How philosophical exercises can improve lives
If you are on a path to improving your life, people will, at some point, offer you what one might call « philosophical exercises » to practice. For instance, they might ask you to reflect on the fact that life is short, throughout your day, in order to stay motivated in the right way. Or else they will offer a thought experiment to consider at pivotal moments; for example « What if money didn’t exist, what would you do with your life then ? ». But the offering isn’t limited to memory and imagination. Philosophical exercises also include contemplative activity, such as meditation geared towards paying better attention, and analytical activity, such as reasoning geared towards thinking clearer in order to be happier. Similarly, any technique that aims at fostering a specific feeling, like gratitude, or joy, is fair game. Given that you will be approached with those things, I think it is important to try to get clear about what is going on there. I know from experience that these things can improve my life, and I trust those who feel the same way about their lives. It is that shared experience, that I think is worth describing in some detail to specify how philosophical exercises work, and why you might want to try out some of them, out of curiosity.
I also know that the existence of « philosophical exercise » as a recognizable domain of activity is not obvious to all. Some think that there is no « there » there, or at least, they are not familiar enough with it to see it. Whereas a lot of people would recognize « physical exercise » when faced with it, and even buy into the idea that physical exercise has benefits, only a smaller subset of people would be able to spot « philosophical exercising » as a category, let alone think it is a good use of one’s time. Do note, however, that this problem is not exactly the same as people not recognizing philosophy when they see it (although that would constitute a handicap here). If philosophy is the deployment of critical thinking in order to question the most fundamental assumptions underpinning a reasoning, then « philosophical exercise » is clearly in that ballpark, but it is a specific kind of deployment. It is a technique aimed at strengthening one’s rational grasp of philosophical truths, to internalize them fully and to let them guide us. Although, as we will see, that characterization can do with some nuance. In the meantime, I borrow that first sketch from someone who clearly understands what philosophy is, and yet opposes Pierre Hadot’s account of « spiritual exercises », a notion similar enough to that of « philosophical exercise ». This person, John Cooper, writes, «You cannot strengthen your rational grasp of truths, except quite incidentally, by any such external spiritual self-manipulations. That strength comes only through increased rational understanding. »1 and also « What was crucial for philosophy (as opposed to religion) as a way of life, all the way through, is that what was to keep you going and keep you living your philosophy was nothing more than your fully developed philosophical, reasoned understanding of what you thought was the truth about human beings and their place in the world. You did not need spiritual uplift and purification, and it would indeed be a serious distraction in most of the ancient philosophical lives »2 This is a “there is no ‘there’ there” reasoning. What he is saying is that the activity of philosophy is enough. He denies the existence of remarkable imaginative, repetitive, and disciplined techniques that you can use to deepen that bond to philosophy in a significant way. If, like John Cooper, you think like this, I think it’s important for you to know that a non-negligible amount of people are so on board with the idea of “philosophical exercise” that to them, this is the whole of philosophy. It is what philosophy means to them. Which is just as one-sided, but in the other extreme. I hope this latter remark can convey the gulf that can separate people participating in the tradition of philosophical exercises and those who do not.
One side thinks the existence of this activity is so obvious as to go without saying, while the other side is flabbergasted that anyone should think this is more than superstition. Another way to put it is, some people have a hard time imagining anything else, while others have a hard time imagining it’s a thing. Both sides can suffer from an inability to discern general features of philosophical exercises that might differ from other activities. I would like to try to help with that, by offering a way of thinking about the virtue of philosophical exercises.
First of all, what is an “exercise”? An exercise is a “serious game”. It is a game that shares the stakes of a real-life situation it points toward. Think of a fire drill. During this fire exercise, the instructor could point out a mistake you make by saying “You are dead, killed by the fire”. It’s not a literal fact, but it points to the truth. The significance of this exercise is to prepare you for the real-life scenario. We are playing pretend, in a way, but with that goal in mind, and acquiring real skills. Thi Nguyen astutely pointed out that games “provide us with something very special: they can expose us to alternate agencies”.3 Meaning: alternate ways of caring, perceiving and acting. Each time game designers come up with new goals, obstacles, and rules, to play with, they sculpt a new form of agency that we can inhabit and try out for ourselves. In so far as similar ways of behaving happen to be useful in the real world, those games can have an instrumental value. However, we are still in need of an explanation of how this works for a philosophical exercise. What would be the “playing pretend” part that this comparison suggests? What is the part that makes it distinct from simply learning the theory?
What is needed then, is more of a description of the specific manner in which these philosophical games suspend the usual rules of behaviour, and switches them out for an alternate set of rules. A game is a change of reality, in so far as not all of the usual ways of acting apply. If you are playing basketball, you are not moving the same way as you usually do, because you are operating under certain restrictions. The rules define the style of the game. It is not easy to describe the change of reality inherent to philosophical exercising, and the style of thinking that comes along with it. But we might get there if we describe its opposite first. Someone who does not get the point of philosophical exercises could forget to be polite and start describing them as a form of “brain-washing”. After all, the point seems to be to induce changes in the way we think and behave, through repetition and clever nudges. Recall John Copper calling it “external spiritual self-manipulations”. A person who would describe philosophical exercising like that might display what is called “genealogical anxiety” (see Amia Srinivasan, who coined the term4). “Genealogical anxiety” designates the occurrences where contemplating how we came to believe what we believe casts doubt upon these beliefs, because we discover that contingent factors played into acquiring them. For example, we might believe in a certain religion, but experience some doubt as we realize that we believe in it because our parents did, and the situation would have been different were we born elsewhere. In the case of the fear of brain-washing, the anxiety is more about micro-nudges. You can think of the fear of “subliminal messages” as an example: we are scared that the smallest of nudges sends us in some pre-determined direction. Well, it seems to me that whatever the particular style of philosophical exercising is, it is the opposite of that. We could call it “genealogical joy” or “genealogical enthusiasm”. Philosophical exercising is this point of view where we welcome creative nudges.
However, it is crucial to understand that we do not welcome creative nudges just for the sake of the nudges. Just as a fire drill is not just about playing pretend, a philosophical exercise is not just about self-manipulation for the sake of manipulation. It is a point of view, through which, in a distinctive manner, we keep track of real stakes. This is a very important point, because, as it might have occurred to you, subliminal messages and brain-washing do not work. I am not talking about propaganda in general here, but about the kind of spy movie brain-washing that is meant to create and activate sleeper agents: a combination of flashiness and tediousness that fails to reform the minds of other people when it comes at them, and yet that people might voluntarily engage in. “Quasi-religious devotional practices”5, as Cooper would say. We have to think that something else is going on that keeps the practitioners of philosophical exercises engaged. That something else is more similar to reading a book or playing a game. And that something else could probably be summarized simply as one way of practicing philosophy. The way philosophical exercises can improve lives is the way that philosophy and games can each improve lives. Philosophy frees us from ill-founded assumptions and expands our thinking. Games let us try out new ways of perceiving and acting. Combining them is quite powerful. Together, they get a shot at challenging assumptions entrenched in the ways we perceive and act. Notice, how it is tempting for the sake of simplicity to spin philosophical exercises as either “preparation exercises” that train us for a future challenge, or as “application exercises”6 that help us stay true to our philosophical values in the moment of challenge. We thus give the impression that the philosophical beliefs were already acquired (we have the values, the answers, the solutions) and that all that is left is an implementation problem that calls for clever manipulations. “Strengthening our rational grasp of philosophical truths” suggests we already have a grasp of what is philosophically true, and we just need a reminder. I think it is fair enough, as there are a lot of situations where we just need a boost. But philosophical exercising is more of a point of view than a mere reminder. A point of view which happens to take seriously factors of belief formation that are usually taken to be irrelevant to truth and suspicious. Repetition and arbitrary constraints are the bread and butter of philosophical exercises. They create a novel point of view through which we can reason and arrive at some answers. For instance, if you are committed to remembering that life is short, every day right after waking up and every day right before falling asleep, this practice can generate novel insights in virtue of the moment that you picked to think about those things. It might influence how you view the day ahead, and the day just past. You might be able to compare the anticipation and the memory of the day. The chronology of your thinking begins to matter to you. I am not claiming that the insights you get could not have been arrived at any other way, the bar is lower than that: it suffices to say that some people, sometimes, would have had a hard time getting there any other way. Philosophical exercises can generate new insights that were not available before; they were not simply there waiting for implementation. This is probably what keeps practitioners engaged. Thi Nguyen believes that games have both instrumental value and aesthetic value, and that both values are connected to the shaping of agency. The same could be said of philosophical exercises: they have instrumental value, but they also have hermeneutical value, as they help us with the business of interpreting ourselves and the world. Both values are connected to taking into account the influence of the most minute seemingly-irrelevant factors on our worldview.
I hope the description of this practical domain is helpful to understand what is going on with philosophical exercises. I meant it to be empowering in several ways. I want the reader to see how cool philosophical exercises are, so that they might be tempted to try one or to try more. Maybe not right away, but potentially the next time around something like that is proposed to them and the memory of this article guides their understanding of what even is the point of this activity. Yet, for all this enthusiasm, I also meant it to be a corrective to the hype and counter-hype that can surround this kind of thing. Grandiose claims are made about how these things work, and they are then countered by scientific studies that prove that they don’t “work”. Do philosophical exercises work? Well, I don’t know, does “reading novels” work? Work for what? What even is the narrow definition of success that is being used as a benchmark here? Reading novels works if you want to read novels. Before you can even get empirically minded about the consequences of an activity you need to be clear about the apparent virtue of the activity: novels are beautiful and entertaining, most of all, we read them for their own sake. Yes, philosophical exercises can improve lives sometimes. But there is no need to see them with “hype” goggles, as if it were a panacea, or with “counter-hype” goggles as if it were a scam. They are cool, and I would like you to try them, but, most of all, I want you to know what you would be getting into, and to feel empowered to say no, if you so choose. Only in that frame of mind, could you, instead of saying “Yes! Thank God!” or “No way!” say what I’m truly hoping: “Hey, why not?”. It is this kind of levity that is suitable for the playfulness of games of philosophy.
Pierrick Simon
02/08/2023
I thank Natalija Cera for very helpful feedback on a draft of this article.
(check out her philosophy blog here: https://humanfactor.blog/ )
my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr
(do not hesitate to reach out)
NOTES:
1 Cooper, J. M. (2013). Ancient Philosophies as Ways of Life. Matheson, M. (Ed.) The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Volume 32. University of Utah Press. 23-66 --- (P.40-41)
2 Cooper, J. M. (2013). (P.40.)
3 Thi Nguyen, Games : Agency as art, P.76
4 https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/genealogical-anxiety Amia Srinivasan
5 Cooper, J. M. (2013). (P.40.)
6 Pierre-Julien Harter discusses those two terms, after taking some inspiration from Pierre Hadot. « Spiritual Exercises and the Buddhist Path: An Exercise in Thinking with and against Hadot » p.154 onward, especially p. 160
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