What Is Contemplation?: An Interview With Michael Chase

Conducted by James MacNee, a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Virginia and a Graduate Research Associate at the  Journal of Contemplative Studies.

JCS: I’ll start by asking you, what is contemplation?

MC: It’s a very tough question because it has many, many meanings. Since my main training has been in Greek philosophy, I think of the Greek equivalent, theōria. And theōria, unfortunately, is also a word that has an awful lot of meanings. It can mean to observe, to examine, and it can even mean to go on an embassy. But for me, the most relevant meaning is in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where he says that theōria is when an incorporeal entity, like the human mind, thinks of any other incorporeal entity, whether it’s an intelligible form or anything else, then the two of them—the mind and its object—become identical. For Aristotle, this is the case always for the gods; the gods are always in this state of theōria, but humans can maintain it only for very short and intermittent periods.

In this sense, theōria is a kind of contemplation that eliminates the distinction between subject and object. This is the highest happiness possible for human beings, says Aristotle. But, for Aristotle, the goal of philosophy is to be able to achieve this state, even if it’s only temporary and occasional. One of his followers, Alexander of Aphrodisias says: whatever you do, be darn sure that you achieve that state at least once in your life, or else you will not become immortal.

JCS: So, do you think of the state itself as contemplation or the kind of behavior that evokes such a state?

MC: Good question. For Aristotle and all his successors, it’s certainly the state itself. I should point out that this theory had an incredibly large influence. It was influential in the subsequent Greek tradition, Neoplatonism, but also very influential on the Arabic tradition. When Arabic works, which had preserved Greeks works that had sometimes been lost in the original, were translated back into Latin beginning in the 12th century, these translated works were highly influential on and in the Latin scholastic traditions. In this view, the goal of philosophy was what was called intellectual felicity. In other words, this theōria is an insight in which the distinction between subject and object disappears. Later thinkers taught that it was brought about by conjunction with the agent intellect, but that’s just an elaboration of Aristotle’s original idea. 

Theōria is a kind of contemplation that eliminates the distinction between subject and object. This is the highest happiness possible for human beings, says Aristotle.

But to answer your question: theōria is usually conceived as the endpoint, and to reach this goal, it’s not like you can retire into a corner and say, “Oh well, I think I have a few spare 15 minutes here I think I’ll contemplate.” Contemplation-as-theōria is the end result of a very long process of philosophical development and study. For instance, the Neoplatonists who took over this idea from Aristotle believed that contemplation was the endpoint of a program where you started off by reading all of Aristotle, his logic, his ethics, his metaphysics, and then you read a selection of 13 dialogues by Plato, culminating in the Timæus, which gave you all knowledge about the physical world, and then the Parmenides, which gave you knowledge about the gods and their hierarchical order and the highest principles. After you go through that philosophical program, which takes years of course, then you might be in a position to enjoy this kind of contemplation-as-theōria.

JCS: You touched on this already a little bit, but how does contemplation intersect with your research? How is contemplation relevant to your research?

MC: First of all, I think that this elevated sense of contemplation is not the only one there is. There are other meanings, and I like to think of them as analogous to and in some cases almost identical with meditation. Both of these ideas, this contemplationist theōria and meditation, point to ways we make use of a cognitive faculty that we don’t usually use. Going back to the Greeks, the kind of thought that we usually make use of to live our everyday lives is called dianoia or discursive thought, where you go from premises to conclusions. It’s a kind of thought that takes place in time, and it’s rational. It’s perfectly adequate for allowing us to live our daily lives. But when it comes to achieving some kind of knowledge of the higher principles, it’s not adequate anymore. So, there was this other faculty, which the later Neoplatonists sometimes called “the one in us” or the “flower of the intellect,” and that is the faculty that we have to mobilize or activate in order to be able to cognize the higher principles.

But now as far as my own interests are concerned, I want to see what these higher cognitive faculties might be that both the Greeks and other people believe that we must mobilize. I think what meditation and contemplation-as-theōria have in common is that they both presuppose the idea that somehow or another we have to quiet this constant self-talk, the chatter that we constantly exercise in our dialogue with ourselves, which the Buddhists call “monkey mind.” Basically, this kind of self-talk, sometimes called “rumination,” can be useful in some contexts, but it has a couple of problems. One is that it distracts us; it’s usually based on regrets about the past and worries about the future and therefore distracts us from the present, which is the only possible locus for our happiness. According to the Greeks, the present is the only thing that actually exists, therefore either we’re going to be happy in the present or we’re not going to be happy at all. Second, this self-talk tends to reinforce our egotism; it tends to reinforce this default opinion that the world revolves around us that therefore justifies us in evaluating everything that happens to us in terms of its benefit or disadvantage to us. This rumination or self-talk that constantly goes on in our minds reinforces those tendencies. 

So, I think of meditation and contemplation as techniques for at least temporarily quieting this constant rumination that distracts us. I’m interested in cross-cultural studies of these phenomena. I see some interesting parallels between several different cultural traditions. I received my training in the Greco-Roman tradition, but in medieval Islamic thought and (the little I know about) Buddhism, there are a lot of analogies with the techniques that are used to quiet this discursive thought and thereby achieve some other kind of cognition of some other kind of reality.

According to the Greeks, the present is the only thing that actually exists, therefore either we’re going to be happy in the present or we’re not going to be happy at all.

JCS: Are you exploring those through constructive philosophy or doing historical studies? 

MC: Well, both. For instance, I have a collaboration with Professor Marc-Henri Deroche of the University of Kyoto. We’re trying to come up with some kind of combination of Greco-Roman spiritual exercises, Buddhist thought, and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Our goal is to come up with a mindfulness practice that would have a philosophical background and would be able to profit from the studies of the neurophysiological effects of meditating, from which conclusions have been drawn about this practice’s possible health benefits. So, that’s our goal.

But also, for instance, philosophically I am interested in the idea about these additional faculties that enable contemplation and mindfulness and why we need these additional faculties. I work a bit on the Medieval Arabic philosopher named Avicenna, Ibn Sina in Arabic. He usually has the reputation of being a pretty strict orthodox Aristotelian. But there are some places where he says logical, discursive thought is not able to understand everything. There are several kinds of areas of human experience where discursive thought is just not adequate. That includes experiences of pleasure—experience of intellectual pleasure, sexual pleasure—but also tastes, for instance. I know in a sense that a cake is sweet, because I’ve heard it, I’ve read it, people have told me that the cake is sweet. But I can’t really know that cake is sweet until I actually make one and taste it. And once I do, I know that taste in a more authentic way, but I can’t communicate it to anyone else. It cannot be formulated in language; it cannot be rationally formulated, and therefore it’s not susceptible to logic. The only way you can experience that is by mushāhadah, which means direct witnessing. And he thinks that there are a lot of aspects of human experience that are like that. One might even say that most of the things that matter most to us as individuals living in the sensible world are that same way too. Our individual experience of the world can’t be entirely communicated; it’s not susceptible to a complete formulation in language. 

Mysticism basically just is the fact that there are areas of our experience that can’t be communicated, that can’t be formulated in language.

And when I got to thinking about this, I thought that well, maybe there’s a connection between contemplation, meditation, and mysticism. And mysticism is another one of those words with all kinds of meanings. It’s usually used as a term for dismissing things that one doesn’t agree with. At least in most of analytic philosophy and in the hard sciences, you just say “oh that’s just mysticism” when you mean it’s nonsense. But we can look to when Wittgenstein said that mysticism basically just is the fact that there are areas of our experience that can’t be communicated, that can’t be formulated in language. Then, maybe there are links between the mysticism of the everyday, in the sense that our everyday experience can’t really be completely formulated and communicated, and the mysticism of the higher principles. Experience of whether there’s a God or whether there’s a world of intelligible forms might be similar to everyday experience in that they can’t be completely formulated by language. So, maybe we should rethink what we mean by mysticism. I think it’s linked with the question of the limits of language and the way that language influences and constrains our thought.

JCS: Other than what you’re working on, what excites you about future directions of the study of contemplation, or maybe something you’re planning to work on in the future?

MC: Yeah, all kinds of things. I think that my interest in mindfulness meditation is based on the fact that I personally find it useful. But more importantly, it’s been the subject of a lot of interesting scientific studies, where scientists have been able to measure what actually goes on in the brain, in other parts of the nervous system, and in the minds of people who are meditating. And it looks as though certain forms of meditation can lead to certain forms of health benefits, including increasing neuroplasticity and even altering the size of certain regions of the brain and increasing the connectivity of these regions in a positive way. I’m interested in knowing what’s going on in the human brain when these sort of mystical or peak experiences occur—which parts of the brain and of the limbic system and, for that matter, of the gut, the whole human cognitive system, which parts are being activated, which parts are being deactivated, which neural networks are in play and so forth? I think that is interesting because if we also studied another question, that of inspiration (whether artistic or scientific), and compared that to what goes on in so-called peak experiences, my guess is that they’d be very similar. What I mean by inspiration is when scientists and philosophers and artists—though perhaps especially scientists—spend days, weeks, months, or even years thinking obsessively about a problem but just can’t get anywhere with it, and then they get these flashes of inspiration, where they go and do something somewhere else and boom! the answer comes to them. It’d be interesting to see if this is indeed similar to peak experiences in such things as meditation. 

Now when I talk this way, some of my colleagues say, “Oh you’re being reductionist. You’re reducing everything to what goes on in the brain.” And I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think that one can perfectly well be interested in the neural correlates of the mystical or peak experiences without forcing one to take a position on whether these are things that actually exist. I think the study of the neurophysiology of meditation, for instance, can be agnostic with regard to the reality of the phenomena that it observes.

JCS: Well, the last question is: what are some books you would recommend or favorite books of yours in the contemplative studies field, broadly?

MC: I came to be interested in these things in a roundabout way. I was a student of a French historian of philosophy named Pierre Hadot. And he had a new approach to the history of philosophy. He proposed an approach now known as “philosophy as a way of life” (PWL)—that what was central in Greek philosophy, and by extension what should be central in all philosophy properly so-called, is not so much the construction of elegant, complex systems of thought but instead a series of concrete spiritual exercises, which was the term he used. These spiritual exercises were practiced in Greco-Roman antiquity and had several functions. In one sense, they could be used to improve some of our psychological defects to combat fear, to combat anger, things like that. But they were also directed toward achieving what Hadot called cosmic consciousness. That is the knowledge, the constant awareness, that we are part of an integral whole, that we’re not isolated in the cosmos, that the cosmos is not hostile to us, and that, in a sense, we are one with the universe. So, I was very inspired by that. I translated half a dozen or so of Hadot’s books into English. One of them is called Philosophy as a Way of Life, published in 1995, and there’s What is Ancient Philosophy from 2004 and several others. 

Hadot himself was not interested at all in neurophysiology. He also was not particularly interested until very late in his life in Asian philosophy. So, I think if I can attempt to advance Hadot’s theories at all, it’s by comparing what he found out about Greco-Roman philosophy with advanced studies that have been made in these other two fields. And in that sense, I have been very influenced by another author, James Austin. He is an American doctor and a neurophysiologist who is also a Zen practitioner. And he wrote half a dozen huge books, in which he tries to figure out what goes on in the brain during the experience of kenshō and the various grades of mystical experience one finds in Zen Buddhism. I think he’s a model of both scientific rigor and a deep understanding of Zen Buddhism. I have no reason to believe that Hadot had read Austin or that Austin had read Hadot. But I find parallels between them. I find them sometimes quoting the same texts, such as Albert Einstein, completely independently and often arriving at the same conclusions—or very similar conclusions, as for instance with regard to the importance of objectivity. I think there’s got to be something interesting going on here: they may both have been on to some aspect of the truth.

The knowledge, the constant awareness, that we are part of an integral whole, that we’re not isolated in the cosmos, that the cosmos is not hostile to us, and that, in a sense, we are one with the universe.

Also, I do take very seriously the possibility that what we experience in contemplation, or peak experiences, may not just be an artifact of our intelligence but may, in some sense, have something to say about the nature of the cosmos and nature of reality. And I think that this is reflected in some ways by certain aspects of quantum mechanics. One area of research that I’m very excited about and have tried to pursue a little bit is precisely the link between consciousness and quantum mechanics. I got interested in the works of a man who was a friend and disciple of Heisenberg and therefore involved in the very foundations of quantum mechanics in the 1930s and 40s. His name was Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. After the war he recycled himself as a philosophy professor, and he wrote some very interesting books on all kinds of subjects. But especially on meditation, he had some quite interesting things to say. He had an interest in both Japanese and Hindu thought and wrote a couple of very interesting essays on meditation and what he thinks it is. He too believes that it is, in certain cases, analogous to or even identical with mysticism, and he thinks it’s another way of perceiving reality and that very often the results of these contemplative activities corroborate his findings in quantum mechanics. In other words, the basic point on which he thinks meditation and quantum mechanics coincide is that both are different ways of pursuing and showing the oneness of reality, that distinctions are basically illusory. The distinction between subject and object is apparent on the surface but at the most foundational level of reality everything is one.

JCS: Wow, what great pairings to read together. Thank you for those suggestions. And thank you again so much for chatting with me.

MC: You’re welcome.