Pierre Hadot: What Is Ancient Philosophy?

What Is Ancient Philosophy?
Benjamin Balint

According to Pierre Hadot, a prominent historian of ancient thought and professor emeritus at the College de France, philosophy today—specialized, professional, and detached from life—is but a shadow of its glorious Athenian past. But that is not the original part of his thesis. A wide array of modern minds have thought the same: Hegel lamented that philosophy is no longer “practiced as a private art, as it was by the Greeks,” Heidegger called for a return to the Greek grammar of being, and Kant claimed that “the ancient Greek philosophers remained more faithful to the Idea of the philosopher than their modern counterparts have done.” What is new in What Is Ancient Philosophy? is that its author confidently identifies Christianity as the agent of philosophy’s decline.

In his latest book, first published in France in 1995, Hadot surveys with care the great schools of classical thought—Platonism, Aristotelianism, Cynicism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism—and argues that they share not only a drive to offer rational explanations of the world but also a conception of philosophy profoundly different from the way that discipline currently understands itself. As in his last book, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Hadot shows that unlike today, philosophers in the age of Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum practiced their craft; they did not merely study it. Since they considered philosophy a means of inner transformation rather than a purely theoretical endeavor, the ancients aimed not at resolving abstract problems or thinking systematically but at preparing themselves for truth and making themselves susceptible to it by cultivating certain attitudes of mind: equanimity and absence of worry ataraxia), independence (autarkeia), good disposition euthumia), and so forth. These inner calibrations in turn demanded a highly developed philosophical exercise (askesis) of self–awareness, self–mastery, and examination of the conscience. Philosophy required rational living as much as rational thinking.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the philosophers of antiquity, from the Pre-socratics to the late Neo-platonists, flourished in tight communities of shared dialogue and practice. The Stoic sage Seneca counseled that “the living word and life in common will benefit you more than written discourse,” and his contemporaries indeed tended to think together and to think out loud. “For Aristotle,” as for others, Hadot says, “the discussion of problems was ultimately more formative than their solution.” Membership in a philosophical school entailed not doctrinal allegiance but, as Hadot puts it, “the choice of a certain way of life and existential option which demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle, a conversion of one’s entire being, and ultimately a certain desire to be and to live in a certain way.”

If this strikes you as closer to religion than philosophy, then you are thinking like an early Christian. For far from rejecting pagan philosophy, Hadot notes, Christianity borrowed from it extensively, ultimately deriving its very conception of itself from Greek thought. The fledgling religion presented itself not only as a philosophy, in the ancient sense of the term, but as the philosophy. If doing philosophy meant living in conformity with reason (the thinking went), if it really represented “a conversion of one’s entire being,” then Christians were philosophers and (at least some) philosophers Christians. Hence we find the apologist Justin, for example, declaring—scarcely a century after Jesus—that “those who, before Christ, led a life accompanied by reason are Christians, even if they were known as atheists. Such were Socrates, Heraclitus, and those like them.” (For a wider discussion of Justin’s view, see “The Christianity of Philosophy” in the May 2001 First Things, where Peter Simpson concludes that “the Christian faith for [Justin] was the true and complete philosophy.”)

Hadot further argues that the first Christians annexed from philosophy not only large swaths of the ancient ideological landscape, but also many of its spiritual practices. In the early Christian exercises aiming to instill virtues such as peace of mind and absence of the passions, and in the tradition of contemplative monasticism as developed by such fourth–century Church fathers as Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen, Hadot detects a strong whiff of Greek philosophical practice. Hadot admits that these exercises “formed part of a broader ensemble of practices which were specifically Christian.” Still, though “the Christian philosophers tried to Christianize their use of secular philosophical themes,” they could not help “de­scribing their spiritual exercises by means of the vocabulary and concepts of secular philosophy."

But the heart of Hadot’s argument lies in his contention that in the process of digesting it, Christianity slowly but inexorably broke philosophy apart. The ancient schools that had not disappeared (Platonism and Aristotelianism in particular), re­moved from the ways of life that inspired them, “were reduced to the status of mere conceptual material which could be used in theological controversies.” Philosophy, made to serve theology, became merely theoretical. “Aristotelian logic and ontology,” for example, “furnished concepts that were indispensable for the formulation of the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation.” But Christianity, itself a pervasive way of life,had little use for the practical elements of ancient philosophy (other than those it chose to appropriate). So when philosophy emerged many centuries later into its own again to breathe the air of the Enlightenment, it “consider[ed] itself a theoretical science, because the existential dimension of philosophy no longer had any meaning from the perspective of Christianity.” And so it was, Hadot concludes, that philosophy, stripped to its conceptual content, became the impoverished thing it is today.

The problem with this story is not its moral. As morals go, Hadot’s is uplifting and deserves to be heard. The lesson, he says, is simply that “there is no discourse which deserves to be called philosophical if it is separated from the philosophical life, and there is no philosophical life unless it is directly linked to philosophical discourse.”

The trouble lies rather with the story itself. To begin with, as mentioned above, nostalgia for the original union of praxis and theoria propels some of the most powerful currents of modern philosophy; it may even be said to be a kind of shibboleth of fashionably self–critical moderns. Alexander Nehamas, in The Art of Living, showed that the Socratic attention to the ways philosophy shapes personality deeply informed the views of Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault—and Hadot himself, citing Descartes, awkwardly admits that the old ideal of philosophia never really died (had it vanished entirely, we would not find Hadot’s own book so unstartling). He might have added that the insistence that thought not abstract itself from life would also form a crucial theme for both the existentialists and the pragmatists.

Further, Hadot’s account—which might more aptly have borne the title Where Did Modern Philosophy Come From?—in considering ancient philo­sophies as ways of life, too often obscures their substance. What about the content of ancient contemplation sets it apart from modern philosophical reflection? Is there nothing about the subject matter of classical speculation that distinguishes it from the study of philosophy today? On this Hadot utters not a word.

But his narrative wobbles most of all in the description of Christianity’s link to ancient philosophy, a relationship that is both closer and more remote than the author allows. More remote because in his account of the assimilation of philosophy into the early Church, Hadot fails fully to acknowledge the distinctively reveal­ed character of Christianity or in­deed the ways in which faith colors the Christian conception of truth. “Faith,” Kierkegaard reminds us, “is not a knowledge.” Surely there is a great leap from truth rationally discovered to truth divinely revealed and from the imperative to doubt to the command to believe, but this is a gap Hadot is not keen to describe.

On the other hand, these two great forces are closer than Hadot permits precisely because the ideal of transformative knowledge defines religion in a way no other quality does. For this very reason, some claim that ancient thought is precociously religious more than Christianity is belatedly philosophical. But we needn’t go that far to recognize that the inseparability of speculative discourse and concrete conduct is a fundamentally religious notion. Philosophy may have embroidered the idea, but religion had always announced that the truth that fails to transform its bearer is no truth at all. (This is true also in Judaism. In his commentary on the Torah, the rabbinic scholar Samson Raphael Hirsch writes: “All ‘religion,’ all so–called ‘honoring God in spirit,’ is worthless if the thought, the idea of God, is not strong enough to exercise its power practically in the control of our words and doings.”)

Seen in this light, the Christian stewardship of philosophy, far from dissolving it, may actually have preserved the union of thought and deed. The real question would then be: Why did our modern philosophers, those “artists of reason,” when freed from their religious guardians to sculpt an intellectual world afresh, choose to reject the potent synthesis that marked Greece and Christendom alike? But that would be another, more judicious book.

相视一笑，莫逆于心

相视一笑，莫逆于心

Aristotle: the "theoretical" form of life

Pierre Hadot: What Is Ancient Philosophy?
Aristotle's school, Lyceum, trained people only for the philosophical life. Aristotle distinguishes between the happiness man can find in political life, in active life, and philosophical happiness, which corresponds to theoria---a kind of life devoted entirely to the activity of the mind. Political and practical happiness is happiness only in a secondary way. Philosophical happiness is found in life according to the mind, which is situated in man's highest excellence and virtue. This virtue corresponds to the mind, the highest part of man, and is free of inconveniences brought by the active life. It is not subject to the intermittent nature of action, and does not produce fatigue. It brings marvelous pleasures, which are unmixed with pain or impurity and are stable and solid. These pleasures are greater for those who reach reality and truth than for those who are still searching for them. It ensures independence from others, insofar as we otherwise assured of independence with regard to material things. A person who devotes himself to the activity of the mind depends only on himself. Perhaps his intellectual activity will be of higher quality if he has collaborators; but the more a sage he is, the more he will be able to be alone. Life in accordance with the mind does not seek any result other than itself, and is therefore loved for itself. It is its own goal and its own reward.

The life of the mind also eliminates worry. By practicing the moral virtues, we find ourselves involved in a struggle against the passions and also mired in material cares. In order to act within the city, we must become involved in political struggles; in order to help others, we must have money; in order to practice courage, we must go to war. The philosophical life, by contrast, can be lived only in leisure and in detachment from material worries.

This form of life represents the highest form of human happiness. Yet it can also be said that such happiness is superhuman: "Then, man no longer lives qua man, but insofar as there is something divine about him." This paradox corresponds to Aristotle's paradoxical and enigmatic view of the mind and the intellect: the intellect is what is most essential in man, yet at the same time it is something divine which enters into him; what transcends man constitutes his true personality. It is as if man's true essence consisted in being above himself: "The mind is our self, insofar as it represents that which decides and which is best."

We must take into consideration the distance which separates man from the deity; and Aristotle admits that we can attain it only in infrequent moments. If the deity is perpetually in a state of joy comparable to that in which we sometimes find ourselves, that is admirable. If he is in a state of still greater joy, then that is still more marvelous. Thus, the summit of philosophical happiness and the of the activity of the mind, that is, the contemplation of the divine intellect is accessible to man only in rare moments, for the proprium of the human condition is that it cannot be continuously in actuality. This implies that for the rest of the time, the philosopher must be content with the inferior grade of happiness which consists in searching.

Aristotle uses the word "theoretical" to designate, on one hand, the mode of knowledge whose goal is knowledge for knowledge's sake, and not some goal outside itself; and on the other, the way of life which consists in devoting one's life to this mode of knowledge. The word is not opposed to "practical." "Theoretical" can be applied to a philosophy which is practiced, lived, and active, and which brings happiness.  Aristotle hints that the mode of contemplative action is the deity and the universe, which exert no action directed toward the outside ut take themselves as the object of their action. It appears that the model of a knowledge which does not seek any gaol other than itself is the divine Intellect, which has no interest in anything else. So theoretical praxis consists in choosing no goal other than knowledge. It means wanting knowledge for its own sake, without pursuing any other particular, egoistic interest which would be alien to knowledge. This is an ethics of disinterestedness and of objectivity.

Kant: "To take an immediate interest in the beauties of nature...is always the sign of a good soul."

Plato's spiritual exercises

Pierre Hadot: What Is Ancient Philosophy?
Plato's writing: Seventh Letters, Timaeus, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, Theatetus.

For Plato, the philosophical way of life requires a considerable effort, which must be renewed every day. It consists in setting more store by virtue than by pleasure, in renouncing the pleasures of senses, in observing a special diet, and in living every day in such of way as to become master of oneself as much as possible.

Preparation for sleep: If we wish to avoid bad dreams, we must prepare ourselves every evening by trying to awaken the rational part of the soul through inner discourses an research on elevated subjects.

Meditation: It will calm our desire and anger.

Exercise of how to maintain our calm in misfortune, without rebelling. We must tell ourselves that we do not know what is good and what is bad in such accidents; that it does no good to become upset; that no human matter is worth being considered very important; and that, as in a dice game, we must deal with things as they are, and act appropriately.

The practice of death: in Phaedo, Socrates declareds that a man who has spent his life in philosophy necessarily has the courage to die, since ophilosophy is nothing other than an exercise of death. Death is the separation of the soul and body, and the philosopher spends his time trying to detach his soul from his body. The body causes us no end of trouble, because of the passions which it engenders and the needs it imposes upon us. The practice is a divestment of passions in order to accede to the purity of th eintelligence.

From Phaedo, the "I" which must die transcends itself and becomes an "I" which is henceforth a stranger to death, since it has identified itself with the logos and with thought. "Corporeal individuality ceases to exist the moment it is externalized in the logos."

In Republic, the exercise of death appears as something like the soul's flight on high, or a look down upon reality from above: "Small-mindedness is what is most opposed to a soul which must always stretch itself toward the entire totality of the divine and the human." In embracing the whole of reality within one universal vision, the exercise allows us to defeat the fear of death.

This is way Plato describes him as an alien, lost in a world which is human, all too human; like Thales the sage, he runs the risk of falling down a well. He is ignorant of fights over magistracy, political debates, and parties with flute players. He does not know how to plead his case at court, or how to insult others, or how to flatter them. Even the most enormous estates seem insignificant to him, "since he is used to embracing the entire earth in his vision.

The sublimation of love: We learn only from people we love.

Whitehead: "Concepts are always dressed in emotions."

Dead Poets Society

We have to constantly look at things in a different way.
Just when you're thinking that you have known something, you have to look at it in another way. You must to strive to find your own voice. Because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you'll find it at all. Break out. Dare to try out and find a new ground.

Conformity: the difficulty to maintain your own beliefs in facing of others. We all have great needs for acceptance, but you must trust that your beliefs are your own.

The Pythagorean community

Pythagoreans: the full-time residents of the community.
Pythagoritst: people who live in the surrounding region but attended Pythagoras' lectures on a regular basis.
Pythagoreans were divided into two groups:
Disciples: people who had completed the full term of probation.
Auditors: the rest of the group.

Before acceptance as a resident, each applicant to the community was rigorously examined. Pythagoras first asked about their relation to their parents and family. Next he observed the tone of their speech and laughter, and inquired about their desires, their friendships, how they employed their leisure, and what were the causes of their joy and sadness. He observed their posture and the shape and motions of their body, regarding these as visible signs of the qualities of the soul.

After subjecting each candidate to such careful screening, those deemed acceptable were invited to join the community as Auditors for a period of three years. During this time, Pythagoras carefully observed their character and habits, evaluating their susceptibility to desire and passion, and how they were affected by conflict and disappointment. He tested their acquisitiveness and pride, and placed a high value on generosity, reticence and modesty.

After this survey of manners, he directed his attention to their memory and facility in learning. He examined their ability to follow what was said quickly and accurately, and then whether they were driven y pure motivation and love to master all the disciplines presented to them. He stressed the importance of open mindedness, and this he called culture.

After the third year, those who were found unfit in any detail were required to leave the community; those who remained advanced toward discipleship. Because Pythagoras considered mastery over one's tongue as the most difficult challenge, successful Auditors were required at this stage to observe strict silence for five years. All their possessions and property were given to the community and committed to trustees. Finally, after five years of silence, those who had won Pythagoras' approval were initiated as Disciples.

Pythagoras explained that the extraordinary disciplines he imposed on applicants were necessary to clear away the thickets of excess and greed that obscure the natural reasoning power of the soul. "Excess brings lust, intoxication and uncontrolled emotions, which drive men and women into the abyss, " he taught. "Greed brings envy, theft and exploitation. Theses thickets, which choke the soul, must be cleared out by systematic discipline, as if with fire and sword. Only when reason is liberated from such evils are we able to implant what is useful and good within the soul."

Life in the community followed a strict routine. Special regard was given to two times of day---the hour of waking and the hour of falling asleep. Auditors and Disciples began the day with solitary walks to quiet places in the around the retreat---to groves, streams, temples and other sacred sites.

Pythagoras, an introduction

And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started,
And know the place for the first time.
     --T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

Pythagoras: 570-c. 495 BC. Buddha is his contemporary.

These three men wrote about Pythagoras:
Porphyry (233-305 C.E.), a student of Plotinus
Iamblichus (250-325 C.E.): On the Pythagorean Life
Diogenes Laertius
Some of Plato's dialogues directly reflect Pythagorean thought. Aristotle wrote specifically about it.