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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
