ASCESIS. Introduction, etymology and bibliography 1989.-Ivan Illich

The following is a brief excerpt.  The article can be read in its entirety here.

NB: Pierre Hadot has written extensively about ascesis in What is Ancient Philosophy? and in Philosophy as a Way of Life.

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I want to cultivate the capacity for second thoughts, by which I mean the stance and the competencethat makes it feasible to inquire into the obvious. This is what I call learning.

Learning presupposes both critical and ascetical habits; habits of the right and habits of the left. I consider the cultivation of learning as a dissymetical but complementary growth of both these sets of habits. I see that since the foundation of the University in the late Middle Ages, the humanist tradition has preeminently fostered the formation of critical habits. Higher Education has come to be the refinement of the habits of the mind, while military service, schools, the conjugal family and later the media have taken over the sad remnants of the “heart’s” formation.

This preponderance of critical over ascetical training for insight and wisdom can be understood as a necessary condition for the science which we now have. Like the science it brought forth, this reduction of intellectual formation to critical procedures constitutes something which cannot adequately be compared with anything in other cultures of epochs. What is worse: we now tend to take this one-sided style of learning to be traditional and historians of education project the present prejudice into the past. This not only makes it very difficult to understand Plato or Plotinus, Marc Aurelius or Boethius, Abaelard or Ockham. It also makes it almost impossible to inquire into the current status of science as the source of the obvious by which we live. Scientific assumptions are the appropriate shell for ascetically untrained, learned persons.

The habits of the heart and the cultivation of its virtues are peripherals to the pursuit of higher learning today.