Reflection 7
CONTEMPLATIVE PHILO-SOPHIA
In western philosophy we are very good at understanding through words, but not through silent reflection and contemplation. Mainstream philosophical thought is quick with brilliant arguments and counterarguments, definitions, conceptual analyses and theories. Indeed, its strategy is to focus on a given subject matter, circumscribe its elements and its boundaries with descriptions, and capture it with theoretical statements.
In order to do so, the academic philosopher is expected to step back out of her everyday life, push aside her personal emotions and experiences and worries in order to ‘purify’ her reasoning capacity from irrelevancies, and likewise isolate the object of investigation from its context in order to ‘purify’ it from the ‘irrelevant’ background noises of life. In this sense, it is not really the entire person who is doing the philosophizing, but only a very specific portion of the person: the consciously reasoning self. We may say that mainstream Western philosophy tends to employ a very specific, even specialized form of understanding—what might be called a reasoning-about mode of understanding.
Unfortunately, it seems to me, philosophical practice has by and large adopted this mode of academic thinking. To be sure, philosophical practitioners discuss not only what the person thinks but also what the person feels and experiences, but in the process those emotions and experiences too become objects of reasoning-about. For example, in philosophical counseling the counselee’s anxiety usually becomes the object of reasoning just like a topic for academic discussions. The fact that the anxiety belongs to a particular person does not change the fact that the conversation seeks to reason about it and apply descriptive statements to capture its meaning. Nor does the fact that the conversation is emotionally charged, or personally significant, change the fact that the dominant form of understanding is reasoning-about. After all, a scientific inquiry, too, may be emotionally charged (imagine a scientist who is developing a vaccine against the bacteria that killed his child), but surely this does not make it any less scientific.
This reasoning-about mode of understanding is good for analyzing, formulating, describing, because it brings a selected object into focus and represents it descriptively in clear and distinct outlines. It has proved itself in the sciences, for science seeks to formulate the principles that govern specific definable phenomena. But it would be naïve to take it for granted that it exhausts the entire range of potential forms of human understandings. When we wish to explore the broader scope of human reality—which is also the context that gives birth to our theorizing activity—we cannot presuppose that it can all be squeezed into the reasoning-about mode. There is no reason to assume that we can treat the horizons which define us, and in which we take part, as if they were just another object for our reasoning self.
I suggest that if we, philosophical practitioners, wish to explore the individual’s lived reality—not an objectified or theorized reality, but the actual horizons of our lived lives—then we must go beyond the narrow boundaries of the reasoning-about mode. We must open the door for ways of understanding that allow our reality to ‘speak’ to us in ways other than the language of theoretical reasoning.
But what kind of philosophical discourse can provide this broader scope of understanding?
It seems to me that if philosophizing is to be deeper than mere reasoning-about, then it must employ aspects of ourselves that are beyond our rational thoughts. This is not to say that philosophizing ought to be irrational, but that it should not be controlled solely by that part of our conscious self that isolates objects from the life in which they appear and captures them with objective reasoned descriptions. The philosophical discourse must be conducted by additional aspects of ourselves and by deeper dimensions of our being.
But this means that philosophizing requires that our conscious thinking self—who is so fond of chattering and so quick to impose its judgments—be silenced, at least in part, at least at times, in order to enable other ‘voices’ of understanding to speak in us. Thus, philosophizing must have an element of inward-looking attention, of silence and reflection, of openness to less familiar aspects of our being and our understanding. It must, in other words, be contemplative.
The goal of philosophical practice, as I see it, is precisely to teach us to relate to our reality from such depth understandings. Put differently, its goal is to explore how to understand from the depth our being. Reasoning-about is, of course, useful and sometimes indispensable, but never as a sole actor, never as a final arbitrator, always as one element within a broader scope of understanding.
What does it mean to understand from the depth of our being, or to engage our depth understanding?
On a theoretical level, I doubt that much can be said here, for it is not a matter that can be captured by theories—which is to say, by the reasoning self. To seek a general theory would be to commit again the error of reducing the richness of our understanding to reasoning-about. Nevertheless, some things can be said about it in a general way.
First, the idea of an understanding that involves our deeper being appears in many spiritual traditions. In Catholicism, to give one example, we find the Lectio Divina, a contemplative reading of the scriptures which arouses deep spiritual insights, whether personal or universal. Note, however, that I am not talking here about alternate states of consciousness (as, for example, in certain meditations and hallucinogenic drugs), but about alternate forms of understanding. Various versions of the idea can be found in philosophy as well, in the writings of thinkers such as Bergson, Marcel, Heidegger and others who sought forms of existential or poetic inquiry that goes beyond theoretical reasoning.
The recurrence of the idea of alternate forms of understanding attests to the fact that it is part of human experience. In fact, it seems to me that we all experience momentary glimpses of such depth understandings. It sometimes happens to us when we read a book, for example, that suddenly a particular sentence strikes us and awakens in us a sense of realization, as if something of great significance has been intimated to us. We feel that a new revelation has suddenly appeared in our awareness, like a ‘bubble’ of light rising from our obscure depths. The content of this realization is often not easy to render in precise words (i.e., in the language of the conscious thinking self), and it may take some attention and effort to reconstruct and verbalize it—this is perhaps why we often ignore and quickly forget it.
This illustrates that most of us are familiar with the experience of at least one type of understanding that seems to come into our awareness from parts of our being other than the conscious reasoning self. Thus, the idea of alternate understandings is not foreign to our everyday life.
If we take this idea seriously, then this opens new horizons of exploration for philosophical practice. It means that we can no longer satisfy ourselves with the standard reasoning-about discourse that is so common not only in academic discussions, but also in philosophical counseling. It poses for us the challenge to go beyond familiar kinds of philosophizing, to develop new ways that are attentive to other ‘voices’ inside us, to seek wisdom through alternate forms of understanding, to open ourselves to the depths of our being. This means, among other things, learning to curb our talkative reasoning self and be attentive. This exploratory direction of philosophical investigations is what I call Contemplative Philo-sophia.
Contemplative philo-sophia seems to me a tremendous task for philosophical practitioners, but fortunately it is not without precedence. As already mentioned, relevant ideas can be found in the writings of some selected philosophers. Also, several spiritual traditions have developed techniques that can facilitate alternate forms of understanding, and some of them can be adapted to our purpose.
But contemplative philo-sophia is much more than techniques. It must also involve different forms of understanding and of discourse. This is an exciting direction to explore.
