Challenging Thought Processes

 

Before diving into the specifics, first it’s important to orient one’s thinking appropriately. The subjects in this book are scientific in nature, but the hard part isn’t as much the “science” as it is the thought processes that block rationality. What follows are cautions for you, the reader. Additionally, this will serve to prime you for paradigm-shifting concepts I discuss later that may cause cognitive dissonance (that is, psychological discomfort). Sometimes easing into jarring subject matter is most palatable to the mind.

1.Falsifying one model does not require having a viable or complete alternative model. When a claim is put forward, the burden of proof is on the party making the claim. If observations falsify the claim, then the claim must logically be discarded—regardless of whether a new, viable claim can be made to replace the old one.

In other words, it’s permissible to show that a model is incorrect without providing a new and comprehensive model to replace it. In such scenarios, we’re left in the uncomfortable but intellectually honest position of saying, We simply don’t know the answer.

Cosmology researcher Austin Whitsitt describes this principle using the phrase “falsification is independent of replacement”: the exercise of falsifying one model is independent of finding a definitive replacement model.20 This is a process of elimination that narrows down the possible truths.

Here is an example: You’re working with a team on a multiple-choice test in school that has options A, B, C, and D as possible answers. You’re required to submit an answer to your teacher, but the caveat is that your entire team must agree on the answer that you submit. Your teammates are convinced that the answer is option A. However, your analysis leads you to conclude that A cannot be correct. You tell your team the news, excited that you narrowed down the set of possibilities. But to your shock, your team dismisses your work. Although  they cannot deny that you’ve falsified option A, they ask with skepticism, But do you know, instead, what the correct answer is? If it’s not A, is it B, C, or D? You reply, I don’t know. That’s a separate analysis, and I haven’t gotten there yet. Your team replies, You don’t know the answer? Okay, then the real answer must be A. We’re sticking with that. This is irrational and illogical, but it can happen with rebuttals to scientific models.

Whitsitt gives another example that’s illustrative: Imagine that you go to your parents’ home and find in their closet official legal papers showing that you were adopted. All the paperwork is there: you were indeed legally adopted. Then you tell your friends, Hey, you won’t believe this: I was adopted! I found the paperwork! Your friends reply, Who are your real parents, then? You reply, I don’t know. That requires a separate line of inquiry. I’d have to look into that much further, but the truth is that I might never know who my real parents are. All I know with certainty is that I was adopted. Your friends reply, We refuse to believe that you were adopted until you tell us who your real parents are.21 This is the same sort of irrationality that can occur within science: even after one model is falsified, there’s a bias toward sticking with it if a comprehensive replacement model isn’t provided.

The psychological desire to have complete answers clouds logical thinking, as opposed to being able to sit in the unknown. There is often a tendency to feel more comfortable living with a lie than living with uncertainty.

This concept is essential to hold in mind while reading the coming chapters. In this book, I make no definitive claims about the true nature of the cosmos—and for reasons that I will discuss, there are limitations that make it impossible to promote a definitive model today. Instead, in this book I aim to expose flaws in the claims put forward by mainstream science. Hopefully by deflating confidence in the existing model, more attention will go toward new and better models.

 The approach is similar to the Vedic philosophy of neti neti (“not this, not that”).22 In other words, one arrives at the truth by continually finding what is not true, thereby leaving a narrower and narrower subset of possible candidates for the truth.

2.Black swans falsify a model. Imagine a model that claims: “All swans are white.” You travel around the world, and you find white swan after white swan. You conclude that the model works well and is highly predictive of reality. Then, one day, you come across a black swan. That black swan destroys your model because your model says that “all swans are white.”23All means all. A single anomaly makes your model unviable because your model is no longer able to accurately describe reality. This may sound obvious, but it needs to be stated explicitly. There is often a psychological tendency to excuse mistakes and defend the consensus model by using mental gymnastics, even if contradictory evidence is presented.

These mental gymnastics often include post hoc rationalizations: an idea is made up out of thin air to “explain away” the apparent anomaly, thereby allowing that model to seem like it still works.

Dark matter and dark energy might turn out to be examples of this rationalization. Observations in astrophysics failed to align with the mainstream model, so scientists effectively concluded: Dark matter and dark energy must be there. But what if they’re not there, and the fundamentals of modern cosmology—including gravity and general relativity theory—are simply wrong?

3.Double standards are everywhere in debates about cosmology. If an existing model explains reality “pretty well,” it’s easy to sweep under the rug seemingly minor errors, incomplete ideas, or unexplained phenomena.

However, when a new, competing model is proposed, there can be a tendency to quickly dismiss it if there  is even a single unexplained issue…while at the same time being willing to tolerate unexplained issues in the existing, mainstream model. This is, of course, irrational and intellectually inconsistent, yet it happens regularly. If one is willing to be so harsh toward a new model, one should be equally ready to let go of the existing model.

For instance, mainstream science seems willing to accept the problems with dark matter and dark energy, and the absence of a unifying theory of physics. Yet when the “nonmainstream” ideas I discuss in this book are proposed, there’s a knee-jerk reaction to dismiss them if there’s even a single concept that is difficult to conceptualize.

4.Observations do not, on their own, reveal the cause(s) of those observations. Imagine a situation in which people get sick with similar symptoms after attending a party. Then they conclude that they “caught” something contagious. This is certainly one reasonable hypothesis. But to stop there would be illogical. The fact that people got sick after being in the same place at the same time doesn’t necessarily mean that a contagious, microscopic germ caused the symptoms. People can get sick for many reasons that have nothing to do with germs. For instance, what if people at the party were exposed to the same toxin floating in the air, emanating from the materials in the building, or sitting in the food and drinks served at the party? What if the attendees were exposed to high levels of radiation or electric and magnetic fields (EMFs)? What if they were exposed to a similar psychological stressor that translated into sickness? What if there was a “bioresonance” between the “energy fields” of the people that mimicked germ-based contagion? Yawns seem to be “contagious,” but they don’t come from a germ. Women’s menstrual cycles sometimes synchronize when they share a living space, but that isn’t believed to come from a contagious germ. Furthermore,  what if there is some other cause that isn’t understood by modern science?

Rather than really digging for the truth, it’s easy to find ourselves in a place of intellectual laziness whereby a single explanation emerges, and we stop thinking any further. Once we’ve decided on the explanation, we erroneously use that as the basis for the model into which all future observations are forced.

This work is, of course, not about medicine (I covered that topic in my book An End to Upside Down Medicine [2023]). But the fallacious reasoning observed throughout medicine often occurs in cosmology as well. Andrew Kaufman, MD, made this very observation in his 2023 lecture titled “Fallacies, Fraud & Pseudoscience: The Parallels Between Cosmology and Biology.” In his words: “You can observe a set of phenomena in nature and you can come up with a model or a hypothesis to explain it….But when you stick to circular reasoning, you feel that your explanation is the only possible solution….[It’s advisable to] always think: ‘If I can come up with another logical explanation for this set of phenomena, then we know that the proposed explanation or model is not necessarily correct because there are many other models that could also be correct.’”24

An example of this type of thinking arises in discussions about heliocentrism (the belief that Earth revolves around the Sun), versus geocentrism (the belief that the Sun revolves around Earth). Heliocentrism is fundamental to the consensus cosmological paradigm, yet physicists rarely acknowledge that observations attributed to heliocentrism could also fit into a geocentric cosmology. We’re simply so accustomed to presupposing the truth of heliocentrism that we struggle to envision Earth at the center—even though our experience is that the luminous bodies in the sky move around Earth, and Earth feels to us like it is stationary. Many prominent, mainstream physicists have discussed this, including  Stephen Hawking. In his book The Grand Design (2010), coauthored by Leonard Mlodinow, they stated: “Our observations of the heavens can be explained by assuming either the earth or the sun to be at rest.”25 Let that sink in. There is more to come on this topic. [emphasis added]

The broader problem here is related to a logical fallacy known as affirming the consequent. It goes like this:

If P, then Q.

 Q, therefore P.

An example:

If it rains, then the grass outside will be wet.

 The grass outside is wet; therefore, it rained.

This conclusion, of course, ignores many other possible causes of wet grass that have absolutely nothing to do with rain. The grass could have been wet because of sprinklers, for instance.

How often do we get stuck in a particular belief system without considering other possible explanations?

5.The way celestial bodies in the sky look and behave doesn’t necessarily imply that Earth looks and behaves in the same way. If you look at bodies in the sky through a telescope, it is not logical to conclude that Earth must share those same qualities. An alternative possibility—and one that must be considered among intellectually honest seekers—is that Earth is unique or distinct relative to those bodies observed in the sky. For instance, the assumption that Earth is just like “other planets” presupposes that Earth is a planet rather than something else. Alternatives need to be considered in fully comprehensive analyses.

6.Testing something on Earth alone, in the present moment, is insufficient to draw conclusions about the broader cosmos in the past and in the future. Scientists can run experiments on Earth today, but they often extrapolate and make  claims that ignore important presuppositions. As stated by physicist Robert Bennett, PhD:

When we design a test, the test has to match what the hypothesis claims. So, if you claim something that is going to apply throughout all space, you cannot test it only on Earth. If you say it’s in the Solar System, you have to be able to test it throughout the Solar System. This is what’s overlooked very often in the statements of laws—the scope of the laws—in space.

Same goes for time. Does the law only apply at a certain time? This is violated [frequently]….You cannot know what happened in ancient times if you make measurements on data in current time. You can only assume that nothing has changed between when the event occurred and when you actually did the measurement. And this is an assumption that is often incorrect.

[Also,] when you look at the stars in space, what you’re looking at are dots of light that are interpreted as being the same type of light production that is being done in the Sun. But there’s no proof of that. The spectrum of the stars—none of them are the same as the spectrum of the Sun. So we’re making assumptions that what we see in starlight is the same as we see in sunlight.…

[In summary,] when you look at a law, you must always ask, “What is the scope in space and time?” This is what I see most often violated in what I call “mainstream thinking.”26 [emphasis added]

7.The way our eyes see obscures reality, and many of us are unaware of this issue; thus, we fail to make the necessary mental adjustments. On the most fundamental level, our eyes only show us a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum: we don’t see radio waves, x-rays, microwaves, infrared light, and more (see the image that follows). Even though we can detect invisible light with  technology, we tend to be biased by what we can see with our eyes. Therefore, judging the cosmos by our eyes alone is problematic.

Visible light is only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. Most of the spectrum exists beyond what our ordinary vision can detect. Our eyes show us only a sliver of reality.27

Beyond that, it’s important to acknowledge that we cannot see forever. Light attenuates, meaning that its intensity fades as it moves through a medium (such as the air and atmosphere).28Similarly, a visual phenomenon known as perspective can lead us to erroneously interpret objects to be rising or falling as they become more distant from us, when in reality they’re not actually rising or falling. Put another way: our brains process visual information in a way that can skew perception. Ultimately, our visual space is curved and limited. It is neither linear nor infinite. More on this later.

8.Math is a tool; it is not direct evidence that a model is correct. Consider the following quotation from Arthur C. Clarke in his 1963 book Profiles of the Future:

The lesson to be learned…is one that can never be repeated too often, and is one that is seldom understood by laymen—who have an almost superstitious awe of mathematics. But mathematics is only a tool, though an immensely powerful one. No equations,  however impressive and complex, can arrive at the truth if the initial assumptions are incorrect. It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible. When this happens, the most well-informed men become blinded by their prejudices and are unable to see what lies directly ahead of them. What is even more incredible, they refuse to learn from experience; they will continue to make the same mistake over and over again.

Some of my best friends are astronomers, and I am sorry to keep throwing stones at them—but they do seem to have an appalling record as prophets.”29 [emphasis added]

Physicist Nikola Tesla stated it another way in 1934: “Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.”30

In this book, I will not delve into math. But inevitably the question may arise in your mind: Wouldn’t equations have proven modern cosmology already? If the assumptions baked into the equations haven’t been correct, however, then the resulting math wouldn’t tell us what we need to know. And perhaps that’s what has been happening in cosmology.

9.Beware of the “appeal to personal incredulity” logical fallacy. When encountering paradigm-shifting concepts, there can be a tendency to think, I cannot conceive how this could possibly be true. I cannot, in my own mind, list all of the steps needed in order for it to have happened in the way that it is claimed. I don’t fully understand it. Therefore, I reject it.

 Truth doesn’t depend on our ability to fathom it. Just because one can’t comprehend something doesn’t mean that this thing is not true. Similarly, there might be ideas beyond our current knowledge that we haven’t even considered—“unknown unknowns.”31

20For example, see Austin Whitsitt’s content on his many social media channels, including his YouTube channel titled Witsit Gets It: https://www.youtube.com/@Whitsitt.

21Ibid.

22I first heard this comparison to Vedic philosophy made by Thomas Cowan, MD.

23Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the term black swan with his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (second edition, 2010).

24Andrew Kaufman, MD, “Fallacies, Fraud & Pseudoscience: The Parallels Between Cosmology and Biology,” https://rumble.com/v44kwso-fallacies-fraud-and-pseudoscience-the-parallels-between-cosmology-and-biolo.html. 3:00–5:20.

25Hawking and Mlodinow, The Grand Design, 56.

26Witsit Gets It, “In The Field – Robert Bennett Ph.D. – Part 1,” https://www.youtube.com/live/5j0wCrkzfwk, 12:45–15:10.

27Figure reconstructed from NASA introduction to electromagnetic spectrum, https://science.nasa.gov/ems/01_intro.

28Attenuation of light is a well-known phenomenon. For instance, “Fog attenuation in the visible and IR regions is reviewed from an empirical and theoretical point of view” is mentioned in Naboulsi et al., “Fog attenuation prediction for optical and infrared waves,” https://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/optical-engineering/volume-43/issue-2/0000/Fog-attenuation-prediction-for-optical-and-infrared-waves/10.1117/1.1637611.short.

29Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible, 7.

30Tesla, “Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World,” https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/radio-power-will-revolutionize-world.

31A phrase used by Donald Rumsfeld. See Graham, “Rumsfeld’s Knowns and Unknowns: The Intellectual History of a Quip,” https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/rumsfelds-knowns-and-unknowns-the-intellectual-history-of-a-quip/359719/.

An End to the Upside Down Cosmos 

Rethinking the BigBang, Heliocentrism,

the Lights in the Sky…

and Where We Live

Mark Gober

Moral philosophy and the "realist" philosophers

Moral philosophy, from the days of Socrates down to our own lifetime, had been regarded as an attempt to think out more clearly the issues involved in conduct, for the sake of acting better. In 1912 Prichard announced that moral philosophy as so understood was based on a mistake, and advocated a new kind of moral philosophy, purely theoretical, in which the workings of the moral consciousness should be scientifically studied as if they were the movements of the planets, and no attempt made to interfere with them. And Bertrand Russell at Cambridge proposed in the same spirit, and on grounds whose difference was only superficial, the extrusion of ethics from the body of philosophy.

The 'realist' philosophers who adopted this hew programme were all, or nearly all, teachers of young men and young women. Their pupils, with habits and characters yet unformed, stood on the threshold of life; many of them on the threshold of public life. Half a century earlier, young people in that position had been told that by thinking about what they were doing, or were about to do, they would become likely on the whole to do it better; and that some understanding of the nature of moral or political action, some attempt to formulate ideals and principles, was an indispensable condition of engaging creditably in these activities themselves. And their teachers, when introducing them to the study of moral and political theory, would say to them, whether in words or not— the most important things that one says are often not said in words—'Take this subject seriously, because whether you understand it or not will make a difference to your whole lives'. The 'realist', on the contrary, said to his pupils, 'If it interests you to study this, do so; but don't think it will be of any use to you. Remember the great principle of realism, that nothing is affected by being known. That is as true of human action as of anything else. Moral philosophy is only the theory of moral action: it can't therefore make any difference to the practice of moral action. People can act just as morally without it as with it. I stand here as a moral philosopher; I will try to tell you what acting morally is, but don't expect me to tell you how to do it.'

At the moment, I am not concerned with the sophisms underlying this programme, but with its consequences. The pupils, whether or not they expected a philosophy that should give them, as that of Green's school had given their fathers, ideals to live for and principles to live by, did not get it; and were told that no philosopher (except of course a bogus philosopher) would even try to give it. The inference which any pupil could draw for himself was that for guidance in the problems of life, since one must not seek it from thinkers or from thinking, from ideals or from principles, one must look to people who were not thinkers (but fools), to processes that were not thinking (but passion), to aims that were not ideals (but caprices), and to rules that were not principles (but rules of expediency). If the realists had wanted to train up a generation of Englishmen and Englishwomen expressly as the potential dupes of every adventurer in morals or politics, commerce or religion, who should appeal to their emotions and promise them private gains which he neither could procure them nor even meant to procure them, no better way of doing it could have been discovered.

The result of all this might have been even worse than it has been, but for the fact that the 'realists' discredited themselves with their pupils before their lessons could take effect. This self-stultification was a gradual and piecemeal business. Not only did they jettison the entire body of traditional ethics; as soon as they began work on their new brand of moral theory, whatever doctrine concerning moral action was tested, to show whether it was fit to form part of that theory, was found wanting. Another traditional philosophical science which was thrown bodily overboard was the theory of knowledge; for although 'realism' began by defining itself as a theory of knowledge pure and simple, its votaries before long discovered that a theory of knowledge was a contradiction in terms. Another was political theory; this they destroyed by denying the conception of a 'common good', the fundamental idea of all social life, and insisting that all 'goods' were private. In this process, by which anything that could be recognized as a philosophical doctrine was stuck up and shot to pieces by the 'realistic' criticism, the 'realists' little by little destroyed everything in the way of positive doctrine that they had ever possessed. Once more, I am concerned only with the effect on their pupils. It was (how could it not have been?) to convince them that philosophy was a silly and trifling game, and to give them a lifelong contempt for the subject and a lifelong grudge against the men who had wasted their time by forcing it upon their attention.

That this did actually happen any one could see. The school of Green had taught that philosophy was not a preserve for professional philosophers, but every one's business; and the pupils of this school had gradually formed a block of opinion in the country whose members, though not professional philosophers, were interested in thesubject, regarded it as important, and did not feel themselves debarred by their amateur status from expressing their own opinions about it. As these men died, no one took their place; and by about 1920 I found myself asking, 'Why is it that nowadays no Oxford man, unless he is either about 70 years old or else a teacher of philosophy at Oxford or elsewhere, regards philosophy as anything but a futile parlour game?' The answer was not difficult to find, and was confirmed by the fact that the 'realists', unlike the school of Green, did think philosophy a preserve for professional philosophers, and were loud in their contempt of philosophical utterances by historians, natural scientists, theologians, and other amateurs.

The fox was tailless, and knew it. But this mental kind of decaudation, when people part with their morals, their religion, the learning they acquired at school, and so forth, is commonly regarded by the tailless as an improvement in their condition; and so it was with the 'realists'. They were glad to have eradicated from the philosophical schools that confusion of philosophy with pulpit oratory which was involved in the bad old theory that moral philosophy is taught with a view to making the pupils better men. They were proud to have excogitated a philosophy so pure from the sordid taint of utility that they could lay their hands on their hearts and say it was no use at all; a philosophy so scientific that no one whose life was not a life of pure research could appreciate it, and so abstruse that only a whole-time student, and a very clever man at that, could understand it. They were quite resigned to the contempt of fools and amateurs. If anybody differed from them on these points, it could only be because his intellect was weak or his motives bad.

The latter end of the 'realist' movement is one of those things whose history will never be written. It is a story of how the men who best understood the ideas of the original 'realists', and tried hardest to remain loyal to them, found one piece of ground after another slipping from under their feet, and stumbled from one temporary and patchwork philosophy to another in a kind of intellectual nightmare. One of them, Bertrand Russell, a gifted and accomplished writer, has left records of his successive attempts at a philosophy; but most of them are, or were, less articulate, or else struck dumb by their sufferings; and when they and their friends are dead no one will ever know how their lives were spent. What I myself know about it I shall certainly not repeat.

From the book An Autobiography - R. G. Collingwood

Human Time

Our era, more than any other, has thought and written about time as a condition of human life. Twentieth-century thought has taken temporality seriously, perhaps for the first time in history. Not only has philosophy centered on this theme, from Dilthey and Bergson to the present day, passing through Ortega and Heidegger, not only is the title of the latter’s most important book Sein und Zeit, but the other intellectual disciplines have explored temporality in all directions: in society—theory of generations—in psychology, in literature, in art. In my own work I have had to devote many pages, from different perspectives, to the problem of time and temporality, pages which I am not going to repeat here; I shall limit myself to recalling them to the degree indispensable for comprehension of what I must now say.

We are dealing—let us not forget—with an anthropological perspective, but we must be well aware that this anthropology is metaphysical. This means, as we have said repeatedly, a biographical perspective; not the perspective of human life as radical reality, not that of analytical theory, but that which pertains to the empirical structure of that life. And so we must try to see how temporality functions, in a precise way, as one of the ingredients of this life; that is, of the empirical but structural form in which it actually takes place, and which we call “man.”

Human life is temporal and successive. The definition of eternity given by Boethius is literally presented as a negative cast of human temporality: interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio, “the simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life.” Human life is not everlasting, but has begun and will end—most important of all, will end, whatever its ulterior fate. Furthermore, its possession is not simultaneous, but specifically successive—it is possessed bit by bit—and it is not perfect, but highly imperfect and precarious: unstable in the present instant, pale and impoverished in memory of the past, uncertain and vague in anticipation of the future. Life presents itself in any case as affected by temporal finitude: its formula is that of “our days are numbered.” Stretching from birth to death, we might say that the radical form of “installation” in life is precisely time; time is that in which I “am,” properly speaking, and the temporal mode of being—as we saw in general elsewhere—is “to keep on being”: expressed more succinctly, “to endure.”Birth is the absolute past. While all the contents of my previous life have been present at some time, birth was never present: it was never present to me, I did not “attend” it. The past is recalled in memory and the future is anticipated in the imaginary project; but, in a more immediate way, life is both “retention” and “protention.” The “instant” is not a point without duration, but a temporal surrounding when we are dealing with human life and not with cosmic time. Past and future are present in a decision, in a human doing. What is done is done “because of something and for some purpose,” and it is that presence—no matter how “abbreviated” it may be—of motivation and aim, which introduces temporal distension, duration, into every instant of my life. This means that, strictly speaking, life does not consist of instants, but moments. This is the form of the intrinsic temporality of human life.That temporal and successive quality is expressed, in a way that cannot be improved upon, by saying that human life happens. Language uses different and ultimately metaphorical expressions to describe what “goes on.” The most frequent of these—which unconsciously emphasize the chance dimension of life, a point which we shall have to discuss—allude to “falling”: incident, incidence, accident, and so on. The particular shading of “hazard” is explicit in the Greek τυνχάνειν (tynkhánein), from the same root as τύχη (tykhé), luck or fortune. The idea of “arriving” or “coming” is very close to συμβαίνειν, (symbaínein), hence συμβεβηκός, (symbebekós) “accident,” occur (oc-currere), and the French arriver. In the English word happen we again find the idea of luck, fortune, or chance; in the Spanish word acaecer (“to fall out”), the idea of falling reappears. The word acontecer (happen) in Spanish is deeper and more interesting: it is derived from contigere, a Vulgar Latin form of the Classical contingere (that is, con-tangere); it is “what touches,” that is, the luck which falls to someone; it is not mere casualidad (coincidence), derived from casus or fall, but the “lot” or portion (méros, mórion); in short, it is what corresponds to μοῐρα (moîra), and in this sense the word acontecer is semantically related to destino, “destiny” or “fate.” (We find something similar in the German Ereignis and the reflexive verb sich ereignen, in which the root eigen, “own,” shows through: in acontecer, one makes something one’s own, what happens belongs to one or touches one.) And this etymologicnl connection shows us that man’s temporality and contingency are unexpectedly linked.What happens happens to us; that is, it takes place, it “touches” us (contingit, attingit, from which the Spanish verb atañer, to touch or affect). Therefore, what happens “remains”; it gradually constitutes the content of life, its “resources,” its “riches,” its ousía, and in this sense is the substance of life. The future, for its part, is a reality which does not yet exist, and therefore is not possessed, but with which we have to make our life. Hence we live “on credit,” reckoning with the future which is possessed by anticipating it in the form of belief. As it passes, time “brings me into realization” and, in a certain sense, “thingifies” me. I mean that the past “I,” as it “continues to be,” once that it “has been,” ceases to be I and becomes circumstance: the “I” which I was is something that I encounter, with which I have to count, which conditions me, which opens up certain possibilities to me and closes off others. (I can speak English because I learned it before, because an “I” who is now past learned it; I cannot speak Russian because no past “I” of mine learned it, or because I forgot it, and so on.) That is, time affects me, like the other ingredients of my circumstance. The executive I, the true I in its pronominal function—not the substantive one, not “the I”—the function in which I say “I,” is present, is pure presentness and momentness, but its reality consists in projecting itself vectorially toward the future. I am not future, but present and actual and acting, and therefore future-oriented.On the other hand, if we attempt to understand in a concrete, non-abstract way, not in the sense of pure measurement, the meaning of the finitude of life, of the limited time of its duration, we must regard it dramatically. Human life does not “last” a longer or shorter time, like a building or a utensil, not even like an organism, but has a “plot.” In the phrase ars longa, vita brevis, the brevity of life depends on the longevity of art. Life is short because it is not long enough for the art which must be learned and executed; that is, for one’s projects. Human time is not a mere quantity, but is always the time there is not enough of—or too much of. When there is too much time, that tremendous situation we call boredom occurs, and then we say that we have to “kill time.” There is not enough when the “plot” of our life needs more time than is available. Man frequently complains that he “has no time for anything,” but then he usually discovers that he “has nothing for time,” and his life takes on the form of tedium. This means that time is not mere passage or flow, that it does not limit itself to “passing,” but has structure; and this structure is not that of simple duration or quantification, but the structure imposed by the projective reality of life. Once more we encounter the dual structure which we find everywhere when we analyze human life: installation and vectors. Man is “in” time, the substance of his life. But to live temporally is to aim vectorially in different directions, near or far. There is no such thing as an “indefinite” vector, and this will lead us to the ultimate questions posed by human life when it is considered as totality, and when, in consequence, its configuration becomes problematical.

All this is characteristic of human life in general, of biographical life as it reveals itself to the analysis of its necessary, and therefore universal, structure. But if we now go on to the higher concreteness of its empirical structure, we find some aspects which affect its temporality. Worldhood, corporeality, the actual sensorial system, the interaction of biographical life and its biological substratum, real social forms, the rhythm of history—all this conditions the true reality of human time. We must consider it briefly within this anthropological perspective.

Time appears as articulated; it is not a continuum, a permanent and homogenous flow. From the point of view of human “doing,” we have already seen that the elective and decisive quality of human life, founded on motivation and projection, imposes the structure of the moments of which life is composed. The moment is not a chronological unit—it makes no sense to ask “how long” a moment lasts—but it is a vital one, that is, a biographical unit. Man lives moment after moment—and these moments are not instantaneous—and the linkage between them establishes the articulated continuity of the biographical trajectory. But the world as it actually is imposes another empirical articulation which is superimposed on the previous one: that of day and night, with light and darkness, which correspond to the periods of wakefulness and sleep, and these are dependent on human corporeality. (But, it might be objected, are there not other more elemental and primary articulations, such as the beating of the heart or the rhythm of breathing? Do not these impose the most characteristic structure of human temporality? No; for heartbeats, inhalation and exhalation, are primarily somatic and not biographical. Normally I do not notice them, they do not have biographical relevance for me save in exceptional cases; they are abstract units, what we might call “submultiples” of vital time.)The cyclical quality of biological and terrestrial life, insofar as it conditions biography, is the primary mode of quantification of time; the “tale” of the numbered days allows them to be counted. Imagine a man who never slept, in a world that was always the same, where light was perpetual: he would have a completely different experience of life with respect to time and its finitude. On a larger scale, the rhythm of the seasons projects a new and higher structure on temporality, which reinforces the “plotlike” quality of life. To the passage of the days is added the recurrence of the seasons, and with it the “passage of the years,” which is what is counted, strictly speaking, what makes us feel at a certain level in our vital trajectory. Daily life, by its repetition, creates an illusion of eternity: that which we do “each” day makes us feel as if we could do it “every” day; that is, forever. At the same time, variation and innovation impress the “plotlike” quality of life upon us. And from this arise all the concrete forms of sensation in relation to time: expectation, waiting, hope, despair (which becomes the experience of “this can’t go on”), hopelessness (expressed in the melancholy experience of “things can go on like this indefinitely”).Naturally, the chief characteristic of time as a form of empirical structure is age. In the first place, life has a “normal” duration (which has nothing to do with “mean” duration, for that can be altered by infant mortality, accidental death, and so on). It is not the time one is going to live, but the time one counts on; in consequence, the time which makes us feel at a certain “altitude” in life. This is of an order of magnitude which in practice is constant, but by no means unchangeable: between the Romantic period and today, in a period of 150 years, the normal life of Western man has been extended by a good fifty per cent, and the end is not yet in sight. Age, on the other hand, besides being an accumulation of reality—what we call “experience,” and that is why we distinguish between the time that “passes” and the age that we “are”—presents itself as a qualification of human possibilities, inextricably linked with biological powers. According to his age, man feels himself to be in each respect—in each vectorial orientation—in a situation which could be expressed in these terms: “not yet,” “now,” and “no longer.” These expressions never affect the whole of life, but only each of its dimensions, and the “not yet” in respect to something coincides with the “now” in respect to something else, and so on.

The child, whose reality is intrinsically immature, who is not yet...we shall see what...nevertheless is with unusual fullness. He has a certain very obvious “substantivity,” which on the other hand, in a form not easy to determine, persists throughout his biography: we keep on being, to an unsuspected degree, the child that we have been. But we have seen elsewhere that the child is not yet the person he is going to be. This explains the anxiety felt by parents about their children as they grow and mature: literally, they do not know who that child is going to be. This is only known—or it begins to be known—when the sexuate condition achieves the maturity of sexual development: at puberty. This is why the young person never feels quite identified with the child he has been, with that child whom people tell him about and whom he perhaps remembers: it is not obvious that “he” is that child. Hence he must “revalidate” his loves, his friendships, his devotions, his childish beliefs, and largely reject them, at least temporarily; that is why I say that he has to revalidate them. The crisis of belief—religious belief, for example—in a young person is not primarily due to the expansion of his mental horizon, to contact with books or teachers who teach hip things that are different from those he has received, but above all to the fact that the young person is a different person from the child who began to believe; and he must begin again, must revise and accept out of his own self what he cannot receive passively from the child he bears within, but whom he has left behind. This is the anthropological basis that gives meaning to the sacrament of confirmation, which is stripped of its human significance when it is administered before the age of puberty, before the “who” is established in the first fullness of adulthood.

The young person is defined by his minimum of reality and his maximum of real possibilities—those of the child are abstract, are not yet “his” possibilities. This is why youth consists very largely in the absorption of reality and the exploration of its possibilities—the traditional Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre, years of apprenticeship and travel. The child, and even the youth, considers the “grownup,” the adult, as a stable and already formed reality, but when he reaches adulthood he discovers his instability, and, in consequence, the need to keep on inventing. As for the old man, independently of what his physical state of decline may be—that is, if we consider old age as a temporal level, as a form of age—in principle he represents a positive form: the maximum richness of reality, and possibilities which are reduced but in fact broadened by the accumulation of experience of life. The old man’s powers are certainly less than those of the youth or the mature adult, but their significance is much greater to the degree in which his biographical life is a great deal more ample—at least, as long as physical decline does not impose a narrowing stemming from biological factors but with personal repercussions. The important thing about old age, however, is something different: “one can’t go beyond old age,” which means, if we look at things from inside life, that it is the last age, that there is no further age. But this means that the old man has to persevere in his vital phase, and this transforms the “plotlike” meaning of his life. Hence, the meaning of old age depends entirely on how one confronts death, on what this means for each old person. Don Juan’s famous exclamation, “What a long credit you give me!” is a strictly juvenile attitude, which the young man cannot really escape. Old age, on the other hand, is the season of realization and fulfillment, that situation where life is installed in a form which is either “definitive”—unlike all the others—or results in death. And since death is a question mark, the life of the old person is determined by it and by the meaning which, in each case and at every moment, he gives it. This brings us to another problem, one we will have to deal with in its proper place.

Of course, all this is linked to the concrete form—not individual, but collective, historico-social—in which human life takes place. For example, at the present day longevity is encountering a number of social patterns which did not foresee it—retirement, statistical tabulations of age, difficulty of “starting over,” and so on. The scale of the generations depends on the role of ages, and is affected by alterations in the biographical structure; historical knowledge conditions possession of the past and the possibilities of invention. I have spoken at length of all these subjects—from Reason and Life to Generations: A Historical Method and The Social Structure, in a different form in “Experience of Life,” and most specifically in my “books about countries,” The Spaniards, Julián Marías on the United States, Our Andalusia, and so on—and I need not repeat what I have said before and what does not belong in this book. Just now I am interested in the anthropological aspect of what I have studied elsewhere from the viewpoint of analytical theory, social structure, or the ultimate concreteness of the historical forms of life.

Life is circumstantial invention. It is not creation, for life never exists “out of nothing,” but is a making of oneself together with things: it is not, however, mere “realization,” for it consists in the previous invention of possibilities as such. This quality of quasi-creation has a temporal correspondence which affects man as the image of God, imago Dei. In Genesis, in contrast to the instantaneous fiat of the creation of things, γενηθήτω, (genethéto in the version of the Septuagint), a very different expression is used when the creation of man is being described: faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram, ποιήσομεν ἄνθρωπον κατ' εἰκόνα ἡμετέραν καὶ καθ' ὁμοίωσιν (poiésomen ánthropon kat’ eikóna hemetéran kai kath’ homoíosin), “let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Leaving aside the suspicion of some theologians that the plural contains a reference to the Trinity—one that is more interesting than it seems, even in an anthropological perspective, for we have already observed that the notion of person is connected with the concept of “living-with,” and not in vain did Unamuno say: “An isolated person would cease to be one; whom, indeed, would he love?”—“Let us make” rather than “let him be made” seems to indicate a continuity, an undertaking; perhaps the best translation of faciamus would be “we are going to make.” And if we ask ourselves in what man’s resemblance to God consists, what allows us to think of man as an image of God, we would have to find it in his indefiniteness, the finite version of infinity. Man is essentially imperfect, that is, unfinished, uncompleted, always a thing-to-be-done and as yet undone. Different from God, who is infinite and eternal, but the opposite of things. Things are in time, but man is making himself from the stuff of time; and since the real man, in his empirical structure, is in a certain sense also a thing—the articulation of a who and a what—his temporality is conditioned by all the structures we have just been examining, not forgetting the sexuate condition, which introduces two forms of biographical human time. Nicholas of Cusa said that man is Deus occasionatus. We might say that in his created but creative temporality, the absolute innovation which has to make itself successively in the form of happening, we find the anthropological meaning of his nature as the image of God.

Julián Marías

METAPHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY:

The Empirical Structure of Human Life

Person and I

The theme of the person is one of the most difficult and elusive in the whole history of philosophy, and for reasons which are not at all coincidental. Around this theme perhaps the most radical transformation of that whole history has taken place—or is taking place—and strictly speaking it is a question, rather than of the different ways of studying or interpreting a reality, of the emergence of that same reality and of its establishment as such on the mental horizon of the West. Customarily the origin of the notion of person is sought in the Latin word persona, and this is considered to be the equivalent of the Greek prósopon which, as a Hellenic word, is naturally taken as “previous” to the Latin one. But none of this is particularly clear when we take a closer look at things.

In the first place, the word πρόσωπον (prósopon) is very infrequent in philosophical texts, and rarely means “person” or anything like it. Among the pre-Socratics it appears in three texts, Antiphon, Democritus, and Empedocles, and means face, countenance, even the visage of Helios, the Sun. In Plato it also means countenance. This is again the meaning which appears in Aristotle, who speaks at length of the prósopon and its parts (the nose, for example), and also of the face of the Moon. Somewhere he remarks that one says prósopon of a man, but not of an ox or a fish. This remark is interesting, for in the use of the Greek language there is frequent mention of the “face” (prósopon) of animals: ibis, dogs, horses, deer, fish. Of course, the most interesting meaning of this Greek word, the one which has been taken as a basis or starting point for the notion of “person,” is the meaning in which it coincides with the Latin word for mask, the tragic or comic mask worn by actors, for example. It is from this that meanings of “role” or “character” or “personage,” and ultimately “person,” are derived. It is possible, though not certain, that the meaning of prósopon as “mask” is indebted to influence from the Latin persona; this word has a doubtful, probably an Etruscan, etymology.The direction the word has taken—the mask and the personage represented by the actor—has led to abandonment of another which strikes me as interesting: the meaning of “face” in speaking of animals or stars, and also the “façade,” more specifically, the front of a building. In a moment we shall see why this is more important than it appears to be at first glance.

During the Scholastic period, when there was an attempt to think about “person” philosophically, the notions which have been decisive are not the ones arising from these contexts, but from those of “property” or “subsistence” (hypóstatis). Boethius’ famous definition, which has been so influential—persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia—started off from the Aristotelian notion of ousía or substantia thought of primarily in relation to “things.” Always explained with the eternal examples of the statue and the bed, this notion was founded on the old Greek ideal of the “independent” or sufficient, of the “separable” (khoristón). That this substance or thing which we call “person” is rational, is no doubt important, but not sufficiently so to react upon this quality of ousía and modify its mode of being, its manner of reality. The person is a hypóstasis or suppositum like the others, only it is of a rational nature. Signoriello’s Lexicon peripateticum, which is so careful in its distinctions, says literally: “persona nihil addit supra suppositum, nisi aliquam dignitatem et excellentiam petitam ex natura intellectuali” (“Person adds nothing to substance, except some dignity and excellence required by the intellectual nature”). That is, the person is simply a thing with a slightly greater degree of dignity and excellence than the rest.

But suppose that there were an error in all this? Suppose that the “model” of reality which has been used to think about things were not applicable to the person? Suppose it were completely inadequate? The introduction of the theological viewpoint in the theory of the person represented a decisive step as well as a risk. Beginning very early, Scholasticism spoke of divine persons; moreover, the word “person” is applied more to God than to man; in fact, man is described as homo and only secondarily as persona; it is the person—the divine person—of Christ who is simultaneously God and man (homo tends to become relegated to natura). Similarly, it was thought that the person could be divine or angelic or human. This is fruitful in one sense: the divine person is not, of course, a “thing,” and in this sense theology has been a fertile stimulus for the investigation of personal reality. But it also contains a serious risk: the notion of person was thought of in such a way that it could “harbor” the reality of divine or angelic persons as well as human ones. This has caused a loss of contact with immediate reality, with that which becomes immediately present to us. Perhaps it is better to proceed from presence, phenomenologically, reserving the right to add and subtract later so as to be able to arrive at other persons and to think about them from the only person who is clear to us. To begin with, the only persons we know are human ones: I, thou.

We cannot even say “man,” for this is to say a great deal. When we hear a knock on our door we ask “Who is it?” (Although philosophy and science have been mistakenly asking “What is man?” for 2,500 years and receiving, as was to be expected, mistaken answers.) The normal and sufficient answer to the question “Who is it?” is “I.” Naturally, an “I” is accompanied by a voice—a known voice—that is, by a circumstance. If the voice is unknown the answer does me no good, which means that the significance of that word “I” has been changed. Now it means something else, a non-circumstantial I, that is, anybody at all; as if someone were to say “an I.” But I already knew that when I asked “Who is it?” and the answer does not resolve my doubts. What I was asking for when I inquired was precisely the pronominal position of that “someone” who is knocking, his concrete circumstantialization in “I,” unsupplantable, unequivocal, irreplaceable. This pronominal function of the circumstantial “I” or “thou” is equivalent to a proper name—a personal name—if, of course, we always keep in mind that this has not only a significance but a denominative function, along with another vocative function whose full significance will become apparent later on.Certainly, when I say “I,” “thou,” or a proper name, I am thinking of a body; we must not forget this for a single moment, and we must not content ourselves with saying it once and then leaving it inoperative as we go on thinking. But we think of a body insofar as it is the body of someone. That corporeal someone is, to begin with, what we understand a person to be. But now let us try, without relinquishing that first piece of evidence, to see more clearly what we actually understand and are trying to say.The corporeal someone or person not only “happens” but is identified with futurition, that forward tension—or pretension—which is life. Now we begin to glimpse the meaning of prósopon as “front” or “façade” or “forward part.” It is important to retain that frontal quality of the person because life is an operation performed in a forward direction. That “someone” is future-oriented; that is, present and real but turned toward the future, oriented toward it, projected toward it. The face in which the person expresses and shows himself faces the future and hence the face is, among all the parts of the body, the strictly personal one, that in which the person is concentrated and revealed, in which he is expressed. But this future-oriented condition of the person contains one essential trait: it is partially unreal, for the future is not as yet, but will be. In the countenance or person we now see—truly present—the person he will be. By person we understand a reality that is not only real. A “given” person would cease to be one. The programmatic, projective quality is not something that merely happens to the person; rather, it constitutes that person. The person is not “there,” he can never be there as such, but he is arriving.When we say that he “is being made,” we can easily misunderstand what is being sought is his “result.” That is not the point: the person already is, is made as a person, and on the other hand his “finishedness” or result is unimportant. His present being is to be becoming; better still, to be arriving. Every strictly personal relationship—friendship, love—proves this. In such relationships, “being” means “to keep on being,” a condition made of duration and primarily of future, a constant arriving and setting forth, especially a “going to be.” The personal relationship, insofar as it is truly personal and not “thingified,” is always “the eve of delight” even in the fullest presence or possession.Of course, this is also true of myself. My possession of myself has the same programmatic, durative, and arriving quality, by means of which the personal pronoun—me, I—is possessive: mine. And this turns the traditional ontological definition upside down. So far from possessing sovereignty or sufficiency, the person is defined by the indigence, the neediness, the unreality of anticipation, poised on an expectant reality.

I am a person, but “the I” is not the person. “I” is the name we give to that programmatic and arriving condition. When I say “I,” I “prepare” or “get ready” to be. For man, to be is to prepare oneself to be, to get ready to be, and therefore he consists in disposition and readiness. When we say “I” we are not dealing with a simple point or center of the circumstance, but with the fact that this circumstance is mine. Because I am I myself I can have something which is mine. In the person there is selfhood, but not identity: I am the same one but never the same. But here we must add something which I have said many times but which is often forgotten: the past “I” is not I, but circumstance with which I find myself; that is, the circumstance which I—the projective and future-oriented I—encounter when I am going to live. And mere “succession” would not be sufficient for selfhood. There is need for that anticipation of myself, that already being what I am not, that intrinsic futurition or neediness. Man can possess himself throughout his whole life and be the same man because he does not possess himself wholly at any moment in that life.The common noun signifies what is; the proper name, as I have already noted, denominates who one is. The reality of that “who” is never given, and simultaneously includes a certain infinitude and an essential opacity. That infinitude does not affect the finite character of human reality. The image of infinity is lack of definition, and only in this form is the human person infinite: not to be “given,” always able to be something more, to be arriving. The arcane quality of that reality consists in its superlatively internal condition, its intimacy (intimate is the superlative of inner). Hence, the need and possibility of the expression as the person’s mode of being: the secret intimacy in which that arcane person consists rises to the surface in the face—which is the person as he is projected forward. And one’s own person? you will ask. One’s own person is the means by which each can understand himself, interpret himself, and thus project himself. My own reality is reflected in those mirrors which are other people; in them I find my expression, I recognize myself, and thus project myself. This is why personal life is essentially living-with.In the Introduction to Lessons in Logic, Kant summed up the field of philosophy in the mundane sense (in dieser weltbürgerlichen Bedeutung) in these four questions:

What can I know? (Metaphysics.)

What ought I to do? (Ethics.)

What can I hope for? (Religion.)

What is man? (Anthropology.)

And he said that fundamentally all these questions could be included in anthropology, for the first three are reduced to the last. Well—and leaving aside the Kantian correlation between the questions and the philosophical disciplines, which today would be debatable—my point of view would be considerably different.

I think that everything could be reduced to two radical and inseparable questions, whose meaning lies in an intrinsic mutual connection: 1) Who am I? 2) What is to become of me? It is not a question of “man,” or of “what,” but of “I” and “who.” And that question can only be answered by living, with an executive response. The second is also a personal question: I ask “what,” but inquire what is to become of me. The articulation of the “who” and the “what” is precisely the problem of personal life.

But the decisive point is the interconnection of both questions. To know the first means not to know the second and in the measure in which the second is answered, the personal quality of that me vanishes and becomes more like a what, a thing. The more I know who I am, the more I possess my programmatic and projective reality, future-oriented, unreal, and “arriving.” The more authentically I am “I” in the mode of personal life, the less I know what is to become of me, the more uncertain is my future reality, which is thus the more open to possibility, to invention, chance, and innovation.This is the radical neediness of man as person, projected forward, facing the future, going toward the other and especially toward the other person. The person needs the other person in the measure in which that person is presented to him as irreplaceable and unreasonable. And since every human person is affected by that same insufficiency and neediness, we find here the reason why the personal being, considered to its ultimate consequences, brings us to the need for something that is described by one of the most obscure words there is: salvation.

Julián Marías

METAPHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY:

The Empirical Structure of Human Life

Next to Gautama Buddha, Plato was the first epidemiologist of the spirit ...

 EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES

The Critique of Repetition

Damned to Distinguish Between Repetitions

The ethical distinction took effect from the moment in which repetition lost its innocence. The appearance of ascetics and asceticisms in the twilight of the advanced civilizations revealed a difference that had not been open to explicit development in earlier stages of civilization: in choosing to withdraw, the early practising ethicists broke with the conventional forms and attitudes of life. They abandoned the established repetition sequences and replaced them with different sequences, different attitudes – not arbitrarily different, but rather redemptively different ones. Where the original distinction between high and beneficial life forms on the one hand and hopelessly ordinary ones on the other hand makes its cut, it does so in the mode of a neuro-ethical programming that turns the entire old system against itself. Here there are initially no intermediate forms. Body and soul reach the other shore together – or not at all. ‘The whole man must move at once.’

The radical separation of ascetics, saints, sages, practising philosophers, and later also artists and virtuosos from the mode of existence of those who continue in the average, approximate and unqualified, shows that the human being is a creature damned to distinguish between repetitions. What later philosophers called freedom first manifests itself in the act with which dissidents rebel against the domination by inner and outer mechanisms. By distancing themselves from the entire realm of deep-seated passions, acquired habits and adopted or sedimented opinions, they make space for a comprehensive transformation. No part of the human can stay as it was: the feelings are reformed, the habitus remodelled, the world of thoughts restructured from the bottom up, and the spoken word overhauled. The whole of life rises up as a new construction on the foundation of favourable repetition.

A first enlightenment came about when the spiritual teachers showed that humans are not so much possessed by demons as controlled by automatisms. They are not assailed by evil spirits, but by routines and inertias that force them to the ground and deform them. What impair their reason are not chance errors and occasional errors of perception – it is the eternal recurrence of the clichés that render true thought and free perception impossible. Next to Gautama Buddha, Plato was the first epidemiologist of the spirit: he recognized everyday opinion, the doxa, the pestilence that does not kill, but does occasionally poison entire communities. Empty phrases that have sunk down into the body produce ‘characters’. They mould humans into living caricatures of averageness and turn them into incarnated platitudes. Because existence in the ethical distinction begins with the annihilation of empty phrases, it inevitably leads to the negation of characters. Part of the charm of free humans is that one can see in them the caricature they might have become. Whoever sought to eradicate it would be the human without qualities, free for an absence of judgement, character and taste. Such a person would, like Monsieur Teste, state: ‘La bêtise n’est pas mon fort.’ [Stupidity is not my strong suit.] They would be the human who had killed the marionette inside them. The transformation occurs through mental deautomatization and mental decontamination. Hence the use of silence in many spiritual schools to empty the cliché depot – a procedure that usually takes longer than a major psychoanalysis. Pythagoras supposedly demanded a five-year silence of his pupils at the beginning of their studies. Nietzsche was still acting in this tradition: ‘Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus – you have to react, you follow every impulse.’144 The spiritual exercise is the one that disables such compulsion.

This de-automatization, this liberation from infection by the blindly reproducing unexamined, must be accompanied by the methodical erection of a new spiritual structure. Nothing could be more alien to the pioneers of the ethical distinction than modern spontaneism, which cultivates shock, confusion and the interruption of the habitual as aesthetic values per se, without asking what should replace the interrupted. The original ethical life is reformatory. It always seeks to exchange harmful for favourable repetition. It wants to replace corrupt life forms with upright ones. It strives to avoid the impure and immerse itself in the pure. That these binary oppositions entail costly simplifications is, for now, beside the point. All that matters is that in this framework, individualized freedom emerges in its oldest and most intense form. It results from an awkward discovery: there is a choice that changes all the factors influencing human behaviour. The first ethicists faced the decision between a life in the usually unnoticed iron chains of involuntarily acquired habits and an existence on the ethereal chain of freely accepted discipline. The most erroneous possible conclusion one could draw from this is that the appearance of genuine practising awareness concerned purely the active. Let the sadhus torture themselves in their lonely forests with complicated breathing exercises; let the Stylites feel closer to heaven on their absurd pillars, and let the philosophers sell their second coats and sleep on the ground – the average mortals will cling nonetheless to the opinion that these extravagant distortions of the ordinary are meaningless for them, the business of a sacred-perverse private meeting between the incomprehensible God and his artiste followers. Whoever is unable to participate can continue in their old habitus, which, though not perfect, seems good enough for everyday life.

The Creature that Cannot Practise

In reality, the secession of the practising places the entire ecosystem of human behaviour on an altered foundation. Like all acts of rendering things explicit, the appearance of the early practice systems brought about a radical modification of the respective area – that is, of the whole field of psychophysically conditioned actions. Explicit exercises, whether the asanas of the Indian yogis, the Stoics’ experiments with letting go of the non-own, or the exercitationes spirituales of Christian climbers on the heavenly ladder, cast a shadow on everything that lies opposite them on the implicit side: this is no less than the world of old Adam, the gigantic universe of unilluminated conventionalities. The shadow zone encompasses the area dominated by repetitions of an undeclared practice character. We can leave open the question of whether the psychoanalytical insult to humans claimed by Freud – triggered by the purportedly unwelcome discovery that the ego is not the master of its own house – ever really existed. There is certainly no doubt about the reality of the behaviouristic insult to humans, which could equally be called the ascetological one. It follows from the observation that 99.9 per cent of our existence comprises repetitions, mostly of a strictly mechanical nature. The only way to deal with this insult is to imagine that one is still more original than plenty of others. If one subjects oneself to more probing self-examination, one finds oneself in the psychosomatic engine room of one’s own existence, where there is nothing to be gained from the usual flattery of spontaneity; and freedom theorists would do better to stay upstairs.

In this investigation, one advances into a non-psychoanalytical unconscious encompassing everything belonging to normally athematic rhythms, rules and rituals – regardless of whether it stems from collective patterns or idiosyncratic specializations. In this area, everything is higher mechanics, including intimate illusions of non-mechanics and unconditioned being-for-oneself. The sum of these mechanics produces the surprise space of personality, in which surprising events are actually very rare. Humans live in habits, not territories. Radical changes of location first of all attack the human rooting in habits, and only then the places in which those habits are rooted.

Since the few have been explicitly practising, it has become evident that all people practise implicitly, and beyond this that humans are beings that cannot practise – if practising means repeating a pattern of action in such a way that its execution improves the being’s disposition towards the next repetition. Just as Mr K. is always preparing his next mistake, humans as a whole are constantly taking the necessary steps to ensure that they will remain as they have been up until this minute. Whatever is not repeated sufficiently often atrophies – this is familiar from everyday observations, for example when the musculature of static limbs begins to degenerate after a few days, as if concluding from its temporary disuse that it has become superfluous. In truth, one should probably also keep the non-use of organs, programmes and competencies for exercises in steady decline. Just as there are implicit fitness programmes, there are also implicit unfitness programmes. That is why Seneca warns his pupil: ‘A single winter relaxed Hannibal’s fibre.’145 Other states of weakening may follow years of neglecting-work.146From this it follows that even a simple maintenance of bodily – or rather neurophysical – form can only be comprehended as an effect of undeclared training. This comprises routines whereby the standard movements of an organ complex are, through inconspicuous procedures, employed often enough to stabilize the complex at its current fitness status. The self-activations of organisms in sequences of undeclared practice programmes, sequences that constantly have to be run through anew, culminate in a mute autopoiesis: the element in live creatures that seems like mere self-identity is de facto the result of a perpetual self-reproduction by overcoming invisible training programmes. The nocturnal activities of the brain, part of which one experiences as dreams, are probably first and foremost back-up processes for the self-programme in its state prior to the last waking phase. The self is a storm of repetition sequences beneath the roof of the skull.

Personal identity, then, offers no indication of a mental essence or inert form; it rather shows the active overcoming of a probability of decline. Whoever remains identical to themselves thus confirms themselves as a functioning expert system specializing in constant self-renewal. For surprise-friendly creatures of the Homo sapiens type, even triviality is not futile. It can only be attained through a constant cultivation of identity whose most important aid is inward and outward self-re-trivialization. Re-trivialization is the operation that enables organisms capable of learning to treat something new as if they had never encountered it – whether by equating it mechanically with something familiar or by openly denying its didactic value. Thus the new, initially and mostly, has no chance of integration into the apparatus of operating gestures and ideas because it is assigned either to the familiar or to the insignificant.147If, in turn, the neolatric culture of modernity posits meaning in the new per se, this causes a brightening of the global learning climate; the price of this is a historically unprecedented will to be dazzled that gives unlimited credit to illusions of the new. Even manifest stupidity, incidentally, cannot be taken as a simple datum: it is acquired through long training in learning-avoidance operations. Only after a persistent series of self-knockouts by the intelligence can a habitus of reliable mindlessness become stable – and even this can be undone at any time through a relapse into non-stupidity. Conversely, every learning-theoretical romanticism should be viewed sceptically, even if it appears under classical names. Aristotle was speaking as a romantic when he stated in the first line of his Metaphysics: ‘All humans strive for knowledge by nature.’ In fact, every striving for knowledge – understood by Aristotle above all as primary visual enjoyment – encounters its limits as soon as something new appears that one does not want to see. Such things are usually sights that are irreconcilable with the imperative of preserving identity. Then the much-lauded thirst for knowledge among humans turns in a flash into the art of not having seen or heard anything.

The ethical distinction not only uncovers the hidden practice character of ordinary life; it also reveals the gulf between the previous existence in the accustomed and the metanoetic life forms that must be newly chosen. This distinction demands cruelty towards oneself and others; it leads to overload in its most naked state. We hear its original voice when Jesus says: ‘Anyone who loves his father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.’148 ‘Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.’149 ‘I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’150 The blade of distinction is the apocalypse that takes place now or never.

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

On Anthropotechnics

PETER SLOTERDIJK

Translated by Wieland Hoban

Hypatia

 The crushing

No part of Hypatia’s work has survived, although she seems to have been well versed in philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics. A charismatic teacher, she attracted students from remote places who came to Alexandria just to attend her lectures. A pagan Platonist (she was the head of the Platonic school in the city), Hypatia was intellectually ecumenical and tolerant, as proven by the diversity of her followers—pagans and Christians, Greeks and foreigners. One of her disciples, for example, Synesius of Cyrene (c. 373—c. 414), was a Christian who became Bishop of Ptolemais in 410. We don’t know exactly what her philosophical ideas were, but there is evidence that her learning, practical wisdom, and manner of speaking made her influential in Alexandria and gave her access to people in high places, including the Roman prefect (governor), Orestes. Socrates Scholasticus, who was Hypatia’s contemporary and is considered a reliable source, says of her in his Historia Ecclesiastica: “On account of the majestic outspokenness [parrēsía] at her command as the result of her education [paideía], she maintained a dignified intercourse with the chief people of the city, for all esteemed her highly, and admired her for her sophrosyne” (in Dzielska 1995: 41).

There was something distinctly uninhibited about Hypatia’s public persona. She was free-spirited, independent, and, as the chronicler mentions, she always spoke her mind. She socialized with whoever she pleased, showed up wherever she wanted, and social conventions didn’t mean anything to her. A beautiful woman in her youth, Hypatia didn’t think much of her attractiveness. As a Platonist, she must have been keenly aware of the precariousness of everything finite, physical beauty included. According to another source, Damascius (c. 458–538), one of Hypatia’s students fell madly in love with her. Unable to suppress it, he confessed his passion. Hypatia listened patiently and, in response, produced her sanitary napkin, offering it to him along with a lesson in applied metaphysics: “This is what you really love, my young man, but you do not love beauty for its own sake” (in Dzielska 1995: 50).4 Apparently she kept her chastity to the end of her life, and adopted an ascetic life-style, as was the custom among philosophers at the time.

Her contempt for the body was something she shared with the Christians, but that may be all they had in common. In the Alexandria of the early fifth century a woman like her—outspoken, independent, and pagan to boot—was bound to enter on a collision course with the city’s authoritarian Christian leader, the Patriarch Cyril (c. 376–444). He must have perceived Hypatia as a competitor for the symbolic power over the city that he was seeking to gain for himself. It didn’t help matters that she was also on close terms with the city’s prefect.5 As customarily happens in such situations, Hypatia must have received warnings and threats, more or less discreet. But she did not change her ways, which must have enraged Cyril and given him a reason to act. Indeed, it appears that he incited his faithful parabalani (a Christian brotherhood, a militia of sorts) against Hypatia. Involved primarily in charity work, parabalani also served as Cyril’s “toughs,” being deployed wherever firm action was needed.6 Their involvement in Hypatia’s death, attested to even by pro-Cyril chroniclers, reveals the kind of work they sometimes did for the Patriarch.

In March 415 (“in the tenth consulship of Honorius and the sixth consulship of Theodosius II, during Lent”), Hypatia was abruptly seized by a group of parabalani. This is how Socrates Scholasticus reports the event:

They threw her out of her carriage and dragged her to the church called Caesarion. They stripped off her clothes and then killed her with broken bits of pottery [ostraka]. When they had torn her body apart limb from limb, they took it to a place called Cinaron and burned it. (Socrates Scholasticus in Dzielska 1995: 17–18)

What the report communicates is an image of total annihilation. For a mob of hot-blooded fanatics the parabalani are remarkably thorough. Slowly, methodically, they subject the body of the philosopher to a process of utter physical destruction. Hypatia is dragged, broken, burned, torn to pieces, literally reduced to nil; they want to make sure that nothing is left of her corporeal presence in the world. There is an uncanny sense here that such an exit—departure through dismemberment—cruel beyond measure as it certainly was, suited Hypatia the Platonic philosopher. For someone who associated feminine beauty with menstrual blood, the body must have been a site of discontent and frustration, a rather unpleasant place to find yourself in. The tomb of the soul indeed. This may explain Hypatia’s total lack of resistance; the chronicles don’t mention the faintest opposition on her part. Why oppose your liberators?

DYING FOR IDEAS 

The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers

COSTICA BRADATAN

Moral asceticism must be understood as part of the cognitive cure and vice-versa

Change and Permanence

Thee formal structure of philosophy can be further fleshed out with an important material characteristic. Philosophical conversion occurs within the field of the antinomy of change/permanence, which characterizes the tension between the starting point and the endpoint of the person striving toward wisdom. The end-point, happiness, was universally understood as the act of possessing the highest sum of the goods proper to man.138 The condition of happiness was therefore, obviously, the character of that which a man actually possessed. Permanence is the basic quality inherent in the nature of intellectual goods. Th is is why virtue and contemplation (understood as forms of spiritual possession) of the unchanging essence of things are the objective guarantee of the most lasting type of happiness.139 Man’s unhappiness comes from his turning his sight away from the necessary and universal (or, at the very least, comparatively lasting), and his turning toward everything which is characterized by change, decay and death.

The diagnosis of philosophy (frequently called the medicine of the soul140) connects all the dismal aspects of human life with man’s fatal turning toward the side of the transient. Th e two basic types of passions—the ones connected to desiring changeable goods and the ones connected to worrying about losing them—are the tragic symptoms of spiritual illness. The desire for wealth, power, beauty, popularity or success can never be satisfied and even when they are attained they never give us the sense of permanence. The passions destroy our happiness. As Socrates said, the chase after apparent goods is essentially just like carrying water in a sieve.141 The unavailability of certain goods and the spiral of insatiable desire on the one hand (individual), and the image of a conflagration consuming a granary or of the ingratitude of the crowd on the other (social), are the basic images of a human life consumed by unquenchable desire, uncertainty, and fear. The nature of desired goods dictates the nature of our life, which is also fleeting, fills us with the greatest of all passions: the fear of death. Therefore the diagnosis is gloomy and the transformation of fered by philosophy accomplishes itself within the perspective of an unavoidable (without the saving cure) destruction, enslavement, disease, animality and non-existence. The medicine of the soul promises freedom, self-sufficiency, and happiness, which is the freedom from the passions, independence from what does not depend upon us, and the hope of possessing the goods which cannot be taken away by anyone. This was the common promise of the philosophers; the same was said by the Epicureans, Stoics, and even the Skeptics.

Why is it that, as the philosophers so gladly repeated after the Orphics, if we are souls trapped in bodies, we do not ignore our bodily prisons or graves?142 Why does philosophy treat man as a psychophysical whole? How to explain the fact that when the soul discovers its spiritual identity, it does not become indifferent to the fate of the body, negligently allowing the passions to do as they please? There is no such negligence because responsibilities toward the body come from the discovery of the simultaneous opposition and dependence of the spiritual with the bodily. Man—through whom runs the boundary of ontological oppositions—can only have one ruler. When reason sleeps, the passions enslave the mind, by making it their servant they degrade it and destroy it in practice.143 Happiness is the possession of that which we desire, so long as we do not desire anything evil. Philosophers discovered early that, “It is not better for people to get all that they want!”144 Or as Cicero put is, “nor is it so miserable not to obtain what you will, than to will to obtain what you ought not.”145 Man is like a rider on a horse, that is, even though in truth they form a somewhat accidental totality, the rider controls his mount and the horse does not take the rider where the horse wants to go. If we do not secure the rule of reason over the whole of existence then reason will be sabotaged and the whole person will be reduced to the level of the passions. Therefore, an existential reduction will take place, an animalization that is characterized by moral and epistemological corruptions.

There is no place for compromise, the rule of one element occurs at the price of the other, “It is difficult to fight passion (one’s heart), for whatever it wishes it buys at the price of the soul.”146 Each of us, like young Hercules at the crossroads of the story told by Socrates, must choose either virtue or pleasure.147

The details of our picture of the goal of philosophizing will depend upon our view of human nature, which will determine the character of the highest good and the degree of man’s unavoidable dependence upon the body. We can assume that for all philosophers that highest good is a spiritual good, a state of internal harmony that expresses itself through the rule of reason over the passions. For the extremists, it will take the form of a cosmic order victorious over disorder and immorality.148 For everyone it will be the state of the highest spiritual freedom available to man, an internal independence understood as the state of an optimally lasting happiness. This theme expresses itself with equal force in Socrates, Plato, just as it does in the Cynics, Epicureans, and the Stoics. The common ideal is a perfect self-sufficiency, a life based upon a foundation that is reasonably lasting and independent of the vicissitudes of life, from the general ontological impermanence of sensual goods. Perfection understood as independence leads to the judgment that the happiness and unhappiness of man is essentially the state of his soul. As Democritus put it, “Happiness, like unhappiness, is a property of the soul.”149 You can search for permanence and immutability in the soul (not in the world of the senses) because it is where authentic delight, freedom, control, and the good are to be found.

Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise

Philosophical transformation is neither easy nor definitive. When Hercules gives his hand to virtue he does not thereby take possession of it. Th e famed Diogenes of Sinope, the first to call philosophy an exercise,150 ostensibly mocked the automatism of ritual purifications.151 Diogenes is not an isolated case. All the philosophical schools, even though they defined health differently and differed in their methods of healing, agreed that the cure of the soul takes a long time.

Philosophy, as Pythagoras is said to have told Leon of the Phliasians, is the skill of striving for wisdom.152 Just like any other skill, it must be perfected. From this perspective, says Plato, “Now, it looks as though the other so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of the body, for the really aren’t there beforehand but are added later by habit and practice [spiritual exercises].” 153 The systematized practice of Stoic, Epicurean, and Platonic was based upon methods of work upon the soul and grew out of the conviction that the basic problem of spiritual transformation is its permanence and that spiritual progress has a differentiated and gradual structure. The constant repetition of the exercises, adjusting them to the level of spiritual development, and their engagement of a person on all sides meant that conversion became the second, that is, proper nature. The spiritual masters took to heart the opinion of Democritus who taught that, “Nature is similar to teaching, since teaching transforms a man and by transforming him creates a new [second] nature.”154 There is an understanding of the role of habit (ethos) at the root of spiritual exercises, which, if we are to believe Krokiewicz’s interpretation, was already discovered by Heraclitus.155 The habit that leads to happiness, the habit of denying the heart (the realm of passions) and degrading pleasures, is the foundation of the developed concept of virtue conceived as fitness or ability (dynamis). What’s interesting is that habit is also an important element of theoretical knowledge156, which, much like virtue, the Greeks included in the wider category of abilities (dynameis). Therefore the art of properly grasping the essence of things is an ability, which, just like any art, can be perfected. This is an important qualification, which capably reflects the teleological paradigm of Greek thinking. Just like all of reality and all dynameis, knowledge and acting has its goal-oriented dimension, its proper function. The art of building ships, leading an army, the art of playing a cither, the art of healing are all different types of abilities, whose more perfect use requires the proper kinds of exercises.157 The essence of spiritual exercises is therefore the gradual perfection of man in realizing the functions proper to him qua human being. The realization of these, that is, their able and proper use, constitutes a specific type of good, a spiritual good, whose possession is synonymous with happiness.

Therefore the task of philosophy is to tear man away from unconsciousness, to wake him, to put his life under question, and then, while leading him through the succeeding phases of spiritual development, to protect him from the reefs of impermanence and doubt. The authentic doctor begins by awakening consciousness, by convincing the patient that he is sick. This is, we can assume, one of the functions of paradox: wonder, which opens up one’s eyes up to the truth. This is how Socrates saw the starting-point of his therapy. It is the reason why Socrates is like a torpedo-fish which paralyzes the confidence of so many of those who approach him158, the birth, during an incidental conversation, of the consciousness of a factual ignorance and the evanescence of goods for which people strive, and finally a brutal examination of conscience which allows one to discover, as Alcibiades acknowledges with extraordinary honesty that “my life isn’t worth living!”159 This, however, is only the beginning. Spiritual development is a slow achievement. As Pierre Hadot demonstrates in his wonderful study, paideia always takes a concrete person into consideration.160 The set and scope of the exercises depends upon the actual stage of development and the intellectual attunement of the student. Philosophy is the perfecting of the whole person, therefore we must remember the mutual conditioning of the exercises. Even though they are concerned with various aspects of human existence, they are parts of an overall personal development. In some sense logic has the quality of a moral exercise, whereas battling with the passions is an element of epistemological development. Reason cannot submerge itself in contemplation if the desiring part of the soul is in chaos. This is the elementary level of the tie between epistemology and ethics.161 Putting an end to the rebellion of the passions not only cures the soul of anxiety, but it also is the necessary condition for the proper functioning of reason. Moral asceticism must be understood as part of the cognitive cure and vice-versa. We should also remember that the exercises deal with different aspects of one and the same person and the development of the aspects tends in principle to be parallel.

All the exercises are meticulously selected for their aptitude or, to put it another way, usefulness. The principle of selecting the instruments is their effectiveness. There must be enough instruments/exercises and they must be practiced in such a wide range that the transformation will change the whole person. Therefore, when we determine what human nature is, that is, when we will know by what properly conducted functions human perfection is realized, then happiness will become the criterion of choosing the exercises—thus, paradoxically, also the criterion of the reasonableness of the teachings. This is the reason why the concept of nature decides about the various canons of education proper to the different philosophical schools, and simultaneously fulfills the role of a negative criterion that demonstrates what is not worth knowing. One of the sharpest pejorative designations is that of futility, that is, of inutility. The only one worse characterization is harmfulness. The former is connected to the conviction that happiness must be reached by the most reasonably short road without wasting precious time. These motives probably stand behind the decision of the stoic Aristo of Chios, who rejected logic and physics162, or Socrates, so often praised for his negative attitude toward the natural sciences.163 When Diogenes of Sinope calls Platonism “empty pride” , he probably had in mind the futility, which, according to him, characterized most of the Platonic exercises.164 However, when Heraclitus or Plato rail against the poets they have in mind something like anti-exercises—the strengthening of spiritual degeneracy. Futility is not at stake here, instead, they are concerned with harm. On the other hand, some exercises can become acknowledged as an indispensable condition of transformation. “That’s because you neglect geometry”165, Socrates accuses Calicles, whereas Xenocrates turns back a pupil who does not know music, geometry and astronomy telling him to, “Be gone, for you have not yet the handles of philosophy” , or according to another, more brutal, version, “Be gone, for I do not card wool here.”166 Even though this might sound iconoclastic, we can confidently say that the ancient philosophers were not interested in music, geometry, physics, semiotics or what-ever else. The philosophers were interested in happiness. Neither the advocates of the astronomical enthusiasm of Thales, nor their opponents were interested in astronomy for itself. After all, pure zeal for the curiosities of astronomy produces fruitless knowledge, for “we can know nothing about such things, or, even if we knew all about them, such knowledge would make us neither better nor happier”167, so said an opponent of these types of studies, and in principle it found a resonance in the words of their proponent, who said, “First of all we must not think that there is any other aim in knowledge of heavenly phenomena, whether in combination [with other subjects] or in isolation, than peace of mind and firm assurance.”168 This is how astronomy, in cooperation with rhetoric, can be, for example, an exercise in taming the passion for fame, limiting pride, which lie at the foundation of so many human miseries. The majestic spectacle of cosmic harmony gives resources, which when repeatedly meditated upon, will establish a disdainful stance toward the spectacular triviality of human ambitions and the impermanence of earthly accomplishments.169 The matter was much the same with all the disciplines that the ancients included in philosophy’s circle of interests: logic, natural sciences or even rhetoric (which was meant to teach how to use the human imagination to gain control over the passions). The Pythagorean brotherhood was the first to create a canonical method of philosophical transformation. Studying was accompanied by the practice of individual poverty, silence and abstinence during the period of the introductory exercises.170 We also know that Pythagoras recommended to his pupils a type of continually renewed ethical autoreflection, “It is said that he used to admonish his disciples to repeat these lines to themselves whenever they returned home to their houses, ‘In what have I transgressed? What have I done? What that I should have done have I omitted?’”171 We can surmise that a similar role was played by the Pythagorean study of music, mathematics, and astronomy, namely, they allowed thanks to meditation upon the order revealed by them, the soul of the philosopher increasingly to resemble that order. We will not consider more types of exercises.

The constant effort of attention directed at oneself, the continual coming to know oneself and contemplation of the whole of the world, Stoic meditation upon the triviality of unavoidable misfortunes, or the Epicurean meditations which discover the joy of existence through meditating upon past and future pleasures, are just a few of the many activities which led philosophical novices toward a state of inner freedom. We should however turn our attention to the importance this understanding of philosophy gave to schooling and the important role it gave to the authority of a spiritual master. A.D. Nock answers the question why philosophical schools played such a substantial role in the spiritual history of antiquity with the following: “Firstly, they offered intelligible explanations of phenomena. The Greek was naturally inquisitive, and the intellectual and political ferment of the fifth century had left many open questions. Secondly—and this is a point of cardinal importance—the schools offered a life with a scheme.

One of the terms for a school of philosophy, whatever its kind, is agoge, which means way of teaching and way of living.”172 As Ilsetraut Hadot writes, “ Ancient philosophy was, above all, help with life’s problems and spiritual guidance, and the ancient philosopher was, above all, a spiritual guide.”173

137 Ibid., p. 267.

138 Cf. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, O szczęściu [On Happiness], Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1985, p. 20.

139 The subjective guarantee of the absolute permanence of happiness is constituted by the unchangeableness, permanence, and immortality of the human soul.

140 This understanding of philosophy was propagated by Pl.. Cf. Grg. 464b, Th t. 167a, and Ti. 87c. It was taken up by Aristotle, cf. EN 1105b13–17; and after him by the whole of the ancient world. Healing, nursing, and the hospital are the typical metaphors that served to describe the tasks of philosophy. Cf. Juliusz Domański, Erazm i filozofia [Erasmus and Philosophy], op. cit., especially the chapter, “Filozofia jako ‘medicina animi’ a wolność filozofa” [Philosophy as ‘Medicina Animi’ and the Freedom of the Philosopher], p. 79–82.

141 Cf. Pl., Grg. 493b-c.

142 Cf. Pl., Cra. 400c; Clem. Al., Str., III.3.17.1–2. When characterizing the state of the soul in the body Aristotle uses the macabre image of an Etruscan torture that consisted in tying the bodies of the dead to the bodies of the living. Cf. Arist., Protr., fr. 107.

143 The only exception known to me is the libertine sect described by Irenaeus (Adv.
haer. I.6.2–3) which combined an ontological dualism with a belief about the total freedom of the soul toward the body, so much so, that some of the perfect were permitted debauchery. Cf. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, p. 275–276.

144 Heraclit., fr. B110 op. cit., p. 65.

145 Cited in: Augustinus, De Trin. XIII.5.8, quotation from: Augustine, On the Trinity:
Books 8–15, trans. Stephen McKenna, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 112.

146 Heraclit., fr. B85, op. cit., p. 53.

147 X., Mem. II.1.21–34.

148 “Yes, Callicles, wise men claim that partnership and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is why they call this universe a world order, my friend, and not an undisciplined world-disorder.” Pl., Grg. 507e-508a, op. cit., p. 852.

149 Democritus also says, “Happiness does not dwell in flocks of cattle or in gold. The soul is the dwelling place of the (good and evil) genius.” Both quotes cited in: Giovanni Reale, op. cit., p. 124.

150 D.L. VI.70, op. cit., p. 243.

151 Ibid. VI.42, p. 232.

152 Cic., Tusc. V.3.8–9.

153 Pl., R. 518d, op. cit., p. 1136.

154 Democr., fr. B33, cited in: Nikolaos Bakalis, Handbook of Greek Philosophy: From Thales to the Stoics: Analysis and Fragments, Victoria BC: Traf f ord Publishing, 2006, p. 99.

155 Cf. Adam Krokiewicz, Zarys filozofii greckiej [An Outline of Greek Philosophy], op.
cit., p. 149.

156 Arist., EN 1103a15, op. cit., p. 23: “Intellectual virtue owes its origin and development mainly to teaching, for which reason its attainment requires experience and time; virtue of character is a result of habituation [ethikai from ethos], for which reason it has acquired its name through a small variation on [ethos].”

157 Ibid. 1098a5.

158 Pl., Men. 80a.

159 Pl., Smp. 216a, op. cit., p. 55.

160 Cf. Pierre Hadot, op. cit., especially the chapter “Spiritual Exercises” , p. 81–126.

161 Ibid., p. 81–83.

162 D.L. VII.160–161, op. cit., p. 318.

163 Ibid. II.21, p. 65.

164 Ibid. VI.24, p. 226.

165 Pl., Grg. 508a, op. cit., p. 852.

166 D.L. IV.10, op. cit., p. 156.

167 Cic., Rep. I.19.32, in: On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, trans. James E.G. Zetzel, Cambridge: Cammbridge University Press, 1999, p. 15.

168 Epicur., Ad. Pyth., § 85. Cited in: R.W. Sharples, Stoics, Epicureans and Skeptics: An Introduction to Hellenistic Philosophy, New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 14.

169 An example of using astronomy as this type of spiritual exercise is the unusually popular “Scipio’s Dream” which concludes Cicero’s On the Commonwealth.

170 D.L. VIII.10, op. cit., p. 342.

171 Ibid. VIII.22, p. 347.

from the book The Archparadox of Death Martyrdom as a Philosophical Category (Dariusz Karlowicz, Bartosz Adamczewski)