Note, in the above post - there are ways to strategize about using your mind well. Sleeping well, moderating diet, being cautious to how caffeine intake gives you that big lack of energy if you drink too much, being careful what kinds of music you listen to and the quality of environment around you - finding out quiet places, or thinking places, not distracting your mind too much with lots of images and movies all the time...
That sounds suspiciously like the ascetic life.
Yet, surprisingly (?) it does not seem any graduate students follow the above advice for keeping one's brain healthy. As a general rule, grad students don't sleep enough, and overload on caffeine, or illegally obtain prescription drugs to concentrate longer (especially in high pressure schools), get drunk on the weekends (I know of someone who insists he writes best hungover), eat junk food, don't exercise, listen to what we feel like, although some music is just too distracting, study in noisy coffee shops (which, granted, are also good thinking places - I wonder why?), and as a general rule, although we may think about the short term effects of our actions on our mind, we rarely think of the long-term ones.
But the Greeks did, and not with a simple utilitarian desire to maximize their brainpower:
"In his masterful study of ancient philosophy, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot has called our attention to the intensely practical character of philosophy in the Greco-Roman world. Far from being a merely academic, intellectual exercise of asserting and demonstrating "cognitive claims," all the schools of philosophy in the ancient world were forms of training—of askêsis—that sought to reshape the student's basic sensibilities and attitudes so that he or she could not only come to know the highest truths but could also actually live in light of them. Conceived in this way, ancient philosophy can be seen to have concentrated on what Hadot calls "spiritual exercises" which had as their purpose cultivating the student not simply as a "knower" but in his or her total existence: "We can perhaps get a better idea of this spiritual exercise if we understand it as an attempt to liberate ourselves from a partial, passionate point of view— linked to the senses and the body—so as to rise to the universal, normative viewpoint of thought, submitting ourselves to the demands of the Logos and the norm of the Good. Training for death is training to die to one's individuality and passions, in order to look at things from the perspective of universality and objectivity." (94-95) [-a description from an article by Ligne]
[RIP, Pierre Hadot - February 21, 1922 – April 24, 2010]
So, asceticism seems profoundly linked to seeking and trying to live the truth.
Philosophy today is not about truth. It is about either what other people have said, or whether their arguments were valid (as in, sound, not true), and maybe their applications to political issues sometimes. I have spoken to several philosophy graduate students here who switched from English to philosophy... because the tools for arguing were much more refined. Not because they wanted to get to something after their arguments.
Why we are in the place we are today is a long story, and involves names like Duns Scotus, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre. The list could go on. Perhaps that will come in a different post, perhaps not.
My interest here is simply to point out that there seems inherently a friendship between philosophy and asceticism, which bridges right into the question of the medieval debates about the theologian, and whether his proper identity should be a scholastic (Abelard, Aquinas, etc) or a monk (Bernard). Tied up in this question is prayer. What is the relation between philosophy, asceticism, and prayer?
To be continued: Evagrius and Plotinus.
So here is my question. Are we thinking anything NEW, or is everything that comes into our minds recycled material. I am not saying that this is anything negative, but it is a question that has been constantly present in my mind. Has philosophy anything new to say, and if it does, why are we not saying it, instead of studying the HISTORY of philosophy? All courses seem to be like that now a days. All history, and not NOW.
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of people study history of philosophy because there are still so many rich sources to be mined - it's not something that easily goes out of fashion. Do you feel like Plato and Aristotle were so out of date when you read them? No! They're still so true and so relevant in so many ways! That's the same with a lot of philosophy, and the fact that many of these voices are building on top of other voices requires you to know the history of thought before settling on, say, Heidegger. You would need to know Aristotle and Kant and Hegel and Husserl, to name just a few. That takes up a lot of time, getting your sources straight. So there's one reason history of philosophy is important. (And mind you, history of philosophy is more than "Aristotle said this. Plato said this." it's, how do we make sense of the fact that Aristotle said this, especially in connection with this other thing? What is really going on in this thought system? What would Aristotle say to this situation or this philosopher he never encountered?)
ReplyDeleteNow, are you saying that the value is in saying something new? Paul Griffiths says, "A well-catechized intellect has no interest in originality." Be careful. The value is in what is true, not what is new. I'm kind of repeating myself, but because the subject matter of philosophy is the truth of human existence, as discovered through human reason, there's something in it which is just not going to change. Something like science will change depending on the technology for measurement, something like history will change with new data and perspectives to be studied, but philosophy has something universal to it. So in a sense, there's nothing really new.
Of course, I am partially playing devil's advocate. On the other hand, we do have something new, we do have a slow development (and sometimes decline) as we try to take new paths and close off some of them, and maybe reopen others. The cultural currents flow from changes in philosophy, I think, but philosophy also needs to take corrective action on paths it often didn't realize would open up. I think right now, to my knowledge, the frontier is still phenomenology. Postmodernism (a la Derrida) is an interesting thought, an eye-opening way to tear down false assumptions, but not a system, and ends in chaos and fragmentation by itself. But we have moved from objectivity to isolated subjectivity, and now we need to find a way to get objectivity through subjectivity without lessening either. That's some interesting stuff.
But yeah, it will make no sense unless you understand the tradition of thought and where it comes from. I still don't understand phenomenology, actually. I still haven't really understood where it comes from - I read it but because I don't know its roots a lot of its technical language goes right over my head.