Contemplative Philosophy and the Practice of Cultivating Critical Consciousness

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Some Rambling Thoughts To Be Revisited From Time To Time

One of my favorite things about reading philosophy - and other topics - is those moments where something I've experienced or puzzled out myself gets put into words by another.

I learned about the concept of Hermeneutic Injustice in a Disability Studies philosophy class. This is the idea that because we can't express our experience until we have the words to label our experience, we cannot fully communicate with others, or with ourselves. This is why getting that Autism or ADHD diagnosis is so very important for so many people. Having a label contextualizes our experience - we're no longer alone in our "weirdness," there are others like us, who have similar experience, and who we can relate to.

I'm reading Marx Notes for a political philosophy class I'm taking this semester. He gave us a way to describe and critique the phenomena under Capitalism where our labor is exploited and we are thus alienated from what makes us human - producing to meet our individual and collective needs.

The core connecting these various experiences is awareness.

If you don't have the words to describe something, you may not even be aware there's something to describe.

And once you're aware, it's hard to forget.

Critical Race Theory is a label that will send certain conservatives into an absolute tizzy.

Some of it is, of course, that critical theory of any kind tends to pick apart the traditions that conservatives are so fond of trying to preserve, regardless of the actual human cost.

But I think, perhaps, some of it is because White Supremacist culture has turned the word "critical" into a painful word.

Authoritarians don't critique, they criticize.
It is not constructive criticism, but destructive.

The criticisms made by the authoritarian parent are aimed at shaming the child into conforming with their ideals of behavior. It's not an attempt to guide the child towards personal improvement, but to force them into submission to authority.

So for the conservatives who are still most deeply entrenched in White Supremacist culture, without even an awareness of their indoctrination, the words "critical race theory" trigger a fight/flight response, rooted in that shame they feel at any sort of critique, because that shame-based criticism is the only sort that they know.

They can't even conceive of "critical consciousness", let alone that it's about developing a mindset that questions everything - questioning is barely tolerated under the authoritarian structures. The crushing of curiosity is the first direct oppression we suffer as children in Western society. Some of us get lucky, find people who encourage us, but most people have the "Why?" stamped out of them early on.

My intelligence was identified very early on - I started reading at 2, and when my mother noticed I was following along with words as she read them, she started creating picture books using polaroids of everyday objects and the people I knew, with the words for those written on sharpie on the white part. My grandfather kept a personal library with hundreds of books that I had access to whenever I visited, and my parents let me go to the library as much as I wanted, so I was constantly reading.

It wasn't until college that I discovered a love of philosophy - I'd been more into science, math, and fiction writing prior to that. The first time I tried college, I went for chemistry, with a plan to become a high school chemistry teacher. I'm glad that didn't work out.

The second time I went to college, in my early 20s, I decided to major in philosophy. I got about halfway through my degree and then life got all wonky on me, and what was supposed to be just a semester off turned out to be almost two decades, but I'm back at it now, a junior, with just a couple more philosophy classes to take and a crapton of non-philosophy gen ed classes to take over the next couple years to get that degree.

But it's not like I wasn't engaging with philosophy in the intervening time.

I discovered Stoicism years before the brodude anti-woke "philosophers" discovered it and diluted it down whatever nonsense it's become the last few years.

Stoicism, like other philosophies, wasn't just a head game a bunch of dudes played with each other in an ancient plaza, it was a practice.

"How do I live a good life?" is the core question driving all of that, and ultimately what we're all trying to figure out.

When you start to ask that question, all sorts of other questions arise from that, so of course, it behooves authoritarian systems to condition people not to question anything at all.

Make philosophy seem lofty and out-of-touch so only those whose curiosity couldn't be stamped out pursue it.

Keep people from being able to identify their life conditions, and you keep them alienated and participating in the numbing of consumer culture.

Contemplative Philosophy

It seems a bit of a tautology, right?

Thinking thinking? Really?

But it's more about the approach to philosophy.

Slow.

Savoring the words and ideas, turning them over in your head.

Not to write an academic paper, not to get a grade, but to understand, to discern, and to internalize that which you determine to be worth internalizing.

"Contemplative" as in the monastic practices that fall under that label.

Lectio Divina mostly, modified for reading philosophical texts through varying approaches and mental states, unlocking the different layers from analytical to intuitive and everything between. Though if you're digging into some Aesthetic Philosophy, Beholding is a good one.

I learned these from Christian monastic traditions - after having come to the conclusion that none of the pagan/neopagan traditions were for me, and that most were appropriative, I crafted my own path, polytheist in nature, working with some "old" deities and some made up ones, but with the monastic traditions of my cultural and actual ancestors (I've got two Catholic saints in my ancestry). Western European Christianity stole a whole bunch of practices from the European traditions it sought to stamp out, so I yoinked some of their practices to work with those old deities WEC would have liked us to forget ever existed.

My theology is complex and something I'm still sorting out - I'm a monist, I think we're the Universe experiencing itself and trying to figure out what it wants to be. I'm not entirely sure I believe in the objective reality of deities, but I do know that playing with them in your own personal subjective reality leads to very interesting results.

Even when you make the deity up.

But that's a bit of a tangent for another note...

I apply those contemplative practices not just to theological sorts of things - it's great for reading the myths of a particular deity whose lessons you want to more deeply explore - but also to pretty much everything I want to go deeper with.

Contemplation isn't just "thinking" it's thinking with purpose, in a meditative state, with the aim of allowing yourself to be moved by the words, see what they're saying to you in that moment.

It's an approach where you treat the words you're reading as if they are sacred.

There's a few stages - those vary by the source describing to the practice, and in a religious context, begins by entering a state of prayer that is more meditation than begging a deity for favors. So for secular texts, drop the prayer part, or create a secular prayer for yourself, but get into that meditative state however it is that you do that.

Then you read the passage/book. Don't linger too much, this first round, you're taking in the text as a whole, getting that full context.

Then you read again. This time, you do linger. What phrases stand out to you the most? What moves you? What repulses you? This isn't an analytical look at the passage, it's emotion and intuition. What does it make you feel?

And then you read again. This time, you do that analysis. Analyze the text, apply various frameworks to that analysis, but also analyze those feelings more deeply. You marked that quote, why? And so on.

Then, as you finish that last reading, you keep contemplating it. Keep letting it spark new questions, new ideas, churn away inside of you, transforming you.

Maybe those ideas will turn into something tangible. Maybe you'll decide to write an essay or create a podcast.

Or maybe they'll just simmer inside of you, slowly shifting your perspectives until your entire life has changed.

There's no end goal with contemplative practices.

Transformation is eternal, evolution never ends.

The Practice of Cultivating Critical Consciousness

The texts you choose are important.

What you get out of the practice will vary greatly depending on what it is that you're consuming.

You're opening yourself up to transformation, and that puts you in a vulnerable position.

It also makes it an effective practice for cultivating critical consciousness, and the ability to sit with the discomfort that can often come with becoming a critical thinker aware of the reality of the state of the society we live in. I've applied the practices to my own personal anti-racist work, reading the works of Black authors with the same sacred approach to learn from them, and to unpack the white supremacy I was conditioned into from birth. This is an ongoing process, a work that will never be done.

I apply it to reading all sorts of philosophical texts, and I'll often come back to the same texts after several years - reading Descartes in your 40s hits different than reading him in your late teens/20s. He also hits different when you've studied the medieval mystics and were inspired by Jesuit methodologies in the intervening years, and you discover he cribbed his most famous thought experiment and conclusion from a nun, and his methodology was heavily influenced by the Jesuit education he had.

I'm currently using the method to read Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

It's a slow process. Especially when you're reading full books. I will usually focus on one chapter or subsection of a chapter per session, spending time savoring the ideas before moving onto the next.

I'll often be working my way through multiple texts in parallel - the mashing of ideas that comes from this is brilliant. Marx+Philosophy of Curiosity+Pedagogy of the Oppressed is my current combo, and let me tell you, it is doing things to my brain that are wonderful.