Against meditation

The practice of meditation in Indian (Hindu and Buddhist) traditions is based on a belief in the irrelevance of thinking. The meditator focuses attention on some object in order to cultivate a receptive awareness to what appears. This privileges perception over thought, which is treated as noise. It also is a technique of adjustment to the way things are, and that is it has become so popular in the American business and medical establishment.

There is an alternative. It is thinking itself. It is the work upon ideas which can take place through contemplation. One's receptivity to what is observed or thought is qualified by the idea that at the end of the day what we want to achieve is not a contented state of mind but the truest thoughts and the most useful actions, arriving at the latter entirely through thinking about them. This process has no singular method apart from the discursive techniques of philosophers themselves (Socrates gives us one of them, but there are other possible methods). These are techniques of questioning. Simply, one entertains various thoughts, wonders what they mean or entail, whether they are true, whether this or thought is "it," the thing itself that is the matter or problem in the situations one is in. The hope is that after spending some time in reflection and thought, you will think more clearly about whatever it is you may need or want to understand, or even what you are at the moment most curious about.

The most important question is, what is it? We always find ourselves in situations that are complex, since there are any number of possibly relevant facts about ‘where’ one is and what is happening at the moment. This is related to what science does; it does not try to solve a given problem (as in business and government, which want to manage things in order to get a beneficial result of activity) or ask for factual information, but wonders how to conceptualize a given situation as a problem, and how to think about it, resulting typically not in an answer or a fact but a problematic.

"Meditation" is proper to a religion (or to several of them). Philosophy is not religion. The religious will say that some philosophy proves theirs and is a ladder to religion, as the proper way to live a good life. But we philosophers and lovers of philosophy (which is not the love of wisdom so much as that of thinking, the path to truth, and for some philosophers to wisdom and other ethical ends) deny that anyone can take for granted something they take themselves to already know about what the good life is and how they can live it. Philosophy makes that a question, and it remains a question, befitting a life that also is open-ended, until it is over. (What it will be then is what it will have been, and that can be known, but not by oneself in the time of his life.)

Thinking properly understood has a connection to the political, but none, necessarily, to health. The political moves through problematization to contestations. Religion is connected to notions of health and, generally, happiness, and that is is no doubt why medicine and religion are generally quite comfortable with each other. To say that the good life is health, the normal functioning of the body, is to beg the question what the good life is, removing it from what can be thought, which calls for philosophy, into something that supposedly need not be placed in question because it is authoritatively known (and as such documented in infallible sacred canonical writings that can be trusted as revealing necessary truths), which calls instead for religion. Everyone has the right to their own religion and its private truths, while the society as a whole apparently has no need to base what is done on clear thinking. But clear thinking wants to take every good thing to the limits of what it is capable of. Thus it leads to transgression, which is part of what founds the political. Health is by comparison conservative. Health is a good, it is the good of bodies considered as destined to live and be happy or comfortable. Health is a good but not the good. For medicine, especially when used as a form of management or governmentality, it is an idol. The mere pursuit of health is a form of order that, while seeming to answer it, begs the question, what is the matter?