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KATE LARSON
they share the concept of attention and the need for the transformation
of the whole individual soul as a reorientation and shift of vision. This
transformation is depicted, for example, in Plato’s allegory of the cave and
formulated by Weil as the wrenching away from individual perspective.
The turning around and wrenching away is described as a violent change of
direction and even of the composition of the soul.
Pierre Hadot, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, turns our attention to a more
everyday aspect of this sudden externality of ourselves. Dialogue, the form
Plato chose for his philosophical writings, is in itself a spiritual exercise,
a transcendence of oneself in the authentic meeting with another. In several
ways the turning towards in dialogue can be understood in terms of
the turning of the soul in Plato’s parable of the cave. Plato says in the Republic
(518c), “the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be
turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body.”!
A PHENOMENOLOGY OF INITIATION
Pierre Hadot describes dialogue, the very form of Plato’s philosophy, as
one with an idea of philosophy as a way of life, as a spiritual exercise:
“As a dialectical exercise, the Platonic dialogue corresponds exactly to
a spiritual exercise (...) The dialogue guides the interlocutor — and the reader
— towards conversion.””
The specific aspect of dialogue which singles it out as not just an example
of a form of spiritual exercise but a phenomenology of initiation is, firstly
and most importantly, the interlocutor. Because of the presence of another,
the dialogue is prevented from falling into dogmatism or purely theoretical
propositions. The subject matter of the dialogue is of less value than the way
travelled together in investigating it. The latter pinpoints a second important
phenomenological trait: the joint struggle presupposes the desire and the will
to let oneself be changed. The concrete and practical exercise of dialogue is at
the same time an exercise in authentic presence, to oneself and the other.’
The conversion aimed at in the Platonic dialogues is a change of point of
view; liberation from a partial, passionate perspective and from a formal
and conventional one. The goal is virtue, a virtuous life, the understanding
of which rises above individual preferences and attitudes, but nonetheless
1 Plato, Republic 518c, trans. G.M.A Grube, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, Indiana,
Hackett Publishing Company, 1997, 1136.
? Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1995, 93.
3 Ibid.91.
Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 252 6 2020.06.15. 11:04:23