Although it is only a small number of thinkers who are willing to diagnose the institutions that provide employment to “academic philosophers”, they do constitute a distinct narrative inside the history of philosophy. This narrative stands opposed to the more general trend that seeks to construct theoretical systems into which things can be placed in order to comprehend them. Levinas and Hadot are two recent additions to this counter-current of philosophy. Although these two thinkers construct their critiques in divergent fields of inquiry, ethics and history respectively, their writings converge by putting into question the human propensity towards acquiring knowledge. Knowledge is understood in this sense as the product of the hegemonic self that attempts to fold all others in the same. Self-transcendence therefore includes the transcendence of knowledge. However, what are we to make of the entity that is undergoing this transformation, what are we to make of the products of this self-consuming endeavor. Unless we want to leave ourselves in the midst of a total negation of humanity (which we probably are trying to do anyways), we must not overextend the destruction of the self as a destruction of the I. The I will continue in existence well after the death of the self unless one takes measures to enact a biological death. In the attempt to liberate the philosophical spirit from being the handmaiden of scientific progress, there must be left room for a point of origin with which speaking of such a transformation can make sense. Conscioussness, if purged of its relationship to knowledge, neither leads inevitably towards the ethical violations that Levinas delineates nor betrays Hadot’s historical conception of philosophy as the practice of spiritual exercises. The possibility of progress in understanding is crucial in order for anti-systematic thought to not engender intellectual stagnation. Preserving the potential for understanding allows for new levels of profundity to be added onto the human experience.
WRONG. The death of the self is the death of a nexus, the removal of a point from which a boundary is created between internal and external. Wanting to retain the junction of the spiritual endeavor is merely the want to retain spirituality as spirituality distinct from other motivations. Get rid of this thought and learn to not stare a gift-horse in the mouth.
This picture perfectly demonstrates what was going on in this first paragraph.
