Description
"What does it mean to practice philosophy as a spiritual exercise? When Pierre Hadot made this comparison, he argued that the goal of philosophy was to cultivate a different relationship with nature and establish a new attentiveness to matter's liveliness. Yet the living world has all but disappeared from the philosophy of spiritual exercise, giving way to an interior landscape of the self. Revealing the mattering implicit in the practice of philosophy as a way of life, Ecologies of Ecstasy shows how contemplation is related to the generation of life on earth. While contemplation implies receptivity and openness, life is associated with affect and sensibility. This book exposes the processes by which the open world implicates itself into spiritual exercises; it shows that plants, animals, and other organisms were once understood to exist by virtue of contemplation and narrates some of the ways in which religious and scientific orthodoxies suppressed this idea during the early modern period. In the seventeenth century, radical mystics like Jeanne Guyon (1648-1717) faced persecution and imprisonment for encouraging pure affectability by comparing contemplation to bodily activities like sensing, digesting, and breathing. Simone Kotva traces the marks left by mystical spirituality on such disparate thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Simone Weil, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Luce Irigaray, and Jane Bennett. Finally, she argues that the philosophy of spiritual exercise converges with recent scientific and philosophical research on vegetal minds, with new-materialist accounts of nonhuman agency, and with multispecies ethics"-- Provided by publisher.
