Sophiology and the Life Questions

hand study, Leonardo da Vinci

For a while there, I regularly taught philosophy in a couple of Catholic liberal arts colleges. Most professors don’t teach philosophy to undergraduates the way I do, preferring instead to run a kind of survey of historical philosophic movements (Platonism, Scholasticism, Pragmatism, Utilitarianism, and so forth), which is okay, I suppose, but rather a scholarly or almost antiquarian approach. It’s also often impossibly dull (for students, anyway). It would also be dull for me. So I don’t do it that way.

In fact, every course I teach is essentially a philosophy course, even, for instance, the current course I am finishing up, Love & Romanticism. How can one teach Blake, or Coleridge, or Shelley, or even John Clare without asking some fundamental questions concerning society, ultimate values, the possibility of transcendence, or the existence of evil? It’s impossible.

When I have taught those official “philosophy” courses, I used many literary and ostensibly religious texts as well as more technically philosophic works. A short (and incomplete) list includes Sophocles’s Antigone, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Plato’s Symposium, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Tao te Ching, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as well as Simone Weil’s “Human Personality” and Georges Poulet’s “The Phenomenology of Reading.” These allowed the students to reflect upon their understandings of, for example, familial, religious, and political obligation (Antigone); the existence of evil (Blood Meridian); love (Symposium); the idea of living a moral life (Tao te Ching and Meditations); the (pre)existence of the soul (Tibetan Book of the Dead); self-examination (“Human Personality”); and the spiritual activity of reading (“Phenomenology of Reading”). All of these considerations are part of what we can call “the Life Questions.” If we live our lives without asking and attempting to answer them, are we living a life at all? As Socrates asked, “Is the unexamined life worth living?”

As Brad Gregory notes in his outstanding The Unintended Reformation (is it old enough to be considered a classic yet?), these questions are very simple:

“Despite the pervasive influence of science in our world, very few people look to it for answers to questions about the most important concerns of human life, and for good reason. ‘What should I live for, and why?’ ‘What should I believe, and why should I believe it?’ ‘What is morality, and where does it come from?’ ‘What kind of person should I be?’ ‘What is a meaningful life, and what should I do in order to lead a fulfilling life?’ These questions and others like them are Life Questions: they are serious questions about life, with important implications for life.” [1]

These simple questions are essential to self-knowledge; and, from what I’ve seen among college students (and, let’s be honest, most of our culture) over the past twenty years, students have been increasingly less and less concerned with them. With humanities programs more and more marginalized (if not completely eradicated) in the higher education landscape, this should come as no surprise. Of course, humanities programs in philosophy, literature, and history have only themselves to blame, captured as they have been by the simplistic and adolescent politics of “social justice” (which is neither) and cancel culture. So, I am not entirely saddened to see higher education in its death throes.

One book I have often used in philosophy courses is Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life. Philosophy, as I have alluded above, is typically taught in a scientific way, as if both professor and student are impartial observers of philosophy over time. Hadot’s tack is much simpler: philosophy as spiritual exercise. This approach has inspired, among others, John Vervaeke’s project concerning “the meaning crisis” (and it is a very real crisis), and when I had the honor to speak with John a couple of months ago we both expressed our admiration for Hadot. John criticized Martin Heidegger as being a bit cagey or stingy as regards to his practices, though I think Heidegger’s writings on poetry (I’m not sure if John is familiar with them) do offer some hints at philosophical praxis. But that is a minor disagreement since both John and I believe the spiritual practice of philosophy is central to living a life of meaning.

Hadot offers a simple recipe for this practice in a quote from George Friedman:

“Take flight every day! At least for a moment, however, brief, as long as it is intense. Every day a ‘spiritual exercise,’ alone or in the company of a man who also wishes to better himself…. Leave ordinary time behind. Make an effort to rid yourself of your passions…. Become eternal by surpassing yourself, This inner effort is necessary, this ambition, just. Many are those who are entirely absorbed in militant politics, in preparation for the social revolution. Rare, very rare, are those who, in order to prepare for the revolution, wish to become worthy of it.” [2]

My own spiritual practice includes prayer and liturgy, but also includes farming, playing music, and writing poetry. Even scholarship can become a spiritual practice. All of these are ways by which I “take flight,” and are the means by which I have come to a sophiological understanding of the cosmos. As I write in The Submerged Reality, Sophiology is intimately related to phenomenology in the way by which its practices or dispositions allow phenomena to reveal themselves to us. This method of becoming intimate with the cosmos inculcates a method of self-knowledge which arises, oddly enough, by forgetting oneself in the contemplative movement which such practices nurture.

Become eternal by surpassing yourself.

Outstanding documentary on skillful practices that become spiritual practices--whether you know it or not.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. There are also a few spots open in the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening as Christian Path course being offered at the end of April. See more here

1. Brad S, Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap, 2012), 74.

2. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Blackwell, 1995), 70.

Playlist for Times of Madness

World Party

You know it, and I know it: things are bizarre. Hopefully, we will not be slipping into a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” but I am not taking any bets. The closer we get to a culture of “show me your papers,” the closer we get to societal chaos.

In that spirit, I have put together a little playlist to help navigate the season of this our angst. You will notice that most of these songs are from my youth. I remember reading an interview with John Lennon just before he died (I think it was in Rolling Stone) and the interviewer asked what he was listening to. He answered, “Old rock ‘n’ roll. Chuck Berry, Fats Domino. I’m like our parents, you know: That was my era.” Even though I left the music business for the most part in 1987, while still a babe, I haven’t really tried to keep up with what the cool kids are listening to since then. But if you have suggestion of songs to add, mention them in the comments.

1. Beatles, “Revolution.” Speaking of Chuck Berry, John Lennon’s evocation of the guitar god at the opening of this tune is one of the most ferocious sounds ever to be recorded. I also love his equivocation about destruction. “It’s gonna be alright.”

2. The Call, “The Walls Came Down.” Michael Been, lead singer, songwriter, and leader of the band The Call employed biblical allusion to the walls of Jericho in his castigation of American “nation building” (meddling to you and me). It seems particularly poignant right now in light of the disaster that is Afghanistan. Interesting trivia, No. 1: In 1985 I opened for The Call in Detroit and talked to the band quite a bit in the dressing room. Been was ALL ABOUT THE POLITICS, a very earnest and sincere man. Interesting trivia, No. 2: A few years later, when I watched Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, I was surprised and pleased to see Been in the role of John the apostle. Unfortunately, Been died prematurely of a heart attack in 2010.

3. The Hooters, “All You Zombies.” Speaking of biblical allusions, this song by The Hooters is just crummy with them. The Hooters were outstanding musicians, very inventive and accomplished, but they were also cursed with good looks, so the record company marketed them as heartthrobs. To their credit, they didn’t play along.

4. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, “Ohio.” This is one of the great monuments in the catalog of protest songs. Written by Neil Young about the massacre of students at Kent State in 1970, it captures that moment like nothing else could. I show this video just every semester to my college students, telling them that they shouldn’t ever think it couldn’t happen again. It can. I don’t know if you’ve seen the video circulating of Autralian police pepper-spraying a 12-year-old for not wearing a mask, but I’d say Western democracies are moving dangerously close to turning on the unarmed citizenry. Don’t think what happened at Kent State can’t happen again.

5. “Get Up, Stand Up.” Bob Marley and the Wailers. This one, Peter Tosh’s masterpiece of resistance, really needs no explanation. I was very pleased to see it used at the conclusion of the recent protest against vaccine passports in New York City.

6. World Party, “Ship of Fools.” Karl Wallinger is a great and underrated songwriter. This scathing indictment of the political order has been my theme song for a good long while, even more so over the last eighteen months.

7. X, “The Have Nots.” One of the most disappointing developments of the last year and a half has been the vilification of the working and poor classes as part the propaganda apparatus of BigPharma and friends. The caricatures of doltish Trump supporters as the symbol of “vaccine hesitancy” is one thing, but New York mayor De Blassio’s vaccine passport actually impacts 60% or more of his city’s African-American residents. More propaganda. My sympathies are with the working classes and the poor, not with corporate, political, and media elites. Whose side do you think Jesus would be on? X’s song is a validation of the working poor—and it mentions Detroit’s Aorta Bar where I hung out once upon a time. This song is Charles Bukowski set to music.

8. The Parachute Club, “Rise Up!” Nothing says “80s” quite like parachute pants. Canadian band The Parachute Club offers an optimistic song here. I used to hang out in Toronto quite a bit as a young man (it’s only four hours from Detroit, where I grew up) and this song perfectly captures the mid-80s Toronto vibe. So rise up already.

9. Steppenwolf, “The Pusher.” This one goes out to BigPharma.

10. Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “(What’s so Funny about) Peace, Love, and Understanding.” Something to remember! Costello’s turn on Nick Lowe’s song (Lowe did it more as a ballad or lament) is as earnest as it is aggressive. And what a great description of our own moment:

As I walk through This wicked world Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity. I ask myself Is all hope lost? Is there only pain and hatred, and misery? And each time I feel like this inside, There's one thing I wanna know: What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding?

This version, from when Costello hosted The David Letterman Show, is gold.

11. Queen and David Bowie, “Under Pressure.” I don’t think any song has captured existential angst better then this one from 1981, an earlier time of existential angst (trust me, I was there). It also describes our own time. Bowie and Queen must have been reading their Heidegger, as the antidote to this angst is found in care, Heidegger’s point. We should try to remember that. This video beautifully complements the music.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.