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VOCABULARY OF PHILOSOPHY – ASCETICISM

ASCETICISM (ἄσκησις, exercise).—Practice of self-denial beyond the requirements of moral law, avowedly for the attainment of a higher moral life. The exercise of severe virtue among the Pythagoreans and Stoics was so called. «This name may be applied to every system which teaches man not to govern his wants by subordinating them to reason and the law of duty, but to stifle them entirely, or at least to resist them as much as he can; and these are not only the wants of the body, but still more those of the heart, the imagination, and the mind… Asceticism may be distinguished as religious, which is founded on the doctrine of expiation, and seeks to appease the divine wrath by voluntary sufferings, and philosophical, which aims at accomplishing the destiny of the soul, developing its faculties, and freeing it from the servitude of sense» (Dict. des. Sci. Phil.).
 
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