In this series of engaging essays, Sylvain Roux calls into question Pierre Hadot’s “paradigm” of ancient philosophy. After an introduction and first chapter summarizing Hadot on spiritual exercises—i.e., those practices of Epicurean, Stoic, and Neoplatonic philosophers that suggest an idea of philosophy as, above all, a way of life—Roux turns to Socrates (ch. 2), Plato (ch. 3), and Aristotle (ch. 4), arguing that Hadot misapplies this idea to earlier thinkers. Even after briefly returning to the Hellenistic and Roman periods (ch. 5), Roux maintains that Hadot’s “paradigm” cannot account for the multiple conceptions of philosophy in antiquity. “Paradigm,” we should note, is not mere jargon for Roux, and his opening citations of Thomas Kuhn are not ornamental: the wheels of his argument turn on the axle of “un paradigme méthodologique” (p. 10, emphasis his) that he ascribes to Hadot. Of course, he is not the first to wonder if Hadot, in construing philosophy as a way of life, left too little room for its more theoretical elements.[1] Is there not a risk of ignoring those elements—and, perhaps, the very content of philosophical arguments—if we follow Hadot?[2] Are we neglecting the diversity of ancient thought if we accept a seemingly unitary notion of philosophy-as-a-way-of-life?[3] To others, it has usually seemed possible to raise such concerns while still accepting many of Hadot’s insights; where Roux goes further is in suggesting that Hadot actually effected a “paradigm shift” in the study of ancient philosophy, and that the new “paradigm” is not viable.
In its very nature this argument raises a historical question about Hadot’s influence. It would be interesting to ask those who knew him if, in their estimation, he ever intended anything quite like a scientific revolution. From his 2001 interviews with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, he seems to have had more modest aims: he saw his own work as a response to “un problème strictement littéraire” unmotivated by “considérations plus ou moins édificantes sur la philosophie comme thérapeutique, etc.”[4] As for those “impératifs méthodologiques” (p. 11, emphasis Roux’s in quoting a passage of Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique?)[5] that Roux uses to justify his “paradigm” language: Hadot suggests reading with an eye to authorial intent, notes that ancient texts originally had oral-performative contexts, and encourages an awareness that form may determine content (and vice versa). Although perhaps more typical of literary historians than modern philosophers, these insights are not exactly Copernican. We are left with some question, then, as to why Roux deems “paradigm shift” appropriate language “pour décrire la situation dans laquelle nous nous trouvons désormais à l’égard de la compréhension de la philosophie ancienne” (p. 10).
This question about Hadot’s “paradigm” leads to another about Roux’s methodology. Roux begins by questioning the “essentialism” implicit in titles like Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? or La philosophie comme manière de vivre, and announces his intent “d’ouvrir la voie à une autre approche, plus descriptive et pluraliste, qui cherche au contraire à manifester la variété des démarches philosophiques présentes dans l’Antiquité” (p. 16). Few would object to this goal: scholarship should tend in the direction of higher- and not lower-resolution imaging of the past. Because of this, and because it is to Hadot’s philological acumen and historical sensibility that Roux attributes his success (pp. 12-14), one might have expected Roux to evaluate Hadot as a reader of texts—i.e., to show where Hadot himself was inattentive to language or historical context. Where Roux does this, he is not unsuccessful (see, e.g., pp. 116-18 in critique of Hadot’s reading of a passage in Aristotle’s Politics, or of his slippage between the phrases “mode de vie” and “exercice spirituel” at pp. 143-6). But in general this is not Roux’s method, and he prefers to discuss the “paradigm” ascribed to Hadot rather than Hadot’s interpretations. In ch. 1 he surveys the spiritual exercises that, he says, comprise this paradigm: “la concentration sur soi,” “l’attention,” “la méditation de la mort,” “l’examen de conscience,” “l’expansion du moi,” “le regard d’en haut,” “la définition physique” (pp. 21-30). This list, drawn almost exclusively from a single chapter of Hadot’s 1995 book, is questionable for a couple of reasons: first, because Roux reorders it such that “la concentration sur soi” now receives frontal emphasis (pp. 21-2), and second because Roux omits Hadot’s entire section on “la rapport à autrui.” This “paradigm” may or may not be unfair to Hadot, but by virtue of its selectivity it is undeniably Roux’s own rhetorical construction. As such, it seems like a strange tool for the job Roux has set for himself—a brush even wider than Hadot’s, so to speak, when a narrower one seems to have been called for.
It seems worthwhile to voice these methodological questions only because Roux’s “paradigm” sometimes seems to undermine his central historical argument, with which I am otherwise sympathetic. At the end of ch. 1 (pp. 36-41) he posits that Hadot took a Hellenistic- and Roman-era conception of philosophy-as-a-way-of-life and “la rattache…aux époques et aux auteurs antérieurs” (p. 39). This is both intuitive and plausible—all the more so because of Hadot’s own biography, as a former priest and patristics scholar who borrowed the very idea of spiritual exercises from St. Ignatius, and who would, even in his later years, continue to cite his early Catholic inspirations (his 2001 interviews, in particular, discuss some of these). Hadot provided ample rationale for seeing a correspondence between patristic ideas of “philosophy” and those of, e.g., Epictetus or Plotinus.[6] But can we really extrapolate those ideas back to Plato and Aristotle? The importance of this question justifies Roux’s focus, in most of what follows, on the earlier philosophers. Each chapter offers evidence and interpretations worthy of careful consideration: ch. 5, which makes the most concessions to Hadot while arguing that not all Hellenistic philosophers saw philosophy as a way of life, is particularly compelling.
Roux’s “paradigm” method, however, leads to certain difficulties in these chapters. Especially in those long stretches of text where citations and mentions of Hadot are either sparse or completely absent (pp. 50-70, 78-87, 98-113), we are sometimes left wondering whether Hadot’s voice has really been heard. In ch. 2, for example, Roux picks up a line from Hadot—that “la démarche socratique est existentielle” (p. 50, emphasis Roux’s)—and proceeds to argue against that assessment, on the grounds that Socrates was indeed a political thinker. But did Hadot ever mean to call Socrates’ thought “existential” in such a narrowly individualistic sense? And what about that important element that Roux omitted from his “paradigm”: “la rapport à autrui”? The Hadot quote itself comes from an essay on the reception of Socrates in western philosophy, which begins with a sober acknowledgment of the Socratic problem (something of an elephant in the room in Roux’s chapter) and goes on to make certain qualified claims about Socrates as seen in Plato’s Symposium and, much later, in the writings of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.[7] One cannot help but think that, were Roux engaging not a “paradigm” but Hadot’s actual claims, he might have allowed for the genre of this essay (not to mention the fact that Hadot indeed maintained a careful distinction between the historical and mythical Socrates throughout his work).[8] One may also feel, upon reading Roux’s treatment of Aristotle, that Hadot wrote much more qualifiedly about Aristotle than Roux allows. In particular, on the issue of the primacy of either theory or practice, this reader wonders why Roux did not engage more generously with Hadot’s argument for the incommensurability of ancient and modern distinctions of theoretical and practical in ch. 6 of Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique?[9]
Roux’s essays are enjoyable to read—which may be due, in part, to his “bibliographie… voluntairement brève” (p. 153) and a sort of ad fontes attitude to the primary texts. But what is gained in readability is lost somewhat in convincingness. One wonders especially how much more compelling the presentation of a “paradigm” of Hadot’s thought would have been were it distilled as an essence from all of Hadot’s work and not just one or two key texts. And, considering that others have been writing in critique and defense of Hadot for some time, it is strange that Roux does not more openly enter into this ongoing dialogue; the recent work of Matthew Sharpe is conspicuously absent (especially his 2016 article on misapprehensions of Hadot and his 2020 collection of Hadot’s essays).[10] Other conspicuous absences, considering that Roux devotes no little space to the history of the concept of φιλοσοφία in the classical period, are the large bibliography on that subject and the important recent contribution by Christopher Moore.[11]
In sum, Roux has posed some very worthwhile historical questions not only about Hadot’s legacy but, more generally, about the stability throughout antiquity of the idea of philosophy. And Roux certainly finds his place, with Hadot himself, among the important interlocutors in this conversation. As for the fundamental charges against Hadot, however, and especially of an essentialism or myopia toward the ancient texts, we seem to want more evidence. A “paradigm” will not suffice to substantiate those charges. To the question of “what is ancient philosophy” it may be true that Hadot gave “une seule réponse,” as Arnold I. Davidson put it in 2001, but it was a response “modulée en formes assez diverses, commes des variations sur un thème.”[12]
Notes
[1] For an introduction to the “reception, critique, lacunae” of Hadot’s writings, see esp. Matthew Sharpe, “Introduction: Situating Hadot Today,” in The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as Practice. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020: pp. 1-29. It is unfortunate that Roux does not engage with the essays in this book nor with their French originals.
[2] See comments in this direction by Lloyd Gerson in BMCR 2002.09.21 of the 2002 English translation of Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique?
[3] See Christopher Moore’s comments in BMCR 2022.02.30 BMCR review of the 2020 volume cited above (n. 1).
[4] Pierre Hadot, La philosophie comme manière de vivre: Entretiens avec Jeannie Carlier et Arnold I. Davidson, Paris: Albin Michel, 2001: p. 101.
[5] Pierre Hadot, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? Paris: Gallimard, 1995: pp. 412-14.
[6] See esp. Pierre Hadot, “La fin du paganisme,” in Encyclopédie de la Pléiade. Histoire des religions, vol 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1972: pp. 81-112.
[7] Pierre Hadot, “La figure de Socrate,” Les Annales d’Eranos 43 (1974): pp. 51-90 (reprinted in Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique: Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée, Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2002: pp. 101-41).
[8] See, as just one example, the discussion in ch. 8 of the Entretiens (cited above, n. 4), pp. 193-227.
[9] See Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? (cited above, n. 5), pp. 123-38.
[10] Cited above, n. 1. See also, e.g., Matthew Sharpe, “What place discourse, what role rigorous argumentation? Against the standard image of Hadot’s conception of ancient philosophy as a way of life,” Pli Special Volume: Self Cultivation, Ancient and Modern (2016): pp. 25-54.
[11] See Christopher Moore, Calling Philosophers Names: On the Origin of a Discipline, Princeton, 2020.
[12] Arnold I. Davidson, “Introduction” to the Entretiens (cited above, n. 4), p. 8.