Category Archives: Greek philosophy

Foucault’s spiritual exercises

Here is Michel Foucault’s definition of “spirituality”:

… I think we could call “spirituality” the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth. We will call “spirituality” then the set of these researches, practices, and experiences, which may be purifications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modifications of existence, etc., which are, not for knowledge but for the subject, for the subject’s very being, the price to be paid for access to the truth. Let’s say that spirituality, as it appears in the West at least, has three characteristics.
[1] Spirituality postulates that the truth is never given to the subject by right. … It postulates that for the subject to have right of access to the truth he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself. … It follows that from this point of view there can be no truth without a conversion or a transformation of the subject.
[2] Eros [the subject’s attraction to the truth, or the truth’s movement to the subject] and askesis [labor] are, I think, the two major forms in Western spirituality for conceptualizing the modalities by which the subject must be transformed in order finally to become capable of truth.
[3] The truth enlightens the subject; the truth gives beatitude to the subject; the truth gives the subject tranquility of the soul. In short, in the truth and in access to the truth, there is something that fulfills the subject himself, which fulfills or transfigures his very being.
Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Lectures at the College de France 1981-2, translated by Graham Burchell (Palgrave, 2005), pp. 15-16

Foucault distinguishes spirituality from philosophy: “the form of thought that asks what it is that enables the subject to have access to the truth and which attempts to determine the conditions and limits of the subject’s access to the truth” (p. 15).

Although philosophy and spirituality are different, all the Greek and Roman philosophers–except (Foucault thinks) Aristotle–believed that a person could not have access to the truth without first being transformed into a better self. Therefore, all the classical philosophers argued for spirituality, as defined above. More than that, they combined their philosophical arguments with spiritual instruction, because they saw the two as inseparable.

One of the main topics that a self was supposed to understand was justice. To understand justice required improving oneself. In turn, learning about justice made a person better. “Consequently, taking care of oneself and being concerned with justice amount to the same thing” (p. 72, here interpreting Plato).

These presuppositions of ancient philosophy and spirituality contrast with two prevalent modern traditions. First:

Science is that set of methods and institutions (such as labs, PhD programs, and peer-review) that allow us to know nature without having to improve the self first. A scientist “can recognize the truth and have access to it in himself and solely through his activity of knowing, without anything else being demanded of him and without him having to change or alter his being as subject” (p. 17). In turn, science generates knowledge that may not improve anyone spiritually. Nature is precisely the realm that is independent of our spiritual condition. If some scientists prepare themselves mentally to do their jobs or gain tranquility from what they discover about nature, those are incidental facts about them as people. Spiritual preparation may not be necessary, and it certainly isn’t sufficient. Science is about methods, techniques, instruments, rules, and norms that prevent the self from influencing knowledge. And science pursues truth without flinching even when the results are morally problematic.

I would add another tradition as a contrast with ancient spirituality, although I am not sure Foucault would agree:

Liberalism is the political tradition that seeks to base good government on well-designed institutions (rights, checks-and-balances, elections and other mechanisms of accountability) so that good government need not depend on the moral excellence of either leaders or the people. Good institutional design is a more secure basis for justice than human excellence. Further, in a well-designed polity, we can leave people alone in their private lives instead of badgering them to transform themselves. Thus liberalism is compatible with freedom as autonomy and with diverse understandings of the good life.

According to Foucault, classical spiritual traditions lived on in Christianity. Spirituality ran into trouble with the rise of scholasticism, which made the study of God into a kind of science. Drawing on Aristotle, medieval scholastics provided methods for understanding God and nature that did not depend upon spiritual self-improvement. They left methods of self-improvement to non-scholars, a division that continues today.

I struggle to decide where Foucault stands himself. Does he give detailed lectures about Greco-Roman spiritual traditions because he believes that modern science and governance are bad and he wants us to return to a better way? Does he describe these Hellenistic traditions dispassionately, as a contribution to truth that may not improve us or himself? (In other words, is he a scientist of the past?) Or does he seek to liberate us from spirituality and science by demonstrating the historical contingency of both? If we shed spirituality and science, what are we left with?

I don’t know, but I enjoy the moments in the lectures when Foucault interacts with his audience. For instance, here he demonstrates concern:

[Is there] another room you can use? Yes? And are those people there because they cannot get into the other room or because they prefer to be there? I am sorry that the conditions are so bad, I can do nothing about it and as far as possible I would like to avoid you suffering too much. Okay, earlier, while talking about these techniques of the self and their existence prior to Platonic reflection on the epimeleia heautou [care of oneself], it came to mind, and I forgot to mention it to you, that there is a text … (p. 65)

And here he is playing with his audience:

I was saying that it seemed to me that at a certain moment … the link was broken, definitively I think, between access to the truth, which becomes the autonomous development of knowledge (connaissance), and the requirement of the subject’s trans- formation of himself and of his being. When I say “I think it was definitively broken,” I don’t need to tell you that I don’t believe any such thing, and that what is interesting is precisely that the links were not broken abruptly as if by the slice of a knife (pp. 25-6).

Foucault respected and learned from his colleague Pierre Hadot, a great scholar of Hellenistic thought. Hadot emphasized that the Hellenistic thinkers did not write systematic treatises. They were teachers who worked with students or other audiences in concrete circumstances.

Philosophy in antiquity was a spiritual exercise. … Whether we have to do with dialogues as in the case of Plato, class notes as in the case of Aristotle, treatises like those of Plotinus, or commentaries like those of Proclus, a philosopher’s works cannot be interpreted without taking into consideration the concrete situation which gave birth to them. They are the products of a philosophical school, in the most concrete sense of the term, in which a master forms his disciples, trying to guide them to self-transformation and -realization. Thus, the written work is a reflection of pedagogical, pyschagogic, and methodological preoccupations.
Although every written work is a monologue, the philosophical work is always implicitly a dialogue. The dimension of the possible interlocutor is always present within it. This explains the incoherencies and contradictions which modern historians discover with astonishment in the works of ancient philosophers.
Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, translated by Michael Chase (Blackwell 1995), pp. 104-5

Foucault’s concrete situation was rather unusual. As a holder of a chair in the College de France, he was required only to conduct his own research and report the results annually in a series of lectures–free, public, and uncredited. Because he was an academic superstar, he gave these lectures to a packed lecture hall and overflow areas, with ranks of tape-recorders piled on the desk before him. The audience could not literally discuss with him, but he could address them in a dialogic way.

Here is Foucault’s description of Epictetus:

unlike Seneca, [Epictetus] is a teacher by profession [and] he really does have a school. He opens a school which is called “school” and in which he has students. And, of course, among his students there are a number, no doubt a considerable number, of young people who come to be trained. … It should not be thought that the care of the self, as principal axis of the art of life, was reserved for adults. But alongside this, intertwined with this training of young people, we can say that in Epictetus’s school there is also what could be called, employing an unjust metaphor no doubt, an open shop: an open shop for adults. And in fact adults come to his school to hear his teaching for one day, for a few days or for some time. Here also, in the social world evoked in the Discourses, you see, for example, a town inspector passing through, a sort of tax procurer if you like. He is an Epicurean who comes to consult Epictetus and ask him questions. There is a man sent to Rome by his town who, passing through Asia Minor to Rome, stops to ask Epictetus questions and get advice on how he can best accomplish his mission. Moreover, Epictetus by no means disregards this clientele, or these adult interlocutors, since he advises his own students, young people therefore, to find prominent people in their town and to shake them up a bit by saying: Tell me then, how do you live? Do you really take proper care of yourselves? (p. 90)

I think Foucault’s own role is similar. And that makes him–not a scientist of history–but a practitioner and provider of spiritual exercises.

was Aristotle right about what we must know to be good citizens?

Let’s posit that a good citizen should be able to a) form ideas about what would improve her community or society, b) understand how decisions about such matters are actually made and who has power to make each decision, c) persuade those people to think and act differently, and d) do all of the above ethically, which means reflecting on right and wrong.

A name for b) is “politics”; for c), “rhetoric”; and for d0, “ethics.” Aristotle wrote a book on each of those topics, and, although he didn’t give titles to any of his books, these are the names that we give them.

The Politics is about how city-states worked, about the pros and cons of various forms of government, and about the role of citizens in these states. The Rhetoric is about persuasion, but especially about “how to generate trust in ways that preserve an audience’s autonomy and accord with the norms of friendship” (Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers, p. 141). In other words, it’s about persuading responsibly, to the benefit of the listener. And the Nicomachean Ethics is about how to live a good life.

As the founder of a school (the original “Lyceum”), Aristotle meant his works to frame a curriculum. The good citizen should study politics, rhetoric, and ethics.

Was he right? I think largely so, with two caveats.

First, Aristotle had little to say about the actual decisions that confront a community. Ancient Athenians had to decide whether to build a wall or more ships, to invade Sicily or pursue peace with Sparta, to rebuild the Parthenon or use the money for something else. In our day, we must decide what to do about climate change, policing, economic growth and equality, and myriad other issues. Aristotle didn’t address most of the policy questions of his day, let alone those of our time. And he didn’t make “policy analysis” a part of his civic curriculum.

I think one reason was that he didn’t believe that general, theoretical reasoning was helpful for policymaking. Wise collective action was a matter of phronesis, judgment, and it was highly concrete. Citizens should deliberate about whether to build more triremes and should learn from the results. No abstract theory would help them to decide.

The other reason may have been a kind of elitism. Expertise existed about military, architectural, economic, medical, and agricultural matters, but it belonged to tradesmen (broadly defined). Gentlemen-citizens were generalists who lacked such knowledge. Their role was to consult experts when necessary and then to make all-things-considered judgments. A curriculum for gentlemen-citizens was about politics, rhetoric, and ethics, not about policy.

In contrast, we have disciplines such as economics, medicine, law, education, social work, international relations (and many more) that confer the highest social status and that promise knowledge relevant to making decisions. They sometimes even promise to be able to determine the best policies. For instance, if economics works, it should generate answers about questions involving taxes and interest rates. Advanced education for leaders has turned into the study of public policy, largely to the exclusion of rhetoric, ethics, and even politics, in Aristotle’s sense.

We might think that the pendulum has swung too far, because we really do need phronesis to make decisions. There are few algorithms that can determine a better policy. And to exercise judgment, we need ethics, rhetoric, and politics. But we wouldn’t want the pendulum to swing all the way back to Aristotle’s view, which is too disparaging of the study of policy. We should add the social sciences to Aristotle’s curriculum.

The second caveat concerns how we interpret Aristotle’s project and continue it. One type of interpretation emphasizes the consistency of Aristotle’s whole philosophy. He perceives ethics as connected not only to rhetoric and politics but also to logic, metaphysics, and natural science. It’s all part of one coherent universe organized by a small number of principles. A major test of whether a view is right is whether it coheres with this whole system.

If you think of Aristotle’s system as an inspiration, but you want to update it for a new era, you may try to build a new system. You won’t derive your specific views from any social science but from the elaboration of an overall view of the world: a systematic philosophy.

Thomas Aquinas exemplifies this approach. He believes that Aristotle must be updated by adding Christianity, and he writes a new systematic philosophy to that end. He begins with the question of God’s existence and works from there toward all other questions. When Aquinas gets to politics in the second part of the second part, question 58, his topics are: (1) What is justice? (2) Whether justice is always towards another? (3) Whether it is a virtue? (4) Whether it is in the will as its subject? (5) Whether it is a general virtue?; (6) Whether, as a general virtue, it is essentially the same as every virtue? — and so on.

The ornate cathedral of Aquinas’ thought might seem like a mere curiosity, except that the urge to systematize has been common, and Aristotle has often served as a model.

The alternative is to emphasize the Aristotelian idea of phronesis, practical wisdom. What Aristotle offers are some very general guidelines about how to organize political communities in which individuals who strive for personal virtue can argue productively about what to do together. No theory settles how to structure political organizations, how to live, or what policy arguments are right, but Aristotle inaugurates a process of thinking about those three topics together. And they are still more or less the right topics for citizens.

John Stuart Mill, Stoic

on philosophy as a way of life

3 Replies

(San Antonio, TX) Here I briefly introduce schools of thought–Indian and European–that have combined introspective mental exercises with reasoning about moral principles and critical analysis of social systems. I contrast their integrated approach to forms of philosophy that construct comprehensive models of ethics by using reasons alone. This essay will be the introduction to a book on mapping moral networks, which is a new introspective exercise.

–“I should have given that man some change. He looked hungry.”
–“He would have used it for drugs or alcohol.”
–“Maybe he has that right—it’s his life!”
–“If you’re going to try to help the homeless, you should donate to the Downtown Shelter. They spend the money on real needs. Plus, it’s tax-deductible.”
–“That’s not realistic advice. While I am talking to a homeless person, I have homelessness on my mind. Once I get back home, the thought is gone. I’d never remember to mail off a check.”
–“Perhaps we should set aside some time every day to practice compassion and remember people who are suffering.”
–“Yes, I guess I’m for compassion—but handing someone money seems to create the wrong kind of relationship. What did Emerson write? ‘Though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.’”
–“Maybe we should think about why some people are homeless in the first place and what policies would end that situation.”

This little dialog shows a pair of human beings doing several valuable things. They display emotions, some expressed with enthusiasm and some with regret. They exchange reasons. But they know that their reasons may not actually influence them deeply because they have habits that they would have to counteract by altering their regular routines. They cite rules—such as the tax deduction for charity and the shelter’s ban on alcohol—that are meant to improve and regulate people’s behavior. Finally, one speaker (perhaps showing off) cites an influential thinker from the past whose argument seems relevant.

Each of these modes of thought can be practiced at a high level. Instead of quickly asserting moral beliefs, we can develop whole arguments: chains of reasons that carry from a premise to a conclusion. If the argument persuades, it joins the list of things you believe, and you have been changed. Anyone who is serious about being a good person must struggle to get the reasons right and then act according to the conclusions.

But because our wills are weak, we also need enforced rules that guide or constrain us. And just as we can reason about our own choices (“Should I give a dollar to this homeless person?”), so we can reason about laws, regulations, social norms, and institutions. We can ask whether the rules that are in place are acceptable and, if not, how they should change. As Alexander Hamilton wrote on the first page of the Federalist Papers, laws are meant to arise from “reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force.” Political thinkers have often offered elaborate arguments about how institutions should be designed to improve people’s behavior.

Meanwhile, we can learn reflective practices such as confession, memorization, visualization, meditation, autobiographical reflection, and prayer. These methods are more personal than arguments, for they work directly on an individual’s beliefs, emotions, and habits. They are less coercive but more individualized than rules and laws, for we enforce these practices on ourselves. They tend to require practice and repetition to achieve their goals. You can read an argument once in order to evaluate it, but you must repeat a mental exercise for it to affect your psychology. In the 1500s, Michel de Montaigne observed, “Even when we apply our minds willingly to reason and instruction, they are rarely powerful enough to carry us all the way to action, unless we also exercise and train the soul by experience for the path on which we would send it” (II.6). But self-discipline without reason is blind, potentially turning us into worse rather than better people. Think of terrorists who have overcome their habits of peacefulness and tolerance to make themselves into killers; their fault is not a lack of discipline but a poor choice of means and (often) ends.

Finally, we can take the interpretation of other people’s thoughts to high levels of sophistication and rigor. Instead of just quoting a snippet of Emerson, we can make a full study of his ideas in their context. Cultural critique and intellectual history help us understand where we come from and what influences us. After all, we believe what we do in large measure because other people have formed and shaped our thoughts. No one invents her whole worldview from scratch. Since we begin with the traditions that have developed so far, it is important to understand them. Reasoning or self-discipline requires a critical understanding of the materials with which we construct our thoughts, which are ideas that our predecessors have invented.

It makes sense to put these modes together because we are reasonable creatures (capable of offering and sharing reasons for what we do), but we are also emotional and habitual creatures (requiring either external rules or mental discipline and practice to improve ourselves), political creatures (living in communities structured by laws and norms that people make and change), and historical creatures (shaped by the heritage of past thought).

In some periods, it has been common to combine argumentation about personal choices and social institutions, mental exercises, and the critical study of past thinkers. In other times–including our own–these elements have come apart. Here I will offer a very short and suggestive review of that history to support the thesis that now is a time to put the pieces back together. Continue reading →

to whom do the ancient Greeks belong?

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal