As I read Hadot, I am beginning to wonder if, as he claims,
that Philosophy itself is a spiritual exercise!..…
This notion intrigues me…Is not the point of spiritual exercises to
allow one to rise to the level of becoming acceptable to god…
Let us secularize this and make the goal of philosophical spiritual
exercises to become the best possible human being one can become…
It has nothing to do with god or heaven or hell or Satan, but with
one becoming who they are………isn’t that the philosophical goal!
Not only to understand but to remake one into a better person…
As Marx once stated, it is not enough to understand the world,
one must remake it…….
so let us put this into context…
You are born into a world with already preset ism’s and ideologies
biases and prejudices and habits and superstitions…
You are indoctrinated into those ism’s and biases by family,
society, media, church, state…
You grow up in those indoctrinations… then at one point in time,
whatever age, you learn that those indoctrinations are not or do
not adequately explain what you are seeing on the ground…
they are contradictions, discrepancies, incongruities, anomalies,
that are not explained or understood by your indoctrinations…
What are you to do?
For most people, they sweep it under the rug, just write it off.
For some, the anomalies are enough to get one to reexamine,
reevaluate one’s indoctrinations… they become thinkers, philosophers…
for example, we have been lead to believe that capitalism is the
“greatest” economic theory ever, and yet, capitalism is flawed,
severely flawed to the point where it has threatened to
destroy everything it touches…including America……
The rhetoric of the greatness of capitalism is denied by the
anomalies that capitalism creates. The massive poverty it creates,
the wonton destruction of the earth to the point of massive
extinction of plants/animals/species is in progress…
we have pollution and global warming which is the “cost”
of capitalism and I as well as many others, believe to be
to high a cost to pay for the 1% to enjoy the good life…
The problem of capitalism, the system of choice, is that
there is no other choice besides capitalism…capitalism
doesn’t allow any other choices, you cannot exists within
the capitalistic system without making the pursuit of
profits/money as your primary goal and that pursuit is
what is damaging and destroying the earth and, AND
our souls…….
And this is the point of thinking about philosophy as being
a spiritual exercise… At no point must we or should we
reference god or any other metaphysical concept, we don’t have
to, we can use philosophy as a spiritual concept without any recourse
to metaphysical concepts…
Philosophy as a spiritual exercise means we use philosophy
as a tool of diagnosis of our “illness” and as a tool to
find our means to the path of recovery from our “illness”…
By philosophy, we understand the failure of capitalism
and by philosophy we then find another economic system
that is not so destructive to either our planet or to us……
We make choices based on our philosophical understanding of
what it means to hold a capitalistic system opposed to
a non-capitalistic system or some combination therein…
In other words, we shall follow the ideal of the French revolution
and instead of falling into our choices, we make our choices,
we create our future instead of just accepting whatever comes
around… we actively participate in the creation of our future,
which is quite a change of pace from what has actually occurred
over the course of human existence…We have said “god wills it”
or “historical materialism wills it” which is the same thing and
then we just simply accept without comment or reaction to this
rather passive accepting of our fate…I want an active, not reaction,
to the events and actions of our time… and the organ of our understanding
of the events and actions of our time is or will be, philosophy……
Instead of being passive in our future, we engage with and
create our future…we engage in creating our own future
and philosophy as both a branch of rational thought and
as a spiritual exercise is a means of doing this……
we become “enlighten”, to become better people, which
in turn allows us to bring about a better future…
You want a better future? you must work at it, you must
become the person you want to be and that takes
effort and work and that work is philosophy…
To become who you are……. that just doesn’t just happen
overnight………we have the template of becoming…
we just have to have the courage of practicing what we preach…
How will you become?
Kropotkin