ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author wish to pursue a theme that he have explored in a trilogy on the religious imagination. While positivists of varying stamps insist upon banishing Platonism and religion, he wish to present a cursory defence of the vision of God as the eternal principle and paradigm of value, and the special role of the artistic imagination in that process. Moreover, the contemplation of absolute value is properly closer to the ferment of emotion and bolstering of the will in the yearning for goodness and beauty or the worship of the devout than any merely abstract cognition. Yeats deploys enigmatic images in his poetry and interpreting these words and images is taxing. The philosopher who did the most to popularize the importance of spiritual exercise for the appreciation of the history of philosophy is Pierre Hadot. Hadot stresses the tradition of Philosophy as a ‘therapeutic of the passions’ leading to a ‘conversion to the self’.
