Pierre Hadot

Pierre Hadot, the French scholar of Hellenistic and Roman thought, died on the night of April 24-25 at the age of 88. Hadot was emeritus Professor at the Collège de France and Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Studying Hadot over the last five years or so has helped me to see aspects of the life and teachings of Siddhattha Gotama, the man we call the Buddha, in ways that indological, philological, and even historical approaches obscure. It’s a long story. I will tell it more fully in the biography of Gotama that I am currently working on.

In short, Hadot made it his life’s work to establish what he saw as the original intent of philosophy in the ancient world; namely, as a “mode of life, as an act of living, as a way of being.” Although this formulation may initially sound vague, it nonetheless serves to instigate our reorientation toward a revaluation of what we mean by both “Buddhist practice” and “doing philosophy.” Today, what commonly counts as philosophical practice is the presentation of a set of tightly arranged propositions constituting, on the whole, an argument. Ancient philosophical practice, by contrast, consisted in “an invitation for each man to transform himself.” “Philosophy,” Hadot adds, “is conversion, transformation of the way of being and the way of living, the quest for wisdom.” “Wisdom,” indeed, was ostensibly the very purpose of the philosophical quest now and then. The notion can, of course, be a simultaneously vacuous and grandiose notion. Too often, it connotes special knowledge of “mystical” matters, or of insight into cosmic truths normally veiled by human foibles. For both the Greeks and Gotama, on the contrary, wisdom meant practical knowledge concerning the living of life, of this very life. Both this knowledge and this living require, necessarily, insight into nothing more or less than reality as it is. This reality as it is, as it, that is, appears to us (yathabhuta was Gotama’s term, phenomenon, the Greeks’), however, is not, like Kant’s Ding an sich, a quality of being beyond the reach of the sensorium. On the contrary, it indicates precisely that which fills and permeates the sensorium; namely, the continual unfolding of one’s subjective experience. It may seem counterintuitive that knowledge of such an unfolding requires practice or cultivation to achieve. For, such knowledge, by definition, must be immediately available. But it is in fact a major presupposition of both Gotama and the Greeks that a clear-eyed view of our actual—that is, our phenomenologically evident—human situation (as desiring, cognizing, feeling, emoting, in short, experiencing, beings) is something acquired, or cultivated, rather than habitual.  As such, what was required of the practitioners of philosophy was the practiced removal of delusion. It was precisely this practiced removal that constituted doing philosophy.

I might have shared Hadot’s enthusiasm for Plotinus’s “mysticism” twenty years ago, but no longer. (To be fair, Hadot himself outgrew this fascination, calling Plotinus too otherworldly, impractical, and body-phobic to be of real use to real people in the real world.) And his choice of the term exercices spirituels for describing practice that involves the entire person–body, mind, and emotions–is unfortunate.  Why not just say what it is: “wholistic practice,” or simply “practice”? Nonetheless, I am grateful to Hadot for opening my eyes to the possibility of placing Gotama’s life in the milieu of the classical philosopher as he conceived of him/her. Doing so, I believe, significantly advances our understanding of the actual nature of Gotama’s achievement—his enduring legacy to humanity. But, yes, I agree, the details still need to be worked out.

Here is a excerpt of  Michael Chase’s obituary of his former teacher from the Harvard University Press Publicity blog.  There is a link to the whole piece below the excerpt.

Under the influence of his wife Ilsetraut, who had written an important work on spiritual guidance in Seneca, Hadot now began to accord more and more importance to the idea of spiritual exercises, that is, philosophical practices intended to transform the practitioner’s way of looking at the world, and consequently his or her way of being. Following Paul Rabbow, Hadot held that the famous Exercitia Spiritualia of Ignatius of Loyola, far from being exclusively Christian, were the direct heirs of pagan Greco-Roman practices. These exercises, involving not just the intellect or reason, but all a human being’s faculties, including emotion and imagination, had the same goal as all ancient philosophy: reducing human suffering and increasing happiness, by teaching people to detach themselves from their particular, egocentric, individualistic viewpoint and become aware of their belonging, as integral component parts, to the Whole constituted by the entire cosmos. In its fully developed form, exemplified in such late Stoics as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, this change from our particularistic perspective to the universal perspective of reason had three main aspects. First, by means of the discipline of thought, we are to strive for objectivity; since, as the Stoics believe, what causes human suffering is not so much things in the world, but our beliefs about those things, we are to try to perceive the world as it is in itself, without the subjective coloring we automatically tend to ascribe to everything we experience (“That’s lovely,” “that’s horrible,” “that’s ugly,” “that’s terrifying,” etc., etc.). Second, in the discipline of desire, we are to attune our individual desires with the way the universe works, not merely accepting that things happen as they do, but actively willing for things to happen precisely the way they do happen. This attitude is, of course, the ancestor of Nietzsche’s “Yes” granted to the cosmos, a “yes” which immediately justifies the world’s existence. Finally, in the discipline of action, we are to try to ensure that all our actions are directed not just to our own immediate, short-term advantage, but to the interests of the human community as a whole.

Hadot finally came to believe that these spiritual attitudes—“spiritual” precisely because they are not merely intellectual, but involve the entire human organism, but one might with equal justification call them “existential” attitudes—and the practices or exercises that nourished, fortified and developed them, were the key to understanding all of ancient philosophy. In a sense, the grandiose physical, metaphysical, and epistemological structures that separated the major philosophical schools of Antiquity—Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism⁹—were mere superstructures, intended to justify the basic philosophical attitude. Hadot deduced this, among other considerations, from the fact that many of the spiritual exercises of the various schools were highly similar, despite all their ideological differences: thus, both Stoics and Epicureans recommended the exercise of living in the present.

Hadot first published the results of this new research in an article that appeared in the Annuaire de la Ve section in 1977: “Exercices spirituels .” This article formed the kernel of his book Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, and was no doubt the work of Hadot’s that most impressed Michel Foucault, to the extent that he invited Hadot to propose his candidacy for a Chair at the Collège de France, the most prestigious academic position in France. Hadot did so, and was elected in 1982. Hadot’s view on philosophy as a way of life consisting of the practice of spiritual exercises was given a more complete narrative form in his Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique?.

Another aspect of his thought was more controversial: if philosophy was, throughout Antiquity, conceived as a way of life, in which it was not only those who published learned tomes that were considered philosophers, but also, and in some cases especially—one thinks of Socrates, who wrote nothing—those who lived in a philosophical way, then how and why did this situation cease? Hadot’s answer was twofold: on the one hand, Christianity, which had begun by adopting and integrating pagan spiritual exercises, ended up by relegating philosophy to the status of mere handmaid of theology. On the other, at around the same historical period of the Middle Ages, and not coincidentally, the phenomenon of the European University arose. Destined from the outset to be a kind of factory in which professional philosophers trained students to become professional philosophers in their turn, these new institutions led to a progressive confusion of two aspects that were, according to Hadot, carefully distinguished in Antiquity: doing philosophy and producing discourse about philosophy. Many modern thinkers, Hadot believed, have successfully resisted this confusion, but they were mostly (and this again is no coincidence) such extra-University thinkers as Descartes, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer. For the most part, and with notable exceptions (one thinks of Bergson), University philosophy has concentrated almost exclusively on discourse about philosophy. Indeed, one might add, extending Hadot’s analysis, that the contemporary university, whether in its “analytic” manifestation as the analysis of language and the manipulation of quasi-mathematical symbols, or its “continental” guise as rhetorical display, irony, plays on words and learned allusions, seem to share one basic characteristic: they are quite incomprehensible, and therefore unimportant to the man or woman on the street. Hadot’s work, written in a plain, clear style that lacks the rhetorical flourishes of a Derrida or a Foucault, represents a call for a radical democratization of philosophy. It talks about subjects that matter to people today from all walks of life, which is why it has appealed, arguably, less to professional philosophers than to ordinary working people, and to professionals working in disciplines other than philosophy.

You can read the entire piece at the blog. Here is Part One. And here is Part Two.

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