Adam Robbert

"Philosophy heals human diseases, diseases produced by false beliefs. Its arguments are to the soul as the doctor’s remedies are to the body. They can heal, and they are to be evaluated in terms of their power to heal. As the medical art makes progress on behalf of the suffering body, so philosophy for the soul in distress. Correctly understood, it is no less than the soul’s art of life (techné biou).[36]

Through what Nussbaum calls therapeutic arguments, recovered is the sense that reason and logical rigor come together with a commitment to reducing suffering and enabling flourishing through the ameliorative practices that philosophers use to dispel the sources of false belief. The good and the true are joined through actions aimed at care that deal both in propositions and emotional well-being, rejecting the misguided binary that reasons and emotions are ultimately unrelated to one another, or that only one or the other are worthy of attention.[37]

Indeed, Nussbaum is committed to raising this view, essential on her account to Hellenistic philosophy as a whole, that compassionate attitudes are philosophically indispensable in understanding and treating the complex interrelations among reasons, beliefs, emotions, and actions.[38] The epistemology of emotions Nussbaum offers here suggests a complex relation between emotions and perceptual knowledge.[39] Emotions, like reasons, on this account involve thought, judgement, and evaluation. In other words, emotions are wrapped up in our intentional awareness of things, they are directed at or about the objects of their attention. They are not simple physiological responses but assessments of a state of affairs, as more-or-less finely grained cognitions of things.[40]

On this basis, Nussbaum, like Cooper, suggests that Greek and Roman Stoicism is predicated on the transformation of our modes of intentionality through rational evaluation. “The Hellenistic thinkers see the goal of philosophy as a transformation of the inner world through the use of rational argument,” is how she puts it.[41] And yet, Nussbaum is clear that the work of transformation entailed herein is not best performed through the work of an unemotional, detached intellect but through our moral involvement, attention, and generosity, and this may be especially true of our involvement with other people. Sherman appraises Nussbaum on this point thusly, “Our knowledge of persons is a moral knowledge, a knowledge that can only be accessed under certain conditions and that, for this very reason, resists exhaustive propositional formulation.”[42]

Del nido and Nussbaum thus share the sense, on both psychological and textual grounds, that reason’s aims and performances must be understood within its larger and more complex relation to habits, sensations, feelings, and beliefs. The point is, reason alone is a necessary but insufficient element for activating philosophical conversion, and for these reasons, I accept Hadot’s vision of philosophy as a way of life over Cooper’s. That is to say, the best account available suggests that philosophy, now and throughout history, is most faithfully expressed as a commitment to forms of life that include reason and spiritual exercise, theory and theoria, where both serve as a preparation for and complement to the other. The practices, rituals, prayers, aesthetics, and texts of the spiritual life are neither secondary to nor derivative in the philosophical life; they till the very soil within which the soul grows.

Stated in a more theoretically precise way, I would frame the relation between reason and spiritual exercise as follows. While reason evaluates and makes judgments about thoughts and emotions at the level of their content, spiritual exercises move to change thinking and feeling at their sources, shifting over time the quality and character of both in their moment-to-moment emergence. On this view, contemplative philosophy, rooted in spiritual exercise, views reason, itself a mode of practice in Cooper’s and Nussbaum’s senses, as nonetheless surrounded by and integrated within a set of concrete exercises that are nonconceptual and therapeutic in nature, which like reason deliver insight transformation. This fact is essential to all modes of philosophy, whatever their theoretical orientation, and this view is, at minimum, what Hadot means by treating philosophy as a way of life. However, the account I have given thus far still falls short of being truly philosophical in its lack of attention to metaphysics, on the hand, and its under formulation of the relation between askēsis and transformation. I turn next to these ideas.

The Primacy of Practice

I have been arguing that in order to recover a robust vision of philosophy as a way of life, we must re-join those aspects of philosophical living captured by the phrase “spiritual exercise” with those acts associated with the works of reason. I have tried to make the case that reason and spiritual exercise are both required in the philosophical life, and that there is good textual and historical evidence for suggesting that ancient Greeks and Romans lived philosophically upon this dual basis. I now want to advance the discussion by turning attention not only to the necessity of developing philosophical practices in addition to those of reason, but also towards developing an account of reason and knowledge adequate to larger notions of epistemology, metaphysics, and morals.

It is not enough, on my view, to simply join reason and exercise to the aims of therapy or the recuperation of the passions, however laudable those aims may be. They must also connect to the larger question of cosmology, to worldview, and this will require a transvaluation of reason itself. In a phrase, I want to argue against a reduction of philosophy to reason and reason to instrumentality. What I mean by this is that reason itself has undergone substantial evolution over the course of history, and just as I have set out to recover an ancient view of philosophy as a way of life rooted in askēsis, there is something of the ancient conception of reason that we would likewise do well to re-integrate today. Allow me to explain what I mean.

Max Weber showed in his famous study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that our notions of rationalism and asceticism have undergone substantial change and evolution throughout history, especially in the transition to the modern industrial world. In Weber’s analysis, the shift from the other worldly asceticism of the Middle Ages and prior to the inner worldly asceticism of the Reformation and after corresponds with, and in many ways enabled, an increasingly narrow and utilitarian view of reason married to an increasingly mechanical and instrumental view of nature. The dissolution of these earlier asceticisms into a calculated efficiency program, executed for the sake of economic productivity alone that, while still connected to notions of God and a providential plan for humanity, nevertheless encouraged divestment from the communal and individual enrichment associated with traditional ascetic practices, social orderings, and philosophical expressions.[43]

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 Charles Taylor, “in what it is to live according to nature which separates the eighteenth century from its ancient sources.”[44] In what do these changes consist? To be sure, reason and nature maintain a privileged relation in this new image, but this relation is, as I noted above, an instrumental one wherein reason calculates its advantage in the terms of mechanical systems. I quote Taylor again, “Rationality is now an internal property of subjective thinking, rather than consisting in its vision of reality.”[45]

Gone is the deeper sense that contemplative practices also deliver insight into the nature of the real, and 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 theoria, 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.”[46] Taylor here diagnosis a contradiction: The modern mind is committed to a science that reveals the world, including the biological world, as mechanism, while at the same time this mind is in search of moral and psychological sources of meaning that cannot find ground within the operations of this reductive image.

In a certain sense, as long as this image remains, the human arts of practice stay unmoored, unable to gain a substantive grasp within what Alfred North Whitehead called the bifurcation of nature.[47] The result of this image is stark: On this view, the practices I have been discussing—contemplation, self-examination, philosophical therapy, training of the senses, and so on—may have some limited subjective psychological benefit for the individual, but they cannot cross into the domain of knowledge about the world. This is how contemplation becomes a “pious ornament of a beautiful soul, sentimental and subjective” and how philosophy “is made banal, desacralized, and alien from the wonder that is its raison d’être,” to repeat Sherman’s words once more. In contrast, the image I am looking to uphold contains a more substantive view of practice. As Sherman states elsewhere, “It is not just that philosophy ought to add a practical or spiritual component alongside its theoretic activities but, rather, that practices of transformation mediate and secure important aspects of philosophical discovery".