Category: philosophical counseling
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‘Philosophy is not suited to the classroom’: An essay on ascesis
Today I begin with a remarkable meditation from Pierre Hadot on philosophical life. I then discuss the supreme value of ascesis: the style of reasoning that is aimed less at informing and more at forming and re-forming the self. This symbol, [ ], denotes my own additions. This symbol, […], denotes my editorial decision to…
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All the present alone
1 I believe that, for him [Plotinus], if philosophical life in fact prepares one for an eventual mystical experience, this philosophical life has value in itself. All things considered, Plotinus’ mystical experiences were extremely rare. Poryphyry [Plotinus’s student] tells us that the rest of the time–that is, almost all the time–he tried “to be present…
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‘What was most essential for us could not be expressed’
In this remarkable excerpt from the opening pages of The Present Alone is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Marc Djaballah, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009, 5-7, Pierre Hadot speaks about the boyhood mystical experiences that led him, many years later, to embrace philosophical inquiry. “What was most essential for us,”…
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On the art of longing for a radiant way of being
The truth of metaphysics is revealed in the question, “Can this [way of life] be all?” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics). My longing is a longing for another way of life beyond the one I inhabit. The truth of the perdurance of the soul is that of a being that leaves behind one way of life but…
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‘I spilled the ink across the page’: Reflections on inquiring about life
Preface I spend a lot of my time trying out novel experiments, watching them unwind, and then puzzling through what I can learn about their reasons for unraveling. (Mine, a life in letters spelling out failures. All spilled ink across the page.) I worked at two start-ups, have run my own businesses, have conjured up…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 
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