Spiritual Exercises and the Aesthetic Analogy

Of the many interrelated themes in Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault,Footnote ¹ two strike me as having a particular centrality. First, there is the theme of attention to the present instant. Hadot describes this as the ‘key to spiritual exercises’ (p.84), and he finds the idea encapsulated in a quotation from Goethe's Second Faust: ‘Only the present is our happiness’ (p.217). The second theme is that of viewing the world from above: ‘philosophy signified the attempt to raise up mankind from individuality and particularity to universality and objectivity’ (p.242). Insofar as both attention to the present and raising oneself to an objective view imply the mastery of individual anxiety, passion and desire, they belong to a single conception, that conception being one of a ‘return to the self’:

Richard SorabjiFootnote ² has questioned the extent to which it is true to say generally of the ancient philosophers that they found value only in the present, conceding the idea principally to Marcus Aurelius, an author to whom Hadot has given special attention.Footnote ³ Sorabji too, however, has spoken of what he terms the ‘inwardness’ of the ancient spiritual exercises, and he has pointed out that the idea of turning inward is more ancient than Augustine, who indeed says that he learned to look inward from the Platonists. For Hadot, the guiding metaphor seems to have been the one introduced by Plotinus, who likened the inward turn to the activity of a sculptor, chipping away at a block of marble in order to manifest the statue within. Thus Ennead 1.6.9:

Hadot makes the point that for Plotinus a sculptor merely exposes something that pre-exists in the marble. This is the reason why he finds fault with the use to which Michel Foucault has put the ancient exercises, in Foucault's description of them as the ‘cultivation of the self’ through ‘techniques’. Foucault, alleges Hadot, misunderstands the Plotinian metaphor as implying an exaggerated aestheticism, and even a Dandyism, according to which one fabricates a personality for oneself as if creating a work of art (pp. 102, 211). In an appraisal of the role of the aesthetic analogy in ancient ethics, Joseph Sen has pointed out that the Plotinian conception of the inward is based on a concept of subtraction: ‘The ideal psychic state is not something to be newly made or created but is experienced with the removal of those accretions which have hidden and thus prevented a realization of the self which we already are.’Footnote ⁵

For some ancient Indians, the thought that death occurs not just once but many times over within the span of a single human life provides not comfort but additional anxiety. If one is to be cured of the fear that an endless chain of ‘re-deaths’ is our fate, one remedy is to learn to see one's true self as something indestructible. That thought motivates the spiritual exercises described in the Upaniṣads. These typically involve precisely that ‘return to the self’ of which Hadot speaks, encouraging us to turn our attention inwards in order to re-acquaint ourselves with a universal, impartial self that indwells each of us. A couple of verses from the Katha Upaniṣad are enough to illustrate the point. Turning inward is the way to free oneself from sorrow and desire, to reach wisdom and even immortality:Footnote ⁶

Wilhelm Halbfass has observed that later philosophers in the Upaniṣadic tradition of Vedānta use the term svāsthya, ‘coinciding with oneself; being in one's own true, natural state’, to refer to a soteriological goal involving the removal of obstacles that distance us from an appreciation of our underlying self: ‘‘Final release’ (mukti) or ‘isolation’ (kaivalya) of the self is not to be produced or accomplished in a literal sense, but only in a figurative sense, just as the regaining of the natural state of health (svāsthya) through medical therapy is not the accomplishment or acquisition of something new, but only a return to a ‘previous’ state, a removal of disturbances and obstacles.'Footnote ⁷ The recovery of this natural state of the self is achieved by means of exercises whose function is to train one to regard apparent diversity as merely apparent, assenting to such appearances being regarded as a precondition for desire and other forms of emotional attachment. One way to accomplish this is to learn to ‘withdraw’ the senses. The most celebrated expression of the idea is found at Bhagavadgītā 2.58, though the same metaphor is found in Buddhist and other Indian texts too:

This idea of a ‘return to the self’ by way of a withdrawal of the senses has an echo in other of the spiritual exercises catalogued by Marcus Aurelius, who speaks of retreating to a ‘daimon’ within, as the Indians might to an ‘ātman’.Footnote ⁸

Philosophy and Therapy

Two philosophers belonging to the fourth or fifth century ce refer to a model of the discipline of philosophy that has four divisions: an account of what is sought to be removed or eliminated (heya, lit. ‘what ought to be abandoned’); an account of its aetiology (heya-hetu, lit. ‘that which produces heya’); an account of the state or condition achieved subsequent to this elimination (hāna; lit. ‘abandonment’); and finally an account of the method to be employed to bring this condition about (hāna-upāya; lit. ‘the means leading to hāna’). Their model of philosophical practice generalises and abstracts from two earlier four-fold accounts of practical disciplines. One is the soteriology made famous by the Buddha as the ‘four noble truths’, consisting in accounts of suffering (duḥkha), the causes of suffering (samudaya), liberation from suffering (nirodha), and the path from suffering to liberation (mārga) in the shape of eight sorts of ‘right understanding’. The other is a model of medicine found in the treatises of the physicians, according to which there is an account of disease (roga), the causes of disease (roga-hetu), health or ‘freedom from disease’ (ārogya), and the treatment of disease (bhaiṣajya).Footnote ⁹ One of the two philosophers who advance the model is the author of the Yogasūtra, Patañjali. Thus:

So the ‘spiritual exercise’ here is a practice of discrimination which leads to a ‘return to the self’ in the form of the self's isolation from the perceptual world. Patañjali goes on to add that this practice of discrimination is supported by such things as postures (āsana), breathing control (prāṇāyāma), holding the mind steady (dhāraṇā), meditation (dhyāna, samādhi), ethical restraint (yama) and religious observance (niyama).Footnote ¹¹

The other philosopher to promote the model is Vātsyāyana, author of a commentary on the Nyāyasūtra, the foundational text of the most outwardly ‘theoretical’ of the Indian philosophical schools, Nyāya. In his commentary on the first sūtra, he says:

Vātsyāyana will go on to stress that the ideas of the highest good and the knowledge that leads to it are subject-specific; thus, while the highest good in medicine is health, the highest good in the ‘science of the self’ (ātmavidyā) is ‘liberation’ (apavarga). The next sūtra is then read as identifying what ought to be abandoned as suffering (duḥkha), its cause as erroneous beliefs (mithyājñāna), the condition of the abandonment of suffering as liberation (apavarga), and the method as acquiring knowledge, including knowledge of the self (ātmajñāna). He explains that erroneous beliefs produce in us lusts (rāga) and revulsions (dveṣa), which lead first to greed (lobha) and thence to acts of harm (hiṃsā), stealing, and sexual indiscretion.Footnote ¹³ It is ironic, in view of the similarity of this scheme with the four noble truths of the Buddha, that the mistake about the self identified here is the error of thinking that it does not exist. The knowledge that is the antidote to such errors is knowledge of the ‘real nature’ (tattva) of the entity in question. Vātsyāyana concludes by noting that the condition of being without pain and suffering is also a condition of being without pleasure, because pleasure and pain are always intermixed, just as someone who wishes to administer a bitter poison, mixes it into honey.Footnote ¹⁴

Another commentator, Uddyotakara, however, thinks that one should include as causes of suffering both erroneous beliefs and ‘cravings’ (tṛṣṇā), as well as merit and demerit. He considers that the condition of abandonment is having knowledge of the real nature of things, and the method for acquiring it to be the philosophical treatises (śāstra), and distinguishes that condition of abandonment from the final goal, liberation.Footnote ¹⁵ More generally, if it is knowledge of the ‘real nature’ of things which is sought, then the methods – the ‘exercises’ – will be ones of studying, debating, and examining with the help of evidence. These have approximate counterparts in the spiritual exercises documented by Hadot (pp. 84, 89, 153). Uddyotakara's remarks are clearly influenced by Buddhism, where all unwholesome emotions, it is claimed, have a possessive ingredient, which philosophical knowledge about the impossibility of possessing can eliminate.Footnote ¹⁶ Hatred, for example, is the belief that the person hated is preventing me from getting something I crave; if I come to know that the true nature of things is that everything is in flux and so there can be neither possessed nor possessor, then it is impossible (or at least irrational) to continue to feel that way.

If we return to our earlier discussion, the therapeutic model outlined in both the Yoga and Nyāya schools seems to be one of ‘subtraction’. In every case, there is an elimination of suffering (in all its forms), leading to states of spiritual wholeness conceived of either as the self in isolation or the self as free from lusts and aversions, painful or pleasurable alike. A slightly later Nyāya philosopher has expressed the matter very clearly: ‘In eliminating its particular qualities, the self rests in its own natural state – being permanent, it is not itself eliminated.’Footnote ¹⁷ In these systems, acquiring knowledge of a certain privileged sort is the key spiritual exercise, and so, as is perhaps most explicitly stated by Naiyāyikas, the study and practice of philosophy – reading philosophical texts, debating, arguing, and so on – is the fundamental activity in what Hadot has appropriately described as a ‘return to the self’.

Plutarch and the Buddhists: Returning Oneself to The Present Moment

Instead of a model based on the activity of a sculptor, Plutarch speaks of weaving or painting a life with the help of active memory, allowing the memory of unpleasant things to form the muted backdrop against which more pleasant memories can shine out and be made prominent. I will quote Plutarch's important and densely argued passage in full:

I find in the contrast between Plotinus and Plutarch the reflection of a more general contrast between two interpretations of the spiritual exercises. In the first interpretation, the value of the spiritual exercises is restorative, returning the person to a state of psychological health from which they have departed. According to the second interpretation, the spiritual exercises are instead generative, producing in the person a condition (for example, an ‘identity’ or a ‘character’) that had not been there before.

It is not entirely clear whether Plutarch's view about weaving is that there is no self until one is woven, or if his view is that the weaving fashions, for a person who is already there, an ‘identity’ or ‘character’ or ‘personality’ that is their own.Footnote ¹⁹ Elsewhere, he speaks as if in favour of the view that there are no continuous selves:

Sorabji has argued that this passage is incompatible with the earlier one about weaving, and possibly represents a poorly integrated acquaintance with Buddhist ideas about the self: ‘Plutarch could have argued consistently, if he had chosen, that the short-term selves should be woven into a long-term biography. But in fact, when he recommends biographical weaving, he treats the short-term selves of the Growing Argument as no more than a simile. And in practice, it would not have been possible to combine the therapy of weaving, to produce tranquillity, with the therapy of dwelling on discontinuity to allay fear of death.’Footnote ²¹ And again, ‘If [Plutarch and Seneca] really mean the same [as the Buddhists], it will be incompatible with the rest of what they say, which suggests that it could be an alien growth.. [I]t is incompatible with … Plutarch's belief that we have genuine memories that we can use to weave our lives into a unity… Plutarch might be expected to say no more than that one acquires a new identity in an everyday sense.’Footnote ²² For Plutarch, the spiritual exercises help us not fret about the past or worry about the future, but they do so by encouraging us to see the good and the bad as belonging within a harmoniously unified whole life, with the bad providing a dim backdrop to the more pleasant. Plutarch sees no therapeutic value in thinking of our past miseries as simply flowing away and ceasing to belong to us.

It is open, of course, even for someone who thinks that the self is just a river of fleeting experience to find value in weaving together everything that is in their mind at a given moment, including the (merely apparent) memories they have; and indeed the possibility which Sorabji envisages but does not attribute to Plutarch might be what some Buddhists have in mind when they speak of constructing a sense of self by way of an activity involving the ‘appropriation’ (upādāna) of one's memory and experience.Footnote ²³ More often, though, the resonance is with those spiritual exercises which involve an attention to the present moment, and indeed a reduction of oneself to a single point in time. Buddhists argue, unlike Plutarch, that there is therapeutic value in the idea that there are no continuous selves. The line of thought is roughly as follows: thinking that there are no continuous selves is an ‘antidote’ to the belief that the self is continuous or permanent, but this second belief is what makes it possible for us to ‘crave’ for things we do not yet have, or mourn that which we have lost. Since unsatisfied cravings are the source of ‘suffering’ in all its forms, we cure ourselves of suffering with the remedy that is the idea that there are no continuous selves (and that there are no continuous objects of craving either). Reminiscent, in a way, of Marcus Aurelius' advice to live each day as if it is one's last,Footnote ²⁴ the idea is that it is hard to worry about the future if one does not expect to be there. For example, Milinda-pañhā 4.2.3:

Neither, perhaps, will one be greatly agitated by the memory of past calamities, although one will be able to feel compassion for that other one upon whom they fell. Another line of thought agrees that we do construct lives and characters and personae for ourselves, and sees the function of the spiritual exercises as one of dismantling these constructs, but in order to return us to a state in harmony with nature, rather than to the self. Many Buddhists, especially those within the Abhidharma school, have proposed the use of exercises of breakdown and dissolution, as did the Buddha himself. In the Simile of the Lute, for example, the Buddha explains that if one looks within and investigates, one will find only the psychological elements and not the self, just as one will search in vain among the components of a lute for the sound that the lute makes:

This is the way, the Buddha explains, for someone in whom lust, desire, hatred or delusion has arisen to acquire a mind that is steady, settled, unified and concentrated. The concept of self upon which those possessive emotions depend does not survive an analytical break-up of the mind into its components, any more than the sound made by the lute survives if the lute is broken into its parts. In the Simile of the Lute, the aesthetic analogy is used to compare the self with a piece of music in the air, and the point of the analogy is to emphasise that it has an ephemeral nature.

The idea that one should aim to reduce one's sense of self to a point in time is evident in Āryadeva's verse, ‘What is called someone's life is nothing other than a moment of consciousness. People certainly do not know this; consequently self-knowledge is rare’ (Catuḥśataka 1.10). The seventh century Buddhist Candrakīrti explains that

Coming to know that there is no enduring self is thus clearly seen as a therapeutic philosophical achievement. No emotion that requires one to admit the existence of enduring self, such as regret or possessive desire, is able to survive the surgical removal of that commitment. Though possibly free of regret and anxiety, such a life may be, as Plutarch suggests, a ‘needy’ one, for one will need constantly to be affirmed in the present; one will have neither a past nor a future to sustain one. The therapy of ‘dwelling on discontinuity’ is intended to do more, certainly, than merely allay a fear of death, even if that fear is the basis of many others; it also produces tranquillity by removing unwelcome emotions. If anything, the problem is that it does too much – for will it not also eliminate wholesome emotions like hope?Footnote ²⁸

A Life Complete at Every Moment

There are, however, dissident voices. One of these rejects the aesthetic model altogether, whether it sees life as sculpting a self or weaving a persona and narrating a biography. For any artistic endeavour might be ended before it has reached completion, and any work of art might be left unfinished. A human life, however, it has sometimes been suggested, is complete at every moment; and if that is right, then the aesthetic analogy in any of its modes is singularly inappropriate.

Marcus Aurelius points to a disanalogy with aesthetic activities like drama and dancing:

It is with the same idea, an idea antithetical to the aesthetic paradigm, that the Meditations are brought to an end (12.35–6). Among the Indians, the thought seems to me most clearly and beautifully expressed by Rabindranath Tagore:

As a mode of being-in-the-world, learning to think of one's life as complete at each moment seems to me to have many advantages. It does not require that one attach no value to the past or the future in order to allay dismay and anxiety, nor to think of oneself or the world as only momentary. Also, it does not expect of us the high-mindedness necessary to see oneself wholly objectively in terms of one's place in the cosmos. While I am not convinced that Tagore's analogy with organic growth is entirely successful, we may say that one's life is not so much a work of art as a work indefinitely extendable, adding to itself as a city might a new building or suburb, without any implication that what exists before the addition is unfinished.

Taming the self

A fascinating discussion of the ends of human life is to be found tucked away in four short sections of the Śāntiparvan, a voluminous book of philosophical reflection embedded within the body of the Mahābhārata. The text represents a clear attempt to absorb and integrate general ethical insights into the moral framework of the Hindu epic. It can be read, therefore, as an attempt to articulate a set of wide-spread ethical concerns. What is the ‘highest good’ (niḥśreyasa)? The Śāntiparvan gives a direct and unequivocal answer: it is the taming (dama) of the self (12.154.7).Footnote ³¹ Taming the self is a subduing, a rendering calm or tranquil, a pacification. What needs to be tamed is the self's inclination to reach out to things that are ‘external’ to oneself (where ‘external’ means both physically exterior and outside of one's influence); so taming is a pulling back, a drawing in, a restraint (cf. Bhagavad-gītā 10.4); it is a form of self-control. One who achieves this is without fear, anger or envy, and has a profound steadiness of mind (gāmbhīrya dhairya; 12.156.12), that is an unpeturbability in the face of either pain or pleasure (12.156.9). This is because ‘reaching out’ is greed, a wish to obtain (lobha), and from this arises both anger and desire. With this in check, one lives the life glorified as one of wise conduct (śiṣṭācāra), namely the life of one who is fearless in the face of death, equal in the face of pleasure or pain, self-controlled, and impartial (12.152.20–26), delighting in no acquisition and pained by no loss. Such a person lives as one for whom acting well is just like a movement of one's body; in particular, there is no ulterior cause for such activity, such as wealth or fame (12.152.27). With the taming of self are also associated – perhaps optimistically – forgiveness, patience, abstention from injuring others, truth, sincerity, wisdom, mildness, modesty, liberality, contentment, pleasantness of speech, benevolence and freedom from malice (12.154).

It takes knowledge (jñāna) to achieve such a life, for greed and ignorance go hand in hand (12.153); and it takes ‘spiritual austerity’ (tapas) (12.155). What, though, is the role of knowledge in ‘taming’ the self? Greed is a failure to understand that none of things one seeks to obtain is going to last (12.157); it should also be understood that greed is, of its nature, insatiable (12.152). Anger is greed together with a sensitivity to other people's faults, and so is removed by tolerance (kṣamā), which comes from forbearance (kṣānti). The result of anger is desire (kāma), which arises from willfully wanting something (saṃkalpa).

A beautiful metaphor is used to illustrate this conception of the self-controlled life. One who lives wisely is said to tread softly on the earth: ‘As the track of birds along the sky or of fowl over the surface of water cannot be discerned, even so the track of such a person does not attract notice.’ Such a life has but one drawback, and this is that a person who lives thus is regarded by others as weak and simple. But for this, those others can be forgiven, and a life so lived is one from which one does not need to retreat: ‘What need has a man of self-control for a forest? Similarly, of what use is a forest to him that has no self-control? That is a forest where the man of self-control dwells, and that is even a sacred asylum.’ This, clearly, is not a transcendental, privative, ideal, but a way of living in the world, in a human community, one in which one can adopt either the practices of the cities or those of the forest. This life, the life of a dānta, a ‘tamed’ one, it is said, is one of tranquillity (praśama; 12.154.18).

Philosophy and the Ends of Life

That epistemic practices have a role in living a life well is asserted explicitly in the Śāntiparvan analysis: knowing that desires are insatiable and the things desired unstable is a solution to anger and greed. Yet it is not very explicit just how it is that knowledge, or philosophy more generally, can serve in this way as a ‘therapy.’ Perhaps that is not surprising, for the Śāntiparvan is not a work of academic philosophy; it is a work of epic literature. So let us turn next to the professional philosophers, specifically the practitioners of Nyāya. They say that the study of philosophy is indispensible in reaching the highest good: ‘What leads to the highest good is knowledge (tattvajnāña),’ specifically knowledge of the methods of inquiry and their objects, including the forms of debate (NS 1.1.1).Footnote ³² The connection is this: ‘In the sequence of suffering, rebirth, activity, moral failing, and cognitive error, removing each by removing its successor leads to liberation (apavarga)’ (NS 1.1.2). That is to say, moral failings are produced and sustained by cognitive errors, so if the error is removed, the moral failing will disappear too. Likewise, moral failings indirectly result in and sustain suffering, and a state free of suffering is the result of their removal.

One fundamental way in which we go wrong is to mistake a thing for its opposite. We ‘mistake suffering for pleasure, the unreal for the real, that which is not a remedy for a remedy, the afraid for the fearless’ and so on (Nyāyabhāṣya under 1.1.2). We mistakenly think of ‘liberation’ as a state of complete insentience, and so as quite undesirable. These cognitive errors instil in us wants and aversions, and that leads us to moral failings like falsehood, malice, deception and greed. Such failings in our moral psychology make us act immorally too; we engage in harmful acts towards others: theft, lies, rudeness and fault-finding. These contrast sharply with the virtues of thought, word and deed for which we strive.

Why, though, is it claimed that cognitive errors lead us to desire per se, rather than to desire the wrong things? Mistaking a sea shell for a piece of silver, I might want to go after it; and if I did, I would be desiring something which is not really there. But if it really had been a piece of silver, there seems to be nothing wrong with my wish to obtain it. The answer, presumably, is that we are not speaking here of ordinary empirical knowledge, but of that philosophical wisdom one derives from the śāstras, the texts. If I do not know what good evidence is, I cannot know if any of my beliefs matches up to it. But if I do not know this, then acting on anything I believe, true or false, would carry with it a degree of moral risk. The elimination of moral risk requires that I have ‘theoretical’ expertise in the arts of knowing. One might live a life that happened to be free from mistakes entirely by chance, but that would not be a good life. For a life to be a good one, the absence of suffering must rest on something more secure than chance.

How does one discriminate between a thing and a masquerade of it? How does one distinguish between a true pleasure and a pain that passes itself off as a pleasure? This, exactly, is what philosophy excels in, distinguishing between pretence and truth. For instance, the difference between a good argument and an argument that only pretends to be a good one, i.e. a piece of sophistry. Philosophy shows us how to see through the pretences of reason. Without a secure ability to do that, our attempts to live well in thought, deed and speech are subject to moral risk. Uddyotakara raises a further issue: incompatible beliefs cannot simultaneously be entertained, but what ensures that truth trumps error? According to him, it is only that true beliefs have a foundation that the false ones lack.

It is, of course, true that a great deal is said about such transcendental spiritual goals as mokṣa, mukti and nirvāṇa, and that these goals are represented as an ultimate, idealized aspiration for all. Mortal human beings, though, do not aspire actually to become sages; rather, they take the image of the sage as a device to help them pursue those goals that are properly their own. Thinking about mokṣa and nirvāṇa, as well as about the buddhas and the ṛṣis, helps us to actualize the human ends that are ours. Entertaining the idea that one is striving for a transcendent ideal might itself be a ‘spiritual exercise,’ a practice that forms a part of the good for a human being. If that is right, then it would be a mistake to read the descriptions of the transcendental states and the means to reach them as if they were literal expressions of a path from the world of men to the world of the gods. For the Indians, no doubt, these ideal states are given a characterization in largely privative terms, as states free from pain, free from suffering, free from anger and desire, and often indeed, free from pleasure too. The idea that what one should aim for is an existence that is so colourless has been one reason that European philosophers have struggled to engage with the Indian philosophical imagination. From my point of view, the very fact that the ideal states are described in such unappealing terms shows us that these are not really intended as descriptions of the good for human beings. The question to ask is a different one: namely, how might entertaining the idea that one is striving to achieve such a state help one get somewhere; and indeed, where might one be attempting to get for this to be an appropriate method for getting there? Might it be, for example, that reflecting on the nature of an existence entirely void of either pleasure or pain will help us to re-examine the relationship between these two? One might be led, for example, not to eschew pleasures altogether, but to be somewhat wary of them: to aim to live in such a way that pleasure is not itself the motivation of one's actions. Believing that the ideal state is a pleasureless state might lead me, not to give up all pleasure, for that is not a realistic human end, but to allow myself to be nourished by the pleasures I have and also to resist voluntarily seeking out new ones. That is, entertaining such an ideal might lead me to a life characterised as one of restraint and self-control.Footnote ³³

Philosophy, then, enables us to see through the pretences of reason, and so makes it possible for us to direct our efforts securely on their target, the living of a life free of suffering. This is not a life of insentient catatonia, for having as our outside aim a life free of suffering does not imply that the life which ensues is devoid of pleasure. It implies only that the pleasures are, as it were, collateral, that their presence does not distract us from our ultimate aims. A life of the restrained mind is a life in which pleasure provides neither the goal nor the motivating reason; but such need not be a life without pleasure.

I will conclude with a quotation from Henry Thoreau, very apt in the context of this chapter: