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What Is Ancient Philosophy?
A magisterial mappa mundi of the terrain that Pierre Hadot has so productively worked for decades, this ambitious work revises our view of ancient philosophy―and in doing so, proposes that we change the way we see philosophy itself. Hadot takes ancient philosophy out of its customary realm of names, dates, and arid abstractions and plants it squarely in the thick of life. Through a meticulous historical reading, he shows how the various schools, trends, and ideas of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy all tended toward one to provide a means for achieving happiness in this life, by transforming the individual’s mode of perceiving and being in the world.
Most pressing for Hadot is the question of how the ancients conceived of philosophy. He argues in great detail, systematically covering the ideas of the earliest Greek thinkers, Hellenistic philosophy, and late antiquity, that ancient philosophers were concerned not just to develop philosophical theories, but to practice philosophy as a way of life―a way of life to be suggested, illuminated, and justified by their philosophical “discourse.” For the ancients, philosophical theory and the philosophical way of life were inseparably linked.
What Is Ancient Philosophy? also explains why this connection broke down, most conspicuously in the case of academic, professional philosophers, especially under the influence of Christianity. Finally, Hadot turns to the question of whether and how this connection might be reestablished. Even as it brings ancient thoughts and thinkers to life, this invigorating work provides direction for those who wish to improve their lives by means of genuine philosophical thought.
Most pressing for Hadot is the question of how the ancients conceived of philosophy. He argues in great detail, systematically covering the ideas of the earliest Greek thinkers, Hellenistic philosophy, and late antiquity, that ancient philosophers were concerned not just to develop philosophical theories, but to practice philosophy as a way of life―a way of life to be suggested, illuminated, and justified by their philosophical “discourse.” For the ancients, philosophical theory and the philosophical way of life were inseparably linked.
What Is Ancient Philosophy? also explains why this connection broke down, most conspicuously in the case of academic, professional philosophers, especially under the influence of Christianity. Finally, Hadot turns to the question of whether and how this connection might be reestablished. Even as it brings ancient thoughts and thinkers to life, this invigorating work provides direction for those who wish to improve their lives by means of genuine philosophical thought.
384 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1995
About the author
Pierre Hadot
41 books308 followersPierre Hadot (né à Paris, le 21 février 1922 - mort à Orsay, le 25 avril 2010) est un philosophe, historien et philologue français, spécialiste de l'antiquité, profond connaisseur de la période hellénistique et en particulier du néoplatonisme et de Plotin. Pierre Hadot est l'auteur d'une œuvre développée notamment autour de la notion d'exercice spirituel et de philosophie comme manière de vivre.
Spécialiste de Plotin et du stoïcisme, en particulier de Marc-Aurèle, il est un de ceux qui ont accompagné le retour à la philosophie antique, considérée comme pratique, manière de vivre et exercice spirituel. Ses livres, très agréables à lire et d'une très grande érudition, manifestent constamment un rapport avec l'existence, l'expérience, voire la poésie, la littérature et le mysticisme.
Spécialiste de Plotin et du stoïcisme, en particulier de Marc-Aurèle, il est un de ceux qui ont accompagné le retour à la philosophie antique, considérée comme pratique, manière de vivre et exercice spirituel. Ses livres, très agréables à lire et d'une très grande érudition, manifestent constamment un rapport avec l'existence, l'expérience, voire la poésie, la littérature et le mysticisme.
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May 19, 2023
Pierre Hadot susține că orice filosofie constituie (și prescrie) un mod de viață. Poate că nu a fost întotdeauna așa, dar Seneca, Epictet și Marcus Aurelius (filosofii de la sfîrșitul Antichității) ilustrează în chip vădit această definiție. Mi se pare curios că, pînă la cărțile lui Hadot, acest aspect al filosofiei a fost ignorat.
Sigur, termenul „filosofie” desemnează multe lucruri: meditație asupra Ființei (Parmenide, Platon, Aristotel, Plotin, Heidegger), meditație asupra morții (Platon, Seneca, Montaigne), instituire a subiectului (Descartes, Husserl), meditație asupra limitelor cunoașterii (Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein), creație a unui „vocabular nou” (Richard Rorty), creație de concepte și „personaje filosofice” (Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari), rezolvare de probleme (gînditorii analitici) etc.
Pierre Hadot (și, pe urmele lui, Michel Foucault, în cursul intitulat Hermeneutica subiectului) arată că măcar pentru unii gînditori „exercițiile spirituale” au fost cu mult mai importante decît aspectul pur speculativ al filosofiei, că a face e mai presus de a gîndi și a scrie. Filosofia nu e numai discurs, ci și practică.
Prima ediție a acestei cărți fundamentale a apărut cu mulți ani în urmă la Polirom. Nu se mai găsea în librării. Așadar, e de salutat reeditarea ei.
Sigur, termenul „filosofie” desemnează multe lucruri: meditație asupra Ființei (Parmenide, Platon, Aristotel, Plotin, Heidegger), meditație asupra morții (Platon, Seneca, Montaigne), instituire a subiectului (Descartes, Husserl), meditație asupra limitelor cunoașterii (Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein), creație a unui „vocabular nou” (Richard Rorty), creație de concepte și „personaje filosofice” (Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari), rezolvare de probleme (gînditorii analitici) etc.
Pierre Hadot (și, pe urmele lui, Michel Foucault, în cursul intitulat Hermeneutica subiectului) arată că măcar pentru unii gînditori „exercițiile spirituale” au fost cu mult mai importante decît aspectul pur speculativ al filosofiei, că a face e mai presus de a gîndi și a scrie. Filosofia nu e numai discurs, ci și practică.
„Vreau să spun, prin urmare, că discursul filosofic trebuie să fie înţeles din perspectiva modului de viaţă pentru care este totodată mijloc şi expresie şi, în consecinţă, că filosofia este înainte de toate o manieră de a trăi, strîns legată de discursul filosofic”.
„O noţiune ce va apărea frecvent în paginile următoare este cea de 'exerciţii spirituale'. Desemnez prin acest termen practici ce puteau fi de ordin fizic, ca regimul alimentar, sau discursiv, precum dialogul şi meditaţia, sau intuitiv, precum contemplarea, dar care erau toate menite să opereze o modificare şi o transformare în subiectul care le practica. Discursul maestrului de filosofie putea lua el însuşi, de altfel, forma unui exerciţiu spiritual, în măsura în care acest discurs era prezentat sub aşa o formă, încît discipolul, ca ascultător, cititor sau interlocutor, putea să progreseze spiritual şi să se transforme interior”.
Prima ediție a acestei cărți fundamentale a apărut cu mulți ani în urmă la Polirom. Nu se mai găsea în librării. Așadar, e de salutat reeditarea ei.
July 28, 2012
That Diogenes—what a card.
I must say, this has to be one of the single best translations from French into English that I've encountered so far—and that the work in question is one delving into the specifics of philosophical and theological thought only makes that fact all the more impressive. Big, honking kudos to Michael Chase for his absolutely top-notch rendering work herein, and even grander, more enthusiastically Charmin™-squeezing kudos need be sounded to Pierre Hadot for providing a source French so rife with the potentiality for a thoroughly pleasing transition into the tongue of the Anglo-Schwaxons. That the author eschewed the recondite density and abstruse gargleflargle so prevalent in modern intellectual writing in lieu of clarity of thought and a subtle but keen sense of humor and humanity throughout is something I fully appreciated.
From the outset it is apparent that Hadot has what he deems an important purpose here, one with utile potentiality for the present day—this being nothing less than the desire to uncover philosophy as it existed back in the time of its origin amongst the Ancient Greeks, both removing it from its current status as a highly regimented subject primarily existent in academia and of little practical use to everyday life in our modern era and revealing the divergence between such a state of affairs and how it was considered and applied in its earlier stages. Beginning with the Presocratics and varied spiritual links to the mystery cults and mythological patterns, Hadot presents a philosophy that was inseparable from active efforts to determine what comprised—in order to actually strive to live—the good life. Sophia, wisdom, in Hadot's exegetical reinterpretation, was complementary with virtue; not the passive state of possessing an apprehension in order to be learned—knowledge for its own sake—but an active one within a daily proving ground where the pursuit of the Good invariably led its seeker closer to his goal through the very means employed to that end; a therapeutic discipline of the elder days. When his attention turns to Socrates and his disciple, Plato, this vibrant and animate Philo-Sophia is further positioned with the language-driven dialectic, in which continuous discussion about a select variety of topics brings the viewpoints of one's interlocutor(s), whether supportive or dissenting, into a living dialogue with those of one's own, the result being a burgeoning and evolving process that brings one nearer—without ever being able to attain—to the Transcendent Norm of the Sage, an idealized state exemplifying perfect wisdom, ie the perfectly lived life.
Socrates is an integral figure for Hadot herein; in a chapter on that famous personage, the author works in comparisons between Socrates and Christ—quoting Nietzsche esteeming the former more for his application of rationality in morality and metaphysics accompanied by a steady undercurrent of humor—as well as triangulating between Socrates, Eros—a Greek daimon—and the philosopher in The Symposium. All three share a commonality, existing at a midpoint between mankind and the gods, striving towards the latter while painfully and tragically understanding the impossibility of that attainment, but nonetheless using its ideality and perfection as a lodestar for how to be a philosopher, i.e. ever considering how to mediate between the immanent and the transcendent through moral choice and the virtues. Socrates is also noted for his continuous declarations to his interlocutors of knowing nothing—and that whatever instances of possessing knowledge that he does reveal in the Platonic dialogues inevitably proves of the ethical kind, of what is good and bad for man's psyche. To the author, the writings of Plato were never intended to convey any manner of set dogma in determined form, but rather were a means of imprinting the extended and developing dialogues between the Master of the Academy and his disciples and auditors. In the conception of the Ancient Greeks, philosophy was always a discursive method of determining the good life with the view that in the moral and ethical was man able to exercise his freedom; the idea of writing a body of work to subsequently be studied, commented upon, and taken up as a determined corpus of knowledge at a certain waypoint on the road to understanding was the furthest thing from the philosophical actuality. Indeed, the term Sophist described those who positioned the attainment of knowledge as an end, rather than an existential means, and it is one that even back in the early days of the Attic philosophical endeavor had inhered a derogatory sense.
With this conception of an active, growing, and discursive method of determining how man should conduct himself—women, for the most part, being excluded from the process (boo!)—Hadot further fleshes out ancient philosophy as bios, a way of life, a method of being, rather than a field of study in which the memorization of its doctrine was the inanimate goal. Proceeding through a very enlightening (and enjoyable) look at the differences and similarities within the Platonic Academy and the Aristotelian Lyceum, and both the former's influence upon the latter and their own interpretations and incorporation of the Pythagorean teachings that preceded them, Hadot spends a lengthy chapter delineating the four major philosophic schools that extended through the Hellenic period: the aforementioned Platonism and Aristotelianism, together with Stoicism primarily concerned with a life of virtue—however differing in conception—and an Epicureanism which underwrote the pursuit of specified pleasures. As a more independent and less formally configured branch, Hadot also sidebars the Skeptics and the Cynics, observing that even the extreme questioning and doubting of the latter two was in an effort to lead its practitioner to an understanding of how to lead a life best suited to man's happiness and awareness of the good during his span of mortal years upon the earth; that their list of aphorisms and epigrams functioned as guides towards spiritual exercise for the student, a means to ground them while they yet used their own powers of reasoning, while minimizing actual discourse, in order to determine how to apply those particular doctrinal methods to their own ceaseless quest to live the halest life amidst an ofttimes hostile world and seemingly debased polity where the passions run rampant.
Hadot discerns an increased textual emphasis within philosophy as bios when he transitions his book into the Imperial period—charting roughly with Roman domination of the Mediterranean, circa 86 BC, when Sulla sacked Athens, through to 370 CE, prior to the elevation of Christianity to the status of favored (and within a short period of time exclusive) religion of the empire. During the Imperial period the process of having school masters and/or auditors write commentaries upon the works of Plato, Aristotle, and others was broadly taken up. Though initially this was but a differing approach from those at a greater remove from the source philosophers, allowing them the exercise of their own rationality in reflecting upon those topical writings in an order specified by the school's master and, increasingly, tradition—ie, from works of ethics to those of physics and then metaphysics—Hadot claims that it had roots in the Greek tradition of pursuing a tier or path of thought back towards an ideal primordial source, as well as an Orphic mystic esotericism in which nature's secrets are revealed via contemplation and aesthetic perception, and previous philosophies are deemed part of a chain stretching back to oracular pronunciations and revelations, adding a mystic element to the dialectic. In particular, this mysticism working in tandem with logos, reasoned thought, arises within Neoplatonism, the result of a fusion of Platonism and Aristotelianism, and in which The Good assumes a divine aspect that the human soul, nominally inferior to the intellect, can, surpassing the latter, come close to union with whilst yet separate; a transcendence in which the individual being ascends to the universal, the absolute, and the harmony that is immanent within the whole.
Such comprises a principal theme of the lengthy chapter upon Philosophy and Philosophical Discourse, a manner of viewing the praxis of philosophy as bios. Hadot ranges across the centuries he has previously traversed in his exploration, examining, comparing, and, where possible, contrasting the bios practices of the various schools constituted during that period and mentioned in the previous two paragraphs. Certain stark similarities are highlighted using both Hadot's analysis, the commentary of Classical exegetes and the written word of the philosophers themselves—that of the contrast between the ineffable nature of the existential philosophical experience, impossible to be captured using the mere tools of human discourse, and the vital necessity of that discourse if there is to be any such philosophy whatsoever. Thus, philosophical discourse retains an ambiguity that runs through many strains of the thought prevalent in this ancient period. This leads into an in depth look at the therapeutic value of the spiritual exercises that comprised this bios, most intriguingly that which was termed the exercise of death. Death's presence informed a plenitude of discourse, for it was an awareness, contemplation, acceptance of death that allowed the philosopher to address himself to life. To transcend death's lingering, laming, and ever looming presence was to remove its shackles from existential reality; it brought about a keen appreciation for life, for living each day in the moment, and as if it were to be one's last. Indeed, this living in the moment would later be interpreted by Wittgenstein as an alternate definition of eternity; a thoroughly present-oriented existence that, viewed from such a position, was scarcely distinguishable from the atemporality of the divine.
To achieve such transcendence meant striving for and perduring with a rational existence; using the intellect whilst casting off the beguiling passions; exercising one's reason to make the correct moral choices, those that lead to the good; all else will perforce prove to be indifferent, the workings of fate that one has no choice but to accept. Only in living a virtuous, moral life can man exercise his freedom in a rational and proper manner; only by such praxis can he free himself from the chains of death and the ruinous passions such as envy, greed, lust, hunger, vainglory and the desire to amass Goodreads votes, to name an egregious few. And once man has understood this—that is to say, by living this—he will have gained wisdom, and positioned himself that much closer to the semi-mythological figure of the Sage. Depending upon the philosophical school in question, the Sage was either a mortal who attained a near union with the divine, or one who was coeval with the gods, indifferent to the passage of time and the ravages of fate, concerned only with his own rational contemplation and moral exercise. But above all it was the desired endpoint of all such spiritual exercises; to lift man's soul from the wearying and abrading bonds of physical life by directing his intellect, via discourse and continuous practice and contemplation, towards a perfect wisdom that was wholly unattainable and yet forever within one's reach if one lived a life dedicated to virtue and sought the means to better judge, criticize, and transform one's being. And though each school might promote its directed philosophy for differing practical ends—Platonism and Aristotelianism for producing better leaders, generals, aristocrats, teachers; Stoicism and Epicureanism aimed towards bettering the life of any citizen who sought out their teachings; and Skepticism and Cynicism for those desirous of escaping the polity and its debased wallowing altogether—all were united in considering the philosopher as one who lived a life of the exercised mind that was both admirable and apart from that of the unenlightened general populace: an exemplary—though not above mockery—spiritual figure within the ancient world.
Hadot finds in this evidence of both the ease and the apparent incongruity of early Christianity's adoption of philosophy to its own religious structure. Notwithstanding that its tenets came via divine revelation and soteriological doctrine, the fact that both Christianity and ancient philosophy promoted, even demanded, a spiritual life of bettering oneself within the material world—though for entirely different ends—allowed the early Christians to mine the Platonic dialogues, Aristotelian treatises, Epicurian epigrams, Stoic aphorisms, and, most of all, the coterminous texts of a competing Neoplatonism, matching them with passages in the Old and New Testaments in order to rework and reveal Christianity as a holy bios, in which the good Christian desired, through rational thought and the restraint of his earthly passions, to bring himself closer to the divine Logos that had appeared in its purest form within the figure of Jesus Christ. This reached something of an apogee in the spread of Christian monasticism, which borrowed forms, means, and regulations from both the existing philosophical schools and their ancient forerunners, as well as the various flavors of Buddhism and oriental mysticism that had arrived in the southeastern Mediterranean world via the spread Hellenic and Roman power, culture, and trade during the previous five centuries. This exposure to and adoption of philosophical mores produced the curious effect of bringing tendencies that had been latent and/or secondary within Christianity into the forefront; that of living the life of a soul, encompassing reason, rather than one of a human being; that of a spiritual life, analogous to that described by Plato in his dialogues, in which the flesh was abandoned in pursuit of an intelligible transcendence; important shifts that would be maintained, and in many cases strengthened, as Christianity evolved towards the Middle Ages.
However, Hadot also sees this Christian embrace of philosophy as the beginning of its long process into becoming solely a discursive method of debating and teaching systems and dogma for purely knowledgeable ends. As Christian monasticism and churches replaced the ancient philosophic schools—Neoplatonism being the last one standing—the analytic tools of Plato and, more readily, Aristotle were used to settle questions of theological dogma; and the living means of philosophy subordinated to the soteriological demands of ordaining the proper Christian life. With the onset of the Middle Ages, the original philosophical writings were lost and clerics were forced to rely upon commentaries by the likes of Boethius and Macrobius; when Aristotle was rediscovered, the philosophical strains remnant within the monasteries were superseded by the newly-arisen universities and the methodology of the Scholastics, in which Aristotelian treatises were picked to solve existent problems of revelation and salvation as against reason. The progression of the universities through to the modern age witnessed the increasing use of philosophy as a tool, either of religion or of science—and both, eventually, under the state—to train a succession of civil servants who increasingly systematized philosophy, making it a discipline abstract and esoteric, divorced from any practical application in human life and rather a way to process knowledge to the point that a degree acknowledging a certain attained level of understanding might be dispensed. In the modern teaching of Idealism, Existentialism, and Structuralism, Hadot observes this evolved tendency reaching a level of removal from any spiritual exercise or therapy to better one's life that is profoundly marked.
Of course, this is an academic changing of the means into ends that Hadot has elucidated. He proffers a look at a handful of philosophers who maintained the existentially transformative nature of philo-sophia in their thought and work: Petrarch, Erasmus, Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, to name a few. All understood that the praxis of philosophy required more than the sophist's philodoxos, or love of opinion; a scholastic concept of philosophy as opposed to a worldly one; speculative and systematic as against transformative and lived. Hadot believed strongly that ancient philosophy, having been a manner of experimental laboratory for determining how to live a better live, can be set against thousands of years of passed historical responses and tests in order to be applied to how one might seek the good even in the rushed, ironic, dream-scrubbed insubstantiality of our modern world. Furthermore, in the sage-like figure of Socrates, Hadot sees a western thinker readily recognizable amongst the ancient Chinese philosophers and savants who engendered and contemplated their own several permutations of what might be branded an Eastern Stoicism. But it would not be easy. As Hadot notes on one of the penultimate pages:
I must say, this has to be one of the single best translations from French into English that I've encountered so far—and that the work in question is one delving into the specifics of philosophical and theological thought only makes that fact all the more impressive. Big, honking kudos to Michael Chase for his absolutely top-notch rendering work herein, and even grander, more enthusiastically Charmin™-squeezing kudos need be sounded to Pierre Hadot for providing a source French so rife with the potentiality for a thoroughly pleasing transition into the tongue of the Anglo-Schwaxons. That the author eschewed the recondite density and abstruse gargleflargle so prevalent in modern intellectual writing in lieu of clarity of thought and a subtle but keen sense of humor and humanity throughout is something I fully appreciated.
From the outset it is apparent that Hadot has what he deems an important purpose here, one with utile potentiality for the present day—this being nothing less than the desire to uncover philosophy as it existed back in the time of its origin amongst the Ancient Greeks, both removing it from its current status as a highly regimented subject primarily existent in academia and of little practical use to everyday life in our modern era and revealing the divergence between such a state of affairs and how it was considered and applied in its earlier stages. Beginning with the Presocratics and varied spiritual links to the mystery cults and mythological patterns, Hadot presents a philosophy that was inseparable from active efforts to determine what comprised—in order to actually strive to live—the good life. Sophia, wisdom, in Hadot's exegetical reinterpretation, was complementary with virtue; not the passive state of possessing an apprehension in order to be learned—knowledge for its own sake—but an active one within a daily proving ground where the pursuit of the Good invariably led its seeker closer to his goal through the very means employed to that end; a therapeutic discipline of the elder days. When his attention turns to Socrates and his disciple, Plato, this vibrant and animate Philo-Sophia is further positioned with the language-driven dialectic, in which continuous discussion about a select variety of topics brings the viewpoints of one's interlocutor(s), whether supportive or dissenting, into a living dialogue with those of one's own, the result being a burgeoning and evolving process that brings one nearer—without ever being able to attain—to the Transcendent Norm of the Sage, an idealized state exemplifying perfect wisdom, ie the perfectly lived life.
Socrates is an integral figure for Hadot herein; in a chapter on that famous personage, the author works in comparisons between Socrates and Christ—quoting Nietzsche esteeming the former more for his application of rationality in morality and metaphysics accompanied by a steady undercurrent of humor—as well as triangulating between Socrates, Eros—a Greek daimon—and the philosopher in The Symposium. All three share a commonality, existing at a midpoint between mankind and the gods, striving towards the latter while painfully and tragically understanding the impossibility of that attainment, but nonetheless using its ideality and perfection as a lodestar for how to be a philosopher, i.e. ever considering how to mediate between the immanent and the transcendent through moral choice and the virtues. Socrates is also noted for his continuous declarations to his interlocutors of knowing nothing—and that whatever instances of possessing knowledge that he does reveal in the Platonic dialogues inevitably proves of the ethical kind, of what is good and bad for man's psyche. To the author, the writings of Plato were never intended to convey any manner of set dogma in determined form, but rather were a means of imprinting the extended and developing dialogues between the Master of the Academy and his disciples and auditors. In the conception of the Ancient Greeks, philosophy was always a discursive method of determining the good life with the view that in the moral and ethical was man able to exercise his freedom; the idea of writing a body of work to subsequently be studied, commented upon, and taken up as a determined corpus of knowledge at a certain waypoint on the road to understanding was the furthest thing from the philosophical actuality. Indeed, the term Sophist described those who positioned the attainment of knowledge as an end, rather than an existential means, and it is one that even back in the early days of the Attic philosophical endeavor had inhered a derogatory sense.
With this conception of an active, growing, and discursive method of determining how man should conduct himself—women, for the most part, being excluded from the process (boo!)—Hadot further fleshes out ancient philosophy as bios, a way of life, a method of being, rather than a field of study in which the memorization of its doctrine was the inanimate goal. Proceeding through a very enlightening (and enjoyable) look at the differences and similarities within the Platonic Academy and the Aristotelian Lyceum, and both the former's influence upon the latter and their own interpretations and incorporation of the Pythagorean teachings that preceded them, Hadot spends a lengthy chapter delineating the four major philosophic schools that extended through the Hellenic period: the aforementioned Platonism and Aristotelianism, together with Stoicism primarily concerned with a life of virtue—however differing in conception—and an Epicureanism which underwrote the pursuit of specified pleasures. As a more independent and less formally configured branch, Hadot also sidebars the Skeptics and the Cynics, observing that even the extreme questioning and doubting of the latter two was in an effort to lead its practitioner to an understanding of how to lead a life best suited to man's happiness and awareness of the good during his span of mortal years upon the earth; that their list of aphorisms and epigrams functioned as guides towards spiritual exercise for the student, a means to ground them while they yet used their own powers of reasoning, while minimizing actual discourse, in order to determine how to apply those particular doctrinal methods to their own ceaseless quest to live the halest life amidst an ofttimes hostile world and seemingly debased polity where the passions run rampant.
Hadot discerns an increased textual emphasis within philosophy as bios when he transitions his book into the Imperial period—charting roughly with Roman domination of the Mediterranean, circa 86 BC, when Sulla sacked Athens, through to 370 CE, prior to the elevation of Christianity to the status of favored (and within a short period of time exclusive) religion of the empire. During the Imperial period the process of having school masters and/or auditors write commentaries upon the works of Plato, Aristotle, and others was broadly taken up. Though initially this was but a differing approach from those at a greater remove from the source philosophers, allowing them the exercise of their own rationality in reflecting upon those topical writings in an order specified by the school's master and, increasingly, tradition—ie, from works of ethics to those of physics and then metaphysics—Hadot claims that it had roots in the Greek tradition of pursuing a tier or path of thought back towards an ideal primordial source, as well as an Orphic mystic esotericism in which nature's secrets are revealed via contemplation and aesthetic perception, and previous philosophies are deemed part of a chain stretching back to oracular pronunciations and revelations, adding a mystic element to the dialectic. In particular, this mysticism working in tandem with logos, reasoned thought, arises within Neoplatonism, the result of a fusion of Platonism and Aristotelianism, and in which The Good assumes a divine aspect that the human soul, nominally inferior to the intellect, can, surpassing the latter, come close to union with whilst yet separate; a transcendence in which the individual being ascends to the universal, the absolute, and the harmony that is immanent within the whole.
Such comprises a principal theme of the lengthy chapter upon Philosophy and Philosophical Discourse, a manner of viewing the praxis of philosophy as bios. Hadot ranges across the centuries he has previously traversed in his exploration, examining, comparing, and, where possible, contrasting the bios practices of the various schools constituted during that period and mentioned in the previous two paragraphs. Certain stark similarities are highlighted using both Hadot's analysis, the commentary of Classical exegetes and the written word of the philosophers themselves—that of the contrast between the ineffable nature of the existential philosophical experience, impossible to be captured using the mere tools of human discourse, and the vital necessity of that discourse if there is to be any such philosophy whatsoever. Thus, philosophical discourse retains an ambiguity that runs through many strains of the thought prevalent in this ancient period. This leads into an in depth look at the therapeutic value of the spiritual exercises that comprised this bios, most intriguingly that which was termed the exercise of death. Death's presence informed a plenitude of discourse, for it was an awareness, contemplation, acceptance of death that allowed the philosopher to address himself to life. To transcend death's lingering, laming, and ever looming presence was to remove its shackles from existential reality; it brought about a keen appreciation for life, for living each day in the moment, and as if it were to be one's last. Indeed, this living in the moment would later be interpreted by Wittgenstein as an alternate definition of eternity; a thoroughly present-oriented existence that, viewed from such a position, was scarcely distinguishable from the atemporality of the divine.
To achieve such transcendence meant striving for and perduring with a rational existence; using the intellect whilst casting off the beguiling passions; exercising one's reason to make the correct moral choices, those that lead to the good; all else will perforce prove to be indifferent, the workings of fate that one has no choice but to accept. Only in living a virtuous, moral life can man exercise his freedom in a rational and proper manner; only by such praxis can he free himself from the chains of death and the ruinous passions such as envy, greed, lust, hunger, vainglory and the desire to amass Goodreads votes, to name an egregious few. And once man has understood this—that is to say, by living this—he will have gained wisdom, and positioned himself that much closer to the semi-mythological figure of the Sage. Depending upon the philosophical school in question, the Sage was either a mortal who attained a near union with the divine, or one who was coeval with the gods, indifferent to the passage of time and the ravages of fate, concerned only with his own rational contemplation and moral exercise. But above all it was the desired endpoint of all such spiritual exercises; to lift man's soul from the wearying and abrading bonds of physical life by directing his intellect, via discourse and continuous practice and contemplation, towards a perfect wisdom that was wholly unattainable and yet forever within one's reach if one lived a life dedicated to virtue and sought the means to better judge, criticize, and transform one's being. And though each school might promote its directed philosophy for differing practical ends—Platonism and Aristotelianism for producing better leaders, generals, aristocrats, teachers; Stoicism and Epicureanism aimed towards bettering the life of any citizen who sought out their teachings; and Skepticism and Cynicism for those desirous of escaping the polity and its debased wallowing altogether—all were united in considering the philosopher as one who lived a life of the exercised mind that was both admirable and apart from that of the unenlightened general populace: an exemplary—though not above mockery—spiritual figure within the ancient world.
Hadot finds in this evidence of both the ease and the apparent incongruity of early Christianity's adoption of philosophy to its own religious structure. Notwithstanding that its tenets came via divine revelation and soteriological doctrine, the fact that both Christianity and ancient philosophy promoted, even demanded, a spiritual life of bettering oneself within the material world—though for entirely different ends—allowed the early Christians to mine the Platonic dialogues, Aristotelian treatises, Epicurian epigrams, Stoic aphorisms, and, most of all, the coterminous texts of a competing Neoplatonism, matching them with passages in the Old and New Testaments in order to rework and reveal Christianity as a holy bios, in which the good Christian desired, through rational thought and the restraint of his earthly passions, to bring himself closer to the divine Logos that had appeared in its purest form within the figure of Jesus Christ. This reached something of an apogee in the spread of Christian monasticism, which borrowed forms, means, and regulations from both the existing philosophical schools and their ancient forerunners, as well as the various flavors of Buddhism and oriental mysticism that had arrived in the southeastern Mediterranean world via the spread Hellenic and Roman power, culture, and trade during the previous five centuries. This exposure to and adoption of philosophical mores produced the curious effect of bringing tendencies that had been latent and/or secondary within Christianity into the forefront; that of living the life of a soul, encompassing reason, rather than one of a human being; that of a spiritual life, analogous to that described by Plato in his dialogues, in which the flesh was abandoned in pursuit of an intelligible transcendence; important shifts that would be maintained, and in many cases strengthened, as Christianity evolved towards the Middle Ages.
However, Hadot also sees this Christian embrace of philosophy as the beginning of its long process into becoming solely a discursive method of debating and teaching systems and dogma for purely knowledgeable ends. As Christian monasticism and churches replaced the ancient philosophic schools—Neoplatonism being the last one standing—the analytic tools of Plato and, more readily, Aristotle were used to settle questions of theological dogma; and the living means of philosophy subordinated to the soteriological demands of ordaining the proper Christian life. With the onset of the Middle Ages, the original philosophical writings were lost and clerics were forced to rely upon commentaries by the likes of Boethius and Macrobius; when Aristotle was rediscovered, the philosophical strains remnant within the monasteries were superseded by the newly-arisen universities and the methodology of the Scholastics, in which Aristotelian treatises were picked to solve existent problems of revelation and salvation as against reason. The progression of the universities through to the modern age witnessed the increasing use of philosophy as a tool, either of religion or of science—and both, eventually, under the state—to train a succession of civil servants who increasingly systematized philosophy, making it a discipline abstract and esoteric, divorced from any practical application in human life and rather a way to process knowledge to the point that a degree acknowledging a certain attained level of understanding might be dispensed. In the modern teaching of Idealism, Existentialism, and Structuralism, Hadot observes this evolved tendency reaching a level of removal from any spiritual exercise or therapy to better one's life that is profoundly marked.
Of course, this is an academic changing of the means into ends that Hadot has elucidated. He proffers a look at a handful of philosophers who maintained the existentially transformative nature of philo-sophia in their thought and work: Petrarch, Erasmus, Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, to name a few. All understood that the praxis of philosophy required more than the sophist's philodoxos, or love of opinion; a scholastic concept of philosophy as opposed to a worldly one; speculative and systematic as against transformative and lived. Hadot believed strongly that ancient philosophy, having been a manner of experimental laboratory for determining how to live a better live, can be set against thousands of years of passed historical responses and tests in order to be applied to how one might seek the good even in the rushed, ironic, dream-scrubbed insubstantiality of our modern world. Furthermore, in the sage-like figure of Socrates, Hadot sees a western thinker readily recognizable amongst the ancient Chinese philosophers and savants who engendered and contemplated their own several permutations of what might be branded an Eastern Stoicism. But it would not be easy. As Hadot notes on one of the penultimate pages:
There is an abyss between fine phrases and becoming genuinely aware of oneself, transforming oneself.Don't I know it. A truly fantastic, beautifully written, edifying and inspiring—though that inspiration will helplessly crash against the towering cliffs of Sastrean cowardice, apathy, fear, guilt, and indecision—tome, surely of value to both the philosophically-informed as well as the philosophically-ignorant, amongst whose ranks I still labor, though I just might one day be able to rise to the lower tiers of the first-named.
November 6, 2015
As an undergraduate I was torn between philosophy, anthropology, mathematics and physics (I already knew that I couldn't make a career out of my interests in literature and history). But academic philosophy in the USA was then (and it appears to be unchanged in this respect today) "analytic", i.e. consisted primarily of formal and abstract analysis of rather technical questions, supplemented by taking (what appeared to me to be important) questions from metaphysics et alia and submitting them to reductio ad absurdum or demonstrating that the very question was nonsensical. There was little, if any, discussion of the questions which are of interest to basically all human beings, but particularly to the young: how should I live? What is the Good Life? I was not afraid of abstraction (indeed, I ended up in physics and mathematics), but I found the pooh-poohing of matters which seemed important to me sufficiently antipathetic that I soon dismissed the possibility of becoming a professional philosopher.
Philosophy was not always that way, on the contrary. In Qu'est ce que la philosophie antique? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) returns to the sources of Western philosophy to recall what it once meant to be a philosopher. In the process of doing so, he provides a necessarily incomplete, but very interesting overview of Greek and Roman philosophy from BCE VIth Century till CE IIIrd Century, and he does so in a very accessible manner. Hadot very deliberately reaches out to the general, well educated reader; indeed, he is so concerned with nontechnical clarity that he uses too much repetition and reformulation for my tastes. But as a long-time pedagogue myself, I can live with it.
Hadot begins by examining briefly the development of philosophy before the word "philosophia" entered the language. And for the purpose of contrast, he describes the Vth Century schools of the sophists, where the ambitious were trained in the tools necessary to "succeed" in public life. (Sound familiar?) Though the sophists continued on their merry way for centuries(*), Socrates' life and death caused a completely new type of philosophy to appear.
(To philosophize is no longer, as the sophists would have it, to acquire knowledge or a savoir-faire , a sophia ; rather it is to place oneself in question, because one feels that one is not the person one ought to be.)
"To become a philosopher" suddenly meant "to choose a way of life/mode of discourse/approach to pedagogy/mode of being." Hadot explains why all of these are inextricably tied together for Socrates' spiritual progeny. I'll just use "way of life" to denote the whole kit and kaboodle.
Hence, both Plato and Aristotle wrote no systematic philosophical treatises, for they were less interested in communicating knowledge than changing the "way of life" of their students so that they could, if only incompletely, partake of the divine , in order to live the only life "worth living". Plato wrote dialogues in order to illustrate the use of dialectic, a primary pedagogical tool in his school, while Aristotle's books are effectively preliminary lecture notes for the dialectical courses he moderated. Much, much later their descendants tried to cobble their writings together into philosophical systems, as Hadot describes.
Hadot also argues that though the Stoic and Epicurean schools did have dogmas which their students had to memorize, Stoicism and Epicureanism, too, were primarily "ways of life"; they, however, shared Socrates' missionary and popular spirit, as opposed to the Platonists and Aristotleans, who were distinctly elitist. The cynics, arising arguably with Socrates' disciple Antisthenes, most certainly with the latter's disciple Diogenes(**), adopted a very radical "way of life" in which philosophical discourse was minimized and liberty and independence were maximized. Knowledge was replaced by (totally) critical inquiry (in this they were, in fact, Socrates' disciples). Needless to say, they did not produce treatises, though some did write poetry. Hadot goes on to discuss other, more obscure, but still interesting philosophers from that time. Common to all was the realization that philosophy was not a body of knowledge but a "way of life".
After describing the essential characteristics of these schools of the Hellenistic Era (approximately from the death of Socrates to the battle of Actium), Hadot turns to the philosophic schools of the time of the Roman Empire and constates some significant changes. Of course, for the most part these changes did not occur suddenly, and Hadot sketches the historical development of some of them. A few of the changes: in every large city in the Roman Empire there were schools claiming to teach one of the four great traditions - that of Plato, of Aristotle, of Zenon (stoicism) and of Epicurus - though they no longer had the direct chain of connection with the founders; these schools were financed by rich patrons and the cities themselves (Marcus Aurelius even sponsored four chairs of philosophy in Athens, one for each school); because of the physical dispersal of the schools, there was no longer a passing along of techniques/ideas/etc. from master adept to junior adept - what one had now to teach from was those founders' writings which were available - and because these were not designed for this purpose, it became necessary to interpret, comment and supplement these texts. In other words, a good part of the life was drained out of the philosophies, and the ominous shadow of academic philosophy began to appear. But whatever else one may think about the Romans, they were extremely practical people with a strong aversion to abstractions; and philosophers such as Seneca, Cicero, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, etc. kept breathing life back into the matter, kept returning the attention to the core questions of philosophy: How do I live? What is the Good Life?
Since this review is approaching the length of Hadot's book, I'll have to become even more telegraphic:::
In the imperial era Epicureanism, Stoicism and the others gradually disappeared in favor of the curious synthesis of what was then represented as the thought of Plato and Aristotle called Neoplatonism. In addition, there was the eruption into the Greco-Roman world from the very alien world view of the Jewish people called Christianity. Hadot touches upon this collision in a chapter entitled "Christianity as Revealed Philosophy" with his attention fixed primarily on the interaction of ideas/techniques/dogmas, and not on the political/military/oppressive aspects. In particular, Hadot makes the point that Christianity absorbed much of Stoicism and Neoplatonism. However, philosophy soon became the servant of theology. Beginning in the XIIIth Century with the birth of universities and the relatively wide distribution of translations of Aristotle's works, philosophy began the slow, painful steps towards independence from theology.
Even at 460 pages, this book is very incomplete, as Hadot knows very well. He ends with a chapter entitled "Questions and Perspectives" in which he states and briefly discusses some of the many questions left open. For not only has he (1) tried to provide an overview of 8 centuries of Greco-Roman philosophy, but he has also (2) briefly treated the complicated interaction between Christianity and Greco-Roman philosophy and (3) emphasized the difference between the philosophy in Socrates' tradition and modern philosophy (and has only been able to suggest how that difference came about). I am currently reading Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus by John M. Cooper, which explicitly undertakes to supplement and correct some aspects of Hadot's book. I'll report on that later.
However, writers of overly ambitious but quite thought provoking books are, in my view of things, to be warmly commended. I expect that Qu'est ce que la philosophie antique? will generate quite a few books in response, which I shall also look forward to reading.
(*) Indeed, we can view our universities as their descendants.
(**) Some scholars have argued that Diogenes never met Antisthenes, that the claim that Diogenes was a student of Antisthenes was a later fabrication of the cynics in order to provide an unbroken chain to Socrates. It doesn't really matter, since the conceptual link to Socrates is obvious.
Philosophy was not always that way, on the contrary. In Qu'est ce que la philosophie antique? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) returns to the sources of Western philosophy to recall what it once meant to be a philosopher. In the process of doing so, he provides a necessarily incomplete, but very interesting overview of Greek and Roman philosophy from BCE VIth Century till CE IIIrd Century, and he does so in a very accessible manner. Hadot very deliberately reaches out to the general, well educated reader; indeed, he is so concerned with nontechnical clarity that he uses too much repetition and reformulation for my tastes. But as a long-time pedagogue myself, I can live with it.
Hadot begins by examining briefly the development of philosophy before the word "philosophia" entered the language. And for the purpose of contrast, he describes the Vth Century schools of the sophists, where the ambitious were trained in the tools necessary to "succeed" in public life. (Sound familiar?) Though the sophists continued on their merry way for centuries(*), Socrates' life and death caused a completely new type of philosophy to appear.
"Philosopher, ce n'est plus, comme le veulent les sophistes, acquérir un savoir, ou un savoir-faire, une sophia , mais c'est se mettre en question soi-même, parce que l'on éprouvera le sentiment de ne pas être ce que l'on devrait être."
(To philosophize is no longer, as the sophists would have it, to acquire knowledge or a savoir-faire , a sophia ; rather it is to place oneself in question, because one feels that one is not the person one ought to be.)
"To become a philosopher" suddenly meant "to choose a way of life/mode of discourse/approach to pedagogy/mode of being." Hadot explains why all of these are inextricably tied together for Socrates' spiritual progeny. I'll just use "way of life" to denote the whole kit and kaboodle.
Hence, both Plato and Aristotle wrote no systematic philosophical treatises, for they were less interested in communicating knowledge than changing the "way of life" of their students so that they could, if only incompletely, partake of the divine , in order to live the only life "worth living". Plato wrote dialogues in order to illustrate the use of dialectic, a primary pedagogical tool in his school, while Aristotle's books are effectively preliminary lecture notes for the dialectical courses he moderated. Much, much later their descendants tried to cobble their writings together into philosophical systems, as Hadot describes.
Hadot also argues that though the Stoic and Epicurean schools did have dogmas which their students had to memorize, Stoicism and Epicureanism, too, were primarily "ways of life"; they, however, shared Socrates' missionary and popular spirit, as opposed to the Platonists and Aristotleans, who were distinctly elitist. The cynics, arising arguably with Socrates' disciple Antisthenes, most certainly with the latter's disciple Diogenes(**), adopted a very radical "way of life" in which philosophical discourse was minimized and liberty and independence were maximized. Knowledge was replaced by (totally) critical inquiry (in this they were, in fact, Socrates' disciples). Needless to say, they did not produce treatises, though some did write poetry. Hadot goes on to discuss other, more obscure, but still interesting philosophers from that time. Common to all was the realization that philosophy was not a body of knowledge but a "way of life".
After describing the essential characteristics of these schools of the Hellenistic Era (approximately from the death of Socrates to the battle of Actium), Hadot turns to the philosophic schools of the time of the Roman Empire and constates some significant changes. Of course, for the most part these changes did not occur suddenly, and Hadot sketches the historical development of some of them. A few of the changes: in every large city in the Roman Empire there were schools claiming to teach one of the four great traditions - that of Plato, of Aristotle, of Zenon (stoicism) and of Epicurus - though they no longer had the direct chain of connection with the founders; these schools were financed by rich patrons and the cities themselves (Marcus Aurelius even sponsored four chairs of philosophy in Athens, one for each school); because of the physical dispersal of the schools, there was no longer a passing along of techniques/ideas/etc. from master adept to junior adept - what one had now to teach from was those founders' writings which were available - and because these were not designed for this purpose, it became necessary to interpret, comment and supplement these texts. In other words, a good part of the life was drained out of the philosophies, and the ominous shadow of academic philosophy began to appear. But whatever else one may think about the Romans, they were extremely practical people with a strong aversion to abstractions; and philosophers such as Seneca, Cicero, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, etc. kept breathing life back into the matter, kept returning the attention to the core questions of philosophy: How do I live? What is the Good Life?
Since this review is approaching the length of Hadot's book, I'll have to become even more telegraphic:::
In the imperial era Epicureanism, Stoicism and the others gradually disappeared in favor of the curious synthesis of what was then represented as the thought of Plato and Aristotle called Neoplatonism. In addition, there was the eruption into the Greco-Roman world from the very alien world view of the Jewish people called Christianity. Hadot touches upon this collision in a chapter entitled "Christianity as Revealed Philosophy" with his attention fixed primarily on the interaction of ideas/techniques/dogmas, and not on the political/military/oppressive aspects. In particular, Hadot makes the point that Christianity absorbed much of Stoicism and Neoplatonism. However, philosophy soon became the servant of theology. Beginning in the XIIIth Century with the birth of universities and the relatively wide distribution of translations of Aristotle's works, philosophy began the slow, painful steps towards independence from theology.
Even at 460 pages, this book is very incomplete, as Hadot knows very well. He ends with a chapter entitled "Questions and Perspectives" in which he states and briefly discusses some of the many questions left open. For not only has he (1) tried to provide an overview of 8 centuries of Greco-Roman philosophy, but he has also (2) briefly treated the complicated interaction between Christianity and Greco-Roman philosophy and (3) emphasized the difference between the philosophy in Socrates' tradition and modern philosophy (and has only been able to suggest how that difference came about). I am currently reading Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus by John M. Cooper, which explicitly undertakes to supplement and correct some aspects of Hadot's book. I'll report on that later.
However, writers of overly ambitious but quite thought provoking books are, in my view of things, to be warmly commended. I expect that Qu'est ce que la philosophie antique? will generate quite a few books in response, which I shall also look forward to reading.
(*) Indeed, we can view our universities as their descendants.
(**) Some scholars have argued that Diogenes never met Antisthenes, that the claim that Diogenes was a student of Antisthenes was a later fabrication of the cynics in order to provide an unbroken chain to Socrates. It doesn't really matter, since the conceptual link to Socrates is obvious.
October 17, 2024
hadot, ilkçağ filozoflarının -özellikle stoacılar, epikürcüler ve sokratikler- felsefeyi bir tür 'manevi egzersiz' olarak gördüklerini savunuyor. bu filozoflar için felsefe, bir yaşam pratiği ve ahlaki bir eğitimdi ve insanlar, felsefeyi hayatın günlük karmaşasında kendilerini, dünyayı anlama, ruhlarını dinginleştirme aracı olarak kullanıyordu. hadot, çağdaş felsefenin yaşamın içindeki pratik boyutunu kaybettiğini ve akademik bir konuya indirgenmiş olduğunu ileri sürerek, bizi felsefenin gerçek anlamını yeniden düşünmeye davet ediyor. kitap, felsefenin bireysel yaşamda bir rehber olabileceğini, kişisel gelişimi ve toplumsal uyumu sağlayabileceğini gösteriyor. felsefenin bir teoriden ibaret olmadığını, bir yaşam biçimi olduğunu hatırlatıyor.
kitapta dikkatimi çeken bir diğer noktaysa farklı felsefi okulların yaşam tarzları ve günlük pratikleri nasıl şekillendirdiği. örnek vermem gerekirse; stoacılık, sadece zihinsel bir egzersiz değil aynı zamanda doğayla uyum içinde yaşamak, duygusal dinginlik ve kendine hâkimiyet kazanmak için bir araçtı. epikürcüler ise hayatın zevklerine odaklanırken aşırılıktan kaçınarak, huzur dolu bir yaşam sürmeye çalıştılar. işte bu okullar, felsefeyi teorik bir uğraş olarak değil yaşamımızı yapılandıran bir yol haritası olarak gördüler. bu noktada hadot, felsefeyi sadece düşüncelerin değil, eylemlerin bir rehberi olarak sunuyor.
felsefe zamanla nasıl bir dönüşüm geçiriyor ve hadot bunu ustalıkla ele alıyor: ilkçağda felsefe, yaşamla iç içe bir disiplindi ancak aristoteles sonrası dönemde sistematik bir yapıya bürünmeye başladı. özellikle ortaçağ ile birlikte felsefe, yaşam pratiğinden koparak daha soyut ve teorik bir uğraşa dönüştü. bu değişim, felsefenin akademik bir disiplin haline gelmesine katkı sağlarken onun yaşam pratiği olma özelliğini de zayıflattı. hadot bu dönüşümü eleştiriyor ve felsefenin günümüzde yeniden yaşamla bütünleşmesi gerektiğine dikkat çekiyor. felsefe ona göre, bireyin ve toplumun yaşamını şekillendiren, dönüştüren bir güç olmalı. bize, felsefenin 'hayat bilgisi' olarak algılandığı ilkçağa geri dönmeyi öneriyor.
hadot’nun sunduğu bakış açısıyla felsefenin özüne bakmama neden olan bu kitabı yeniden okumak benim için ayrı bir zevkti. felsefe severlere öneriyorum!
kitapta dikkatimi çeken bir diğer noktaysa farklı felsefi okulların yaşam tarzları ve günlük pratikleri nasıl şekillendirdiği. örnek vermem gerekirse; stoacılık, sadece zihinsel bir egzersiz değil aynı zamanda doğayla uyum içinde yaşamak, duygusal dinginlik ve kendine hâkimiyet kazanmak için bir araçtı. epikürcüler ise hayatın zevklerine odaklanırken aşırılıktan kaçınarak, huzur dolu bir yaşam sürmeye çalıştılar. işte bu okullar, felsefeyi teorik bir uğraş olarak değil yaşamımızı yapılandıran bir yol haritası olarak gördüler. bu noktada hadot, felsefeyi sadece düşüncelerin değil, eylemlerin bir rehberi olarak sunuyor.
felsefe zamanla nasıl bir dönüşüm geçiriyor ve hadot bunu ustalıkla ele alıyor: ilkçağda felsefe, yaşamla iç içe bir disiplindi ancak aristoteles sonrası dönemde sistematik bir yapıya bürünmeye başladı. özellikle ortaçağ ile birlikte felsefe, yaşam pratiğinden koparak daha soyut ve teorik bir uğraşa dönüştü. bu değişim, felsefenin akademik bir disiplin haline gelmesine katkı sağlarken onun yaşam pratiği olma özelliğini de zayıflattı. hadot bu dönüşümü eleştiriyor ve felsefenin günümüzde yeniden yaşamla bütünleşmesi gerektiğine dikkat çekiyor. felsefe ona göre, bireyin ve toplumun yaşamını şekillendiren, dönüştüren bir güç olmalı. bize, felsefenin 'hayat bilgisi' olarak algılandığı ilkçağa geri dönmeyi öneriyor.
hadot’nun sunduğu bakış açısıyla felsefenin özüne bakmama neden olan bu kitabı yeniden okumak benim için ayrı bir zevkti. felsefe severlere öneriyorum!
September 19, 2023
The Spirit Of Ancient Philosophy
For some time, I have been studying the American philosopher Josiah Royce's 1892 book "The Spirit of Modern Philosophy" which discusses the nature and value of philosophy and the role in philosophical thinking of the history of philosophy. Royce engagingly describes the history of "modern" philosophy from Spinoza through the theory of evolution and Herbert Spencer. In the course of the work, Royce develops his own philosophy of absolute idealism based on his reflections on philosophy's history and purpose. Few thinkers today will follow Royce in this direction. I turned to Pierre Hadot's book, "What is Ancient Philosophy" to reflect further on the issues Royce considered. Hadot was a French scholar who published widely on ancient philosophy. His 1995 book post-dates Royce's by more than a century while it considers philosophers from a millennium earlier.
As does Royce, Hadot sees philosophy arising from the human experience as individuals reflect to find meaning in their lives. Hadot calls this situation "existential". But Hadot distinguishes far more than does Royce between a philosophical life and philosophical doctrine. Hadot understands philosophy as a way of life first with varied doctrinal teachings playing a secondary role.
As does Royce's book, Hadot's "What is Ancient Philosophy" shows great erudition but is written to be understood by non-specialists. Hadot examines briefly the growth of philosophy during the time before Socrates and then focuses on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He distinguishes between knowledge of things and the possession of wisdom. Hadot offers a reading of Plato's "Symposium" to show the philosopher as the seeker of wisdom rather than its possessor. Philosophy is shown as a search rather than as a system of doctrines. Plato and Aristotle each established a long-lasting school which aimed to form the lives of its teachers and students more than to teach particular doctrines.
Hadot emphasizes that ancients understood the purpose of philosophy as the shaping and transformation of life rather than the teaching of doctrine as he examines stoicism, epicureanism, skepticism, cynicism and Neo-Platonism. He describes doctrinal differences but shows that the schools taught substantially similar ways of living. Philosophical living for the ancients focused on making the most of life and its treasures in the present while not losing oneself in worrying about the past or in fearing for the future. A philosophical life also involved taking a broad non-egotistical view. The philosopher would understand the breadth and scope of reality and not see his or her own affairs only from a limited personal perspective. The core of Hadot's book is the discussion of a system of spiritual practices or, in Greek, "askesis" that philosophical practitioners taught. These exercises crossed the doctrinal boundaries of the schools.
Hadot argues that the understanding of philosophy as a way of life has persisted even through modern thought which tends to see philosophy more as a teaching of competing doctrines. He believes the ancients more properly understood the nature and value of philosophy. He shows how the ancient understanding of philosophy persisted in the work of Kant and Wittgenstein and draws parallels between ancient philosophy, Buddhism, and early Christianity.
Hadot writes in his deeply inspiring concluding chapter:
"Yet, what does it mean to live life as a philosopher? What is the practice of philosophy? In this book I have tried to show , among other things, that philosophical practice is relatively independent from philosophical discourse. The same spiritual exercise can be justified after the fact by widely differing philosophical discourses in order to describe and justify experiences whose existential density ultimately escapes all attempts at theoreticizing and systematizing."
"Seen in this way the practice of philosophy transcends the oppositions of particular philosophies. It is essentially an effort to become aware of ourselves, our being-in-the-world, and our being with others. It is also, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty used to say, an effort to 'relearn how to see the world' and attain a universal vision, thanks to which we can put ourselves in the place of others and transcend our own partiality."
Importantly, Hadot also stresses the importance to philosophy, ancient and modern, of reflection and reasoned thought and argument. He writes: "[t]he philosophical way of life must be justified in rational motivated discourse, and such discourse is inseparable from the way of life. Nevertheless, we have to reflect critically on the ancient, modern and oriental discourses which justify a given way of life. We must try to render explicit the reasons we act in such-and-such a way, and reflect on our experience and that of others. Without such reflection, the philosophical life risks sinking into vapid banality, 'respectable' feelings, or deviance." Hadot's discussion of the importance of both experience and critical reflection to the philosophical life has parallels in Royce's "Spirit of Modern Philosophy."
In my own narrow case, Hadot's book helped me think about Royce's "Spirit of Modern Philosophy" to find differences and similarities. But of course the book is much broader. Hadot's work will help readers understand philosophy as a way of life rather than, as it is too often viewed and practiced, as a dry academic exercise. The book reminded me of why I fell in love with philosophy many years ago.
Robin Friedman
For some time, I have been studying the American philosopher Josiah Royce's 1892 book "The Spirit of Modern Philosophy" which discusses the nature and value of philosophy and the role in philosophical thinking of the history of philosophy. Royce engagingly describes the history of "modern" philosophy from Spinoza through the theory of evolution and Herbert Spencer. In the course of the work, Royce develops his own philosophy of absolute idealism based on his reflections on philosophy's history and purpose. Few thinkers today will follow Royce in this direction. I turned to Pierre Hadot's book, "What is Ancient Philosophy" to reflect further on the issues Royce considered. Hadot was a French scholar who published widely on ancient philosophy. His 1995 book post-dates Royce's by more than a century while it considers philosophers from a millennium earlier.
As does Royce, Hadot sees philosophy arising from the human experience as individuals reflect to find meaning in their lives. Hadot calls this situation "existential". But Hadot distinguishes far more than does Royce between a philosophical life and philosophical doctrine. Hadot understands philosophy as a way of life first with varied doctrinal teachings playing a secondary role.
As does Royce's book, Hadot's "What is Ancient Philosophy" shows great erudition but is written to be understood by non-specialists. Hadot examines briefly the growth of philosophy during the time before Socrates and then focuses on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He distinguishes between knowledge of things and the possession of wisdom. Hadot offers a reading of Plato's "Symposium" to show the philosopher as the seeker of wisdom rather than its possessor. Philosophy is shown as a search rather than as a system of doctrines. Plato and Aristotle each established a long-lasting school which aimed to form the lives of its teachers and students more than to teach particular doctrines.
Hadot emphasizes that ancients understood the purpose of philosophy as the shaping and transformation of life rather than the teaching of doctrine as he examines stoicism, epicureanism, skepticism, cynicism and Neo-Platonism. He describes doctrinal differences but shows that the schools taught substantially similar ways of living. Philosophical living for the ancients focused on making the most of life and its treasures in the present while not losing oneself in worrying about the past or in fearing for the future. A philosophical life also involved taking a broad non-egotistical view. The philosopher would understand the breadth and scope of reality and not see his or her own affairs only from a limited personal perspective. The core of Hadot's book is the discussion of a system of spiritual practices or, in Greek, "askesis" that philosophical practitioners taught. These exercises crossed the doctrinal boundaries of the schools.
Hadot argues that the understanding of philosophy as a way of life has persisted even through modern thought which tends to see philosophy more as a teaching of competing doctrines. He believes the ancients more properly understood the nature and value of philosophy. He shows how the ancient understanding of philosophy persisted in the work of Kant and Wittgenstein and draws parallels between ancient philosophy, Buddhism, and early Christianity.
Hadot writes in his deeply inspiring concluding chapter:
"Yet, what does it mean to live life as a philosopher? What is the practice of philosophy? In this book I have tried to show , among other things, that philosophical practice is relatively independent from philosophical discourse. The same spiritual exercise can be justified after the fact by widely differing philosophical discourses in order to describe and justify experiences whose existential density ultimately escapes all attempts at theoreticizing and systematizing."
"Seen in this way the practice of philosophy transcends the oppositions of particular philosophies. It is essentially an effort to become aware of ourselves, our being-in-the-world, and our being with others. It is also, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty used to say, an effort to 'relearn how to see the world' and attain a universal vision, thanks to which we can put ourselves in the place of others and transcend our own partiality."
Importantly, Hadot also stresses the importance to philosophy, ancient and modern, of reflection and reasoned thought and argument. He writes: "[t]he philosophical way of life must be justified in rational motivated discourse, and such discourse is inseparable from the way of life. Nevertheless, we have to reflect critically on the ancient, modern and oriental discourses which justify a given way of life. We must try to render explicit the reasons we act in such-and-such a way, and reflect on our experience and that of others. Without such reflection, the philosophical life risks sinking into vapid banality, 'respectable' feelings, or deviance." Hadot's discussion of the importance of both experience and critical reflection to the philosophical life has parallels in Royce's "Spirit of Modern Philosophy."
In my own narrow case, Hadot's book helped me think about Royce's "Spirit of Modern Philosophy" to find differences and similarities. But of course the book is much broader. Hadot's work will help readers understand philosophy as a way of life rather than, as it is too often viewed and practiced, as a dry academic exercise. The book reminded me of why I fell in love with philosophy many years ago.
Robin Friedman
January 2, 2022
müthiş bir kitap bitirdim.felsefeye dair kavrayışımı kökünden değiştirdi. İsminin ders kitabı gibi olduğuna kanmayin tam aksine kurumlaşmış felsefeye karşı ruhsal alıştırmayi savunan zihin açıcı bir kitap. Bundan sonra da baş ucumdan ayırmam dönüp dönüp referans alırım.
December 11, 2019
R. Shaerer ha scritto: «L'essenza del platonismo è e rimane dunque sopradiscorsiva». Egli intendeva dire, con queste parole, che il dialogo platonico non dice tutto, non dice cosa sono le Norme, non dice cosa sono le Forme, né la Ragione, né il Bene, né la Bellezza: tutto ciò non si può esprimere con il linguaggio e non è suscettibile di essere definito. Viene sperimentato o mostrato nel dialogo, ma anche nel desiderio. Tuttavia, non se ne può dire nulla. (pg.75)
Platone non ci dice nulla eppure tra i suoi dialoghi sembra filtrare un venticello rinfrescante che ci accarezza la fronte. è quando due uomini discutono e cedono al discorso la loro individualità che quel venticello trasmette un sentimento nuovo; con il suo tocco unico ed eterno spinge le sue verità inesprimibili nel nostro desiderio, e questo basta per renderci migliori.
Platone non ci dice nulla eppure tra i suoi dialoghi sembra filtrare un venticello rinfrescante che ci accarezza la fronte. è quando due uomini discutono e cedono al discorso la loro individualità che quel venticello trasmette un sentimento nuovo; con il suo tocco unico ed eterno spinge le sue verità inesprimibili nel nostro desiderio, e questo basta per renderci migliori.
May 29, 2023
Als er een vakgebied bestaat waar er het meest discussie is over wat het vakgebied nu eigenlijk is, dan is het wel de filosofie. Het ligt natuurlijk in de aard van het beestje. Biologen die vragen wat biologie is, doen op dat moment nu eenmaal niet aan biologie maar aan filosofie. Hedendaags wordt filosofie vaak als een theoretische discipline gezien die een filosofisch betoog construeert om heldere antwoorden te formuleren op bepaalde problemen.
Voor de antieke wijsbegeerte was filosofie juist wat er in de naam 'wijsbegeerte' vervat zit. De filosoof begeert de wijsheid. Dit gaat altijd samen met een praktische manier van handelen. Het filosofisch betoog is niet onafhankelijk van de praktijk van het filosoferen. Het is niet voor niets dat er immens veel leefregels zijn die afstammen van de stoïcijnen of epicuristen bijvoorbeeld. Veel intellectuelen zouden rillen bij het idee dat de filosofen vroeger hadden. Fysica en andere wetenschappen zijn enkel interessant als fundering voor de filosofische manier van leven. Fysica als dienstmaagd van de filosofie. Ik zie Maarten Boudry al rillen.
Het filosofische voorbeeld bij uitstek is Socrates en het is zijn manier van leven dat vaak wordt aangehaald als het voorbeeld van een filosofisch leven te leiden. De 'horzel' van Athene toonde aan iedereen zijn eigen onwetendheid. Door een dialoog aan te gaan, werd duidelijk dat men niet zo slim of deugdzaam was als men dacht. De filosofie kan dus ook niet alleen beoefend worden. De filosofie is per definitie een sociale gelegenheid.
De vroegere scholen waren dan ook institutionaliseringen van bepaalde filosofische manieren van leven. Nu klinkt dit vreemd in ons oren en heeft het wat weg van indoctrinatie centra. In zekere zin was dit wel zo, al was een open debat vaak de basis voor zulke scholen. De manier van leven van een denker toonde ook van welke school hij kwam. Van handelingen tot spreken, men kon zien welke filosofie men aanhangt. Tegenwoordig is dat al wat moeilijker te ondervinden wanneer we met iemand omgaan welke filosofie hij aanhangt.
Hadot pleit voor een terugkeer van de filosofie als manier van leven. Iets waar ik hem ten zeerste in steun. Laten we weer filosofisch handelen in plaats van altijd maar te spreken. Waarover men niet kan spreken, moet men zwijgen. Maar laten we er wel naar handelen.
Voor de antieke wijsbegeerte was filosofie juist wat er in de naam 'wijsbegeerte' vervat zit. De filosoof begeert de wijsheid. Dit gaat altijd samen met een praktische manier van handelen. Het filosofisch betoog is niet onafhankelijk van de praktijk van het filosoferen. Het is niet voor niets dat er immens veel leefregels zijn die afstammen van de stoïcijnen of epicuristen bijvoorbeeld. Veel intellectuelen zouden rillen bij het idee dat de filosofen vroeger hadden. Fysica en andere wetenschappen zijn enkel interessant als fundering voor de filosofische manier van leven. Fysica als dienstmaagd van de filosofie. Ik zie Maarten Boudry al rillen.
Het filosofische voorbeeld bij uitstek is Socrates en het is zijn manier van leven dat vaak wordt aangehaald als het voorbeeld van een filosofisch leven te leiden. De 'horzel' van Athene toonde aan iedereen zijn eigen onwetendheid. Door een dialoog aan te gaan, werd duidelijk dat men niet zo slim of deugdzaam was als men dacht. De filosofie kan dus ook niet alleen beoefend worden. De filosofie is per definitie een sociale gelegenheid.
De vroegere scholen waren dan ook institutionaliseringen van bepaalde filosofische manieren van leven. Nu klinkt dit vreemd in ons oren en heeft het wat weg van indoctrinatie centra. In zekere zin was dit wel zo, al was een open debat vaak de basis voor zulke scholen. De manier van leven van een denker toonde ook van welke school hij kwam. Van handelingen tot spreken, men kon zien welke filosofie men aanhangt. Tegenwoordig is dat al wat moeilijker te ondervinden wanneer we met iemand omgaan welke filosofie hij aanhangt.
Hadot pleit voor een terugkeer van de filosofie als manier van leven. Iets waar ik hem ten zeerste in steun. Laten we weer filosofisch handelen in plaats van altijd maar te spreken. Waarover men niet kan spreken, moet men zwijgen. Maar laten we er wel naar handelen.
January 19, 2021
The central argument of “What is Ancient Philosophy”, by Pierre Hadot (translated from the French by Michael Chase) is that we’re doing philosophy all wrong, and that the ancients did it right. Kids these days, right? According to Hadot, the Ancients, meaning from philosophers from classical Greece to late Rome, did more than merely study philosophy. They lived it. To them, to love wisdom, philo-sophia, one had to choose how to live one’s life, situated in a community, with constant intellectual “exercise” directed toward wisdom.
This is not how we teach philosophy these days. Rather, we teach the arguments of each “school”, situating each in a historical context. This focuses on the “what”, rather than the “how”, of the actual students and masters. The ancient philosophers lived in communities where they not only learned philosophical “stuff”, but they lived every day in an active effort to form themselves into a human ideal. Philosophy was lived, under the guidance of a teacher/exemplar, not merely learned from an instructor.
Hadot reviews the primary schools of ancient philosophy, with special attention to Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, Platonism (and Neoplatonism), and Aristotelianism (and Neoaristotelianism). He presents the primary arguments that define and distinguish each “ism”. But he also shows what they had in common: praxis. This presentation is accurate, clear, and approachable.
The book is appropriate as a textbook on the history of ancient philosophy. In fact, I was introduced to it by a colleague, Jamal Lyksett, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Idaho, who was using it in his course on Ancient Philosophy. We were having a beer or three, having a conversation about how similar ancient philosophy was to Buddhism, once one got past the discursive stuff one learns in college.
Later in the book, Hadot addresses the obvious question: what changed? He argues that in one sense, nothing did. There were philosophers for whom praxis was central in the middle ages, the Renaissance, and the modern era. These include some of the “big names”, such as Descartes, Kant, and Wittgenstein. But one has to look carefully to find this golden thread. The Meditations of Descartes were in fact “spiritual” exercises, things one needed to actively engage, not mere exposition. Kant emphasized the practical nature of his thoughts, not only the theoretical side. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, according to Hadot, analyzed propositions with the goal of influencing how the reader could pass beyond mere propositions. Even Christian monasticism aimed to form character, not just to teach dogma.
But, argues Hadot, when the Church discovered “Aristotle”, they adopted his methodology primarily as an adjunct to “true philosophy”, namely Christianity. (Aristotle’s manuscripts were lecture notes, not discourses, and the Church was as much influenced by commentaries on Aristotle as on what “The Philosopher” actually said.) Church dogma was that ancient philosophy could provide a path to the only way of life that would lead to salvation, namely Christianity. This drove a wedge between argumentation and living one’s life, with the former codified in University curricula and the latter in the monastery.
Though one can read “What is Ancient Philosophy” as a roadmap to what the Greeks and Romans thought, and to a small extent how it influenced Scholastic and modern philosophy, I think that Hadot’s primary reason for writing the book was to shape the lives of his readers, not just to inform them. He isn’t preachy about this. But the message is there throughout.
I appreciated this message immensely. I studied philosophy in college (and before) because I was eager, arduous even, to figure out how to live the best possible life. Fortunately, many of my teachers were Straussians, which (in part) assumes that texts should actually make a difference, not merely document opinions. I focused on ancient philosophy because I found it to be the most transparently honest in this regard. The Ancients hadn’t learned yet how to teach to a syllabus, straightjacketed by educational “deliverables”. In fact, I focused on the pre-Socratics, because to them there was little difference between ethics, physics, and poetry—and the end objective was always to understand the world in order to live better lives. (See my review of “Nature and the Greeks” by Erwin Schrödinger.) Hadot argues, and I agree with him, that we can (and should) study Ancient Philosophy as the Ancients practiced it: with the urgent compulsion to improve one’s life.
This is not how we teach philosophy these days. Rather, we teach the arguments of each “school”, situating each in a historical context. This focuses on the “what”, rather than the “how”, of the actual students and masters. The ancient philosophers lived in communities where they not only learned philosophical “stuff”, but they lived every day in an active effort to form themselves into a human ideal. Philosophy was lived, under the guidance of a teacher/exemplar, not merely learned from an instructor.
Hadot reviews the primary schools of ancient philosophy, with special attention to Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, Platonism (and Neoplatonism), and Aristotelianism (and Neoaristotelianism). He presents the primary arguments that define and distinguish each “ism”. But he also shows what they had in common: praxis. This presentation is accurate, clear, and approachable.
The book is appropriate as a textbook on the history of ancient philosophy. In fact, I was introduced to it by a colleague, Jamal Lyksett, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Idaho, who was using it in his course on Ancient Philosophy. We were having a beer or three, having a conversation about how similar ancient philosophy was to Buddhism, once one got past the discursive stuff one learns in college.
Later in the book, Hadot addresses the obvious question: what changed? He argues that in one sense, nothing did. There were philosophers for whom praxis was central in the middle ages, the Renaissance, and the modern era. These include some of the “big names”, such as Descartes, Kant, and Wittgenstein. But one has to look carefully to find this golden thread. The Meditations of Descartes were in fact “spiritual” exercises, things one needed to actively engage, not mere exposition. Kant emphasized the practical nature of his thoughts, not only the theoretical side. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, according to Hadot, analyzed propositions with the goal of influencing how the reader could pass beyond mere propositions. Even Christian monasticism aimed to form character, not just to teach dogma.
But, argues Hadot, when the Church discovered “Aristotle”, they adopted his methodology primarily as an adjunct to “true philosophy”, namely Christianity. (Aristotle’s manuscripts were lecture notes, not discourses, and the Church was as much influenced by commentaries on Aristotle as on what “The Philosopher” actually said.) Church dogma was that ancient philosophy could provide a path to the only way of life that would lead to salvation, namely Christianity. This drove a wedge between argumentation and living one’s life, with the former codified in University curricula and the latter in the monastery.
Though one can read “What is Ancient Philosophy” as a roadmap to what the Greeks and Romans thought, and to a small extent how it influenced Scholastic and modern philosophy, I think that Hadot’s primary reason for writing the book was to shape the lives of his readers, not just to inform them. He isn’t preachy about this. But the message is there throughout.
I appreciated this message immensely. I studied philosophy in college (and before) because I was eager, arduous even, to figure out how to live the best possible life. Fortunately, many of my teachers were Straussians, which (in part) assumes that texts should actually make a difference, not merely document opinions. I focused on ancient philosophy because I found it to be the most transparently honest in this regard. The Ancients hadn’t learned yet how to teach to a syllabus, straightjacketed by educational “deliverables”. In fact, I focused on the pre-Socratics, because to them there was little difference between ethics, physics, and poetry—and the end objective was always to understand the world in order to live better lives. (See my review of “Nature and the Greeks” by Erwin Schrödinger.) Hadot argues, and I agree with him, that we can (and should) study Ancient Philosophy as the Ancients practiced it: with the urgent compulsion to improve one’s life.
May 14, 2017
İlkçağ (ya da Eskiçağ) felsefesi üzerine okuma yapmaya başlayacak olan kişilere önerilebilecek bir eser.
Shelved as 'dnf'
August 31, 2024DNF this at 10% and will revisit later.
August 21, 2020
Le he dado 5 estrellas a este libro, pero porque no puedo darle más. He leído cada página de '¿Qué es la filosofía antigua?' con ilusión, con avidez, con auténtica fascinación. Posiblemente sea uno de los libros sobre filosofía que he leído con más ilusión y avidez (si no el que más). Propone una inmersión en el mundo antiguo con una perspectiva profunda, novedosa (respecto a cómo se acostumbra a hablar de filosofía) y, por tanto, apasionante. No volveré a pensar la filosofía (y, en particular, la filosofía griega) de la misma forma después de haberlo leído.
¿Qué me esperaba de este libro, partiendo de su título? Una especie de manual que explicase las doctrinas de los filósofos clásicos (presocráticos, Sócrates, sofistas, Platón, Aristóteles): explicaciones exhaustivas sobre la teoría de las ideas, del amor platónico, de la metafísica aristotélica...
¿Qué me he encontrado? Precisamente un enfoque muy diferente al de los manuales, al de la enseñanza típica de la filosofía, tanto en institutos como en universidades. Me he encontrado una agudísima y apasionante reinterpretación (o, más bien, reconstrucción) del auténtico significado de la filosofía en su mismísimo origen. La tesis de Hadot es que, a diferencia de cómo la concebimos ahora, en aquel entonces la filosofía no era sólo un discurso, sino también (y ante todo) una elección de forma de vida. Partiendo de esta tesis, las distintas partes de la filosofía (física, metafísica, teoría del conocimiento, ética) adoptan una perspectiva completamente diferente. Así, recorren este libro reflexiones sobre la tarea del filósofo, la noción de sabiduría, la relación entre el discurso filosófico y la vida, la palabra oral y la palabra escrita, la enseñanza de la filosofía y el papel de las escuelas y, posteriormente (en la Edad Media), las universidades... todas ellas de gran actualidad.
Es, desde luego, una lectura que consideraría imprescindible para cualquier persona interesada en la filosofía, en el mundo clásico, en el desarrollo personal y en estilos de vida inspirados en el estoicismo o, incluso, en filosofías orientales (como el budismo o el taoísmo), por los paralelismos posibles en lo que se refiere a la concepción de la sabiduría. Pero no sólo; se lo recomendaría también a personas con intereses en psicología y pedagogía, puesto que, tal como Hadot expone, la filosofía antigua prestaba mucha atención a la cuestión de la formación como persona lo que dio pie tanto a indagaciones sobre las pasiones y los placeres, sobre las causas de la desdicha y los modos de alcanzar la tranquilidad del alma, como a reflexiones en torno a la cuestión de la enseñanza: ¿cuál es la mejor manera de formar?, ¿cómo debe ser la relación entre maestro y discípulo? Sobre estos temas, los antiguos tienen mucho que enseñarnos.
¿Qué me esperaba de este libro, partiendo de su título? Una especie de manual que explicase las doctrinas de los filósofos clásicos (presocráticos, Sócrates, sofistas, Platón, Aristóteles): explicaciones exhaustivas sobre la teoría de las ideas, del amor platónico, de la metafísica aristotélica...
¿Qué me he encontrado? Precisamente un enfoque muy diferente al de los manuales, al de la enseñanza típica de la filosofía, tanto en institutos como en universidades. Me he encontrado una agudísima y apasionante reinterpretación (o, más bien, reconstrucción) del auténtico significado de la filosofía en su mismísimo origen. La tesis de Hadot es que, a diferencia de cómo la concebimos ahora, en aquel entonces la filosofía no era sólo un discurso, sino también (y ante todo) una elección de forma de vida. Partiendo de esta tesis, las distintas partes de la filosofía (física, metafísica, teoría del conocimiento, ética) adoptan una perspectiva completamente diferente. Así, recorren este libro reflexiones sobre la tarea del filósofo, la noción de sabiduría, la relación entre el discurso filosófico y la vida, la palabra oral y la palabra escrita, la enseñanza de la filosofía y el papel de las escuelas y, posteriormente (en la Edad Media), las universidades... todas ellas de gran actualidad.
Es, desde luego, una lectura que consideraría imprescindible para cualquier persona interesada en la filosofía, en el mundo clásico, en el desarrollo personal y en estilos de vida inspirados en el estoicismo o, incluso, en filosofías orientales (como el budismo o el taoísmo), por los paralelismos posibles en lo que se refiere a la concepción de la sabiduría. Pero no sólo; se lo recomendaría también a personas con intereses en psicología y pedagogía, puesto que, tal como Hadot expone, la filosofía antigua prestaba mucha atención a la cuestión de la formación como persona lo que dio pie tanto a indagaciones sobre las pasiones y los placeres, sobre las causas de la desdicha y los modos de alcanzar la tranquilidad del alma, como a reflexiones en torno a la cuestión de la enseñanza: ¿cuál es la mejor manera de formar?, ¿cómo debe ser la relación entre maestro y discípulo? Sobre estos temas, los antiguos tienen mucho que enseñarnos.
July 5, 2014
This book is challenging: Hadot's writing style is holographic, one sentence can contain the whole. Each sentence requires focus and thought, and comprise large chunks of text not given to a general reading. He is superb and absolutely authoritative on historical elements and teases out the distinction between philosophical discourse and practice. The reader is left with a very clear idea of the centrality of 'askesis' to philosophy, and how 'lived' philosophy was buried by Neoplatonic theology, before arising again in Kant onwards.
The strongest part of the book is Hadot's own summative comment at the end where he expounds why philosophy is a lived action and central to us all. Superb.
The strongest part of the book is Hadot's own summative comment at the end where he expounds why philosophy is a lived action and central to us all. Superb.
February 11, 2011
Forgot about the importance of a commute to get reading done! I just finished this book on the commuter rail to Boston. This is the first book in the Stoned Philosophers Book Club discussion group happening at a local bar near you. I am sure that I'll have much more to say after bookclub meets, but in general, I found this book to be a great place to start delving into the philosophical tradition. Since I have never formally studied philosophy, I've had a hard time figuring out where to start. Ultimately, I decided that I need to begin with the Ancient Greeks. Pierre Hadot's "What is Ancient Philosophy?" is an accessible overview of the beginning of a formal philosophical life as it was conceived by the ancient Greeks. If you equate philosophy with theoretical discourse, this is a great book to help you parse through the true meaning behind the word and concept of "philosophy" and how modern scholastic teachings (aka - how philosophy is taught in the academy) deviates greatly from the intentions of the ancients (Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus, etc.). The reader comes to understand that philosophy was conceived NOT as speculation/ discourse BUT rather as a way of life. It was amazing to me how much resonated with me today from 500BC - REMARKABLE! The connection of how living a philosophical life (practicing the love of wisdom) was seen as your civic duty and had a large hand in shaping the Nation. Also, coming to understand the centrality of ASKESIS, or spiritual exercises or meditations as meant to shape your intellect, and the importance of simple contemplation and convening with Nature was in incredible connection to these ancient philosophers. I'm rambling, more to come.
November 26, 2021
O absolută necesitate pentru cineva interesat de o privire de ansamblu a filosofiei antice!
Recenzumatul meu poate fi găsit aici: https://citesc.deepdesign.ro/books/ce-este-filosofia-antica/
Recenzumatul meu poate fi găsit aici: https://citesc.deepdesign.ro/books/ce-este-filosofia-antica/
February 24, 2018
Ця книга, мабуть, одна із найкращих, які доводилось мені читати з історії філософії античності. Читаючи її, будьте обережні, адже вона може вас змінити.
June 9, 2023
Excellent livre. Hadot montre comment la philosophie antique est d'abord un mode de vie, cherchant à rendre l'homme meilleur, à le transformer en une personne plus sage. Le discours philosophique sert toujours ce but, directement ou indirectement. La raison pratique a donc un primat sur la raison théorique, comme le dirait Kant. Hadot touche même aux Pères de l'Église qui ont repris des exercices spirituelles venant de diverses écoles philosophiques.
C'est surtout l'enseignement scolaire de la philosophie qui est responsable de notre conception de la philosophie comme purement théorique ou systématique. Cela a émergé comme une tendance avec la scolastique médiévale, mais la compréhension traditionnelle de la philosophie a trouvé ses défenseurs à travers toutes les époques.
La clarté de l'écriture de Pierre Hadot le rend très agréable à lire; ce livre n'est aucunement difficile mais reste profond.
C'est surtout l'enseignement scolaire de la philosophie qui est responsable de notre conception de la philosophie comme purement théorique ou systématique. Cela a émergé comme une tendance avec la scolastique médiévale, mais la compréhension traditionnelle de la philosophie a trouvé ses défenseurs à travers toutes les époques.
La clarté de l'écriture de Pierre Hadot le rend très agréable à lire; ce livre n'est aucunement difficile mais reste profond.
October 15, 2020
Excelente libro, que deja pensar muchas cosas sobre qué significa la filosofia como forma de vida, y cómo tal vez la recuperación reciente de esta tradicion puede estar empobreciendola y mostrando solo un aspecto de la misma: la repetición vital de dogmas ya decididos. Pero en esto no se agota esta tradición infinita que voy a seguir trabajando en mi tesis, que si tiene algo es incorporada en ella la lección Socrarica que dejan de lado muchas recuperaciones de la filosofía antigua: vivir examinandose a sí mismo y a los otros, sabiendo la tarea interminable que eso implica.
February 21, 2013
Filosofija kaip gyvenimo būdas, kaip dvasinės pratybos, o filosofinis diskursas, kurį mes dabar linkę vadinti filosofija, tai tik to gyvenimo būdo produktas. Labai man tas patinka, skaičiau su dideliu malonumu. Yra dar lenkų filmas "Zmruż oczy", kuris gražiai iliustruoja tą filosofinį būvimą pasaulyje, rekomenduoju: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379063/
April 17, 2013
Hadot provides an exhaustive look at the origins of Western Philosophy and shows how it began as a love of wisdom, not a love of argument as it's become. He provides a steady guide through some of the key figures, their schools and their askeses (practices) which all had the goal of self-knowledge. This book will change your outlook on philosophy.
June 24, 2016
یکی از بهترین کتاب ها برای آشنایی با فلسفه ی باستانی یونان که نتیجه آن آشنایی عمیق با فلسفه می باشد. این کتاب را باد با دفت و با صبر و حوصله خواند و از اندیشه های مطرح شده در آن برای پیدا کردن راه خود در فلسفه استفاده کرد. کتاب ترجمه ی کتابی فرانسوی است که مترجم آن به خوبی از پس این کار برآمده است.
April 27, 2017
Ancient philosophy is described as a way of life, focused primarily on ethics (contrasted with moderns focused on abstract truth, and post-moderns deconstructing it). Fascinating discussion of how ancient philosophical schools more or less morphed into Christian monasticism.
February 2, 2012
Got it from the library, but worth buying...
June 1, 2021
This is the first time I've re-read Hadot's "What is Ancient Philosophy?" since I last used it as a text for one of the undergraduate courses I was teaching. My esteem for the book has only grown in the decade plus since I last read it. Hadot presents each of the ancient philosophical schools (Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa of Chrysippus and his followers, and the Garden of Epicurus; as well as looking at Pythagoreans, Cynics, and Skeptics) not as a body of theories about reality, but, rather, as different ways of living oriented around a particular philosophical discourse that was seeking, each in its own way, the fundamental truth of existence. Each school had its authoritative texts (Plato's dialogues, Aristotle's lectures, and so forth), it's own "jargon" (the Idea of the Good, the Prime Mover, the Logos, etc.), and it's own disciplines (Plato's contemplation, Aristotle's research, Epicurus' asceticism, Pythagoras' vegetarianism, and so on). Indeed, different schools had their own forms of clothing (see, for example Justin Martyr's account of wearing the Platonic philosopher’s robe in his first apology). Having been chrismated and living as an Orthodox Christian since my last read of Hadot's work, I read this with a fresh appreciation. When I became Orthodox I was looking for not just a means to "be saved," nor a body of dogmas to believe, but rather, an all-encompassing way to live (which happened to also include the other concerns). Hadot's work helped me clarify what I was looking for in Orthodoxy, and gave me a much greater appreciation for the ancient philosophical schools. This is a very accessible work, which well-read readers will find accessible, even if they do not have a background in philosophy, though lacking such a background, some portions will stretch the reader. I highly recommend it.
September 5, 2024
I don't often write reviews, but "What Is Ancient Philosophy?" by Pierre Hadot is a must-read. This book is a revelation, offering a completely new perspective on philosophy as a way of life rather than just an abstract academic pursuit. Hadot’s exploration of how the ancient Greeks and Romans approached philosophy, not just as a theoretical discipline but as a practical guide for living, truly broadened my mind.
What sets this book apart is its accessibility. Hadot explains complex philosophical concepts with clarity and depth, making them approachable for readers at any level. He brings the reader into the world of ancient philosophers and shows how their insights remain incredibly relevant today. The book is both intellectually stimulating and personally enriching, challenging us to think about how we can apply philosophical principles to our own lives.
If you’re looking for a work that will change the way you think about philosophy, this is it.
What sets this book apart is its accessibility. Hadot explains complex philosophical concepts with clarity and depth, making them approachable for readers at any level. He brings the reader into the world of ancient philosophers and shows how their insights remain incredibly relevant today. The book is both intellectually stimulating and personally enriching, challenging us to think about how we can apply philosophical principles to our own lives.
If you’re looking for a work that will change the way you think about philosophy, this is it.
October 19, 2023
No me gusta hacer reseñas de los libros o, bueno, mejor dicho me da pereza y me siento más cómodo transcribiendo algun fragmento del libro que haya sido significativo para mí. De este libro de Pierre Hadot, no puedo extraer ningún fragmento concreto porque, en realidad, debería copiar el libro entero.
No obstante, dejo estas palabras de Michel de Montaigne que Hadot cita en varios libros suyos y que vienen muy al caso de una de las tesis principales de este maravilloso recogido, glosa, muestrario, exégesis o reflexión sobre la filosofía antigua. Dice así, Montaigne:
"No hice nada hoy.—¿Qué? ¿no habéis vivido? Tal es no sólo la fundamental, sino la más ilustre de vuestras ocupaciones [...] Nuestra grande y gloriosa obra maestra es vivir con propósito. Es una absoluta perfección, y como divina, saber gozar lealmente de su ser".
La vida misma, la vida de todos los días.
No obstante, dejo estas palabras de Michel de Montaigne que Hadot cita en varios libros suyos y que vienen muy al caso de una de las tesis principales de este maravilloso recogido, glosa, muestrario, exégesis o reflexión sobre la filosofía antigua. Dice así, Montaigne:
"No hice nada hoy.—¿Qué? ¿no habéis vivido? Tal es no sólo la fundamental, sino la más ilustre de vuestras ocupaciones [...] Nuestra grande y gloriosa obra maestra es vivir con propósito. Es una absoluta perfección, y como divina, saber gozar lealmente de su ser".
La vida misma, la vida de todos los días.
May 30, 2021
Exposé passionnant en particulier des différentes écoles de la philosophie antique. Il y a ensuite une partie un peu plus brouillonne. La troisième partie étendant le propos aux philosophes modernes est aussi très riche. L'exposé est toujours clair, la langue rigoureuse et simple.
March 20, 2023
Very convincing regarding the relationship between philosophical practice and philosophical discourse; not so much when it comes to the (rare) references to the Pre-Socratics. While there are many self-evident links between VS fragments and the general developments of classic and hellenistic greek philosophy, Hadot seems to willingly ignore them, and in doing so he misses an hefty chance to enrich his take on the matter. This would be justified, says H., considering the lack of complete writings from the Pre-Socratics: nevertheless, not only this should engage a compelling exegetic challenge (not the opposite), but Hadot himself does not hesitate to use categories derived from non other the the Presocratics – for example when motivating epicurean's lack of fear of death with evidence that «being can not shift into not-being», clearly referring to Parmenides, who is not mentioned in any way. Still, an important piece of literature regarding ancient philosophy, even if it feels maybe a little too wordy and less concise than H.'s masterpiece ‘Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy’.
October 22, 2020
“Nowadays, there are philosophy professors, but no philosophers.”
“Do not wait for Plato’s Republic, but be happy if one little thing leads to progress, and reflect on the fact that what results from such a little thing is not, in fact, so very little.”
One of the most insightful, challenging, and fun reads I’ve had in a while. I recommend this to anyone and everyone. It’s easy for philosophical discourse to be completely independent of how we live day to day. That has to change.
“Do not wait for Plato’s Republic, but be happy if one little thing leads to progress, and reflect on the fact that what results from such a little thing is not, in fact, so very little.”
One of the most insightful, challenging, and fun reads I’ve had in a while. I recommend this to anyone and everyone. It’s easy for philosophical discourse to be completely independent of how we live day to day. That has to change.
September 18, 2023
the most boring thing i’ve read, so happy it’s over!
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