On Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise

A Symposium

P. Goodchild

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137353146
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

What if self-questioning could provoke an extreme attentiveness to a rich inner life? In pursuit of this question, a mixed group of highly fallible thinkers gather together in the north of England. Will they be able to respond to the actual events of their lives, and reinvent philosophy as a collective spiritual exercise?

Chapter 1

Thinking and Life

The Speech of Phaedrus

Alcibiades: Welcome, one and all, to our modest symposium. I am so grateful that you have all agreed to take part. I do believe that we have gathered here an extraordinary collection of talent and integrity, and I’m sure that our conversations will be fruitful.

Eryximachus: I see that you have chosen to surround yourself largely with men. We are all your willing yet unwitting guinea pigs in this experiment. How did you manage to seduce all of us into taking part?

Alcibiades: It was easy. Men are such helpless creatures, incapable of saying no. Especially when invited to listen to the sound of their own voices. Perhaps you have seduced yourselves.

Eryximachus: And yet we shall be competing with each other to give the best speech, vying for your attention and approbation.

Alcibiades: Well, if all you gentlemen are distracted by such matters, then Agathon will undoubtedly give the most philosophical speech.

Aristophanes: Agathon has a greater motive for giving a more courageous speech than the rest of us: she can’t afford to be ashamed before her beloved. Was it Pausanias who in Plato’s Symposium said that an army of lovers would conquer the world?

Phaedrus: No, it was Phaedrus.

Aristophanes: Perhaps an army of philosophers could conquer the world through the power of thinking alone.

Eryximachus: They would only be courageous enough if they were also lovers. That is, if they were in pairs of lovers, not in threesomes or more complicated networks that would provoke jealousy, wouldn’t it, Aristophanes?

Alcibiades: If you gentlemen intend to spend all evening gossiping then we shall never get started. Aristodemus, are you ready to read us the first challenge?

The Provocation

Aristodemus: (reads aloud)

Philosophy is a quest for wisdom. But how many philosophers have ever written a wise word? Where are the sayings, the aphorisms, and the maxims that one can gather for daily meditation, until they become written on one’s soul, and then written in one’s life? Have philosophers ever advanced further than Socrates, who although he knew nothing fine and good, at least knew the depths of his ignorance? Philosophers have had much to say about how we should think when we consider the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and related matters. But when do they ever actually recollect the vision of these forms? When do they ever say a word filled with goodness, truth, or beauty? Where is the content, the wisdom? If Socrates was only ever a midwife, which philosopher was ever a mother, capable of giving birth to a word that illuminates, that gives life?

Look, this is where the problem lies. Ancient philosophy begins as a preparation for death—it concentrates on what is pure and everlasting and changeless. While Socrates accepted his death with equanimity, his wife Xanthippe was led away from his prison cell crying hysterically, leaving the men to talk. Such passions are excluded from the conversations of philosophy, which listens only to reason, so that the soul can become eternal by grasping the vision of the eternal forms and participating in their glory. Such an immortal soul knows nothing of death. Socrates’s detachment is bought by the sacrifice of passion and sympathy, a denial of the body, its suffering, and its life, an attempt to overcome fear of death itself by separating soul and body, thought and passion. So philosophy enacts death in advance. Is philosophy not cruel? It is not simply the values that are inverted here, as though philosophy could be redeemed by celebrating body and passion. Philosophical thought itself is blind. Socrates’s violent gesture is repeated everywhere, even in the questions it asks. To ask, “what is justice?,” seeking justice apart from the just, is to seek the soul apart from the body, the concept apart from life. All philosophical abstraction is a decontextualization, as though the world can only be grasped from without, as though philosophy can only be done on the moon, as though the superior perspective is that of bare rock. Philosophy is sheer cold-blooded lunacy.

Of course, modern philosophy attempts to liberate itself from such lunacy by introducing a healthy measure of doubt. Modern philosophy begins with doubt—but is the situation here any better? Descartes described the conditions of his experiment: to travel from town to town, living simply, prepared to question everything, and yet, to safeguard against falling into any dangerous error, always following the customs and practices of those around him. It is the same kind of violence. Thought is separated from its bonds of kin and collective labor. It is separated from all meaningful projects. It detaches itself from the necessities of life in questioning everything, but it does not focus on what needs to be questioned. To doubt even the sensations of the body (why would you need to doubt them?) turns the mind into a thinking substance cut off from life. Then all such a philosophy can do is reproduce the presuppositions that had previously found their way into the mind, before the cut was made, before one became a philosopher. A thought deriving from analysis or logical genesis alone is a thought unsullied by sea or sky, by field or forest, by porpoise or petrel, by drunkenness or diarrhea. Such catatonia is no model for wisdom.

Can philosophy encounter life, without ceasing to think? Look, Phaedrus, I’m addressing this to you because I have read some of your work, and I see how you have ignored disciplinary boundaries to try to reconnect thought with life. You tell us that philosophy is attention to that which matters. What matters, what really matters, beyond any possibility of rising above life to a superior perspective, or any possibility of leisurely entertaining the mind with doubt? Suffering matters, you tell us. Suffering is the matter, the object of thought, the meaning of being, the call on attention and thinking. Suffering is the site of materiality, force, necessity, objectivity—it is the brute resistance that obstructs our plans and frees us from the illusions of imagination. While the wanderings of the mind do not matter, evaporating at the touch, the suffering of the body remains, inert and insistent.

I can see why you choose suffering. You want to replace the force of logical necessity with the force that physical and moral necessity imposes on thought itself. But I have little time for suffering. Beware of suffering—it’s a trap. What difference does it make if the planet holds 9 billion, 1 billion, or just 100,000 people? What difference does it make if people live 80 years, 40 years, 20 years, or just a day? What matters is not the numbers, the duration, or even the suffering, but life itself, and joy in life. Only joy counts. What is joy in life? This is where we need a joyful wisdom. All the clichés concerning love are of course correct, profoundly correct, but tell us nothing. There has to be a special connection between people for joy. And all the years of fidelity, all the passions surging through hormone, blood, and brain, all the caresses and fumbles of intimacy mean nothing without that special connection, the honest and beautiful word, the gift of self with the gift of attention, mediated by the wisdom of pillow talk. To say the word that will establish connection, penetrate the heart, convey the soul, warm love into blossom—wisdom is needed for this. If philosophy is to become a way of life then it should be pillow talk.

Let me give you a scenario. There is a wise, elderly woman lying in a hospital bed. She has given her life in caring for others—as a teacher, an adoptive mother, a carer for her own mother during a long dementia, and as a grandmother. Her body is wasted away, skeletal, more than half gone. Her brain is more wasted still, leaving few remaining words. There is a strong odor of decay and corruption emerging from her lungs, the unmistakable stench of death. The persistent, almost interminable cries of anguish that pierce the soul, “Ohhh . . . No . . . No . . . I don’t want it,” have now subsided, leaving little more than a bare life—a rasping breath, a cough. Yet even in the advanced stage of Alzheimer’s disease, her spirit remains intact. When greeted by her son with a kiss to her putrid mouth, she greedily demands, “Can’t I have another?,” as if mistaking the son for her one lover in life, some 40 years previously, the boy’s father. She raises her head a fraction and lets it fall, again and again, moving centimeter by centimeter across the pillow, until she at last reaches the hand that holds her own and the face that awaits hers beside the edge of the pillow. Her final journey complete, she speaks once more. The words will be her last, she will live another week but neither speak nor recognize any more.

And here is the question for the philosopher: What should she say?

Eryximachus: Now that’s what I call provocative.

Aristophanes: Yet is it really philosophical? There’s a reduction of thinking to pathos, an oversimplifying feminist critique of Platonism and Cartesianism, a subsumption of philosophy into eroticism, a demand that philosophy should be direct personal address. All these are quite tendentious.

Pausanias: Its manner is as insolent as the Zen monk who hammered on the door of the hermit’s dwelling, calling, “Is the master in? Is the master in?” It demands a demonstration of how awake you are.

Phaedrus: It demands that I demonstrate my mastery over thought: it places me in a role I cannot accept. To refuse any pretence of a master discourse requires a refusal of a response in direct speech, all dialogue and meditation, and so I have chosen to simply respond with an academic paper. For I do think there is a genuine philosophical problem implicit here. There is something barren about the way philosophy is normally practiced. I propose to pursue a different image of thought, where philosophy is practiced as a spiritual exercise. Three different dimensions of this practice can be drawn from brief considerations of three very different philosophers: Simone Weil, Gilles Deleuze, and Michael McGhee.

Thinking and Life

Phaedrus

What does it mean to lead a rich life, as opposed to a long one? A fruitful life, as opposed to a comfortable one? A life filled with meaning, as opposed to bare living? Who are our most truly wealthy souls? Such souls must surely be thoughtful. Is life endowed with meaning by reason, and is the richest life that of the philosopher, the life devoted to pure reason, as many of the great philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Hegel seem to have believed? And if our contemporary philosophers bear little resemblance to wealthy souls, is this because true wealth is imperceptible? Or is it rather because our contemporary philosophers are better at mastering concepts than at pursuing philosophy as a way of life? Or even, on the contrary, is it because true wealth is not to be found within, in the life of thought alone?

I admit that such considerations occasionally lead me toward a temptation: to suppose that the richest life is the one that gives life to others. The greatest souls attend closely to life, respond to that which matters, and spend their lives by nourishing others. Unlike the philosopher who spends life as a preparation for death, the greatest souls spend life as a preparation for birth. Meaning is given by what lies outside and comes after the self. Human life is conceived in terms of natality rather than mortality, and the good life is essentially maternal: one gives of one’s own substance to nourish the lives of others. The greatest souls lead lives of total obscurity, impacting deeply just a few others, perhaps unnoticed and taken for granted even by those whom they serve. On such an account, the philosopher, whose freedom of thought is bought at the expense of a lack of response to the urgent clamor of personal, social, and political demands, opts out of any opportunity for living a wealthy and worthwhile life. To think is at variance with being good.

This temptation mirrors its opposite: to suppose that philosophy provides a training in being good. The work of the recent French philosopher Pierre Hadot has reestablished that ancient philosophy was a way of life, a set of spiritual exercises.¹ Socrates himself explained the philosophical vocation for which he was condemned: “I tried to persuade each of one of you to concern himself less with what he has than with what he is, so as to render himself as excellent and rational as possible.”² He tried to shame his fellow Athenians, as citizens of the city with the greatest reputation for wisdom and power, for their eagerness to possess wealth, reputation, and honors without caring for the state of their souls.³ In practice, this means that “the most important thing is not life, but the good life.”⁴ And it is the greatest good to discuss virtue every day, for the unexamined life is not worth living.⁵ Then Socrates regarded reason as a matter of masculine heroism: “Wherev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Thinking and Life: The Speech of Phaedrus
• 2 Ends and Illusions: The Speech of Pausanias
• 3 Hypocrisy: The Speech of Eryximachus
• 4 Dispositions and Interests: The Speech of Aristophanes
• 5 Mutual Attention: The Speech of Agathon
• 6 Death and Love: The Speech of Socrates
• 7 Conclusion: Alcibiades’s Confession
• Appendix: Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise
• Notes
• Index