Section 73: Philosophy of Religion

Learning to Love : extending Hadot’s account of Spiritual Exercises.

Abstract : I propose to do three things in this paper. First, I summarise briefly Pierre Hadot’s (1995) argument that ‘spiritual exercises’ were at the heart of the purposes and practices of the six ancient and classical schools of philosophy. Taken from Philo Judaeus, these exercises are reclassified by Hadot under the four ‘learnings-to’: learning to live, to dialogue, to read, and to die. Second, I begin to frame an argument that a fifth ‘learning-to’, learning to love, is fundamental to any advance in both life and philosophy made through the deployment of the other four. However, I eschew the standard approach of assessing the ‘ladder of love’ argument, and instead adopt the approach favoured by Raymond Gaita (2000), who talks of the ‘preciousness’ of the individual. Finally, I begin to frame a further argument that these, now five ‘learnings-to’ are central to any form of engagement with religious pluralism. In doing so, I acknowledge the multiple difficulties surrounding religious pluralism as indicated by contemporary critics.

Keywords : spiritual exercises; love; pluralism; Hadot; Gaita.

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1. Spiritual Exercises & the Four ‘Learnings-to’ :

As human beings we all, in Pierre Hadot’s terms, ‘learn to live, to die, to dialogue, and to read’ (Hadot, 1995, pp. 83-109). These activities of learning are considered fundamental to a meaningful and flourishing human life, and are themselves derived from the ancient spiritual exercises conducted variously, but often differently, within the six great schools of philosophy : Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism, and Cynicism. For Hadot, they find their best expression in the two summarised lists of daily askeses, or exercises, provided by Philo Judaeus, perhaps better known as Philo of Alexandria, and taken from his Who is the Heir of Divine Things, 253, and Allegorical Interpretations, 3,18. These are :

‘ research (zetesis), thorough investigation (skepsis), reading (anagnosis), listening (akroasis); attention (prosoche); self-mastery (enkrateia); and indifference to indifferent things … meditations (meletai), therapies of the passions, remembrance of good things ….and the accomplishment of duties.’ (Hadot, 1995, p.84)

In carefully reclassifying these spiritual exercises under the four ‘learnings-to’, Hadot demonstrates how they help us to identify who we are in relation to ourselves, to others, to the world we inhabit, and ultimately, to the cosmos to which we all belong.

I have discussed these four teleological practices at some length in a previous paper given at the Athens Congress in 2013. (Grosch, 2018). However, briefly and for our purposes here, Hadot argues that the spiritual exercises form the basis of our self-education along with our formal and informal education within the wider communities of which we are members. By listening to others and paying attention to the world around us, by gradually reading the elements of our culture, and by recognising and controlling our emotions, our wants and desires, we are slowly learning to live. In so doing we are also learning to dialogue, both inwardly with ourselves, and externally with others. Conversations and arguments, discussions and debates, with those with whom we both agree and disagree help us to live a more meaningful life, especially if they are combined with self-mastery, the ability to subdue, train and refine our impulses.

Learning to die, necessarily connects with that ancient Socratic notion that doing philosophy is akin to playing dead, whereby an escape from bodily existence permits us to view the cosmos uninhibited by the particularities of time and place. Meditation, alongside therapies of the passions, are prerequisites to this activity. Moreover, life itself is a necessary preparation for death, which is why, paradoxically given what has just been said about fleeing the particularities of time and place, the dictum of paying keen attention to the present moment, savouring all that it has to offer is central to the living of a life, for no-one knows when death shall come knocking.

Finally, learning to read involves not only the singular act of being able to understand and interpret texts, but also the wider and more complex business of comprehending the signs and signals of one’s own culture in all its richness and beauty, as well as its contrasting shallowness and ugliness. Moreover, this should be an absolute prerequisite if we are to engage with others whose culture, language and texts differ significantly from our own.

2. The Fifth Practice : ‘Learning to Love’ :

However, I shall begin to argue that these four practices alone are insufficient in addressing the major ideological differences that regularly lead to severe conflict within and between communities. These are often, and tragically, played out in the competing religious and philosophical ‘language games’, (Wittgenstein, 1953/2001, §23, p.10) that are at the heart of all cultural and sub-cultural groupings.

What I propose is that a fifth ‘learning-to’ – learning to love – may help to provide the necessary conditions for both meaningful and fruitful inter-religious dialogue and cross-philosophical exchanges of a metaphysical and moral nature.

I had previously argued that Hadot’s four-part account may well lead to a form of quietism: these individual and collective exercises can simply encourage a passive acceptance of the political and social status quo. (Grosch, 2018). Which is why I suggested that the figure of Plato’s mentor provided a classic exemplar of what I called the ‘Socratic imperative’ : the desire to not only improve the self, but also to improve the society of which one is a member. As MacIntyre succinctly reminds us, in Greek society being a good person is equated with being a good citizen. (1988/95, p.111)

Learning to love may provide the impetus for doing just that : the recapture of the, admittedly rather romanticised, notion that we ought all to have the good of oneself and the good of the community at the forefront of our debates, enquiries, and general exchanges. Easy to say, difficult to achieve. But what does ‘learning to love’ actually entail?

We might begin, in classic philosophical mode, with a full-scale analysis of the metaphysical scaffolding that is the ascending ‘ladder of love’, described by Socrates in The Symposium (199d – 212c), followed by Aristotle’s account of eros and philia in The Nicomachean Ethics (1156a16-b2 – 1156b2-23), and ending with the Christian notion of agape, or selfless love. All of this is dealt with comprehensively by Nussbaum (2001) in Upheavals of Thought.

However, I should like to begin, first, with Raymond Gaita’s (2000, pp.18-25) powerful account of a nun performatively acknowledging and demonstrating the ‘preciousness’ of a vulnerable person, one who has lost all the characteristics of someone living a meaningful life. Responding to such an individual partly depends upon a Kantian notion of respect for persons, irrespective of their utilitarian value to society. Recognising and responding to each and every person’s ‘preciousness’, simply because they are a living human being, provides us with a clear starting point.

Second, acknowledging that preciousness demands that we respond with kindness, a kindness in conversation and conduct that helps to ward off the potential for indifference at best and violent confrontation at worst. We can agree to disagree with kindness, without necessarily disavowing our most cherished beliefs and principles. If, as Wittgenstein avers, language shapes reality, then the quality of our dialogue, our speech and writing, can help to shape a positive social landscape rather than a destructive one. One need only look at contemporary online media to witness the personal and cultural damage that unkind words, or hate speech, can wreak.

Third, a recognition of preciousness and the necessity of kindness, go hand in hand with empathy and tolerance, the qualities that may be marked out by Philo’s therapy of the passions combined with the imaginative leap into another’s consciousness prompted by meditation, research, and thorough investigation.

3. Learning to Love and Religious Pluralism

Being kind, empathetic and tolerant in dialogue, along with openly recognising the preciousness of one’s interlocuters, presupposes an understanding of equality governing our relationships and a sense of justice informing our exchanges. Consequently, when engaging in inter-religious dialogue, such a complex form of learning to love helps us to eschew both the explicit superiority of the exclusivist paradigm, and the undeclared or implicit superiority of the inclusivist paradigm. Instead, it permits the often painful and always difficult work of challenging and understanding competing belief systems seriously within a pluralist paradigm.

Notwithstanding Harrison’s (2020) and Basinger’s (2020) widely acknowledged arguments that in a pluralist account of religion there necessarily exist a range of deep conflicts across metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and social philosophy, a serious-minded attempt to learn to love one’s interlocutors, however much we would want to resist their principles and positions, can only help but improve the nature of human conduct, intellectual exchange, and religious dialogue.

And there are, as MacIntyre (1999) reminds us, some useful historical precedents here. A rich pluralist exchange of rival moral and metaphysical belief systems were propounded by some ‘medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian philosophers’ (p.1). Moreover, such exchanges helped shape the very institutions that sustain the kinds of spiritual exercises listed by Philo and outlined by Hadot. Hick’s long, fruitful, but somewhat lonely journey towards pluralist religious belief and dialogue (1989) provides a powerful historical analysis of the possibilities of non-destructive, inter-religious enquiry, drawing on Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘language games’.

Learning to love, therefore, becomes central to the development and refinement of the spiritual life lived with others. It provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for individual and communal progress, by enhancing the other four learnings-to.

Moreover, an acknowledgement of, and commitment to, the fifth ‘learning-to’, learning to love, is presented as a sine qua non, given that all the major world faiths, in various ways, point to the centrality of love, love as the primary impetus for life and well-being. In Christianity, for example, the religious culture and language game with which I am most familiar, the Galilean rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, placed it above all other impetuses for human conduct, exhorting his followers both to love God, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself. (paraphrasing NT, Matthew, 22, 37-40). Everything else is subordinate.

4. Conclusion :

Finally, there is an illuminating comment by Aristotle, when referring to major metaphysical and epistemological differences between his school of philosophy, in the Lyceum, and that of his former teacher’s, in the Academy, both of which existed virtually side by side in Athens for almost two centuries. In resisting Plato’s Two Worlds theory, and despite the colossal consequences of doing so, he cautions against any critical hostility by saying that the theory was ‘introduced by friends of ours’ (Nicomachean Ethics, 1096a3 – 19). If learning to love, along with the other four learnings-to, helps us in this quest for a pluralist understanding of both religion and philosophy, then it will prove its final worth.

References :

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, (1976, trans. J.Thomson, London: Penguin)

Basinger, D., ‘Religious Diversity (Pluralism)’ in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (2020, Zalta, E., (ed.), www.plato.stanford.edu)

Gaita, R., A Common Humanity : Thinking About Love, and Truth and Justice, (2000, London: Routledge)

Grosch, P., ‘The Social, the Spiritual, and the Political’ in Proceedings of the XXlll World Congress of Philosophy, Vol.72, pp.33-39, (2018, Philosophy Documentation Center, www.pdcnet.org)

Hadot, P., Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, (1995, trans. A.Davidson, Oxford: Blackwell)

Harrison, V., ‘Religious Pluralism’ in Oxford Bibliographies, (2020, www.oxfordbibliographies.com)

Hick, J., An Interpretation of Religion, (1989, New Haven: Yale University Press)

Holy Bible, (NT, NRSV, 2017, Cambridge University Press)

MacIntyre, A., After Virtue : a study in moral theory, (1988/1995, London:Duckworth)

MacIntyre, A., ‘Moral Pluralism Without Moral Relativism’ in Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Vol.1, (1999, Philosophy Documentation Center; www.pdcnet.org)

Nussbaum, M., Upheavals of Thought, (2001, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press)

Plato, The Symposium, (1999, trans. C.Gill, London : Penguin)

Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, (1953/2001, trans. G.E.M.Anscombe , Oxford:Blackwell)