Spiritual Exercises and Historical Analysis

We had a couple of really good talks here at Marquette last weekend. Last Friday, Michael Chase (among other things, translator into English of some works by Pierre Hadot) gave us quite the journey. He started with ancient skepticism, and talked about Hadot's views on how ancient philosophy (by which, I mean ancient Greco-Roman philosophy) was about spiritual exercises as much as anything else; it was about a way of life. Next, he talked about Nassim Taleb's modern-day skepticism, which takes the epistemological pieces but declaims the practices as being too hard for actual people.

The most cogent of Taleb's criticisms was that we are hardwired to make certain judgments about the world, and so the skeptic ideal of suspending judgment is illusory. Chase brought in modern accounts of brain plasticity and studies on how mindfulness meditation seems to make certain sections of the brain larger, which allows for increased ability to sit back and observe a situation without judging. Now, as he mentioned in the question-and-answer session, this can be seen to be simply part of the skeptic practice of arguing both sides of the problem. But it does seem to provide evidence for increased ability to suspend judgment after putting in the hard work, nevertheless. And even if perfect suspension of judgment is only an ideal, progress seems to be possible.

Next, Chase showed that there are some key features of modern mindfulness meditation (which is in turn taken largely from Buddhist sources, and generally without recognition of any Western roots). These same key features show up in ancient skepticism, and in ancient philosophy in general. True, people weren't sitting around counting breaths, but that is only a technique. The goal of apatheia, of objective and detached analysis of the world and of increased insight into one's own inner workings, are there (he went into a bit more detail, showing five core points that have been established in mindfulness meditation and identifying each one with practices in ancient philosophy). So ancient skeptical practices, insofar as they intending to advocate a lifestyle and not merely academic discussions, would seem to have had some effect on actual suspension of judgment.

It was nice to here of philosophy as something beyond academic disputations. But what interested me at least as much was that Dr. Chase had given a talk the day before, looking at a neglected commentary of the Neoplatonist Porphyry and digging up references which clarified Porphyry's views on cognition. The detailed historical analysis wasn't something other than what he was talking about in the more exciting talk; as he told me when I asked him afterward, the work of analysis and translation are also spiritual exercises, making him put away himself with his interests and concerns for the time. Interesting way to think of the work that I am doing.