Christos Yannaras wrote:
Asceticism is necessary to overcome the ego and its resistance to the knowledge of the other. The knowledge of personal otherness, the knowledge of the person, is an outburst, an explosion of freedom. Knowledge and freedom cannot be separated, since I must free myself from myself in order to open myself to the other, in order to recognize the otherness of the other. I must free myself from all those individualistic, egocentric forms of resistance. This is the only way to achieve freedom: freedom as love and freedom as knowledge. This is why the path to knowledge and freedom and love is the path of ascetic struggle: it is in this way that we free ourselves from the exigencies of the ego. To know the other it is necessary to say goodbye to oneself. Asceticism is the way in which we can develop the strength and discipline to do this.
— From The Freedom of Morality
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