Nietzsche adopts from the Socrates of the Apology a medicinal and diagnostic model of the philosopher as a physician of the soul and society. I can (partially) agree with this model of philosophy while also departing from Nietzsche’s diagnosis and prescription. Our moment is altogether too Nietzschean already, and so we need an alternative that understands that “Nietzsche should be honored as an antagonist,” in William Desmond’s words.

“The paradoxes that open the gates to silence have a rationality all their own; they cannot be considered in their discrete parts or their dynamic will be destroyed.”

— Maggie Ross A few additional quotations from Silence: A User’s Guide (Vol. 1):

“No matter how clever the writer, the words are never, ever more than gestures toward the threshold or the effects of contemplation.”

I’m always struck by how often the notion of attending to oneself is linked to the notion of conversion in Pierre Hadot’s reconstruction of, just to list some examples, Stoicism, Neoplatonism, & Christian monasticism (more controversially I’d include Kantian philosophy here too). The underlying intuition in all these cases is that the self that takes itself as a subject of inquiry cannot do so without also changing the nature of the self it has set out to observe. The act of attending is also an act of conversion, a moment of transformation.

A Christopher Alexander quote thread:

“In the 20th century we have passed through a unique period, one in which architecture as a discipline has been in a state that is almost unimaginably bad. Sometimes I think of it as a mass psychosis of unprecedented dimension.” “Very few people realize, I think, how much of the present confusion which exists in the field of architecture is wound up with our conception of the universe”.

The phrase “contemplative philosophy” denotes a specific understanding of theory and practice that transforms the meaning of both terms. One could say that this transformation implies a recursive relationship between theory and practice, but this move doesn’t go far enough. A real contemplative philosophy marks a crossing over of theory into practice and practice into theory. In other words, on this view, theory is itself a kind of practice, and practice delivers what we normally think of as theoretical insight.

The word askēsis can refer to a set of practices used for strengthening attention, especially attention to oneself, first for the sake of caring for oneself, but ultimately for increasing one’s capacity to attend to others. Attention is a practice and a kind of care. “One cares for oneself in order to be able to care for the city” is how Edward McGushin puts it. For this reason, practices of attention can also be cultivated as modes of resistance to political power, to social conditioning, and to one’s own psychological history.