{"id":3078,"date":"2020-06-23T16:20:56","date_gmt":"2020-06-23T16:20:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/06\/23\/why-a-philosopher-should-meditate-and-why-it-is-difficult-for-a-philosopher-to-meditate\/"},"modified":"2020-06-23T16:20:56","modified_gmt":"2020-06-23T16:20:56","slug":"why-a-philosopher-should-meditate-and-why-it-is-difficult-for-a-philosopher-to-meditate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/06\/23\/why-a-philosopher-should-meditate-and-why-it-is-difficult-for-a-philosopher-to-meditate\/","title":{"rendered":"Why a Philosopher Should Meditate and Why it is Difficult for a Philosopher to Meditate"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-body\">\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">If a philosopher seeks the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then he should do so by all available routes.&#0160;<em> Qua<\/em> philosopher he operates in the aether of abstract thought, on the plane of discursive reason, but he cannot consistently with his calling ignore other avenues of advance.&#0160; It is after all the <em>truth<\/em> that is sought, not merely the truth <em>as philosophically accessible<\/em>.&#0160; There is surely no justification for the identification of truth with philosophically accessible truth.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">Meditation is difficult for intellectual types because of their tendency to overvalue their mental facility and cleverness. They are good at dialectics and mental jugglery, and people tend to value and overvalue what they are good at. Philosophers can become as obsessed with their cleverness and gamesmanship&#0160; as body builders with muscular hypertrophy.&#0160; Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the typical analytic philosopher suffers from hypertrophy of the critical\/discursive\/dialectical faculty.&#0160; He can chop logic, he can mentally and verbally jabber, jabber, jabber, and scribble, scribble, scribble, but he can&#39;t be silent, listen, attend. He would sneer, to his own detriment, at this thought of Simone Weil (<em>Gravity and Grace<\/em>, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 107):<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">The capacity to drive away a thought once and for all is the gateway to eternity.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">Compare this striking line from Evagrius Ponticus (<em>The Praktikos and Chapters of Prayer<\/em>, tr. Bamberger, Cistercian Publications, 1972, p. 66, #70):<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">For prayer is the rejection of concepts.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If a philosopher seeks the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then he should do so by all available routes.&#0160; Qua philosopher he operates in the aether of abstract thought, on the plane of discursive reason, but he cannot consistently with his calling ignore other avenues of advance.&#0160; It is after all the truth that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/06\/23\/why-a-philosopher-should-meditate-and-why-it-is-difficult-for-a-philosopher-to-meditate\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Why a Philosopher Should Meditate and Why it is Difficult for a Philosopher to Meditate&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105,20,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meditation","category-metaphilosophy","category-spiritual-exercises"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}