“Hadot deserves to be far more widely known. In the Anglophone world, he is usually eclipsed by Foucault, who was his colleague at the College de France and a great supporter of him, although, as you have probably gathered, Hadot did not agree with Foucault on many issues.”[1] Professor Peter Brown
Americans have slept on Pierre Hadot—the late historian of philosophy—who may have been the great European thinker (and intellectual action-figure!) of the late 20th C. Hadot’s What Is Ancient Philosophy? (1995) woke me up. In this compact work, written with a kind of urgency rarely found in scholarly texts, Hadot evoked the existential side of Western philosophy’s founders. He seemed glad all over as he taught how each Greek school of philosophy “corresponds [his choice of the present tense is on point] to the choice of a certain way of life and existential option which demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle, a conversion of one’s entire being.” In an essay that echoes his essential text, Hadot doubled down on the two senses of the word “discourse” to drive home the difference between philosophy “as a way of life” and dry scholasticism that’s long defined academic philosophy…
On the one hand, discourse insofar as it is addressed to a disciple or oneself, that is to say discourse linked to an existential context, to a concrete praxis, discourse that is actually spiritual exercise; on the other hand, discourse considered abstractly in its formal structure, in its intelligible context. It is the latter that the Stoics would consider different from philosophy, but which is precisely what is usually made the object of most of the modern studies of the history of philosophy. But in the eyes of the ancient philosophers, if one contents oneself with the discourse, one does not do philosophy.
Hadot’s foremost American interpreter, Arnold Davidson, took a moment in a summative introduction to drop a bomb on America’s Generation Theory: “life must not be reduced to discourse.” Davidson wasn’t taking liberties as an interpreter.[2] Hadot himself distanced his work from French colleagues who conflated the world with texts. Hadot may have been taken up by Foucault who helped him assume a prestigious academic position at the College de France in the 80s, but Hadot was a rigorous scholar who didn’t go for Foucault’s somewhat cavalier approach to pre-modern content. Hadot upheld philological discipline. (He once spent decades of his life preparing an as-definitive-as-possible edition of Marius Victorinus—an obscure Roman rhetorician and Christian convert.) He had no use for post-moderns’ lazy projections.[3]
Hadot was out to wrest the idea of philosophy away from quiescent professors:
The essential element of a philosophical life is in in fact, one could say, non-discursive, insofar as it represents a choice of life, a wish to live in such and such a way, with all the concrete consequence that that implies in everyday life. In antiquity, the philosopher regards himself as a philosopher, not because he develops a philosophical discourse, but because he lives philosophically.
Hadot liked to quote Epicetus on this score:
A carpenter does not come up to you and say “Listen to me discourse about the art of carpentry,” but he makes a contract for a house and builds it and thereby shows he possesses the carpenter’s art…Do as he does: eat like a human being, drink like a human being, get spruced up, get married, have children, take part in civic life, learn how to put up with insults, tolerate an unreasonable brother, father, son, neighbor…Show us these things, so that we can see if you really have learned anything from the philosophers.
Hadot deployed the figure of Socrates to bring home the dailiness of ancient philosophy. The ending of The Symposium offers one key to the template for philosophy as a way of life. Hadot set the scene, pointing out how Socrates “although he has drunk more than anyone else, is the only one still awake, remaining lucid and serene amid the sleeping guests.” Hadot then gave the story back to Plato:
Only Agathon, Aristophanes, and Socrates had stayed awake, drinking from a great cup which they passed from right to left. Socrates was conversing with them…He was gradually forcing them to admit that one man could compose both comedies and tragedies…Aristophanes fell asleep first and then Agathon, when the sun had already come up. Socrates…got up and left. He headed in the direction of the Lyceum, after performing his ablutions, he spent the rest of the day, just as he would have any other.
Hadot had me at his image of Socrates at dawn. And I was with him when he elaborated on The Symposium’s ender (in a separate essay devoted to “The Figure of Socrates”) with help from Nietzsche, C.F. Meyer and, especially, Holderlin who saw Socrates at first light as “the lover of life”:
Yet each of us has his measure
For hard to bear
Is misfortune, but harder still good fortune.
Yet one wise man was able
From noon to midnight, and on
Till morning lit up the sky
To keep wide awake at the banquet
Hadot underscored Socrates’ lucidity was “democratic” not a sign of a superior attitude. As presented by Plato et al., Socrates wasn’t all-knowing or above-it-all. Instead, he practiced a calculated naivety: “He knows only one thing—namely that he does not know anything.” His stance was deeply social. He needed others to work his dialogic magic in those ancient rap sessions. And his practical reason wasn’t opposed to passion. The lover of life was a lover. Per Holderlin:
Holy Socrates, why do you always
Pay court to this young man?
Do you know nothing greater?
Why do your eyes gaze lovingly on him
As on a god?
He who has thought most deeply
Loves that which is most alive.
He who has seen the world
Can understand lofty Youth.
And often, in the end,
The wise bow down before the fair.
But Socrates didn’t bow down before the unjust. Or run from the jury of city fathers who sentenced him to death for impiety. Without getting into the weeds of the actual trial that led Socrates to execute his own death sentence by drinking a cup of poison, Hadot leaned on Merleau-Ponty to explain how Socrates’ attitude was “not one of social conformity.” Socrates’ final, fatal choice was informed by a faith in social justice:
As Merleau-Ponty has emphasized, “Socrates has a way of obeying which is a way of resisting.” He submits to laws in order to prove, from within the city itself, the truth of his philosophical attitude and the absolute value of moral intention. Hegel was thus wrong to say that “Socrates flees within himself, in order find the good and just there.” Instead, we shall agree with Merleau-Ponty, who wrote: “He thought that it was impossible to be just by oneself. If one is just all by oneself, one ceases to be just.”
Schools of philosophy that followed in the wake of Socrates—and Plato’s Academy—were moral-and-social enterprises. They were designed to form—not simply inform—students who were living and learning together. Hadot traced the particulars of each school. He told how Plato’s approach to the city (and politics) differed from Aristotle’s. And he was surely alive to nuances that remove life lessons of Epicureanism from Stoicism. Above all, though, he wanted to convey how all ancient philosophies shared the aim of establishing a tight link between a philosophical discourse and a common way in the world.
Plato’s method—which he credited to Socrates—isn’t defined by thin intellection. There’s an ethical and emotional (and irrational!) component to the “Socratic” approach to truth. Per Hadot, Holderlin wasn’t the only German genius of the heart who limned how love lived on in the heritage of Socratism. Goethe spoke to the educative power of loving presence: “We learn only from those we love.” Hadot also embraced Whitehead’s felt thought: “Concepts are always dressed in emotions.”
Science and even geometry is knowledge which engages the entire soul and is always linked to Eros, desire, yearning, and choice. “The idea of pure knowledge, or pure understanding,” said Whitehead, “was completely foreign to Plato’s thought. The age of the Professors had not yet come.”
That age was on the come, according to Hadot, “from the first century BC on” as the original Greek schools—and their oral traditions—gave way to text-first dogmatism.
Henceforth, philosophers and their students did not talk about the problems themselves or about things themselves; instead they talked about what Plato, Aristotle or Chrysippus has said about such problems or things…
What was essential henceforth was that one’s starting point should always be in a text. M.D. Chenu has given an excellent definition of medieval scholastics as “rational form of thought which is elaborated consciously and voluntarily from a text considered authoritative.” If we accept this definition, we can say that from the first century B.C. on, philosophical discourse starts to change into scholastics, which would be inherited by medieval scholasticism. As we have already seen it was this period which saw the birth of the Age of the Professors.
Hadot wasn’t one for anti-intellectualizing. He spent most of his life in scholarly surrounds. Yet his corpus is shaped by own urge to protest against scholasticism. While his reputation rests on his studies of ancient philosophy, his resistance to abstract theorizing and academic specialization was rangy. In essays, and a book of “conversations,” The Present Alone is Our Happiness (conducted by Arnold Davidson along with another classical scholar, Jeanne Carlier), Hadot aligned himself with a crew of master thinkers—Montaigne, Erasmus, Goethe, late Rousseau, young Marx, Thoreau, Existentialists, etc.—who meant to change human beings (and the world) rather than settle into academic niches. Hadot’s variousness was evident early. In the Fifties, he took time out from doing painstaking philological work on Victorinus to write the first essay introducing Wittgenstein to French readers. The Present Alone is Our Happiness is animated by Hadot’s will to protect what’s vital/ethical in philosophy from encroaching dead zones.[4]
Given his readiness to take sides in the long twilight struggle against Western pedantry, I was struck by his choice not to address the legacy of Simone Weil—who cried out when culture was reduced to an instrument for “manufacturing more teachers.” Weil put her own modern spin on Christian Platonism, ID’ing Plato as master-mystic and prepper for the incarnation. She was no respecter of Aristotle. She might have pushed back the birth date of the Age of Professors to the moment when Aristotle broke with Plato’s more expansive (and lovesome) idealism. Hadot, OTOH, notes Aristotle’s way of being contemplative was pretty engaged even if this master-thinker assumed hoi polloi would be at odds with “the life of the mind.” Aristotle’s way had a sacred side too, which had zip to do with upholding text-based dogma:
If we consider the activities which were honored in Aristotle’s school, it is evident that philosophical life there had the features of what we call a great scientific undertaking. From this perspective, Aristotle reveals himself to be a superb research administrator. His school engaged in an immense hunt for information in every area. His students and colleagues gathered all kinds of data, historical to sociological, psychological and philosophical…Innumerable zoological and botanical observations were also collected. The tradition was to remain in force throughout the lifespan of the Aristotelian school…For Aristotle the life of the mind consists, to a large degree, in observing, doing research, and reflecting on one’s observations. Yet this activity is carried out in a certain spirit, which we might go so far as to describe as an almost religious passion for reality in all its aspects…
Hadot’s responsiveness to Aristotle’s realness may explain why he avoided Weil. He grew up Catholic—his mother wanted him to be a priest (like his two brothers)—and it took him decades to cut his ties to the Church. Weil went in the other direction. Her mid-to-late life was shaped by Christian epiphanies and she was always on the verge of converting to Catholicism. Hadot’s opposing trajectory was rooted in his own natural/spiritual highs. While there was a period when he venerated St. John of the Cross and yearned to feel similar ecstasies, he had his own unchristian history of getting gone.
The Present Alone is Our Happiness brings that home with a postface evoking cosmic sensations of being one with the natural world. Hadot introduced various writers’ testaments on this theme by tuning their quotes to Romain Rolland’s famous evocation of “the oceanic feeling.” In one Q&A section of The Present Alone is Our Happiness, Hadot told how his own deep dives into the mystic, which began when he was a teenager, filled him with positivity about the universe and his place in it. He chose to end what amounts to his most personal book with a collation that made a case for a sort of odds-and-sods pantheism.
No doubt Hadot was aware there was a final challenge in his choice to finish up with nods to thinkers who’d sensed “the torrent of the world, in a little inch of matter.”[5] After all, he’d written chiefly about Greek philosophers who tended not to be natural mystics even if they were pagans. (Moderns, Hadot allowed, have “expressed better, and perhaps felt better, than the ancients what is strange and mysterious in the existence of the world.”) That “postface” is one sign Hadot and his collaborators weren’t simply all in when it came to philosophy’s founders. It’s the push-backs that help make the book’s Q&A so lively. I was struck, in particular, when Jeanne Carlier pressed Hadot—in a chapter called “Unacceptable”—about his thought-leaders’ aspiration to a kind of Godly imperviousness. She begins her query/critique by invoking a phrase Hadot had used as the title of his study of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations…
With respect to this “inner citadel” that makes the sage invulnerable, is there not something that considerably distinguishes us from the ancients, that we have completely lost the desire to be Gods? Is there not an entire current in Antiquity that is, in all kinds of ways, a sort of refusal of the human condition? I am not talking about the mythological gods, but of the god the philosophers, who is totally free from passions, who does not move, who is never angry, who does not suffer. You cite a good number of texts that suggest this, and first of all the famous text from the Theaetetus, “To flee from the here-below toward the world above, as quickly as possible, up above from down here,” and that continues “To escape is to make oneself similar to god, as much as it is possible”; or Seneca, “A god [the sage], says: “Everything is mine.” We want no more of this. We accept the human condition.
I’m with that un-royal we. Not that Hadot was against us. While he seems not to have taken in the full force of Carlier’s contrarieties in the moment, he must’ve signed off on that title of the chapter where she talked back to him and his Hellenic exemplars. “Unacceptable” serves to highlight Carlier’s refusal of would-be divines’ inhuman aspirations.
More on this anon, but let me delve a little more into what Hadot got right about his favorite Stoics and Epicureans. Starting with lines from Marcus Aurelius that Hadot cites at the top of his study of the Meditations.
Soon, you will have forgotten everything,
Soon, everybody will have forgotten you
Hadot had some fun with this: “Marcus Aurelius was wrong. Eighteen centuries have passed—almost two millennia—and the Meditations are still alive.” Hadot didn’t cite those lines, though, as a joke. They’re in the tradition of one of Hadot’s major takeaways from his old heads. Recall the title of that summative work, The Present Alone is Our Happiness. It chimes with Marcus Aurelius’s efforts to ring them bells.
The Meditations (per Hadot’s reading) were meant to prompt their author to be here then as a do-right human. Marcus wasn’t out to compose a text that would belong to the Ages. He was trying (repeatedly) to come up with impellent phrases and formulas that would “produce an effect upon himself.” The Meditations were a kind of verbal compass intended to steer him away from streets of indulgence. He wanted to get back to his self’s inner citadel—the moral core behind behavior free of egotism and tit-for-tat payback.
Marcus’s guide was informed by the Stoics’ physics which allowed him to see through false values to naked realities: “The decomposition of matter which underlies each one of us: water, dust, bones, stench.” As emperor of Rome, Marcus may have been the most powerful man in the world but he insisted social and political life weren’t worth all that much:
Everything by which people set so much store in life is emptiness, putrefaction, pettiness; little dogs nipping at one another; little children who laugh as they fight, and then suddenly burst into tears.
This cool ruler cast a cold eye on himself and his proud subjects:
Imagine them as they are when they are eating, when they are sleeping, when they are making love, or going to the bathroom. Then imagine them when they are putting on airs; when they make those haughty gestures, or when they get angry and upbraid people with such a superior air.
Hadot zeroed in on how Marcus “always looks to the ‘physical’ reality.” What’s in a famous name left to posterity? “[N]othing but a simple sound as weak as an echo.” Hadot noted that Marcus’s method is to keep dividing a whole into its parts, which allow him to “strip life of its false appearances”:
Just as your bath appears to you—oil, sweat, filth, sticky water, all kinds of disgusting things—such is each part of life, and every object.
Yucks notwithstanding, Hadot explained why Marcus’s dirty comedy isn’t misanthropic or self-enrapt:
It has often been held that Stoicism is fundamentally a philosophy of self-love, since the point of departure for its physics and for its ethics is the tendency to self-preservation, and to remain in a state of coherence with oneself. In fact, the fundamental tonality of Stoicism is to a much greater extent the love of the All, for self-preservation and self-coherence are possible only by complete adherence to the Whole of which one is a part. To be a Stoic means to become aware of the fact that no being is alone, but that we are part of a Whole made up of a totality of rational beings and that totality which is the cosmos.
Marcus’s awe for the All, though, didn’t lead him to renounce his place at the top of Rome’s hierarchy. Hadot’s large claims for the moral stance of Stoics[6] become a little easier to sustain when he speaks of the school in general rather than focusing on the philosopher-emperor. Hadot doesn’t avoid biographical detail or social history, but his account may be less than definitive when it comes to the tie that binds Marcus’s morality to noblesse oblige.
Stoic justice…was aristocratic: not in the sense that it consisted in giving wealth and power—that is, indifferent things—to the aristocratic class, but in the sense that it made the consideration of value and of moral responsibility enter into every decision of political and private life. The historian Herodian relates that when it came time for Marcus Aurelius to marry off his daughters, he did not choose patricians or rich personages for them, but men of virtue. Wealth of the soul, Herodian continues, was, in the Marcus’ eyes, the only genuine, proper, and inalienable wealth.
No doubt aristos can be soulful and/or impartial. Yet Hadot’s angle on the emperor-philosopher’s high-minded, top-down world-view highlights the enduring need for Frederick Douglass’s bottom-up “black political philosophy,” which was shaped by Douglass’s experience in bondage and freedom.[7] Sorry if that seems like it should be a sidebar, but I’ve only begun to stretch. Let’s go Bronx…
Last December after I’d started to nose around Hadot’s readings of Marcus and other Stoics, I got run over by a car on Arthur Avenue and woke up in a hospital with blood in my brain, a corneal graft that needed repairs, busted ribs, and a broken foot. The Stoics had their uses for me at that point. The driver who ran me over hadn’t left the scene of the accident and had called an ambulance so there was nobody to be angry at. On my back in the hospital, I wasn’t about to seize the day, but I was easy about my fate even if I didn’t adore it. Once I got through to my wife and kid on Christmas eve—the accident happened late in the afternoon earlier that day—I found a kind of peace in knowing there wasn’t a helluva lot else I could do. I was in for a time of waiting and with a lot of help from pain meds I went with the flow like a good stoic. (I’m not sure if I knew then that Hadot once linked his knack for catching the temper of certain Greek thinkers with the long periods he’d spent in hospitals due to a bad heart that had him code a couple of times in the years before he changed tense.)
Looking back through the haze, though, I realize my narratively apt stoicism isn’t the most vital story of my trip to the Bronx. While I was sleeping off my accident after I got the word out to my family—my wife and son started showing me more love than I’ll ever deserve. They weren’t content to act like patience is a virtue or endure petty problems like a philosopher-emperor. Finding her way in the Bronx after midnight on Christmas eve, my wife parleyed with hospital personnel intent on upholding Covid era restrictions until she could get into the Emergency Room where she watched over me. She stayed up all night, seeing to whatever groggy me needed—her eyes on the prize of a private room. There had been patients with Covid near me in the Emergency Room (not that I noticed). While I’m not sure my wife saved my life—I’d been vaxed and boosted—I’m just now thinking of what a Covid cough would’ve felt like with five broken ribs. My wife scoped out which Sisterly nurses she could hang tight with and then collab-ed like a community organizer to get me out of the Emergency Room and then out of the hospital in a week, though she was setting herself up early for a season of serious homecare. My son let his mom get some rest during that first week. He was there when docs realized I needed emergency surgery on one eye. And he was better than a calmative; asking a sharp question about the crisis-diagnosis without pumping up anxiety. What I remember most about him in the hospital was his gentle attentiveness. He wasn’t cheery exactly, but he seemed genuinely un-bummed though he was spending vacation days on the ward. St. Barnabas Hospital, where I began my recovery, doesn’t have a great rep, but I got extremely good care there. I’m sure that was due chiefly to the glow from my wife’s and son’s deliberate kindness, which lit up the hospital’s medical staff. Their shared light in the Bronx should shine brighter than my own poor imitation of amor fati.
My wife’s constancy uptown wasn’t a one-off. She’s the sort of righteous person whose faith feels real to her only when she’s sure she’s doing good. I know Allah means everything to her, but I haven’t tried hard enough to grasp the meaning of her prayers, though I’m glad she keeps putting them up for me too. Her spiritual exercises remind me of how Fr. Rick Frechette disciplines himself to live a truly Christian life as a medical doctor and priest in Port-au-Prince. (Their ecumenical connection is coming through to me now since I just served as a middle-man for an Islamic cleric who sought out Fr. Frechette on behalf of eight Turkish Muslims who’d been kidnapped in Haiti by the 400 Mawozo gang. Fr. Frechette is widely known as a trustworthy kidnapper-whisperer.)
Fr. Frechette won’t be a stranger to most First readers, but I recently had an occasion to steer a newbie to his works and days. Peter Brown—famous scholar of “late antiquity” and fervent admirer of Hadot—was moved by Fr. Frechette’s moral passion and my wife’s midnight in the Bronx. (“It is good in this constricted time to know of truly good people.”) Brown himself is a man of faith and he responded to their deeds by invoking Psalm 31.21 (RSV): “Blessed be the Lord! For He has shown me the wonders of His love in a besieged city!”
Let that psalm of the city supplement Holderlin’s vision of Socrates on the morning after an Athenian banquet. It sings of urban realms that seem removed from sunnier precincts where humans have practiced philosophy as a way of life. But in any neighborhood, there are singular souls alive to all that’s going on around them.[8] They stay up—but not too high. More awake than the woke.
NOTES
[1] Private email to author, November 27, 2021.
[2] Hadot gives you license to demur when you hear someone who’s stuck on the term “narrative.”
[3] Hadot valued the discipline of philology which taught him humility before ancient texts even as he realized it could be “dangerous” if “it becomes self-sufficient, delaying the effort of genuine philosophical reflection.” In “our era,” which Hadot once mused “could be defined as the era of misinterpretation,” he was alive to other threats to true intellection:
I hate those monographs which, instead of letting the author speak and staying close to the text, engage in obscure elucubrations which claim to carry out an act of decoding and reveal the “unsaid” of the thinker, without the reader’s having the slightest idea of what that thinker really said. Such a method unfortunately permits all kinds of deformations, distortions and sleight of hand.
[4] Hadot’s implicit critique of the way universities do philosophy now would provide a good basis for a new humanist curriculum. One that might include, say, Christopher Small’s revisionist approach to music education or Benjamin DeMott’s protest against lifeless English teaching: “Reading, Writing, Reality, Unreality.”
[5] Cezanne’s phrase.
[6] Here he suggests the Stoics anticipated Christ’s message.
It cannot, then, be said that “loving one’s neighbor as oneself” is a specifically Christian invention. Rather it could be maintained that the motivation of Stoic love is the same as Christian love. Both recognize the logos or Reason within each person. Even the love of one’s enemies is not lacking in Stoicism: “When he is beaten, the Cynic [for Epicetus, the Cynic is a kind of heroic Stoic] must love those who beat him.”
We have seen Marcus assert that it is proper, and therefor essential, to human beings to love those who make mistakes. One could say, however, that the tonality of Christian love is more personalized, since this love is based on Christ’s saying: “What you have done to the least of my brethren you have done to me.” In the Christian view, the logos is incarnate in Jesus, and it is in Jesus that the Christian sees in his fellow man. No doubt it was this reference to Jesus which gave Christian love its strength and its expansion. Nevertheless, Stoicism was also a doctrine of love.
The Inner Citadel, Pierre Hadot, p.231
[7] https://www.firstofthemonth.org/that-strange-mysterious-and-indescribable-the-fugitive-legacy-of-frederic-douglasss-political-thought/
Douglass’s words at first seem to enforce a pejorative distinction between ‘philosophy’ or “speculation,” on the one hand, and “fact” and “history,” on the other. Feigning to believe that the philosophical questions are “profound,” Douglass goes on to mock them, indeed to mock profundity itself, and philosophy and theory along with it. Although these afford some “satisfaction,” he acknowledges sarcastically, they resemble the innumerable “theories” about “the origin of evil” that tell us nothing new and get us nowhere…
This disparagement of theorizing gradually emerges as a theme in this speech; yet, when we have read or heard the speech in its entirety, we realize that Douglass has actually taken up and answered the very questions he mocked at the outset: “What is this mighty force? What is its history? And what is its destiny?” …Far from leaving “this profound question … to the Abolitionists of the superior class,” he made it the engine that drove his own philosophical speculations.
[8.]
They sit among the ruins and see through it and know it…they know what’s out there, even as they fight to keep building their doors and windows to get beyond the thickets of whitebread tomfoolery. That decent thing that the churches occasionally bring to mind for a couple of hours by accident mostly, is a communal knowledge. An understanding that for many, this world is not theirs to escape from, and sympathy for those who each day watch the asphalt grow, spin the twist-off caps, the jive and fives, the what-they-know. Homegoing & Tom DeMott’s Hidden Obit