Askēsis and Care of the Soul

July 17, 2020 — 16 Comments

In the lectures published as Plato and Europe, Jon Patočka (1907–1977) asks a series of questions: What does the soul mean? What is its significance? and What does it mean to care for it? These questions Patočka says are central to the heritage of Europe’s spiritual identity. To answer them, he will appeal to readings of Greek myth, Plato, Democritus, and Aristotle, but more fundamentally these questions are approached in the mode of phenomenology, principally stemming from a unique reading of Husserl, and to an extent Heidegger. I won’t recount Patočka’s historical exegesis here, as my concern is with the phenomenological account he gives, and with how this understanding relates to the role of askēsis, or spiritual exercise, in the formation of perception. To this end, I will summarize Patočka’s phenomenology, paying attention to the role care of the soul plays within it, before making my own connections with askēsis. Continue reading

Merleau-Ponty

May 24, 2017 — 4 Comments

41Q8YkxbywL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_ In my last few posts, I’ve been working my way through the ideas set down by the late great Hubert Dreyfus. While I end up disagreeing with Dreyfus on a number of issues, particularly on the role of conceptuality in practical action, I still see him as largely setting the terms of the debate. As part of my effort to understand Dreyfus, I’ve been undertaking a parallel study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had a pronounced influence on Dreyfus. Below is a short summary of how I understand a few of Merleau-Ponty’s key insights. (Readers familiar with Merleau-Ponty won’t find too much ground-breaking interpretation in this post, but it does serve to ground the larger investigation I’ve been engaged in.)

His major work, Phenomenology of Perception, was first published in France in 1945. As the title indicates, the work deals with articulating a philosophy of perception. Drawing from his predecessors Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty in this effort gave primacy to the body’s practical comportment with the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), the historically situated and intersubjective horizon of experience from which all theoretical and scientific investigation begins, and to which it must always return. In emphasizing the body’s dynamic behavior as central to epistemological investigation—a move seen as early as his 1942 work The Structure of Behavior—Merleau-Ponty continued the work of his predecessors in returning to twentieth century philosophy the central role of embodiment in philosophy and psychology alike (the latter effort being greatly informed by gestalt theory and the neurological sciences of Merleau-Ponty’s day).

Kant and Fichte

March 4, 2017 — 12 Comments

Below are a few thoughts on Fichte’s advance over Kant’s critical philosophy. I’m finding that there’s much in Fichte’s work that forms something of a historical starting point for my own work on concepts as capacities. There are substantial differences, too. For example, Fichte’s strong separation of the causal order of nature and the normative order of human freedom strikes me as implausible, and it would be hard to imagine a philosopher arguing the point with as much force today (though the exact way to think of this partition—or to not think it at all—continues to give everyone a headache).

That said, as I read them, the primary difference between Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophies lies in their differing starting points, in what a grounding for transcendental philosophy requires. If Kant was correct to say that experience has an a priori structure that conditions all possibilities of experience, he was wrong to suggest that this a priori structure—including the forms of intuition, the categories of the understanding, the ideas of reason, and the transcendental ego itself—could be taken as simply given. That is, in much the same way that Kant’s critical philosophy leads one to reject the mere givenness of empirical experience, this same rejection should be applied to the mere givenness of the a priori concepts and categories of the transcendental itself. Continue reading

Architecture and Epoché

October 22, 2016 — 9 Comments

tumblr_oeivjpl1za1qd0i7oo1_1280 [Image: Tanja Deman]

In an earlier post, I connected typography and bookmaking to James Gibson’s theory of affordances, the idea that perception is layered less with the properties of individual objects and more with the possibilities for action they enable or afford. The basic idea of this application is that books provide a detailed and intentional set of affordances for a certain kind of understanding, and that typography and bookmaking are from this perspective intricate material practices for the installment of conversions in apprehension, for the reshaping of awareness through the mode of discursive engagement.

As I noted in the original post, on this view books are things we think with and through rather than storehouses we download from. The art of writing and bookmaking, then, is the intentional creation of affordances that make such transformations of experience possible. The book is the environment in which such affordances can endure. It’s in the context of designed affordance environments—settings created with the expressed purpose of enabling certain experiences—that I find interesting Peter Sloterdijk’s reflections on architecture and epoché.

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