Hadot: philosophy as a way of life
Pierre Hadot (1922 – April 24, 2010) just died
Hadot taught all of us, or at least reminded us, that for ancients
philosophy was a way of life, a way for self-perfection and eternity and
not an abstract knowledge. To understand why the monotheists Plato,
Aristotle, and Zeno the Stoic were important for Maimonides or for that
matter any medieval Jewish thinker, then one should read Hadot. Everyone
from Idel to Boyarin is dependent on Hadot’s work
Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell, 1995) Organized more on ideas
Hadot, Pierre, What is Ancient Philosophy?, Harvard University Press, 2002, Organized more on history
Here are some paragraphs from online book review to get a sense. From Here
Hadot identified and analyzed the “spiritual exercises” used in ancient philosophy
By “spiritual exercises” Hadot means “practices … intended to effect a
modification and a transformation in the subject who practice them. The
philosophy teacher’s discourse could be presented in such a way that
the disciple, as auditor, reader, or interlocutor, could make spiritual
progress and transform himself within.
For Hadot, the fundamental distinction lies between “philosophy” and
“philosophical discourse.” For example, after surveying the schools of
Plato and Aristotle and their successors in the Hellenistic and late
antique worlds, he explains, “Throughout this investigation, we have
recognized the existence of a philosophical life–more precisely, a way
of life–which can be characterized as philosophical and which is
radically opposed to the way of life of nonphilosophers.
How then did the philosophical life (as opposed to philosophical
discourse) die, or appear to die? Hadot draws attention to the movement
under the Roman Empire away from philosophy as dialogue or research and
towards philosophy as commentary on the “great books” of the past (see
149-157). As the 2nd century AD Platonist Taurus complained,
“There are even some [students] who want to read Plato–not in order to
make their lives better, but in order to adorn their language and their
style; not in order to become more temperate, but in order to acquire
more charm” (150).
What is ancient philosophy? Pierre Hadot makes very clear what he
thinks it is not: it is not the deposit of philosophical concepts,
theories and systems to be found in the surviving texts of Graeco-Roman
antiquity, the subject matter of courses of study in the curricula of
modern universities.
In the author’s own words, “Philosophical discourse . . . originates
in a choice of life and an existential option—not vice-versa . . . .
This existential option, in turn, implies a certain vision of the world,
and the task of philosophical discourse will therefore be to reveal and
rationally to justify this existential option, as well as this
representation of the world” (p. 3). Moreover, philosophy both as a way
of life and as its justifying discourse is not the attainment and
deployment of wisdom, but “merely a preparatory exercise for wisdom”
which “tend[s] toward wisdom without ever achieving it” (p. 4). It is
the primary purpose of this book to establish these
Plato and the Academy (chapter 5). According to Hadot,
Plato’s goal in founding the Academy was the creation of “an
intellectual and spiritual community whose job it would be to train new
human beings . . . (p. 59). The program of training and research in the
Academy from the various branches of mathematics to dialectic had
primarily an ethical aim, which was to purify the mind and to “learn to
live in a philosophical way . . . to ensure . . . a good life and
thereby the ’salvation’ of the soul” (p. 65). To achieve this aim
various “spiritual exercises” mentioned in several Platonic dialogues
including, notably, the practice of death in the Phaedo (64a) and the (practice of?) transcendence over all that is mundane described in the Theaetetus (173d–175e) would have been instituted in the Academy. All these exercises have as their aim the transformation of the self.
Aristotle and His School (chapter 6). Aristotle, according
to Hadot’s account, founded the Lyceum on the model of the Academy—at
least with the same ethical goal in mind, if not the same intellectual
practices.
The Hellenistic Schools (chapter 7). Hadot’s general thesis
is most easily demonstrated in the cases of the various Hellenistic
schools which arose in the late fourth century BCE. The idea that
Epicurus and Zeno (respectively the founders of Epicureanism and
Stoicism) established their schools to create communities which pursued
some shared way of life to attain a shared spiritual goal is not new,
and Hadot demonstrates very effectively how the physical and
epistemological theories of these schools were intended to support their
spiritual goals. This is true not only of the “dogmatists” (Epicureans
and Stoics as well as Platonists and Aristotelians, all of whom affirmed
positive doctrines) but also of their opponents, the “skeptics,” who
recommended the suspension of belief as the proper path to their
spiritual goal. In addition, Hadot shows convincingly that these various
spiritual goals, differently described in the different schools—for
example, for the Epicureans it was a life of stable pleasure achieved by
the limitations of one’s appetites while for the Stoics it was a life
of self-coherence, lived in conformity to Nature or Reason—all involved
the goal of self-transformation. Each school had its own set of
spiritual exercises designed to lead its adherents to the achievement of
its particular version of that goal.
