Habits: The Ascetic Ideal -- 3

25 December 2022

Habits: The Ascetic Ideal -- 3

“It is said that Plato, after watching someone playing at dice, admonished him.  And when the man said that he played for an insignificant stake, Plato replied, ‘But the habit is not insignificant.’”

(Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, translated by Pamela Mensch, edited by James Miller, Oxford University Press, New York, 2018, pages 151 and 152, ISBN: 9780190862176)

1.  Cultivating habits that are helpful and useful for spiritual understanding is a common theme in spiritual traditions.  And avoiding habits that are hindrances to spiritual understanding are also a common theme in spiritual traditions.

2.  I see this kind of teaching as part of what Platonism means by ‘purification’.  Part of purification is to cease from engaging in activities that lead the soul to cling to sensory experience; avoiding gambling would fall into that kind of teaching.  The other part of purification is to cultivate habits that assist in our journey on the spiritual path, and are, in a sense, the spiritual path itself.  These are the traditional asceses of refraining from alcohol and intoxicants that cloud the clarity of the mind, sexual restraint, and vegetarianism/veganism.  But ascetic practices are not limited to these three and Plato in this interaction is applying the same logic to gambling, namely that we should refrain from gambling as it leads the soul to clinging to the material world.

3.  I think of stories like this one as revealing that at one level Platonist teachers were a kind of ‘spiritual coach’.  In sports, coaches will often admonish the athletes under their tutelage regarding diet, drugs, sexual behavior, etc., as part of their overall goal to transform them into excellent examples of athletic performance.  In a similar way, the Platonic teacher, or coach, suggests a life guided by purifications as a way of transforming a student into someone who has attained spiritual excellence.

4.  When I began to think of myself as a Platonist, I noticed that in comparison to Dharmic traditions like Buddhism and Jainism, there seemed to be something missing.  I had grown used to an explicit preceptual structure in Dharmic traditions such as the basic five precepts of Buddhism, and standard commitments that Jains adhere to whether they are lay or monastics.  There is no such list in Platonism, at least not in the simple and summary form one finds in Dharmic traditions.

Instead, in Platonism the practices that are the equivalent of Dharmic precepts are mentioned in scattered locations, in various Dialogues, and in subsequent literature.  This means that a student of Platonism won’t necessarily understand the practices of purification as specific asceses, at least at first.  It might take numerous readings to see the many passages that contain these teachings as not just something an individual takes on, but as defining commitments of the Platonic way.

It's possible that these kinds of purification practices were explicitly presented at some kind of ceremony which might have been done when someone officially joined a philosophical community.  There are hints of this in Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Killing Animals.  But these are only hints.

Eventually, with the help of some Platonist friends, I began to see the way purification practices are presented in the Dialogues, and other Platonist literature, as a plus.  Someone who diligently engages with works like the Dialogues and the Enneads, and many other works, will gradually come to an understanding of the significance of these specific purification practices.  And this gradual learning over an extended period of study leads, I think, to a more secure understanding of how purification works and the consequent rewards for a life framed by them.