This book translates fourteen essays by Pierre Hadot, born a century ago on the day this review is published (February 21, 2022), that have not previously been published in English; ten have already been collected in Études de philosophie ancienne (2010), and three in the most recent edition of Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique (1993). Most of these essays, of diverse length and explanatory purpose though with remarkably similar tenor, formulate aspects of the thesis most popularly known in English from What is Ancient Philosophy? (2002, BMCR 2002.09.21; French original in 1995). That view is that ancient philosophy overall, from at least Plato till late antiquity, should be understood as a “way of life,” with the various schools of philosophy prescribing overlapping ways of life. In these programs of living, “spiritual exercises” modify one’s desiderative, perceptual, and cognitive responses to the world and oneself, with the aim of increasing one’s happiness. The contrast is with seeing ancient philosophy principally as an endeavor to accumulate and systematize certain fundamental areas of knowledge.
Hadot’s perspective amounts to three warnings. First, we should not treat the literature of philosophy that has come down to us as the principal substance of ancient philosophizing, because philosophy was specifically an oral phenomenon, a live teaching of students by masters and, surely, students discussing with one another. Second, we should not reduce philosophy-as-a-way-of-life to a practical ethics, and leave physics and logic, for instance, to the theoreticians: all the branches of philosophy constitute aspects of a way of life. Third, philosophical cultivation does not mean merely development of oneself into a proper subject of moral or epistemological judgment; it means, rather, integration of oneself into an objective and heretofore imperfectly understood world.
Is this how we should perceive the total enterprise of “ancient philosophy”, namely as a practice animated by the desire to change oneself in such-and-such a way? Well, why not? It is fascinating, edifying, and intellectually-historically provocative to do so. Still, we may still ask, to what extent should we now, as self-identified practitioners in the ongoing enterprise called philosophy, study and write about ancient philosophy from this perspective—one that reads the texts as at times basically epiphenomenal to the overall enterprise? And how much value is there in identifying or ascribing such macro-level practical norms—in other words, to depicting a unified disciplinary conception—to the various lineages of ancient philosophy?
One should attend to an ancient philosopher’s purpose in writing, but understanding that purpose will take a fine historical and literary sensibility, a familiarity with genre, commonplaces, operating concepts, and audience expectations; and it will take detailed argument analysis and scrutiny. This involves taking the written texts very seriously, as deliberate formulations of concepts, argument-types, interpretative schemes, or positions—even if none of these is asserted or otherwise doctrinized (as could be the case in Socratic- or Pyrrhonian-style writings). I find myself a bit resistant to Hadot’s approach to Plato in this respect, which I think encourages taking life in the Academy, and in particular Plato’s teaching in the Academy, as somehow the realer part of Plato’s philosophy, and the dialogues, with their Socratic message of non-teaching, their arguments of endless irony, their intertextuality with the literature of the fifth and early fourth century, as simply aide-memoires (the passages on writing in the Phaedrus notwithstanding). For Hadot, the dialogues are less boundlessly engaging works of philosophical literature than informative records of or sly allusions to the genuine philosophical practice found or at least idealized in the Academy. Maybe this is reasonable, but I just have not yet been convinced that What is Ancient Philosophy? or this volume of Selected Writings improves my reading of Plato, Socrates, or any figure from (at least) fifth- and fourth-century philosophy. Maybe I am simply too doubtful that we can know what pre-Hellenistic philosophy was like.[1]
Hadot’s book does, however, occasion for me two productive questions about the contemporary scene, and a third question about the ancient scene. First, in what sense could philosophy now be a way of life? The big issue with the contemporary efflorescence of philosophical ways of life, Stoicism notably, is their reluctance to give epistemological, moral-psychological, physical, or metaphysical justifications for their views. For instance, is it a philosophical way of life if they do not involve a lot of argumentative justification for hard positions?[2]
Second, and relatedly, can a philosophical way of life be both radical and reachable: sufficiently radical to count as a distinctive way of life, sufficiently reachable to be available as a solution to some real existential problem? Here was a dilemma I faced two years ago and again this winter, teaching a class called “How to Live.” The ways of life that were obviously reachable to students were properly optimizations: doing mindfulness meditation, daily strolls through the woods, math problems. And none of these ways of life was justified by tenuous strings of premise and inference. The radical ways of life, by contrast—expunging one’s self-concept, abandoning beliefs in non-evident positions, accepting that all that happens is for the best, treating virtue as the only good—never seemed occasioned by a present ill and would depend on lots of erudite argument some of whose premises were never compelling to any student. One problem, I feared, was that the lives of my students were simply going too well—they could not be presented with acceptable-to-them eudaimonistic reasons to reject the basic framework of their lives.
So, third, I began to wonder: how did our ancient brethren feel the force of reasons to transform themselves utterly? How could “philosophy” cause the abandonment of certain foundational principles of one’s self-concept by persuasive appeal to other foundational principles? Now, this is a great question, one that has and can drive lots of philosophical inquiry; but it is not an overall interpretation of philosophy, only of one aspect of human life, transformational change.[3]
Anyway, back to Hadot’s book, which I found a great pleasure to read, inspirational in the immense historical reach and interpretative ambition evidenced by every essay, quite clear in its conceptual distinctions and articulations, and provocative of the questions raised above, even while never being analytically close enough to some text as for me ever to believe that I was coming away with more knowledge of some philosopher than I had had before (with a partial exception for Marcus Aurelius).
The present volume is a compact paperback, convenient for carrying around, though with a Brutalist De Gruyter-esque typographic layout. It includes footnotes from the translators concerning French-to-English choices, and endnotes for spelled-out references to ancient texts; these might have been switched around, to increase the appearance of Hadot’s engagement with actual ancient texts, though some of the translation remarks, for example contrasting théorique and théorétique, are historically informative.
The Introduction (1–29) covers, somewhat essayistically, Hadot’s influence, his distinctive approach to ancient philosophy, his celebrated connection to Foucault, the upshots of the various essays, and the approach to translation. A significant oversight is the omission of a conspectus of the chapters’ original sources; worse, only seven of the fourteen chapters include information about the original source (as their first endnote). Thus often we lack even the date of authorship, much less the context for its publication. I reconstruct that material at the end of this review. Throughout the book there are a number of typos and at least one misrepresentation.[4]
All the chapters evidence Hadot’s synoptic vision of ancient philosophy as a self-directed and therapeutic endeavor. About half of them argue more or less directly for that vision. Four of these are occasional pieces (chs. 1, 2, 4, 12). The volume opens with a mildly autobiographical 1993 lecture: it entices with an underdeveloped allusion to the founding influence of Wittgenstein’s conception of language-games and puzzles with another underdeveloped statement: since “it is often extremely difficult to follow the thread of ideas in ancient philosophical writings,” Hadot had to explain them as “born” in “the concrete conditions of life of the philosophical school,” and from this came the idea of spiritual exercises. A second autobiographical piece adumbrates Hadot’s criticisms of Foucault—his relative silence about “wisdom” and his view of fashioning oneself as a work of art rather than surpassing oneself through coordination with the cosmos—and thereby highlights his more epistemological or truth-sensitive views. Of the two prefaces to other people’s books, one is uncontroversial and valid, the other argumentative and dubious. The first printed is the preface to Richard Goulet’s Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques (1989–2018, BMCR review of Vol. VII).[5] Hadot, celebrating the encyclopedia’s prosopographical and bibliographical exhaustiveness, proffers a research program: the encyclopedia allows for a reconstruction of “the historical phenomenon represented by philosophy as a whole.” The other preface, this one to a book on Tübingen-school interpretation of Plato, argues that Plato’s dialogues are simply aids to a deeper Platonic teaching. He argues:
Major premise: ancient philosophers had doctrine to convey to students (see Aristotle);
Minor premise: Plato was an ancient philosopher;
Inference: Plato had doctrine to convey to students;
Yet: the dialogues do not really convey doctrine;
Observation: Plato also had a school;
Conclusion: So Plato conveyed doctrine in his school.
“It is impossible that Plato did not then express his own opinions or his methodological reflections.” For Hadot, reading Socrates’ remarks in the dialogues as Plato’s assertions, the statements on the inadequacy of writing bandied about in the Phaedrus corroborate. Yet Hadot does not acknowledge an alternative: that Plato’s dialogues stand on their own, with their Socratism stymying precisely the longing for a truer, deeper Platonic teaching.
Three other chapters get close to spelling out Hadot’s overall view. Chapter 3 is the volume’s most direct discussion of spiritual exercises. Ancient philosophical books, Hadot claims, were written not as the primary output or vindication of the philosophical life but “only [as] point[s] of material support for speech destined to become speech once again.” He therefore emphasizes “the event of oral teaching, addressed, first of all, to a group of students who hears the master or debates with him.” What is this teaching? “A certain savoir faire, a knowledge of how to debate and to speak which will allow the disciple to achieve a new orientation in their thinking, in the life of the city or in the world.” Chapters 6–7 analyze the discipline of philosophy. The traditional idea that ancient philosophers divided philosophy into ethics, logic, and physics comes originally from the Stoics, Hadot argues in Chapter 6, and has a complicated backstory. The Stoic view of logic, as a science meant to achieve epistemological certitude, differed from Platonic dialectic, which pursued forms, and from Aristotelian dialectic, which was “a simple technique of argumentation belonging always to the domain of the probable”; and their view of physics subsumed all theoretical activity, including theology. This tripartition did not represent a hierarchy for the Stoics, as it did in their predecessors; Hadot emphasizes the “dynamic continuity and reciprocal interpenetration” of those parts. This all eventuates in Hadot’s being able to set out his view that physics counted as a spiritual exercise—one coordinated one’s judgments with the structure of nature—as much as logic and ethics did. (This view is given some textual support in Chapter 11, in a study of Marcus Aurelius.) Chapter 7 develops a subsidiary issue, starting with Aristotle’s understanding of dialectic—in contrast to rhetoric, as a radical shift from Plato’s use (in some dialogues), and as a propaedeutic—then explaining dialectic’s use as a teaching tool, and surveying the range of those uses throughout antiquity. I wish Hadot had explained the transformation between Plato’s putative and Aristotle’s elaborated conception of dialectic.
The other half of the chapters are engaging, at times astounding, exercises in synoptic intellectual history. The chapter on “conversion” adumbrates two impulses from antiquity to Christianity and then modernity, and concludes: “one could describe the whole history of the West as a ceaselessly renewed effort to perfect the techniques of ‘conversion.’” On “Ancient Man and Nature,” Hadot distinguishes two ancient attitudes toward nature: the Promethean, concerned with “mechanics,” a “rational process put into the service of human passion,” and the contemplative, which is “‘physics’ as a spiritual exercise.” This latter he connects to the ideal of the “simple life”; to seeing “landscapes”; to valuing the “sublime”; to the retreat into actual or figurative solitude; and to the way philosophy involves “an inner effort… designed to overcome the habitude which makes our way of seeing the world banal and mechanistic.” The concept of “sagehood,” we read in another chapter, depends on “an increasingly acute awareness of the I” and it “implies two dimensions which are totally foreign to quotidian life: inner liberty… and cosmic consciousness.” The longest chapter is a long, complex, edifying, and ambitious study of the mutual relations of classical antiquity and Christianity; it is a model of big history concisely presented.
Conspectus
EPA: Études de Philosophie Ancienne, 2nd ed. (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2010) (1st ed. 1998)
ESPA: Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 1993) (1st ed. 1981)
1. “My Books and My Research” (33–42). A talk delivered to the Collège philosophique in 1993. [ESPA]
2. “The Ancient Philosophers” (43–54). Preface to R. Goulet (ed.) Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, vol. 1 (Paris: Editions to CNRS, 1983), pp. 7–16. [EPA 13]
3. “Ancient Philosophy: An Ethics or a Practice” (55–79). P. Demont (ed.) Problèmes de moral antique, sept etudes(Amiens: Université d’Amiens, Faculté des lettres, 1993), 7–37. [EPA 11]
4. “The Oral Teaching of Plato” (81–90). Preface to Marie-Dominique Richard, L’Enseignement oral de Platon (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1986), 7–15. [EPA 10]
5. “Conversion” (93–103). In C. Gregory (Ed.) Encyclopedia Universalis, 20 vols. (French Book Club and Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968–74). [ESPA]
6. “The Divisions of the Parts of Philosophy in Antiquity” (105–32). Museum Helveticum 36 (1979), 202–23. [EPA 8]
7. “Philosophy, Dialectic and Rhetoric in Antiquity” (133–62). Studia philosophica 39 (1980), 139–66. [EPA 9]
8. “Ancient Man and Nature” (165–76). Annuaire du Collège de France, 1988–1989 (Paris: Collège de France, 1989), 371–79. [EPA 15]
9. “The Genius of Place in Ancient Greece” (177–82). M. Crépu, R. Figuier (edd.) Hauts Lieux. Série Mutations 115 (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1990), 149–53. [EPA 16]
10. “The Figure of the Sage in Greek and Roman Antiquity” (185–206). G. Gadoffre (ed.) Les Sagesses du Monde: Un Colloque Interdisciplinaire. Institut Collégial Européen (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1991), 9–26. [EPA 12]
11. “Physics as Spiritual Exercise, or Pessimism and Optimism in Marcus Aurelius” (207–226). Revue de Théologie et de philosophie 22 (1972), 225–39.
12. “An Interrupted Dialogue with Michel Foucault: Convergences and Divergences” (227–33). “Un dialogue interrompu avec Michel Foucault: Convergences et Divergences” [ESPA]
13. “The End of Paganism” (237–64). Encyclopédie de la Pléiade. Histoire des religions, vol 2. (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1972), 81–112. [EPA 18]
14. “Models of Happiness Proposed by the Ancient Philosophers” (265–74). La Vie Spirituelle 72 (1992), 33–43. [EPA 17]
Notes
[1] It is hard to go much further than the discussions found in Debra Nails, Agora, Academy, and the Conduct of Philosophy (Kluwer, 1995), and Carlo Natali, Aristotle: His Life and School, ed. Doug Hutchinson (Princeton, 2013).
[2] I found a recent New York Review review of the New Stoicism inadequately sensitive to this problem; Ryan Holiday, one of its major proponents, can come across as hostile to argument. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s summaries of and commentary on recent “ways of life,” in Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living (Notre Dame, 2020), adds to one’s pessimism here.
[3] This is the question that gets formulated, though maybe not comprehensively answered, in Agnes Callard’s Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (Oxford, 2018).
[4] The most problematic is p. 256 footnote y: “the text reads ‘Linos’, but the context renders this improbable; Hadot is perhaps referring to Minos”: yet the text, “At the origins of each people, there are divine men – legislators, poets, kings or inspired philosophers like Linos, Musaeus, Orpheus, Homer and Pythagoras amongst the Greeks,” is perfectly sensible as is. Diogenes Laertius discusses Linus among the originators of philosophy in Lives of Eminent Philosophers 1.3–4; see also Stobaeus 3.1.70 and 4.46.1.
[5] This encyclopedia is available on amazon.fr, at an average price of $80/volume; unfortunately, vol. Va is not currently available.