Philosophy as a spiritual experience

[Angelo Cannata]

We know that any objective statement is subject to criticism. For example, if I say that the sky is blue or that our planet is round, anybody could object that these statements are conditioned by my human way of perceiving things, creating and organizing ideas, managing my consciousness, and so on.

Besides, if we try to study this problem, we are just applying the same mental structures that we have just exposed to criticism: any kind of study can be accused of being conditioned by our subjectivity. Any kind of study proceeds by applying the same mental structures that made us to state that the sky is blue or our planet is round. This makes any study meaningless under this perspective, because it tries to criticize our mental structures just by using them.

The way to go out of this cage would be an attempt to use different mental structures and procedures.

The alternative is to renounce, at least partially, just as an attempt, to mental structures based on objectivity and try to adopt, or at least to add, to mix, subjective ways of thinking, that is, ways that are close to arts, rather than to science.

What I am saying is not just to replace science with arts. We cannot remove structures of objectivity from our mind, because they are too deeply rooted in our way of thinking. The best way would be to combine objectivity and subjectivity, in a way that is ultimately nothing else than human experience, human path, self-training, self-criticism. I would call this way “spirituality”, because I think that it has the ability to give meaning, sense and taste to our human life.

In other words, the entire philosophy, that has been produced in every time and every place and still continues to be produced today, could be experienced as human inner experience, rather than simply a (pseudo) scientific way to understand how the world is made or how the world works. The statement 2+2=4 can be experienced as a subject for meditation, rather than an illusion of having understood some thing undeniable.

This opens new ways to make philosophy a deep human, inner, experience, rather than a mechanical movement and interacting of ideas inside our brains. That is what Pierre Hadot tried to recover about what philosophy was in its origins.