Philosophical Exercises

One of my all time favourite philosophers, Helen de Cruz, passed away recently. I wanted to write a little something to honour their memory, and especially to highlight one striking feature of their philosophy: how inspiring it is, and how it is meant to inspire.   Helen de Cruz’s work covers a lot of areas, and I shall not pretend to be very familiar with all of this. So I am not offering to do a full retrospective, or to measure the extent of their life's work. If you want some idea of how broad their interests were, and how much they accomplished professionally for the sake of the philosophical community: take a look at   this lovely tribute , which covers a lot more ground than I will. Though I think everyone agrees that any tribute about them is only very partial. Instead, I shall focus on only one aspect of their work, which is this call that they put out there, this call for self-actualiza t ion . Their declining health gave them a sense of urgency that prompted t...

I took two months (April & May 2025) to practice a yoga exercise that I had tried before (February 2024) but with mixed results. The exercise consists in practicing yoga poses while being attentive to specific phenomenological insights that they disclose; insights which are handily listed in an amazing article by Hayden Kee 1 . My first try with this practice was only half successful, but coming back to it allowed me to unlock what had eluded me: a sense of openness, of daringness… strangely, a sense of relationship towards the sky. The key was patience, discipline, and enjoying the journey. To be honest, enjoyment did the heavy lifting and carried the other two virtues. On the importance of taking your time If you recall, when last I explored the phenomenological insights disclosed by postural yoga , I only managed to gain insights related to the sense of earth : feeling grounded, bound by gravity, supported, secure. But the corollary sense of sky – the feeling of opennes...