Transculturally assessed, [the] Platonic approach, as tersely dialogued in Phaedo (65a-66a), is analogous to that of the Sceptic’s ataraxia, i.e. a psychosomatic state of composure achieved through ‘resolving the anomaly of phainomenon and nooumenon (Sextus Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.29) and where participation in the world of the senses—particularly cognitive participation—becomes as it were quiescently suspended and appears to have stopped altogether. This naturally alludes to the Platonic state of the philosopher’s soul (or self) when it or he ventures to ‘employ pure, absolute reason in the hunt for the pure and absolute essence of things, by withdrawing himself, in so far as that is possible, from his senses and their objects.’ Or in brief, by withdrawing himself from ‘his entire body’ as he feels ‘the affixation to the corporal frame disturbs the soul and hampers it’s acquaintanceship with truth and wisdom’ (Phaedo, 66a).

This furthermore finds companionability to the “perfect aloof-ness” of the Sāmkhya school and its provision of kaivālya as the exalted state of “self-isolation” of the purusha (Sanskrit ‘person’) from material and metempsychotic existences, conclusively. Beginning with the strategy of prānāyāma (‘breath regulation’) this strikingly hiero-philosophical praxis, first attested in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras (ca. turn of the 1st cen. CE), entails the subsequent fixing of the mind on an object of sense, to be followed in turn by ‘the abstract withdrawal and eventual freeing of the senses themselves from the domination of external sense objects’ (pratyāhāra). In Patañjali the unqualified state is itself termed in Sanskrit kaivālya-mukti and may best be rendered as “supreme self-sufficiency.” But while kaivālya-mukti here is tersely presented as an analogue to Plato’s far-flung sphere (and thereby the ethical goal that is sought), still the actual praxis—the hiero-ascetico approach itself—is the way of pratyāhāra or ‘sense withdrawal,’ as readily corresponds to what the Sceptics describe as ‘resolving the anomaly of phenomenon and noumenon’ and what Plato explains as ‘disinterested rational inquiry (logos).’

Excerpted from Grafting Plato’s Shadow Play:
a spray can version of metaleptic mimesis
Ashé Journal, Vol 5, Issue 1, 3-33, Winter/Spring 2006