What If Anthropology Were a Spiritual Exercise?

Taking a cue from Pierre Hadot’s conception of philosophy as “a way of life,” this paper imagines anthropology as a “spiritual” exercise. Freed from the cage of sovereign secular reason, the anthropological intellect may recover its mission to immerse in the other, even in the other of its very reason, and thereby set in motion multiple transformations. Opening up to an “antheistic” space and time wherein human reason welcomes divine possibilities, the modern discipline of anthropology would re-cognize itself in at least five facets: method, form of knowledge, object of knowing, location, and knowing subject. This imagining here draws on the lives of three extradisciplinary figures whose experiences with the question of the other were anthropologically resonant: Simone Weil, Martin Buber, and Muhammad Asad. Open to revelation coupled with reason unconcerned with its autonomy, their lives and words help demonstrate a spiritual anthropological intellect that did not stop at meeting a cultural other. In similarly accessing revelatory dimensions of thinking, anthropology might recover its oneness with life, revive and expand its reasoning capacities, and ultimately consider puzzles other than those dictated by state, market, and surveillance languages.