Friday, October 23, 2009

MF 17: listening skills & silence

Philosophical ascesis involves putting together a defensive equipment against possible events in your life. THis is what the Greeks called the paraskeue. The function of ascesis is to form a paraskeue so that the subject constitutes himself.Its principle is not the individual's submission to the law, but to bind the individual to the truth.

Ascesis is what makes possible the acquisition of the true discourses we need in every circumstance, event, and episode of life in order to establish an adequate, full, and perfect relationship to ourselves.

Listening, reading, writing, these are the techniques and practices that support ascesis.

Plutarch's On Listening: listening is the most passive sense. We cannot avoid hearing what take place around us. The sense of hearing is more than any other sense capable of bewitching the soul. The example of Ulysses when encountered Sirens. He had to block up the ears of his sailors and have himself tied to his own mast, knowing that his sense of hearing is his most passive sense. But Plutarch also says that hearing is the most logikos. It can receive the logos better than any other senses. The only access to the soul for the logos is through the ear.

The sense of hearing is ambiguous, therefore.

Epictetus on listening: to listen, we need empeiria, that is to say, competence, experience, or acquired skill. We also need tribe, that is, diligent practice. How can we purify logical listening in the practice of the self?
First is silence. This is an ancestral, age-old, even millennial rule in practices of the self.

Pythagoras, Plutarch, and Seneca.

Plutarch makes apprenticeship in silence an essential component of good education, For him, silence possesses something profound, mysterious, and sober. It was the gods who taught men silence, and it was men who taught us to speak. And children who receive a truly noble and royal education learn first of all to keep silent and only learn to speak afterward. Not only should silence, the education of the gods, be the fundamental principle of the education of human beings, but we should impose a sort of strict economy of speech on ourselves. We should keep as quiet as we can. It means we should not speak when someone else is talking. We should not immediately convert what we have heard into speech. We should keep hold of it, preserve it and refrain from immediately converting it into words. He jokes that the ear of the the chatterbox is not connected directly with his soul, but rather with his tongue. The chatterbox is always an empty vessel. The passion for chatter, like the other passions, can only be cured by the logos.

Philo of Alexandria: how to hold a posture to the obligation of a fixed attention, guaranteed and expressed by immobility.

Seneca, letter 52: if you examine carefully, everything in the world reveals itself through all kinds of external signs, and the smallest details may be enough to give an indication of morality. The man of loose morals is betrayed by his gait, by a movement of the hand, sometimes by a sing answer, by his touching his head with a finger. The cheat is betrayed by his laugh; he madman by his face and general appearance. Do you want to plump the character of an individual? Observe how he gives and receives praise.

Epictetus: you really must arouse my desire, because one can't do anything without a certain desire. For example, the shiip is only moved to graze if it is shown a green meadow.

Virgil: "Time flies, time beyond repair." Virgil always puts the flight of time, old age, and illness together, for old age is a disease which we cannot cure. "Here comes illness, sad old age."
The days fly, which is the quickest kind of movement. It says says, "our finest days are also the first to be snatched away; why, then, do we delay to increase our speed to keep up with the thing which is the quickest to flee us? The best of the batch flies past and the bad takes its place. The purest wine flows from the top of the amphora; the thickest, the dregs always fall to the bottom. Thus in our life, the best is at the start. Shall we leave it to others to use it up, keeping only the dregs for ourselves? Let us engrave this on our soul, take it in like a heavenly oracle: time flies, time beyond repair.

How to focus our attention: As soon as one has heard something from the month of the person uttering it, it must be taken in, understood, firmly grasped by the mind, so that it does not immediately escape. When you have heard someone say something important, do not start quibbling straightaway but try to collect yourself and spend some moments in silence.

The soul that listens must keep watch on itself. In paying proper attention to what it hears it pays attention to what it hears as signification. It also pays attention to itself so that, through this listening and memory, the true thing gradually becomes the discourse that it clutches to itself.

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