contemplative practice] do with you whatever it pleases and lead you wherever it pleases. Let it do the working, and you be the material it works upon; just watch it, and let it be. Do not interfere with it, as if to help, for fear you should spoil everything. You simply be the wood, and let it be the carpenter; you simply be the house, and let it be the master who lives there. (chapter 34)

The apophatic, as a species of the ascetic, exhibits this same relation of a self to itself initiated in order to overcome itself.

It is telling that both the Cloud Author and Dionysius wrote anonymously and pseudonymously, exhibiting this very quality of de-emphasizing the role of personal identity in favor of letting the practices themselves speak. In other words, the identity of the authors in both cases repeats in the medium of authorship the message of apophaticism and negative theology; namely, that the named and the nameable do not exhaust that to which they refer.

Here we find a key insight about language and reference that goes beyond standard philosophical accounts of naming and meaning. Rather than seeing names and concepts as simply failing to capture their referents—a common enough observation—the apophatic tradition suggests that the very structure of reference itself, the way language reaches out toward its objects, must be transformed. The inability of names to exhaust their referents becomes not a limitation to be overcome but a positive feature that points beyond the conventional structure of linguistic meaning.

And so, as I mentioned earlier, if it is the case that the contemplative practice described in The Cloud of Unknowing is a craft that can be taught, like writing or woodworking, we should now add that this is only part of the story, since the type of craft the Cloud Author describes is also one wherein the craftworker is taken up as the object of the craft itself in an ambiguous circle of initiation and transformation.

Gavin Flood’s analysis of asceticism describes this very ambiguity, disclosing the reciprocal form of the explicit and cataphatic methods of textual and discursive thought—which often form the basis or rungs of a ladder through which the self initiates a process of its own dissolution—and the subsequent apophatic rejection of those very forms of thinking. His work helps us understand how this apparent contradiction enables the transformative power of contemplative practice.

I quote Flood:

There is a deep ambiguity here. On the one hand, asceticism entails the assertion of the individual will, a kind of purified intentionality, yet on the other it wishes to wholly form itself in the shape of tradition and in terms of the tradition’s goals. . . . The eradication of subjectivity in ascetic pursuit entails the assertion of subjectivity in voluntary acts of will. Asceticism, then, is the performance of this ambiguity, an ambiguity that is absolutely central to subjectivity.5

The ambiguity Flood identifies is key to our investigation.

It is the self who through an act of will initiates the ascetic transformation but in so doing works to overcome the very self that initiated the act. This tension between will and self-overcoming opens up deep philosophical questions about the nature of agency and transformation. If agency is typically understood as the capacity of a subject to act intentionally in the world, what are we to make of an intentional act aimed at transcending the very subject who initiates it?

This paradox suggests that transformations of consciousness may require forms of agency that exceed our standard philosophical models of autonomous self-directed action, just as the apophatic method, as we’ve just seen, points beyond the ordinary structure of linguistic meaning. What we find here is what we might call an apophatic anthropology—an understanding of human nature that sees self-transcendence not as contradicting but as fulfilling our deepest identity.

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This apophatic anthropology states that to know the unknown God, one must become similarly unknown to oneself, but this practice doesn’t result in mere negation. Rather, this transformation should be read within the Christian doctrine of imago Dei—the understanding that humans are created in God’s image. This anthropological foundation also implies that self-transcendence fulfills rather than negates our deepest nature, as the soul returns to the divine pattern from which it originated. The practice of self-forgetting thus enables self-realization through reunion with God.

Thus while it’s true that asceticism in general, and apophaticism in particular, follows this pattern of a self who initiates acts that undo or remake the self, we must also underscore an additional, and primary, element of this process emphasized in the works of Dionysius and the Cloud Author. Namely, to state the point again, this unknowing of the self shouldn’t be read as concluding in mere emptiness or negativity. It is, in the Dionysian account, for example, the place in which the self is emptied of self so that Christ can begin to live in the person.

The Dionysian practice of unknowing the self and God alike, then, follows Paul’s dictum, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Thus we have in the Christian apophatic scholarship phrases like the following: “If the soul is united to God in its ground, then it must be as completely unknown and unknowable as God. Consequently, to know the unknown God one must know the unknown self.”6

There is, then, a transformative commerce active in these texts that differs from a discourse on no-self emptiness. Rather, the aim is Eucharistic transformation that aims at divine darkness but it is a darkness that leads towards the luminosity of Christ. For the Cloud Author, this transformative process depends in every way on Christ’s grace. The contemplative’s love for God is made possible through Christ’s prior love, which provides the ground for this radical self-transformation.

The role of tradition here is key, as it provides the framework within which this particular form of self-transcending agency can operate. I want to note again here the connection between asceticism in general and apophatic practice in particular, as both exhibit a similar tension between a self-initiated will that is ultimately overcome and abandoned. Here apophaticism sheds further light on asceticism.

If asceticism in Flood’s sense means taking on the shape of tradition in one’s own life—in his words, in reforming the narrative of the individual’s life within the narrative of tradition—then this suggests a model of identity transformation that differs significantly from both voluntarist accounts of self-creation and determinist accounts of cultural conditioning. Instead, it makes visible how genuine transformation occurs through a complex interplay between individual agency and traditional forms, where tradition provides content but also the very structures through which self-transformation becomes possible.

The self neither simply chooses its path nor is shaped by external forces but rather finds in tradition the tools for its own undoing and remaking. I can reframe my original inquiry as follows. What is the shape of this apophatic tradition? And is there a way to answer this question within the conditions set by apophasis?

It is clear already that the answer lies in the direction of ambiguity and contradiction. The will of the self is involved in practice insofar as the practitioner acts to move towards an end that cannot be grasped intellectually, conceptually, or imagistically but can nevertheless be embraced.

But how?

The epistemological argument latent here—and it applies in theological and philosophical contexts alike, I think—is that while words, ideas, concepts, and images can open out the practitioner’s view into new understandings and configurations of thinking, feeling, and perceiving, they also serve as constraints that bind practice to certain limited and self-referential modes of thinking and being that reduce that which is the focus of our attention to our own capacity to attend, to our very particular ability to conceptualize the object of theology within a set of self-referential anthropocentric epistemic categories. But we cannot stop at self-reference.

The apophatic tradition that descends from Dionysius the Areopagite and finds renewed expression in The Cloud of Unknowing suggests a way through this philosophical impasse.

Willing, Knowing, and Loving

Having traced how ascetic practice enables self-transformation through a complex interplay of will and tradition, we can now see how Dionysius offers a way beyond this apparent paradox. His account suggests an alternative path—an ascent of the self through the Neoplatonic hierarchy of spiritual initiation.

This ascent is aided by the use of prayer words, but also through the use of liturgical symbols, rituals, architectural spaces, as well as the various choreographed elements—colors, sounds, shapes, and scents—at the level of aesthetics, in addition to the words, phrases, and ideas used at the level of texts and discourse. Whatever the medium, the dynamic is the same: A vehicle is deployed to initiate a change but is then left behind.

There is, then, not only a link between the mystical and the discursive, but also between the mystical, the aesthetic, and the ritual wherein the one acts in the service of the others—the explicit words, phrases, and practices acting as preparations for, or even invitations of, modes of mystical comportment, and where moments of mystical comportment can offer deeper truths about the reality of symbol, word, and image.

The role of the will, in this epistemic picture, is to let go of these constraints, even as they may help, initially, to point the practitioner in the direction of the goal of practice—into the darkness of the cloud of unknowing where silence and shapelessness take precedence over the linguistic tools that helped bring about this experience. Indeed, the use of various artistic, liturgical, and discursive implements mirror and imply the Cloud Author’s own understanding of human spiritual faculties.

One can see how aesthetics, rituals, and ideas correspond to the principal (consciousness, reason, and will) and secondary (imagination, sense perception) faculties discussed in The Cloud Author’s text. However, true to form for the via negativa mode of practice, neither object nor word nor movement can adequately capture the God beyond Being that the apophatic tradition gestures towards.

In this, says the Cloud Author, we need not only will and practice, but also, and principally, love. Such willing love is the key epistemological force within the whole movement of contemplative prayer. Where the intellectual faculty of knowledge fails, the faculty of love succeeds. The Christian mystical tradition understands this transformative power of love as a form of divine erōs that transcends ordinary modes of knowing. In this movement beyond conceptual understanding, contemplative practice opens a space where divine indwelling becomes possible precisely through the emptying of self-reference. This represents more than a negative movement of removal, but also a positive transformation through love’s capacity to know beyond conventional epistemological structures.

Again, this transformation challenges traditional philosophical accounts of knowledge. Where conventional epistemology typically positions knowledge as a relation between a knowing subject and a known object, mediated by concepts or phenomenological perception, the epistemology of love proposed here transcends this basic structure. It points instead to a form of knowing that operates through union rather than representation, through participation rather than observation.

This is why the Cloud Author can say, “By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought neither grasped nor held” (chapter 6). It is this willing lovingness that supersedes the other symbolic and discursive implements used in the via negativa tradition, and it is this activity above all others that guides the craftwork of contemplation through its ascension beyond conceptual knowledge and beyond aesthetic appreciation, turning back upon itself to overcome the very self that initiated its own activity.

The relation of thought to contemplation, in the final analysis, is then best described not as one of increasing spheres of intellectual understanding, but as framed within love as a faculty of knowing, as a love that sees, grasps, and recognizes a divinity in God that exceeds all possibility of representation. Beyond being a sentimental act, this is a transfigurative activity that permits an encounter, given through grace, with a mystical unity beyond expression.

Where other contemplative traditions might rest in the darkness of unknowing, the Christian path reveals this darkness as suffused with divine presence—with the emptied self becoming the dwelling place of Christ. In this way, the path of unknowing reveals itself as simultaneously a path of knowing—not through the accumulation of concepts or ideas, but through the transformative power of love itself.

The seeming diremption between thought and contemplation, then, thus resolves into their deeper unity, where each mode of practice sustains and illuminates the other. Without contemplative practice, thought could not grasp how its own limits point beyond themselves to new possibilities of understanding ; without philosophical rigor, contemplative experience would remain ineffable, unable to transform our understanding of knowledge, self, and presence.

The modern mind’s tendency to separate these spheres—and indeed, to exclude the contemplative dimension altogether—has left us unable to access the transformative power that emerges when intellectual and contemplative practices are properly integrated. It is precisely in their integration, as demonstrated in the Christian apophatic tradition, that we find a way to articulate what exceeds articulation and to know what surpasses knowledge.

The structure unfolds in five stages:

1. The speaker puts forth a thesis or proposition to be defended or engaged through a set of prepared remarks

2. The first respondent offers a series of questions, concerns, or comments to be further explored

3. The second respondent does the same, with both respondents offering prepared comments to the primary speaker

4. The speaker responds to both respondents

5. A closing dialogue and discussion

This our second recording for this series, which featured , a lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder. (You can find the first recording here.)

Pedro recently completed his PhD in Philosophy at the University of North Texas and has a BS in Physics from the University of Texas at Dallas. Pedro set out to explore and defend the claim: “The Desire for Truth is the Desire for Justice,” by drawing from Plato, Simone Weil, Henri Bergson, Karl Jaspers, and others.

As you’ll hear, I was quite sympathetic to Pedro’s claim, even as both Jacob and I had a number of questions and provocations that I think left all three of us in a place of deeper appreciation for the claim and what its truth value may entail.

We’ll likely continue to iterate on the format as we proceed through the next sessions, but for my part I was quite happy with how this discussion played out. One of our central goals with this series is to produce, through this protocol, a space that can afford a greater intensity for thought, and I think we’re on our way to doing just that.

I’ll add that this is not a debate series focused on winning an argument, but a method through which the participants can achieve a deeper understanding of the topics raised. More to come soon.

1. The Philosophical Priority of Askēsis

My philosophical focus over the past several years has been to bring into the foreground the following idea:

Philosophical insight is delivered by philosophical practice—that what philosophy delivers in proposition and argument, or can be shown through phenomenological demonstration, is downstream of the practices that make all three possible. These practices I group under the word askēsis, or spiritual exercise. These are practices that transform the perceiver by transforming who he or she is as a person.

The point is that what we see and understand is linked to who we are as persons, and who we are as persons is, in part, a result of the practices that form us as people. This view of philosophy is centered on movements in thought that precipitate transformations in perception, secured by practice.

Among other things, this approach implies a specific way of reading and interpreting texts. I am looking in them for reference to these practices or movements that generate the discursive account we find within them. In the tradition of Pierre Hadot, who showed that ancient philosophy was as much a way of life as a system of ideas, I take philosophical exposition to be the expression or outcome of certain formative practices—often tacit, sometimes explicit—that shape not only the content but also the very mode of perception from which philosophical insights emerge.

In many philosophical texts, what we receive is the result of a sustained perceptual or cognitive discipline, a set of insights, arguments, or distinctions that presuppose a certain orientation or transformation of the thinker. But these practices are rarely thematized; they remain in the background, if mentioned at all, even when they are essential to the very possibility of what the text discloses.

The genres of philosophical writing are many, but they share the quality of hiding their work—not work in this sense of argument, but work in the sense of practice, something that takes place somewhere off the page. In my readings of Henri Bergson these past few weeks, I have found a particularly illuminating example of what I mean. Bergson is a useful case study because he both thematizes this kind of transformative movement in perception and exemplifies in so many ways precisely what Hadot meant by philosophy as a way of life. (Indeed, Bergson is one of Hadot’s central examples in his works, and he was a primary influence on Hadot throughout his life, dating as far back as his high school graduation thesis, continuing through to his late essays.)

Keith Ansell-Pearson has devoted a whole essay to this connection, noting how for Bergson philosophy is at once a “way of life,” “a new way of seeing the world,” and “a preparation for the art of living.” On these points, Ansell-Pearson writes:

Bergson provides a conception of philosophy as a way of life in this sense: he does not simply offer his readers the possibility of acquiring abstract knowledge, but instead his work aims to encourage the cultivation of a special mode of perception (intuition and intellectual sympathy) that will dramatically transform our vision of the world and in the process change our comportment and sense of being in the world.

Ansell-Pearson hones in on the Ignatian phrase “spiritual exercise” in his treatment of both Hadot’s and Bergson’s understanding of philosophy as a way of life, a phrase we can treat interchangeably with askēsis to arrive at the same understanding.

The idea is simple. In the same way that there are physical exercises for transforming the body, there are philosophical exercises that can transform our minds, and, so, our way of being in the world. Bergson’s intuition (and the related notion of sympathy) is, for Ansell-Pearson, the central spiritual exercise that Bergson’s philosophy commends us to practice. It is “a unique mode of extended perception,” as he calls it, one that moves us “beyond the human condition.” I want to draw out Bergson on these references to movements or practices in thought, both to show their centrality to his philosophy and to surface how they, unfortunately, often take the shape of vague allusions in his philosophical works. These references show how integral practice is to his metaphysics, even when left undeveloped.

To see how this relationship between practice and expression works in detail, we can follow Bergson into his own texts, where the distinction between analysis and intuition is explicitly drawn and where the practical movement underlying that distinction shapes his metaphysics.

2. Analysis, Intuition, and Metaphysics

The following passages come from the essays published in Bergson’s The Creative Mind, especially in “Introduction Part II” and the “Introduction to Metaphysics,” wherein he lays out the argument for his method of intuition, the method that for Bergson makes his metaphysics possible. In what follows, I describe the distinctions he makes between “analysis” (or “intelligence,” elsewhere) and “intuition” from one short section of the “Introduction to Metaphysics” to foreground how Bergson, ultimately, secures this distinction via a movement in perception that he passes over but is clear in saying is unique, and central, to this approach to metaphysics.

My point is to show that this aspect of his account is noted but then moved beyond rather quickly, without much mention of what it is, or how to reproduce it. A view of philosophy that foregrounds practice, I would argue, would spend more time on this procedure, treating it not as a passing gesture but as the very condition for the possibility of philosophical insight, a condition we find more precisely described in religious handbooks, as we’ll see. In Bergson’s case, the practice is signaled, even emphasized, but remains largely unexamined—its methodological priority affirmed, its practical enactment left undeveloped. I don’t fault Bergson for any of this; he did not set out to write a handbook of philosophical techniques. He, like so many other philosophers, is reporting what he sees from a point of view, a point of view replete with the vision of a unique man, one with a canny sense of depth and sensitivity.

Let us look, then, at the passages in question, where Bergson develops his difference between practical knowledge, achieved through concepts and actions, and the possibility of metaphysics, which requires a different kind of engagement with reality altogether—one that is at once disinterested and sympathetic (in the Plotinian sense of a “cosmic sympathy” with the whole of life as a continuous movement). Along these lines, Bergson suggests that “the usual sense of the word ‘think,’” means to fit the right concepts appropriate to our practical needs. He says, “nothing is more legitimate than this method of proceeding, as long as it’s only a question of practical knowledge of reality.” This process, Bergson continues, “is the ordinary role of ready-made concepts, those stations with which we mark out the passage of becoming.” I’ll quote Bergson at greater length to sharpen this distinction:

Our intelligence, when it follows its natural inclinations, proceeds by solid perceptions on the one hand, and by stable conceptions on the other. It starts from the immobile and conceives and expresses movement only in terms of immobility. It places itself in ready-made concepts and tries to catch in them, as in a net, something of the passing reality. It does not do so in order to obtain an internal and metaphysical knowledge of the real. It is simply to make use of them, each concept (like each sensation) being a practical question which our activity asks of reality and to which reality will answer, as is proper in things, by a yes or a no. But in doing so it allows what is the very essence of the real to escape. (Italics in the original)

The method of analysis appears at this level of conceptual parceling. It shows itself through a carving out of the world into clear and distinct categories and ideas, on the one hand, and their corresponding objects and events, on the other. The unexamined mind may take these parcelings to be artifacts of reality in itself, but a more conscientious one would observe that these artifacts are, in fact, effects wrought into existence by our own epistemic proceduralism. These are practical distinctions, not ontological ones—habits of thinking and perceiving rather than veridical perceptions—and we miss reality in its truer character when we comport with Being in this way. The method of intuition, Bergson says, shows us something different: “What I find beneath these clear-cut crystals and this superficial congelation is a continuity of flow comparable to no other flowing I have ever seen,” is how he puts it.

This flow is what Bergson names duration, the object of metaphysical intuition.

In other words, Bergson is saying that our knowledge of things is mostly a practical knowledge that elides a deeper knowledge that he argues is secured by his method of intuition. This method, Bergson says, is what allows us to enter into the project of metaphysics. To stay at the level of conceptual practicality is “to forget” the possibility of metaphysics, which requires a different approach, one that can “penetrate to the innermost nature of things.” This work, in his words:

Can only be an effort to re-ascend the slope natural to the work of thought, to place oneself immediately, through a dilation of the mind, in the thing one is studying, in short to go from reality to concepts and not from concepts to reality.

This idea, which the rest of Bergson’s writing in this essay rests upon, is argued for by making a distinction between a practical and a metaphysical claim. But the claim itself rests on a movement, on “a dilation of the mind,” as he calls it.

This dilation, in turn, enables a demonstration from the point of view that one enters into as a result of the movement itself. For Bergson, this shift in perception discloses the reality of duration—the flow below those clear-cut crystals—that subtends our conceptual parsing of reality into practically useful regions of separable and analyzable objects, events, and causes. One would think, then, that what would follow from here would be a practical instruction for enacting such a dilation. Instead, what we read is a treatise on the limits of analytic procedure when it tries to understand duration in the terms of its “ready-made concepts” versus the intuitive method that can disclose something deeper, and, I would add, more elusive-but-true about reality.

But no such commentary arrives—here or in how Bergson is often taught.

3. Bergson as a Case Study in Implicit Practice

Indeed, when we teach Bergson, we teach his ideas, arguments, and texts; we place him in a field of contrasts, emphasizing how his philosophy differs from a Plato a Schopenhauer or a Whitehead. We may even teach how his ideas were appropriated by Deleuze, or how he fits into larger traditions of French philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries. What we don’t do is teach the technique of intuition, or the other practices that might need to be in place to enact such a maneuver, and we certainly don’t teach a curriculum centered on something called “Dilation of the Mind 101,” even though it is this movement of thought from which Bergson’s philosophy springs.

It’s clear in Bergson that these are existential operations one can put into play in one’s own life—an act he suggests is necessary in order to do metaphysics. But that’s not what we get, even though Bergson’s own philosophy is a testimony to the effectiveness of these techniques. Indeed, his whole philosophy could be summed up as a phenomenological description of the world from the point of view of these maneuvers. Without them, we would have no philosophy we call “Bergsonian” or “Bergsonism.” No event that precipitates the philosophy.

We point to these practices, as Ansell-Pearson does, but we don’t center them, let alone teach them. I don’t point this out to discredit Bergson’s reasoning. And my aim here is not to litigate the integrity of his claims—to ask, for example, if concepts as such really are reducible to practical knowledge alone, or to press him on the reality of form in his image of duration, two places where I might question him on more technical grounds. What I am trying to do instead is examine and make explicit the preconditions for the insights that Bergson argues are central to his philosophy, and to foreground a tendency all too pervasive in philosophical writing; namely, that the key procedure, or movement, is mentioned only in brief terms, even when it is the movement, the procedure, the protocol—and the practices that might secure them—that are in many ways the most important part of the discussion.

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To be sure, there can be something crass about reducing these methods to simple and sober protocols, and there is some sense in which these practices should be guarded and transmitted only in specific circumstances, teacher-to-student, but it would be saying too much to suggest that they have no place in our curricula, or that we have no means or methods by which to transmit them. Unfortunately, Bergson goes on to gesture at the repeated use of these movements, or “acts,” as he calls them, without naming them or describing how we might learn to be transformed by them. As he says:

Without taking up the study of these different points here, let us confine ourselves to showing how the intuition we are discussing is not a single act but an indefinite series of acts, all doubtless of the same genus but each one of a very particular species, and how this variety of acts corresponds to the degrees of being.

I must respond to this statement and say: Henri, please do take up the study and articulation of these different acts here! Which of these “acts” do you practice? How many of them are there? How does one incur this “dilation of the mind” so central to your method of intuition and so to your metaphysics and the “degrees of being” they disclose? If, as I have argued elsewhere, degrees of disclosure follow from degrees of attentional transformation, then what Bergson names as a dilation of the mind must be preceded by—or at least made possible through—some form of askēsis. That is, there must be practices that prepare perception for the kind of intuitive entry into Being that Bergson’s metaphysics requires. The difficulty is that while Bergson acknowledges the necessity of these “acts,” he leaves them unnamed and unexplained, even as they anchor the possibility of his method.

4. Recovering Practice

What we do receive is an additional series of descriptions that point further to yet more movements in thought. For example, Bergson tells us that “to philosophize means to reverse the normal direction of the workings of thought” (italics in the original). This claim follows from his distinction between the analytic or intellectual thinking of practical knowledge and the intuitive knowledge of metaphysics that we explored earlier. For Bergson, it is this intuitive method that enacts the “reversal” of the normal direction of analytical thinking. We can observe here, with some amusement, that intuition is a counter-intuitive movement in thought’s normal patterning.

Before turning to the question of where we might find the practical means for enacting Bergson’s reversal, it is worth seeing how he positions this method against one of the most influential accounts of philosophical inquiry in the modern era. Bergson sets up Immanuel Kant as his foil not simply to disagree on abstract grounds, but because Kant represents a form of philosophical method that, while immensely rigorous, remains bound to the very symbolic and conceptual frameworks that Bergson believes must be transcended. If Kant’s system cannot accommodate metaphysical intuition, then philosophy as practiced in this mode will never produce the kind of perceptual transformation that Bergson regards as essential, which means we must look elsewhere for a method capable of delivering it.

The insufficiency of Kant’s transcendental philosophy to grasp metaphysical intuitions (or what Kant called “intellectual intuitions”), stuck as it is in what Bergson calls metaphysical symbolism, means that for philosophy to proceed in the way Bergson suggests, it will need a method that moves beyond the categorical and conceptual architecture that normally structures the field of knowledge and experience. This method, as we’ve seen, is the method of intuition, that program which we can now say reverses the normal structure of thinking, a reversal that amounts to the disruption of thought at the level of symbols and concepts, moving from world to concepts instead of concepts to world, as Kant enjoins us to do.

Bergson says that one can move from the mobility of reality—its flowing and generative character—to the immobility of our pragmatic, ready-made concepts, but we cannot do the reverse. “Dogmatism,” in Bergson’s view, is what happens when we start our thinking from the second of these positions, attempting to arrest the mobile complexity of the real with the static, immobility of the concept. If this is right, then Kant’s critical philosophy—dependent as it is on just this kind of categorical closure—ends up, in the final analysis, as yet another kind of dogmatism in this technical sense (a choice irony considering that awakening us from our “dogmatic slumber” is precisely the effect that Kant’s philosophy was supposed to have on our thinking).

And so Bergson says, “metaphysics . . . must transcend concepts and arrive at intuitions” and that “the principle justification for metaphysics is a break with symbols.” Elsewhere, Bergson will note, as a result of this break, “metaphysical experience will be bound up with that of the mystics.” We see here, then, further outlines of what the practice of intuition looks like, as this reversal of thought in the undoing of symbolic conceptuality. But here, again, we are left wanting. Bergson even goes on to say that “this reversal has never been practiced in a methodical manner.”

I’m not convinced this is accurate.

Thus much as he glosses over the “acts” of intuition, he glosses over the means by which thought might be reversed even though this is what his philosophy depends upon. Hadot for his part spends more effort elucidating what this turning motion might mean for philosophy, a theme I tried to explore, following Hadot, in terms of the Greek epistrophe, periogoge, and metanoia and the Latin conversio—all different attempts to “turn” the philosopher’s thinking towards a different existential orientation. To be fair, these texts are also short on practical advice, but they do soften the claim that these movements “have never been practiced in a methodical way.”

Similarly, Ansell-Pearson ends his essay with a commentary on Bergson’s late work The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, wherein we find some hesitation from Bergson about the role of philosophy when engaging in these matters of practice, philosophy, and contemplation. The risk, as Ansell-Pearson tells it, is that for Bergson:

There is too much contemplation in philosophy, to the point where the philosopher becomes utterly self-absorbed in pursuing the task of living a life of wisdom. . . . Ultimately, then, for Bergson it is necessary to turn to dynamic religion and to the religious mystic as a way of breaking out of the limits of philosophy and the self-absorption of the philosopher.

I agree with Ansell-Pearson and Bergson here on the limits and risks of philosophy, and I would only add that the kinds of instruction I am seeking from Bergson’s texts—and from philosophical texts in general—have more in common with the handbooks of religious and spiritual instruction. The via negativa and apophatic traditions, in particular, do more than describe the goal of moving beyond symbolic thought; they provide sequences of exercises, meditative progressions, and disciplined acts of detachment aimed at accomplishing exactly this. These are methodical programs for emptying the mind of its conceptual limitations, a movement that mirrors Bergson’s own call to “break with symbols” and to bind metaphysical experience with that of the mystics, especially in relation to the task of moving beyond, or negating, the symbolic affordances of our thinking through specific practices.

Philosophy could in this way benefit from the handbooks of religious and spiritual traditions, which have preserved with far greater concreteness the kinds of transformative exercises that Bergson’s method presupposes. Recognizing this does not mean philosophy must become theology, but it does mean acknowledging that the practical means for such transformation may already exist outside its current canon. The only question is of the coordination between them. These are the ideas a philosophy centered on askēsis must confront. They are not meant to subordinate expression to practice, but to show that philosophical insight—whether expressed in concept, argument, or demonstration—depends upon a prior transformation in the perceiver. The written articulation of ideas is indispensable, but it is also, in many cases, the outcome of a disciplined reorientation that remains implicit.

A philosophy of askēsis isn’t in competition with the philosophy of expression. Indeed, expression is one of its modes, when properly trained. And, to be sure, we could even run run this statement in reverse, noting how expression may also transform perception as its own kind of practice. However, its purpose is still to make visible the formative work that underwrites expressiveness. This, I believe, is central to philosophy’s task: It is not enough to state what is true, but to prepare the soul to see it, and to leave us, the readers, with some sense as to the method of achievement by which we might follow in the philosopher’s footsteps, something we find in the handbooks and texts of religious and spiritual instruction, but less so in the works of philosophy, even though at their most superlative they depend on these very same exercises of transformation, as we see so clearly in Bergson’s texts.

I have been giving increasing thought to memory these past few months. Initially, I explored the topic through the work of scholars like Francis Yates and Mary Carruthers; both of whom explore memory in the context of the history and practice of memorization and the role places and texts play in this work.

In these accounts, we find depictions of the art of memory in ancient mnemonic systems, in memory theaters, and in monastic and scholastic disciplines of shaping the soul through repetitive reading and writing practices (as we find in Lectio divina and elsewhere), all treated as means of training attention and contemplation.

More recently, I’ve been drawn to Henri Bergson’s work on what we might call the metaphysics and phenomenology of memory and perception.

In this piece, a first sketch on Bergson, I draw him out on the relation between memory and perception, and the unique role that thought plays in this work. If we follow Bergson and accept the idea that all perception, even at its basic level of sensation, involves memory, then we should ask: What lies outside of these “memory-images”—Bergson’s term for how past experience endures within us, cooperating with present perception—and how do we step outside of this patterning?

My answer, argued for below, is thinking, which, if we accept my terms, ends up being a very rare activity indeed, one that we can’t identify with recall or representation alone. Instead, thinking must be something else—because if it were only recall or representation, it would merely repeat what is already known. Thinking must in some sense be a kind of interruption, one that I will argue has three characteristics: It is external (to repetition and memory), contemplative, and generative. I mean these in the sense of thinking as partaking in the movements of ekstasis, theōria, and poēsis, or in a kind of receptivity and creativity that stands outside the structure of repetition.

1. Memory and Perception

Bergson himself doesn’t provide a theory of thinking in this sense; what follows is my use of his framework to study, via negativa, the space in which such an account might emerge. To get there, we first need to understand how Bergson parses the field of memory itself. When Bergson turns his attention to memory, we find not a singular and undifferentiated field, but a multiplicity with distinctions, a taxonomy of different kinds of memory that hang together in different ways depending on our actions and circumstances. As this field comes into greater focus, details and differences emerge—a whole ecology of remembering.

Thus with Bergson we might identify memory as contraction (how the plurality of moments are synthesized into a unified whole), perception (how the content of experience is realized as meaningful in a basic semantic sense), habit (a non-representational physical response), recollection (memory as the representation of a past event), and pure (the totality of one’s past experiences as a whole). For a deeper exploration of these distinctions, I recommend this paper by Trevor Perri, who has done us all a great favor by drawing out these terms from across Bergson’s many works and showing how they, in the end, form a variegated but continuous whole.

For our present purposes, I am interested in memory in the first two senses—contraction and perception—since these are the ones most relevant to Bergson’s account of memory and sensation. As he says in Matter and Memory, “There is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience.”

The implication of this view is that memory is both what secures the possibility of intelligible perception, on the one hand, and what establishes the habits that constrain perception to past encounters, on the other. When we read a statement like this one, we are tempted to see it as a commentary on our psychological profile—in other words, that we bring a personal history to our impressions, one that colors perception with its preferences, inclinations, and idiosyncratic histories.

This observation is true enough insofar as our perception of things is influenced by an individual past. But I do not think this level quite gets at Bergson’s meaning, or at least it is not limited to this level of individual psychology alone. It is not, in the main, a commentary on how our personal psychology projects meaning onto experience. Rather, I think the insight refers to a much smaller, more subtle, and more fleeting level of perception. With Bergson, we are at the interstice of memory and sensation, down to their root in the bringing‑to‑presence of objects, events, and causes as such.

Here we see Bergson as the philosopher of the very small—“the fugitive moment,” in his words—of the passing present, the interval of contact between perception and memory, arising and perishing in the flux of awareness. As Bergson says elsewhere, “We see in sensible qualities contractions effected by our memory.” If I see and behold a particular phenomenon—say, a flower—I am already for Bergson downstream of a very elaborate and variable process. It is not just that I have identified some living thing and brought it under the concept of “plant,” then “flower,” then, “magnolia,” but that I have also brought to this encounter a variety of meaningful details made available to me by my previous encounters with plants, flowers, and magnolias.

These details let me draw attention to the particularity of individual flowers whilst recognizing their standing in relation to other flowers, both of the same kind and beyond. This process is also what let’s us draw normative conclusions in our observations. We can say this plant is healthy, sick, in need of water or sunlight, et cetera, as a consequence of this comparative capacity born in memory.

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It is precisely this detail and judgment that memory, in Bergson’s sense, begins to furnish. And it is because memory enriches perception in this way—embroidering it, layering it with compound detail—that I can bring an increasingly rich engagement to phenomena. We need only reinsert the missing hyphens in our terms to see how this works: we say re‑presentation, re‑collection, re‑cognition; all instances, in a sense, of re-petition. But these repetitions don’t just stand alone; they layer on top of one another in a cumulative fashion, in the same way one might layer paint onto a canvas to achieve a richer and more deliberate effect, except here the layers expand iteratively and retroactively within perception itself, as memory and sensation encounter phenomena again and again with increasing depth and detail. This is how perception learns and grows by accumulating experience into presence as we perceive.

For Bergson, this layering on of perception through memory is what “thickens,” so to speak, what we’re aware of when encountering the world. Memory in this way is concerned, first, with this level of recognition, but also, more generally, with the passage of time as such. The flowing intervals of time synthesized in consciousness through memory are what allow for our intelligible perception of motion and change, and so for the possibility of apprehending causal relations between events.

Any sense of succession requires a past synthesized with the present into an ongoing future in a continuous process. The past is still present inside the present, we might say. In their introduction to Bergson’s writing, Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarky describe this co‑presence as “the immanence of past and present” or “a virtual co‑existence of past and present.” This is part of what Bergson means by duration (durée)—time sensed not a series of discrete instants like points on a line, but a living flow in which past, present, and future interpenetrate. Duration is what lets time be felt as a continuum rather than a sequence of instances, and allows for its growth and deepening in and through experience, like we see in a living being.

2. Memory Overwritten

But this iterative process also carries a downside, depending on whether we emphasize the memory pole or the perception pole in our perceiving. Bergson posits two theoretical extremes: pure memory (memory without perception or content) and pure perception (perception without memory, a kind of absolute, unmediated encounter). These are hypothetical conditions more than concrete aspects of our experience—save perhaps for rare limit cases—but they provide a helpful way to imagine the continuum on which our ordinary experience sits.

But in the very act of enriching perception, memory also threatens to flatten it, overlaying the living moment with its stored templates of concepts and ideas. The risk of recalling the general concept over the particular instance is that I may replace the encounter with the word or concept I associate with it, and thus fail to encounter the phenomena in its singularity. “It’s just another flower; they are all the same,” we might say. This move has replaced the phenomena with the concept of the phenomena, and this is important because the phenomenon in question will be both the same and different to the other members of its class. It is the same at the level of word and concept, and different at the level of empirical instance.

Without the concept, held in memory, all phenomena would appear distinct, singular, unrelated—William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Without the instance, all phenomena would appear the same and interchangeable. This, then, shows us in the brief moments of perceptual awareness one example of the much more pervasive philosophical question of the relation between identity and difference, not as a logical, formal problem, but as a constitutive feature of perception as such.

It is not too much to say that the antinomies of philosophy—one and many, identity and difference, being and becoming, particular and universal—are at play in the subtle texture of perception itself. Already here in perception do we find the work of Heraclitus and Parmenides in tension, the contest between flux and permanence, before we’ve attempted to say anything at all. In this sense, all philosophy, at least in part, is always phenomenology, whatever else it might be.

And this observation raises for us the following questions: What are we doing when we examine the phenomenology of perception in this way? What activity are we engaged in when these memory-images fail to grasp the phenomena in question? What do we do when there are no adequate memory-images to choose from? We would enter into a field that is neither the automatic recollection of habit nor the intellectual work of deliberately calling forth a representation adequate to our circumstance. I’ll propose that the answer to this question is “thinking,” in the particular way I’ve described it above—as composed of ekstasis, theōria, and poēsis.

From here, we can put the situation more plainly: Thinking is what happens when we do not know what to think, when we do not know what we’re perceiving.

Another way to say this that differentiates the two meanings of “thinking” in this statement would be: Thinking is what happens when we do not know what to recall, represent, or repeat. If we take recourse to memory—to our stock of extant knowledge, concepts, and representations—then we should not call this activity “thinking” but remembering, applying, or rule‑following.

For this reason, thinking can only happen in a field where existing concepts, feelings, and sensations lack purchase on a phenomenon or event. The precipitating event is something singular—the first of its kind, at least for that perceiver—and the thought that meets it must be likewise singular. If the event resembled past experience closely enough, we wouldn’t think; we would simply recall the concept, the kind of thing under which it can be classed, and perceive the event in those terms. If, however, what we encounter has no existing corresponding concept, then we must think outside of this storehouse of ideas and memories.

How, then, are we to think about thinking in this context?

3. The Interruption Called Thinking

Not, as I’ve just said, by identification and recall, but through some other means. Gilles Deleuze, drawing in part on Bergson, notes that thinking does not begin in recognition. It begins when something shocks thought into motion—an encounter with a sign, an event, an intensity, an anomaly that cannot be subsumed under available concepts, forcing thought beyond its usual complement of ideas. Concept creation emerges in just this encounter. This would be a thinking that is not yet representing—and may not even aim at representing—a thinking that is something other than following an existing procedure or system of pattern matching.

All of this brings us to another simple claim: The meaning of thinking is its non‑repeated nature. In other words, its uniqueness is the very essence of what thinking is.

In this way, thinking is what stands outside of repetition—or at least, breaks free from it for a moment—and therein we find the reason for its value. Thought can be both singular and abstractly general, singular in the sense that it arises only once in this exact form, yet abstract in the sense that it can give rise to concepts or ideas that transcend the moment of their creation. Its value emerges from this non‑repeatable character. In other words, thought, insofar as it is thought as I’ve described it, is 1‑of‑1. By definition it is scarce.

The economists would describe thought as non‑fungible; it cannot be traded in for another item of its kind because there is no other item of its kind. Even the recall of a thought one has had is different from the thought when it first arrived. It only happens once—hence the importance of needing to write it down before it slips away. Does this mean that every thought will be insightful, useful, or interesting? No, of course not. But in the ecology of mind, thought is the rarest of creatures, as each thought is, perhaps, its own kind. It only later becomes a concept—the means by which one may have the thought again, as a type of memory—bringing it into the level of established ideas available for recollection or circulation or education.

If this is right, then:

• Thinking is not a repetition of the same; it is not simply the application of identity. That activity is better called recall or representation.

• Thinking is not inarticulate or disordered; it is not merely an awareness of sheer difference. That state is better described as confusion or wonder.

• Thinking is not calculation; it is not only the mechanical application of rules or concepts. That belongs to procedure, not to thought.

Identity and difference as limit concepts can certainly be ingredient in thinking, but if thinking is fully neither (1), (2), nor (3), then the negative space left over must hold at least some shade of our answer. I believe part of that answer is creation, generation, life, novelty—poēsis—a kind of creation beyond recombination.

4. Waiting for the Birds

This involves, centrally, a kind of contemplation—a receptive waiting at the steps of confusion, of the failure of our concepts. Originally, a “templum” was an instrument used in augury to mark out a space in the sky, forming a kind of clearing. The augur would literally “cut” the sky into quadrangles with his staff, then sit and watch for the flight of birds, noting their number, direction, and behavior as signs. Contemplation, in its root sense, then, is something like “waiting for the birds”—the discipline of resting, observing, and waiting for what might appear within the clearing.

When we do not yet have the adequate concepts, we must release the errant flow of pattern‑matching and wait—for what? For new signs, for hints of meaning, for symbols more adequate to what we’re trying to understand. This waiting, this resting, this contemplating is, I think, one of the preconditions for leaving the field of representation and memory, letting it fall by the wayside as we move outward beyond the field. And it is in that “beyond” that the next movements—ekstasis and poēsis—become possible.

Insofar as this is possible, thinking stands outside of repetition through a kind of contemplative suspension or patient waiting—or at least it breaks free from repetition for a moment by letting go of, or releasing, the project of representing. In this process, we find its true character. It is essentially ecstatic (in the sense of ekstasis—from Greek ek “out” + stasis “standing,” literally “standing outside”).

Thinking is going outside of ourselves, outside of our memory and perception, back into the unknown outdoors, and back in again. To think, then, is to move outside of repetition into creation, poēsis. Here we come closest to what Bergson called intuition—not the intellect’s analytic parsing, but a direct, creative sympathy with the flowing stream of activity around us. Intuition, for Bergson, is the act of entering into the movement of life itself; and poēsis, in the sense I’m using it, is the outcome of that sympathy, the moment of a new thought form or concept in its genesis.

Thus we can say of thinking that it is contemplative, because it requires preparatory waiting and receptivity; ecstatic, because it requires stepping outside the field of memory and repetition; and poetic, because it requires the creation of new words, concepts, or images. Bergson himself doesn’t give us this account of thinking outright. What he offers instead is a map of this landscape of memory, perception, and duration. I’ve used that terrain to work via negativa and shade in what thinking might look like when it doesn’t operate in this space of repetition, memory, and perception.

If Bergson shows us how deeply memory saturates perception, then this sketch asks what might happen when we break with the saturation of representation that colors our everyday perception, when there is no ready memory‑image to call upon. The answer, I’ve suggested, is a form of thinking that waits, exits, and generates, a thinking not of recall, but of creation.

To think is to create.

Gathering is both metaphor and practice when it comes to thinking.

The etymology of “thinking” suggests this, as the Latin cogitare (to think) derives from cogere (to gather together). We gather our thoughts, collect ourselves, bring ideas together, and we can do this work more or less skillfully, guided by aesthetic criteria like clarity, depth, and coherence.

In this essay, I examine how St. Augustine and St. Gregory of Nyssa understood this process—Augustine through his analysis of cogitare, cogere, and memoria, and Gregory through his account of contemplative ascent.

Through their work, we can better understand both the problem of mental dispersion and the practices that support sustained attention. While I draw on these thinkers’ established philosophical frameworks, my interest here is primarily in what their insights suggest for the practice of thinking and attention.

This means emphasizing certain aspects of their thought—particularly those concerning the gathering and directing of mind—that might receive less attention in standard theological or philosophical treatments. What we gain from this approach is a view of thinking as both art and ascetic discipline, a craft of gathering that requires preparation and practice.

St. Augustine

The practice of gathering takes different forms in Augustine’s thought.

His reflection from the Confessions, cited above, shows how Augustine understands thinking as a gathering of dispersed ideas from memory into order and presence. This passage is particularly significant, as the Confessions itself demonstrates this gathering he describes—it’s both a philosophical autobiography and an exercise in collecting thought and memory into meaningful form.

Augustine describes this kind of gathering, but he also performs it through the very act of writing. Thus “to bring together” (cogo) is “to think” (cogito). For Augustine, the further idea, memoria, extends beyond what we typically mean by “memory.” It includes remembrance of the past, but also our attention to the present, anticipation of the future, and even our capacity for self-knowledge.

It is the mind’s active power to hold and organize experience across time. When Augustine speaks of memory, he means this broader faculty through which we maintain continuity of consciousness and understanding—both essential to the gathering together of thinking.

Thinking means bringing the mind together through attention.

Augustine suggests we will this to happen, we even compel it to happen, he says. Thus we say, “Let me gather my thoughts” or “Let me collect myself ” because we don’t, for the most part, walk around with fully formed thoughts in our heads, even about things we already “know.” Knowledge is always reconstruction, in this view.

What we walk around with is a generative capacity—to gather, to collect, to organize the memory of things we have, including our knowledge of things (this includes for Augustine mathematical knowledge). Each thought is a gathering; even if it’s not a new idea, every bringing-together-in-thought is a re-instantiation of an idea.

Memory is thus a kind of repetition. Bringing to mind things we already know is a kind of collecting again, a re-collecting.

Recollection is a deliberate action performed by an intentional mind who wishes to draw him or herself back to presence in the present in a more or less unified state of awareness. Our thoughts and attention are often scattered about, and we have to re-collect them at each moment.

This is the skill of memory.

Augustine is describing in these passages our use of thinking and memory in-the-moment, but in his autobiographical work, we see this same kind of gathering-together of thought and memory over the period of a lifetime. The narrative structure of a life hangs together through this ability to collect and arrange.

You could in this sense view short- and long-term thinking better as short- and long-term gathering, each involving different strategies and tools (books, records, etc.). There is a gathering of me, today, over seconds and minutes. A gathering of my life over years and decades. A people gather together to gather thoughts about their own history over decades and centuries. And there is an aesthetics to this process.

We say someone’s thinking is “clear” or “muddied” or “straightforward” or “deep” or “meandering.” These are aesthetic criteria. Each one is a comment on the structure of someone’s thinking, on its order and arrangement. It’s done more or less well in the same way that a work of art is created more or less well.

Thinking is gathering but gathering isn’t just making piles; it’s creating shapes and forms and structures and patterns. There’s a whole craft and art to thinking—ascetics and aesthetics. Information processing alone it is not.

This is where Gregory is helpful.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

While Augustine and Gregory approach the problem of thinking differently, they share a concern with how human thought relates to divine truth.

Both recognize that our ordinary thinking must undergo a transformation—whether through gathering or flowing upward—to approach what ultimately exceeds thought’s grasp. For if thinking is something like an aesthetic craft, it is also a discipline of its own, an askēsis or exercise. Or, in Gregory’s terms, thinking is at least surrounded by preparatory exercises that shape our capacity to gather, to think.

Good thinking is skillful gathering, and skillful gathering requires preparation.

Martin Laird, a contemporary scholar of Christian contemplative traditions, is an excellent resource for thinking about Gregory along these lines. Laird is especially focused on what I would call Gregory’s therapeutic treatment of dianoia (discursive thinking). Without the proper training and guidance, Gregory says, our discursive thinking gets entangled, dispersed, and aimless.

We could say, we lose the ability to gather through our distracted inattention.

On this account, Gregory observes that our discursive thinking, our dianoia, is ceaseless and without end. It’s always on the move, necessarily so.

In its healthy functioning, dianoia affords our competent rationalization, verbalization, and investigation. It gives accounts of what’s happening, hopefully in a truthful direction. But it’s also always grasping, or trying to take and seize hold of things and events in an automatic way.

The problem is it can’t stop giving accounts, and in its unhealthy expression, dianoia “has a tendency to grab in a snatching, ravishing sort of way,” as Laird puts it.3

This is where the training comes in. Dianoia must be properly trained and directed to avoid falling into pathological states of functioning. Treating such “rapacious thinking” goes beyond evaluating the contents of one’s own thoughts alone and into an observation of and intervention into deeper patterns of thinking—to those processes that give rise to thought and its character in the first place.

I’ll quote in full Laird’s description of this relation between thought and practice:

The mind’s dynamic quality is perhaps best seen in Gregory’s likening the mind to flowing water. Caught up in the world of obsession with physical pleasures and reputation, the mind gushes in dispersion. Ascetic practice serves as a pipe which constrains the water of the mind to protect it from dispersion. If so constrained, the dynamism of the mind, previously encouraging a downward flow into dispersion, pushes the water up to higher levels. With support the mind flows up; with no support the mind flows down. This is the passion of the mind; it will move. It is a question of training this mind so that it moves in the right direction.4

We’ve switched metaphors here from gathering to flowing, but the emphasis on dispersion is the same in Augustine and in Gregory.

In the former, dispersion is gathered back together in thinking. In the latter, dispersion is like flowing water pooling around in need of direction. It’s hard not to see much of the thinking done today as this kind of distracted dispersion, flitting about from topic to topic, issue to issue.

Our contemporary experience of distraction makes Gregory’s diagnosis particularly relevant. Beyond our digital dispersions through phones and screens, we face an overwhelming array of attention-fragmenting forces: the constant press of appointments and deadlines, the blur of rapid travel and movement between contexts, the ceaseless stream of news and information, the social pressure to maintain multiple roles and identities, the commercial assault on attention through advertising, and the general acceleration of life’s pace.

While the challenge of focusing attention is perennial—Gregory’s audiences surely struggled with their own forms of distraction—our modern environment presents unique intensities of mental dispersion. His understanding of dianoia’s tendency toward scattering speaks directly to our struggle with splintered attention and constant mental movement. His emphasis on training and directing thought suggests that contemplative practices might offer resources for addressing both timeless and distinctly contemporary problems of attention and presence.

What makes Gregory’s analysis particularly valuable is that he situates these practical challenges of attention within a larger framework of human development.

He places dianoia in the context of contemplative and epistemological ascent towards God, offering techniques for focus but also a comprehensive vision of how attention relates to understanding. Laird is excellent in developing this aspect of Gregory’s thought, showing how dianoia operates within this larger movement.

Baptism and studying scripture figure with high importance in this account—“Scripture leads the mind by the hand,” in Gregory’s words5—as does the pursuit of virtue (essential to our knowing and perceiving), but much of the diagnosis centers on a few additional terms. These are pistis (faith), kataphasis (saying), apophasis (unsaying ), aphaeresis (clearing), and a term of art that Laird himself introduces into the discussion, logophasis (logos-, “word” and -phasis, “expression”).

These aren’t just descriptive terms but markers of distinct moments in the mind’s ascent, each requiring its own form of attention and discipline. Together they outline a practical methodology for training thought—one that preserves philosophical rigor while serving contemplative ends.

Gregory’s technical vocabulary here reveals his systematic approach to contemplative practice, an approach that builds on but transforms his Neoplatonic inheritance. To understand how these terms function in Gregory’s thought, we need to see how he adapts and transforms the philosophical tradition he inherits.

Let’s look more closely at how this works.

Gregory picks up a number of terms and themes from his Neoplatonic forebears, but in a Christianized way. This philosophical inheritance is important—from Plotinus and others he takes both the idea of ascent beyond Being and the understanding that such ascent requires a progressive refinement of thought.

But where the Neoplatonist seeks union with the One, Gregory reframes this ascent as the soul’s return to God. This distinction matters because it shapes how each tradition understands the relationship between thinking and ultimate reality. Both see the absolute as beyond Being itself, as the source rather than a member of the chain of beings, but they differ in how they understand our approach to this ultimate reality.

The key point in both Neoplatonic and Christian traditions is that ultimacy is essentially ungraspable. It is, to borrow a phrase, dark, empty, and purely simple. It is to this simple but luminous darkness that Gregory’s contemplative ascent aims, and here our new terms of art are central.

Contemplation is unlike dianoia in that its key activity is no activity. It is rest, rather than action. Stillness, rather than movement. Silence, rather than sound. Unknowing, rather knowing. And yet, it is also a process. The process, crudely construed, is a movement of saying to unsaying (an assertion and its negation), and aphaeresis, or a clearing away, of thoughts, sensations, images, or ideas.

Dianoia has an important role to play in this process, but the contemplative moment ultimately moves beyond what dianoia can narrate to itself. And so Laird says:

It seems that the nature of the mind is to try to catch hold of something in a discursive act, but when it moves beyond to what cannot be grasped, such as darkness, the divine sanctuary, and, here, an abyss, it cannot function properly and can even experience duress and disorientation.6

For Gregory, what moves us beyond the discursive mind into these spaces of empty darkness is faith, pistis, and here Gregory inverts the older Platonic hierarchy of knowledge. Where pistis in Plato’s analogy of the divided line amounts to something like opinion or belief (and so can’t obtain true knowledge), in Gregory, as for his Christian tradition as a whole, pistis becomes a central kind of knowing.

And this is necessarily so for the apophatic tradition—this way of approaching the divine through negation. The concepts and words and arguments fail, but the loving faith keeps going, a theme that resonates throughout the Christian mystical tradition, including its medieval expressions. But the apophatic emphasis, for Gregory, doesn’t mean we have nothing to say about moments of contemplative ascent.

Instead, even as words, language, and symbols fail to grasp the silence of contemplation, we nevertheless come out the other side with a whole vocabulary that tries to narrate what happened.

This is what Laird calls logophasis—the outpouring of words or images that fills us up after the silence and emptiness passes. Laird describes this as a process of watering the mind. This dianoia is likened to the condensation of water droplets; he says the mind is “bedewed” with new thoughts and ideas. In other words, these thoughts emerge from contemplative silence, when silence gives way to speech.

These dew drops of thought are not the experience itself, but they do tell us something about it—they carry something of the contemplative moment back into our ordinary understanding. The analogies and metaphors we come up with to account for the moment are thus in some sense accurate, though not total, images of the more ultimate formless emptiness of God or the One. This pattern of ascent and return through water imagery helps us understand why contemplative writing often moves between silence and speech, emptiness and fullness.

Logophasis is one moment in a larger cycle of practices—pistis, kataphasis, apophasis, aphaeresis—that together mark this particular kind of asceticism of thought, an abstinence or fasting from identification, we could say.

These practices can be engaged with varying degrees of veracity. I think of them more as a thoughtful irrigation of the mind—one you might use to water a garden—than they are a thoughtless force of direction for its own sake.

And here, I think we can say that this kind of gardening is its own art, the art of gathering together the mind in a certain way—of directing the water to flow upwards, as it were—a way generative of new kinds of thinking, being, and understanding.

The Art and Asceticism of Thought

Augustine and Gregory in these ways call our attention back to thinking by turning our attention onto the surrounding conditions of thinking itself, including on the conditions in which our thought fails to grasp what’s happening. They use different metaphors, but the emphasis on redirecting our dispersion is the same, whether it’s redirecting the flowing water of mind or regathering the direction of our thinking.

Both require skill and preparation, and, I would say, an aesthetic touch.

For both thinkers, these practices ultimately aim toward a transformation of understanding—Augustine through the gathering of memory into the presence of divine truth and Gregory in the ascent of mind beyond its own discursive operations towards God. Here their insights about the art and asceticism of thought take on renewed urgency in our age of intensified distraction.

Their teachings show us how the practice of attention goes beyond mere focus or productivity, cultivating our capacity to gather ourselves into forms of understanding where deeper dimensions of truth, meaning, and divinity can emerge.