The Practice of Self-Care [1 ed.] 1527577678, 9781527577671

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The Practice of Self-Care

The Practice of Self-Care By

Luigina Mortari

The Practice of Self-Care By Luigina Mortari This book first published 2022 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2022 by Luigina Mortari All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-7767-8 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-7767-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 To Compose Meaning in Time Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 11 Essence of Care for the Self Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 28 Noetic Practices of Care Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 126 Cultivating Spiritual Practices Bibliography ............................................................................................ 157

CHAPTER ONE TO COMPOSE MEANING IN TIME

The myth of Chronos (Plato, Politics, 269a–275e) tells us that there was once a blessed time for the human race, a time in which the gods had care for human beings. At that time the god Chronos accompanied the universe in its movement: things worked out by themselves in favour of human beings (271d). Indeed, the god Chronos governed the circular movement of the universe, caring for all of it [ਥʌȚȝİȜȠȪȝİȞȠȢ ੖ȜȘȢ (271d 4); the universe was divided into different areas, and each area had its own ruler in accordance with the principle of one order for the entire cosmos. But this condition of beatitude, a condition in which human beings are objects of divine care, had a temporal duration that was not infinite; when this time had been completed and the movement of the cosmos reached its measure, the god withdrew to an observation point external to the movement of the world (272e) and set it free; after which all the gods abandoned, in their turn, the areas entrusted to their care. And so it happened that the movement of the universe no longer knew that first order with which it had moved and human beings found themselves abandoned, without divine care (274b–d). To begin with, still being without tools and techniques, they encountered serious difficulties, since spontaneous nutrition was no longer there. Then they received as a gift from the gods the techniques necessary for human life and with these they were able to begin seeing to their own care. The myth of Chronos enunciates an ontological thesis on the human condition: it tells us that the condition into which human beings are born and in which they live, is that in which they find themselves abandoned by the care of the gods [IJોȢ ਥʌȚȝİȜİȓĮȢ ਥʌȑȜȚʌİȞ ਕȞșȡȫʌȠȣȢ] and they are called upon to ‘have care of themselves by themselves’ [IJ੽Ȟ ਥʌȚȝȑȜİȚĮȞ Į੝IJȠઃȢ Įਫ਼IJ૵Ȟ ਩ȤİȚȞ] (274d). Care constitutes the essential quality of the human condition. Since care is not something which belongs to us, like our mind or our body, but is the way of being to which we must give form, we can say that the human condition is that of being called to something which is always lacking, which is to say, care. Being in the world is always a continuous

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tension to procure what is necessary to preserve life, what makes it flourish and what repairs the wounds that we suffer over time (Mortari 2018). When we think about our own being, we discover that it has the quality of being inconsistent, in the sense that our ontological condition is one in which at every moment we discover ourselves exposed to nothingness (Stein 2002, 54). We live in time, and time is our matter, but we have no sovereignty over it. Only the present seems to belong to us, but the present is the instantaneous coming into being of a moment which instantly flees. The quality of our being is that of a continual becoming; becoming is the prorogation of instant to instant, and each instant in which we become, takes away with it a drop of our being. We are therefore lacking in being and there is nothing in the human condition that guarantees we can become what we can be. We are a series of possibilities, but the possible is not yet the being. In that moment in which we discover ourselves to be lacking in being, prorogated from moment to moment and always exposed to the possibility of nothingness, we also find ourselves called to the responsibility of giving form to our own possible being, a responsibility fostered by the irrevocable desire to live a good life. This is the paradox of existence: feeling our being to be inconsistent, fragile, and fleeting, and that we have no sovereignty over our own becoming; yet at the same time we are tied to the responsibility to respond to the call to give a shape to our life, and bring about our own possible being, that wearisome hard, strenuous ontogenetic labour in which consists the business of living and which asks us to bracket off our tendency to live from moment to moment, in order to think over a long period of time. We are born weighed down with a task that other living beings, whether bees or birch trees, do not have, which is to give form to our own time, or in other words to outline the paths of existence with meaning. Our being is a continual becoming, and this becoming is not just a simple flowing through time, but finding ourselves totally absorbed by the preoccupation of being. We are concerned not only to preserve ourselves but also to become our own possible being. Taking on the task of giving form to our own being means having care for life, taking to heart the fact that we are called to the responsibility for the form which we give to the time of our living. But caring for life, precisely inasmuch as it has its origin in our finding ourselves lacking a finished form, and so absorbed by the task of becoming our own possible being, runs the risk of translating itself into an egotistical movement, concentrated wholly on the self. However, this risk has in reality, an insurmountable limitation, since the becoming of each

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person is inextricably mixed with that of others. We are in fact intimately relational beings. It is the relational essence of the human condition which obliges having care for life to see itself not only as care for oneself, but also as care for others and for the world, which defines responding to this call to the other as the “otherwise than being” (Lévinas 1991), to indicate the gesture of responsibility for the other. In the responsibility for others, we should not however see an interruption of the effort of being, as if being in the world were above all being for ourself and as if the decision to have care for the other implied a decision to interrupt the attention we give ourselves. This “out-ofourselves for the other” conceptualised by Lévinas (1991) supposes a self independent of the other; on the contrary, our being is always from the start a being-with-others. As a consequence, the being that, in its essence, consists in finding itself called to become its own possible being is always and already responsible both for itself and for others. In the ontological vision, the existential adventure of one’s neighbour is for the self even more important than one’s own, and immediately places the self as responsible for the being of others. In this displacement towards the other we find the beginnings of ethics. But this looking towards the other, which is the generative gesture of humanity, must not obscure the essential nature of care for the self, since without care for the self there is no possibility of care for the other, just as the ethical gesture of having care for the other is essential if we are to find our own humanity. There cannot be, therefore, a simple being for oneself against which to posit an “otherwise of being”, since the act of being in the world, which in its essence is having care for life, proposes itself as indivisibly care for the self and for others. What we are called to do is to learn to have care of existence. To put it another way, to learn the art of existence, that knowledge of human things [ਕȞșȡȦʌȓȞȘ ıȠijȓĮ] which Socrates speaks of (Plato, Apology of Socrates, 20d) which would lead us towards finding a good form of living. The art of existing is the knowledge which helps us find the ways to give a good form to our being, such that we make of the time of our being a composition of meaning. Coming to this knowledge is a difficult apprenticeship, which demands to be consciously cultivated. And it is because of the need to help young people learn this art that it takes the form of educational practice. If, however, we agree to share the perspective of Socrates, according to which the art of existence consists in having “a certain knowledge of the virtue of living humanely and politically [IJȓȢ IJોȢ IJȠȚĮȪIJȘȢ ਕȡİIJોȢ, IJોȢ ਕȞșȡȦʌȓȞȘȢ IJİ țĮ੿ ʌȠȜȚIJȚțોȢ, ਥʌȚıIJȒȝȦȞ ਥıIJȓȞ]” (20b), then it is necessary

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to be aware of the limits of educational knowledge, which cannot claim to be able to teach such an art, since nobody possesses it, not even the person who assumes the role of educator; it is a knowledge beyond the capacity of human reason, which can grasp only a few fragments of it. Nobody possesses the formula which might resolve the problem of existence. At the most we can, over time, find a few clues. What is more, the knowledge that is useful for life is something which cannot be accumulated or transferred, but a dynamic nucleus which constructs itself in the light of experience and which, in constructing itself, transforms itself and at the same time transforms the subject who develops it. If education cannot directly teach the essential and primary knowledge which is the art of existing, it can nonetheless guide towards the acquisition of the ontogenerative methods of inquiry–that is, which give form to being–the practice of which helps us in the search for essential knowledge. In the Socratic view, the essence of education that improves the art of existing consists in the action of caring for the soul of young human beings (Plato, Laches, 185e) and this educative activity, which should be seen as having care that the other learns the care for self for himself, comes about not by passing on a piece of knowledge that is already given, since nobody possesses it entirely and only the wise possess it even in part; rather, it consists in guiding the other to the awareness of the existential primacy of the search for such art of living. This awareness constitutes the essential condition for the subject to be able to respond to the ontological call to activate himself in order to become his possible self. Even if the most alive and essential knowledge of all, the one about matters of life, cannot be transmitted, it is possible to encourage young people along those paths of research which, in the light of experience, have proved meaningful to undertake if we are to make sense of our time of living. Education, then, should be seen as having care to offer young people those experiences which prompt the desire to learn the practices necessary in the search for what is indispensable in order to authenticate our own time of being. In order to learn the art of existing it is not sufficient to learn techniques, because no technique becomes a living instrument unless it is accompanied by a deeply meditated decision to seek the best possible form of one’s own being. So what is to be cultivated is the passion for the formation of the self, the passion which directs the person to work towards the realisation of a value (Stein 2001, 186). Passion for becoming one’s own being is a consciously developed vital energy to give form to one’s own existence. It is passion for the search for horizons of meaning for being.

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We are placed in time. Life is made of time. We cannot at all take for granted that we will succeed in giving meaning to the time of our living, or that we even wish to. We can learn to give direction and order to our own walk through time, but this can also not happen: it can happen that one’s own being, instead of expanding along the different paths towards selfrealisation that open up before us, contracts to the point where the person feels himself diminished in his own being. This happens when we allow ourselves to become mere spectators of our own lives, accepting the limiting of ourselves to live life as it comes along, without taking on the responsibility of undertaking those actions of manufacturing our being which are necessary in order to give a good form to our time. Becoming subjects of our own existence implies deciding to take on one’s own ontological burden, so as not to let time, simply, pass with no thread of meaning being sketched out in the brief space of our own becoming. It is unavoidable for a human being to experience moments of unease and a sense of difficulty, since we feel ourselves to be fragile and vulnerable beings. But when we do not take up our own ontogenetic responsibility, which demands to be involved in the process of weaving threads of meaning into the time which is given to us, then it can happen that we feel the anguish which comes from feeling time consume itself in an immobile chain of instances, devoid of meaning. Lacking the search for our own transcendence means risking our soul becoming sick in the desertification of a wasted existence. The call to give sense to time, to make of our lives a worthwhile time, makes it necessary to have knowledge of living, that “human knowledge” [ਕȞșȡȦʌȓȞȘ ıȠijȓĮ] which Socrates speaks of (Plato, Apology for Socrates, 20d). It is therefore essential that every human being is offered the chance to live experiences which might orient him to acquire techniques that are fundamental in the search for the knowledge of living, and also to cultivate the desire for such a search. Educating someone to take existence to heart means educating that person to have care for the self. Care for the self transforms simple living, the time which is allotted to us and which we could live just as it happens; a good time of life takes form in accordance with consciously meditated directions and desires. In reaching this point, we put into effect the intimate unity of life and thought. The value of care for the self was stated by Socrates and then affirmed by other philosophers. It found an eloquent proponent in Epithetus, who defines the human being as an entity tasked with care for the self (Discourses 1, 16, 1–3) in order to cultivate a “great and courageous soul” (1, 6, 43). According to Epicurus, every human being, throughout the course of his life, should have care for his own soul, dedicating attention

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to it every day and every hour of the day (Letter to Menoeceus, 122). Muson in a maxim quoted by Plutarch, writes that “He who wishes to come through life safe and sound must continue throughout his life to take care of himself” (quoted in Foucault 1988, 49). Seneca notes that “the most shameful loss is the loss due to carelessness” (Letters to Lucilius, 1, 1, 2). The material of our life is time and it is this that we have to learn to take care of, sketching threads of meaning which can weave together the moments of our lives. If the event of being is implemented in the preoccupation of being, that is of becoming one’s own possible self, then having care for the self becomes an obligatory existential duty in that taking on this responsibility is the fruit of a decision with which consciousness responds to an unavoidable requirement. Responding with responsibility to the requirements of the real means placing oneself in an ethical position. Care for the self answers a deep and immediate need of the soul: understanding ourselves in order to find the right orientation of our being in the world. In the light of the assumption of the primacy of care for the self we can state that to educate means to offer the other those experiences which are meaningful with regard to every aspect of the person (cognitive, affective, ethical, aesthetic, political…) and which will enable him to take on the responsibility for his own formation. Thus, the ultimate meaning of educating consists in facilitating in the other the acquisition of those capacities, and the development of those dispositions that are necessary in order to activate the process of self-formation, which itself consists in taking on the responsibility of giving as good a form as possible to our own mode of being. In this sense the master is he who has care that the other desires to have care for the self. The direction of meaning of the process of self-formation understood as care for the self consists in constructing an “inner centre” (Stein 2002, 437) and this can mean: establishing an architecture of essential principles which might help to find the path of our own existential implementation; nurturing those mental attitudes which allow us to seek out what is essential, in other words that which when it is lacking, makes us feel a loss of being; and nourishing the drive to hold the mind focused on the search for that which cannot be given up. Dedicating ourselves to cultivating an inner centre allows us to find sovereignty over our own movements from which depends our freedom of being, a freedom which reveals itself when the directions of being are autonomously selected and consciously set into motion. While there is a life which rolls along in unreflective mode, there is a conscious life, the life which reduces as far as possible finding ourselves moved from the

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outside, letting ourselves be guided instead by the desire for transcendence, in other words generating sufficient and proper time and space for existing. Such a life needs a mind whose activity is totally rooted in itself (Stein 2002, 437), a mind which acts not on the basis of impulse in response to external promptings but on the basis of considered decisions, which are structured in the light of essential principle, to give architectonic form to existence, principles which have been acquired through rigorously meditated research.1 A mind rooted in itself is not a self-referential, solitary mind. It is a mind whose activity depends on itself because it is engaged in cultivating an inner centre; this centre, however, weaves itself in continual dialogue with others, through the patient and considered comparison with different perspectives. Precisely because the human condition is intimately relational, a lively mind cannot be anything but a dialogic mind. If living is living together, then dialogue with others is essential in order to find the art of existing. And the dialogue which takes place in an educational relationship is particularly fertile with regard to the process of selfformation. If an authentic relationship with the other is one in which the other is never deprived of the possibility of taking on the responsibility for his own existence, in an educative relationship the sense of educating consists in urging the other to take on the responsibility for his own process of self-formation. In other words, the direction of the meaning of 1

In tracing the movement of care for the self as a drive to act freely, an essential reference point is the work of Edith Stein (2002), who interprets the difference between acting naturally and acting freely in a religious horizon and hypotheses that the person is ready for liberty when the soul is totally rooted in itself. For Stein, this condition only comes about when we find our reference point in the world of faith, because only by entrusting ourselves to divine grace can the soul find its foundations. It might seem a paradox to say that only entrusting ourselves to another and thereby renouncing our own freedom can we find true freedom, but this is the vision of those who have experience of faith, and theorizes philosophically from a starting point of experience which is not accessible to all. Seeking the meaning of care of the self apart from any possible religious connotations, that inner centre from which alone springs the vital force which makes free and conscious action possible can be thought of not so much in the form of a thing which lends itself objectively there to the consciousness, but as an orientation of the mind, a method, if by method we mean a way of being amongst things. When we lose the centre, when we lose the method for moving properly through time, then the soul trembles and can be overcome by anguish, because the soul feels as if its own being and life were separating apart, and the possibility of any movement were fading away. It is in these moments, where we can feel ourselves hanging by a thread, that the discipline of care of the self can keep the soul safe.

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education consists in having care that the other learns to have care for himself. If we accept that the reason for educating consists in having care that the other learns to have care for himself through caring for virtue, as enunciated by Socrates in the Apology (31a–31c), then the process of selfformation is essentially configured as learning how to care for one’s own particular form of life. We can say that when care for the self is understood as a practice of self-formation, through which we take on the responsibility of responding to the call to give form to our life’s time, then it allows us to access an authentic dimension of living. A life made up simply of impersonal acts is inauthentic, those acts in which we let things happen according to decisions made elsewhere and where we do not decide our being, beginning with our own selves. If we can say that the dimension of inauthenticity coincides with living just as it happens by chance, without any investment or design, the dimension of authenticity on the other hand consists in living by taking upon ourselves the task of making directions of meaning shine before us. “Care for the self” was, until recently, an out-dated expression, brought back to the attention of our times especially by the work of Michel Foucault (1988, 1998, 2001). Precisely because it was outdated, before proceeding it is necessary to examine the reasons which caused this concept to be marginalised within our culture, and with it, the practice of care for the self. First of all, we might note the diffidence which accompanies the theory of care for the self, a diffidence which, over time, has led to the eclipse of this practice. The reason for such diffidence can be sought in the fact that dealing with one’s own self is seen as a form of moral dandyism, an aestheticizing individualism to be shunned (Foucault 2001, 14). On the other hand, the concept of care for the self, which in contemporary culture evokes an attitude both egoistic and individualistic, not to say a marked turning in on oneself, has constituted for many centuries a positively valued practice, representing the generative matrix of rigorous and austere ethical perspectives such as the Stoic, the Cynic and in some respects the Epicurean. We might add that many of the techniques which make up the practice of care for the self were later to reappear in the context of Christian culture. For care for the self to be reduced to an individualistic mode of being is a misinterpretation, as Foucault has demonstrated (1988, 51–54). Foucault explains that this practice turns out to be not at all a solipsistic approach to the task of dealing with existence, but on the contrary requires an intensification of social relations, for we cannot find

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the path of the art of living without also comparing ourselves with other people. Another reason for the cultural marginalisation suffered by the theory of care for the self can be traced in the fact that it was originally conceived for the privileged. In the Lacedaemonian culture in fact, looking into oneself was a practice reserved for those who could afford slaves to deal with all the everyday tasks (Foucault 2001, 33). In order to bring up to date the meaning of care for the self we must therefore re-signify this practice through an interpretation which underlines its ethical power. This formation must be of value to all citizens, a condition for one’s own existential self-implementation and for the exercise of full citizenship.

Note on method Making the object of our study the culture of care for the self requires us to immerse ourselves in the texts of ancient philosophy. Reading texts so distant in time brings the risk of slipping into an archaeology of knowledge which might produce beautiful artefacts to be admired, but which remain inert with regard to the present, and to the specific need we have of words which are alive and which speak to us. We should also not forget that in coming to these distant texts, there can be a kind of contamination in that the gaze of the interpreter, as every gaze, is culturally situated and ends up colouring the object of study with the atmosphere of the present. The contamination of the gaze which follows from the situatedness of the cognitive act can on the other hand be turned into a resource if, far from claiming uselessly that we can annihilate our own point of view, we are able to implement a dialogical hermeneutics with the texts which is capable of transforming the presuppositions which structure our gaze into instruments which know how to listen to far-off voices. What we need to cultivate is a hermeneutics which, without giving up on our gaze immersed in the contemporary world, nonetheless lets ancient texts speak with their own voices. Our thinking today is also enriched by the hermeneutic coordinates provided by some twentieth-century philosophies which, even if they do not deal directly with the thematics of care, address the ancient question of spirituality; in other words, attention to the practice of the profound transformation of the subject’s being. It might therefore be useful to outline the features of a culture of care for the self, beginning with those philosophical gazes which, close to us in time, can nourish a fertile reading of the requirements of spirituality expressed by the ancient culture of the self. Every analytical gaze is always and already culturally situated;

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identifying and bringing into explicit focus a precise observation point can lead us on the way to making up-to-date and vital what took form in far off times. Beginning with these premises, I have decided to take phenomenology as my starting point for a gaze from the present. This choice finds legitimacy with regard to the themes of this book because phenomenologists have confronted the submerged continent of inner life. As well as those of Max Scheler, the writings of Edith Stein on the life of the mind, especially its affective side, a world which does not always receive sufficient reflection either in our daily lives or in the sciences of the spirit, are particularly vivid and methodologically rigorous. Also fundamental is the thought of María Zambrano, since she has produced refined analyses of the life of the soul and the heart, which resound with the principle of knowing oneself that Socrates places at the centre of the practice of care for the self. Following a spiral pattern of enquiry, after studying in depth the culture of care of the self in ancient thought, I have chosen as a reading filter reflections which have matured in those philosophies which attest to profound consonance with the nucleus which characterises the culture of practices of spirituality, and from there to engage in a dialogue with ancient texts. Perhaps this choice–even while we must acknowledge that it is impossible to illuminate any path of study in linear fashion–owes itself to the fact that it is the formation influenced by and through these same philosophies which has reactivated our sensibility towards the theme of care for the self.

CHAPTER TWO ESSENCE OF CARE FOR THE SELF

The existential primacy of care for the self If we accept the statement that educating means directing the other towards care for the self, then the essential question–the same one that Socrates puts to Alcibiades (Plato, Alcibiades 1, 128a)–consists in understanding what constitutes care for the self [ਦĮȣIJȠ૨ ਥʌȚȝİȜİ૙ıșĮȚ]. This question needs to be taken further, seeking to understand what constitutes “a perfect taking care [ੑȡș૵Ȣ ਥʌȚȝİȜİ૙ıșĮȚ]” (128b), or that is– if we can find an adequate translation of the Greek term orthos [ੑȡș૵Ȣ]– that of responding perfectly to all that the real becoming of things demands as necessary, and which happens in the right moment and in proper measure. In order to understand what constitutes the essence of good care, it is important to identify to what such practice is addressed, what is the object, and towards what we should turn, in other words what are the operative directionalities. In order to respond to these questions, we must make reference to the thought of Socrates, since it is to Socrates that we owe the institution of the concept of care for the self. It is in Alcibiades that we find the first important formulation of care for self (Foucault 2001, 45), but in order to better understand the meaning of this practice, this text should be read alongside the Apology of Socrates, since here we find a no less important interpretation of care, in that Socrates indicates its essential qualities. In the Apology Socrates, speaking of the original meaning of educational practice, states that the task of the educator is to encourage the other to have a care for self so as to become as good and as wise as possible (Plato, Apology of Socrates, 36c) and he explains that the essence of care consists in having care for one’s own soul [ਥʌȚȝİȜİ૙ıșĮȚ IJોȢ ȥȣȤોȢ] so that it might acquire the best form possible (30b). In line with this aspiration, education should be conceived of as a practice which has as its goal the care for the soul and only the person who is expert in such care can take on the role of educator, not only insofar as he enunciates discourses on the matter, but because he lives in accordance with what

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s/he thinks and asserts, realising in his own life the necessary convergence of thoughts and actions (Plato, Laches, 185d). The centrality of care for the soul is underlined in other dialogues. In Cratylus we read that we should not entrust our own soul to a therapy founded only on names and on words (440c); in the Phaedo we read that since the soul is the immortal essence of the human life, it should receive all time dedication and care (107c). But it is in the Alcibiades that Socrates explains analytically what constitutes cultivating the soul and looks to that [ȥȣȤોȢ ਥʌȚȝİȜȘIJȑȠȞ] (132c). Given the importance of the interpretation of care for the self as care for the soul, it is necessary to synthesise here the argument developed in Alcibiades 1, since it provides the generative matrix of the culture of care for the self. It is necessary to have care for the self (127e); having care consists in being capable of perfect care, meaning that which moves in the direction of self-improvement, and which happens at the right time and in the right measure (128b); in order to better ourselves it is necessary to know our self (129a) because only by knowing ourselves can we also come to know the art of having care for the self (129a); knowing ourselves means knowing our true essence and since the essence of the human being is “nothing other than is soul” (130c), then having care for the self means having care fot the soul (132c). In Phaedrus Socrates speaks specifically of the education of the soul [ȥȣȤોȢ ʌĮȓįİȣıȚȞ] (241c) and explains that the soul is educated insofar as it is nourished by good things, which are: “beauty [țĮȜȩȞ], wisdom [ıȠijȩȞ], good [ਕȖĮșȩȞ] and all other things similar to these” (246e). These are the things that Socrates defines as the “essences worthy of love” (250d); indeed, it is what is good that every soul searches for, and if we share the Socratic thesis according to which what is good coincides with what is beautiful (Alcibiades I, 116c), then knowledge of living consists in seeking the essence of what it good. “The virtue of the soul [IJ੽Ȟ ȥȣȤોȢ ਕȡİIJȒȞ]” (Alcibiades I, 133c) consists in dedicating oneself to the search for goodness. And this search is the only one capable of providing a clear horizon in order to interpret care for the self. The care for the soul finds ontological reason in the need of human being to seek the right and good orientation to designate our life’s time with meaning. The value of the Socratic discourse appears evident, because if we stop to think for a moment, we cannot but feel the indispensable need to deal ethically with our own being. Nor can we fail to point out that in the affirmation “have care for the soul” we perceive the risk of a solipsistic and intimistic interpretation of

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care for the self. Such a risk fades, however, if we take note of the thesis enunciated in the Apology, where Socrates states that having care for the self means learning to discard the non-essential, and especially all that distracts the mind from concentrating on what cannot be given up: putting aside the search for honour, glory and success, and to have care instead for wisdom, truth (Plato, Apology of Socrates, 29e) and virtue (31b). Wisdom, truth and virtue are crucial if we are to make of the time we are given, a life worthy of being lived both as an individual and as a citizen, since these are essential if we are to construct community and carry out the work of politics. When we do not have care for these things that are of maximum importance, then existence suffers, since our value depends on the things for which we have care (Apology of Socrates, 41e). The care for the soul, upon which depends the quality of life (Plato, Protagoras, 313a), requires that we have care with all solicitude of virtues (325c).1 Having care for the self means focusing on the greatest good for the human being, which consists of thinking every day about virtue–the virtue which makes us fully human and good citizens–and in examining the questions that are of the highest existential value, since the possibility of finding a horizon of meaning to give form to a good life depends on the answers we find to these questions. Such is the importance of dealing with these things that a life that does not engage with them “is not worthy of being lived” (Plato, Apology of Socrates, 38a).2 We should remember that in Socratic 1

Literally this passage from Protagoras: “epimelountai pasan epimeleian” [ਥʌȚȝİȜȠ૨ȞIJĮȚ ʌ઼ıĮȞ ਥʌȚȝȑȜİȚĮȞ] should be translated to “have care with all care” of the virtues, a marker not only of the centrality of the virtues in human life, but also of the powerful primacy assigned to the action of care. 2 Having care for the self presents itself, then, as an essentially noetic activity, one, that is, which engages thought. Foucault (2001, 12) writes that care for the self implies a certain level of vigilance about what we think and what happens in our thought. This noetic essence in care for the self can also be seen in the etymological analysis of the term which in Greek means having care, or epimeleomai a term with evident connections to the term melete which means not only care and solicitude, but also thought and meditation. Also, in ancient Greek other terms indicating care also include amongst their possible meanings the activity of thinking or meditating. This is the case with the term pronoia which indicates both attention and care, and also the verbs pronein which means dedicating care to something, and phrontizein which Socrates uses in the Apology (29e–d) where he explains the directions of meaning of educative care: it means both thinking and reflecting, and having care and being engaged. In his Clouds, where Socrates is described in the act of meditating, Aristophanes uses the terms phrontizein Xenophon too, in the Convito (vi, 6), uses ekphrontizein to say that the specificity of Socrates consists in meditating. If we remember that phrontistes not only

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philosophy this search does not resolve itself in a merely intellectual act, but is something incarnated in our mode of being, which can be witnessed and as such is at the basis of our political action, because in order to assume political responsibilities it is a necessary condition to have care for the self, cultivating the virtue of the soul (Plato, Alcibiades I, 134c). Only by having care for our soul can we find the “right and beautiful way [ੑȡș૵Ȣ țĮ੿ țĮȜ૵Ȣ]” to think and to act, and as a consequence procure what is good for the city (134c–d). Thus, what inspires care for the self, as conceived by Socrates, is the principle of being concerned not for what one might possess, but for what one might be, taking care to have one’s own humanity flourish as best as possible (Apology of Socrates, 36c), because the eudaimonia, in other words a good condition of life, does not consist of the things that we have, but literally in a good (eu) spiritual life (daimon). Daimon, indeed, is the spirit who guides the conscience. When we do not have care for our spiritual life, then the vital space of the person contracts, and the potentialities of our own being reduce not only in quantitative, but also in qualitative terms. To have care for the soul it is necessary to have a direction of meaning and we find this when we listen to the primary tension for which all things aim, that is good (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I, 1, 1094a 0–5). The search for what is good for living constitutes the primary search, from which every existential act is generated. The concept of “care for the soul” becomes a valid concept when we identify the right direction for this practice. Wisdom, or that which allows us to live a good life, is not something that is possessed, but is rather an orientation of the soul which is nourished by the search for what is good, in which consists the virtue of the soul, what Aristotle defines as “ethical virtue” (Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 2, 1139a 22). According to Epictetus, the search for what is good is not one of the many options available of relativistic value, but is a “prenotion” and as such common to all men, because every person recognises that what is good is useful, that it is worthy of being chosen and that we should search for it and pursue it on every occasion (Discourses, I, 22, 1). Since, with regard to the vital and essential drive to a good life, it does not automatically follow that we have a clear vision of how to make this good, material and concrete, then the care for the soul–which is engaged indicates the act of meditating, but also signifies care, we could say that the person who meditates, in other words the phrontistes, is the person who can withdraw from the often totalising grasp which practical affairs have over us, in order to dedicate himself to thought, and that it is precisely in meditating that he has care for the self.

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precisely in seeking to give good form to our being in the world–turns out to be a task not only ontogenetically necessary, but also arduous, since it appears as a practice which cannot rest upon certain knowledge, but, rather, nourishes itself through continual searching: searching for the way in which to live well, and for what constitutes a good life. Socrates does not limit himself to instituting the practice of care for the soul and detailing which directions of meaning it should be guided towards. He also speaks of the way in which we should understand it, when he explains that having care for the self implies having knowledge of the self. Faced with an Alcibiades, he explains to him that the most important thing he should occupy himself with, if he wants to excel, is what is written on the temple at Delphi: “know thyself [ȖȞ૵șȚ ıĮȣIJȩȞ]” (Plato, Alcibiades 1, 124a–b), because only in knowing ourselves is it possible to understand how to have care for the self (129a). The first search to be undertaken, and we are speaking here of an extremely difficult search (129a) is therefore that of knowing our own being (129d), because “if we know ourselves, we will also be able to know how to have care for the self, but if we do not know ourselves, we will not know even that” (129a). The way to demonstrate that one has reached a certain form of excellence, and so has the competence to take on governmental tasks, consists in being capable of care [ਥʌȚȝȑȜİȚĮ] and in possessing this technique [IJȑȤȞȘ] (124a–b), that is the practical knowledge necessary to know oneself in order to improve oneself. If, then, to educate means cultivating in the other the capacity and the passion to give form to himself, that is to practice self-education, the directions of meaning to bring about such a process consist in developing the ethical orientation of having care for existence and in learning the techniques which allow us to give form to our own being in the world. At the point where Socrates theorizes the primacy of knowing oneself (129e) he does not, however, establish a coincidence between this practice and that of care for the self. Rather, he considers the first condition as a preliminary to the exercise of the second.3 Indeed, in the Apology Socrates 3 If it is true that Platonism assigns a primary value to self-knowledge (Foucault 2001, 64–65), nonetheless it does not seem possible to make this practice coincide with care for the self, because if we analyse the Socratic dialogues as a whole, we find that in order to realise care for the self, other spiritual practices are indicated (concentration of the thought on oneself, contraction of the soul about its axis, withdrawal and isolation from the world) which cannot be assimilated to the knowledge of the self. It is true that knowledge of the self and care for the self

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makes clear that having care for the self is fulfilled in the search for wisdom about human affairs, and this is in essential relation to the search for virtue; in Alcibiades he not only affirms that the care for the self consists in learning the art of “becoming as good as possible” (124b–c), but he writes that knowing ourselves is a crucial exercise in order to learn such an art (129a) and so subordinates the exercise of knowing oneself to the search for a good form of the self. It is thus evident that knowing ourselves does not coincide with care for the self, but constitutes a condition for it, when just a little further on he says: If we know ourselves, we will also be able to know how to care for ourselves, but if we do not know ourselves, we will not know that either (129a). In order to constitute ourselves as subjects who freely give form to our own matter, our self must know itself and take a position with regard to the forms of its becoming. If I stop and think about my lived experience, I can discover that there are diverse actions through which I move in the world: some arrive as from opaque depths, and others manifest themselves as free acts consciously chosen. The complexity of lived experience is such as to show up the urgent need to turn our attention to it in order to seek a little clarity. Knowing ourselves means understanding what the forces are which act on the life of the mind, what implications they might have for our own way of being and then judging to what extent they might help us in our becoming our own potential being and in our own existential implementation. But it is a difficult matter to deepen our knowledge of ourselves, and for this reason we often find ourselves backing away from such a commitment. When we abdicate from the task of knowing ourselves in order to approach the most intimate nucleus of the life of the soul, we end up living a life on the periphery, consuming time in activities far away from those directions by which we might interpret life according to what is essential. Deciphering what we think and what we feel, seeking as clear an understanding as possible of the visions, the theories, the emotions and the desires which constitute the generative matrix of our way of being, is a need which we feel deep within us, because when we stop and listen to ourselves, we cannot help but feel that the life in which our being flows demands a certain level of transparency.

imply a reciprocal coming together (Foucault 2001, 67); nonetheless care for the self remains an objective to which all the various practices are subordinated. If then it is possible to state that knowledge of the self carries out an essential role, it does not however seem correct to deduce from this the coincidence of this practice with care for the self.

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If we think of the soul as the centre of the vital force of our own being, from which take form the directions of self-realisation of the person in his unique singularity, where the search for the composition of the sense of our life is generated and cultivated, then the delineation of care for the self as care for the soul seems fundamental. If we accept thinking of the soul as the dynamic centre of our being in the world, and that the substance of our being is given by the thoughts that we think and the emotions that we feel, then care for the self, when it is understood as care for the soul, becomes care of our thinking and of our feeling. And since, Socratically, care for the self implies knowledge of the self, having care for the self means knowing how we think and how we feel. A further important element to take into consideration is that in Alcibiades, care for the self is presented as a practice of self-formation that is necessary in order to prepare ourselves for public life, because we cannot deal with shared space if we do not exercise ourselves in having care for our own way of being in the world. Socrates establishes a substantial relationship between care for the self and the exercise of political virtue, thus exempting self-care from any solipsistic or apolitical vision. In Socrates/Plato care is the primary way of being, and is in fact conceptualised as an essential practice both in the relationship we have with ourselves, to cultivate our own humanity, and on the social and political level. The ontological and ethical paradigmatic status of care is evident in Politics, where every time political action is defined, the term “care [ਥʌȚȝȑȜİȚĮ]” is used and the man of politics is defined as he who has care for many, to be precise as he has care not just singly but collectively (275c); politics is defined as “the science of bringing human beings into community [ਕȞșȡȫʌȦȞ țȠȚȞȠIJȡȠijȚț੽Ȟ ਥʌȚıIJȒȝȘȞ]” (267d 11) and in another passage in the dialogue, as “care for the whole of the human community [ਥʌȚȝȑȜİȚĮ įȑ Ȗİ ਕȞșȡȦʌȓȞȘȢ ıȣȝʌȐıȘȢ țȠȚȞȦȞȓĮȢ]” (276b 7). If we consider that not only politics, but also and above all education, manifests itself as care, since the educator is the one who cares for the other so that he/she can mature his capacity to care for his/her own soul, then we might say, with Socrates, that care qualifies every essential gesture of our being: care that the individual person exercises towards himself (care of the self), care that the educator gives the student (paideia as the care that takes place when we take the other to heart in his singular uniqueness), and care that whoever is engaged in politics exercises towards the citizens as a collectivity (politics as care). Care for the self is, then, nothing other than the essential moment for carrying out a range of social roles.

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While we cannot neglect successive interpretations to which the concept of care for the self has been subjected over time, it is the, so to speak, political version of care for the self, which offers an intersubjective dimension, that persuades us to take up Socratic thought as the horizon on which to place the current discourse. Indeed, given the plural nature of the human condition, which means that no existence is closed up within the confines of one’s own skin but is structurally and inevitably relational, care for the self cannot but be thought of in relation to our being called upon to live together with others. This aspect in its most significant form for human beings means that taking on care for the self means also having care to live well with others.

Care for the self as practice In his clear and refined analysis of the concept of care for the self [ਥʌȚȝȑȜİȚĮ ਦĮȣIJȠ૨], Foucault is concerned to demonstrate how care for the self designates not only an attitude of attention to one’s self, but also implies a certain typology of actions which we exercise upon ourselves in order to bring about a more or less profound modification and transformation in the subject’s being (Foucault 2001, 12–13). The verbal expression which in ancient Greek indicates care for the self identifies not only an attitude but a way of being and acting. Etymology sends us on to terms such as meletan [ȝİȜİIJ઼Ȟ], melete [ȝİȜȑIJȘ], and meletai [ȝİȜȑIJĮȚ]; meletan is often associated with gumnazein [ȖȣȝȞ੺ȗİȚȞ] which means taking exercise, or training oneself. To be more exact, the term gumnazein denotes an exercise of the self with things to do with reality, while meletan represents an exercise of thought (Foucault, 2001, 339). In Christian vocabulary of the fourth century too, epimeleia indicates taking exercise, in particular ascetic exercise. Since the terms relative to care denote a number of practices, we must consider the practices by which the essence of care for the self is carried out. Amongst the transformative practices which configure care for the self discussed by the philosophical culture of antiquity we find various techniques: meditation, memorisation of the past, examining our conscience, and analysis of the representations which take form one by one in our minds (Foucault 2001, 13). Certain “techniques of the self” were already present in the most ancient of epochs: for example, the purification rites deemed necessary to prepare one’s being to come face to face with religious experiences and approach the transcendental; the practice of isolation, which consists in removing oneself from the ordinary world, absenting oneself from normal daily life in order to focus on one’s self;

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techniques of silence to empower the vital capacity of the soul and prevent it, insofar as it is a breath of air, from disintegrating beneath the pressures of the world; the technique of perseverance, through which the subject trains himself in dealing calmly with whatever existence might bring him that causes pain; and detailed consideration of daily life in order to have full consciousness of our own way of acting. Some of these techniques, whilst subject to processes of revision and remodelling, survived first into the Hellenistic and Roman philosophical tradition and then into Christian culture. We find an echo of these practices in Plato. In his Phaedrus (65b–c) we read that it is necessary to educate the soul to concentrate upon itself, to find silence within, and to free itself from bodily ties, because these, with all the tensions they bring, would prevent the soul from “touching” the truth (65b). A spiritual practice then is identified in the exercise designed to free thought from its ties to matter in order to become a pure regard (66c), because if what is true is shorn of impurities, then it follows that the mind can approach it only when it reasons with the maximum purity.4 In the “cave myth” (Plato, Republic, book VII), the soul is summoned to a radical conversion which takes it far away from the transient things of the world, where all that is accessible to the mind are shadows, in order to rise towards the light, where alone it can have access to truth. The soul needs a clear life, and this clarity is found in seeking an answer to the questions which we sense are fundamental to seek knowledge in human matters. The work of spirituality, in Plato, is therefore essentially a work of purification whose purpose is to enable the capacity of the soul and the desire to accede to true knowledge. The Platonic culture of care subsequently finds important echoes in Greek and Roman culture. The Handbook of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus is a text of spiritual practices, from which we learn that reading and studying are worthless unless the subject seeks to apply to himself the principles in order to give form to his own being.

4

Dematerialised fleshless thought cannot happen for we are our body and all our cognitive life is fed by sensory data; nonetheless, the epistemological asceticism of Plato, even while we should exercise some caution, still maintains its heuristic value, because with its impossible ideal of perfect purity (Phaedo, 65e), it recalls the task of undertaking the work of knowing, seeking to approach the question with the mind freed as far as possible from the mental content and those standard procedures which impede the acquisition of knowledge which is, as far as possible, “objective”.

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Examining the techniques of self-transformation designed to shape a good form for one’s own being is an essential question and as such always current. Turning back to the past while nourishing our gaze with contemporary philosophies which deal with work upon one’s self can help us to find seeds of thought capable of fertilising a culture of care, now more urgent than ever. That the human being has been given the possibility of shaping his own being is a sign that he enjoys a certain degree of freedom, together with a certain ontological force. Nonetheless, we should underline that this work of shaping has limits, and for this reason we should not expect too much from this work on one’s self. Stein (2002, 372) hypothesizes that it is an originary predisposition which limits the effort of self-transformation, a sort of original imprint which whilst it makes certain developments possible, prevents the being from developing other aspects. This hypothesis, which like others presents itself in terms of an unverifiable presupposition, should be viewed with due critical caution, because it introduces a form, weak though it may be, of genetic determinism. Rather than hypothesise an originary predisposition, I prefer to think of the weight that the first forms our being receives in the first moments of life, because they are acquired when the material of our being is highly malleable and have a particular ontogenetic force, but they are not determining or irreversible in any coercive way. The first experiences of life, when we are most vulnerable and malleable, completely dependent on others and the matter of our being finds itself immersed in a morphogenetic process over which we have no control, prompt the emergence of certain modes of being which, if they remain acquired in this way without being subjected to a reflective gaze, have a powerful modelling force which we must be aware of when we decide to turn to the care of our own form of being. Another limit to the work of self-formation is the quality of the environment in which we act, which together with resources and possibilities presents forces and pressures which often tug the being in opposite directions. Knowing the objective limits of the work of self-formation is essential if we are to avoid useless and damaging illusions of omnipotence.

Spiritual practices Applying the techniques of work to the self means doing spiritual work, because spirituality is the practice and experience by which the subject carries out upon himself the necessary transformations in order to have access to the truth (Foucault 2001, 17). Unlike what will happen in the

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modern era with Descartes, for whom truth is an object accessible to thought through the application of a method understood as being in conformity to a set of rules, for the culture of care for the self, truth is not something objectively available which simply awaits being acquired by the intellect, but a horizon to which we have access by shaping our own being in order to make it able to act with truth. If we develop our discourse within a Socratic perspective, it becomes legitimate to interpret care for the self as a practice of spirituality, which demands that we put into action techniques of self-transformation with the aim of “working on our own inner principle” (Epictetus, Handbook, 29).5 Care for the self should be seen then as a spiritual practice of work on our own mode of being in an attempt to untangle the thread, following which we might have access to some fragment of truth; a truth which is enacted, and not just thought, and thus a truth which has transformative effects on the subject himself, not only when it has been reached but during the search process itself. Precisely because of the semantic stratifications which the concept of truth brings with it, we need to make some clarifications before proceeding with our discourse. First of all, from a constructivist point of view there is no preconceived truth which the mind must see and contemplate, but truth is always something that the mind constructs in a continuous dialogue with reality. Besides, we must distinguish two kinds of truth: the truth of science which answers the need to explain phenomena in order to control them, and which is acquired through speculative and experimental enquiry into the world; and the truth of existence, which answers the need to orient the process of construction of horizons of meaning which are necessary to bring truth into our life’s time. The truth of existence does not simply limit itself to saying what living consists of, but, rather, enunciates the essence of living well (Epictetus, Discourses, 1, 4, 31). The methods for achieving the latter are not those useful to scientific truth, just as modes of verification of the reliability of the theses we might develop are also different.

5

In Pierre Hadot we find the pragmatic use of the term “spiritual” when in order to indicate the quality of the thought exercises suggested by ancient philosophy, he speaks of spiritual exercises understood as cognitive practices through which the mind makes of itself matter to be understood and modified with the purpose of operating a change in our way of being (Hadot 2002, 30). We speak of exercises because there is a fundamental analogy with physical action to mould the body and spiritual action to cultivate inner life: just as physical exercises, regularly repeated, allow us to acquire a good physical form and develop specific abilities, so spiritual exercise transforms the quality of inner life and with it the subject’s way of being.

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In other words, the truth of existence is not something to be acquired by recourse to precise epistemic rules, but requires us to put into action a technique of existence with which the subject modifies and transforms himself. The truth of existence is something incarnate, which enacts itself by developing certain modes of being: there can be no truth without a conversion or a transformation of the subject (Foucault 2001, 17). As a consequence of the different order of questions from which we generate, on the one hand, the search for scientific knowledge and, on the other, the search for knowledge of living, the truths to which scientific research aspires are irrefutable, in that they express themselves in propositions of coercive value, while the truths of existence come into being in propositions which require continual reflection and they express an exemplar value. In the scientific paradigm, the search for truth is not a matter of opinion but has to be asserted on the basis of evidence and justifications, and as such has its own rigour and its own method. Can we speak of evidence for the truth of existence? It is the case that for this type of truth too, we go in search of something which is not just a matter of opinion, and such a research comes about in seeking intersubjective agreement, the validity of whose outcome depends on the radicality of the examination to which are subjected the presumed ideas of truth, and on the quality of the dialectical confrontation on the discourses as they are developed. It is, however, difficult to be able to speak of irrefutable evidence and rigorous justifications, which are epistemological conceptualisations that are rather applicable, even if with some caution, to the other order of truth, that of science. When Foucault (2001, 18) speaks of truth, he seems to take the term in a broad sense, including the truth of science as well as philosophical truths: as subjects in search of truth indeed he mentions both the scientist and the philosopher. Here, instead, when I speak of truth as a tensional pole of care for the self, I mean the truth of existence, that is, those existential attitudes and those directions of being which might permit access to a “good life”, in which each person feels that they are realising their own humanity, their call to being in the world in the best way that is possible. The truth to be sought is the “knowledge of the soul” (Zambrano 1996a), that truth which responds to the yearning for transcendence so that it might open up life to something else. Finding this “knowledge of the soul” (in Latin: sapientia) in which is condensed the truth of existence would be like finding the vision which orients our path through time, and which points out the directions of meaning and the proper rhythm of inhabiting time. The truth we are seeking is the one which can suggest the

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movements of being to be cultivated, and knows how to indicate the proper measure. Care for the self, understood as a practice of spirituality in accordance with a Socratic vision, should be conceived of as a path which takes as its direction of horizon the truth of existence: we train ourselves in care for the self not in order to resolve theorems or to improve techniques for carrying out experiments in a laboratory, but to seek an answer to the questions specific to humans, those which Socrates does not cease to put to his interlocutors: what is it good, right and beautiful to do in order to bring truth into our allotted span? Taking these questions to heart and examining them with discipline, letting ourselves be guided by the drive to search for what does good to our being, are a necessary condition for seeking that horizon which might enlighten the path through life and make our experience glow with meaning. If we hold to the current mode of understanding cognitive activity, that is, as an activity of the mind deputed to comprehend the quality of things, then “knowing one’s self” should not be numbered amongst the techniques which configure care for the self, since we tend to attribute to it a sense of simple recognition–seeing the quality of things, a re-cognition of the truth– whilst care for the self requires us to apply transformative techniques. Rather, the “know thyself” of which Socrates speaks should be seen as a transformative or morphogenerative practice, because in order to be capable of knowing ourselves, or, rather, of examining the soul in order to seek knowledge of human things, it is necessary to activate a certain way of looking, develop precise stances of the mind and modify certain traits of cognitive activity. We might say that knowing one’s self takes place through spiritual exercises, that is through cognitive practices which the mind exercises upon itself in order to gradually bring about a transformation of being. In the Socratic view, “thinking oneself” is interpreted as a form of action which moulds the being. By conceiving knowing as an action, knowledge of the self happens by conceiving of ourselves, that is, by giving form to our self. Understood in this way, knowing one’s self can be included amongst the techniques of spirituality which permit the activation of care for life, since the practice of enquiry into our own being should not be seen as the mirroring of a given reality, but as the being in form which, oriented by a desire for what lies beyond, produces the modelling of the self. In this perspective, knowing one’s self can be conceived as a thinking which seeks the method of living.

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How knowing one’s self can have transformative effects emerges clearly from Stein’s reflections on inner life, which is threatened by being all too often taken up with too many useless thoughts and worries and keeps the life of the mind far away from what is essential, but also by a sense of unease which keeps us in a state of continual agitation. When knowing one’s self is prompted by the intention of knowing the quality of one’s own inner life, we can reach the point of being able to discriminate between what is essential and what on the other hand merely prompts useless anxieties, and acquiring this level of awareness allows us to find a kind of distension of the soul, and to understand what forms of action we should take in order to seek the order of the heart which is the fount from which we should take the measure of our own being (Stein 2002, 56). Knowing one’s self means knowing how to move oneself with a certain level of freedom. For a very different interpretation of the Delphic principle, which might help us glimpse the quality of transformative practice, it is useful here to turn again to the distinction made by Arendt between knowing and thinking (Arendt 1978, 14). If with Arendt we assume that knowing is the cognitive faculty developed by the mind with the aim of finding reliable and rigorous explanations for the phenomena in which our life is immersed, and that thinking is that mental activity tasked with examining radical questions with the aim of seeking out horizons of meaning, then the Delphic principle could find a more fitting translation in the formula “think thyself”. Beginning with this semantic clarification it would then be possible to undertake that epistemology of personal experience, all of which in truth has still to be constructed. In a time such as ours, when we are fascinated by the power of the natural sciences, in particular those relying on mathematics, and by the successes of technologies, it seems like wasted time to linger in this thinking which realises itself in spiritual practices which can grasp nothing that can be calculated. However, precisely because of thinking, which goes in search of the indispensable it becomes a question of our own being in the world, and deciding in favour of self-knowing turns out to be an essential existential act on a personal as well as political level.

Knowing one’s self Knowing one’s self answers the critical need which the human being feels to lessen the opacity around him in order to shed light, as far as is possible, on his own being. “Everyone has the potential for self-knowledge and sound thinking” (Heraclitus, F31/ DK–22B116) in order to uncover our

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own style of living, which allows all of our potentialities to flourish. According to Plutarch it is a form of stubborn idiocy to live with our eyes looking more outwards than on ourselves (On Tranquillity of Mind 470a); knowing ourselves is necessary both in order to reach a certain degree of serenity and in order to find the right measure of our actions such that they correspond to the quality and quantity of the vital force available (471d). Practising forms of self-investigation is of crucial importance: before seeking knowledge about phenomena and before bringing our attention to others, it is essential first of all “to concentrate solely on the divinity within (oneself) and to give it true” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II, 13). Knowing ourselves means asking ourselves what is the hope by which we live, understanding our own desires, discriminating between our strong and weak points, and identifying the inner resources which we can most easily call upon and the fragile areas which require more care. Learning always to have recourse to self-investigation keeps us in healthy contact with our own humanity. The more profoundly the practice of knowing ourselves leads us into the intimacy of our soul, grasping the existential modes which structure the essence of our being, the more possible it becomes to “live a full life” by bringing into being the originating directions of our being. To know one’s self means seeking to identify what Stein calls the “persistent qualities of the I” (1999, 59); we can hypothesise that it is a matter of cognitive qualities and emotional qualities, not to mention relational qualities, which insofar as they tend to endure through time, define the nucleus of the essence of our being. A phenomenological analysis of our becoming also reveals occasional qualities, which are of relative duration and as such situate themselves on the surface of our being. Nonetheless these, too, together with the nucleus of our enduring qualities, come together to define the profile of a person. Identifying what are the persistent qualities, and from time to time differentiating them from situational qualities, is the primary goal of knowing one’s self. It is true that it is no simple thing to identify the essential parts of ourselves and subject them to the objective examination of reason, but it is only by pursuing this sort of knowledge that we can find directions and rhythms for an ordered and measured action of our own being. There is a great appearance of truth in what we think ourselves to be. It seems to us that we make decisions on a solid basis, to make free choices, to act in a way that is right and also recognised as such by others, but nonetheless gaining real knowledge of the gestures of our being is no easy matter. To stop for a while and pay careful attention to the appearances of

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truth is essential, then, if we are to find a clear way of being in relation to ourselves. Every self-deception with regard to our own individuality has a price, a price often paid by others, because when we are in error, we end up by causing suffering both to ourselves and to others. Knowledge of the ways of our own self is not a form of knowing like any other, but emerges as a lively experience of our own being which leads us to encounter ourselves and which, at the same time, situates us in an inner path of research. The decision to undertake practices of self-investigation and transformation implies that there are intentional acts in play (concentrating on the present, remembering, analysing, describing…) which, in that they presuppose a decision to carry out that action, embody the “personal life” (Stein 2000, 174) in which a human being constitutes himself as subject of his inner life. Once we conceptualise knowing one’s self in terms of a formative practice, it becomes necessary to keep our distance from the realist gnoseology of the Platonic stamp. For Plato, knowledge, when it is adequate insofar as it is methodologically coherent, grasps the truth, by which he means something which exists independently of the cognitive act which grasps it. An index of this realist gnoseology, which is still present in our culture, can be found in certain recurrent expressions in the Platonic dialogues. In Phaedrus truth is something which the soul can touch (aptetai) (65b) and possess (ktesasthai) (66a); the search for the truth is presented as a hunt (thesa) and the metaphor of the hunt crops up in several dialogues. Constructivist gnoseology, however, warns us that thought is always a construct, a sketching of scenarios, and so what becomes clear when we speak of our psychic experiences is never the experience in itself but what we think of it as we reflect upon it (Arendt 1978, 31). It is the ontogenetic power of thought, and therefore of the discourse through which thinking makes itself manifest, that gives support to the thesys of the transformative function of the spiritual practice of self-knowledge. And again, it is Plato who warns of the difficulty of acceding to the truth of things of value for life, as he affirms that the truth of things is available only to a mind no longer tied to the body: “only after death” (Phaedrus, 66d–e) can truth be grasped in all its purity, while during our time on earth as living beings we can be as close as possible, in relation to the effort with which we dedicate ourselves to spiritual practices, to knowledge of the true, but it is not possible to grasp it in its entirety (67a). Despite the progress of science, the reflection of Xenophanes is still valid: “There never has been nor will there ever a human being who knows the

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evident truth” on the things that are of best value, “and even were he somehow to speak what is the case especially well, still he himself would not know it” (F16/DK 21B34). There is no human being with access to the method of thought which scrutinises our shapeless soul, because if that were the case, the subject of thought could gain complete sovereignty over himself. But this is a potentiality of being which does not belong to the human condition, which, owing to its fragile and vulnerable being, is destined to lack sovereignty over experience and to live life always in the form of a problem. We are destined to be opaque to our own gaze, always and forever unable to access the primary fount of the meaning of being.

CHAPTER THREE NOETIC1 PRACTICES OF CARE

The work of spirituality through which we have care for the soul requires us to activate different practices of thought.2 Above all, it is a question of understanding how we can know ourselves, and knowing ourselves means paying attention not only to our own thoughts, but also to our feelings, because the one is tightly bound to the other. As we will see, the action of self-investigation is not limited to trying to understand what we are and how we are, but it is also an action which explores other possible worlds of thought and, at the same time, a transformative action on the self. Deepening our knowledge of ourselves is a process which cannot be

1

In the ancient Greek, nous means the mind, but precisely a mind that thinks and feels emotions and passions, so with the term noetic I indicate the practices of a mind that cares for thoughts and emotions. 2 In the literature dedicated to self-care, the term which indicates a faculty tasked with the practice of self-formation is “soul”. Given the semantic superstructures and weight of meanings which over time have weighed down the word soul, I have long preferred to speak of the mind and indicate as the object of care the life of the mind, intending with this term to include both the life of reason and life of the heart, and above all thinking of these two aspects as inseparable and irrevocably interconnected (Mortari 2013). Then, over time, as I looked more deeply into the thought of the ancients, I have learnt the value of the term ‘soul’, which I use here to indicate not a substance or a precise place of our inner life, but the vital orientation which is insistently engaged in seeking out the art of existing. No less important for this decision was the concept developed by Edith Stein (2002, 367) which speaks of the soul as a “form of the body” (377) and as a whole composed of living body and spiritual energy (367), suggesting a material interpretation of spiritual life which also implies thinking of the body as of spiritual matter. Nonetheless, I frequently turn to the term “mind” because it seems to me the most suitable term to indicate the complexity of our immaterial, interior life, which in this different sense becomes more complete in that it includes: the cognitive activity of the intellect which goes in search of knowledge is better to have mastery over experience, the feeling of the heart which speaks of the quality of our being in the world, the reflection of the soul which seeks the truth of existence.

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uncoupled from cultivating practices of spirituality which transform our way of being and, therefore, also our way of relating to ourselves. Ancient culture, which occupied itself with techniques to act on the self in a transformative direction also echoes through the philosophical work of Edith Stein, since her thinking gives great importance to the practice of moulding one’s own being and giving form to one’s own soul. It is this work of formation that she defines “character formation” (2001, 177). Amongst the exercises of self-formation, she indicates the need to: “suffocate your impulses” and “repress your inclinations”, and in general put an obstacle in the way of all those drives which have negative effects on being; direct our gaze towards positive values, cultivate virtue and reinvigorate our will, for on its strength depends our capacity for existential realisation (177). If we examine the quality of these actions, it emerges that they can be categorised in two different typologies with opposing ontogenetic markers: that of undoing and taking away, and that of giving form and nurturing. It will be this double directionality that serves as the background for the research on practices for transformative action on the self. Undertaking practices of spirituality means beginning a path which leads towards an elsewhere, towards other modes of being. The meaning of this path lies in finding the best form of ourselves and bringing it to fruition, making our time in life shine as brightly as possible with meaning. The problem, due to which human being will always be a problem to himself, is that nowhere can we find a paradigm to take up as a welldefined coordinate for self-care, since the search for such a paradigm is a work which engages the whole of our life (Plato, First Alcibiades, 132d). In this sense, wisdom comes from experience. And it follows that the outlines to be developed here can only have some indicative value of some possible direction of meaning amongst so many others.

Knowing the life of the mind Having self-care means embracing our own essence in a destinal manner (Heidegger 1998a, 241). But what does the essence of one’s own being consist of? When we look for an answer to this question, our thinking tends to proceed by making comparisons between different elements, and seeking analogies and differences. In order to understand the essence of the human we start by noting difference to the living beings closest to us, that is, animals. From this comparison it emerges that the essence of our being is one of lack: lacking a definite form and thus already a direction for the being, and it is this lack which compels us to self-care in order to

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try and give form to our time. But we also discover that we have: we have thought, which for some philosophers brings us close to the divine. It is with thought, as well as with action, that we can have destinal care for our being. When Aristotle states that the human being is “the animal endowed with language [ȗ૶ȠȞ ȜȩȖȠȞ ਩ȤȠȞ]” (Nichomanchean Ethics), he invites us to locate the essence of the human in the life of the mind, where thought and language are all one. In self-care, then, the person should devote undivided attention to the mind (Epictetus, Handbook, 41). Without forgetting that the human being has a body and that the life of the mind is therefore always incarnate, we cannot fail to keep in mind the ontological essentiality of thought. We are made up of our thoughts; it is in thinking that the quality of our being is to be found. It is with thinking that we catch ourselves being a problem for ourselves, and therefore in need of caring for ourselves through thought. For this reason, we can speak of the noetic essence of the human being, of he who being at home in language, with his thought, brings his uniqueness and singularity into being and makes it manifest to others. It is in fact from the life of the mind, to be exact of the criteria of values which it elaborates and the maps of signification which it outlines, that derive in consistent measure the form and direction of his becoming. If, then, we accept the assumption according to which the life of the mind characterises the essence of the human condition, then the Socratic principle of “know thyself” can be interpreted as the self-analysis of the life of the mind. Given these premises, we see that it is of fundamental importance to identify the ways in which we can carry out the practice of self-investigation. It is a question of understanding what such a practice should consist of, or rather how it should take place and on which objects it should direct itself so that it situates itself within the perspective of self-care. However, before we head into the woods of self-investigation, we need to reflect on the essence of the life of the mind, noting the difficulty of such an investigation, difficult because of its object, an immaterial material which, precisely because it is such, risks escaping the rigorous analysis necessary to grasp its essential qualities. What we see when we turn our gaze to the life of the mind is that it is an uninterrupted flow of life. Every time I think, in fact, I see myself in a unit of experience and I notice that this is different from the one that came immediately before. From this it follows that knowing one’s self means bringing our attention to the wave of living experiences. These rightly

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become the primary object of self-investigation, since every moment of lived experience reveals the fundamental qualities of the person (Stein 2001, 227). A moment of joy for a noble action reveals a sensibility towards those values which hold virtues to be essential ingredients of life, while a rancorous moment reveals a different order of meanings and therefore a different personal quality. So, when the spiritual gaze turns to look at a moment of lived experience, it is not only this which becomes the object of analysis, but also the way of being of the subject himself. Speaking of “life” of the mind means underlining that what we find under the gaze of reflection when we turn to our inner space is a “flux of consciousness” whose becoming is an unceasing continuum (Stein 1999, 45): an “undivided and indivisible” becoming in which each new particle of experience integrates itself into the flux, in a structuring rather than summative manner, since each new piece of experience incorporates itself into the flow and thus transforms it. When something new takes shape in the flow of the life of the mind, what has already happened does not disappear, but constitutes the base on which the new begins to settle. To put it another way, in the new there is a persistent living part of what has already taken place, such that every emerging form contains simultaneously the new which is becoming and what is already past, but yet is still alive. Nothing disappears from the flow of lived experience, because each part which has already happened persists in being. Nothing is lost: what has past never passes; it remains present and acts, because what has happened has structured us, becoming part of the flesh of the mind. We may not be able to feel some of these past moments or be aware of their presence, but they are there; some others, on the other hand, we feel in all their ontogenetic force: we feel them lasting, and they are so alive that they imbue with their colour every corner and every moment of the present that we are living. This capacity of past events to last, to spread their colour into the present, can be so intense that it stops a real present from taking place, because the moment we are living is instantly assimilated into the mode of being of the enduring event. There are enduring modes which colour the present with good, and others for whom lasting in this way is a subtle form of suffering which infiltrates itself into every moment that we live, making the path of our search for flashes of meaning even more problematic. Stein also speaks of “dead” experience (1999, 46), but nothing of the flux of becoming ever dies. It can plunge into the abyss of consciousness, but it does not disappear, it does not melt away, it cannot become absolute nothingness; it always has its mode of existence, even if this is a silent mode. Every piece of experience stays in its place in the flux and even if in

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certain cases it sinks to the bottom, there is still the possibility that it will rise to the surface, sometimes suddenly and in a disconcerting way, to colour the present with itself. If we accept the assumption of indivisible unity of the experiences of the mind, characterised by the combined presence of what has happened, the present and current, and the possible future in a living unit, then the process of analysis, precisely because of its need to separate a continuum into discrete phases, must always be inadequate. The self-analytical gaze cannot embrace the entire flux, with the result that, in mislaying a vision of the continual, it risks achieving only a partial and simplified knowledge which makes it impossible to reach the truth of the thing that is being investigated. If every experience were a unit intrinsically finite and severable from the rest, thereby linking themselves to other units according to the logic of contiguity, self-investigation would be relatively straightforward. Instead, the new and the old are wound together, with the new experience taking on the colour of the present in which it appears, but also the past in which it is submerged, not to mention an imagined future. When we half close the inner eyes of the mind, we become aware of a conviction, a doubt, a hypothesis or a belief which imposes itself on the gaze. The risk is that we see it as an object without time and without layers, a one-dimensional thing in terms of both space and time. Yet every single thing of the mind brings with it a history made up of evolutions and moments of disorganisation which has made it what it is now. The same goes for emotional experience: the feeling that we discover spreading through the soul at the moment we are observing it is in a continuous flux of emotions and feelings which, even if they have already taken place, fill the present with their essence. The simultaneously stratigraphic and dynamic structure of every unit of consciousness becomes clear when, as we bring our attention to a cognitive or emotive content, suddenly other experiences are awoken, giving the inner gaze the perception of many in one thing. Self-enquiry then, in order to accede to the essence of the life of the mind, and therefore fully and authentically realise the principle of “know thyself”, should be capable of a stratigraphic radiology of experience, with a reflective gaze which spreads through time as it accompanies the becoming of experience. The process of self-enquiry is also made arduous by the fact that not only is the flow of the life of the mind a continuum, such that every operation of individuation of units of analysis always entails a form of reductive simplification, but the mind is a space of simultaneous experiences (Stein 1999, 47); when the inner gaze notes the imposition of a conviction on the scenario of consciousness, it can happen that at the

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same time it seizes hold of a persistent doubt; when we grasp a situational emotion, we can sense its appearance in a deep feeling which reveals a different affective colouring which, nonetheless, does not cancel out the perception of the different quality of the emotion which is imposing itself. Knowing one’s self therefore takes on the contours of a complex and difficult task. It is essential to engage in this sounding out of one’s own inner flow knowing, however, that not only are its confines such that they are never even seen, indeed, precisely because mental life is continual and indivisible becoming, thinking, being able to give our attention to one piece of experience at a time, of necessity produces a knowledge that is limited and fragmentary. The task of knowing one’s self is always incomplete, like and perhaps more than every form of knowledge, because our individual profile simultaneously reveals itself to, and conceals itself from, the consciousness which is investigating it. When thought is dealing with the phenomena it comes into contact with in everyday life, the object of thought is always transcendent, always other than the thought itself; when, on the other hand, thought thinks the life of the mind, the cognitive act is immanent to the object of analysis. What’s more, we should remember that the action of thinking, like every action, leaves traces of itself behind. When we think in order to understand what we are, it happens that the act of thinking does not limit itself to understanding, but at the same time it structures being. In that it is always inadequate, the work of personal knowledge can never be said to be concluded. Not only is it never finished, but it is also excessive for human reason, because our reflective thinking cannot examine the entire life of the mind. The only thinking that thinks the entirety of itself is the divine, which does not know the limitations of going from instant to instant but is beyond time, beyond the limit. Even if we walk every path, the limits of the soul cannot be discovered by our reason, so deep is its logos (Heraclitus, F48 / DK 22B45). To arrive at knowing one’s self, we therefore take on a never-ending work of comprehension; never finished, but also impossible to complete for we are called upon to act, and it is not possible to conceive of ourselves as beings who simply think our own being. Only divine thought, as it thinks, thinks itself continuously. Therefore, the proper measure of the practice of self-understanding must be sought. We need to dedicate ourselves when we sense a real need as well as for the essential questions which impose themselves on our consciousness. Making clear the complexity of the life of the mind and, therefore, the impossibility of compressing it into the analytical instruments of reason, does not however mean that we intend to devalue and consider less valid the work of autoethnography. Rather, it is to raise our awareness of the

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limits of every action of self-investigation. Developing our awareness of the difficulty of knowing one’s self represents the condition to mature the necessary attitude of heuristic humility, which keeps the mind engaged in critically refining every cognitive instrument and every direction of work.

Reflective practice If we assume that it is to the essence of the life of the mind that “belongs the conscious being, that is to say the becoming conscious of our own selves”, then the cognitive action of thinking the experience of the mind allows us to have “knowledge of consciousness” (Stein 2001, 151). Such knowledge is possible because every subject can take up its own experience as an object to which to direct attention. The experiences of the mind are cognitive acts with precise intentional objects and these acts can become in their turn intentional objects of another order of thoughts, of that “reflective turning of regard” (Husserl 1983, 78), which in the form of another cognitive act directs itself onto the first. Whilst thinking keeps a direct hold on reality, thinking thoughts, which is reflection, takes place in the space of consciousness. Knowing one’s self comes about in “acts of reflection” in which the life of the mind becomes the object of analysis and is seen conceptually. Reflection is the gesture of the mind in which the subject of thinking observes what is happening within himself. It is giving attention to thinking as it flows and, as it flows, produces thoughts (Husserl 1983, 176); it is the mind directing itself towards the flow of its own lived experience. Only through the act of reflection can the mind become aware of the quality of its own lived experience. There is a difference between thinking and reflection. Both are cogitationes, that is, acts of the mind, but while thinking looks at something of a different substance to thought (we think about an action, an event, a physical phenomenon), reflection thinks about thoughts and is therefore a cognitive act of the same quality as the object to which it directs itself. The reflecting subject listens to himself thinking and observes himself feeling. With the term “reflection” are identified mental processes that have as their intentional objects “the same stream of mental process to which they themselves belong” (Husserl 1983, 79), and it is for this reason that reflection allows us to take hold of and analyse the flow of experience in its various forms of happening, thus allowing the mind to reach the point of effecting an ethnography of its own experience. Only when they are subject to the reflective regard do the experiences of the mind become lived experiences, making possible a vivid experience of our own vital world (Husserl 1983, 175). Reflection constitutes, then,

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the fundamental cognitive act in the process of self-enquiry. The famous Cartesian formula “Cogito cogitationes” or “Cogito me cogitare, ergo sum” simply indicates the essence of the reflective act in which thinking thinks its own happening.3 Reflection is a directing of the “mental regard (geistigen Blickes)” (Husserl 1983, 71) which indicates a free positioning of the subject with regard to itself. Activating reflection means bringing the regard onto the experience of the mind and keeping it firmly concentrated in order to see “what we find immanently within it” (Husserl 1983, 65). From a phenomenological point of view there are two levels of reflection which can be activated. The first is that which has as its object the products of the mind (thoughts, memories, emotive experiences) and the cognitive processes from which they are generated (remembering, analysing, deliberating and so on); and the second has as its object the act of reflection itself, with the aim of understanding the quality of the reflective acts, that is the way in which they elaborate consciousness of the life of the mind. Reflections too, in fact, are cognitive acts and as such can become the object of a “reflection at a higher level” (Husserl 1983, 177). In both cases the object of enquiry is of the same material as the act which is enquiring, since reflection is a thinking which thinks thoughts, but in the second case reflection becomes “knowledge of one’s self” (Stein 2001, 151). We can say that with the first level of reflection, the mind realises the knowledge of its noetic substance, while with the second it realises the knowledge of its epistemological identity. Since reflection is considered as a fundamental epistemic act and has been conceptualised in great detail by phenomenology in its modes of actuation, the phenomenological method is adopted here as an essential point of reference to delineate the path of self-investigation. Even if this method was conceived for the purposes of a scientific study of the life of the mind, nonetheless in its essential aspects it can be practised purposefully by anybody who wishes to pursue a sufficient knowledge of

3

In the primacy which Husserl’s phenomenology assigns to reflection we see an echo of the Stoic conception of the mind as the faculty which thinks itself (Epithetus, Discourses, I, 20, 5); it is in the capacity to reflect on our own thoughts and our own representations that Epithetus identifies the power of reason, because it is on the capacity to examine the products of cognitive activity that depends the possibility of freeing ourselves from the conditioning that thoughts not meditated upon exercise on the mind, and of giving our own action the proper direction.

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himself, constituting himself in a practice of self-formation, in that it allows us to develop precise attitudes of mind.4

Reflective autoethnography The life of the mind is characterised in terms of a continuous flow of experience which structures the noetic stratigraphy of our being. The fact of having living our experience in the mind does not mean that we have it within our regard, for it can happen without the subject being aware of it. But every unaware fragment of experience can become the object of attention, if a reflective act is directed towards it. Whenever the mind decides to stop and think, this inner life which tends to flow without being within the subject’s regard becomes the object of the reflective act directed towards it: thus, it can be known, and understood. With regard to the opacity with which, in his natural attitude, the subject allows himself to live, the reflective act opens the eyes of the mind, thus making possible this self-enlightening which characterises becoming a subject who is “awake”. The sequence of cognitive acts which structures the phenomenological method of self-enquiry traces a path for the knowledge of one’s self: bringing before the eyes of the mind one’s own experiences, analysing them in such a way as to bring out their essential qualities, fixing these qualities in conceptual expressions which are faithful to the essence of that which the reflective act gathers up, with the key heuristic principle being letting the reflective act be guided only by what imposes itself with utmost clarity (Husserl 1983, 150–151). Practising reflection is not an easy matter because it demands that we stop, interrupting our usual way of being in the world, in which the subject keeps his regard on things, in order to concentrate attention on that immaterial object which is one’s own thought and one’s own feeling. Reflection comes, in fact, from a change in our own position with regard to the world. Nonetheless it is precisely this decision of the mind, difficult to take because it seems to pull against the free flow of being, which gains 4

Here, I will outline only a few aspects of phenomenology, those which are helpful in configuring the method of self-understanding without however taking up this philosophy in its entirety, since certain theoretical and gnoseological positions (for example, realism), even though they have been freed from certain misinterpretations, such as the concept of “pure consciousness” which does not mean at all, in fact, disincarnate consciousness, are difficult to accept in the light of more recent philosophical and epistemological reflections which have followed a constructionist and linguistically situated vision of cognitive processes.

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the subject a regard of awareness in which he can perceive his own being. Life is like the flow of a river which risks dispersing itself in a thousand tiny streams if it does not find its proper direction; the disciplined practice of reflection is what allows us to put some order into our own becoming. Not only is the decision to reflect, to stop and think not an easy one to take, but it is also a difficult one to keep to, because of the effects it produces, given that reflection always provokes a modification in the condition of the mind, a modification such that “the freedom of the course of thought suffers” from it in that we feel constrained within the grip of the reflective act (Husserl 1983, 176). Indeed, under the reflective regard the quality of mental experience is modified; when, for example, joy becomes the object of the inner regard, the very quality of this positive feeling changes, in the sense that the intensity of the emotive experience fades out under the eye of the reflection. In certain cases, this modification of the quality of the experience can be perceived in problematic terms, since, as is the case for joy, the positive feeling seems to lose its vitality; in other cases, on the other hand, the analytical regard, as it makes the experience the object of the reflective act, establishes a form of distance between itself and its own feeling which can produce an expansion of the tissues of the mind. In all cases, when we persist in reflective practice, without letting ourselves be caught up in our first impressions, we sense the gain, the increasing light which this reflection produces. What offers itself to the regard of the reflective act is the stream of lived experience and every experience that the reflective regard manages to seize upon its own essence (Husserl 1983, 80); it is the essential quality of this experience which reflective analysis must seek to identify, in order to outline sufficient knowledge of the life of the mind. In order to grasp the essential quality of an experience it is necessary to enact the cognitive technique of description, which not only has to be finely detailed in order to grasp as many clues as possible to the mental phenomenality, but above all it must take as its methodological principle the need to stay as close as possible to the interior phenomenon and the given ways in which it offers itself to the life of the mind. Describing faithfully, in other words keeping to what offers itself to be seen and to the modes that this givenness suggests, is the epistemic principle to which we should adhere. The phenomenological principle of the faithfulness to phenomenon is the one which best adapts to material of the life of the mind which is fluid, almost imperceptible. Phenomenology teaches us to seek knowledge of things so as to have access to their appearance as it reveals itself. There is

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no experimental tension, no argumentative demonstration: rather describing the thing as it appears in order to grasp it in its original givenness. Given, “dato” in Italian, “donné” in French, is something which gives itself. Grasping the showing itself of the thing just as it offers itself to the regard. More than “seeking” for knowledge of the thing, this is “letting” the thing come into presence. Taking the initiative in order to lose the initiative (Marion 2005, 15). Here, though, is the difficulty, because the I who observes is always a full I, full of experiences, knowledge, opinions, beliefs, obsessions, metaphysical hypotheses, epistemic convictions, expectations, feelings and passions. It is this fullness which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to have a clear and receptive regard, because this describing, which we would like to see adhere faithfully to the profile of the inner phenomenality, becoming thus a transparent cognitive move in which, the essence of the object comes into the light without any polluting elements, turns out to be, instead, filtered through the fullness of the self. If we continue to listen to phenomenological epistemology, it becomes possible to reach a reasonably rigorous knowledge of the self, providing that the process of self-enquiry enacts two strategies: a) interpret description as a technique of analysis which modulates itself to the object according to the directions prescribed by the object itself, because the method of enquiry is not something which can be decided from outside a territory, but must adapt itself to the qualities that are prescribed by the phenomenon itself (Husserl 1983, 172), and b) work on the self in order to silence the over-fullness of the self, so that the descriptive action is enacted by as light a mind as possible. This second strategy presupposes the enactment of the epoché, the cognitive act in which the subject places the fullness of the mind between parentheses. The epoché consists of “putting out of action”, “excluding”, or “parenthesizing” those contents of the mind and those ways of knowing which impede the inner regard from acquiring original evidence of the phenomenicity which it is investigating (Husserl 1983, 59). The work of the epoché has as its goal the undoing of the performative power of those mental constructions which keep the mind in an anticipated world, which prevents the object of analysis from being grasped–in this case the experiences of the mind–in its “purely given something itself, completely and precisely as it is in itself” (Husserl 1983, 154). The life of the mind feeds on theories, on models, on frameworks, and once these become part of our cognitive tool-box they are often applied automatically, compelling the object of our attention to adapt itself to the instrument of enquiry. Not only, then, do we come to a distorted or limited vision of the phenomena,

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but when the object does not adapt itself, then it is not even recognised (Scheler 1955), with the consequence that the process of knowledge loses along the way many of the essential qualities of the object. We can see how this risk of not accessing the original givenness of the phenomena concerns above all that impalpable object of knowledge which is constituted by the material of the life of the mind which, owing to its very immateriality, lacks that solid consistency, which for things and facts in the external world makes it easier for a phenomenon to impose itself to the evidence of consciousness in accordance with the original modes of givenness. Doing epoché, in order to dispossess ourself of the excessive fullness which prevents us from adhering to the phenomenon in its essential quality, is the condition which would ideally make possible the generation of an auroral regard on the life of the mind. For the search for an authentic understanding of the experiences of the mind, it is not only intellectual contents that are to be put into parentheses, however, but also desires, expectations and particular unbalanced tensions of the soul towards something: all acts of volition which if allowed to act, can easily pollute the process of clarification. When Epictetus states that it is possible to acquire a valid knowledge of things in situations in which we are not moved by personal interests (Handbook, 26), he aims to bring our attention to the need to work upon one’s self in order to find a proper interior balance when we are not implicated in actions or caught up in and agitated by passions. The ethical principle of “purifying” the inner life that Plutarch speaks of (On Tranquillity of Mind) in order to be able to access the quietude of the soul, becomes an epistemological principle: deactivating all those dispositions which compromise an access as immediate as possible to the things. It is not enough to seek out a condition of poverty of knowledge, but it is necessary to also seek a lightness of tensions of volition, weakening particular passions and desires of thought in order to seek a form of dispossession of our own being. It is a question of exercising oneself in the practice of spirituality which consists in cultivating “poverty of spirit and purity of heart” (Zambrano 2004, 15). Poverty of spirit, more than a condition of mind, is a disposition to work upon the self to rid oneself of the tendency to lean on presumed certainties which calcify the path of search for truth; purity of heart is the search for lightness and simplicity, because real truths are simple and make themselves accessible to a mind capable of discarding certain acquisitive tensions; only a state of detente of the mind enables us to grasp reality in its original givenness. A pure heart, able to sustain the search for knowledge, is the one which lets itself be moved by passion for the truth.

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Without holding to the phenomenological thesis which foresees the possibility of reaching a pure description of the phenomena which the mind investigates, and taking into account the real difficulty of enacting epoché, we see through experiential evidence the fact that the technique of description and the efforts aimed at producing a dispossession of the I constitute two spiritual practices, whose exercise will enable the subject to become capable of an attention which is receptively concentrated on himself. The reflecting gaze, in which is enacted the concentration of the mind on its own experiences, can apply itself to a mental content which has already taken place, putting into effect a sort of remembering intuition which recalls something experienced previously to reflective attention. The reflective act expresses, however, its maximum cognitive potentiality when it is dealing with an event happening in the present, when, that is, attention is concentrated on the mind’s experience while it is actually happening. Reflection concentrated on the flow of present experience should generate a lively intuition capable of grasping the essential nucleus of an experience. It means learning to let oneself fall into the hiatus of the present. Thinking oneself think, however much it might seek to enact an exact concentration on the present, to the point of making the movement of the reflective act coincide with the flow of the investigated experience with no temporal dislocation, however, implies a remembrance, in the sense that self-observation can give us experience only in immediate recourse (Scheler 1955), even though in the case of thinking concentrated on the present moment it is a closer temporal distance, because perfect coincidence between the time of thought and the time in which thought flows is impossible. Nonetheless, the effort to keep concentrated on the present gives a more vivid knowledge capable of both seeing in depth the phenomenon and seizing it in all its different shades, those which in memory become almost, if not entirely, imperceptible. The action of thinking as experience is in the process of becoming discloses real transformative potentialities of being.

The method of reflective discipline Acquiring consciousness of the quality of the life of the mind can continue even when the mental event has concluded, allowing the consciousness further reflective turns which may not only increase but also deepen, in accordance with different modalities, the process of self-comprehension. Thinking reflectively is to switch on “an inner light which illuminates the

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flux of living” (Stein 2001, 152) and it is this commitment to selfenlightenment that makes us intensively present to time. It is in activating the reflective gaze that consciousness takes form, and it is the alert consciousness which illuminates life in its flux. Edith Stein, who interprets the process of self-analysis in phenomenological terms, speaks of the “knowledge of essence” to indicate that the process of analysis of the mind must aim to grasp its essential quality. From a phenomenological point of view this means: a) describing the experiences of the mind and such a descriptive action can be interpreted as the switching on of the inner light insofar as we interpret the description in accordance with the Husserlian principle of fidelity, which requires us to keep to the evidence of what appears; b) becoming familiar with one’s own descriptions, that is spend reflective time with the data that emerge, because only the prolonged concentration of the reflective gaze allows us to gain consciousness of the quality of mental experience; and c) going in search of what in phenomenological terms are defined as the structural invariables of a phenomenon, that is those which indicate the essential qualities of a phenomenon, in this case noetic, so that knowledge does not resolve into a vision pulverised by the life of the mind, that is in the representation to one’s own reflective consciousness of a multiplicity of cognitive products considered as one disjointed from the other. This path of phenomenological enquiry allows the subject to have experience of himself, the one which alone emerges from thinking oneself and from feeling oneself think and feel. Through these reflective passages is realised a phenomenology of inner life which can make accessible a certain spiritual knowledge. The procedural scansion of reflective practice delineated here should not, however, delude us as to the possibility of a scientific knowledge of the life of the mind, something which is impracticable because of the nature of cognitive matters which, to be investigated in depth should have the quality of an object which remains and endures beneath the reflective gaze; instead, they are not “something which lasts” but, as soon as they finish, little by little they “fade away” (Stein 2001, 152–3), with the result that they make knowledge of the self an objective which is hard to achieve. According to Stein, to avoid this problem, at least in part, we should act in such a way as to retain the experience leaving it unaltered; I think, however, that we are not only speaking here of a memory of the experiences of the mind, but it is also a question of cultivating thinking as the thinking occurs, that is, activating that attention to the life of the mind in the moment of its happening that is called “full mental presence” or

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“self-presence”.5 If the natural attitude is having our thought captured by things and events, the technique of self-presence aims to develop the disposition to keep ourselves present to the flux of the life of the mind in the moment of its happening. A mind intensively attentive to the flow of its own thoughts and its own feelings, is a mind capable of open and continuous attention on itself. “Open” means attention that is not pre-oriented to find something in particular; it implies, therefore, a receptive attitude of the gaze, one which lets the phenomenon constituted by inner experience show itself to the inner eye in its essential quality. Having a certain open attention, not oriented in advance, means keeping the mind as free as possible from the hold exercised by certain conceptual and procedural instruments ordinarily in use, which might end up forcing reflection into pre-given grids, thus rendering impossible the authentic knowledge of the self that we are seeking. In order to become capable of attention the mind is called upon to clear away everything which clouds the gaze, to free itself from every preunderstanding, without fear of the void of knowing which we might then notice. If, when we dedicate attention intensively to that fragile matter which is the flow of the life of the soul, we do so by projecting onto it our own knowledge, our judgements, our images, a kind of thick cover will form which will not allow the mental flow to manifest itself. Open attention is that which nourishes itself with a severe discipline whose purpose is to silence cumbersome forms of knowledge which keep us at a distance from things as they really appear, and to disempower the tendency to take refuge in the imagination, and so to render the gaze more receptive and as transparent as possible, like a dawn light which does not weigh down on things and almost passes through our experiences, making them as if lit up. Attention is continuous when the subject works to maintain the gaze concentrated for as long as possible on the object to be understood. This is difficult because attention tends to be intermittent, because of both 5

Being capable of self-presence means keeping the thought present in the experience as it happens; to obtain this condition it is necessary to develop metacognitive techniques aimed at identifying the moments in which the mind tends to allow itself to be captured by its abstractions and distractions, and take it back to the fullness of its contingent immanence. We should not forget that on the basis of a perspective of interdisciplinary research which brings together philosophical reflection and neuroscience, the techniques of self-presence are considered to be ways in which to access the life of the consciousness which can provide useful information to the cognitive sciences, thus restoring to the techniques of spirituality a cognitive value which a certain scientism has tended to neglect (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991).

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external disturbances and the intervention of disturbances internal to the cognitive flow, because while the subject is engaged in the process of selfenquiry, nothing prevents imaginings, desires, epistemic obsessions and whatever else from filtering into the cognitive act of observing, distracting the subject from the task in which he is engaged. The search for knowledge demands that circling of the phenomenon which presumes a continuing presence of the gaze. What is needed is an insomnia of attention, symbolised in the eyes of the owl of Athena. That fluid reality, continually changing, which is the flux of consciousness demands an unlimited attention, a sustained gaze which does not give in to any distraction; the more continuous the attention, the better reflection can access an adequate knowledge of inner life. If attention is the disposition to grasp life as it is happening, then the existential gain which comes from knowledge of the self will be proportional to the quantity of attention that the person is capable of bringing to his experience. We can say that the intensity of living is directly proportional to the intensity of the light with which the mind seeks to clarify its intimate experience. Thinking ourselves is to switch on an inner light. We cannot always stop to reflect and so we do not always live in the light; there are moments of scarce light, in which we are taken up with living without finding the time to stop to think. We cannot escape these moments of shadow but what is essential is that we keep searching for moments of light. The action of care is one which calls to the light, which awakens us, which makes us alert, which brings out of the shadows and keeps in the light; specifically, self-care calls consciousness into the light of thought, that which makes us conscious beings and destinally present to our own becoming. The discipline of reflection responds to the urgent need to seek a sense of how much remains before it and it is this research which discloses the space of liberty, because “the intellectual search for meaning is already free activity” (Stein 2002, 439).

Undoing inner obscurity However effective the phenomenological method might prove to be, we should avoid the facile temptation of constructing excessive expectations, for even applying the method in the most rigorous way possible, there is very little of a phenomenon which comes as evidence to reflective attention. From time to time that which is given to the regard remains clouded in a halo destined to remain opaque. There is no experience of the mind that can enter fully “into the sharply illuminated circle of perfect givenness” (Husserl 1983, 157), not only because the reflective regard is

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not a ray of pure light but rather a regard always and already made opaque by the cloud of thoughts and the buzz of emotions which inevitably encrust it, but also because every phenomenon is a never exhausted fount of information. If in order to seize the essence of a phenomenon it is necessary to keep to evidence (principle of evidence), that is to its original modes of givenness which reveal themselves to the reflective regard, it is however also necessary to take account of the fact that not everything that is essential appears, and however intense and ordered might be the effort to go beyond surface appearance and penetrate the halo of opacity which every datum carries with it (principle of ulteriority), there always remains something unseen. No cognitive technique, not even the faithfully sustained description through the exercise of the epoché, permits an entire and pure vision of the life of the mind. Besides, human reason, insofar as it is the essence of a finite being, could never bear too much reality. Perhaps this is why the hidden vital structure of things tends to hide itself (Heraclitus, F25 / DK 22B123). Knowledge of the self is inevitably destined to remain partial, also because inner experience gives itself in an uninterrupted happening. When in fact we turn our attention to the life of the mind we immediately sense that this flow does not know moments of silence, does not know peace. When the experience of living weighs heavily on our souls and we struggle to find the vital energy necessary for the search for meaning, it may be that we experience the effort involved in sustaining the continuous flux of thoughts and emotions. We would like to savour, even just for a moment, the quiet which comes from the silence of thinking and feeling, and instead it is exactly at this time that the essential quality of the life of the mind offers itself vividly to our consciousness. It is the effort of being, finding ourselves adrift without moorings in the movement of becoming, with no pause in thinking or feeling, with no vacation for the soul. Not even reflection interrupts this flow, because after carrying out a reflective act, if we think back to the just completed mental experience, we can relive the reflective action, its concentration on a thought or on an emotion, but we perceive that this concentration has not interrupted the mental flux which continues beneath our reflective acts. What is modified in reflection is the stance of the subject and the quality itself of our experiences. Carrying out the Socratic imperative to “know thyself” is also impossible because the human being is in a state of continual becoming and subject to unpredictable transformations following experiences which have been significant for his being; as a result, the process of self-examination presents itself as a never-ending task, destined to accompany our entire

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existence. Self-enquiry is a never-finished work because while we are taken up with investigating ourselves to bring some aspect of our own profile into the light, under the pressure of the experience of our being in relation to other people and other things, some parts of the self are modified, some constitute themselves and others destructure themselves. The essence of a person, the depth of his own being, besides, is never all current and present in each of his acts. At the moment in which I look at myself, only part of myself can be perceived. The person lives, realises himself in countless different inner acts and grasping them all, which would be the condition for a full knowledge of the self, is clearly impossible because it presupposes that to every act of the self there is a corresponding reflective act. Rather, the life of the mind flows continually and only at intervals can we stop to reflect, thus we can only know a few fragments of the multiple modes of our existential realisation. If we follow Stein’s ontology, which establishes a difference between the life of consciousness and the depth of one’s real personal being, the highly problematic nature of the work of self-examination becomes absolutely clear. Self-examination, behind the activity of our inner life, must be able to find the traits of the depth of our being. It is possible to know some layers of our inner selves but not right down to the depths; we can see some strata but the rest remains obscure. For this reason, aiming to know ourselves can look like “madness” if it is not balanced out by the awareness of its own limits and by always seeking the proper measure of every action and every desire. What is more, with the action of self-understanding, we cannot expect to shine some glimmer of light onto ourselves in the short term. Indeed, it can happen at the start of the process of self-investigation that we experience quite the opposite effect, finding ourselves to be opaque, impermeable to the light of knowledge. When we come to perceive the quality of a fragment of our own experience, it becomes clear that this has been taken from the depths, which tends to remain clouded in fog. Recognising that the flux of our life will not be definitively enlightened in no way takes away from the value of the practice of self-enquiry, but it urges us to take a measured and critical view of it. Developing a critical view of the epistemic potentialities of reflection leads us to an awareness of the limits of our thinking, and with this of our being, since the life of the mind constitutes the essence of this. So, if thinking the experience of existence produces the effect of making us lose the quietude in which we seemed to find ourselves before constituting ourselves to ourselves as a problem, the gnoseologically aware reflection of its heuristic quality fosters in the consciousness the unease which follows knowing all the

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limits of this thinking to which we have been consigned. Persevering in the act of self-enquiry requires, therefore, the decision to bear with the limits of thought and, therefore, the fragility and precariousness of its products. Knowing ourselves is revealed as an arduous task not only for the limitations of our reflective capacities but above all because the life of the mind has its own insuperable transcendence. If it is true that it is revealed in experience, it is also true that it never reveals itself in its entirety: it always remains situated beyond the possibilities of its own gaze, obscure and intangible (Stein 2001, 227). When we activate the reflective gaze onto our inner life, we notice a depth and a beyondness which speak to us of the existence of something else, although we do not have the words to speak this other; neither can we give form to the thought necessary to grasp it.

The flow of mental life Thinking oneself think Given that an essential part of the life of the mind is the taking form of the network of thoughts which underlies our existential choices, it follows that essential to the process of self-understanding is thinking thoughts. This self-reflective practice puts into effect the essential quality of the mind since it is destined to think itself and hence to weigh up the value and rightness of every thought (Epictetus, Discourses, I, 1, 4). If the correct direction to take consists of improving the quality of our being and if the essence of that being is in thinking, then we can say with Epictetus that “the material that I must work upon is my own mind, just as that of a carpenter is wood, and that of a cobbler is leather; for my work lies in making right use of my thoughts” (Discourses, III, 22, 20). We should however remember that amongst the products and processes of thought, not each and every one has the same level of importance: there are fundamental thoughts, which play an important role in existential decisions, and superficial thoughts, which do not have a significant impact. The practice of self-enquiry should aim to identify and then examine that web of ideas which plays an important role in our lives, that concerns and absorbs us most intensely, and go to the roots of all of this, in order to understand where the qualities of our being, the fundamental orientations and decisive choices, have their origin. It is no less important to understand where specific attitudes of ours have their roots: if they depend on meditated judgements or if they are the

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result of events which have happened to us and have not been sufficiently elaborated on the rational level. Certain events leave an indelible impression on the mind’s matter and take on decisive significance for the person, to the point of modifying the fundamental attitude which lies at the base of all the actions undertaken by the person (von Hildebrand 1922); with the expression fundamental attitude we mean the mode of being which expresses the orientation of value which informs the intimate essence of the person. Re-thinking decisive events is necessary in order to know and then modify one’s self, so that the fundamental attitude is the outcome of a closely meditated choice in the light of things which are of the greatest value for existence. Given the importance that free acts have for the quality of our being, it is of the utmost importance to dedicate some attention to them. Free acts are those which are not only the object of aware experience, but they are sought and willed by the subject on the basis of motive and foundation: they cannot take possession of me little by little, awakening almost silently in the depths of my very self; on the contrary, it is I who must produce them by myself, making them vibrate within (Stein 2000, 181).

In free acts the subject not only lives, but exercises a form of sovereignty, however limited, over his way of being. To take a position, recognise, affirm and deny: these are free acts which indicate a selfdirected action, where nothing compels me to carry out these acts. In the free act it is the subject who makes the decision to initiate something, and his “fiat” is necessary for this thing to happen (Stein 2000, 184), that taking up of a position within, which is the beginning of making a beginning. Not only can I take a position with regard to content, whether this be a theory or a vision of life, but I can also take up a position with regard to taking up positions, thus demonstrating the critical capacity of mental activity. An act of freedom is also that which consists of deciding to withdraw one’s assent from a belief deemed unfounded and deceptive; this deconstructive action is possible when new data are identified which empty the belief of any force. Another important free act consists in putting an idea up for discussion, with the intention of not letting it act in me with its performative force without meditated assent. It is important to identify which free acts characterise our actions and how frequently they manifest themselves, and which on the other hand are the acts which turn out to be the index of an abdication of responsibility of one’s own thinking and submission to external conditions, and so understand which experiential situations they tend to manifest themselves in. This inner ethnography gives us in return a knowledge, however weak and provisory it may be, of

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the direction of our own existential realisation, in that it allows us to understand in what measure the subject is central to his own actions or reduces his being to a form of unreflective response to external stimuli. In order for an act to be free, it must be motivated and founded. It is motivated when it is moved not by something external, but from a developed intention. And it is founded when it rests on theoretical or empirical evidence, that is on data acquired through an attentive evaluation of experience. Since the degree to which a free act is founded can vary, and certain acts are not sufficiently founded, it would be important to learn to weigh up the arguments on which an act is based. It is not always possible to act on the basis of suitably meditated cognitive instruments, that is on the basis of theoretical or empirical evidence; it therefore becomes necessary to evaluate through reflection the degree to which free acts are founded, in order to be able to have as reasonable an idea as possible of the quality of our own being. If the I can be thought of as the point of irradiation of vital acts (Stein 1999, 90), then knowledge of the self is indistinguishable from knowledge of the quality of the free acts in which the person expresses the quality of his being: cognitive, affective, aesthetic, relational, ethical and political. We have a good knowledge of the self when we can decipher which acts, which modes of being (of acting in the world with gestures and word) are the expression of a free self-determination of the I and which, on the other hand, are acts that are conditioned. It is easy to deceive oneself in this kind of analysis if we have not first meditated deeply on the essential quality of a free way of being in the world. In a culture which values activism, finding ourselves active, engaged in various actions, is often taken for a position of liberty. But a form of active presence can, on the other hand, be the result of an automatic acting in order to mask an unresolved existential problematic, an automatism which indeed conceals an inner rigidity, a block on that movement of the soul which is the essential condition for the expression of free acts. In order to understand what is the degree of free movement of our own being and how far, on the other hand, we are letting ourselves be carried by something external to ourselves, it is necessary to orient the practice of self-enquiry to identify which are the acts which follow deeply meditated decisions and to what extent these have as a reference point a horizon of meanings which our consciousness has identified to be of value for our life. When our action is triggered by fully aware positioning, the being moves from his vital centre, which activates by itself a centrifugal force capable of setting the being in motion.

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No less important to identify are the ideas which, rather than being instruments of free action, condition the mind in more or less pressing ways, to the point that we become servilely attached to them. They are mental situations often masked by the illusory belief that we are acting for a good ideal, or else dictated by a meditative emptiness which leads the mind to take refuge in the forms of attachment which are difficult to recognise, because they tend, in their essence, to remain hidden. The more these ideas and attributions of meaning remain hidden, the more their enigmatic performative force is able to work on our mode of being. Nobody is able to be in a good position if they live in self-deception, because it is a life not fully lived, in that it deviates from the plane of reality. It is a serious matter not to be aware of the self-deceptions which encapsulate our experience, but it is even more serious to accept in full awareness that we take refuge in the unreal. Engaging oneself in selfknowledge, to exercise oneself to avoid all forms of illusion and accept, instead, maintenance of the evidence, means bringing oneself back to the real. Entering into reality and being able to accept it for what it is constitute one condition for having real live experience of things. Knowing oneself however cannot limit its sphere of enquiry to the inner actions of the I, to those that act in the space of the mind without necessarily making themselves visible. It is also “social acts” which configure our personal profile, those which manifest a direction towards another subject (Stein 2000, 188). To welcome, refuse, pardon, contest, pacify… It is possible for these acts to take place in the mind without the corresponding positionings being manifest in the relational space; in this case, they remain actions of our inner acting and cannot be considered social, insofar as the other is not aware of them. The only acts that are authentically social are those acts of the mind which reveal themselves in a relational context, touching the vital space of the other, who can feel the quality of our acting. Since we are relational beings, in the sense that living for us is living together, a practice of self-understanding which does not deal with social acts is not only incomplete, but, precisely because it fails to take into consideration something essential for the human being, reveals itself to be of only relative ontogenetic value. Given the intimately relational substance of our being, the practice of self-understanding should not be interpreted in a solipsistic reductive sense as attention to one’s own inner sounds and tastes, because this inner migration corresponds to a loss of the world. Rather, knowing one’s self should be seen as an interrogation of the self with regard to the world it inhabits, the relations it lives and the situations it experiences. It is therefore a practice which does not only enact itself on an intersubjective

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level in the exchange with others, it also outlines itself as culturally situated. Dealing with social acts means dealing with the way in which we construct relations with others. In our relations with others, each person attributes a meaning to what happens and modulates his behaviour in the light of that meaning. In doing this, while he structures the relational environment together with others, at the same time he moulds his own being. Given, then, the ontogenetic value of relations and of the meanings that are produced in relations, having self-care demands that we think about how we are structuring ourselves in relational dynamics with others, drawing attention to what happens concretely and making it the object of description that is as detailed as possible, in order to gain the necessary data if we are to understand what ontological form our being is taking. It is a question of realising a phenomenology of our relationally situated morphogenesis, to evaluate if the dynamics which structure us in intersubjective exchange correspond to the directions of existential realisation which we would like to follow.

Thinking one’s self critically The mind generates thoughts, but the relation that it establishes with thoughts is not only active in type, but also passive, because it can happen that the ideas it formulates acquire a kind of life of their own and become powerful enough to condition the life of the mind. Activating deep and constant reflection on the contents of thought, continually testing their worth, identifying their performative strength and direction, is a necessary condition in order to safeguard one’s own subjective positionality. Developing the capacity to examine the flow of life of the mind in which thoughts take form, is the fundamental lesson which comes down to us from Epictetus; beginning with the presupposition according to which the only things we can control and dominate are the products of thinking (Handbook, 1, 1), he invites us to weigh the value of our own ideas, because this critical examination represents the necessary condition if we are not to suffer constriction on the part of the products of our thinking, and so not fall into exactly that which we would seek to avoid (Handbook, 1, 5). Even thoughts which are apparently valid should be gone through carefully. If it is true that a recurrent thought of the human being is the aspiration to a joy without end, happiness without shadow, love without limits, a maximum intensity of love with no moments of loss, vigorous activity which is at one and the same time perfect calm and freedom from

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all tensions, then there is a clear need to subject representations such as these to close examination, those visions of life which have so much influence over our existential choices. Indeed, a similar vision contradicts the densely problematic quality of the human condition, for which reason a full life characterised by complete existential realisation is impossible. Cultivating unrealistic visions produces disorder in life, with the result of purposeless suffering. Learning to see clearly: this was the goal of the Therapists of Alexandria. Read today, this imperative in the light of constructivist theory means identifying with precision the quality of one’s own thoughts and the relative performative implications. When we are face to face with the theme of self-knowledge we cannot avoid making reference to Augustine, who, following Socratic teaching, affirms that man is unknown to himself, and so that he might know himself he needs to carry out the constant exercise of withdrawing from use of the senses, going into himself and concentrating his mind on himself (De Ordine, I, 1.2). Thinking oneself means living gathered in the depths; the person who can regularly gather himself into the depths of the tissue of his own thinking activity may have the possibility of understanding what to search for, where to direct his own energies and identify on which aspect of himself it is of primary importance to work. Thinking oneself gathered into the depths means living in the most intimate sphere, knowing the thoughts of the heart, that is, those thoughts which outline the nucleus of our being, those which speak of our existential tensions, our most wild but also our most unspoken desires, our most intimate feelings and the roots of our suffering. To know one’s self is also to understand what consumes and erodes the life of the soul, what nourishes and what wears down our essential ontogenetic force, the one which keeps us searching for the modality of our own being, and then understand how to deactivate the forces which work towards the negative, cultivating instead “healthy thoughts [ıȦIJȒȡȚĮ ijȡȠȞȠ૨ȞIJĮ]” (Plutarch, On Tranquillity of Mind, 470d). It is therefore essential to learn to analyse the quality of our own experience, in order to identify the ones which cause suffering and the ones which do away with our pleasure of being. There are experiences which consume us, which deprive us of vital energy without giving meaning in return; others, instead, give life, widen the space of experience of meaning and being, and nourish our spirit. Knowing one’s self also means identifying the ontogenetic quality of these different experiences. This type of knowledge is essential in order to be able to avoid, as far as possible, ways of being which finish up nourishing negative experiences

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and giving strength instead to those which nourish positive experiences, those which give substance to our being. Self-care means holding ourselves steady in the task of dealing with what is essential to live a good life.

The virtue of thinking It is not enough to affirm the principle of care: it is necessary to understand what good care consists of. Marcus Aurelius states that an essential condition for the exercise of just care is frankness (Meditations, II, 13), that is having the courage to look at ourselves with honesty, without seeking refuge in forms of self-deception. The mind, the subject of the reflective act, is however capable of not only positive cognitive acts, those which reveal the quality of our mode of inhabiting the world, but also of negative acts, those which conceal the quality of the mind from itself, and those which construct blockages to a frank enquiry. It is his knowledge of the complexity of the mind and the inability of the subject to have full sovereignty over his acts that makes Marcus Aurelius say: pay attention to “the analytical power of the mind” (Meditations, II, 12). There can be cognitive acts in the life of the mind which once brought under the gaze of reflection, radically interrogate the subject, triggering problematic experiences which the mind tends to brush aside. This is the case of interpretative distortions, which we put into play when we find ourselves evaluating our way of being, and acts of repression with which we distance what disturbs us from the gaze. Repression consists of turning our eyes away from those inner acts and those actions on the external world which are hard to bear in that they would force us to a critical and unsatisfying judgement of some part of ourselves. Clues to acts of repression can be found in certain feelings, such as fear and shame. When experiences, even though perceived, are nonetheless repressed, we note a kind of self-deception which prevents an authentic shining of light on one’s self. No less essential to bring to light are interpretative distortions with which the subject attributes to his action motivations and directions of meaning which do not correspond to reality, but respond to an ideal imaginary of our mode of being. In certain cases, the desire to adhere to the idealised that we construct can act so energetically as to impede us from seeing how in reality we move in the world. The modes of illusion in self-enquiry are more frequent than those we might find in the enquiry into the external world, since the immaterial of the mind does not present the solidity of things of the external world which offers resistance to certain

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cognitive distortions (Scheler 1955). It can happen that we attribute to an entirely impulsive action a meditated intention, and vice versa, with the objective of legitimising and valorising the action or make it taking note of some of our own attitudes, which is less problematic for our consciousness. Or, considering the outcome of certain actions, we can focus on reasons that are different from those from which they originally sprang. Self-deceptions, in many cases, carry out the function of constituting a socially acceptable I, which once outlined comes to structure a surface which it is difficult to undermine, since consciousness senses the result of revealing one’s true profile as a threat. If the problem is that in order to pacify the soul, we tend to cover acts of will and action which may have little of nobility about them with layers of meanings which allow us to receive approbation on the part of the many, then, with regard to these self-deceptions, the mind is called upon to operate a metacognitive surveillance oriented by the ethical principle of calling things by their names: seeking the truth and staying within it. Acceptance of maintaining the gaze on the ways in which we reveal ourselves to consciousness is the first indispensable condition if we are to work upon ourselves and achieve those transformations which can enable a form of mastery over our own modes of being which Scheler calls “ethical self-domination” (Scheler 1955). But free self-examination, a slow process which encounters every sort of obstacle tacitly thrown up by the subject himself, requires courage. Courage is a virtue. All of self-care, if it really wants to be that, cannot but be informed by the exercise of the virtues: honesty with ourselves, perseverance in pursuing a goal, the courage to tell oneself the truth, the humility to recognise ourselves for what we are, prudence in undertaking actions that can be sustained by our vital force and our capacities, delicacy in dealing with the spiritual matters of life and above all the wisdom to always seek the proper measure [IJઁ ȝȑIJȡȠȞ] (Epictetus, Handbook, 10 o 39), because when we do not have measure there is no limit to the actions which might disrupt the quality of life. Having proper care means seeking the right measure for every action and every spiritual practice, that measure which for Aristotle constitutes the proper essence of every virtue (Nicomachean Ethics, II, 5, 1106b 25–30). In Alcibiades we find confirmation of the circular link between selfcare and the practice of virtues: Socrates explains that it is of the utmost importance for the person who undertakes self-care to learn the virtues (Plato, Alcibiades 1, 135b). Alcibiades, who responds to Socrates by caring for the virtue of justice with the purpose of governing the city well (135e), is an exemplary metaphor of the art of existence since each person

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is called upon to exercise himself in all the virtues which make up a good life. Exercising oneself in cultivating virtue consists therefore of an essential spiritual practice. Only in cultivating virtue are we not overrun by disordered and disordering thoughts. Self-care is not then just something about thought, but requires us to modulate our own being in accordance with precise directions of meaning.6 At this point, we might seem to be in a vicious circle: we dedicate ourselves to self-care in order to cultivate those virtues which enable us to be well and to act well, but to enact self-care authentically it is necessary first of all to give convinced assent to the virtues and to let ourselves be guided by them. The processes through which experience is enacted are not easily marked out and thinking can find itself going round in circles. This is how it is: where it is a matter of the meaning of being, things are never simple. And as such they do not follow a linear logic, the one which we tend to practice. To understand these phenomena, we have to follow the logic of the real: a circular logic, which holds things together, and which holds thought and action together in a reciprocal composition of meaning.

The fragile force of thinking Caring for the self is seeking the art of existence. This search however is not an intellectual operation on an abstract level, but an acting on beingthere, because in the culture of self-care, truth is not something which is simply enunciated, but something which is incarnate in life. If we assume (a) that “the art of living has each individual’s own life as its material” (Epictetus, Discourses, I, 15, 2), and (b) that the essence of human life is in the life of the mind, then it is on the product of thinking that we must intervene, since truth which is incarnate in gestures must be won first and 6

Opening up our discourse to the theme of virtue would require us to develop reflections on ethics which would take us far off topic. Nonetheless, since today it seems strange, as it has seemed in many other times strange, to talk of virtue, I should be precise here about what I mean by virtue. It is not a habit, not a mere application of principles which respond to the need for socialisation, but a way of being meditated in the light of the search for what makes life good. Acting in accordance with those modes of being which can be codified as virtues answers a fundamental need to seek a good quality of existence. If we stop to listen to what the soul asks, we can understand that virtues are nothing other than the way of responding to the necessity of the real (Mortari 2019b). For a proper care of the self, both relational virtues (or ethical virtues, as Aristotle described them) and intellectual virtues are necessary.

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foremost through thinking. Thought is a force, a dynamic energy which decides a substantial part of the quality of our being. According to Epictetus, it is on our mental acts (I, 11, 30) that the quality of our actions depends, and with these the quality of our mode of being. Without totally adhering to the rationalism of a certain type of Stoicism which makes everything depend on thought, and which attributes to thought even the force to intervene on thought itself with radical actions, but also without giving up a gaze which interprets from a more complex perspective the way in which we act, insofar as it depends in many cases on all of that which we are not, nonetheless we cannot fail to think of the weight exercised by thought and the Stoic invitation to bring the principle of responsibility for our mode of being within the subject himself. That our way of being depends on the evaluative acts of thought, to the extent that Epictetus says that what we should be concerned with are only our judgements or appraisals (Discourses, I, 11, 38), is therefore a statement which we should ponder deeply. On the one hand, this rationalist vision of life makes clear the force of the mind and, therefore, the possibility for the human being to trust his own thoughts, those energy principles in which cognitive activity is embodied. On the other hand, however, it brings us back to the fragility of our own force, because thoughts are not intrinsically good or just. For this reason, before entrusting ourselves to our thoughts, we need to weigh them, evaluate them. But where can we find the principle of evaluation of thoughts, if not in thought itself? And how can we verify the value of the measure we are using, if we do not have at our disposal a principle of measure external to the measure to be evaluated? Finding ourselves entrusted to our own thoughts, dependent, in evaluating them, on a measure for which we do not have at our disposal an objective form of measurement, places us squarely before the wearisome fragility of our being. Living is wearisome, because we are irrevocably called upon to seek out the measure of the art of existence without having at our disposal criteria on the basis of which we can assess the value of the measures to which we entrust ourselves (Epictetus, Discourses, I, 17, 2–6). It is important to recognise that reflective thought, which responds to the Delphic principle of “know thyself”, is not easy to put into practice, not only for the cognitive effort it demands and for the existential choice which posits being able to disrupt, when necessary, the adhesion to doing in order to carve out a pause from ordinary engagement with the world, but also because radical thought, such as that which is authentically reflective, cannot fail to make evident to consciousness the fragility of our own being. The fact that reason is the faculty capable of also expressing

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the art of reflection and that reflecting is capable of directing the inner regard of the mind onto the same acts of reflection, reveals a certain power of reason; according to the Aristotelian view the mind is capable, even if for just a few brief instants, of a “thinking which thinks itself [਩ıIJȚȞ ਲ ȞȩȘıȚȢ ȞȠȒıİȦȢ ȞȩȘıȚȢ]” which constitutes the divine form of thought (Aristotle, Metaphysics, ȁ, 9, 1074b 34). But the thinking which thinks itself is that perfect form of thought which does not know the succession over time of cognitive acts: there is not a thinking which is followed by the reflective act, but the perfect thinking thinks itself thinking in the very act of thinking. In this perfect simultaneity of the acts of thinking emerges the condition of pure truth. In the space of human reason, entrusted to time, reflective thinking is instead never contemporary to the thinking on which it is reflecting: in this sense, thinking is a remembering, with the result that reflection can grasp only a part of the life of the mind. When we realise that while we are able to exercise that thinking which thinks itself, we do not have at our disposal an objective principle on the basis of which we can give a robust foundation to our thoughts, the perception of our ontological weakness becomes harsh and unavoidable. The more we think of existence, and the more we try to understand the quality of human life, the more vividly appears our fragility, our vulnerability, and therefore also how much there is to do in order to render life worthy of being lived, and at the same time how many obstacles lie in the path of our intentions which can render our efforts null and void. This evidence can have the effect of rendering the mind uncertain and insecure, permeated by a sense of unease which makes it difficult to find the strength to continue the work of thinking. When we are fully aware of this there are two possible reactions: we either decide to persist in the analysis, because we feel that sticking to the search for meaning is indispensable, or avoid thinking in order to circumvent this unsettling feeling. Since the second option indicates a giving up on staying within the real, then it is the first decision which should constitute the direction to take. Precisely with regard to finding ourselves “from moment to moment … sustained in my being” (Stein 2002, 58) without any certainty on the future state of our being, the essential condition for continuing to reflect is that of maturing deep inside us the disposition to accept our own fragility and vulnerability. What is needed is action which is both cognitive and emotive, knowing how to accept the substance of human life, that is being called to an infinite work which is the fragile one of construction of the self and of the world. Being able to accept the quality of being is the most difficult of spiritual exercises, but when it succeeds, the moments in which it

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succeeds, the anxiety which consumes vital force drains away and an ecstatic serenity floods the mind. The work of thinking which seeks the truth of existence, and through which the human being answers the ethical call to give form to his own life’s time, requires a particular form of reason: vital, living, inventive, creative, and able to think otherwise from what is the norm. It is a seminal reason, in the sense that it does not limit itself to a recognition of thoughts already given, but sows seeds from which new paths of being can spring up and produce evaluations that disclose other spaces of possibility; a mediating reason, which can find the right path between the opposites in which the life of the mind risks remaining entrapped; the certainty of being able to do, or the fear of not succeeding in being, believing oneself to know or the fear of not having even a valid crumb of knowledge; a vivifying reason, which keeps itself tied to experience in order to find real rather than fictitious nourishment for the movement of thought and which therefore, in its relationship with reality, finds different questions that disclose new spaces of thought, obliging us towards the continuous search that makes life a vivid time; a convivial reason, which can enter into dialogue with the other to outline visions that have the force to generate communities. The vivifying, poetic reason embodies a particular form of intelligence: not the intelligence which makes us expert in resolving complex algorithms or planning daring buildings, but the intelligence which helps us find the paths of existence, those movements of daily life in which we feel that we find some substance. It is not an intelligence to be learnt following the ABC logic of institutional learning, because it lies elsewhere. You might see this intelligence at work in certain people, and you try to catch hold of its secret, but the epistemic logic which applies to certain forms of learning does not lend itself to this search, and leads us astray. We cannot seize hold of it, only admire it, stand close to where this intelligence of existing is in evidence, and experience a form of apprenticeship which makes possible a kind of contagion of being. The condition whereby this intelligence of existence can come forth is letting oneself be guided by the desire to feel and do good, that letting oneself be guided which consists in obedience to the intimate essence of our own being which, like all things, aspires to that which is good (Aristotle, Metaphysics, A, 2, 982b 6–7). What nourishes the intelligence of experience is a vivifying reason, which can deal reasonably with things and, so, can deal with that delicate material which is the life of the soul, which asks not only for attentive, perspicacious, profound and rigorous thought, but also a delicate mode, a tactful approximation. It is “an essentially anti-polemical reason, humble,

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scattered amongst things, merciful” (Zambrano 2003, 91); a circumstantial and quotidian reason, which is attentive to the concrete and minute becoming of experience; a reason engaged in cultivating a thought which is glued to the becoming of being to seek a comprehension which is as faithful as possible to its essence. A humble reason dispersed amongst things is the one which keeps in contact with ordinary reality, with life in the plurality of its aspects. A reason incapable of staying in contact with things is a narrow reason which does not allow us to have real experience of the world, the only one which makes possible the flowering of existential possibilities. We need a dialogic reason nurtured on living together with others, because no good search for the art of existence can be carried out in solitude. If it is true that the ontological quality of the human condition is relationality, and that the act of thinking identifies the essential quality of the human, then it is not possible to conceive a good quality of thinking without comparison with others. Zambrano comments that the other is the company which every being needs. Nobody goes alone–this is an abstraction–but accompanied by the other, without whom he would be unable to think. (Zambrano 2003, 72)

Without the other, there is no real movement. When the dialogical confrontation with the other is missing, we end up consuming our energies in an illusory journey, which in fact has us stay exactly where we are. Where there is no movement, there is no transcendence. “We must go out in the search for the other” (Zambrano 2003, 73), leave our theoretical enclosures to dialogue with the other, measuring our own thoughts with his in order to find together other landscapes, other maps of thought. A good care for thought asks, then, that we construct dialogical relations with others, relations made up of frank but at the same time convivial exchanges which always have in mind the desire for truth, which is able to sustain the effort to keep the conversation open.

Exploring other lands of thinking It would be problematic if reflection, which works on thoughts with a transformative intention, were to only follow an analytical-critical direction, in the sense of limiting oneself to raising and deconstructing thoughts; in the horizon of self-care, which finds its meaning in the search for a good form of one’s own being, it is also necessary to walk in the opposite direction, that of constructing: constructing landscapes of thought which might help us to stay within the search for the meaning of

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experience. Walking in time requires maps which orient us in the complexity of human experience, and coordinates which mark the modes of composition of the meaning of existence. With the “allegory of the cave” (Republic, book VII) Plato demonstrates that the practice of having care for existence requires a sort of conversion which drags us out of the opacity of unaware life, to search for the brightness which can shed light on our steps. Freeing ourselves from the condition of deceptive opinions in order to seek truth finds expression in the metaphor of freeing oneself from chains, which indicates a conversion, to be understood as a radical change of perspective which demands a decision that is not only rational, but sustained by passion, accompanied by a change of position also in the body. To bring about this conversion, however, the decision which comes from a free act is not sufficient; it is necessary to know how to turn our attention towards the right place. Only by keeping our thought concentrated on things of value does thought itself become of value for the experience (Republic, 500c): questions of value are those which seek to understand the nature of the good, the just and the beautiful; because the necessary force for what Plato calls periagoghe comes from concentrating the attention on questions worthy of value for life so as to acquire knowledge of essential things, the only knowledge which can save us. It is only by keeping the gaze concentrated on vital questions in order to seek the truth of living, and as far as possible exercise our reason on these matters every day (Plato, Apology of Socrates, 38a), that we can find the knowledge for existence. Plato speaks of gymnastics of the soul (Republic, 498b) to indicate the discipline of thinking about questions of primary importance to give form to our experience; when radical thinking becomes a discipline, we can maybe experience the flowering of new ways of thinking and feeling. The drive to seek the truth of existence is in the intimate nucleus of each and every soul. Conversion comes about when we heed this vital necessity, and the energy of thinking is thus dedicated to the search for a radical knowledge. But it is impossible to acquire clear and profound knowledge, because the questions which reality poses to consciousness do not have a finite measure, and when we cannot consider all the questions or each of them with due depth, the possibility of a rounded truth fades, because when something remains unfinished, knowledge cannot become a measuring measure of existence (Plato, Republic, 504c). Only scattered fragments of wisdom are available to us. It is within this perspective that some philosophers of the Hellenistic age developed the theory of self-care. Ancient philosophies proposed

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training the mind to concentrate on what were defined as canons [ț੺ȝȞȘ], or rules of life, always keeping attention focused on them in order to turn them into lively instruments of thinking. It means focusing the mind through patient meditation, sayings and maxims so that, as they become a substantial part of our own thought, they are available to be enunciated at the most difficult moments of life and so help us get through situations of life calmly. Marcus Aurelius maintained the importance of going in search of the essential principles of life (Meditations, I, 9), as in following these we can bring order and meaning into our existence. Cultivating an intimate familiarity with them allows us to incorporate them into the tissues of the mind such that they acquire the status of mathematical rules to be applied almost automatically. We should always have at hand the essential principles of life, both when we are alone and with others (Epictetus, Discourses, IV, 12, 7). This ethical orientation consists in keeping the attention focused on principles which codify a good art of living, to the point that they become pure energy which orients our mode of being. Continuous meditation on a maxim which we feel to be a source of truth of experience can be considered as a condition for rendering an idea to the soul, since only a living idea is capable of effecting a transformative function on the quality of our being. Spiritual practices are those in which thought makes its matter the life of the mind, thus making the object of reflection both its thinking and its feeling, not only to understand it however, but also to transform it, and mould it (Hadot 2002, 20). It is not enough to know oneself; it is necessary to act on one’s self in order to bring about a modification. Meditation on maxims, the so-called canons, answers to the principle of working on thought in order to transform oneself through thought, to trigger a continual morphogenesis which might give a good form to one’s being.7 7

This performative and transformative vision of thinking is particularly evident in Stoicism, which conceives of philosophy as a practice whose purpose is to develop the art of life (Epictetus, Discourses, I, 15, 2). It doesn’t help to learn abstract theories or stuff ourselves with reading, but we are called upon to seek out a vital relationship with thinking. According to Epictetus (Discourses, I, 26, 15–17), the task of each person is to understand the situation in which his soul finds itself and then seek ways to take care of it, without wasting time uselessly stocking up on philosophical works and treatises which produce nothing more than damaging intellectual indigestion. This is the meaning of philosophical work and precisely because this study takes philosophy not as a thinking which aims to produce systematic discourses, but as a technique for living, ancient philosophy on the one hand and contemporary philosophers like Zambrano and Stein on the other, constitute fundamental points of reference.

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Considered from this perspective, the principle of “caring for self” is not at all an invitation to interior migration, but an affirmation of the need to take on as a primary task acting upon one’s self in order to transform oneself: and this is an action which does not remain confined within the space of an individual life, but, rather, makes its transformative effects evident at the point where it acts.

Cultivating ancients’ seeds of thought In our day, when a scientific and technical conception of education prevails, while philosophical and literary knowledge, not to mention political knowledge, assumes an almost decorative function, we need to work towards a different relationship with ancient philosophies, which conceive the work of philosophy as a practice of transformation of the self. Bringing attention to seeds of wisdom long meditated in times gone by can help us rediscover directions of thought which the science-dominated culture of our times has decidedly left in the shadows, unaware of the loss of cultural capital which this neglect entails. It is not a question of learning these philosophies as from some school textbook, but of meditating upon them, dusting them off in search of those passages which help us trace directions of meaning, to give form to the art of living. A saying, a maxim, can translate into a direction for our existential path only it becomes the object of a continuous and intense attention which can translate them into lively and life-giving ideas. From this point of view, it can be useful to re-read the Discourses of Epictetus, which should be taken up as a box of seeds of wisdom or thoughts to think, on which to meditate at length. Of similar formative value are the principles of life enunciated by Marcus Aurelius, who gathers his reflections together in his Meditations, which present themselves in the form of annotated notes during his voyage in search of knowledge of existence. As such, the thoughts are not subject to systematisation or any form of cataloguing. Even while we acknowledge the lack of a system of this writing in fragments, we can nonetheless identify different typologies of thoughts: as well as general philosophical reflections which pick up certain key themes of Stoic philosophy, we can find thoughts which indicate actions to take on our own inner principle, thoughts which suggest working on our own relational mode of being in order to shape it, and others which have to do with the political dimension of life. In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius indicates a number of actions to be taken on our interior life. Amongst them we should remember: give

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ourselves respect and value (II.6); carrying out everything which we find ourselves doing with effort, care, freedom and dispassionate justice (II, 5); having a goal towards which we can direct our actions, so that we do not live wandering (II, 7); having self-mastery and not letting ourselves be carried away by anything (I, 15); working on our own inner life to “clear away your clouds” (II, 4) and to keep our own spiritual lives “inviolate and free from harm” (II, 17). Exercising ourselves in these spiritual practices is considered a necessary condition for giving a good form to one’s life, the form which depends on knowing how to make the best of the potentialities that lie within us. Studying the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius allows us to confute the thesis that sees in self-care an individualistic and solipsistic drift, because many of the transformative practices indicated in the Meditations serve the purpose of moulding social ways of being, engaged in the construction of a community made up of ethically lived relationships. To this end it is important, he indicates, not to withdraw from our tasks in relation to all those who live with us (I, 12); not to seek to be out in front at all costs and instead acknowledge the superiority of others (I, 16); and do good without sparing oneself (I, 14). That self-care is conceived in the light of a relational vision of life is also clear when Marcus Aurelius states that our first concern should be to have care for our vital nucleus, with the aim of cultivating all those modes of being which are in accordance with human being’s nature (III, 4). Attention to moulding oneself in one’s own relational being is founded on the assumption that “we were born for cooperation” (II, 1), a view which finds its greatest realisation in the relationship of friendship; for this reason, we find in the Meditations a repeated injunction to have care for friends, a care “with no extremes of surfeit or favouritism” (I, 16). In harmony with the Socratic conception of self-care as a practice oriented to the exercise of political life, Marcus Aurelius identifies actions of political care of existence, in accordance with what we might define as “political principles”: he conceives the idea of a state whose laws are equal for everybody, which governs itself according to equality and freedom of speech (I, 14), while being mindful of the aim for the common good (I, 16). But a principle, however much it may interpret a truth of meaning, does not automatically become material which quickens our being. We might fall into the error of reading in a scholastic fashion, simply listing and commentating on the maxims that we find in these texts. Or else we might read them beginning with ourselves, placing ourselves in relation to the text, and seeking what our soul feels it needs. And then, over a long

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period of time, we might keep our attention concentrated on those passages in which we feel there is truth. Such as the one in which Epictetus declares that it is necessary to learn to accept what it is not in our power to change, because when we are unable to accept, then vital space transforms itself into a prison for the soul (Discourses, I, 12, 15–23). We cannot fail to feel the truth, but also the difficulty of a principle such as this. The mind cannot fail to feel the shock provoked by statements that say something about the difficult truth of existence. Then, however, the problem consists in knowing how to use these thoughts in a transformative sense, which means working on our self until we find the crack in our own being from which the principle can begin to operate. To find the crack from which to begin, it is necessary first of all to work on the notion that we have of ourselves, reaching the point of considering ourselves of little worth (Discourses, I, 12, 26); feeling ourselves to be important constitutes a pre-notion which can make it arduous to find motivation to work on our own being in order to transform our self, because it also means renouncing parts of our self in order to explore other modes of being. Not regarding ourselves as important helps us to find the path to self-transformation. In his Handbook (33, 1–15), Epictetus indicates a number of practices we should hold to in order to model our own interior principle in an ethical sense. Some of these practices are exercises of reflection on representations, on thoughts, learning to weigh up the implications of a choice before actually making it. When Epictetus suggests that when someone is faced with a dilemma he should decide to “allow himself some slight delay” (Handbook, 34) with regard to the urgency of making a decision, he invites a provisional type of reflection, one which investigates the possible consequences of every decision possible, as a condition for the exercise of the meditated choice in which lies the essence of free acts. If the essence of the human being, insofar as he is called upon to give form to his acts with liberty, expresses itself in free acts, then practising the principle of stop and think, in order to increase the possibility of carrying out acts which give substance to meditated decisions, constitutes an essential practice for generating the quality of our own being. While reflecting on what has already happened in the mind allows us to gain understanding of the quality of our being, anticipatory reflection and forethought function in acting on the self to give form to our own becoming.

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Thinking the essential questions In our postmodern climate, it is impossible to think of the existence of canons understood as rules of general value which would be objectively available for a course of purely re-cognitive learning. This does not mean that we cannot seek principles of order, and coordinates of meaning for experience, rather that these can be understood only in terms of horizons to move towards, through a continual work of radical interpretation of experience. The problem that emerges at this point is understanding in which direction to orient our thought, so that while we continue to regard as essential the spiritual action of familiarising ourselves with alreadyformulated thoughts, we do not limit ourselves to these, but foster, as it were, a thinking “otherwise” which explores other possible universes. If, following Socrates, we understand care for our thinking as encouragement to radically interrogate experience, then we need to define what type of questions to take on as an instrument for activating the practice of interrogating meaning. It is not an easy question and every answer always falls short, as already seen a little in the suggestion to see “real questions”, those whose answers are not anticipated by anything the subject might already possess in the way of certainty. We end up all too often confining life to a limited horizon which restricts the possibility of making lively and different experiences over time. Opening up space to the free question, which reaches out into the unknown, means broadening our space of experience. If we heed the need to find a good orientation for existence, we note the pressure to go to the root of every principle, every canon, to seek the essential questions from which such thoughts have been generated. It follows from this that a fundamental spiritual practice consists in seeking essential questions. Essential questions are those which remain firmly oriented to the search for the truth of existence, the questions fundamental for the meaning of being. To give significance to our life, to sow time with seeds of meaning, we have to be able to stay within the necessary, stay within the order of necessity, where what is at stake is the good of our being in the world. If it is true that in every human being there is a desire for good which nothing can eradicate, then in order to seek the essential questions it is necessary first of all to listen to this desire and let ourselves be guided by it. In wanting what is good there is the proper essence of enabling that humanity lets it (Heidegger 1998a, 241). The essence of care resides in favouring what is better. When we lend an ear to the need, which moves the soul, to find a good direction for our existence, we note the presence of

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the first question which asks us to take a position with regard to this need. Epictetus indicates this primary ethical decision with the term proairesis [ʌȡȠĮȓȡİıȚȢ], a difficult term to translate but which fundamentally means a pre-choice, a decision to be taken with regard to the primary drive of being: to support or not the search for what makes our life’s time good. It is the ontogenetic value of this primary decision which prompts Epictetus to say that the person is his own proairesis, his own first and decisive choice (Discourses, II, 22; III, 1, 40; IV, 5, 11, 23). The primary ethical choice, when it is the choice to dedicate our self to the search for that which is essential in order to make our life good, has the power to make unassailable our desire for what is good and our aversion for what is harmful for life, safeguarding the soul from wasting itself in useless things (Discourses, I, 1, 31). The first virtue, the one from which descends the possibility of cultivating other virtues, is deciding to embark on the search for that which does good, from which a good life might grow. If the primary, fundamental choice is a fully considered one, then according to Epictetus (Discourses, I, 17, 14) the person has available the power to impress the right direction on his thoughts and, so, on his life, becoming capable of giving assent to thoughts which orient himself to what does him good, and of suspending assent to that which is harmful to being (I, 4, 11). If we hold with the anthropological thesis on which Epictetus too bases his philosophy, according to which the essence of the human being lies in his thoughts, and thus the quality of our being depends on the quality of the thoughts that we think, then, in defining this deep choice, we would find the key to access that thought which can reach the root of the orientation of our being. Deciding in favour of this profound ethical choice is not, however, an act which the person can carry out once and for all, but it requires a renewed conversion of the mind and a continuous exercise, which transforms a mental act into a mode of being. When this profound choice becomes a continually renewed option, then the human being knows the power of liberty, for “free is the man for whom every event realises itself in harmony with his deep ethical choice” (I, 12, 9). Only by beginning with this primary decision and continual renewal, which puts the human being in resonance with the necessary drive of the human condition, is it possible to find the energy and orientation necessary to seek wisdom in human affairs, a search which constitutes the essential task of being.

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But however significant is the demand to work on one’s orientation to decide on this deep choice, and even assuming we come to this primary ethical option, this is not enough to define in a dynamic way the map of living which the soul feels to be of the utmost importance. It is perhaps this need which is answered by the concept of ordo amoris (Scheler 1957), which indicates the order of values, the order of that which is of worth. The ordo amoris is, for the person’s quality of being, what the formula of glass is for producing glass: it is the nucleus of the person as a spiritual being. Precisely because the ordo amoris defines the axiological horizon of a person, it exerts a performative force on his mode of thinking and feeling, serving as a background to every movement of a person’s being. When the person abstains from the search for that which is of worth, he risks slipping into a disorder of thinking and feeling. Finding the ordo amoris means understanding what is essential, what is key, and so identifying the map we might tap into for direction and measure for our own being. According to the ontological realism of Scheler8 the ordo amoris corresponds to a hierarchy of the things we meet in the world, which have the power to prompt the degree of intensity of our consideration according 8

Scheler’s realist thesis is one of a kingdom, rigorously objective and independent of man, of the ordinate dignities of love and all things, a something which we can only recognise and not make, create, and do, also the “individual determination” of a spiritual subject, singular or collective is something not to make, but exclusively to know (1957). Scheler speaks of “universally valid criteria of measure” and claims the existence of an “individual objective determination” which can be known not only by the subject to whom it belongs, but also by others. This objective interpretation of the ordo amoris is problematic not only on a gnoseological level for someone who has come up within a constructivist vision of things but also on the ethical level, because it leads us to think of the becoming of one’s own being in the form of a movement of reaching for an already established idea of the self, of which an authentic life would be a colour photocopy. Instead, thinking that the ordo amoris is a hierarchy of chosen modes of being brings individual liberty back to centre stage, that liberty which makes living highly problematic but which, however, in rendering the becoming of one’s own being so fragile, is also a sign of its possibility of excellence. Taking a constructivist position does not mean denying the existence of an objective order of values, but maintaining this order to be inaccessible to the individual mind, for its unavoidably situated, local vision. Taking our distance from an objectivist vision does not mean, however, automatically assuming a radically relativist and subjectivist position; the search for the ordo amoris can be seen as a search together with others, which allows itself to be guided by the idea of coming to an intersubjective agreement so long meditated as to bring us as close as possible to the objective vision which only a divine gaze can access.

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to the position they occupy in the axiological hierarchy (Scheler 1957): if however, as is our case here, we hold to a constructivist vision of knowledge, we can see it instead as the order of value of modes of being which we reach through a process of thinking and incarnate subjective action. There are many possible examples of ordo amoris to which consciousness can adhere, and the criterion which decides the direction of our adherence is the idea of the good condition of life which the person pursues. Seeking the order of value of modes of being is a constructivist action which, however, requires a simultaneous work of deconstruction which consists in unmasking and deactivating that of multi-coloured ghosts (Scheler 1957) which latches onto our consciousness, deceiving us as to the direction to be taken. A work of undoing must be undertaken: diverting, removing, and deactivating the being’s tendency to stay on the side of the negative. Given the ontogenetic primacy of the order of values, we cannot allow just any of the perspectives amongst those present in the world we inhabit to impose itself on our consciousness, but this order, which will become the crystallographic formula of our own becoming, should be the outcome of a never-ending work of reflection which comes to constitute the primary direction of the work of self-formation. Seeking the ordo amoris demands a lot of energy and strong determination, which comes from cultivating authentic self-love (Scheler 1957); this is not egotism, but passion for one’s own existential actualisation, that passion which stands in a relation of evolutive cogenerativity with the vital force which nurtures every act of our being. Love for the self is passion for the call, which we feel pressing on our consciousness, to become the best possible form of our own being. Once we find this measure of value, we are still, however, only half way through the work, because at this point we have to seek out those spiritual practices capable of giving form to the movements of life which enact this measure, so that we make a generative matrix of the composition of meaning which we would like life to be. Accepting the responsibility of existence means dedicating our entire life to this search. The concept of an order of values is useful to think about, but keeping the gaze overly-attentive to the principle of finding a hierarchy amongst the possible directions the being could enact, can lead to rigidity of thought, if the search for a presumed definitive axiological formula absorbs the subject excessively, as if the certain order of values of living were something which could be acquired by human consciousness. Thinking that the axiological horizon, that line which guides our path but can never be definitively reached, is a nucleus of knowledge which we can

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master, distorts the process of searching for the art of living. The ordo amoris is an asymptotic idea to which we should turn as a guiding principle, but difficult to grasp in any definitive truth. For this reason, the ideas of María Zambrano might be helpful. Beginning with a reflection on the concept of ordo amoris, she proposes we should continue to seek a method, meaning by method not a framework over which we acquire mastery, but a way of being in the world, precisely our way of walking, always on the path in search of reasonable ideas. Being on the path means seeking the order of valid modes of being but at the same time keeping under surveillance the manner of this search, so that we do not become subject to error as we proceed, errors which would impede us in our authentic search. For Zambrano (2003, 43), who Socratically assumes as an essential principle having care for the soul, the way of care consists in being constantly in search of knowledge of the soul, since it is the heuristic drive which makes possible transformations of the self. If the method were not to bring about any modification of the life of the soul, it would be nothing more than a superficial technique unuseful to the work of living. The art of existing consists in being constantly in search of the right method of being in the world. Incarnating the method of living means being on the path, or in the process of searching, a search which, to allow that composition of meaning to which the soul aspires, must allow itself to be guided by essential questions. Essential questions are those relating to directions of meaning through which we can make real our lifetime: what does good consist of? How do we achieve it? In what does my being find its full and just realisation? Finding some seed of an answer to this question means giving form to the living nucleus of the life of the mind, from which springs the vision of the directions of our being. This living nucleus, so decisive for the quality of one’s own existential enactment, should also be kept under the eye of reflective action, both in order to reach ever better answers and also to identify modes of action which might weave together the threads of meaning found. If the human being were to find himself in the condition of being entirely revealed to himself, he would have no need to think, to take on the questions of meaning, those which lead consciousness to come to terms with his own fragility and vulnerability, with the limits of vital energy and instruments of cognition and praxis which he has available to himself in the face of the drive which everyone feels to realise their time in the best way possible. Insofar as he is undefined, lacking in form, and for this reason called to self-care, the human being cannot avoid posing himself questions of meaning. Seeking answers to crucial questions, those which

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reason senses to be of compelling importance for life, does not mean seeking complex responses which would require sophisticated reasonings; the principle which should inspire our search is that of simplicity, because the essential is to be found in a co-substantial relationship with simplicity. One part of our life’s time should be reserved to dedicating the maximum attention to those lands of thought which have the greatest importance for the person. Instead, it happens all too often that the mind takes in a whole host of solicitations which distract it from what should be the vital nucleus of its search. Allowing ourselves to be distracted with regard to the essential questions, permitting our mental energy to be captured and consumed by secondary questions, means lacking an order of thinking, which becomes translated into a disorder of living. The energy necessary to effectively carry out the business of existing asks us to find what we can put our heart into. Self-care means knowing how to keep our attention concentrated on the vital and substantial questions, by insisting on where we can find cardinal points or orientation for our decisive choices.

The discipline of analysis Once we have identified the essential questions, we need to examine them deeply, being careful to seek answers which are as reasonable as possible, knowing however the inevitably partial and provisory nature of every answer, because the questions which emerge from the compelling need to seek the coordinates to make sense of existence are huge, almost excessive compared to the capacity of human reason. Stating that questions of meaning are huge and that there are no definitive answers available to them does not mean stating that they are destined to remain always and completely open, in the sense that there are no acceptable answers, for if that were the case the thinking that is directed towards them would take on a despairing tonality. If we keep the thought anchored to the desire from which it has its origin, that is the search for a good spiritual life, then it is possible to find answers which, even if they are not definitive, can be seen as valid, since they can constitute solid points that we can lean on in order to orient effectively our action in the desired direction. This path that is life, while it must certainly avoid already structured maps of ways of being which would immobilise the movements of the soul, needs however systems of orientation, and the answers which we find in the course of an authentic search carry out this function. Underlining the provisional nature of these resting points does not mean subtracting value from the answers as we find them going along. Rather it recalls thought,

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insofar as it is the expression of a finite being, to its task, which is to stay continuously in search of the best form of one’s own horizon of meaning. So that the search can move in the right direction, and stay faithful to the unanswerable essence of such questions, it becomes crucial to adopt the principle of humility, that knowledge of never being able to know enough, which assumes the form of being aware of not to know and compels not only a cautiously pondered thought, which knows no hurry or short cuts, but also a method which fits the nature of the object. Here again it is useful to assert the methodical principle which asks us to deal with a question from different angles, circling around it until we perceive the saturation of the process of enquiry. An investigation circling around the object should not be seen as a kind of siege which sees the heart of a question as a fortress to be conquered or wiped out, but a circling around which maintains itself on the external circumference and from there examines the question from different perspectives. Full understanding is achieved only after trying out as many different perspectives as there are infinite angles on a circumference. By going along diverse paths of analysis it is possible to find multiple answers to a single question, a fact which obliges us to examine each of them in order to seek a second order of answers which might bear the traces of the outcomes of the path of differential analysis which has been carried out. If in practising the principle of circling around, the first sensation is that of unease following the discovery that the object is an infinite source of information, the resulting gain consists in coming to the authentic awareness of the interminable nature of essential interrogation. This is something which invites us to consider the time of life as a time of continual research. If we allow ourselves to be guided by the principle of seeking radically and critically, with simplicity and humility, we should manage to structure a horizon of vivid and vital thoughts capable of lighting up just a little the possible directions for our being. Allowing ourselves to be guided by this principle constitutes an essential decision, for only profoundly meditated horizons can become a “vitalizing source of strength in the soul” (Stein 2002, 438). When we reach ideas, which seem to possess a little of that truth of existence that we are seeking, happy intuitions from which seem to spring directions for being which generate meaning, what is left to be done is to make them act, and test them against experience. As Plato states (Phaedrus, 73b), we must experience directly what we perceive with our reason in order to learn something of significance. This testing, however, has none of the logic which underlies scientific experiment, which controls and

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manipulates phenomena, but it is a reflective accompaniment which takes care that ideas and happy intuitions find the ground to flourish in, and which bends thought in the form of attention oriented towards taking from the new experience every element capable of opening up new passages to our being. It is difficult to find answers to the essential questions. It takes time. Sometimes the time required seems excessive and we are aware of an urgency which presses and pushes thought to seize an answer, because the gap of knowing in the art of existence can be unbearable. But nothing works more against us coming out of this situation than the very effort to come out of it. We must sustain ourselves in this situation with a firm heart, accepting that thinking questions of significance implies moments of non-thinking: that suspension of the action of the mind which makes us feel as though we are in a desert. Maybe what can help us bear the emptiness of answers is the feeling that we have when we keep to what is essential, because just as Plotinus spoke of “joy of feeling [ȝĮțĮȡȓĮȞ įȚįȠȪȢ ĮȓıșȘıȚȞ]” (Ennead, VI, 6, 7, 38–39) when the soul orients itself to contemplate the good, in the same way we can experience the joy of thinking when we have the sensation of keeping our thought concentrated on that which is substantial.9 In dedicating ourselves to thinking about the most crucial questions we need not only time, but the capacity to find the right measure of enquiry. If it is true that asking, raising essential questions such as those about meaning, is the most human aspect of human being (Zambrano 2020), nonetheless it is also true that precisely because these questions are unanswerable, that is, constitutionally open, there is the risk of snarling up the mind in excessive questioning, which could end up uselessly corroding our cognitive energy. The Delphic principle of “never too much”, which invites us to seek the right measure for all things, thus imposes itself forcefully for those activities of the mind in which whatever is at stake is the sense of being. 9

Within the perspective of Plotinus, it is difficult to accept that the soul is capable of this feeling and thinking, which is not a thinking insofar as it does not even have a life (Ennead, VI, 6, 7, 43–44). We can reflect on the importance of adopting an attitude which is radically receptive, distended, which alludes to an active passivity, but since being and life, as he states himself (VI, 6, 7, 38–39) are all one, thinking, insofar as it constitutes an essential part of the being of the human, cannot not be in movement. The distension typical of the poetic mind is difficult to distinguish from the heuristic drive of the seminal and vivifying mind which cannot draw back from the urge to seek.

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Given the great effort of thought, there are many deceptions and abysses into which the life of the mind can fall. One of these is giving up asking questions. In order to avoid this risk, we must be vigilant about the form taken by our thought, so that it can cultivate its fundamentally exploratory dimension. Nevertheless, obeying the imperative to ask questions of meaning does not save us from the risk of slipping into a diminution of being, because it may be that we moderate our questions, or seek too little, contenting ourselves with little sense of being. Plato speaks of the need to turn the soul back from the world of appearances in order to look at the sky of the things that are essential, “namely, the one we call the good” (Republic, 518c). We can redefine the meaning of this radical turning back and understand it as a withdrawing of the mind from the comfortable position of accepting what has already been said and the little that makes itself accessible, and risk the new and beyond compared to the immediately available. “Turning around” the mind (Republic, 518d) should be understood as the cognitive practice of interrogating the primary questions of meaning which guide the search for the essential measure of our being. Plato states that the education of the soul should begin in childhood, working to free the mind from all those “leaden weights” which prevent it from soaring high, and freeing it from all the bad habits which impoverish the authentic power of thinking (519a–b). This would be the condition to have experience of a lighter life [ijĮȞȩIJİȡȠȢ ȕȓȠȢ] (518a), which should be the objective of education of the soul. Faced as we are with an impoverished vision of the craft of educating, it is time to meditate upon the words of Plato in order to move ourselves out of a mercantile logic of education and bring back to the centre the task of educating in the search for knowledge of the human, which compels us to learn the art of cultivating the mind through practices of spirituality.

Identifying the vulnerable zones of the life of the mind The life of the mind has its zones of vulnerability: a tendency to nurture obsessions, to comfort itself in illusions, to allow itself to be paralysed by fears unsubstantiated by evidence, to get lost in minutiae without seeking a gaze which would bring out the whole profile of phenomena, and so on. One recurrent risk, which follows on from not being able to sustain the gaze on the quality of the real, is that of cultivating illusions, which is the tendency of the mind to willingly trust statements which are untrue, masking our awareness of the inconsistency of such thoughts. Our own

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acts suffer from moving on an illusory plane, because when we happen to lack adequate ideas for the quality of the real, it is difficult to find the right direction for our own steps. Through a detailed phenomenology of mental life, it is possible to identify the points of greatest vulnerability, in order to look for practices which might reduce or re-shape it. If, for example, we discover in ourselves the tendency to always see something risky or negative in situations that are unforeseen or which do not correspond to our expectations, resulting in our slipping into a state of excessive alarm and inner anxiety, training ourselves to always look for the positive might bring about a different mode of being. If we turn the gaze upon ourselves, we might discover a tendency towards an easy and sudden collapse of inner good sense, with the result that we feel the positive feeling of living diminished, drained even, to the point where we see ourselves compressed into shadowy tonalities; in this case, understanding what vision of things suddenly hooks the mind when a positive frame of mind suddenly vanishes, means going to the root of one of our areas of vulnerability. We can find ourselves seized with fears which chain the mind so much that we no longer feel the lively reality of things and we consume our energy in the useless attempt to push them aside with exhausting effort. Making these fears the object of analysis and trying to understand where they come from are important; but, if our aim is a possible change, it is more meaningful to succeed in finding other terrains for thought and feeling to cultivate, and intensify our attention on them, thus indirectly disempowering the vice-like grip of our fears. Then our mind can breathe once more. Certain vulnerabilities have the effect of fencing life into spaces which do not allow us to grow. There are thoughts which are difficult to bear because they are an obstacle to living, those which present themselves as prohibitions, forbidding us to feel things, to encounter others, to think differently, and to take uncharted paths. Feeling ourselves to be a prisoner of thoughts which limit the free movement of being blocks our energy, and immobilises the tension to life. In the face of the perception of the extreme fragility of human life, and depending on external events which often make our efforts ineffectual, we would like to have a certain level of sovereignty over our own existence, and as human beings we entrust our reason with this task. Precisely because of the heavy investment, which we tend to make in our reason, when we feel it suffering biting thoughts, we suffer a sense of radical helplessness and blame our consciousness for our own ontological weakness, and this cannot help but provoke a sense of anguish. Understanding the origin of thoughts which impede the free flow of existence, and finding the way to not submit to their limiting power, is a

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condition of rediscovering the proper flavour of things and the pleasure of experiencing the new. This search, if carried out with a certain continuity, produces a sense of quiet in the soul, helping to find in it once more a limpid and serene climate (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II, 4), that sense of inner peace that alone allows us to gather the necessary strength to continue the work of the thinking which has care for being. We cannot neglect the fact that the thinking, which we ask to find frameworks to deal with our areas of vulnerability and fragility, is the very same as that at the origin of this feeling. There is in fact a thinking which is as one with the feeling, which reveals to us with great immediateness our ontological quality of inconsistent beings, with gaps in our being. It is from feeling our ontological weakness that a thought springs forth which makes problems of us to ourselves and makes us experience the deep, dark light of metaphysical interrogation, the interrogation which unveils how for the human being, who has set out on the voyage of existing, there is never a definitive berth where he can have access to the knowledge of human things. When thinking finds itself caught up by the need to interrogate itself on the human condition, to capture its essential quality, and thus makes itself a conscious thinking, it finds itself inevitably faced with all the fragility of our being, since it cannot avoid that all things in which it traces the imprint of its essential qualities (thoughts, desires, feelings, projects, relationships…) and on which it concentrates its vital energy, are destined to evaporate like dew in sunshine. It discovers that despite the effort to give substance to our own being, reality conspires to be silent about us and that our flowering soon fades away. The realisation that our being is weighed down by an unresolvable contradiction, since it is caught between the unavoidable urge to do things to be at home in the world, and the inconsistency of its own doing because it is subject to the conditionings of the world and to the usury of time, cannot help but generate suffering: this is the ontological pain, the pain of being-there. It is, then, difficult to think without trembling. Exposed to the perception of the inconsistency of its own existential projectuality, the mind tends to step back, tends to seek comforting thoughts, those which help us to believe that the cosmic space in which we dissolve–the only thing which seems to consist and persist–will retain some flavour of us. Or else we seek refuge in desiring a full possession of being, an impossible form of sovereignty over experience, over the dynamics of constitution of our own being. We would like “a being capable of embracing the totality of the ego’s contents in one changeless present instead of its having to witness the continually repeated disappearance

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of all these contents almost at the very moment they have ascended onto the stage of life” (Stein 2002, 56). Cultivating a thought which has care for the self means not letting oneself be deceived by the de-realising work of the imagination, which does not live in the real, and training oneself instead to resist in order to stay rooted in reality. It is true that human reason cannot bear too much reality, but not for this must it seek refuge in the distracting actions of an imagination caught up with the wish to seek spaces of being which do not belong to the human condition. When, no longer able to bear what is real, we let ourselves be distracted by the deracinating work of the imagination, it is difficult to avoid the unsettling experience of a desiccation of meaning. Self-care means training oneself to bear the thinking that keeps consciousness tied to the quality of our being, and accept being the little that we can, but at the same time engage ourselves in doing everything necessary to give the best form possible, staying open to other possibilities. Accepting the ontological quality of our own being, our own fragility and vulnerability in which is enacted the principle of staying within the necessity of the real, becomes effective spiritual action when it does not resolve into a merely intellectual act, but engages the subject in constructing a creative and ethical relationship with regard to time, a relationship which becomes solid when we act according to how we feel it is good to act. When awareness of the inexorable sliding by of events penetrates the mind accumulating the perception of the inexorable loss of being, having real care means engaging oneself in concretising those modes of being which make time outlined with markers of meaning, and which makes the feeling of life dripping away a little less intolerable. This is how we create a living space where time makes sense: it continues to slide inexorably by but it does not flood, for the meaning of acting remains. The vulnerability of the mind does not just depend on the fact that it produces certain thoughts, is subject to certain emotions, and develops certain cognitive habits which are obstacles to the free flowering of being, but also on a failure to cultivate certain potentialities. Omitting to cultivate reflection aggravates the vulnerability of the mind. In order to be effective in the care for the soul, reflection must become a habit, in the positive sense of the term, a turn of mind trained to be ever present. It is when it becomes a daily act of the life of the mind that it can be of use to the person to deal with the unforeseen parts of the self, those which escape daily examination however rigorous it might be and then

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suddenly leap out, upsetting hard-won and fragile cognitive and emotive equilibriums. There is in the mind, in fact, an unreachable memory which collects experience plunged into an unknowing forgetting which, all of a sudden, imposes the absolutely unforeseen to the gaze of consciousness. Nothing is lost in the life of the mind. And in the moment in which something comes into presence, what has been forgotten might even reveal itself with greater intensity than when it was actually lived. It is in these unsettling moments that the discipline of reflection shows its usefulness, since it saves the subject from having to submit to the shock of the sudden interior event, setting in train the process of self-enquiry which allows us keep the life of the mind, as far as possible, in the sphere of free acts. It is Epictetus who tells us that reflection has the power to reduce, even if by just a little, our vulnerability to ourselves, that is the vulnerability of the mind with regard to its own thoughts. Epictetus states that once you have gained a little time for reflection, you will be able to control yourself more easily (Handbook, 20). If we cultivate the discipline of reflection, we can reduce the power that certain thoughts have to overwhelm us.

Sharing our thinking Since we began to reflect on the fact that we do things with words, in the sense that there is a doing not only with the hands but with the mind (Goodman 1978), we have begun to consider ideas as having a performative power on our mode of being. If we accept that ideas exert a performative power, then we can hypothesise that spiritual work on ourselves to bring about transformations on the being passes through a process of examination and transformation of ideas. The hypothesis of work on ideas to modify them in such a way as to lay the ground for a change, also, in our way of being, currently finds its fundamental reference point in constructivism which, considering as it does, ideas as something constructed by the mind and therefore also deconstructible, legitimises a work on the products of thought which does not limit itself to examining them, but also implies a work of modification. If constructivism allows us to give foundation to the thesis according to which it is possible to modify the life of the mind working reflectively on ideas, social constructivism points to a social environment which generates dialogic relationships as a context which facilitates the learning of spiritual practices. Indeed, if the individualism of constructivist theory is corrected by the intersubjective approach of social constructivism, according to which thoughts, cognitive stances, ways of feeling, aspirations and desires, in other words everything that structures the life of the mind,

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is constructed in relation to others, which is to say to the relational context in which our experience takes form (Steier 1995), then the practice of work on the self should be seen not only in the platonic terms of a silent dialogue of the mind with itself, but also in its social, intersubjective qualities and, therefore, cultivated within a community of thinking practices through which the self-formation is achieved. Just as continuous exchange with others allows the elaboration of knowledge and the internalisation of cognitive capacities which are embodied in social interactions, in the same way an intersubjective comparison facilitates the learning of ways of looking at oneself which might have transformative effects. In order to be able to transform oneself, the reflective action of becoming conscious of the quality of the mind is not enough, because if we were to hold our gaze only upon ourselves, no authentic knowledge could be grasped, nor would we find instruments and techniques to mould ourselves so as to find a better form. We need something else, to nourish ourselves with what is outside ourselves. It is our ontological insufficiency, the reason we irrevocably need relations with others, which demands that the work of the inner gaze be integrated with other gazes, which enlarge our thought into other visions and other possibilities for the interpretation of experience. In order to reach knowledge of the self we cannot stay turned in on ourselves, but need to seek out contact and comparison with others. Socrates says that the soul, in order to learn to have care for itself, must look steadily at another soul, specifically the noble part of the soul, where virtue is generated. This is the part in which eidetic thinking manifests itself, the thinking which seeks essence, and the knowing thought which guides our deliberative processes [IJઁ İੁįȑȞĮȚ IJİ țĮ੿ ijȡȠȞİ૙Ȟ] (Plato, First Alcibiades, 133c). Western culture, since the beginning of modernity, has set great store by knowledge which should be understood as that activity of the mind aimed at acquiring knowledge of the things of the world in order to exercise control over phenomena; at the same time, it has marginalised thought, the meditation on questions of meaning which is at the root of the search for wisdom. But in the noble part of the mind, where virtues can be cultivated, both cognitive activities have their generative matrix. It is always, then, the moment of deciding to have care for thinking, that meditating thinking which is a necessary ingredient in the search for the art of living. The term fronein [ijȡȠȞİ૙Ȟ], which in Greek indicates meditating thought, has the same root as the term which indicates wisdom, that is fronesis [ijȡȩȞȘıȚȢ], which Socrates teaches us to seek through dialogue

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with others. Our thoughts and our feelings always have need of something which only another can give. If we can take as a canonical rule of the cultivation of soul the principle to search for and practice what seems best (Epictetus, Handbook, 22), then the meeting with others becomes essential, because knowing what the best consists in is such as to require as wide a thought as possible, something that the individual alone cannot guarantee. Care for the self implies an ethic of sharing. Precisely because the company of others is a vital necessity for human beings, self-care is not practicable in a condition of isolation, where neither thought nor feeling can nourish themselves and flourish. On the larger question we have to interrogate ourselves interrogating others, in nurturing and exchange, which is radical and courageous. Thinking of self-formation in solipsistic terms would remove all power from the work of thought, because the person is always a being with others. The concrete being of the person is an unceasing being-with, where the becoming of one’s own essential qualities is indistinguishable from the becoming of the qualities of the others with whom we share the space of being. There is an intimate connection between dialogue with others and dialogue with oneself, because it is the encounter with the other that develops the disposition to radical thinking which when practised into ourselves represents the most powerful of the spiritual exercises. Since Socratic dialogue aims at provoking in the interlocutor not only awareness, but also transformations in the mode of thought, and since spiritual practices are exercises moved by a transformative intentionality, Hadot (2002, 39–40) considers the Socratic dialogue as an essential practice for learning spiritual exercise. So, if we could speak of a community of practices of self-formation we should think of contexts inspired by the Socratic art, where what is privileged is the dialogue which provokes profound reflections on the fabric of our own thoughts. In line with the spirit of the Socratic dialogue, in the communities of thought there are no predefined truths to be acquired, but a shared spirit of research which manifests itself in frank and open exchange, in which each person seeks responses to the solicitations of the interlocutor, to test together the value of the ideas and experiment with untried paths of thought. A community of thought is one which invents meaning, which seeks a word that speaks, and so is destined to be an unending process that is both creative and hermeneutic. Almost taking on the method of Cabbalistic readings, a community of thought tends to loosen the crystalline rigidities of thought, enlivening words with bursts of new meaning which give the word back to the word, so that it becomes a word which is speaking rather

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than merely spoken, and thus capable of shining a light with living and never repetitive thought. The individualism which characterises our culture risks leading us to a solipsistic and solitary interpretation of self-care, when what should be emphasised is the need to go beyond the limits of an atomistic vision of the self in order to take account of relational ontology, which conceptualises the plural substance of the human being. Just like our relational substance, the practice of self-care has to situate itself within networks of relations. The self as an object of the practices of self-understanding is not, indeed, a closed and self-sufficient entity, but we might say it is the epiphenomenon of a morphogenetic process situated within networks of relationships. In other words, each self is the emerging form of his lived relationships. Without the other it is impossible to waken oneself to transcendence of the self. If the other is the company which every person needs because alone, he would not even be able to feel, then in that primary ontogenetic work which is self-care, the company of others is indispensable. Without company there is no access even to one’s own self. Relationships with others are a necessary condition not only to know ourselves, but also to find the paths to self-realisation.10 Confining the formation of the self within individual space means remaining closed within the circle of one’s own thoughts, a victim of one’s own beliefs, and slave to our own prejudices. Discussion with others makes us hear different points of view, nourishing possibilities of thought and feeling which would not flourish in the restricted space of a reductively solipsistic self-knowledge. And since, however significant a relationship may be, it only nourishes a part of our own being, cultivating a plurality of encounters, without thereby falling into dispersion, it produces an enrichment of experience which is indispensable to the flourishing of spiritual life. Foucault remarks on the necessity of the relationship with a teacher to enable self-care to take place (2001, 58), as stated in platonic culture. But when looking for a teacher who is competent in the didactic strategies necessary for the pupil to acquire understanding of the various disciplines, 10 Some monastic rules foresaw the need for exchange with others, according to the principle of the collatio. The collatio of spiritual communities is essentially a shared practice of the search for the truth, or at least for a more consistent knowledge concerning an important question through the patient comparison of each point of view with every other. Collation aims therefore to lighten the obscure through the contribution of each person.

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it is very difficult to find a master capable of paideia, that is education; in other words, one who is competent in the art of self-care. The master of self-care takes care of the pupil in such a way as to make him capable of taking passionate care of his own existence, but to have the ability to carry out this education, he himself must be trained in the art of self-care, and with good results. This competence, which is difficult to acquire, is no less difficult to verify, because it would be necessary to identify people capable of demonstrating that with their actions, they have managed to turn some of their pupils into excellent people (Plato, Laches, 186b). For this reason, education, not in the sense of instruction but of paideia, is a continual gamble, just as every movement of existence is a gamble.

Understanding the quality of affective life The emotional side of the life of the mind Where there is life there is movement, vibration, and noise. If we activate the gaze of the mind, we discover that our inner space is never still, or empty, or silent: it is inevitable to find oneself caught up in thought, just as it is inevitable to feel oneself feeling. Feeling has a presence in experience such as to lead us to speak of an excessive density of the life of feeling which envelops the entire experiential field. Our affective experience constitutes us; we are our feelings. We always recognise ourselves in our experience, even when we don’t sense any quality in it. We can venture a mental phenomenological experiment: now, as I write here, I am immersed in writing, and I don’t feel anything, I don’t feel as though I am in any particular condition. But then, if I just stop and think, I see that I am in a precise emotional condition: I can feel the pleasure of thinking or the effort of constructing thoughts. And, if I do not immediately interrupt the reflective thought and immerse myself once more, I can feel something else: I can sense a background feeling, which comes from afar and which lasts and will continue even when I have finished writing. It could be a sense of tranquillity with its scent of the well-being which ties us to the things of the world, or else a corrosive fear of being, of having to face the hugely difficult task of becoming one’s own being, which we sense is crusted over in the tissues of the soul, almost making them turn to rust. This background feeling, which I sense when I let my thoughts go down into the heart of the life of the mind, does not offer itself to my inner gaze as if it began in that same instant in which I grasp it, but as if it were already present, part of the stuff of the soul, even if it is only now that I notice it.

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And I notice it as something which is in front of me objectively, that is like something given, which was also there before. If we focus our thinking on this enduring feeling, we can have the impression of intuiting our own existential profile and, in comparison to this lasting feeling our passing feelings seem to fade away, drained of colour. When I turn my thinking away from this experience at the moment of its happening and reflect on this cognitive experience, I cannot fail to notice that I always find myself in an emotive situation. When we think of the life of the mind, it is easy to make it coincide with its intellectual side, as if the side of feeling were non-existent. But “the heart is the real centre of life”, meaning with this term to indicate not a bodily organ but the affective side of the life of the mind, “the inner being of the soul” (Stein 2002, 437). Stein writes that our soul is by its nature full of feelings, so much so that one continually displaces the other and keeps our heart in continuous movement, often in a state of tumult and unrest (2002, 438). Such is the importance of affective life in existence that the globality of lived experience is strongly influenced by feeling. We are immersed in feeling like a fish in water. Affective experience is throughout the whole of the becoming of the life of the mind and a living part of everything that happens in it: nothing in life is outside feeling. Affective experiences are not transitory or superficial, but co-essential to cognitive life; they are not phenomena which occasionally accompany cognitive acts, but they are a structuring part of these acts, like hail accompanies a storm (Heidegger 1992, 256). Feeling is what makes us feel life, where it is and is not, or where it is not yet. It therefore carries out a function of ontological revelation. According to Heidegger’s thesis, the “emotive situation” or “emotive tonality” constitutes a fundamental existential phenomenon, because the human being as a living creature finds himself always in an emotive state (Heidegger 1962), whose essential quality can span from the pole of depression to the pole of euphoria, passing through anxiety and calm, the sense of security and insecurity, of unease and serenity. In a phenomenological analysis the emotional dimension turns out to be constitutive of our being, in the sense that existence is always emotionally tonalised, to the extent that we can say that “a mood assails us” (Heidegger 1962, 176). Feelings are such an essential part of living that they permeate the whole flow of the mind and colour everything they touch with their quality, every act of thought, whether perceiving or deliberating, conjecturing or remembering. Nothing escapes feeling, because the emotive situation is that to which being in the world is consigned.

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This vision of the quality of experience as always emotionally connoted is contrary to the perception of common sense, which tends to consider as emotive phenomena only those states of being which make themselves apparent to consciousness because they constitute a modification of our normal state, such as joy or sadness, exaltation or anguish, joy or depressive melancholy. In modes of normal experience, those events which do not prompt tangible modifications in our bodily state and in our manner of relating to other people and things are perceived only vaguely (Scheler 1955). The quality of affective life is that it is fluid, difficult to grasp, and invisible to the consciousness, even if it touches consciousness at the deepest level. As a result, it is difficult to note that the soul is always impregnated with feeling, especially when it is a question of feelings which are almost imperceptible, such as an indifferent calm around our daily business, or the subtle melancholy which accompanies certain moments of our lives. Affective experiences are fluid, light of substance, and for this reason, even if they are not noticed, they permeate the flesh of the soul. But theirs is a weighty lightness which makes itself felt heavily on inner experience. Indeed, emotive tonalities, which the subject struggles to grasp because he lives immersed within it, even if they are hard to perceive, have an ontogenetic consistency insofar as they characterise our way of being, that is they bend our being in precise directions and make us decide one way or another in our relationships with the world. States of mind are the feelings in which the person himself lives, in which his ontological specificity expresses itself; not only do they reveal the vital quality of the person, insofar as they serve as indicators of vital energy, but they also have the power to condition existential choices, since they orient us in a particular direction. In certain cases, the effect that feeling exercises on the being is to provoke a slight change of direction, a shift in our existential orientation that does not, however, substantially change our mode of being since it remains at a relatively superficial level of being. There are other cases however, in which, despite their intrinsic fluidity, certain affective experiences demonstrate a force which we feel pressing on the skin of the soul, with the effect of heavily conditioning our mode of being, always marked by the quality of those experiences and so always tending towards a precise tonality of feeling. An important question to be considered then is the performative potentiality of emotional life; precisely because of the importance it has for our very being, we need an appropriate understanding of emotional phenomena.

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The culture of feeling Since the time of antiquity, we have always known how essential feeling is to the life of the mind. In biblical anthropology the heart is the seat of intelligence, so much so that Qohelet says that he has dedicated his heart to searching with wisdom all that happens under the sky, because the heart is the seat of thought. Indeed, he repeats many times, “I thought in my heart”. The importance of feeling, to be exact the idea of the heart as the generator of a feeling which thinks, is widely present in the culture of the Gospels. In Matthew we read that essential teachings are things which are “sown in the heart” (13, 19) and that therefore, there is a serious problem when the heart has “hardened”, because “there is no understanding except with the heart” (13, 15). Significant actions are always preceded by decisions in which feeling plays a determining role; indeed, when Jesus decides to carry out the miracle of the multiplying of fish he does so because he feels compassion for the people (13, 32). And it is compassion that prompts the Samaritan to care for the other man. When we hear the true word, the word which speaks essential things, we keep it within our heart. This is what Mary does; after listening to the shepherds, “she kept all those things meditating upon them in her heart” (Luke 2, 18). Essential thinking, then, is that which takes place in the heart, and vice versa, the heart which helps in the business of living is that which thinks. Nor can we forget that Dante, in order to undertake his journey, needs the presence of Lucy, who moves his heart and sets him on his way. We cannot undertake the journey of the search for the meaning of life without the participation of the heart. Dante assigns feeling a primary function at an ontological level, because when he writes of “the love which moves the sun and other stars” (Paradise, XXXIII, v. 145), he identifies in the sentiment of love what moves the world, what gives life. Even before Dante, we find Plotinus conceptualising an intelligence “which loves [ȞȠ૨Ȣ ਥȡ૵Ȟ]”, which unfolds in a receptive intuition of the essence of the object (Ennead, VI, 6, 7, 24). Obscure but interesting is the observation that this intelligence “always possesses thinking, but also ‘not thinking [IJઁ ȝ੽ ȞȠİ૙Ȟ]’” (Ennead, VI, 6, 7, 30), that is, a thought which does not follow the rules of normal intelligence. Aside from the fact that the way in which Plotinus describes this intelligence is very close to the thought of the mystics, since he hypothesizes the possibility of a contemplative fusion with the object, what is of interest in this conceptualisation is the way it foresees a thinking which suggests the idea of a poetic reason, a reason which knows how to love the real, which

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keeps itself apart from normal modes of reasoning and tends to entrust itself to compelling conceptualisations. If feeling is the thing in which all things find connection, the glue that keeps together different moments and planes of experience, then, in order to develop the heuristic capacity which knows how to adhere to the complexity of the real, the intelligence must perforce avail itself of the gaze of feeling: being in things and loving them. Over time, however, our culture has gradually developed a negative conception of affective life, considered as the irrational part of human experience which had as far as possible to be anaesthetised in order to guarantee an efficient and effective existential stance. For this reason, attention has for a long time been almost exclusively on phenomena of knowing and the will (Heidegger 1992, 256). One of the metaphors long used to account for the relationship between emotions and reason is that of master and slave, with the wisdom of reason engaged in controlling the dangerous impulses of the emotions (Solomon 2008, 3). Speaking of a person as a feeling and emotive subject, still implies a label which defines him in negative terms. Only over the last few decades has the cultural attitude with regard to the sphere of the emotions shifted, for we now no longer tend to consider them as irrational components, but as intelligent aspects of life. This new interpretative paradigm has penetrated every field of enquiry current in various professional contexts, even in those which have always been hostile or indifferent with regard to emotional life.11 In place of a neutral, emotionally ascetic cognition, today we tend to conceive of living thought as an emotionally dense thinking, for if emotions need thought in order to illuminate experience, thought without emotions would not be able to penetrate reality. For Heidegger (1962, 177), pure intuition–if we agree that it is a truly practicable cognitive act– is not able to penetrate the most intimate structures of lived experience, as on the other hand would be possible for a thought which activates the dimension of feeling. A “purely rational knowledge” with no “inner feeling”

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Epistemology, which has long theorised a neutral mode of heuristic acts in that this was regarded as a condition for acquiring objective knowledge, now recognises legitimacy in what is defined as passionate knowing; this does not mean authorising a flood of emotions into the encounter with the other and, in general, in actions of research, because affectivity which becomes an effective instrument of research strengthening our knowledge of things is accompanied by reflection which considers what happens in the mind and in the relationship with the world.

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(Stein 2002, 437) remains pinned to the surface of things, incapable of a deep understanding of human events. For the development of a philosophy of the emotions, we should not forget the essay which William James wrote in 1884, with the title What is an emotion? This has always been a difficult question to answer: should we think of emotions as intrusive or essential to rationality, capable of constructing meaning or dangerous, to be avoided or to be considered part of our responsible being? (Solomon 2008, 10). With regard to the positive re-evaluation of feeling, Heidegger (1962, 179) attributes merit to phenomenology (Max Scheler and Edith Stein have been attentive analysts), but he points out that we owe the first systematic hermeneutics of the world of affect to Aristotle. It is Martha Nussbaum who brings to light the contribution of Aristotle, beginning with his dispute with the position taken by Plato, who has developed the Aristotelian position in an original and analytically detailed way. For Plato, the possibility of reaching an epistemically rigorous practical wisdom required the elimination, or at least the reduction, of the power exercised by affect, considered as a source of uncontrollable dangers. Aristotle, on the other hand, not only disputes this negative judgement of emotions, but considers the responsiveness of emotions as an important and necessary part of good deliberation (Nussbaum 1986, 307). The cognitive act of choice is described as an act which is intellectual and emotive at the same time. Faithful to the theory according to which we can speak of moral sentiments, Nussbaum believes that the responsiveness of emotions offers an essential contribution to the deliberative act, because it allows us to focus on ethically relevant features of the phenomenon in question (1986, 308). Depriving the practical intellect of the contribution of affect means losing many elements useful in a proper orientation of praxis. In re-evaluating affective life, for the contribution it can make to the understanding of experience, it is however necessary not to fall into a position which rather than devalue it, would lead us to place unconditional faith in feeling. Every vision of things, precisely because it moves from a framework of presuppositions, is always partial. For this reason, in adopting a positive vision of affective life, we need to remember that certain emotions can act as an obstacle to correct action. We find a vivid example of the erroneous power of some passions in The Trojan Women of Euripides, where we read that what pushed the Achaeans to unacceptable cruelty was their blind trust in an unfounded fear which has obscured reason, and Hecuba states that it is not praiseworthy to fear without just motive (1165–1166). There are negative feelings which weigh heavily on

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our course of action. Negative feelings are those which interrupt good relations with others and with the world: negative feelings promote suffering in relationships, and trigger threatening actions to the point of destroying the good quality of life. We live in relationships and marking relationships with negativity means compromising the quality of life. Affective acts are useful for thought, becoming instruments of intelligence of the real, when they are the object of a reflective analysis which understands their essential quality. Simply being within an emotion does not help us to throw light on the situation in which we are living. The mode of being, in contrast to a widespread view which considers it to be determined from outside, is, rather, prompted by the inner part of a person and, when we are speaking of feelings, by the most intimate part of this inner part. The greatest danger for a person’s being lies in those pressures on life which emanate from within, without however revealing themselves, without showing their faces. Some feelings are like rocks of slavery which we carry around with us without being aware of the power they exercise over us: they consume energy, they press on the soul, they decide the direction of the path that is life. Engaging in the discipline of self-enquiry means deciding on a life that is aware, which does not let itself be moved by what is unknown and what has not been freely chosen. Learning the discipline of self-understanding of emotional life becomes decisive for love of the freedom of a life lived in full awareness.

Reflecting on feeling Affects are considered as a resource, but we have to get to know them if they are to be as such. Listening to our own affective experiences helps us to construct a deeper sense of reality and to mature a more refined understanding of our own experience. If we just stop to think about our existential situation, we cannot fail to find ourselves emotionally situated, that is consigned to the feeling of our situation, and for this reason we can speak of evidence of the emotive situation (Heidegger 162, 175). But feeling ourselves to be in an emotive situation is not to be confused with understanding ourselves reflectively. Feeling happens for the most part in an unreflective state. With regard to this state, of immediate situational self-perception, we can decide in favour of the practice of self-enlightenment in which consists reflective awareness. Gaining awareness with regard to our own mode of being requires the subject to stop and think about his own emotive situation in order to understand it.

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The search for the “reflective apprehending” of our emotional lived experience (Heidegger 1962, 176) transforms us from simple living beings unreflectively immersed within the flux of life, into existing subjects, who answer to the necessity of the human condition to understand how we are when we live a certain experience. Engaging in a phenomenology of affective life means understanding how the weariness of living or the joy of living, the sense of pleasure for experiences lived or the inner inertia which immobilises the soul manifests themselves; understanding the origin of a certain feeling and what consequences it has for my mode of relating to myself, to others and to the world. When passions do not go hand in hand with reflection, we risk submitting to them passively, whilst the exercise of reflective discipline produces the effect of reducing and in certain cases transforming the tendency to let ourselves be dominated by them, and allows us to gain a reasonable capacity for temperance (Plato, Phaedrus, 69b–c). It is perhaps not by chance that in Phaedrus Plato uses the term fronesis that in the Greek language indicates at the same time thought and wisdom; there is, indeed, a thinking which is not reasoning, but thoughtful reflection which, having care for the object (for frontizein indicates both “thinking and reflecting, having care and being concerned”), can be a generator of wisdom. Living the affective dimension in full awareness helps us to stay within reality in a more vivid and penetrating way, and can resolve in a positive fashion the energies that would otherwise be engaged in keeping affect at bay; in addition, it reduces the risk of impulsive behaviours which are also the consequence of a sparse education in self-reflection. But in order to hypothesise a process of understanding of affective life, it is essential to evaluate if it has the necessary characteristics to be subject to a process of analysis, or if it is of such elusive and labile material that it cannot be grasped rationally in its essential quality. If we follow Hannah Arendt, the work of reflection on emotional experience is impracticable because, in her view, feelings and passions cannot become part of the world of appearances as happens with thought, which makes itself visible within language. What becomes manifest in the world of emotional experience is only what is elaborated through the operation of thought; in other words, the emotions I feel cannot show themselves in their essence, but are altered by the reflective act which works to make them thinkable (Arendt 1978, 31). Arendt’s thesis evokes Rilke when he says that it is not given to us to know “the actual, vital contour of our own emotions–just what forms them from outside” (2009, Fourth elegy, 23). Arendt’s thesis about the impossibility of having access to the essential quality of affective life rests on an extra-cognitive vision of emotional

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experience. If we conceive of affective life as a flow of experiences which have nothing in common with cognitive life, it becomes difficult to hypothesise a process of comprehension, since cognition would struggle to grasp the quid of something totally extraneous to it. If instead we refer to a neo-Stoic theory of the emotions (Nussbaum 1994), we open up the possibility of understanding emotional experience, because to them is attributed a nucleus of cognitive substance.

The cognitive nucleus of emotional life The thesis of neo-Stoic theory is that emotional experiences are not irrational impulses which drag a person’s being independently of his convictions, but instead have a cognitive substance in that they are closely connected to beliefs fundamental to the person, that is to say to ethical convictions which define what has importance and what has not (Nussbaum 1994, 38). For example: judging the quality of a person as excellent awakens in the subject of the evaluative act admiration for that person; finding oneself in a situation which the mind judges to be dangerous triggers feelings of fear; and judging an experience to which we have dedicated a lot of our energy to be a failure generates a sense of discouragement which can lead us to undervalue our own capacities, a feeling which swiftly becomes a lessening of self-confidence. At first glance then, affective experiences may seem elusive and ungraspable, ready to vanish as soon as we seek to understand them, nonetheless if they are observed beginning with a cognitive paradigm of affective life, they become graspable, on condition however that we do not attempt to compress them within a defining reason, and instead activate a poetic reason which approaches its object with a method suited to the material and with care for the words we use to nominate the essence of affective acts. According to Epictetus, behind every action, whether it be interior or social, there is judgement (Discourses, I, 11, 30–33); so, the first task is to verify the value of the judgements, and when we are not convinced that they are right we will not undertake the actions that follow from them (I, 11, 37). Emotions, feelings, moods and passions can be irrational when the beliefs on which they are founded are false or unjustified, but they are not irrational in the sense that they lack cognitive components. Exponents of the phenomenological school who have dealt with the theme of affective life in general share the thesis of the cognitive substance of emotional life. Dietrich von Hildebrand in particular maintains that every attitude and, in general, every cognitive act of a certain importance

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for the person depends on the type of attribution of value conferred on the object to which they refer, that is, its position in the scale of values (1922). If we accept this concept, then what thought should concentrate on above all is the order of things of value which constitute our reference points, with the aim of examining their appropriateness, and at the same time the cognitive acts through which these scales of value are modified in time. Edith Stein, too, in developing the interest that phenomenology has shown in affective life, gives voice to this cognitive vision of the emotions, claiming that feeling is a state of the I which motivates its vital flux, and gets its strength to put the person in movement from the fact that it is always connected to a value: “To each value corresponds an act of feeling in which the latter comes to a state of givenness” (2001, 175). The essence of affective acts–essence meaning the qualities that are essential to a thing and without which it cannot be–would then be that of the being founded in values and it is as such that they exercise a force in the activity of reason (Stein 2000, 202). Taking this theory as a starting point, we can hypothesise that the intensity with which a feeling is lived, and, therefore, the influence which it exercises on the person’s being, is directly proportional to the place which that value, the affective act of which is expression, occupies in the person’s axiological hierarchy. In other words, the more important a value is for a person, the greater is the force exercised by the affective act connected to it, because the “depth of feeling depends on the height of the felt value, just as its force and its specific coloration depend on the particular nature of that value” (Stein 2000, 192).12 The propulsive strength of a feeling, the urge for action which affective acts are capable of triggering, awakening in the subject an act of will, depends on the type of value to which it is connected (Stein 2000, 192). If 12

I can recognise the value of a work of art, but without this arousing any enthusiasm or aesthetic pleasure in me; a sign, this, that the aesthetic value does not hold sufficiently vital importance for me to modify the quality of my emotional experience. I can recognise an act of injustice and identify the suffering it causes certain people, without however being able to be indignant enough to make a decision to act; a sign, this, that justice does not occupy an important position in my scale of values. If a person happens to be a slave to a deceptive vision of the scale of values, it is through the analysis of experience that he can clarify the real axiological weight of certain convictions. Since moral feelings depend on our own axiological coordinates, in the sense that the vital force of a feeling depends on the vital force of the content to which this feeling is connected, and since the vital force of a value depends on the position it occupies on our axiological scale, then a self-formative action on moral sentiments presupposes an attentive reflection on our own axiological architecture.

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I judge an experience to be positive for my being, I can feel such a sense of joy that, depending on the type of judgement to which the affected judgement is connected, this experience assumes a strength capable of rendering operative the proposition that I might cultivate other experiences of this kind. It is by virtue of its cognitive essence, that is, it depends on a judgement, that we can say that feeling is not irrational. In other words, precisely because feeling incorporates ideas of value, emotional life cannot be considered the seat of confused states, of obscure and indeterminate ferments in which reason cannot intervene. Rather, since feeling is the expression of options of value, thought can act by working on its axiological coordinates. Saying that feeling is rational, in the sense that it incorporates a cognitive nucleus, does not authorise us however to attribute in all cases a positive value to affective experiences, as the currently voguish term “emotional intelligence” seems to imply, because the positive or negative valence on our way of being depends on how the mind has arrived at giving assent to a value or to a certain scale of values. There are in fact values which we absorb from the environment without proper due reflection; or else, certain values, even if they receive our assent following a critical analysis, can over time become crystallised cognitive elements which we apply almost automatically, without dedicating ourselves to a sufficiently rigorous check of their foundations. When feeling depends on this type of values, which sees the person passively submitting to them, then we cannot speak of intelligence of feeling, a quality which is appropriate, rather, a sentiment that comes out of an evaluative act which depends on the mind referring itself to profoundly meditated values. Given these premises, we can state that working to identify the hierarchy of our own values and identifying the quality of the affective acts related to it means fully grasping the dynamics of one’s own emotional life. If we agree that the individual identity of a person, which structures his deepest essence, is given by his preferences of value, then concentrating the attention of the process of self-enquiry onto what really matters to us means finding a path by which to access the most intimate nucleus of our own being. Delineating the profile of our own ordo amoris, therefore, or those “rules of preferring or deferring certain values” which go towards configuring the vision of the world and with this, determining the mode of our own being (Scheler 1957), becomes an essential action in the practice of self-care.13 13

For those who embrace a realist perspective, the ordo amoris is the nucleus or order which the mind can grasp since it is impressed in things; Scheler speaks of values inherent to things (1955) and of existing dignities of love (1957) accessible

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If we conceive of the order of values as something without which life would be impoverished, then attention to one’s own axiological horizon assumes existential primacy. In a culture such as ours, where mercantile logic has the power to disqualify values exactly as the natural mechanical vision disqualifies intuitive and sensitive qualities (Scheler 1955), it might seem to be a vain path of self-formation as suggested here, working above all to model one’s own order of values. But paideia has never been current discourse, compelled–as Socrates showed us–to structure itself as a radically critical orientation with regard to the current prevailing gods. Faced with the prevailing interpretation of life which is all too often excessively focused on action and business, where stopping to think becomes less than useful, the process of self-formation can help us to find meaning and direction for one’s own becoming in orienting us to deal thoughtfully with the order of values on which depends the quality of our being, and so avoid, as far as is possible, that disorder in matters of sentiment (Scheler 1957) which is at the root of a disordered existence. Together with the neo-Stoic vision and the phenomenological vision of emotional life we find a psychological perspective characterised as a “cognitive theory of the emotions”, according to which emotions have a cognitive substance, constituted by judgements which the subject makes of events and phenomena of lived experience (Oatley 1992). According to to a mind which is capable of ordering in a proper way the acts of knowledge, because the order of things would be at first sight hidden, but possible to discover (1957). For a constructivist, on the other hand, like every cognitive act, the one which presides over the constitution of one’s axiological order is also a constructive act, and therefore almost limited by the framework of ideas which are the starting point for the subject to think and to know. If the limit of constructivism is that if it is not fully thought through it risks radical relativism, the risk of realism is that it induces us to hold that an isomorphic vision of the axiological structure which is the nucleus of the order of the world (1957) is accessible to the human mind. The realist thesis, if not critically meditated, produces at the individual level the presumption of being able to accede with certainty to the order of the value of things and at a collective level, certain fundamentalisms which impede the creation of dialogically constructive relations between different perspectives. When the mind believes it has reached the vision of an objective of values, we notice a stagnation of spiritual becoming which can degenerate into madness, which envelops and inhibits thought in an unfounded presumption of knowledge. Good self-care cannot then do without a gnoseological reflection, which it embodies by a radical thinking of the real possibilities of human reason. Thus, the thesis of the need to reflect on the life of the mind is strengthened in all its formative valence, for in order to know how to think correctly it is necessary to know the potentialities, as well as the limits, of reason.

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this cognitive theory, fear, for example, is a consequence of an evaluation of a situation as dangerous; joy is experienced when the subject judges a situation to be generative of well-being; and indignation, which can be defined as a moral sentiment, is the result of evaluating an event as unjust and intolerable. The so-called moral sentiments are those in which we see most clearly the cognitive substance of emotional life, but an attentive phenomenological analysis of emotional content shows that even the feeling least elaborated on the rational plane, that is, those emotions which seem merely to be a response to external events, reveal a cognitive content. Oatley (1992, 19) writes that “the nucleus of an emotion is a mental state beneath which, as happens for the majority of mental states, only limited aspects are conscious.”14 While Frijda (1986) considers emotion as a process constituted by codification of the event, evaluation of its importance, evaluation of meaning, preparation for action, and action, Oatley (1992, 22) suggests considering emotion as a mental state of preparation for action based on an evaluation, which in order to be understood in its essential quality, can imply, as well as identification of the underlying evaluation, a phenomenological analysis of its mode of manifestation, but must be uncoupled from consideration of other aspects, conditions of activation, elements of accompaniment and sequences of action. Since the evaluative act which accompanies the emergence of an emotion prefigures the possibility of actions which unfold themselves to the consciousness of the subject, it is essential to learn to understand the quality of our evaluative acts, going back, as far as is possible, to the frame of often implicit criteria which are the silent background to our decisions. This process of understanding of the cognitive processes which accompany emotive experience is essential if we are to acquire selfknowledge, understood as awareness of our own existential modes. Discursive psychology, too, lends support to the thesis whereby understanding of the emotions implies understanding of the underlying 14

In fact, a phenomenological analysis reveals the complexity of emotive experiences. These frequently imply a physical modification which involves the autonomous nervous system and other physiological processes; they become visible through bodily modifications (facial modifications, tone of voice, physical gestures); they can involve a focalisation of attention on the experience which absorbs attention almost completely, etc. (Oatley 1992, 19). The attention reserved here for the cognitive side of affective life rests on the assumption that, in order for a process of self-understanding to take place, the subject must focus attention on the evaluative nucleus, since on the evaluation of the lived event depends not only the quality of the affective experience but also the decisions and actions which flow from it.

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cognitive nucleus. Discursive psychology deals with the emotions as entities that are psychologically equivalent to statements (Harre and Gillet 1994). The emotions are conceived as manifest expressions of judgements and in many cases, although not in all, they are modalities by which to realise certain social acts. If the emotional phenomenon implies a cognitive phenomenon, in the sense that the quality of feeling which we experience is always connected to a specific cognitive content, which generally presents itself in terms of an evaluation with regard to the event that the subject is living, then we can hypothesise that it is also possible on the emotional dimension to intervene in transformative terms, since in working to modify cognition we have the effect of a modification of emotional experience. Precisely by studying the theme of emotions from a neo-Stoic and cognitive perspective, and situating this analysis within a reflection on self-care which has ancient philosophies as its matrix, we can see the decisive value of judgements on the dynamics of emotional life. The way that we are depends on the judgements we formulate with regard to events, whether external or internal. Keeping the judgements that we make under the vigilant gaze of thought, trying to understand which theories they rest on and what the implications are for the quality of our lives, therefore constitutes an essential, if not primary, cognitive commitment. A commitment which has positive effects on the being if it is continuous over time, if one perseveres, is honest in analysis and radical in following a knowledge faithful to the quality of the experiential phenomenality examined. The thesis which holds that by working reflectively on the cognitive nucleus of the emotions we can prompt transformations in our way of feeling, can be accused of rationalism. Certainly, the risk of an overevaluation of the possibilities of reason is possible, since rationalism is something which we have in the blood far more deeply than we believe; nonetheless we cannot help but appeal to cognitive resources because this would mean treating the emotional side of experience as something absolutely ungovernable. And so, without falling prey to false rationalistic illusions and knowing that only a few instants of sovereignty over our being are conceded in return for a constant work of the thought, it is a question of cultivating the transformative potentialities which thought can have on our being in the world.

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Affective self-comprehension The object of affective self-comprehension Focusing on the essence of the process of self-comprehension of emotional life means two things: what to examine and how to develop the analysis. We could avoid considering the first question if we assumed that a good practice of self-enquiry should take as its object our entire emotional life. A total process of self-clarification would certainly fully realise the objectives of the process of self-comprehension, but this constitutes an immense objective for human reason; and giving ourselves objectives on such a scale means risking not gaining any glimmer of comprehension and remaining in the dark about ourselves. It is more sensible to identify within the geography of emotional life those aspects on which it would seem more useful to focus our attention. Before dealing with such a question however, we should make clear that when we enter into the field of affective life, we come up against the difficulty of finding terms used in different ways and referring to different conceptualisations, making it difficult to find a shared categorisation of the various affective phenomena. Certainly, it is not easy to establish clear distinctions between the various affective experiences. The words emotions, feelings, states of mind or affective tonalities denote phenomena not always clearly distinct one from the other. What’s more, in some texts the term emotion is used to indicate what in other texts is indicated with the word “feelings”, while in other cases feelings are made to correspond with states of mind. Despite the limits of every possible effort to operate clear distinctions, it is still useful to attempt a categorisation of emotive phenomena since, even if as always it should be viewed as provisional, not only does it help to bring order into our discourse, but it constitutes a necessary condition in order to effect a phenomenological analysis of emotional experience. From a phenomenological analysis of experience, it is possible to identify criteria to establish differences within the flux of affective life. Experiences are differentiated on the more or less active or reactive position in which the subject finds himself with regard to the object of feeling. There are affective experiences with which we express reactions to events, others we deliberately cultivate with regard to specific objects, and others which come as if from afar, from the depths of the soul, and still others which take intimate hold of us and push us towards an elsewhere, as if tugging us. Even while we know that this is only one of the numerous possible criteria of order, on this basis we can identify a

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different essence for the following affective acts: emotions, sentiments, passions and affective tonalities. With the expression “affective tonalities” we can identify a feeling which connotes, like a climate, the colour of the life of the soul, even if we cannot identify an object or a precise direction towards which this feeling directs the soul. Affective tonalities are states of mind with no object, that is, “objectless mood” (Nussbaum 2001, 24), those which Scheler defines as “spiritual feelings”; for example, melancholy and beatitude (1955) can be considered as emotive tonalities. Affective tonalities can be defined as the intimate qualities belonging to a person, the way in which the person feels life: our soul can have a tendency towards melancholy or lightheartedness, to anxiety or serenity, to tension or placidness. The affective tonality is not situational in the sense of being tied to an event and the thought I have of that event, but it is a way of feeling intimately connected to a way of interpreting life, the way the soul has of breathing life. Affective tonalities are like the colour of the life of the soul. Different emotions can assail me during the day, passions which seize hold of me to the point of unbalancing inner life, sentiments in which I invest my energies, but under all of this is still the affective quality of my being, which permeates everything. Affective tonalities can be more or less persistent; the most enduring ones constitute the substrata of the life of the mind. Identifying and examining the most persistent ones allow us to outline our own intimate affective profile.. The term emotion can indicate a sudden feeling of varying duration, which manifests itself as a result of something suddenly happening which involves us and activates our sensitive receptivity. Emotions always imply an intentional thought, which is to say a thought directed to an object, with regard to which we exercise a form of judgement (Nussbaum 2001, 23). So we can identify an object to which the emotion refers, but not a precise, intentionally followed directionality. We can say, in Heidegger’s terms, that emotion has a clear “whence” but not a “whither” to which the subject intentionally directs himself. But even if it is of short duration, an emotion can be of great intensity; in these cases, the moment remains written in the flesh and the memory of it alone is enough to reactivate the perception of the quality of the affective act. Sentiment is an affective act cultivated in full awareness by the mind in the process of weaving relations with the objects of our experience: other people above all, but also things. Sentiments are: admiration, indignation, love, and diffidence. We are relational beings, and our way of being in relations is guided by an urge to interpret and live them in a particular way. Sentiment is an affective act with which we direct ourselves to the

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other in a particular way; it is therefore not a relative act like emotion, but nurtured by the find in full awareness. It can be purposeful, when a precise object to which we refer can be identified: we admire someone, or we are grateful for something; it can be tensional when the mind is kept oriented outwards. Tensional hope is not that which is oriented towards something precise, but a sentiment which keeps the being open to the possibility to become fully; there is trust in a particular person and there is trust in the openness of the possible. Sentiments can be distinguished between relational sentiments which are directed towards others, and ontological sentiments, turned towards being, towards the things which are. While relational sentiments define the quality of relations, ontological sentiments make us take up a precise position towards existence. There is gratitude towards a friend and gratitude towards life; there is resentment towards a particular person and there can also be resentment towards the condition in which we find ourselves living. When an ontological sentiment is cultivated over time it can become a tonality of the soul and so come to characterise the essence of inner life. Passions, too, direct the being towards something according to a certain direction, but the tendency to undergo rather than reach out prevails here, since in these cases the intensity of feeling is such as to subject the mind to the point of feeling oneself pulled along by it. Passions are forces which the heart suffers, in the sense that it is subject to the force of intense experiences such as jealousy, hatred, terror, and euphoria, which in certain cases have the power to raise the human being’s urge to chance. According to the intensity of the passion we can be overwhelmed, and in this case the possibility of the mind to move according to free acts is reduced, if not annulled. A passion can be defined as an excessive feeling because it is precisely this excess, while it can move the energies of the soul as necessary to effect something which the subject deems important, which means at the same time it can trigger negative behaviours, destroy the state of wellbeing and cause suffering. Passions are to some extent problematic because of the intensity and force they express; because of this intimate excessiveness they are devouring and can end up annihilating the will itself. In this sense, passions are irrational, and lead us where reason would not have us go. Nonetheless, like every other affective act passions, too, can be the object of regulation by reason because, as Plutarch comments, the passionate part of the soul can allow itself to be modelled by the rational part (On Moral Virtue, 442c). The practice of thinking about what we are feeling can reduce the powerful force of a passion.

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Precisely because passions are feelings which lack measure, one of the virtues to be cultivated is temperance, which consists in being able to give the right measure to passions, and to moderate them (Plato, Phaedo, 68c). Passions originate from disordered desires or immoderate fears which push us to excess and enslave the soul, making the subject who lives them passive. They unbalance the soul because they lead to excess, which we see when feeling becomes uncoupled from reflective thought, the one which contains and gives measure. In this sense passions can be defined as feelings which have removed themselves from the regulatory and containing function of reflective reason. We can define them as habitual folds of the will: they have a disturbing effect because they are not always in harmony with the preferences of value in which we recognise ourselves or would like to recognise ourselves. Passions, however, are not only problematic elements of being in the world, because nothing of significance is done without nurturing great passions. Passion is a vital tension, a dynamic energy capable of moving the being of the subject towards something which is judged to be of particular value: for this reason, we can speak of passion for thinking, passion for politics, passion for art and so on. Certain passions are moved by desires which respond to the call to construct worlds of meaning. Working on the passions means, then, examining desire, identifying its object and judging if and to what extent it has value in the existential work of composition of the meaning of life. Going back to the source of desires means understanding the generative nucleus of our tensional energies. Every emotive experience is worth examining. Emotions, because they immediately reveal to us criteria of value; affective tonalities, because they indicate the colour and hue of a person’s emotional life; and no less important are sentiments and passions, because they have the power to direct our mode of being in specific directions. If an analysis of the emotive tonalities tells me how I am, an analysis of sentiments tells me something about my fundamental orientation, my tensions and my relational consistency, while the analysis of passions provides me with an idea of what keeps me in tension, or unbalances me, or perhaps makes me suffer because it pushes me into excess. According to the implications of emotional experiences for the quality of being, we can distinguish between feeling positive and feeling negative (a distinction we find in many authors, such as Heidegger and Zambrano): positive ones are good for the soul, allowing us to feel pleasure in relations; while negative ones obstruct the possibility of a good relation with the self or with others. Then there are those which Simone Weil defines as “base sentiments, such as envy, resentment and rancour, which

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are nothing other than degraded forms of energy” (2004, 175) which while it desiccates the life of the mind, also pollutes relational space, generating useless suffering. As for the function they serve with regard to the being, we can say that positive sentiments and affective tonalities feed the full flowering of the soul, while negative sentiments disturb the state of well-being and yet can constitute positive experiences for one’s own existential self-realisation if they become the object of a conscious and critical re-elaboration from which we can gain attitudes oriented constructively towards existence. Low sentiments, on the other hand, always serve a negative function, for they consume inner energy to no purpose, with the frequent result of degrading intersubjective relations. Stein also suggests distinguishing emotional experiences according to the degree of depth in which they find themselves collocated in our being, insofar as it is structured in more intimate and deep parts and more external and superficial parts. At the centre of the person Stein identifies the soul and states that feelings born in the soul have the quality of being “profound”, and for this they permeate the entire being, while feelings which do not spring from these depths would be “peripheral” and, as such, do not characterise the essence of a person (Stein 2001, 185). Affective tonalities and sentiments which develop in the depths of the soul, where we find the thoughts which characterise the intimate essence of spiritual life, are defined as “fundamental” (184) because evident in them is the individual particularity of a person. Von Hildebrand defines as “profound” all that which not only develops in a person’s depths, but presents greater weight than the rest (1922). Nussbaum (2001, 5) elaborates an analogous distinction when she establishes a difference between “background” and “situational” emotions. This theoretical distinction expresses a truth, because when we think of ourselves and what happens to us, we can sense that some modes of feeling are truly ours and characterise us, having a deep root within our soul. The typology of affective experience can similarly be deep or situational. We can live a restless ease of short duration because it is tied to a clearly defined event, such as the falling of snow which muffles the sounds of the world or the falling of petals from a cherry tree in the wet winds of spring, or we can feel the same quality of unease permeate the soul in its depths and accompany every superficial experience. We can live a superficial cheerfulness which leaves no footsteps on the soul, or else feel ourselves permeated by a spiritual joy which comes from the heart of the mind. We can feel bitterness for something which has struck us without this leaving any lasting effect, such that other emotive tonalities

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immediately have the upper hand in the mind, or it can happen that we feel the entire soul to be bitter, retracing the generative matrix of this bitterness in a painful evaluation of our living which has finished by rooting itself in the flesh of the mind. There are moments in which these deep experiences are so intense as to flood our entire inner space, to the point of colouring every other peripheral experience. Deep affective experiences are those attached to the flesh of the mind and which as such characterise us, which is to say they speak of our essential affective quality; situational affective experiences are those tied to particular experiences, more or less on the spur of the moment, which do not touch the nucleus of our most vital beliefs. If we accept this distinction, then an essential part of the process of self-comprehension should be dedicated to identifying those modes of feeling which mark us and, amongst these, those which are fundamental, deep, which we find ourselves living with greater intensity and continuity. Identifying fundamental affective experiences means grasping one’s own affective coloration, because essential experiences reveal “the imprint of the individual characteristic” (Stein 2001, 180). It is not easy to grasp these essential states and distinguish them from situational ones, but succeeding in understanding what they are and what is this deep quality of feeling means going back to our own essential individual quality. We can hypothesise that in each of us there exists a heart of the life of the mind whose substance is given by our fundamental convictions and by the feeling that accompanies them. Seeking to identify fundamental affective experiences means, then, seeking to come as close as possible to the most intimate nucleus of the heart of the mind, where are gathered all our beliefs concerning what has value in life, and this work of gradually coming closer and closer to the living nucleus of our inner life is the way to follow in order to bring about that self-comprehension which, alone, is capable of shedding some gleam of light on the tangled matter which is our being. But asking ourselves what should be our object of enquiry opens up other questions: for example, we cannot avoid pondering whether to spread our attention over all feelings, or else choose amongst the positive feelings which are good for our being, or the negative ones which disrupt the possibility of a good existential realisation.15 If we look at the 15

Any distinction we might make with regard to emotional life should anyways be made with due caution, because it is not possible to distinguish a priori the ontological quality of an emotive experience, whether it be a tonality or a feeling; its quality depends on the situation in which it occurs and from the entire affective

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relationship which the mind sets up with positive sentiments and emotive tonalities, we see that they do not constitute a pressing investigative preoccupation, precisely because insofar as they procure a positive sense of well-being, they do not interrogate the mind in a problematic sense by making it necessary to dedicate towards it great efforts of comprehension. If we carry out a phenomenological analysis of positive affective experience, we realise that the subject lives them without feeling the need to think about them, as we can understand. However, in this unreflective living we let joy, the moments of pleasure of beauty, the moment of good fortune pass us by, without learning from what we experience, experience which would perhaps allow us to recognise and nurture those ways of being which constitute the generative nucleus of these feelings. It would be necessary to investigate them, if we wish to understand where they originate, which experiential directions generate them and which modes of inner action and relational action create life contexts which facilitate such experiences. We should not forget, however, that positive emotional experiences are particularly difficult to examine as, when we live them, we immerse ourselves in them as much as we possibly can; it is as if we sensed that activating the analytical gaze has the effect of interrupting or reducing the intensity with which we feel them. Under the analytical action of reflection, the flow of inner experience is modified; when, for example, joy becomes an object of reflection, the very quality of this positive feeling is transformed: it becomes less vivid, it has almost faded away under the eye of reflection (Husserl 1983, 176). Precisely because it implies an interruption of the free flow of being, the reflective act interrupts the “letting live” in joy and this feeling, becoming the object of a thoughtful gaze, suffers a diminution of intensity even if the intensity of meaning remains intact. Simone Weil writes that “there are certain joys– and they are the most precious–which, when imagined, are extremely pale; whose whole value consists in their presence itself” (2004, 178). Positive feelings seem to be almost damaged by reflection, because reflection interrupts the experience and hence interrupts the pleasure of savouring situations which make us feel good. It is not by chance that, when experience of a person. An experience of suffering, however acute and piercing, if it is collocated within an experience of life in which inner security and trust are dominant traits, has effects which are less negative on one’s sense of one’s self than does an experience of suffering which might not be particularly acute, but which is situated in an experiential story in which positive feeling is rare and of short duration. Like every other aspect of life, emotive life is situated and should be investigated and understood as such.

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somebody is asked to describe emotional life, they without fail pick problematic experiences, not good ones, for which there seem to be no words to express them. Indeed, when we happen to live good experiences, we are immersed in them with a pleasure that is immediate. Consciousness tends to flee, on the other hand, from low feelings because they disturb our identity; we tend to avoid them, without realising that when we try to escape them or resist them, we end up sinking ever deeper into them. The first condition to deal with them is not to flee to the periphery of ourselves, but to accept the experience we are living, even if it disturbs us or causes us suffering. It is necessary to be within the experience, listening to what is happening to us, and accompanying this decision of ours to stay anchored to ourselves with the discipline of reflection. With regard to affective acts whose awareness makes us uneasy, we need to activate, with the power of the will, the necessary critical attention to identify their generative dynamics and performative effects. Negative feelings, on the other hand, impose themselves vividly on our consciousness, making us feel the need to understand what is happening to us. Precisely because they put in crisis our inner sense of well-being, selfcomprehension with regard to these feelings becomes essential. The need to understand is compelling in the face of suffering, from the most bearable inner anxiety to the most piercing despair, from the unease provoked by the restlessness which does not even for a moment leave us calm, to the depression which makes life feel far off and strange. Although we would just like to live joy as intensely as possible without anything staining our pure experience, when we feel pain on the other hand, the pain of the mind, the need for comprehension inevitably spears our thought. Pain in the body hurts, but so does pain in the mind. This heavy, mute pain comes from the work of the thought, the radical thought which interrogates itself on the meaning of our being here, the same thought from which we seek comfort. When we feel we are drowning in time passing without being able to grasp reasonable forms of enduring consistency, when we see our efforts at searching for meaning drain away without us having the time to translate them into something endowed with a certain stability, then the pain of living floods the mind. It is a pain which can work so profoundly in the soul that it anaesthetises the desire to exist. It is an intangible feeling, dry and mute, but weighty in its performative power. It can insinuate itself slowly into the tissues of the mind, like the slow falling of one drop after another, but then, when the soul becomes aware of its presence, it is as if a wave submerges it, leaving it unable to breathe.

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When in pain we feel all the weight of being, suffering is incarnate to such an extent in the tissues of the mind that we have the perception of finding ourselves in an irremediable situation from which it seems impossible to escape. The power which pain exerts is such that we feel as though we are caught in a vice, and under its weight we do not notice what is happening in the most intimate part of our being. The work of pain weakens the energies of the mind and in this weakness, we tend to loosen if not completely interrupt, our relations with things and with others. The world becomes distant, as if we can no longer touch things while others become intangible, as if they belonged to another world. Then the experience of pain becomes as one with that of feeling isolated. In certain cases, this isolation is deliberately sought, because the lack of energy makes us wish for a kind of immobility of the soul, which would be impossible in the lively exchange of relationships, in that they continually nourish existence, calling upon the subject to act, or at least to react. The state of immobility which we reach in succumbing to pain is not, however, the relaxed quiet which we aspire to, but like a stiffening of our inner life, a folding in of the soul upon itself. In this sense, isolation can only worsen the weakness of the mind, which becomes ever more helpless in the face of pain, in a spiral which it takes a great deal of energy to interrupt. Given his relational ontological substance, the human being, in order to face this pain, needs first of all good relationships, those which help the mind to find the energy to turn and breathe life once more. For this reason, it is essential to belong to a community which can express the capacity to have care, a community of relationships which form a network even for those who seek isolation. We do not always, however, have the opportunity to anchor ourselves in good relational ground, and even when this happens it is not enough to entrust ourselves to others. Rather we need to seek within ourselves the strength to step back upon our path. For this it is essential to bring our attention to the pain in order to understand what is happening. Exercising the discipline of reflection should keep the soul sufficiently alert to gain consciousness of the work that the pain is doing. Understanding what is happening does not of course annul suffering, but it can reduce its sharp power, because thought is action and as such has an effect on the life of the mind. Observing what happens within us and becoming aware of the dynamics of inner life have transformative effects because this places us in a situation of self-presence, and being present to ourselves develops a power which softens the often devastating and annihilating power of the most painful feelings.

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The entire sphere of feelings which colours experience would ideally be an object of the process of self-enquiry, but specific attention should be reserved for the “vital feelings”, that are those affective tonalities which characterise our way of feeling in relation to the world, such as weariness or freshness. Much depends on these affective tonalities, because when we feel tired, weary of living, then our being tends to become lazy and fold in on itself almost without wanting to touch things, because every movement of living costs too much in terms of vital energy. When, on the other hand, we feel a freshness in the soul and the mind experiences pure lightheartedness, the drive to live is alive and every experience takes on the hue of pleasurable vigour. While weariness pushes the subject to withdraw from the world, even from itself if that were possible, freshness is a continual fount of vigour from which springs a continual drive towards the movement of existence. In both these polarities of vital feeling the tension is equally intense, with the difference that in the case of weariness the tension is oriented in a defensive direction whilst in the case of freshness it follows an open and expansive line towards the world. Concentrating attention on the life of the mind to grasp its fundamental emotional qualities, those that determine the tonality of our being, allows us to go right back into our essential nucleus, our intimate essence. Dedicating thought to our vital affective tonalities means understanding what nourishes it and what obstructs it, and this type of understanding is important, because by acquiring some clarity on the connection which exists between certain events and vital feeling can facilitate a more vigilant direction of the self. In this sense, the effort to understand is a form of virtue, since it allows us to identify what to avoid and what to cultivate in order to seek a good affective quality for our being, one that makes us feel reconciled to life.

Method of the process of self-comprehension It is phenomenology which offers the most appropriate method to practise access to the quality of affective experience, a method which consists in observing and describing the affective phenomenon just as it manifests itself. Feeling appears, with its own way of manifesting itself to the consciousness, and like everything that appears it, too, makes the givenness which constitutes the material essential for comprehension available to thought. Describing this phenomenon means how I perceive myself as I live an emotive state, thus how I perceive myself physically and within my soul.

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The essence of feeling never reveals itself entirely; what remains hidden is the “whence” and “whither” of feeling (Heidegger 1962, 173), that is to say where that precise emotive state has its origin, and to what mode of being in the world it is leading us. In order to acquire reasonable knowledge of these aspects of emotional phenomena, which tend to remain partly concealed, we need to apply the phenomenological principle of transcendence: the principle, in other words, which asks us to go beyond evidence in order to facilitate intuition of aspects which are not immediately manifest. In reality, nothing can ever be grasped in its entirety in one go, because the appearance of the real always leaves something hidden. The principle of transcendence, interpreted in the light of cognitive psychology and the neo-Stoic theory of the emotions, requires us to seek the cognitive content to which the feeling is anchored and that we understand to what mode of being this tends to orient the person. Description can be articulated in four different directions (Harre and Gillet 1994): (a) decipher how the affective experience is sensed physically (exaltation for example is sensed in the body); (b) describe the typical expression by which this affective experience manifests itself, externalises itself, thus becoming a socially recognisable phenomenon (for example, exaltation can be expressed by laughing or even crying, jumping up and down, clenching our fists); (c) identify the cognitive content, often a judgement, which underlies the cognitive content (for example, an emotion of exaltation indicates the judgement that something particularly good has happened, for which the subject has some responsibility); and (d) name the social act which the expression of the affective experience enacts, that is the illocutionary force of what is said or done (for example, exaltation can express the social act of self-congratulation, of showing the success obtained to others). To these four directions of enquiry, we could add a fifth which is particularly significant on the existential level: (e) identify the possible performative power of an affective experience on one’s way of being, and thus evaluate if and to what extent this, with its cognitive correlate, helps to give the experience a good and positive meaning or else a negative and problematic orientation. It is important to draw attention to the corporeal dimension of feeling, for emotive experiences often have a somatic translation: when I feel sorrow my heart aches, fear makes it tremble, it is warmed in sympathy, it breathes lightly when I feel joy and hardens when I feel anger. However, although emotive experiences tend to spill over into the body, this does not always happen; for this reason, the first point of the analytical process

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should be taken as a possible indication, but not necessarily constitutive; rather it is important to ask more generically, and therefore less bindingly, how the feeling manifests itself, without straight away focusing on the corporeal dimension. When in fact thought thinks feeling, it can happen that it captures it in its self-manifestation as a mental phenomenon, whose mode of revealing itself to reflective attention is such that its corporeal dimension is not immediately evident, even though this may manifest itself at a second stage. There is an anxiety of being that you sense in the body, such as agitation or muscular tension, like a tremor in the stomach which makes breathing harsher; and there is an anxiety which you sense in the mind, when thoughts cannot be still and become jumbled up one with the other, producing an inner disorder which can atrophy the breath of the mind. There is a sensible pleasure that you feel in the rested body, feeling the muscles relaxed and without tension, and there is a pleasure of being that you experience in the mind when you sense that something meaningful comes from your thoughts, something which you find of substance: it is this pleasure which opens up your being to things. Hypothesising an intellectual feeling does not mean presupposing that the corporeal dimension should be perceived as different from the cognitive dimension, for mind and body always go together. It is Plato who reminds us not to risk the slippery terrain of a dualistic ontology, the same Plato who theorised the scission between body and soul. When in fact he describes the state of the soul at the moment in which it is faced with the “realities that are worthy to love” (Phaedrus, 250d), he represents it to us as something which is not in the least immaterial, but as it is made of flesh which can be moved by a shudder or by heat which melts even its hardest of parts (251a–b). The flesh of the soul, fed and warmed by the sight of beauty of the ideal realities, “ceases to feel pain and is filled with joy”, and in its joy it grows wings which will carry it up to the skies (251d). The human being breathes its essence in the spiritual mode (Stein 2002, 364), but it is a spiritual life immersed in matter: in this sense, the soul has a body. Spiritual energy has corporeal substance: where there is a soul, there is a human body and where there is a human body, there is a soul (367). A spiritual being without a body would be pure spirit, not a soul. Nonetheless, the intensity with which one aspect or another manifests itself can vary, and so capture reflective attention differently. The experience of an intellectual feeling is not without evidence, a suffering or a joy which seems to have no connection with the corporeal dimension, and it is

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precisely this incorporeal feeling which makes us sense the immaterial essence of our being.

Reflection which transforms A good phenomenological description is one which analyses every dimension of feeling, with each of them considered with respect to the others in their intimate, reciprocal relations. What should always be followed is a pure phenomenological description, pure in the sense that it keeps to the evidence gathered by the reflective gaze, bracketing off every tendency to seek explanations which imply adherence to metaphysical presuppositions and which, as such, are unverifiable. Such, for example, is Stein’s hypothesising of an “originating predisposition” which imprints an “ultimate irrevocable qualitative moment” (2001, 188), which would identify in a stable, and therefore not evolutionary, manner the essence of the person. However rigorously practised, the description of emotional life is no stranger to self-deceptions. Forms of self-illusion are also possible, in the analysis of emotional experience. It may be that we want to focus our attention on a superficial feeling which gives us pleasure, while we hide deep feelings from ourselves, the awareness of which disturbs our consciousness. Being capable of applying the phenomenological principle means having the courage to send our gaze behind the periphery of our consciousness and keep it concentrated even on those sides of our own being which we would prefer not to see. When we notice a sentiment or a passion which we judge to be intolerable for the image that we have constructed of ourselves, it may be that we look away and try to minimise the weight of its presence on our being. Movements of thought are not limited to seeing what appears, but construct clearer and darker zones in the life of the mind. The inability to accept the profile of our own feeling renders vacuous any effort at interior examination. No technique for analysing the life of the mind can be a substitute for the virtue of honesty, which makes us keep our attention even on emotional experiences which we would rather not feel and, therefore, on the underlying cognitive content.16 16 Describing, even if it is characterised as a silent act confined to the space of our individual mind, is a linguistic act, and therefore uses words. It is with words that we give voice to emotive states and to underlying cognitive nuclei. But precisely in the use of language we encounter a problem, because ours is a language of the external world, a spatial language. Since saying carries out not only a denotative but also a structuring function with regard to the phenomena it names, then it

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We should consider the effect produced by the practice of selfdescription. While on the one hand reflective attention has the effect of diminishing or softening the intensity of the experience (in order to observe it, it needs to place it at a certain distance away from the self), on the other hand it introduces a level of self-awareness which increases the intensity of feeling, making it more vivid to the inner gaze, with the effect of almost generating another mode of feeling. It may be that when, right in the middle of an action, we cast even the briefest of glances into the space of the mind, we feel within a storm of sensations, a cacophony of diverse emotional sounds. When we take the time, so as not to be drowned in this chaos, to think in a meditative and intentional way, it is possible to perceive the din dying down and the experience becoming so attenuated as to be barely perceptible, to the point where we almost cannot grasp our affective consistency. This draining away under the gaze of reflection seems to happen above all with regard to situational emotions, while when the objects of attention are emotive tonalities connected to fundamental cognitive experiences, those tied to the nucleus of one’s own ordo amoris, then reflection produces the effect of intensifying their consistency. It can happen that describing an experience of joy increases the sense of pleasure, as if there were a second order of happiness which follows once we realise the possibility of living this kind of feeling; in analogous fashion describing a feeling of anxiety can intensify the sense of unease that this problematic emotive tonality produces, precisely because the awareness which reveals its disturbing essence is evidence for its problematic nature on an existential level. It is as if reflective attention on feeling generated another level of emotional life which, since it follows on a self-investigation which produces a vivid and perceptive vision of the event, constitutes an experience of different essence. Reflection, then, does not interrupt the feeling by dissolving it, but, rather, modifies its perceived becomes essential to meditate on the words we use, to find words which are capable of speaking the specific quality of an experience, rather than absorb it into conceptualisations which risk being unable to pronounce its essence. It is not just a question of avoiding the use of words too heavy with meaning which would obscure the quality of the datum, but also of seeking new words or unusual uses of words, because when we cannot even find the words capable of saying the essential quality of a thing, then it cannot even be identified (Scheler 1955). Phenomenological analysis then becomes as one with working on words, which requires a poetic stance, since poetry seeks those words and combinations of signs which are able to say what up to then has seemed opaque or unsayable. Seeking those words which are also able to give voice to the most subtle shades of meaning can only enhance our capacity for self-examination.

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quality.17 If the intensification of the quality of the experience is pleasurable when the reflective act has a positive feeling as its object, it can be felt as a problem in the case of a negative feeling, because in making it more vivid it could make the perception of suffering worse. Stein, as an expert in deeply depressive states, explains this condition as a state of fissure between life as it is lived, and our deep self. Discovering through the process of self-investigation a form of discontinuity between the planes of being, experiencing the perception of not managing to live our own essential part or our existential choices because we lie under the weight of inauthentic semblance, can generate an experience of intimate and excruciating suffering, more painful to bear than the depression itself. Such a perception might induce us to avoid reflective practice, and indeed even silence our feelings. It is, however, necessary to learn how to resist such a temptation because the experience of reflection, with all the difficulties that it might bring, such as the intensification of suffering, is existentially essential: without the thinking that we might have about our experiences, we would not be able to savour other feelings to the full. Besides, it is ethically essential if we are to come to a position of awareness with regard to emotional life, none of which we should attempt to cancel out. All of our feeling should be guarded (Zambrano 2003, 92); even that which reveals inconsistencies, lacks and excesses makes us aware of the weaknesses of our form of life, because seeing and accepting what happens to us are a necessary, if not sufficient, condition if we are to find those paths along which we can make our being flourish. Furthermore,

17 With regard to this question, Max Scheler takes a different position when he states that it is not because we pay more attention to our emotive states, or take them more into consideration, that we feel them more–on the contrary, attention results in the dissolution of feelings. According to him, attention in itself does not render feelings richer or more vivid, as happens for the contents of representation; on the contrary, it destroys them (Scheler 1955). In reality, a phenomenology of emotive experience shows that when we dedicate attention to feeling, while attention might not have the power to modify the quality of the emotive experience, nonetheless it produces the effect of making it more vivid, allowing a mental content to emerge that, when called back to mind, has the power to make the emotive experience which is the object of reflection live once more, even if in a different mode to the original experience. If it were true that attention destroys feelings, nobody would ever feel the need to seek refuge in acts of repression, which distract thought from certain emotive states. Paying attention to pain destroys nothing of it; rather, under the gaze of reflection its contours become more sharply outlined, but it is precisely this clearness which makes understanding possible.

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knowing how to persist in self-investigation with a thinking that has care for our inner space can bring into our soul a slower time of liquid calm. In order for this difficult work of acceptance not to be a simple remission to our current being, but an opening up to the beyond, the disposition to accept ourselves should be tied to the work of thought which focuses its concentration on two essential questions: Ortega’s “what can we do?”, which is brought up by the work of seeking the direction for our own being, and the question suggested by Stein’s reflections when she asks “from what depths of our being do we live?”; while the first question is at the root of the choices which guide our actions, the search for our own modes of existential enactment, the second is at the origin of the reflective meditation with which we linger a while on our way in order to judge which path to take in order to continue the road of being.

The logos of feeling From the point of view of neo-Stoic theory, the heart of comprehension of affective life consists in going back to the cognitive acts which are at the root of emotional experiences. From what cognitive act does this anxiety that I feel constantly colouring my soul come from? It might be a precise vision of life: if this were the case, then it would become necessary to define the essence of this vision, then understand how it has matured, and so judge if it has meaning and if it is the right thing to hold it in the heart of the mind. When I feel my trust failing, not in anything in particular, but in life itself, can I manage to understand from what judgement of things in general this lack is generated? And what presuppositions are at the basis of this judgement? What paths have they taken to root themselves in the most intimate spaces of the mind? If the description of the phenomenicity with which feeling offers itself to the gaze requires the cognitive act to keep to the evidence, going back to its conceptual nucleus and reconstructing the underlying judgement demand that we make operative the principle of transcendence, that is, that we go beyond what simply appears, even as we allow ourselves to be guided by the modes of evident givenness of the experience. While it is always arduous to apply the principle of transcendence, it is even more difficult when it is applied to the flowing and liquid material of the mind. Since the material of the life of the mind is a reality so fluid as to appear without consistency, there are many forms of self-deception into which the process of self-examination might fall. We deceive ourselves when a rushed analysis ends up by constructing phantasmatic cognitive scenarios when, on the contrary, it is essential to take time for an analysis dilated

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over time, but which is also honest and capable of untangling feelings in order to have access to the cognitive nucleus which moves them. According to Plato, a true knowledge of the things can be gained only by moving around things (Phaedrus, 247d). But the possibility of a circular motion enabling the mind to go round and around the objects of knowledge, doing as many turns as needed in order to develop a clear vision of their essential quality, is only possible if the object of knowledge is something stable, something like the entities which Plato speaks of. Things subject to becoming, instead, cannot be easily investigated, since they change over time. Emotional life is a continual flowing and as such, according to the Platonic epistemology, cannot be counted amongst knowable things. If, however, we admit the existence of fundamental, background feelings which, even while they manifest themselves in different shades, present with a certain uniformity, it also becomes possible for the sphere of the emotions to reiterate the reflective act on an object which maintains a continuous quality over time, and thus allow for a thought which encircles a thing. We need to pause over the heuristic concept of encircling in order to adapt it to the delicate material that is feeling. Encircling should not be understood as an obsessive movement which prepares the mind to wipe out the object; indeed, in Phaedrus going around the things is a passive act, since the soul “after taking its place on the high ridge of heaven, is carried around by circular motion so it can stay in contemplation” (247c). In this Platonic vision of knowledge there is all the passivity of the cognitive act, the passivity necessary to configure a delicate way of approaching the fragile consistency of affective experience. Knowing requires passivity, letting ourselves receive the givenness with which the phenomenon offers itself to the gaze. Examining a phenomenon without imposing any form of external logic means letting the appearance appear in such a way that the gaze can receive it exactly in the way in which it offers itself. Every phenomenon, even the most immaterial, such as feeling, manifests its own essence in a givenness which the mind must learn to receive. The gesture of the mind which lets itself encircle the thing is a receptive and concentrated attention, like the wide eyes of a child who is capable of admiration. Only continuous attention, guided by the passion to understand, has the chance of perceiving, even if faintly, the inner becoming exactly as it happens. This flowing reality, continually changing, which is the flow of emotional experience would require unlimited attention, that sustained gaze which knows of no slips or distractions; not, however, a gaze which

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takes the form of a violent imposition, but the looking that is like the oblique ray of dawn light, that edge in which light itself trembles (Zambrano 1996b, 31). But precisely because this experience is a continual flux, unlike the platonic essences which do not know the usury of time, fundamental feelings require an investigation which is not only circular but also linear, one which moves along the line of the inner time of consciousness, following the evolutionary path of a feeling and that of its underlying cognitive content, since like feeling, thinking, too, is constantly modifying in relation to the judgements of meaning which the mind effects with regard to lived experience. The analysis of emotional life turns out to be, then, a complex spiritual practice, since it requires a number of diverse heuristic acts: observation which encircles (circular motion) and the observation of becoming in time (linear motion). The need to differentiate the mode of investigation also becomes clear when we analyse superficial feelings, those which are peripheral or of short duration, due to the fact that every experience is linked within a flux of thinking and feeling which never ceases. An act of feeling should be considered not as a definitive or definable event, which can thereby be described by means of an analysis which separates out inner life into discrete acts, but as a wave of the current of experience, a wave whose structuring dynamism on our being can be understood only if considered in relation to what comes before and what comes after. If we are to arrive at a reasonable level of knowledge, the description should never restrict itself to the finite instant, but should consider a flow of emotional waves, and as such it requires consciousness to engage in a long period of inner concentration.18 Precisely because it requires a long period of inner concentration which considers each moment of the life of the mind in its intimate relation with the before and after of our inner flux, it is unlikely that understanding will arrive as speedily as we might like or expect, and indeed it is quite likely that we will experience prolonged moments of opacity. In these situations, it is important not to be too anxious to arrive 18

Precisely because knowing is never an isomorphic representation of the phenomenon it investigates, but a process of construction of scenarios, the reflective act which identifies an experience is a constructive act of the mind, which defines contours where phenomena are characterised by not having precise contours. We should take account of this quality of the cognitive act, although within an enactive gnoseology according to which knowledge implies intervening on the object and at the same time adapting to the object’s objective mode of presenting itself to the mind’s gaze.

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quickly at a reasonable level of knowledge. There are complex and convoluted experiences for which it is useless to expect hermeneutic solutions in short periods of time. Learning to wait patiently without making demands and avoiding any hermeneutic acceleration are essential if we are to exercise the spiritual practice of passivity which alone is able to prepare the mind for a vivid and profound understanding of things. Another factor to consider is the different tension of feeling. There is a weariness of the mind which is superficial enough to leave it open to the world, and thus receptive and reactive with regard to solicitations which come from others and from things, and there is a tiredness of the mind which makes our inner energies feel so exhausted and drained that every level of sensibility is almost annihilated. Since differences of intensity are qualitative differences of being, it is important to be able to identify them in order to be able to go back to their generative matrix. It is certainly difficult to distinguish all the shades of intensity of the tension of feeling, but through a disciplined practice of reflection it is possible to learn to identify the gradations of one’s own affective life. Not to be forgotten is the fact that the more intense an affective experience, the more we find ourselves immersed in it, for while the first level of consciousness, which is feeling oneself feel, intensifies as if alerted by the tension with which we are living, reflection on the other hand struggles to find itself a space. The difficult thing in the effort to reach an understanding of emotional life lies precisely in the fact that the more intense the experiences and the harder they make it for the person to carve out a space for reflection, the greater is the energy required of the act of thinking. But the gain which comes from this reflective work becomes evident because the more we reflect, and the more consciousness of the self takes form; the clearer and more awake is consciousness, and the more intense is the act of living. Given the extent to which ordinary thought tends to use the category of causality, the process of comprehension of experience tends to suffer the application of this same category. When we feel weariness in the soul it is easy to identify this event as a cause, or establish a causal connection between the weariness and the inability in that moment to give our attention. Even if it is necessary to be cautious in our use of causal reasonings to explain experience, and human experience in general, it nonetheless seems that certain connections can be regarded as legitimate. Perhaps the epistemological problems lie not so much in introducing causal explanations

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or not, as in the fact of seeking an explanation which is not causal-linear but multifactorial and then, possibly, seeking connections of probability between events. It is possible that through a careful analysis of the flow of experience we can identify what we might term evident connections, which reliably account for the reasons that the soul finds itself in a certain way, and in such cases, we have at our disposal elements from which we can begin to rethink the way of giving form to our own being. But since it is difficult to uncover essential connections, it is necessary to be cautious in formulating explanations, for when we have no sure evidence, we risk constructing phantasmagoric landscapes which might lead us to decide in favour of disordered actions.

Vital energy Thinking intensively and in a concentrated fashion within the process of self-investigation is much more likely to be able to describe and understand experience the more that the mind as “vital force” is at its disposal (Stein 1999, 57). As Aristotle explains (Nicomachean Ethics, I, 8, 1098b 10–20), what characterises the essence of the life of the mind are not only actions [ʌȡȐȟİȚȢ] but also energies [ਥȞȑȡȖİȚĮȚ], those dynamic forces which make possible the acts of existing. If we conceive of vital force as the reserve of energy necessary for every act of existence and which nourishes vital feelings, then the process of self-understanding should dedicate a great deal of intense attention to it. Vital force is a spiritual energy which maintains the flow of psychic life and if, as Stein states (1999, 70), our experiences feed on it, it is also just as true, from a phenomenology of experience, that it takes energy from or loses energy to these same experiences and in a reciprocal manner positive feeling nourishes vital force while negative feeling diminishes it. By activating the reflective gaze, we can see how vital force is consumed in the course of an activity, for example when we are engaged in thinking, but it takes nourishment in its turn from the activity that it makes possible, when the person perceives that from dedicating himself to thinking through that content, or giving mental activity a particular gradient, there is a gain to be had for his being. There are emotional experiences, such as negative experiences or those of passion, which unbalance the life of the mind, absorb the vital force and leave us exhausted; and there are positive experiences, like certain emotions which we live entirely by chance or certain feelings which we cultivate intentionally, which on the contrary give vigour to the mind. Feelings which nurture vital force are those which are essential to life as is

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the air that we breathe: faith and hope. Where there is faith and hope there is vital force, and, vice-versa, vital force is indispensable if we are to feel hope and faith, for the morphogenetic law of life manifests itself in a circular fashion where each element stands in a relation of evolutionary co-dependence with others; where there is force and a sense of vigour it is easier to cultivate positive feeling. Finding the source from which to draw up hope and faith is at one with nourishing the soul with vital force, which alone makes these feelings resistant to the often difficult and painful blows of experience. The life of the soul implies a continuous consumption of vital force, but this consumption, when accompanied by the practice of selfinvestigation guided by the intention of self-care, generates existential modes which encourage the growth of sources of energy from which the soul receives ever new force. Living within the depths means having access to the soul’s spring of life force, and seeking the way to nourish it so that it becomes a generative matrix of good forms of being. It is not necessarily big things or highly significant events which nourish the soul or subtract energy from it, but small things too, small gestures. Working to know the sources of the quality of our being means knowing one’s self. The quality of vital force conditions the life of the mind, but, in its turn it is conditioned by the type of cognitive activity carried out, and by the emotive experiences which accompany it. Vital force can extend along a continuum of degrees of vitality which go from freshness, which gives a sense of vigour, to weariness, which can become lassitude; it is the experiences of the mind, in a recursive type of morphogenetic reciprocation, which determine the quality and intensity of spiritual energy. It is essential to monitor the condition of our vital force in order to understand the quality of existence, and if we assume that such a condition is in relation with the quality of mental experience, then identifying which cognitive and affective experiences consume it, and which nurture it, becomes a matter of priority in order to be able to find the proper direction for selfcare. As for every cognitive activity, in this case, too, we can easily deceive ourselves; this happens when thought, rather than writing faithfully the modes of givenness of our vital force, lets itself be swayed by tacitly nurtured illusions. Then a second reflection becomes necessary, one which is not directed at the content of thought, but deals with the modes of givenness of the reflective act, in order to bring about a critical epistemology of the life of the mind.

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The work of analytical description of one’s own experience outlined here constitutes the phenomenology of inner experience, which represents the indispensable condition for every act of self-understanding. Understanding emotional life does not mean constructing a classification table for the emotions, feelings and passions, but understanding the connections of emotional phenomena with the fundamental movement of being. Comprehension reaches a good level if it avoids entrusting itself to the logic of atomistic and simplifying analysis of the modern sort, which believes that a phenomenon can always be broken down into distinct and separable elements, and identifies the origin of an emotive state either in the environment or in interiority, as if it were possible for us to think of a subject distinct from its environment, when, rather, things always happen in relation to others: relationality is the substance of the human condition. Seeking to understand where an emotive situation comes from, and where it leads to, requires us to understand which world of signifying permeates the relational exchange in which the subject finds himself. Precisely because of the ontological primacy of the relational dimension, analysis of the feelings we nurture towards others takes on a decisive function. It may be that behind the mask of our own narcissistic vision we do not manage to see the real quality of our sentimental relations. We tend to seek out in ourselves what the community to which we belong deems acceptable, thus constructing for ourselves the sort of self-deception which then translates into inauthenticity in our living with others. It always takes a long path of critical comparison before we reach the point of bringing our own feelings into the light, revealing the emotional constructions with which we deceive ourselves about our mode of being. Examining relational feeling also means attempting to understand which of the feelings we attribute to the other are in reality only our own projections, thus coming to understand what is our real empathic capacity, that capacity which is evident when we authentically feel the quality of feeling of the other, all the while respecting the person’s external otherness to us. Emotive blindness (Scheler 1955) has serious implications for our being, because it inhibits not only a frank gaze at our own selves, but also the possibility of establishing good relations with others, the relations which help us to grow. The capacity to feel the quality of the real is defined by Zambrano as “pity”. It is different from empathy, which consists in the quality of the feeling of the other; pity sees and grasps the alterity of the other in its essential profile. It is capable of not only emotional but also ontological hermeneutics. Pity is the ability to feel reality in its heterogeneity, to sense the singularity of every being from ourselves. It is a sensitive thinking or

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an intelligent sensibility to the quality of the real. Without this sensibility that Zambrano calls pity, thought would not be capable of noting the singular and unique essence of every entity that is (1949). In this sense, true knowledge of the real is possible only by means of a thought which feels.

Thinking which transforms An understanding of the emotional dimension of being finds its necessity in the fact that, given the performative potentialities of affective experience with regard to the way of being with others in the world, passing from an unreflective position to a reflective awareness allows us to gain a conscious existential positionality by which we can shed light on our own being. What the soul feels it needs, in fact, is the type of awareness which accompanies the encounter with one’s own being. This awareness is a condition in order to gain a free gaze, which we do not have when we remain rigidly trapped within unreflective living. Unreflective means ignorance with regard to ourselves and ignorance becomes immobility which translates itself into lack of transcendence (Zambrano 1996b, 30). Understanding one’s self is to transcend, that is to flow consciously in one’s being. There is a loss in the capacity to stay within reality every time we give up staying within thoughts and affective states which have not been meditated upon. But aside from reflection which comprehends and which we have spoken of up to now, there is also a reflection which is directly functional to planning our own actions. It is what we might call anticipatory reflection, since it seeks to anticipate the possible consequences of emotive experience on the plane of action, if we choose to go that way. Only after carefully weighing up the possible consequences of an emotional orientation of our being should we decide how to act, that is decide whether to adhere to it or not. Ideas, not only explicitly normative ones but also descriptive ones, exercise a performative force. Reflection which carries the quality of this force to the consciousness reduces the silent performative power of ideas; it is therefore with reflection that we can gain the freedom of the self which Epictetus speaks of when he suggests we should not let ourselves be dragged along by ideas, but we should wait and allow ourselves a pause before acting (Epictetus, Handbook, 34). Reflection carries out not only a hermeneutic function, which consists in understanding the quality of a cognitive act and an emotive experience, but also a programmatic function, when it provides us with the elements to exercise the reflective judgement which establishes what it is good to do

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and what not, what is right and what is not, what is beautiful and what is not. The reflection which seeks to anticipate what might be the consequences of adhering or not to an orientation of feeling, weighing up the implications for the person and the world in which he lives, is essential to prepare the person for a reasoned decision, because first we must “consider what comes before and what follows after, and only then proceed the action itself” (Epictetus, Discourses, 3.15.1). When we reach a decision without adequate time for reflection we risk, even when the orientation is the right one, setting out on an adventure which our vital force cannot sustain; in order for an undertaking to nourish the being, it is essential to dedicate ourselves to it with all our soul, and this is a condition which only comes about by following a careful and reflective evaluation which might prepare us for measured action. If it is true that the soul has its reason, it is part of the practice of selfformation to seek reason that is just and upright, because there is no wisdom without the good and right logos [ੑȡșઁȢ ȜȩȖȠȢ] (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 1, 1138b 29), the one which gives measure to the movement of our being. However, in order to cultivate a reason which is able to think in the right way, that is appropriate to the object, and in the right moment, time is needed, in the sense that practices of self-investigation must be exercised to the point of becoming a structuring part of the self, transforming itself into “flesh and blood” (Stein 1962a, 438). The thought that thinks feeling is of help to us if it becomes a discipline regularly practised over time, learning to spend time with ourselves, and not a technique which we learn and practise only when we feel a sense of urgency. Thinking becomes effective in emotional self-care when it becomes a practice that is systematically put into action in order to learn of one’s own existential qualities. When we do not work to have care of our own inner life in ordinary times, because we believe that certain cognitive exercises are completely useless, then in difficult moments–when certain negative feelings flood the soul and pain breaks out within, the pain that if it is to be tackled has to be able to look at itself deeply, to be with itself in a way so intense as to keep together the pieces of experience–it can be difficult to find the style of thought and the cognitive force necessary to acquire a reasonable mastery of the situation. The meaning of the practice of selfcare consists in modelling inner dispositions which can prepare us to face the difficult and unforeseeable moments of experience. According to Plutarch (On Tranquillity of Mind, 465b), who assigns thought as a significant performative force, if we do not prepare ourselves in advance by cultivating cognitive practices which can become habitual instruments,

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it is difficult to deal with disturbing thoughts and emotions when they have already flooded into the soul like a storm at sea. If we concur that cultivating certain dispositions of the soul allows us to keep alive “the fountain of tranquility that is in our own selves” (467a), then an essential task in the process of self-education consists in training ourselves gradually, but continuously, to have care of our own inner life, in order to cultivate those stances of present-to-oneself that reduce our rate of vulnerability in the difficult moments of daily life. It is characteristic of the human being to seek a good quality of life and, as a result, not to be able to bear to be deprived of what is considered to be good (Epictetus, Discourses, I, 27, 12). However, not all emotive situations work for the promotion of spiritual well-being, and indeed there are affective states which make us feel bad. Heidegger (1998b, 234), who certainly does not approve of the categorisations of emotive states, nonetheless nods to the distinction between feelings that are “uplifting” and “depressing”. Negative experiences are those which erode the pleasure of living, which obstruct the search for being well in the world. Operating transformations on our own existential force in order to make it better able to nourish positive modes of being responds, therefore, to an originating direction of the human being. The problem lies in “discovering the right logical reasoning” and “train[ing] ourselves in that reasoning” (Epictetus, Discourses, I, 27, 6) for deactivating those stances of being which prevent a reasonable realisation of our own existential possibilities. For this question we might consider the neo-Stoic thesis, according to which precisely because our substance of feeling is structured by our beliefs, through which are expressed those judgements on experience from which spring precise emotional experiences, then a transformative action on our own emotional profile, working on the ideas which underlie it, becomes possible. Not that this work is easy, because there are internalised beliefs at such a deep level that it is difficult first of all to identify them and then, even without hypothesising radical transformations, put into motion a process of critical reflection. In the life of the mind, perhaps, there is no element that is inaccessible to rational argumentation (with due exception for certain experiences such as religious or mystical ones, which are animated by a different intelligence to that operating in ordinary life), but in order to be effective the work of thought must patiently seek adequate access to the most intimate spheres of being. To speak of the work of thought people use the metaphor “digging deep”, but this radical action, which evokes something violent, is not appropriate for the delicate part that is the heart of the life of the mind, which, rather, asks us to approach it cautiously,

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without intending to intervene, since it needs an attention motivated by respect. We have to approach the most intimate parts of the soul, those in which the person breathes his spiritual essence, with delicacy, with gentleness, with a thought that has to be like the water of mercy and the light of understanding: the water which melts away inner tensions and the knots of feeling rooted in the soul, and the light which clarifies and takes in the most intimate zones. Stoic philosophy suggests systematic recourse to the so-called canons, the trenchant maxims which if they become the object of a constant meditative attention, help us to have dominion over our passions. These canons, or maxims, have the form of concise argumentation which the subject should repeat to himself until they become an automatic part of the mind, and when a maxim becomes automatic it allows us to control the emotional phenomena which can cause disturbance in our experience (Hadot 2002, 28–29). Epictetus indicates as essential learning to control the judgements which we form of events: what makes us feel offended, or disturbed, are not the actions which we undergo, but, rather, the judgements which we form of them. So when we have a negative feeling, what we need to keep in mind is that it is our own judgement which has provoked it; it is essential to try above all not to allow ourselves to be carried away by the representation and to find a little time to reflect, then we will find it easier to have control of ourselves (Epictetus, Handbook, 20). If we assume that feeling, and, with it, acting, depends on the judgement that the subject defines with regard to the experience, the task of reason, by virtue of its capacity to reflect on itself and so either approve or disapprove of itself (Epictetus, Discourses, I, 1, 1), is to analyse the criteria which guide the processes of judgement in order to deactivate those which trigger erroneous judgements. From the phenomenology of the submerged continent which is our affective life, comes the indication to activate the epoché. Precisely because feeling has a nucleus of thought in that it rests upon an evaluation, when we feel the urgent need to disable a negative feeling, we can, if not neutralise, at least diminish the force of an emotive tonality or of a feeling, removing value from the beliefs on which this feeling nourishes itself. Bracketing off a judgement means making it ineffective. To make a judgement ineffective it is necessary to refuse assent: in this way it is bracketed off, suspended in its possible action on the life of the mind. The epoché (Husserl 1983) consists of this gesture. When we are confronted with a negative judgement of an event, giving assent to which will inevitably mean succumbing to a disturbing emotive experience, we can decide to suspend assent to this judgement in order to give ourselves time

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for a meditated reflection, with the effect of silencing at least temporarily this feeling which unbalances the soul, and thus re-acquiring sufficient sovereignty over our own being. This action of suspension of assent is completely different from fighting against a feeling. Using brackets has the quality of a non-violent cognitive action, which has the capacity to safeguard at least temporarily our inner climate, leaving us time to prepare ourselves to face events with greater equilibrium than we experience when we fall prey to negative feeling. With regard to the need to work on the self in order to modify the self, Heidegger (1962, 176) suggests what we might call a technology of emotional life, which consists in seeking to free ourselves from a negative emotional tonality, not by concentrating on it, but by cultivating the opposite tonality. In this technology of the self, we hear the ancient Stoic principle by which, in order to tackle a particular habit it is necessary to cultivate a contrary habit against it (Epictetus, Discourses, I, 27, 6). If we interpret this emotional technique in the light of the cognitive theory of the emotions, it turns out that in order to cultivate the opposite tonality to the one we are living, it is necessary to bring our attention and give our assent to cognitive content of a different type compared to what is incorporated in the emotion that we would like to, if not completely deactivate, at least disempower and weaken. When our eyes “are wounded by too dazzling a light” we “refresh them with the tints and hues of flowers and grass” (Plutarch, On Tranquillity of Mind, 469a). We should do the same with thought: instead of keeping it fixed on what produces pain, we should direct it to consider something else, paying attention to other possible landscapes of thought to cultivate other emotional geographies. There are, however, feelings which, even though they are essential for a good quality of life, we do not know how to cultivate, because we almost do not sense them amongst the possibilities of feeling, as if we did not have the necessary training to consider them. One of these is the sense of gratitude. Knowing how to express gratitude for the good things in our experience which alight our being with vital energy is a movement of the soul which has the effect of reconciling us with the world. Faced with a sense of anguish that can pierce the soul when the effort of living seems unsustainable, Plutarch (On Tranquillity of Mind, 470b) suggests cultivating the capacity to be grateful for life. Being capable of gratitude expands the soul and seems almost to make it capable of touching things.19 19 If we follow the reflections of Epictetus (Discourses, I, 6, 19–22), it would seem that what generates the capacity for gratitude is the exercise of contemplation of the things of the world and the phenomena which occur. Contemplation is an act of the mind to which all of us should dedicate ourselves, since a quality of the human

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The highly important role assigned to thought is evident in these indications of spiritual practices. This is a perspective which gives voice to the faith in the capacity of reason to allow the person to acquire some form of sovereignty, however weak, over experience. This is an ancient perspective which we also find enunciated in Plotinus, when he states that unforeseen events which the becoming of things reserves for us can be counteracted by virtue, repelling “the strokes of fortune by virtue” and awakening them “by greatness of mind” (Ennead, II, 9, 18, 28–29). Epictetus, too, laid great store by reason, for he establishes that since it is not facts in themselves that provoke disturbance but the judgements which people pronounce on the facts, then the essential thing to have care of is the representations which structure cognitive life (Handbook, 5). Even if the assumption which lies at the origin of this study is faith in the activity of thought, we cannot nevertheless be silent as to the limits of an over-evaluation of the force of the mind. This becomes evident just when we feel the urgency of transforming certain feelings, such as the fear of being, or the anxiety which follows the fear of not succeeding in becoming our own possible being. We are a series of possibilities, but the possibility is not yet the being. When we find ourselves called to become our own possible being, we can feel this task to be overarching and feel ourselves pierced by the fear of not being up to responding to the call of being. Then the ontological feeling of the fear of being can desiccate our vital force, and create disorder in the movements of being. Finding a remedy for the fear-of-being, according to the perspective of Heidegger indicated above and which goes back to Epictetus, means concentrating our attention on another feeling, the faith-in-becoming. Faith in the quality of becoming possible is essential, for it expands the soul. The flowering of this feeling in the soul cannot be traced back just to the work of thought. It is a feeling of vital importance and, like everything which is essential, this, too, has something about it of the human condition, which is relational; this means that faith is a good thing which we learn by experience of live relations with other people who can vividly condition is that of being spectators. The culture of modernity has exalted doing, to the point that at the top of the hierarchy of abilities it has placed that of manipulating things, forgetting that the quality of our being also has need of passivity and receptivity. When we think of the position of the spectator in philosophy, and with it the exercise of the capacity for contemplation, it is the sense of sight which is privileged; but fully exercising the position of the spectator requires activating all the senses, because there are things which demand to be seen, others heard, others smelled, others touched, and yet others tasted. It is the exercise of every sensorial direction which produces the sense of being-real with which we feel ourselves to be in the world.

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witness words and actions of faith. Feeling upon us a gaze of faith, from people who are important to us, teaches us to have faith. Zambrano (2020) hypothesizes a sacred depth from which essential things take their form. The sacred, for her, is situated in a zone which remains mysterious to reason. With a gaze that is perhaps excessively empiricist, however, even the first experiences and relations which outline the vital space of each of us can be considered sacred. Considering them sacred means considering them worthy of the greatest care. From here might flower a different philosophy of existence which takes care as the paradigm of being in the world. Even while lived experience is essential, it is not enough to experience relations permeated with a faithful and trusting way of being in the world for this feeling to be generated in us too. There is always a need for thought, for only with thought can the experience become something from which we can learn. And thought which is capable of generating something else is never abstract, but rooted in lived experience. Any rationalistic or rationalising perspective needs to be viewed critically, for we know from experience the fragility of the power of the mind, and how much the good in things does not only depend on thought and a person’s vital force, but on a whole series of environmental conditions, the most important of which is relational. Nonetheless, even while we must avoid placing the weight of too much expectation on that doing which is thought, we cannot deny the importance that spiritual force can have, when it is cultivated in the proper way. Just at the moment in which we attribute a transformative responsibility to thought, it is necessary to step back from every facile illusion about the regulation of affect. One of the myths which marks certain theories about the intelligence of the emotions is that of leading the subject to full mastery over himself, a form of sovereignty over his own emotional world, which will make him impermeable to external events. Even if the process of emotional self-understanding, depending on the intensity and continuity with which it is practised, allows us to limit our dependency on emotive experience and so gain a sort of inner kingdom, it is still necessary to avoid any managerial interpretation of our relationship with our affective life, because emotions, feelings, passions and affective tonalities are not to hand to be used as things are used, but they are living elements which, even if they can undergo processes of transformation following a practice of self-formation, fortunately draw back from any attempt at managerial logic. Stein herself, who attributes great importance to the practice of the knowledge of the self, and conceives the obscurity of

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the soul as something on which reason can throw some light, states that the light of self-knowledge should not be over-valued. Stein, however, maintains that an increased mastery of the self is possible if the soul decides to turn its attention to a different world in which we live, by orienting the regard towards the divine realm (2002, 58). This interpretation of the process of self-education recalls the one expressed by Socrates in the Alcibiades–in a part of the text, however (133c 8–17), over which doubts have been raised as to its authenticity– where the philosopher explains to his pupil that the soul will be able to know itself only if it turns its gaze towards the divine. With slipping towards the transcendent, but also without, for this reason, giving up on responding to a possible drive towards the beyond, we can emerge from an interpretation of the process of self-investigation which is dangerously intimist and solipsistic, interpreting self-care in a dialogic relation with others which allows us to trace shared modes of signification, from which we can begin to seek self-knowledge. Furthermore, if we take on board the Aristotelian thesis whereby a good spiritual life takes place when living well is as one with acting well, then, situating this ethical thesis on the horizon of relational ontology, self-care cannot fail to move away from an intellectualising vision and become pragmatic, embodying itself as care for others. Even broadening the horizon of interpretation of being beginning with other worlds of signification, the knowledge we might acquire is always partial, because affects are complex material for human reason and what reaches the conscious level is always only a part. Other feelings at the same time can contribute to triggering a way of being; these feelings can be generated from different cognitive actions, which constitute responses to different points of experiential attention, and it is difficult for the mind to cover the whole range of feelings in play. And even when reflective attention succeeds in grasping a certain level of complexity in our inner life, and identifying the way in which the motive force of feeling operates on a person’s decisions, other movements of the soul can act in the shadows, remaining in the background but still producing an active force no less intense than our conscious feelings. However, complete and constant contact with the deepest and most intimate parts of our minds remains impracticable and so, fortunately, does the possibility of dominion over our inner life. If on the one hand this impossibility of accessing the heart of the life of the mind is a sign of the fragility of the instruments of reason, on the other hand it signals the intangibility of the depths of affective life, and is thus a safeguard against unacceptable manipulations.

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However limited is our capacity for the comprehension of emotional life, what remains unarguable is the need for a self-education of feeling, in order to reach that inner condition which can be defined as “a still heart”; this can assist thought in its most difficult work: seeking horizons of meaning when every measure of living seems to be lacking, projecting rhythms and directions of existence even when what seems to prevail is disorientation. Education in order to cultivate a still heart should begin as early as possible, teaching the child to sustain himself by searching for good thoughts in the face of the enigmatic situations that life will offer him. This type of education is as one with the cultivation of a still thought, one which can face devitalising feeling, such as the fear of being, or being stuck with ourselves, in which we can feel ourselves sinking. Precisely because we are our thoughts and our feelings, the process of self-investigation asks us to have tact, to proceed with delicacy. In dealing with inner life, in seeking self-knowledge in order to understand the vital movement of thought and feeling, we need not only method (describing in detail, staying faithful to the mode of givenness of the life of the mind), nor only to cultivate abilities (such as intense and continuous inner concentration), but also a certain way of treating this delicate material which is our inner flow. We need to treat it with delicacy. It is not perhaps by chance that the soul has been designated with the name of such a delicate insect as the butterfly, because the Greek term psyche [ȥȣȤȒ] means both the soul and the butterfly. When you get too close to the wings of the butterfly, and go to touch it, you ruin the work of art that is its patterning, for once touched they are nothing more than dust on your fingers: the same thing happens with the soul. The act of knowing always raises ethical questions, but even more so when it deals with the intimate essence of the person. In this case we need an ethics of delicacy. Delicacy is a virtue, one which allows us to treat the object properly, with due regard. It does not wish to seize or to manage, but seeks only to approach with tact. At the roots of the cognitive nucleus which characterises all emotive experience, we can trace certain axiological criteria, those to which we entrust ourselves in order to give a direction of meaning to our walk in time. Since the criteria which express the principle of value constitute a material of ontogenetic value, more essential than ever is the virtue of delicacy which cannot be uncoupled from the virtue of humility, which expresses itself in knowing the limits of one’s own process of selfunderstanding and so the fragility of the knowledge that we are constructing about ourselves.

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The reflective thought which answers to the principle of selfknowledge is not easy to practise, not only for the cognitive commitment it requires, together with the choice that such a commitment inevitably presupposes to interrupt our adherence to doing, in order to carve out a space, a pause in our daily comings and goings, but also because radical thought, as authentically reflective thought always is, cannot fail to arouse the awareness of the fragility of our own being. When this awareness takes possession of the mind, there are two possible reactions: either to persist in the practice of self-investigation, because even while we feel all of our own ontological weakness and as a result the difficulty inherent in the work of existing, we feel the search for the meaning of our being cannot be avoided; or else we avoid the commitment to thought in order to avoid the sense of empty dislocation. If we hypothesise that the first reaction is the right one with regard to finding ourselves not knowing with any certainty what the future state of our being will be or when, then the essential condition in order to continue to exercise reflective thought is, on the one hand, acceptance of our own ontological weakness, and on the other, intimately convinced adherence to the principle of having self-care. When the mind has self-care, care as to its thinking and its feeling, then living water springs from it. But even though it is essential, self-care cannot be invested with too heavy a load of expectations, and we cannot assume that it will guarantee us the possibility of living a full life in which we attain the height of our being (Stein 2002, 438): this would be a state of perfection which does not pertain to the human condition. Nothing safeguards us from the possibility of experiencing those dark nights in which the soul seems to slip into unsurmountable depths. Nonetheless, even if there is nothing to protect us from the painful knowledge that is knowing our own ontological fragility, it is self-care which can provide those instruments necessary to find glimmers of light even in the most difficult moments, so safeguarding the health of the soul and the desire to give full implementation to our own existence.

CHAPTER FOUR CULTIVATING SPIRITUAL PRACTICES

The purposeful meaning in self-care is to give a good form to one’s own being: to reason every day, as Socrates teaches, about the things that are most worthy of consideration, and to see ways to enact them in reality. In order to carry out a fruitful and effective transformation of our own mode of being, ancient philosophies insist on the necessity of practising what are called “spiritual exercises” (Hadot 2002) which aim to develop precise stances of the mind. There is an expression in Plotinus (Ennead, I, 6, 9, 7) which neatly characterises the meaning of the spiritual exercises: sculpting one’s own statue. Plato speaks of a “conversion [ʌİȡȚĮȖȦȖȒ] of the soul” (Republic, 518d) to indicate the spiritual work of education, which orients the person searching for the true knowledge for life, and believes that the soul had to be “turned around” (518c) in order to abandon the world of inessential things and to address the regard towards the questions worthy of examination. In order to promote the conversion of the soul, what education has to do is not put into the soul already-formulated bits of knowledge, but instead cultivate the epistemic virtues through these exercises (518e). Ancient philosophies constitute deposits of seeds of knowledge, which are still valid as a source for techniques with the aim of configuring a good form of the process of self-formation.1 1

Philosophers of antiquity who wrote of spiritual exercises developed their views within a precise philosophy, with precise epistemological and ontological presuppositions, with which, in the light of contemporary philosophies, we cannot always agree. Nonetheless, even if the nucleus of their thought cannot be accepted in its entirety, it is legitimate to refer to them in order to recuperate spiritual practices whose value is recognised to this day, without having to adhere to their philosophy, since we can extract certain principles of spiritual practice without this de-contextualisation weakening their formative value (Hadot 2002). The advantage of a retrospective look at ancient philosophies is that we can take from them both positive qualities and limits after careful evaluation. For example, in Stoicism spiritual exercises have the purpose of preparing the mind to ethically face life’s difficulties, while those of Epicureanism aim to free the soul from worries and lead it to take pleasure in the “simple joy of existence” (Hadot

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For, aside from the differences which characterise the various schools (developing strong mental concentration for the Platonists, cultivating good ethical habits in Plutarch, promoting the transformation of the personality in Plotinus, mobilising energies for ethical formation in the Stoics, and cultivating expansion and separation in the Epicureans), what they had in common was a goal which gave sense to the suggested practice of the exercises: giving form to the spiritual actions in which lies the intimate nucleus of the art of existence. The ancient philosophies which have dealt with the art of existence [IJȑȤȞȘ IJȠ૨ ȕȚȠ૨] agree in believing it possible for the human being to undergo a process of progressive perfection of his own form of being, and that spiritual exercises serve to realise this paideia (Hadot 2002, 61). Indications from the past on spiritual practices necessarily need to be reread and re-signified in order to make them appropriate and relevant to the present. For this reason, the solicitations which have come down to us from the culture of antiquity will be considered in the light of reflections developed in some contemporary philosophies which, in harmony with those of antiquity, address philosophy as work for life and not as a production of thought systems. Before delving into the analysis of the mental stances to be cultivated, it might be useful to provide a concise and simple categorisation of the possible spiritual practices, where each category indicates the specific function of a certain type of exercise. -

Techniques to concentrate the mind. Keeping the mind concentrated on the substantial questions to be thought about, which have to do with the search for the truth of existence; but also, on the experience of the mind itself as it carries this out.

2002, 34). While Stoicism seeks to keep the soul in constant tension in the search for what is good, Epicureanism seeks to cultivate a receptive disposition and a feeling of gratitude towards what happens (Hadot 2002, 34). Each of the two philosophies brings out something essential, but neither of them alone can resolve the problem of the art of existing. For this reason, they need to be considered jointly because the human being needs to act with rigour upon himself and so arm himself to face difficult times, and also to be capable of savouring the joy of existence. The first perspective without the second risks sinking into mere formalism, which saddens and hardens the soul, draining away spiritual life, while the second without the first risks being reduced to an aestheticism incapable of giving back a single crumb of meaning. The commitment to rigorous inner work nourished by a strong ethical drive should then be reconciled with the search for positive experiences for the soul which help him perceive the pleasure of existence.

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Techniques of shedding mental weight. It is indispensable to remove from the mind everything that gets in the way, that is not essential, thus raking away the inessential, to reserve space due to what is–thoughts, affect, and desires. Techniques of subtraction. Finding the time to think quietly, subtracting ourselves from frenetic doing and producing; this implies being able to gift ourselves moments of gratuitousness, relieved of any precise goal. Techniques of relaxation. Training ourselves to disempower the disturbing power of certain thoughts, those which throw the soul into confusion, impeding the soul from living in serenity. Techniques of recall. Bringing into the presence of the consciousness past experiences in order to understand them, and thus stay reconciled with our own past.

In order to embody these principles, the cognitive postures to be cultivated are here described.

Giving attention In order to know oneself and transform oneself, it is necessary to have one’s own experiences “in the mind’s eyes” (Husserl 1983, 76). This means being able to focus attention on the self, the kind of attention which means inner concentration. Being capable of attention to the life of the mind means being as vigilant as possible in order to keep one’s consciousness alert. These days, in certain cultural contexts which take oriental philosophy as a reference point, there is much talk of “mindfulness” to indicate the concentration of the mind on the present moment. This concept is analogous to the concept of attention [ʌȡȠıȠȤȒ] proposed by the ancient philosophies, particularly by Stoic philosophy, according to which, the worst habit we can acquire is not paying attention to the real as it happens (Epictetus, Discourses, IV, 12, 1). In Stoic philosophy, attention is not contemplation of the self, which leaves things just as they are, but a cognitive discipline which produces transformative effects on the life of the mind. Marcus Aurelius understands it in this way (Meditations, VII, 54); for him, it is important to examine methodically at every moment of the present the life of the mind, in order to admit nothing into our thought to which we do not give assent. Above all, it is a question of learning to pay attention in receptive mode, almost without seeking anything; the essential thing is to cultivate this attitude of the mind.

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For Epictetus, attention is an ethical attitude, because having attention means being vigilant over our own being, and since the quality of our being is in strict correlation with the life of the mind, attention becomes the inner gaze with which the subject reflects upon experience. Such attention is to be carefully practised in accordance with the principles that guide our actions. The principles to which we entrust the directions of our mode of being are not elements which we acquire once and for all, but they become truly operative, capable, that is, of acting as a guide, only if we give them continual attention. In this sense, attention is not contemplation, but action which makes the act a vital force (Epictetus, Discourses, IV, 12, 1–21). In order to be vital, and to be able to operate on our actions, these principles, which can inspire us to find the right direction for our being, must always be available and active in the mind, and what makes them active is attention, when it is continuously concentrated on them. For this reason, it is necessary to “keep our mind directed to this end” (IV, 12, 15). Being capable of attention means knowing how to concentrate on the present. Concentration on the present as it is happening should be seen not as a gaze upon what is exterior to us but on the inner life of the mind, monitoring the thoughts which we construct to give meaning to our experience and the affective acts through which our being manifests itself. We might say that it is an ontological imperative to choose the present moment as temporal space for the act of knowing, for seeking transparency even in the tiniest fragment of experience. Indeed, the characteristic of our being is that of finding ourselves prorogued from moment to moment; paying attention to the life of the mind in the instances of it happening, therefore, means keeping to the essence of our being. It is difficult to keep the gaze concentrated on the present, since it demands keeping our distance from attachment to the past and, at the same time, from the tendency to seek refuge with the imagination in the future. Preparation of the soul is required, which consists in examining our attachments to what has already taken place and our expectations with regard to what is to come, in that being aware of the tensions which keep us distracted from the present is the right way to develop a mode of reflection which can remain firmly within the actuality of experience. The exercise of reflective attention requires us to work, not only on the pull of the imagination, but also on affective life and on the sphere of desires, because feelings often keep us tied to the past, preventing us from living fully in the present, just as certain desires end up restricting the future through anticipation.

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The capacity for concentrating on the present has a dual effect, both ethical and epistemological. It produces an ethical effect because keeping the gaze on what happens, as it happens, frees us from remaining chained to the past and from useless and damaging flights into the future, allowing us to live fully in the present. An essential condition for an authentic life is structuring for ourselves, as it were, a path sown with instances of fully lived present. It has epistemological implications, because attention on the present flow of the mind is the condition for acquiring a deep knowledge of its dynamisms. We need to develop two dispositions in order to empower the epistemic capacity of an intensively concentrated attention: the tension [IJઁȞȠȢ] spoken of by the Stoics and the distension [ਙȞİıȚȢ] spoken of by the Epicureans (Hadot 2002, 26, note 6). The attention which manifests itself as tension orients the gaze to follow knowledge with regard to a precise point of attention, whilst receptive attention, which consists in distension, in letting oneself be in the present, allows the mind to gather the data which become evident to the inner gaze. Freely re-interpreted, these two qualities of attention can be defined, one as the intensification of the gaze when we notice a problematic aspect which demands that we dedicate the maximum attentive tension to it, and the other as an opening of the mind to the maximum of its receptive capacity with regard to every detail of the experience. Thus conceived, the practice of attention allows us to concretise the principle of “entering into reality”. It might seem a contradiction to state that the human being, who finds himself immediately in the world, has work to do in order to enter into reality, but finding ourselves amongst things does not automatically translate into vital contact, which is, rather, to be patiently cultivated by keeping our cognitive, affective and sensorial life, not to mention our relational acts, close to things. It can happen that certain thoughts and fantasies keep the mind closed within a world of anticipation which prevents us from having a genuine contact with phenomena, whether external or those of the mind, not to mention the places of refuge in the mind which we often create through our inability to bear reality. Working to enter into reality means avoiding letting the life of the mind produce ontological enclosures and seeking a vital contact with things and with other people. Training ourselves in the ability to pay attention produces a precise formative effect on the mind: it sharpens our sensibility to the becoming of phenomena, develops our capacity to keep the gaze concentrated with the greatest continuity possible on both the inner and external world, and keeps the person’s being focused and receptive towards the real: and

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attention thus becomes an ethical virtue which leads us to inhabit the centre of things. It is part of everyday experience to be distracted from essential questions, letting mental energy be captured and consumed by questions which are superfluous or of second order. This is the phenomenon of mental dispersion, which is rooted in the lack of an order of thought, allowing ourselves to be distracted from what is essential. And when thought allows itself to be captured by the irrelevant multiplicity of certain experiential details, we suffer a form of ontological inconsistency. This way of feeling happens when we find ourselves experiencing a type of suspension with regard to living as life proceeds. We feel the passing of time, passing by us without us being able to live it fully. It is as if the acts which pass by without us having enjoyed them fully and intensively in the present simply disappeared, and with them vanish our own existential possibilities. Knowing how to stay within the present is therefore a condition for being able to live in time. When the tendency to be distracted is always lying in wait, in order to promote an attitude of attention, it becomes necessary to practise a phenomenology on our own experience of inattention. Inattention manifests itself as attention pulverised in a multiplicity of directions and according to discontinuous modalities. If we look at the phenomenology of mental life, inattention is evident when suddenly the gaze is filled with future tasks, or when we let ourselves be distracted by the memory of past events which present themselves to the gaze as does present experience, but then end up absorbing all our attention, or else, again, when we let our attention be drawn to irrelevant details. Once we have effected the phenomenology of these distracting mental acts, that is, carried out a detailed description of the modes of their appearing, it is a question of understanding the reasons for the force with which they impose themselves on the life of the mind. Going back to the originating motives for certain forms of disattention helps us to uncover unresolved parts of the self, since disattention often occurs when the mind lets itself be catalysed by unresolved problems. When they have the power to absorb our attention, these unresolved parts can reveal to us inner tensions which indicate a lack of consideration of substantial questions within our experience. These unresolved knots silently absorb the energies of thought and feeling, making it difficult to focus attention on the real as it is happening. Therefore, they should themselves be made the object of attention so they do not continue being a source of disattention, and made subject to a gaze that is at one and the same time phenomenological,

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hermeneutic and transformative, a gaze which after describing them analytically, seeks the best interpretation as a presupposition for the activation of paths of transformation. We also let ourselves be confused by inattention because we have not matured a precise awareness of the order of importance of things to be thought; and so, when we have no clarity as to what is indispensable to think about, what is important and what, on the other hand, might be meaningful but is not necessarily so, we risk not being able to mete out our attention to what on the contrary it would be a priority to think about. The incapacity to give attention is often a clue to a disorder of the sense of being, but it can also happen that thought is pulverised into many tiny and insubstantial rivulets when it notices the lack of time. There is a dawning time of life, in which everything still seems possible: it is that time when we feel we can dedicate the life of the mind to a philosophy of new life; but there is also contracted time, which happens when the soul notices the dripping away of time without it being marked by meaning. It is as though every instant carried away with it a drop of being and when, drop by drop, time drains away, feeling the draining away of possibilities takes the breath away. Perceiving the reduction of possibilities for finding the path of meaning of being that we are seeking can weaken our vital force. Feeling ourselves within contracted time can bring on a sense of anxiety, and when our relationship with time prompts anxiety which finds no measure with regard to the unease which assails the heart, then almost inevitably we suffer that disorder of the soul which crushes our energy. This disturbed state of inner life cannot fail to produce a worsening of any distraction which pursues the impossible melting away of the feeling of time. Time of disattention is empty time, an emptiness of being. Giving attention means observing. The Greek term skopein [ıțȠʌİ૙Ȟ], which means observing, has amongst its secondary meanings “have care for”. Giving attention, which has care for the object to which the thought is directed, is the act of the mind which, rather than tending to exercise pressure on the thing, seeks the distension which is the condition if the phenomenon is to manifest itself in its proper profile. Distended thought has an essential trait in passivity (Scheler 1955). The difficulty in paying attention to inner life lies precisely in the fact that it requires us to place ourselves in a position of passivity, which is necessary in order to let the acts of the mind reveal themselves to consciousness in their originating givenness, that is for what they are rather than what we would like them to be. If the phenomenon, and therefore the experiences of the life of the

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mind insofar as they are inner phenomena, is that which offers itself in the immediacy of the living act, then the passivity of distended attention is that which allows the phenomenon to happen in its essential quality. Hypothesising the possibility of a passive attitude which allows the manifestation of the object to which attention is directed in the form of an originally offering vision, does not mean that we presuppose a realist gnoseology, that is thinking that the passive listening to the life of the mind allows an isomorphic knowledge of its happening. Giving attention always comes from a precise perspective; always, even in the most passive of positions, there is a constructive activity of the mind. Passivity is a guiding idea which we might follow, beginning with the assumption that this work of disempowering the self allows a different inner perception, in which is enacted a rapprochement, however asymptotic, to one’s own essential content.

Making an inner silence The pressing hold that care of living exercises on the soul is at some moments so weighty that it makes us feel the desire for the inner quiet which the ancients spoke of, and which is described well in certain mystical texts. The quiet of the soul is a state of rest, of serene inner relaxation, in which the mind has found time suspended from normal activity: making no plans and making no decisions. This lack of activity is not a sign of absence of life and should not be confused with those desolating forms of inner desertification in which the desire for life seems to be annihilated: on the contrary, it allows the mind to experience the maximum of vitality.2 2 In the description of the mystical quiet which we find in Stein, the philosopher speaks of a “state of repose in God” in which “we hand every future thing over to divine will and abandon ourselves completely to our destiny”; this abandonment to the transcendent leads us to experience “a sense of security, of freedom from all responsibility” which little by little fills the soul with “a new life” (Stein 2000, 201). In order for this “inner rebirth” to take place, it is not enough to have a certain level of receptivity. Religious faith is essential, because to be capable of receiving this state of suspension of being which is outwith ordinary experience, we must presuppose a divine source. This condition would exclude many people from the possibility of having experiences of intense inner quiet; Stein, however, maintains that a state of inner life of analogous quality to this “repose in God” can happen even in the context of experiences where the urge to the divine is not involved, because when the soul is sufficiently receptive, even “simple contact with intensely alive people can have a vivifying effect” (2000, 201) on our sense of being.

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But the ordinary condition of the life of the mind is that of not knowing rest, to be incessant in its movement; a movement which can become a laboured succession of thoughts and emotions with regard to which consciousness perceives all the weakness of every ordering instance. When the breath of the mind is contracted in the travail of a disordered movement, the need to experience inner silence becomes compelling. Stein adopts an expression from the mystics: becoming an “empty vessel” (1977). Emptying is not the same as eliminating–even if that were possible–every content from the mind. The mind is not, indeed, a container to be filled and emptied at will. Rather, it is a vital flow of thoughts and emotions which would mean eliding the life of the mind itself. It is not therefore by scraping away thoughts and emotions that we bring about inner silence, since that would be to damage the substance of the mind; rather, we need to silence everything that is inessential and produces only useless noise. The silence imposed on continual chatter, the chatter which occupies our inner space, constitutes, in every philosophy of spiritual practices, the first step towards self-care. Achieving inner silence means rendering the non-essential inactive in order to allow only the indispensable to take root in the fabric of the mind. Being capable of inner silence is an indispensable condition when we are seeking answers to the substantial questions of thought, those which deal with the search for the art of living. In order to avoid hurried answers and have the time to find the right direction for thought, it is a matter of knowing how to interpose a gap between the moment in which we grasp the question and the start of the search for an answer, a suspension which deactivates tensions and expectations. It is about learning without seeking, only then what is not foreseen can make itself present to the mind. Achieving inner silence means silencing everything we feel to be nonessential, mere frippery. There are no a priori criteria for deciding what should be silenced, for each person has to judge that for himself, starting with a close and detailed examination of the impact which certain ideas, beliefs, and modes of feeling have on our lives. But we might offer some indication, and say that it is possible to identify as harmful all those theories which claim a definitive value for themselves, or those expectations which lead us to only enclose our experience around predetermined objectives. If every experience leaves traces on the soul then it becomes an unavoidable imperative to judge the quality of what remains of a lived experience, a train of thought, a desire which has drawn our energies to it, and work to deactivate what puts our inner life at risk, cultivating instead what does it good.

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A certain degree of inner silence is essential to bring about any knowledge of the self, which requires that nothing should insinuate itself into the process of enquiry such as to pre-figure what we are investigating. Having focused on the quality of this action of the mind, we must however say that the absence of presuppositions is an extreme criterion which can never be realised, and thus moving towards the essential simplicity of thought is a work destined never to be finished. Precisely because it is unavoidable to think from a specific place, from a specific architecture of thoughts and breathing a precise feeling, knowing ourselves becomes of necessity a construction of the self, a conception, a bringing to the light of an idea of the self. It is this constructive capacity of thought which impels us toward a meta-reflective and methodical surveillance.

Allowing oneself time The essential direction of the process of self-formation lies in seeking the knowledge of existence which helps us to give sense to our being, to inhabit the world with good sense, together with others. This search takes time, a different time to the busy and hurried time of daily circumspection. It is not easy to remove the chains of doing and dedicate ourselves to a reflection which seems useless because it leaves nothing productive behind it. We are beings obliged to care, that is yoked to the unavoidable task of procuring for ourselves things with the effort of work, and stimulated to create works with the aim of finding our own place in the world with others. With regard to the declension of care which we see in the form of dealing with things, and doing things, the care which manifests itself as solicitude with regard to our own spiritual dimension seems a small thing, almost an inconsequential act. It is, however, the essence of the human condition which makes both kinds of care necessary. It is not by chance that the Greek language has two different terms to name the two diverse types of care: merimna [ȝȑȡȚȝȞĮ] and epimeleia [ਥʌȚȝȑȜİȚĮ]. The term merimna indicates care as concern, as being chained to the ontological work of procuring things in order to continue to live. The term epimeleia, on the other hand, is used by Plato each time that Socrates speaks of the soul, to indicate that care which responds to the need for transcendence, for what lies beyond. It is obvious that the tendency to be taken over by care as merimna, by the frenzy to acquire things, has become for modern human being almost a vice which constrains living to the level of production and consumption. It is a problem present in the Gospels, where Jesus warns of the risks when too much effort is reserved for the material things of life, and when “the

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concerns of this world [ȝȑȡȚȝȞĮ IJȠ૨ Įੁ૵ȞȠȢ]” (Matthew 13, 22) are excessive then the thought which the soul has such need of remains suffocated, and does not make life flourish. For this reason, Jesus indicates the ethical principle of “not to worry too much [ȝ੽ ȝİȡȚȝȞ઼IJİ]” (Luke 12, 22). Indeed, there is no excess which is good and adds to the sense of living. Care as acquiring things is necessary, unavoidable, but even in this part of the business of living it is important to have the right measure so that we can also find time to have care for the soul, that care for our immaterial being that reason, the reason which listens to the essence of being, feels to be indispensable. If we just stop and listen to the noise of the soul, it is not difficult to perceive a sense of anguished dispersal, the frustration of feeling time passing without us giving it sufficient substance. We cannot then fail to note the need to guarantee ourselves a sabbath of the soul, the day of rest. Rest does not mean inactivity, however, but a different activity of the mind, activity which removes itself from productive business and submits to the principle of the search for meaning. In this way rest becomes living time, time for the donation of meaning. We can all, from our own experience, attest to the value of this principle of action, by which we give ourselves time free of other more or less productive concerns in order to find the time for the care of the soul. We should dismiss out of hand, however, any intimistic interpretation, because it is not enough to give ourselves time and interrupt our busy doing, in order to find quiet. It is necessary, rather, in the time dedicated to doing and acting, that we move according to those directions of being which a careful examination of our consciousness has shown us to be right and good. Only then can consciousness be capable of distension, during those moments of relaxation of busy tension. The primary mode of selfcare is that of acting with meaning and, so, not only working on the self to find the path of existence but committing ourselves in practice to trace it.

Taking away Giving a good form to our own life happens through actions that are not only constructive, but also destructive. There are in fact two different typologies of spiritual actions: seeking horizons which help us to see the path of existence, and taking away all that does not help us in finding that path. Just as someone making a statue which has to be beautiful cuts away here and polishes there and makes one part smooth and clears another till he has

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given his statue a beautiful face, so you too must cut away excess and straighten the crocked and clear the dark and make it bright, and never stop ‘working on your statue’ till the divine glory of virtue shines out on you. (Plotinus, Ennead, I, 6, 9, 7–15)

This taking away is an essential action on the epistemological level. We reach knowledge of what is good through a process of purification, of inner perfecting (VI, 7, 36, 8–9), which involves a taking away (IV, 7, 10, 27). In order to go to the essence of things we have to eliminate what is not essential, but first of all we have to work on ourselves, removing those encrusted conceptualisations and those methodological rigidities which inhibit as direct an access as possible to the object. It is a continual work of subtraction of what can cloud our gaze, because, if the gaze looks at a thing when it is already polluted with ideas and thoughts, it cannot see anything, even if someone shows us what is there and possible to see (I, 6, 9). Adopting the logic of taking away and purifying does not imply that we hold the Platonic perspective of aspiring to pure thought, because if pure thought is the vision that appears when the mind tears itself away from ordinary intelligence, which does not see through the light but itself becomes the light by which we see–vision is itself light (VI, 6, 7, 20–21)– then it is unachievable for the human mind. This metaphysical vision of knowledge which aspires to a thinking so transparent as to make itself as one with the thing and thus allow a homogeneous and isomorphic knowledge of the object is unachievable since our thinking is always a thought incarnate, indistinguishable from the materiality of life, separating ourselves from which was considered by Plato (Phaedrus, 661) to be the necessary condition for reaching a thought capable of grasping the essence of things but which for human beings is unreachable. Nonetheless, the impossibility of a thought so pure that it is the same light which caresses things does not take away from the value of the spiritual practice of working to take away the inessential. Taking away, seeking essential simplicity, constitutes one of the spiritual imperatives. Situating ourselves in this perspective asks us above all to avoid running after too many different types of knowing, and especially to deactivate attachment to our own theories, and in general to the multitude of ideas which are not adequately tested, in order to avoid the life of the mind suffocating in the already-known. The mind cannot keep itself in a continual condition of self-reflection, one which would allow us to weigh the ideas with which it comes into contact and give assent only to those which have passed the test of scrupulous judgement. Often, we act like a vessel that fills itself up with

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many different opinions and ideas which have not been thought (Plato, Phaedrus, 235d). When the mind is weighed down by too many nonessential things while it is searching for the true knowledge it is as if on its surface there are encrusted shells, algae and stones which prevent us from breathing (Plato, Republic, 611d–612a). The mind capable of reaching the land of truth is depicted by Plato as a soul with wings. A soul which flies can only be a light soul, involved in nothing else but investigating essential questions. The energy required to fly up high, towards the “land of truths” (Plato, Phaedrus, 248b–c) is found only when thought is not weighed down by useless encumbrances. For this reason, it is essential to take away, to strip away as much as possible. Taking away, then, becomes a spiritual act. Taking away is understood as an acting upon the self to reduce the overflow of certain imaginings which prevent us from staying in the real and keeping attention concentrated on what is really happening to us, and to know that, because it is not essential, only obstructs our access to questions of vital importance. To pursue the objective of lightness the phenomenological method is useful; it is possible to rediscover the formative value of taking on one of its fundamental cognitive moves such as the epoché. This means putting into brackets, and thus obscuring, many of our ideas and types of knowledge and making inactive many of the theories which we assimilate in our daily commerce with the world. There are cases when we would like to eliminate certain beliefs and opinions which we note are putting pressure on our cognitive life, but it is not easy to cancel ideas which we believe to be unfounded or which instil some level of doubt in us. The exercise of epoché, however, allows us to diminish the performative power exercised by these thought contents, because it means behaving as if that idea did not inhabit the mind, with the effect of rendering it ineffective and neutralising its power over our mental life (Stein 2000, 178). The difficulty in the practice of epoché lies in the fact that it is not simply a question of repression, but of an explicit and conscious bracketing of an idea, an act which to be effective requires consciousness never to lose sight of the act itself which is to be bracketed off. Implicit in the exercise of epoché, therefore, is a metacognitive commitment of reflection which watches over the reflective act and absorbs a great deal of mental energy. Even following Husserl’s reflections, the phenomenological method is interpreted by many as an ascetic method because it requires us to enact exercises similar to those of mysticism, for example reducing to a minimum the theories available in order to render the fabric of the mind transparent, and the disempowering of the self in order to make thought as

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receptive as possible with regard to the profile of the phenomenon. In this sense, the phenomenological method is not a simple thought process but a sort of spiritual exercise, because it produces transformations in the life of the mind. It is a demanding method because it asks us to abandon the self and its states, our own conscious contents, to transcend them, in order to reach, as far as we can, a lived experience of the encounter with the world. If we ourselves are too full, this impedes the true encounter with the other and so, authentic knowledge of the ethical principles on which attention should be stoically concentrated is going along the path of experience with light baggage and we should keep our eye on what is essential. In the world which opens up before the person there is an order of possibilities, passages to elsewhere, which can be intuited when we keep our mind clear of the inessential. Even knowing how to be in deficit of meaning when, despite all our efforts nothing can be found which restores the pleasure of being there, is a way of keeping only to the essential without fear of the too little that we might feel we have, because an accepted lack is a living lack which keeps the being open to what is beyond. When we note our own gap in being, we are tempted to have recourse to an infinite series of things to fill it up, but rather than fill the emptiness, these things only have the effect of weighing down the soul, obstructing other unforeseen movements of being. In that smallness, which seems to be the trait of the essential, there is the possibility of a gain in being which cannot be ours if every space is already filled, leaving no emptiness. The way of removing, of going lightly, the way of sobriety, is the exact contrary to the thought that meaning lies in accumulating. It is perhaps here that we find the poverty in spirit and the purity of heart that constitute one of the existential imperatives of evangelical inspiration. It is when thinking sheds the weight of the non-essential that it has access to reality in its originating dimension. We cannot have care for too many things. We have to seek the right measure. On the temple of Delphi, alongside the imperative “know thyself”, was also written “nothing too much” and “chain yourself to nothing”, that is stay within the essential and with lightness with regard to all things, thus freeing the soul from risky attachments. Spiritual practice, taking its inspiration from the principle of practising the search for the essential, lets the soul breathe the freshness of emptiness. Specific to spiritual care is precisely helping the soul breathe easily and freely.3 3

Weil (2002, 49–71) takes to the extreme of her possibilities the technique of taking away and making lighter when she speaks of the practice of destroying the I to make an emptiness in the soul, because the action of emptying out the self is for

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Making ourselves lighter in order to keep to the indispensable can have a strong existential dimension for every human being, and show itself as particularly necessary for those people who are deeply touched by things. Indeed, there are people who let themselves be deeply touched by events, and others who on the contrary live them in a peripheral fashion. We are touched in the depths of our emotional life when an experience engages us to the point of penetrating our “gut” or striking at our “heart”, piercing the being “right to the bone” (von Hildebrand 1922). Allowing ourselves to be touched in our depths is, on the one hand, a sign of being open to the other and to the things necessary for the construction of intense relations of communion, while on the other, it signifies finding ourselves exposed and vulnerable when our being is at stake. This inner experience of participation and vulnerability is well documented in those who do the work of care, which takes account of the risks when we allow ourselves to be touched too deeply. The practice of care is, in its essence, a taking to heart of the other; there are, however, defective practices in which we do not take the other sufficiently to heart, and an excessive practice, in which we take the other too much to heart. In both these cases, it is a question of a lack of measure which, however, in the case of excessive participation, carries risks for the person who acts. Working on the self in order to identify the indispensable and having care for our own inner principle mean constructing a point of anchorage to keep ourselves safe from certain excesses. The work of lightening one’s own self is not to be understood as directed only to the “contents” which encumber the being, but also the her the only action capable of rendering the soul a receptacle to divine action. “Once we understand that we are nothing” writes Weil, “the goal of all our efforts is to become nothing” (2002, 63). While such a radical interpretation of the practice of making oneself lighter is conceivable only within a religious vision sustained by a drive towards the transcendent, nonetheless it can be useful to borrow this conception of “destruction of our own attachments”, to be understood as the drive to disempower the illusion of possessing force and energy insofar as we can dispose of things, whether they be material or immaterial. The various forms of attachment–to our own beliefs and theories, our own attitudes and abilities–enslave the soul, stopping it from entering into a true relationship with the real. Renouncing the thought of meaning as possession of something not only would allow the mind to welcome in something other, what remains unthought in the midst of our attachments, but paradoxically would dispose it to a different form of mastery over things, a detached mastery, because only when we are capable of weakening our acquisitive drive does a radiant energy make itself available, an energy which makes it possible to activate a real movement of being in order to allow us to inhabit the world with others.

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“modes” of being. Scheler (1955) writes that there are two different paths of being: tension and distension. The way of tension keeps us actively inclined toward things, ready to embody constructive actions, while distension keeps us passive and receptive to the world. Amongst the tasks of the present time, we include that of rediscovering the value of the capacity for distension, even if it is discredited by our culture which is so centred on valuing activism, the incisive presence of the self on things. Distension means cultivating a receptive attitude, one which places the mind in the condition of being sensitive to others and to things in their own being. This receptivity which manifests itself in correspondence with work committed to the deactivation of a particular excessive activism aimed at affirming ourselves, constitutes the condition to note the being of things and of others who we meet in the course of our lives.

Seeking the essential Lightening the mind of what weighs it down is a spiritual practice to be understood not only in the sense of scraping away non-essential content, but also as keeping our distance from common thought, from discourse which may seem wise but which in fact keeps us chained to a knowledge which is neither vital nor alive. The thinking needed by the person who goes in search of knowledge of the soul, of the art which allows us to authenticate our existence, is a thinking which is out of the ordinary, because it keeps itself at a distance from established rules and dares to explore untrodden paths. It is an uncomfortable thinking, a winged thought, because it moves away from normal thinking, the kind which often stays stuck in things of little worth. This winged thought, which is capable of walking outside the order of common discourse, sets its roots only in “a tender and pure soul [ਖʌĮȜ੽Ȟ țĮ੿ ਙȕĮIJȠȞ ȥȣȤȒȞ]” (Plato, Phaedrus, 245a). Tender is the mind whose thought has not been hardened by the arrogance of possessing certainties, and it is pure in the sense that it lets itself be moved by just tensions, and just are those who keep the mind concentrated on seeking what is good for life. The subtle reasoners are wrong (Phaedrus, 245b), those who claim that effective thought consists of philosophical systems as daring as they are asphyxiated, which claim to encase truth in the grids of rationalising discourse: on the contrary, the mind needs a winged thought. Winged thinking is something different from the footsteps of thought which develop as we learn technical abilities (Phaedrus, 245a), it is something which grows when the mind holds itself close to “things worthy of being loved” (Phaedrus, 250d). In order to keep the mind close to the things

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which need attention it is necessary to nourish it with what Plato defines as “beautiful reasonings and speculations” (Republic, 571d). It is difficult to say exactly what these consist of. Perhaps good discourses are those which help us find some fragment of the art of living, identify strategies which are achievable and useful in overcoming difficulties, and indicate horizons of reflection from which it might be possible to trace lines of meaning of existence. Good searches, perhaps, keep themselves locked into the essential but at the same time they are uncoupled from any pretence at definition and thus open to the possibility of travelling along unforeseen paths; those that foster a clear gaze in the mind are good, and keep our attention vigilant in the face of deceptive visions of life. But above all, those discourses and searches are good which nourish the mind with the passion for questions of value. Things of value, about which it makes perfect sense to be passionate, are for Plato questions regarding virtue: what is justice? What is temperance? How can we ensure we are just and temperant? (Phaedrus, 250b). These are questions that we should consider not so much and not only to identify the general essence of every virtue and capture it within a clear concept, as Socrates intends, but to understand how to put this into effect in the here and now, taking them on board then as practical questions of daily ethics. Dedicating oneself to thinking of the substantial questions which are to be thought in order to seek the coordinates which allow us to compose an existence of meaning signifies dedicating oneself to what is indispensable, and it is precisely in concentrating on what is essential for thought that one can find the path for giving a good form to our time of living. Being in search of the essential requires energy, the energy needed by the mind to keep concentrating on the questions which consume the power of thought because they are of the greatest value for our being. This energy can be found through the exercise of two spiritual practices at the same time: lightening ourselves of that which weighs down the mind and makes the flight of thought impossible, and then keeping the soul tied to the examination of essential questions, because it is precisely in keeping in contact with questions of value that we find the power of thought to be well oriented. As Plato explains, the wing, thanks to which the soul can arise in the search for what is essential, needs energy and this comes to the soul through keeping attention concentrated on the questions of value which we find in the “land of truth” (Phaedrus, 248b–c). In order to nourish the vital force necessary for every movement of transcendence the mind must keep itself as free as possible from thinking of useless things which would weigh it down to the mind that might lose its wings, and,

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rather, nurture the stance which keeps it seeking what it is substantial to search for. A stance which finds nourishment in searching for things is worth investigating, because when the gaze focuses on essential questions, then it is as if the mind has noted a warmth which flows into its fabric, allowing the wings of thought to grow (Phaedrus, 251b–d). The principle of unburdening oneself of the inessential in order to seek lightness suffused with the indispensable is valid not only on the plane of epistemic formation, but also on the planes of ontology and ethics. Seeking what is indispensable for a full existence of our own being means focusing on the nucleus which occupies the place of greatest value in the person, the axiological sphere around which everything revolves. The indispensable consists of those things that we can define as being of vital importance such that they constitute the decisive point for the existence of a person.4 Being in search of the essential is the source of positive feeling. As Plato says, the mind delights in having its attention in a place where there are “the realities worthy of love” (Phaedrus, 250d), those which are weighty matters for thought. But we can only experience this mental happiness when the mind is light, unencumbered by all contents which obscure the gaze. The mind is only nourished by what gives it cheer, and delight has the same root as light (Augustine, Confessions, XIII, 27–42). Being in a condition of lightness is not, however, the equivalent of vacuousness, the thinking which avoids the uncomfortable risks of a particular form of questioning. The lightness which allows the thought to take flight is the one weighed down by the responsibility to seek the truth, because only then does the mind find nourishment, and is content (Plato, Phaedrus, 247d). The spiritual practice of taking away is therefore that lightening of all that weighs down thought, thus making it capable of concentrating energies on the substantial questions to be considered. It means concentrating on what is indispensable for thinking to produce a positive feeling, one that translates into good energy for the life of the mind and nurtures the power of thinking.

4

According to von Hildebrand, there are moments in life when the position of the indispensable remains empty, nonetheless each person has the tendency to fill this place (1922, 80). The problem lies in filling it through a meditated process, not succumbing passively to external conditionings and fashions. Having self-care means avoiding this second possibility, in order to situate oneself as a subject who freely chooses what it is worth being on this earth for.

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Cultivating the vital energy Self-understanding requires that we activate reflection, that is the behaviour in which we observe what is happening within ourselves. For the development of a good reflective activity the subject needs to have had care to cultivate the spiritual practices indicated above to the highest degree possible. There cannot be an intense reflectivity if the mind is not capable of a concentrated attention on its own experience; without inner silence the reflective capacity finds itself disempowered, for the life of the mind which is too encumbered and distracted cannot gather together the necessary vigour in the act of thinking. If we do not give ourselves sufficient time it is not possible to find the space that this reflexivity needs, since it requires a good level of cognitive calm. When we take away what is surplus to the essential, we avoid mental energy being dispersed, and it is instead made to flow into and nourish our reflective potential. But this is not enough. Self-care also needs something else–vital energy. The commitment to cultivate practices of spirituality not only implies a decision which it is not easy to renew on a continual basis, but also requires us to have available an adequate level of vital energy which keeps us in a state of tension and keeps the eyes of the mind alert. Vital energy is an indispensable positive energy for the unfolding of every personal act, those which embody our essential individuality. Vital force indicates the degree of inner well-being. The better we feel, at ease in the present that we are living, the more we manage to keep the eyes of the mind alert and keep our attention oriented on essential matters, and the more intense is our capacity to concentrate on the object, the greater are the possibilities of achieving sufficient knowledge. When they are not animated by vivifying power it is difficult for good ideas and positive feelings to be capable of generating a movement of being, one which makes us initiate something new; without vital energy thinking and feeling are only capable of weak actions, without the energy necessary to open up experience to what lies beyond. There is then a virtuous circle between self-care which is primarily oriented towards cultivating the vital energy necessary to carry out our personal acts, those in which our essential individuality is concretised, and the possibility of enacting the spiritual practices that are indispensable if we are to have self-care. When Stein speaks of “vital force” (2000, 170), she does not introduce a metaphysical element which would as such be unverifiable, but, rather, she speaks of a phenomenon which each of us notices when we pause to think and to understand the quality of our being. It may be that we feel inside a strength of vital force which keeps our being present and active as

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much as is necessary to experience existential well-being, or else we might sense a weakness in our vital force which makes us notice a kind of diminution of the possibilities of existence. If a certain quantity of vital force is necessary for those activities of the I in which the subject feels it finds substance are to take place, then it is even more essential for each individual to identify what nourishes and what, on the other hand, consumes this energy. It seems to be affective acts which exercise significant action of the vital force, the emotive tonalities which permeate the flesh of the soul, the feelings which guide our gestures, and the passions which put into movement and often throw us off balance. Whilst Stein (2000, 195) believes that all affective experience involves an expenditure of vital energy, whatever its quality, it seems on the other hand phenomenologically evident that negative feeling consumes vital energy while positive feeling nourishes it. Negative feelings consume or block inner energy. Fear can paralyse cognitive activity, but even more problematic is the fear of being afraid, in other words the provisional fear of the paralysing effects which fear exercises on our being, because it keeps the subject gripped within the vice of defensive attitudes which in the end prevent us from living a time which is alive. In the fear of being fearful vital energy is consumed in negative mental acts, because when we are absorbed in pre-figuring possible events and in imagining possible personal reactions we turn away from the present, which is the time of being. The fear of fear, which is largely fear of not being able to sustain the task of existence, prevents vital energy from acting in its originating direction, which is that of putting living into motion and more specifically nurturing free acts in which we actualise our own personal profile. Negative feeling which produces suffering not only reduces the energy available but in certain cases arouses a desire to not even avail ourselves of the energy that we do have. If it is true that there is a direct proportionality between our inner vital force and the sensibility of the soul, then having available a certain inner force can sharpen our sensibility, and this phenomenon can become problematic when we live particularly painful experiences, because the experience feels more vivid. In these cases, the mind might aspire to exhausting its own strength, its own state of vigour, in order to feel that it can no longer feel. The more alive and sensitive is the soul, the more intensely it feels the quality of experience, and when the experience is of a suffering which seems without end, then we might wish to desensitise the soul, let its force drain away, let the feeling which is at one with being fade away too. When this destructive

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desire acts silently on the mind without being analytically meditated upon and resignified in the light of precise directions of meaning, it can push the person to seek to exhaust mental energies by getting involved in a disordered series of activities with the result that, in the end, rather than finding peace in a desensitised state which is not a loss of being but a prelude to something other, we experience only a negative sense of exhaustion in our being. Positive feeling, on the other hand, distends the soul and restores a sense of well-being, translating into an increase in vital energy. When we feel in good form, because we feel our soul is nourished with a life-giving force, we can perceive ourselves to be capable of intense mental activity, and this positive sensation is often at the root of intellectual adventures which allow us to obtain significant results which were not previously foreseeable. The presence of a positive or negative feeling is not enough, however, to produce modifications on our vital force or on our way of positioning ourselves in relation to the world. It may be that we appreciate the way a person behaves and as a consequence feel a sense of gratitude towards that person, but if this gratitude is not felt in a profound way–if, in other words, it remains a superficial feeling which does not touch the depths of the soul–then in the subject who lives it there is no flowering of any lifegiving force. What finally reinforces the theory of the dependence of feeling on our evaluative acts is the fact that the degree of vitality and hence of ontogenetic significance with which we live a feeling, is directly proportional to the degree of positive evaluation attributed to the lived event or to one’s own experiential situation and to the role which the value of reference has in our scale of values. Only vivid feelings have the possibility of making available to the person the vitality necessary to give a beginning to something new, to a new action, whether it be inner or directed towards others. If feeling has significant effects on vital force, it is also true that in its turn the intensity with which we experience our feelings depends on the quantity of vital force available. This morphogenetic reciprocation in terms of a direct proportionality between the quantity of vital force and the intensity of feeling explains why in elderly people, who feel that they have given everything possible to life and are aware of the forthcoming end of their journey, certain forms of suffering which in their more vigorous years would have torn at the soul, provoking unbalance in both thought and feeling, appear to be more tolerable, as if they were more blurred. Maybe the equilibrium with which the elderly face things depends not

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only on the wisdom gained over the course of time, but on a shift in the quality of vital force, as if the root of our being comes to our aid in the most appropriate way for the time which we are living. Since the force of feeling and its coloration depend on a precise evaluative act carried out on our experience, and this act is in relation with the type of value and the position it occupies in the scale of values, then, if we accept this premise, the possibility of cultivating our vital energy turns out to be connected with the work of reflection on the values which guide our thinking and our feeling. We would be falling into a mentalist and therefore abstract vision of vital energy if we were not to take account of its co-dependence with the physical vital force that we feel in our bodies. The mind is immersed in the body, in the materiality of life. Ours is not a thought purified of tangible life, and so the pure thought which Plato spoke of, the only one which can accede to truth, is not possible in that it presupposes the disjunction of the mind from the body. There are moments when the tiredness which sweeps across the body seems to colour the life of the mind, too, preventing it from using its inner force as best as possible, just as in other moments a sense of physical well-being can prompt a feeling of freshness in the mind. Bodily life which keeps us immersed in things can obstruct the life of the soul or bring it nourishment. And in reciprocal fashion the life of the soul has an effect on the physical dimension: an unexpected joy gives us a sense of vigour in our bodies, whilst thinking we will be able to have a positive outlet for a particular passion makes us find a level of energy that we thought we had lost; when the pain of the mind is such that it seems as though the mind will shatter, the body, too, seems to tremble and fall into pieces. Since the body is part of nature, through it the mind nourishes itself with the qualities of experiences in contact with the physical elements. Contact with the natural elements can be perceived as a source of energy: simply resting the gaze on the shiny green of the new leaves of a laurel produces a sense of pleasure, and this sensible pleasure can translate into a sense of freshness and relaxation of the mind; the gleam of dawn light on the surface of the sea can become spiritual light which refreshes the breath of thought, the mind drinks in the blue and an unexpected happiness pervades it. Given the close connection between inner vital energy and physical vital force, the life of the mind finds itself rooted in bodily life which keeps us in relation with the wider life of nature; for this reason, positive experiences on the plane of bodily sensibility procure corroborating forces

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which also have a positive effect on the life of the mind, not in the sense that “physical vital force” is immediately translated into mental energy or “inner vital force”, but because it provides that sense of well-being which allows the mind to deploy its vital energy in the best possible way. Like material life, spiritual life also needs an energy source: corporeal life, in being amongst things, finds a source of well-being or ill-being which acts on our physical force; and in analogous fashion, if our thought is concentrated on questions of value, we notice that the effort of thinking discloses other landscapes of our being and this gives vigour to the soul, nourishing our spiritual force. Even if spiritual life, in which the human being finds his essence, has its own sources of energy, it is not distinguishable from corporeal life, and is in tune with both the body’s vigour and its weariness. My mind is present in all of the parts of my body, it feels it and cannot detach itself from it; the perception of bodily processes is as much a part of my life as thinking and feeling. If spiritual life suffers the same quality as physical life, the opposite is also true. The fact that spiritual life is tied to bodily life means it can have positive and health-giving effects: when the mind, following some spiritual work, savours the pleasure of a few gleams of light in the depths of the soul, this flows over into the body which seems to become more alive. Even in the darkest night, when the lack of light risks dragging our thoughts towards areas of the mind soaked in suffering, the spiritual force which comes from keeping our attention on certain thoughts can generate that spiritual pleasure which makes the darkness of the night seem lighter, and allows us to resignify our experience of things. Maintaining the thesis of a close dependency between bodily life and inner life does not mean making spiritual life completely dependent on physical life. Even if inner life is conditioned by physical life, a phenomenological analysis of experience shows us that it is possible to have cognitive experience which expresses a certain level of mental vigour even when the body is weary; this is the case of free acts which can take place even under conditions of bodily weariness, a sign that freshness of mind is possible even in non-optimal physical conditions. It is a characteristic of inner life to be able to draw strength from itself and this happens when, following mental effort on a particular cognitive event, the subject experiences an intimate sense of satisfaction which seems enough to reintegrate the vital energies consumed. We cannot fail to note that the happiness which comes from feeling we are carrying out a good work of thought is the result of a self-evaluation in which, through a second-degree reflection, the mind positively qualifies the cognitive work in which it is

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engaged: and this is a further sign of the primacy of evaluative acts for the quality of existence. The existential value of the practice of understanding the quality of mental life is confirmed when it offers up not only its essence, that is to say the quality of mental acts which indicate their quid, but also, in carrying out an axiological analysis of the degree of value of different mental acts for spiritual life. In other words, the existential primacy of axiological acts decides the primacy, in the process of reflective selfinvestigation, of meditating upon those spiritual acts which enact the analysis of things of value which orient the life of the mind, the analysis which allows us to decide in which directions to invest our own vital energy. And from this, in confirmation of the thesis which lies at the heart of this study, it emerges that knowing ourselves is a practice of spirituality in that, if directed towards what is essential, it provides the cognitive data which constitute the necessary premise for carrying out significant decisions which are engaged in finding the orientation of meaning for our own being.

Writing the thoughts In order to intensify the moulding forces of practices of spirituality, it is useful to accompany inner work with writing. The potentiality of writing in moulding thought has been known since antiquity. Marcus Aurelius wrote the maxims which condense guidance for conducting our lives and accompanied them with indications of the way in which they should be practised. In order to have principles of life which are clear and ready to be applied it is useful to meditate upon them over a period of time and to this purpose it is helpful to write them, because writing makes available to the reflective gaze essential lines of orientation, and keeping them before the gaze is the necessary condition to make them become a structuring of the life of the mind. Only when they are repeatedly meditated upon will they become capable of carrying out all their performative force on our being. And in order for the principles of the art of living to become a live instrument of experience, they must be formulated in concise and essential form (Hadot 1992, 75). In this way, writing becomes spiritual exercise. Writing thought so that the exercise of writing is formative essentially requires work on words. Since truth takes form with words and language is the house in which the meaning of existence lives, we must have care of words. We care for them when we seek those which best help us in the search for truth, without letting ourselves get too tangled up or be taken in by the rhetoric which falsifies our perception of things.

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When we search for a language that can speak the quality of the life of the mind, we immediately come up against the difficulty of finding adequate words to name internal, non-visible reality. Our language is above all a language of the external world, which is formed in response to the primary interest of the human being for external reality. The untouchable nature of inner life makes necessary a reference to ordinary language which allows us to move at our ease amongst things, and in many cases, it can work; nonetheless it is important to keep watch over the effect that certain expressions can have on our inner perception. Speaking of the soul in the same terms that we use to speak of things can mislead us into thinking of a “quiddity” of inner flow which can catch reflective thought in cognitive dispositions that seek an inner object, a thing with spatial dimensions, rather than interpreting reflection as a gaze which accompanies the living flow of thoughts. The spatial metaphor of “inner castle”, for example, with which mysticism speaks of the life of the soul, while it has the positive effect of guiding us towards a search which can keep its distance from the surface and go, rather, into the depths, can lead us to think of a layered structure of the soul, as if in the flux of thoughts there were distinct areas or places, when in fact thoughts endowed with a certain degree of weightiness are mixed in with superficial thoughts, and the most deeply held beliefs can find themselves next to encrusted careless thoughts which should stay on the surface without impinging on the live nucleus of our thinking. Even to describe the simplest formation of our flow of experience, we need a great effort to fight against the tendency to use language as we use it for the external world, and to seek instead to re-invent language in order to render it capable of expressing the most elusive part of ourselves. Creative work on language, to make it suitable for speaking of the essence of the life of the mind, is indispensable because, when we lack words capable of speaking adequately of the quality of experience, this experience struggles even to be clearly perceived. Words do not just have the simple function of saying what has already been perceived, but their power extends further: they allow the outline of things to be seen more clearly. There is a reciprocally generative recursion between the search to give a profile to our lived experience and the search for words which can adequately speak their essence. The meaning of language consists in being able to give voice to what lives in the soul and so communicate with others. Being able to find words which faithfully speak the meaning of experience is thus an essential spiritual activity. Once we understand that the function of language is

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structuring, as far as reality is concerned, and not merely expressive, we are compelled to take on the ethical responsibility of the word. We must not fail to follow the ethics of the word for a writing which can contribute to the care of the self, an ethics which expresses itself above all in seeking words capable of transmitting the meaning of experience, life-giving words. There are words which claim to operate full coverage of the experience we have of things–it is necessary to avoid them and free ourselves of this deception. We need, instead, to search for those words which leave fissures of silence, clues to what is for us unsayable, living words which can be, and say, something of experience. Living language is not something we can acquire in terms of an object at our disposal: it needs to be cultivated, seeking true words and new techniques for weaving together our discourse.

Directions of meaning in the process of self-analysis In order to be practised effectively, practices of spirituality require the mind to keep itself along precise lines and directions of meaning. Always remind ourselves of the limits of what we know. As we have already said, the process of self-formation takes on meaning when it is in search of the authentic human knowledge [ਕȞșȡȦʌȓȞȘ ıȠijȓĮ] (Plato, Apology of Socrates, 20d) which is indispensable in authenticating the time of existence, and when it is aware that what we know is inevitably destined to remain uncertain and fragile. Not having a sense of this limit, that is, not having a measure of the relative and contextual value of our own knowledge, causes the greatest harm. Real knowledge consists in always keeping in mind the real measure of our knowing. When we read ancient texts, it is easy to become fascinated by the objective assigned to the process of self-formation as self-care: seeking wisdom. Socrates speaks of it in the Apology, assigning to the search for wisdom the quality of the direction of meaning of the process of selfformation. Without denying the value of the direction of meaning, its indispensability, the outlines of this objective should nonetheless be drawn so that it remains sustainable. Knowledge of human matters is not an object which can be possessed by anybody, and thinking we can acquire it means situating ourselves in excess. Assuming the thesis that wisdom of life cannot be fully accessed does not, however, mean renouncing our efforts in pursuing it, but, rather, starting our search in the full knowledge that we are walking a path that

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has no end. We cannot give up seeking wisdom, but we must do so in the knowledge that we will only ever be able to access sparse fragments. Stay within reality. It happens that in order to bear the harshness of reality and the weakness of our own being, we tend to nurture illusions, and hide our own inadequacies and lack of abilities. But every illusion which seeks to fill the void that we notice only pushes us further away from the truth. And the more we insist on seeking illusions to fill this void, the sicker the soul becomes. It is essential to know how to stay within reality as it is. When we feel the lack of the right idea, or the knowledge appropriate to the moment, it is necessary to train oneself to stay within real thoughts, deactivating the drive to fill the void. “Loving truth means bearing the void” (Weil 2002, 25). We need to be able to bear not only the void in knowledge but also the void in recognition. We all need to feel ourselves recognised in the gaze of the other, especially those we admire. But this does not always happen. And then we can feel ourselves lacking in that energy which only comes from the other. It is thus necessary to know how to remain lacking, seeking nothing. At some moments the capacity to stay with little becomes necessary: accepting the little power that we have and exercising that alone, without seeking recognition, but only staying within truth. The starting-point for a thinking which knows how to stay within reality can only be the real data that are given to the mental regard through the direct experience. Staying within reality does not mean letting ourselves be conditioned by things as they happen to occur, allowing ourselves to be dragged by movements of force, or yoking ourselves to the nuclei of power. Quite the opposite, it means keeping to what is seen to be necessary to do when feeling and thinking are engaged in seeking to understand what it is right and just to do in that precise moment. This is not mysticism then, but politics of the everyday. Compare with other forms of knowledge. In order not to impoverish thought within reductive perspectives it is necessary to compare notes with other forms of knowledge, because no knowledge has a unique hold on the truth of being; they are all inevitably partial because they are constructed from a specific and hence partial gaze on experience. Examining other perspectives means finding more ways of research, extending the map of practicable paths and so widening the choice of possible actions. It is important that this should be a real confrontation, not weighted with prejudices, and constructed over long periods of time thus allowing for listening and authentic dialogue with the other’s thought. The meaning of

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the encounter with other worlds of thought should be identified not in wishing to acquire other ideas (assimilative logic) but in experiencing different paths of thinking (exploratory logic). Cultivate and safeguard freedom of thought. Having self-care is in its essence a work of action on our ways of thinking and feeling in order to find a good form of being in the world, and so knowing ourselves has sense if it is observation as an end in itself, but observation which prepares us for transformative action. Deciding to work on one’s self requires free acts of the mind, generated by the discipline of deep meditation on essential questions. There is no education of the self if there is no freedom (Stein 2001, 235). Freedom is not, however, a permanent quality that is cosubstantial with each person’s being: it needs to be cultivated. For this reason, a direction of meaning to pursue is the freedom to think. Having care for freedom does not mean thinking or stating what we want independently of every comparison with other forms of knowledge and of every intersubjective critique. It means, rather, safeguarding the possibility of exploring different worlds of thought without becoming subject to preventive censures or prohibitions: not accepting any given truth, but guaranteeing for ourselves the possibility of going in search of truth. In order to experience real freedom and not just blind individualism, every idea should be subject to critical confrontation with others, and then accepted as adequate only once it has been subject to plural processes of radical problematization. And finally, even when we take on board an idea as sufficient to serve as orientation for our experience, we should still only consider it as a provisional point, something to be put up for discussion again each time that a bump against experience shows the partiality or the unreliability of our interpretations. We need to learn to distrust truths which present themselves to us as definitive, and codes which claim to regulate a priori every aspect of our experience, and instead keep ourselves in continual dialogue with the existent and its shifts and mutations. It is indeed within the order of things to wish for certainties; extreme uncertainty and the lack of points we can lean on risk blocking every movement of our being. Nonetheless, excessive investment in specific theories prevents the movement of thought from unfolding in its own force and its own direction, the one which guides us to seek those gleams which might shed a little light on our experience. It is a question of reconciling the search for points of solid ground, which are still, of course, to be regarded as provisional, with passion for the freedom to explore the new. Cultivating a nomadic thought capable of crossing different landscapes and cultures, of measuring itself

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against the open, and bringing with it what is needed in order to have dialogue with the other. Thinking together. The discourse on self-care developed here might seem to suffer the limit of discourse which is too inward-looking, too solipsistic, because attention to the other, to the intersubjective dimension of existence, has only at points been thematised. The fact that self-care in relation to others has not constituted a specific theme of this work is not due to a lack of attention to the relational sphere, but rests on the presupposition that given the relational and plural characteristic of the human condition, which makes our life intrinsically connected to that of others, all the work on one’s self, when it stays faithful to its original direction of meaning, which consists in seeking the outlines of the art of existence so as to give a good form to our own lives, cannot fail to keep within its gaze the priority of constructing good vital relations with others. Working towards our own enacting fullness, in which we feel the joy of being, cannot be distinguished from attention for the other. Having said this, we should clarify that having self-care in the ways outlined here is only possible when certain primary conditions of life are met. And if such a possibility is given to some, we cannot forget that we live in a world in which hunger, poverty and the suffering which results from the spread of warfare, from the lack of respect for human rights and more or less explicit forms of violence are the burdens that many have to bear on a daily basis. For many inhabitants of this earth, the possibility of carrying out these practices of self-formation is a dream so remote as to barely take shape in their minds. A self-formation which does not take account of this reality, and which thus does not consider others, whether they be near or far off, is missing its own proper purpose and becomes nothing more than mere dandyism or solipsism. We affirmed that self-care is learned by being within a community of practices in which the concern for a good education of the self is of primary importance. Given this condition, the community in which we learn self-care, in order to be authentically capable of imposing the right direction on the process of self-education, which takes account of the ontological quality of the human condition, must of necessity be permeated by an ethic of attention for the other. It must be a community in which the eudaimonia, that being well which in Aristotle’s purview is one and the same as doing well, is always conceived as indistinguishable from the well-being of others and hence from the commitment to act so that this good is realised.

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Each act of the process of self-education [examining the flow of thinking and feeling; interrogating the essential questions for life; putting in action the spiritual practices] acquires its real ontological legitimacy when it keeps concern for the other at the centre of attention. It is the relation with the other that poses the real questions of meaning and which calls us to search for our best form of being. Seeking the truth of experience. The meaning of education, in Plato, consists in giving form to a well-cultivated mind, one which possesses knowledge episteme [ਥʌȚıIJȒȝȘ], benevolence [İ੡ȞȠȚĮ] understood as the search for doing good, and frankness [ʌĮȡȡȘıȓĮ], understood as the courage to speak the truth (Plato, Gorgias, 487a). The term parresia indicates the courage to say things as they are, even in a situation where the speaker puts himself at risk. Saying things as they are is a discursive practice which regards not only our relations with others, but above all with ourselves. Learning to stay within a register of truth means accepting the cognitive and emotive effort of being in a relation of frank honesty with ourselves and with others. It means avoiding camouflaging ourselves in illusions, and dismissing the temptation to seek refuge in our mind and to name our being as it really is. Truth is not however something to be possessed, but is, rather, something which is always to be sought. In order to seek the truth of experience we must accept the limits of validity of every thought process, which is always limited by the subjective enclosures from which we gaze out at reality. The courage to continue to seek truth, knowing the unavoidable fragility and uncertainty of every thought construction, is the generative matrix of the authentic dialogue which is the characteristic of the essential and indispensable nurturing of our being.

A reflective note In this study I have proceeded by seeking to stay faithful to the Socratic/Platonic theory which assigns essential value to the mental work of the search for knowledge, and in order to radically enter into this perspective I have entrusted myself to the phenomenological method, which pursues the objective of maximum cognitive clarity. The search for truth about experience has meaning if the words do not stay on the paper but are put to the test by facts. Carrying out the practice of self-enquiry as long as possible in time shows that the most radical and honest possibility of the life of the mind, perseverance in examining cognitive and affective acts in the effort to understand their power in the

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making of our being, helps us to stay in reality with a sense of awareness, to identify those refuges of the mind which keep us far off from reality by deceiving our steps, and finally to untangle those complex inner knots which consume vital energy and bring disorder into our lives. For this reason, as Socrates teaches us, a life without the commitment to thinking is a life not fully lived and the principle of knowing the life of the mind should be adopted as rigorously as possible. Nonetheless, in the light of experience, and not only because of a dutiful act of critical analysis characteristic of the work of research, we should signal that the work of self-care runs the risk of becoming purely intellectualistic, and demands something else if it is to be authentic. It demands reason to be not cold but passionate, a logos agapetos, that is, a reasoning nurtured by passionate care for the living truth, and a dedication to seeking with our actions to model our being as best we can with others in the world according to the principle of agape, love for things. What creates difficulty is not only spiritual blindness but also affective poverty, because no reasoning, even if could be perfectly pure, that is without bonds with senses, constitutes an adequate response to the soul’s drive to what is good for life. A reasoning devoid of sentiments will never be able to satisfy the soul’s thirst for meaning, but it leaves life cold. A life without a crumb of love is hardly worth the trouble of living.

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