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Towards a Phenomenology of Sagesse: Formatted: Left, None, Line spacing: Multiple 1.08 li

Uncovering the Unique Philosophical Problematic of Pierre Hadot

1. Introduction: a masked philosopher

In one of his last interviews, Michel Foucault consented to speak to Le Monde under condition of anonymity. Asked

why he had done this, Foucault commented that he was moved by a nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown,

what I said had some chance of being heard. (Foucault, Masked Philosopher, 321) 1 His editors ascribe to Foucault

the desire to demystify the power society ascribes to the name of an intellectual. (note at 321). 2 Pierre Hadot, one

of Foucaults key sources in his later explorations of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, never had cause to seek out

such anonymity. For Hadots wide-ranging and remarkable scholarly production had a late, and a far less extensive

reception than that of Foucault, his sometime-interlocutor.

Hadots scholarly work after 1970 on the idea of ancient philosophy as involving a manner of living, as well as the

production of learned discourses, is unusual firstly insofar as it has reached people outside of, as well as within the

academy(Hadot, Philosophie Ccomme Mmanire, 232-3; Philosophy as a Way of Life, 285).3 Within academe, his reception is

uthen unusually divided. Hadots earliest philological studies on the patristics, the Roman rhetorician Marius Commented [A1]: unclear: = subsequently?

Victorinus and neopPlatonism are widely respected.14 His better-known work on ancient philosophy as a way of life, Commented [A2]: omit

and the transition from this pagan form of life to Cmedieval Christian philosophia and theology is cited as authoritative Commented [A3]: Not just medieval: the process can be
observed as early ans the 2nd-3rd cents CE
by historians of ideas such as Stephen Gaukroger, Wayne Hankey, Ian Hunter, Peter Harrison, Juliusz Dumanski, or

Soreana Corneanu, not to mention Foucault. 25

Yet within academic philosophy, it is fair to say that Hadots work remains nearly invisible, if not quite masked. Since

Hadots passing in April 2010, Pierre Hadot: L'Enseignement des antiques, l'enseignement des modernes has appeared in Hadots

native French language. There is one collection on his work so far in English, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Ancients and

Moderns.6 This latter collection, however, underscores what might be termed Hadots paradoxical invisibility as his own

philosopher. Only one or two of the fifteen articles47 treat Hadot as, in Arnold Davidsons words, not only one of

the great historians of ancient thought, but also a great philosopher. (Davidson, Prface 7) 8 Instead, something

like Hadots meta-philosophical conception of the ancients, and his signature notion of spiritual exercises, are taken

for granted and applied to thinkers of different traditions, from the Greeks through to Descartes and more recent

thinkers like Leonard Nielson or the Gestalt psychologists.

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Nevertheless, when we compare Hadots work on the Hellenistic and Roman philosophers with that of analytically-

trained philosophers, even those of figures like John M. Cooper or Martha Nussbaum who are broadly sympathetic

with therapeutic readings of the Stoics, Epicureans, and other ancient schools, great differences are apparent. Hadot

has been accused by Cooper in particular of projecting onto all of ancient philosophy what Cooper terms a religious

conception of philosophia, biased by Hadots abiding interest in later antiquity and neopPlatonism (Pursuits of Wisdom

17-22, 402-3; Socrates 20-42).9 In this analytic-philosophical literature, that is to say, Hadots philosophy is invisible

or masked in a different, less flattering way than in his seamless acceptance amongst historians of ideas. The worry is

that Hadot, far from recovering a true sense of ancient philosophy, makes philosophys distinctive rational business

and identity itself invisible behind the choice and cultivation of ways of living.

This paper starts from the contention that Pierre Hadots unusually divided reception veridically reflects what are

different dimensions to Hadots own scholarly profile. In one of the few dedicated English-language articles on Hadot,

Pierre Forces admirable In the Teeth of Time, Pierre Hadot on Meaning and Misunderstanding in the History of

Ideas,10 Force compellingly depicts Hadots oeuvre as drawn in at least two competing directions. Both of these fan

out from his decisive encounter in the late 1950s with a the modern philosopher, Ludwvig Wittgenstein: not any Commented [A4]: a modern philosopher? If you say the
modern philosopher youre implying some readers may not
ancient thinker. Hadot was one of the first French intellectuals in the 1950s to write on Wittgenstein, and he know who W. is...

corresponded briefly with Elizabeth Anscombe. In his 2004 Preface to a book collecting four articles on Wittgenstein,

and in the vital, untranslated piece Jeux dee langage et philosophie, Hadot underscores the shaping importance in

all of his work on the ancient philosophers of the later Wittgensteins central notion of a language game (Prface 11-

13).11 What belongs to a language game is a whole culture, Wittgenstein claims in the Philosophical Investigations. We

cannot understand the sense of someones saying God is dead, to take Hadots loaded example in Jeux dee langage

et philosophie, outside of an awareness of its context (97-99). When it was said in the context of the ancient mystery

cults, or within early Christianity, it meant something very different from when Friedrich Nietzsche has his madman

say it in the The Gay Science, let alone when Sartre mouthed it at an airport, having been prompted by journalists to

say something philosophical.(Jeux 97-99).12

The historicising need implied by this sense that to understand the meaning of any text or utterance, one must situate

it in its original context, shapes the first of Hadots two polarities. Trained as a philologist, when Hadot read ancient

philosophical and literary texts, his ambition was to honour the historians duty to aim for objectivity and, if possible,

for truth by always resituating the works within the concrete conditions in which they were written.(Present Alone

67)13 I detest those monographs which, instead of allowing the author to speak by remaining close to the text, engage

in obscure speculation claiming to decode and reveal the authors tacit meaning, while the reader is left without any
 3

idea of what the thinker really said, Hadot once commented (La Citadelle 10).14 This historicising duty, of course,

forms the spine of Hadots Inaugural address at the Collge de France, Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in

Ancient Philosophy, and the largest part of his wider corpus.15 Hadot in different places underlines the point that

his accepting that, for the ancients, philosophy involved cultivating an entire bios rooted in the teachings and practices

of the different ancient schools is not a stand-alone idea, as it were. It is an inference to the best explanation, given

the remarkably diverse literary legacy that has been left to us by the ancient philosophers (Present Alone, 30-74).16: This

is a legacy whose written texts Hadot devoted his 1979-1980 course at the Collge de Francecole Pratique des Hautes

tudes to itemising into over twenty different genres, spanning poetry, letters and dialogues through to consolations

and treatises (Cours 162-167).17 If we go to Marcus Aurelius Meditations or Senecas Consolations to Marcia, expecting

what we would today credit as a philosophical article or monograph, we will be forced to dismiss them as incomplete,

incompetent, or merely literature. Understanding the very essence of the phenomenon of ancient philosophia as

aiming at the formation of students, not the production of written or spoken discourses (Forms of Life 56)18, Hadot

contends allows us to accept that this essence was capacious enough to include consolatory work which we would

today assign to the clinical psychologist. It was expansive enough to include the philosopher-emperor, Marcus

Aurelius, writing Ta Eis Heauton (Things/Notes to Himself) in order to periodically recollect and imaginatively

reanimate already-accepted theoretical principles, with a view to actualising these principles, faced with the tests of his

personal and political life (Marcus Aurelius).19

There is a second pole to Hadots scholarly persona, Pierre Force observes. And it seems to pull in an almost

completely opposing direction to the self-abnegating objectivity of Hadot-the-contextualising-historian of

philosophical culture.320 As the letters Hadot received from non-academics around the world attest21, Hadots books

themselves seem quietly but unmistakably to always point back from the historical figures, themes, and texts they

describe to present and future living generations of readers, and to the author himself. At the end of the landmark

piece on Spiritual Exercises (which famously influenced Foucault), Hadot makes a revealing confession. For him,

searching the history of philosophy always involved, beneath its scholarly clothing, a supplement, a surplus, which is

the possibility of finding our [own] spiritual nourishment in it (Present Alone 68)22:

Vauvenargues said, A truly new and truly original book would be one which made people love old truths.

It is my hope that I have been truly new and truly original in this sense, since my goal has indeed been to

make people love a few old truths ... there are some truths whose meaning will never be exhausted by the

generations of man. It is not that they are difficult; on the contrary, they are often extremely simple. Often,

they even appear to be banal. Yet for their meaning to be understood, these truths must be lived, and
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constantly re-experienced. Each generation must take up, from scratch, the task of learning to read and to

re-read these old truths.. (Spiritual Exercises 108)23

In The Present Alone is Our Happiness, with recourse to another modern thinker, Sren Kierkegaard, Hadot candidly

admits that he has indeed been working as a masked philosopher in his own way, although for different reasons than

the Foucault of 1980:

I would say that, for my part, it is a matter of what Kierkegaard calls indirect communication. If one says

directly, do this or that, one dictates a conduct with a tone of false certainty. But thanks to the description

of spiritual exercises lived by another, one allows a call to be heard that the reader has the freedom to accept

or refuse. It is up to the reader to decide. He is free to believe or not to believe, to act or not to act. If I can

judge by the numerous letters I have received, written by the most diverse kinds of people, from France,

Germany, the United States, who tell me that my books have aided them spiritually I think that the

method is good, and I always respond to these people, with reason, that it was not me, but the ancient

philosophers, who have brought them this aid (Philosophie Comme Manire 232-233).524

Considering these two seemingly opposed sides to Hadots scholarly and philosophical persona, it seems to us as that

it can be said that Hadots analytic-philosophical critics have heard, loud and clear, Hadots quietly esoteric call to

reanimate philosophy as a set of practices and experiences, as well as theoretical discourses. But they have contested

it, both as philosophy and as history of philosophy. Meanwhile, the historians of ideas, less interested in finding

spiritual nourishment or contributions to contemporary philosophical debates than in examining historical ideas per

se, have responded to the first, philological and historiographical register to Hadots persona. Our contribution here

triangulates these two predominant strands of Hadots reception. For both of these responses, we suggest,

misrepresent aspects of Hadots endeavours, and miss his distinct visage as his own philosopher, as well as an exacting

philologist and historian of ideas. The fact that Hadots reception is characterised by this double blindness is indeed

its own testimony to the uniqueness of Hadots philosophical trajectory in his oeuvre after 1970.

Hadots distinct, nearly-invisible, philosophical originality in later 20th century and early 21st century ideas, we would

contend, lies in two contributions. The first resides in the recovery of the exercises exercices spirituels: a recovery whose

nature and implications has been contested in existing literature, and which willaccordingly will not occupy us here.625 Commented [A5]: why accordingly? The fact that a
topic is disputed seems, a priori, a pretty good reason to
It will suffice to say that, philosophically, Hadot simply denies that talking of spiritual exercises necessarily robs us take it up again...

of the ability to distinguish philosophy from different species of supernaturalistic religion. Indeed, historically,

Hadot claims that in the classical context of pagan civic and mystery cults, the exercises that interest him, with their

goal of cultivating constant ways of seeing, desiring and acting (not, pace John M. Cooper, moments of any kind
 5

(Pursuits 22)26), stood out as a distinctly novel, philosophical contributionintroduction to ancient culture. The Greek

and Roman religions, he claims, did not involve an inner commitment of the individual but were primarily social

phenomena. (Present Alone 36). It was ancient philosophers that first conceived and prescribed practices like the

premeditation of evils or the memento mori. So we should not project backwards, from the subsequent uptake of such

exercises in Christianity (Ancient Spiritual Exercises)27, to the idea that they are necessarily other-worldly or

religious. Far from pushing against the rational claims of the ancient philosophies, the exercises as Hadot sees them

are about extending philosophical rationality into all areas of life, reshaping subjects beliefs, affects, and customs:

[t]he spiritual exercises of the disciple will consist precisely in his attempts to always have present to mind these rules

of life. (La Philosophie Antique 222) 28

Hadots second, larger and orienting philosophical project is what we want to bring out here. For this task, we would

contend, has been far less widely recognised and debated than the exercises exercices spirituelles, with the notable exception

of Cory Wimberlys 2009 The Joy of Difference: Foucault and Hadot on the Aesthetic and the Universal in

Philosophy29. It emerges most directly in a series of highly distinct pieces Hadot wrote, later in his life, on the figure

of the sage, the view from above, the ancients and nature, and the ethical or existential value of the present moment

or instant. It is also reflected in a further, lesser-known side to Hadots intellectual identity: his abiding interest in

natural philosophy, manifest in the last decade of his life in The Veil of Isis and his final book on Goethe (Veil; NOublie

pas).30 Hadot in these places, we will argue, moves towards what can be dubbed a kind of phenomenology: a

phenomenology of how a person would perceive and evaluate the world who had, counter-factually, attained a wholly

enlightened, wholly sage mode of living: in and through experience, argument, dialectic, a regime of life and spiritual

exercises. This problematic, which we will dub a phenomenology of Sagesse, represents the heart of Hadots

remarkably bold, remarkably untimely, and remarkably idiosyncratic intellectual trajectoryone which is only ever

half-concealed in and behind his scholarly persona. Obviously, the very idea of such a transhistorical phenomenology

or Sagesseone which Hadot for instance traces forward from Chrysippus, Pyrrho, or Epicurus into modern figures

led by Goethenot only seems quaint or, as his analytic critics have charged, tendentiously non-philosophical. This

really is the case,It is just so, by most contemporary metaphilosophical lights. From the perspective of any kind of Commented [A6]: Unclear. Do you mean This really is
the case?
historicism, meanwhile, Hadots notion of the sage, with the singular definite article, seems more simply

chimericala ceding of Hadots philological and historical nerve to his desire for spiritual orientation or for present

relevance in the ancient texts he so loved. Nevertheless, it unites his work on Hellenistic philosophy, neoplatonic

mysticism, and the philosophy of nature: at the same time as Hadot pursues it nearly-exclusively in the unassuming

guise of a neutral, historical scholar. It demarcates this apparently philological work from that of contemporary
 6

philosophers and intellectual historians, and can differently unsettle both. Hadot tells us that it has its roots in the

early unitive experience he describes for us so vividly in The Present Alone is our Happiness:

The night had come. The stars were shining in the immense sky. At this time, one could just already see them

My experience was one of being filled by an anxiety that was both terrifying and delicious, provoked by a

sentiment of the presence of the world, or of the Whole, and of me in that world. In fact I was not able to

formulate my experience but, afterwards, I sensed that it might correspond to such questions as What am

I? Why am I here? What is this world I am in? I experienced a sentiment of strangeness, of astonishment,

and of wonder at being-there (tre-la). At the same time, I had the sense of being immersed in the world

the world was present to me, intensely present. Before long, I would come to discover that this consciousness

of my immersion in the world, this impression of belonging to the Whole, was what Romain Rolland has

called the the oceanic feeling. (5-6)31

Methodologically, the papers exegetical recovery of Hadots central philosophical problematic proceeds, as several

other pieces have done732, by looking at Hadots exchange with the work of the later Michel Foucault. The reason for

doing this here is two-fold. On the one side, this is the one extant exchange we have that features Hadot in debate

about the foundationundaments of his work, with a leading contemporary. It is as such a particularly revelatory piece

of evidence. On the other side, we will argue that Hadot remains much closer to Foucault than his criticisms of the

latter might lead readers to suppose, and which extant readings of this interrupted dialogue have registered. Indeed,

we shall argue that in Hadots highlighting of the difficulties facing Foucaults reading of the ancients as practicing an

aesthetics of the self, Hadot names what remains the deep tension within his own return to the ancients, to the

extent that Hadot takes aim at more than historical reconstruction. In particular, Hadots own metaphysical

agnosticism commits him to recovering in the ancients something like what modern readers might call an aesthetic

approach to existence, and methodologically an agnostic, phenomenological perspective; at the same time as Hadot

(arguably rightly) argues, contra Foucault, for the necessity of a strong metaphysical account of the Whole, if

philosophy as a way of life is to be meaningful. Whether Hadot ever resolved this tension would be the subject for

further debate; we aim here to put such debate on a more adequate critical footing, by recovering the distinctive

philosophical problematic of Hadots remarkable work.

2. Hadot against, yet with Foucault

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Pierre Hadots dialogue with Michel Foucault shows very clearly, as in a microcosm, the two sides to Hadots complex

intellectual persona that we introduced above. On one side, wearing his philological hat, Hadot criticises Foucault on

philological, historical grounds. In one of the few moments in his work that Hadot arguably comes close to an

uncharitable pedantry, indeed, he criticises Foucault (in a way that Orazio Irrera has shown applies amply to his own

texts (Pleasure and Transcendence 999-1102)33) for not consistently stressing Senecas Stoic distinction between

gaudium (joy) and voluptas (pleasure). For Hadot, Foucault focusses too heavily in his History of Sexuality III on the uses

of pleasure, when pleasure was the principal goal of existence only for the Epicureans. It was not the central concern

in Stoicism, or the other classical schools of philosophy (Hadot, Rflexions 324-325).34

In Hadots later piece on A Dialogue Interrupted with Michel Foucault: Convergences and Divergences, Hadot

amplifies this kind of philological criticism. Eschewing the voluptas issue, Hadot now argues that Foucaults reading of

the ancients is inimical allergic to the way that the goal of philosophy in the Stoics and Platonicians was explicitly le Commented [A7]: Is this really the word you want? Do
you mean inimical?
bien (agathon), embracing an ethical or moral register, even when the word kalon was used (Hadot, Dialogue

interrompu 308-309).35 Likewise, he charges that Foucault underplays the extent to which ataraxia, peace of mind,

and (as we shall see) the cultivation of a kind of megalopsychia or conscience cosmique was the goal of ancient philosophical

therapeutics across the schools (Dialogue interrompu 309-310).36 As in Reflections on the Culture of the Self,

in all of these historical qualms, Hadot is baulking at the overarching Foucaultian categories of an aesthetics of

existence or culture of the self as modern anachronisms, if not as enshrining a new form of dandyism. (Hadot,

Rflexions, 331; Flynn, Philosophy as Way 615) 37

Hadots deepest criticism of Foucault concerns his failure to register that ancient philosophy did not aim so much at

a culture of the self, one of its beautification or refinement; so much as at the conversion, transformation or

transcendence of the self (dpassement du soi) (Un dialogue interrompu 308; Rflexions 324-325).38 This is why, for

Hadot, it is meaningful to compare the decisive moment of conversion to some philosophical school in antiquity

with divergent, openly religious conceptions of such conversion (Hadot, Conversion; Foucault, Hermeneutics 207-

215).39 In each of the different schools, Hadot claims, some form of this philosophical transcendence of the ego was

involved: whether in achieving unity with the One (neoplatonism), the higher pleasure involved in contemplating

changeless things (Aristotle), harmony of ones logos with the wider, cosmic Logos (Stoicism [Rflexions 325]40), or

the godlike life free of unnecessary fears and desires (as in the Epicureans). Aiming at a descriptor wide enough to

capture these divergent conceptions of the self-transcending telos, Hadot foregrounds the term wisdom, whose near-

absence he also remarks in Foucaults studies on Hellenistic and Roman thought (Dialogue Interrompu 308).41 In

several places, including in his later piece on Foucault, Hadot delineates three registers of this sagesse which he thinks
 8

need more robust accounts than they receive in Foucault: first, inner peace (ataraxia), secondly inner liberty (autarcheia),

and third, the decisive conscience cosmique:

that is to say, the awareness of belonging in the human and cosmic Whole (Tout), a sort of dilation or

transfiguration of the ego (moi) which realises gthe grandeur of the soul (megalopsychia) (Ibid. 309).42 (ESPA

309) Commented [A8]: omit?

Hadots assessment of the historical adequacy of Foucaults reconstruction of the Hellenistic Stoics and Epicureans

cannot detain us here, and has been contested (Irrera, Pleasure and Transcendence 999-1017).43 Certainly, recourse

to sophia seems (literally) definitive for ancient philosophia. Foucaults wider contextualization of the Socratic know thyself

within wider classical concerns for the care of the self does not stress this definitive category.844 The difficulty comes

when, shifting from Hadots philological to his philosophical persona, Hadot concludes not one, but both of his pieces

on Foucault by returning to the convergences of their attempts to reanimate ancient philosophical culture or practices

(Dialogue Interrompu 311; Rflexions 331-332).45 Hadot is now forced to admit that, to the extent that the

justification (and in some cases the rational or cognitive contents) of the ancients spiritual practices that he has

studied leaned semantically on philosophers beliefs in the fundamental ontologies of their respective schoolsand

this is exactly what seems at stake in what Hadot terms the conscience cosmique and philosophical physics in its different

formsthe advent of modern scientific culture seems to foreclose their possibility today. Acknowledging this, Hadot

concludes his Reflections on the Culture of the Self by saying that the philosophical spiritual exercises at the heart

of his work can be reanimated only to the extent that we separate from them the philosophical or mythical discourses

which accompanied them. (331).46 The problem at this point is that readers can be forgiven for wondering what

could remain of the philosophical notion of the Tout at stake in the conscience cosmique in Hadots own accounts of the

spiritual exercises, at least insofar as Hadot holds to the idea that ancient philosophical wisdom preserves an always

actual potential for modern men and women (Dialogue Interrompu 311).47 Certainly, Hadot assigns a key place to

some substantive conception of the Whole, to which the philosophical self is assimilated, in delineating his deepest

divergence from Foucaults care of the self, as Irrena and Wimberly have differently observed (Wimberly, Joy 192-

197; Irrera, Pleasure and Transcendence 1007-1008)..48 When he stands on his own two feet, in his more distinctly

philosophical persona, the precise visage of this larger normative horizon begins to waver.

But by confronting this problem which emerges so pointedly in Hadots interrupted dialogue with Foucault, we can

see the formative parameters of Hadots distinctive philosophical contribution: his attempts, through close readings

of ancient and modern texts, to delineate a phenomenological account of what a fully actualised wisdom, embodied

in the figure of the sage, would involve. Alongside Thomas Flynn and Martha Nussbaum 49, but on this very different
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territory, we will thus agree that Hadot is much closer to Foucault than his critical articles on the latter might suggest.

Hadot protests against Foucaults idea of an aesthetics of philosophical existence. It seems anachronistic to him, as

an understanding of ancient thought, and to uncritically conceal the extent to which:

the moderns tend to represent the beautiful as a reality independent of good and evil, whereas for the

Greeks, on the contrary, the word, when applied to human beings (aux hommes), normally implies a moral

value, for example in the texts of Plato and Xenophon, cited by Foucault (Dialogue Interrompu 308).50

With that said, Hadots ontological agnosticism leaves him too with little room to move, in terms of prescriptively

describing the conscience du Tout which would in some way capture or preserve this moral dimension which Foucaults

aestheticism misses51, except towards a kind of aesthetic phenomenology which leaves the metaphysical question in

abeyance (Wimberly, Joy 192-197). We turn to this material now.

3. Aesthetics and the phenomenology of sagesse

Two paths lay open and are duly explored by Hadot as he tries to reconcile his own dual commitments: on one side,

to a form of metaphysical agnosticismor acceptance of something like the modern, non-teleological and non-

providential conception of nature; and on the other, to recovering and advertising as live options for modern men

and women ancient conceptions of lived philosophical wisdom. The first such path is exemplified, very clearly, in a

lesser-known Hadotian essay on Giordano Bruno et linspiration des Anciens.52 In this piece, Hadot writes

sympathetically of Brunos re-conception of the contemplative life, taking now as its object the mathematically infinite

universe opened to modern Europeans by the Copernican revolution. Before this post-Copernican infinity, Bruno

does not see reasons for Pascalian despair. He sees wondrous testimony of the infinity, and infinite power of God

(Giordano Bruno 148-149).53 Such a contemplative stance, Hadot observes, has ancient precedents in the Epicurean

school. Epicurus, following Democritus and earlier atomists, already posited the spatiotemporal, ateleological infinity

of the cosmos. But this insight had not caused metaphysical angst and a sense of cosmic homelessness. On the

contrary, the Epicureans found in atomisms revelation of a non-anthropomorphic, non-providential and

spatiotemporally infinite universe beyond the walls of the world a source of peace from anxieties concerning

mortality and the interventionist gods (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura I 172; Giordano Bruno 148-149).54
 10

In this piece, then, as well as in his lifelong engagement with Goethe (NOublie pas)55, Hadot gestures towards accepting

a modern, post-Epicurean account of the Whole, as the contemplative basis for renewed practices of cultivating

philosophical megalopsychia. At the very leastfor his mask as a commentator does not fall in this essayHadot

suggests that there is nothing in the modern worldview that militates against our cultivating such conscience cosmique.

Nevertheless, Hadot much more often retains his ontological agnosticism and his philosophical eclecticism, as

Wimberly has noted (Joy 195).56 Such agnosticism, it seems to us, is indeed of the essence of his mature work on

philosophy as a way of lifeboth methodologically, allowing for the impartial examination of ideas from different

schools, but also more substantively.

One of the characteristic features of Hadots writings, indeed, is the way they move more or less seamlessly between

describing, with seemingly equal approval, the ideas and attitudes of the two predominant Hellenistic schools,

Epicureanism and Stoicism (often with passages drawn also from the Platonistcs and peripatetics, and in The Veil of

Isis, a compendious choir of artistic and philosophical voices). Instead of agonising over these schools ontological

differences (indeed, we [should] disengage from them the fundamental propositions that they considered essential

(Philosophy as a Way 273)57), Hadot much more often presents his position as reconciliation itself. Each of the ancient

schools, he claims, present models of life, fundamental forms in accordance with which reason can be applied to

human existence, and archetypes of the quest for wisdom, or else what he calls possible fundamental attitudes of

reason (Ibid.).58 He then draws our attention in particular to what Chase and Davidson call two themes59 that

allegedly shape both these Hellenistic schools conceptions of philosophy, as well as in different forms of Platonism.

These two themes serve to describe the enlarged perspective of autarcheia and megalopsychia at stake in each of the

philosophical schools, as Hadot presents it for us. Both of these themes, it can be said with some understatement, are

not stressed in contemporary analytic accounts of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy: whether in John M. Coopers

Pursuits of Wisdom or, for instance, in Brad Inwoods important work on Seneca and the StoicsReading Seneca.60 Yet they

play a structuring role in Hadots work on Marcus Aurelius, his wider studies on the metaphilosophical idea of

philosophy as a way of life, and his last work on Goethe.

The first of the two themes is a transformed, heightened attention to the present instant (Only the Present).61

Primarily, the present should attract our redoubled attention as the only tense in which we can act and change the

world: as against what our passions preach, which attach us to unchangeable regrets or future contingencies beyond

our control. The present alone is our happiness, Hadot cites Goethes Faust (Only the Present 217-220; NOublie

pas, 16-23).62 Secondly, the present moment should be ascribed importance given the transience of our lives and the

irreversibility of time. This means that each moment is, if not singular, irreplaceable (NOublie pas 42; Forms Of Life
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69; Spiritual Exercises 88; Only the Present 224).63 Yet, thirdly, the present is to be valorised philosophically as

involving at each instant the unfolding of a timeless, recurrent natural order of which we form a small part. Our death,

for instance, is seen by both Stoics and Epicureans as just as natural as our birth. Surprise in classical thought (versus

wonder) is generally condemned as foolish, for there is nothing truly new under the sun, in the ancients estimations.

The second exercise theme which marks out Hadots work as novel and distinctive is that of the view from above

(den haut). If attentiveness to the present moment seems to imply, as critics charge, the influence of an abiding, anti-

philosophical attraction to mystical immediacy (Wimberly, Joy 194-196)64, this view from above involves the

philosopher re-situating his or her life and concerns, precisely, in the larger mediating perspective of the rational

philosophical account of the Whole s/he has theoretically accepted. The spatial stipulation of seeing self and world

from on high is, in this sense, metaphorical. But it is such a compelling metaphor, as Hadot alerts us, that it recurs

in Plato, Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca, Aurelius and Philoand other sources might be added (View 238-250).65 Seen

from on high, we appear almost as insects, tracing out repetitively the same kinds of minute and passing courses which

appear almost completely insignificant: what Foucault, elaborating on these exercises in Hermeneutics of the Subject, terms

an irony of the miniscule(306-307).66 This diminution of the scale of our physical selves metaphorises the way that

our passion-bound absorption in the world, caught up in consuming desires for money, recognition, sexual conquest,

etc., reflect more or less unconditional commitments to needs (in Epicureanism) or objectobjects and evaluative

commitments (in Stoicism) which a philosophically rational account of our nature shows to be unnecessary. Seen from

a point of philosophical elevation, perched atop our Epicurean or Stoic philosophies, these concerns are less

mountains than molehills. The reason is that these philosophies each differently contend that such needs and pursuits

involve no real prerequisites for eudemonia or ataraxia, but things we can as well, or better, go without.

The key thing, in terms of Hadots philosophical project, is that this thematic metaphor of the view from above does

not presuppose any single dogmatic ontology, no more than does a heightened attentiveness to the present moment

and its demands. It only requires some account of a world much greater in scale than the tiny circles of concern which

our lives circumscribe, into whose greater frame the moi can be reinserted by the philosophers transformed mode

of perception (Hadot, Sage et Monde. 346).967 The Stoics had one such account, that of a cosmos guided by a

providential Logos; the Epicureans, another, that of atoms and void, with the clinamen allowing free choice, etc. Thus,

like attention to the present, Hadots elevation of the view from above to the heart of classical thought, as he sees it,

allows him to freely adduce examples of this exercise from across the ancient schools: and indeed, in modern poets

led by Goethe(NOublie pas 119, 229, 237-239).68 More importantly, in terms of his philosophical aim to reanimate

old truths and philosophical practices, its reconstruction as lying at the heart of the ancient philosophical orientation
 12

frees Hadot of the need to face and resolve the ontological question which, like Foucault, he hesitates to directly pose

or answer.

In place of any prescriptive ontology of the Whole, Hadots focus falls on a third preoccupation in his work: one

which again differentiates it sharply from his analytically-trained classicist contemporaries. This is Hadots interest in

the figure of the Sage, as the this-worldly conduit of these two exercises of attentiveness and the view from above,

and of the mode of perception and being they invite and inculcate. Hadot is able, rightly, to point to the much greater

role biography played in ancient philosophical culture and writing, from Platos Socrates to the Lives of the Philosophers

of Diogenes Laertius or Eunapius. This is because, Hadot claims, the sage was the living embodiment of the

philosophical ideal, with his inner freedom, tranquillity, and expansive sense of his own, minute place in the larger

whole. In a revealing passage at the end of The Figure of the Sage, a piece untranslated into English, Hadot for one

moment lets his commentarial mask slip, in order to express his own conception of what the ancient literature on this

cultural type was aiming at:

Above all, it seems to me that this figure of the sage is in some way ineluctable. It is the necessary expression

of the tension, the polarity, of the duality inherent in the human condition. On the one hand, ... man has

need, in order to support his condition, of being inserted in the tissue of social and political organisation ...

But this sphere of the quotidian does not entirely shelter him: it is confronted inevitably by what we can call

the inexpressible, by the terrifying enigma of mans being-there, here and now, given over to death, in the

immensity of the cosmos: to take conscience of the self and of the existence of the world is a revelation

which ruptures the security of the habitual and the quotidian ... The figure of the sage responds thus to an

indispensable need The sage will be the man capable of living on the two plaines, perfectly adapted to

the quotidian, like Pyrrho, and nevertheless plunged [plong] in the cosmos; devoted to the service of men,

and nevertheless perfectly free in his interior life; fully conscious and yet at peace; forgetting nothing of what

is unique and essential ... It is this ideal that the philosopher must try to realise (Figure 254).69

The reader then can see that Hadot himself, despite his criticisms of Foucault, does not shrink from drawing freely

on modern aestheticindeed, as here, on modern existentialist (Flynn, Philosophy as Way 615-616)70categories

to describe this kind of being-there, and way of seeing ones life and experience, at stake in such this philosophical

persona. Hadots piece The Sage and the World has a vital place in a series of important, highly original pieces by

Hadot on ancient man and nature, alongside this figure of the sage.. The piece opens by asking about the rapport

between the ancient sage and the Whole. The sage's consciousness of the world is something peculiar to him alone,

Hadot quotes Bernard Groethuysen:

 13

Only the sage never ceases to have the whole constantly present to his mind. He never forgets the world, but

thinks and acts with a view to the cosmos .... The sage is a part of the world; he is cosmic. He does not let

himself be distracted from the world, or detached from the cosmic totality .... The figure of the sage forms, as

it were, an indissoluble unity with man's representation of the world(Sage and World 251).71

The first of two central sections of the piece then goes on to explore the parallels between the sages sense of the

singularity of the instant, and his immersion in the whole. In doing so, Hadot draws directly upon the modern

notion of la perception aesthetique esthtique developed from Baumgarten, through Kant, Callois and Merleau-Ponty.

Indeed, Hadots argument is that, with the success of science and the eclipse of the philosophical ideal of sagesse within

scientific culture, modern aesthetics emerged as a separate field of inquiry, in order to preserve the cosmic dimension

which is essential to human existence. (Sage et Monde 349)72 In Kant or Merleau-Pontys emphases on seeing

things as solely l, there, without the usual veils of our ego-bound interests and concerns, Hadot sees a modern

legacytee of the Stoics cultivation of a benign indifference towards all natural things beyond our control (Ibid.349-

352).73 In Carus attempts to represent the life of the earth, Paul Klees wish to cultivate his art from out of a

dialogue with nature, Czannes longing to lose myself in nature the immensity, the torrent of the world ,

or Callois claims concerning artistic creation as a particular case of the fecundity of nature, Hadot likewise sees

modern avatars of the ancient, philosophical conscience cosmique and dpassement du soi (Ibid. 349-352).74

In his fascinating piece Lhomme antique et la nature, to consider a second, less well known but highly characteristic

paperindeed, it is hard to imagine any other later modern as its authorHadot contests the idea that the artistic

landscape, in either its charming or its sublime forms, is a distinctly modern invention, unknown to the ancient

world (LHomme Antique 307-318).75 Hadot cites and reflects upon ancient mural art and dcors, and recurrent

ancient philosophical and poetic hymns to the simple, rustic life. Indeed, Hadot ties the ancient appreciation for

landscapes to a poetic or philosophical lineage in ancient thinking about nature for which physics was a spiritual

exercise: viz. that lineage of ancient thought which is the subject of most of his post-1970 studies. And again, Hadot

is far from shy about using modern-sounding aesthetic terminology to describe the ancients feelings of appreciation

before landscapes, nor to adduce aesthetic categories to try to capture what he thinks is important in the ancients

Orphic, contemplative sense of nature. On the contrary, Hadot tells us that the very idea of a landscape per se

cannot be thought of except as the correlate of:

a regard upon nature which has an aesthetic dimension: that is to say, it is disinterested. The field or the

stream becomes a landscape, when we regard it not as a frontier, or a means of production or of commerce

posing technical problems, but when we regard it for itself, without a practical finality. This disinterested
 14

regard of the spectator separates out a privileged field from the totality of nature, but it doesnt in this way

solely limit or demarcate the landscape. It also unifies it, gives it a certain structure, it organises it. It

perceives it as a sort of expressive physiognomy, so that it emanates a certain atmosphere, a certain sentiment,

a certain character. This regard of the spectator, in his perception of what one could call a corner of nature

in this way, anticipates at the same time the totality of nature taken as a whole in this section separated out

by his gaze from the very heart of this totality (Ibid 310).76

Classicists may well heistatebaulk, as Hadot baulks atbout Foucaults aesthetics of existence, at the seeming

anachronism of using the modern term aesthetic to describe ancient cultural forms. It remains true that Hadot is

doing several things here which are certainly philosophically novel, and arguably highly philosophically provocative as

well. First, in effect reversing the charge of anachronism, Hadot positions our modern fascination with aesthetic

experience and artistic creation as the echo and legacytee of the modes of perception he argues that ancient philosophy

had sought to describe in its extensive literature on the figure of the sage, and savoured in their contemplative

appreciation of nature. This is one leitmotif of both the Veil of Isis and NOublie pas de Vivre, his final book on Goethe

(Veil 182-189; NOublie pas 236-266).77 In the former study, Hadot thus can directly link Kant on the sublime with

Seneca on the figure of the sage:

Without any appearance of the word sublime, we glimpse the presence of this feeling in the famous phrase

that appears at the end of The Critique of Pure Reason: Two things fill the soul with ever-renewed and ever-

growing admiration and veneration, the more frequently and constantly reflection applies itself to them: the

starry sky above me and the moral law within me. In this famous text, I think I perceive a structure analogous

to that of a passage from Seneca in which he also associates the moral consciencethat of the sagewith

the spectacle of the world: I look upon wisdom with the same stupefaction with which, at other times, I

look at the world, this world that I often contemplate as if I were seeing it for the first time.(Veil 277)78

This thought gives a surprising new angle on why it is that aesthetics, art and the figure of the artist, has so fascinated

us we moderns (Eagleton, Ideology of Aesethetic).79 At the same time, en passant, it suggests an answer to the question of Commented [A9]: us?

where, within the classical heritage, we can find the consideration of modes of experience that the European tradition

has since Burke or Kant sought out in aesthetic contemplation. Secondly, Hadot is in effect asking us to consider that

ancient philosophy aimed at inculcating in students, and allowing them to retain and reactualise through practices, the

kind of transformed modes of perception moderns can relate to through our experiences of art, and in some cases of

natural beauty. This thought may be contentious., but it is nothing if not novel and distinct. As the final Part of Veil
 15

of Isis, which is dedicated to modern, contemplative modes of experiencing nature as an object of awe and even anxiety

attests (Veil 247-314)80, it also arguably speaks directly to the heart of Hadots intentions, beyond the way that he has

been widely represented, and criticised, hitherto.

Concluding Remarks: an aesthetics of le monde?

If the work of this paper has succeeded, we will have unmasked Hadots unique and remarkable philosophical

contribution to contemporary academic culture. The point has not been to proselytise, so much as to analyse. With

the analytic-philosophical critics of his work, we have argued that Pierre Hadot was indeed a philosopher, as well as

an historian of ideas. Not a religious supernaturalist, however, he actually wrestles with a very modern metaphysical

agnosticism. Beyond these same critics, as well as Hadots historical readers, we have claimed that Hadots unique

philosophical contribution to contemporary debate, seen correctly, lies in his attempting to delineate a

phenomenology of sagesse. At its core is the proposition that there is a peculiar existential density that escapes

all attempts at theorisation and systematisation at the heart of the different ancient schools conceptions of the best

human life. This density is neither identical with, nor reducible to theis at once glimpsed but eluded by theoretical

systems these schools developed to orient their sunphilosophein, which is why Hadot proposes moderns can reanimate

and explore it, while suspending their judgment concerning many of the propositions contained in these

systematisations (What is Ancient Philosophy? 275).81

Hadot for his part seeks to enucleate this density by historical-philological explorations in the ancient texts of two

themes of attention to the present moment and the view from above; of the ancient discourses surrounding the

idealised figure of the sage; andnot least, and in modern terms which we have seen are very much also Hadots

(LHomme Antique 310) 82-- an aesthetic sense of nature, the world, and our place within it. For in order to describe

this state of untroubled sagesse, we have argued (alongside, but also differently from Wimberly1083), Hadot draws heavily

on aesthetic categories, despite his criticism of Foucaults idea of an aesthetics of the self. The difference between

the two thinkers at this level lies in how, in Hadot, what we are given is less an aesthetics of the self than an aesthetics

of le monde or le Tout: that is, of nature as a source of contemplative wonder but also as a Whole in which our own

concerns form only a tiny part, which human beings tend to misperceive through absorption in unnecessary needs

and erroneous attachments.

As will have become clear, we are ourselves agnostic or zetetic about accepting each one of Pierre Hadots claims

without a scholarly reservation, at the same time as an appreciation of the ambition and quiet audacity of his work
 16

seems to us to merit the deepest admiration. Hadots characterisation of a fully-achieved, or sage, way of life is

developed in open dialogue with modern aesthetic categories. This fact will confirm for some critics many of the

anxieties older criticisms of Hadots alleged irrationalism have raised: albeit now under these different terms, which

at least are Hadots own. It in particular seems unclear to us as to whether a phenomenological reconstruction of a

sage sense of the world, like we find in Hadots works on the ancients, can forever keep at bay larger metaphysical

questions, or fully suspend all commitments concerning these questions. With that much said, we hope here to have

provided a more adequate ground for the reading of Hadots new and truly original work: a task which might

forestall some of the misreadings of his texts, balance their partial receptions, while at the same time recapturing their

underlying ambition, and raising anew the questions Hadot himself actually posed and contended with (Spiritual

Exercises 108).84

Notes

1.See P. Hadot, Porphyre et Victorinus (Paris: tudes Augustiniennes, 1968); P. Hadot,

Plotinus, Or the Simplicity of Vision trans. M. Chase (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993 [1963]).
2.For a sample of work in the history of ideas that draws from Hadot, see Gaukroger, Francis
Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy; Corneanu, Regimens of the
Mind; Sellars, De Constantia: A Stoic Spiritual Exercise; The Art of Living; Hankey,
Philosophy as Way of Life for Christians?; Domanski, La philosophie: thorie ou manire
de vivre.
3. Notably, Chase, Observations on Pierre Hadots Conception of Philosophy as a Way of
Life, 262-286.
4.Mediating these two poles, Force argues (Teeth of Time 30-34), is Hadots philological
and historical fascination with the large role of what we would consider misunderstanding
(contresens) taking old ideas in new contexts, in engendering new directions in Western
intellectual history.
5. See On Hadot and Kierkegaard, see Irina, Pierre Hadot 157-171; Gregor, The text as
mirror 6584; and Sharpe, Socratic Ironies 409435.
6. See Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom, 17-22, 402-3, n. 4-5; with Inwood, Review of John
Sellars and Sharpe, What Place Discourse 25-54.
7. See Wimberly, The Joy of difference 191-202; T. Flynn, Philosophy as a Way of life:
Foucault and Hadot, Philosophy and Social Criticism 31: 5-6 (2005): 609-622; with O.
Irrera, Pleasure and transcendence of the self: Notes on a dialogue too soon interrupted
between Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot, Philosophy and Social Criticism 36:9 (2010):
9951017.
8.See Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 10-25; but see for exceptions 71-72 (in Plato);
137 & 194-5 (in Epicureanism); 458-9 (in Stoicism). .
9 The quote comes from a section of the essay not present in the English translation.
 17

10 Wimberlys argument is that Hadot is at his core a mystic. His theoretical agnosticism
reflects a larger epistemic scepticism about the limits of language, seen most clearly in the
works on Wittgenstein (but it might also be sought in Hadots near-life-long work on
Plotinus). It follows from this that people are free to choose different philosophical forms of
life, and this is only a matter of taste: whence aesthetic (Wimberly, Joy of Difference
196). We have argued here that the aesthetic is more clearly central in Hadots attempt to
capture the core dimensions of the sages sense of the natural world, and of his place within
it. Wimberlys argument concerning the place of mysticism in Hadots thought has been
skirted here, due to the demands of space. It seems to us fundamentally correct, but to omit
the other particular dimensions of Hadots masked philosophy we have highlighted here.

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 20

1
M.ichel Foucault, The Masked Philosopher,, in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et
al and others (New York: The New Press, 1997), 321.
2
Ibid, editorial note at 321.
3 P. Hadot, Philosophie Comme Manire, 232-3; cf. P. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life,, ed. A. L. Davidson, trans. M.

Chase (London: Wiley-Blackwell: 1996) 285.

4
See P. P.ierre Hadot, Porphyre et Victorinus (Paris: tudes Augustiniennes, 1968); P.ierre Hadot, Plotinus, Or the Simplicity Formatted: Indent: Left: 0", First line: 0", Space After:
of Vision trans. M.ichael Chase (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993 [1963])..
55
0 pt
For a sample of work in the history of ideas that draws from Hadot, see S.tephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the
Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001); P.eter Harrison, Territories of Science and
Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); S.orana; Corneanu, Regimens of the Mind; (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011); J,ohn Sellars, De Constantia: A Stoic Spiritual Exercise,;, Poetics Today Volume 28:, Number 3
(2007): 339-362; The Art of Living: the Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy (London: Duckwell, 2009 (2 nd
edition)); W.ayne J.; Hankey, Philosophy as Way of Life for Christians? Iamblichan and Porphyrian Reflections on
Religion;, Virtue, and Philosophy in Thomas Aquinas, Laval Thologique et Philosophique, 59:2 [Le Noplatonisme] (Juin
2003): 193-224; J.uliusz Doumanski, La philosophie: thorie ou manire de vivre. (Paris: Cerf, 1996); A.ndr-J.ean Voelke,
Le Philosophie Comme Thrapie de lme: Etudes de Philosophie Hellnistique, Prface par Pierre Hadot (Fribourg:
Academic Press, 1993).
6
A.rnold L. Davidson & F.rederic Worms eds., Pierre Hadot, L'Enseignement des antiques, l'enseignement des modernes Formatted: Font: Italic
(Paris: ditions Rue DUlm 2010); M.ichael Chase, S.tephen R. Clark & M.ichael McGee eds. Philosophy as a Way of Life:
Ancients and Moderns, Essays in Honor of Pierre Hadot (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
7
Notably, M.ichael Chase, Observations on Pierre Hadots Conception of Philosophy as a Way of Life,, 262-286.
8
A.rnold L. Davidson, Prface, in Pierre Hadot, Exercises Spirituels et Philosophie Antique (Paris: Albin-Michel, 2012),
7.
9 J.ohn M. Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus (Princeton:

Princeton UP, 2012), 17-22, 402-3, n. 4-5; J.ohn M. Cooper, Socrates and Philosophy as a Way of Life,, in Maieusis:
Essays in Ancient Philosophy in Honour of Myles Burnyeat, ed. Dominic Scott (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 20-42.
10
P.ierre Force, In the Teeth of Time, Pierre Hadot on Meaning and Misunderstanding in the History of Ideas, History and
Theory 50 (2011):, 20-40.
11
P,ierre Hadot, Prface, in Pierre Hadot, Wittgenstein et les Limites de Langage (Paris: Vrin, 2004).
12 P.Hadotierre Hadot, Jeux de langage et philosophie,, Revue de Mtaphysique et de Morale 67: (3 (1962): 330 - 343.
13
Formatted: Font: Italic
P.ierre Hadot, The Present Alone is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, transl.
Mmarc Ddjaballah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 67.
14
P.ierre Hadot, La Citadelle Intrieure: lIntroduction aux Penses de Marc Aurle (Paris: Librairie Anthme Fayard,
1997), 10.
15 P.ierre Hadot, Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold

L. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), 49-70.

16 See Hadot, Present Alone is our Happiness, 30-74.
17
P.ierre Hadot, Course de Lcole Pratique des Hautes tudes. Anne 1979-1980, in P.ierre Hadot, tudes de Patristique
et DHistoire des Concepts (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2010), 162-167.
18
Hadot, Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy, 56.
19 See Hadot, La Citadelle Intrieure: lIntroduction aux Penses de Marc Aurle; with Marcus Aurelius, in Philosophy as

a Way of Life, 179-205.

20 Mediating these two poles, Force argues (Teeth of Time, 30-34), is Hadots philological and historical fascination with

the large role of what we would consider misunderstanding (contresens) taking old ideas in new contexts, in engendering
new directions in Western intellectual history.
21
22
Hadot, The Present Alone is Our Happiness, 68.
23 P.ierre Hadot, Spiritual Exercises, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 108.
 21

24
Hadot, Philosophie Comme Manire, 232-3; cf.See Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 285. On Hadot and Kierkegaard,
see Nicolae Irina, Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a way of life: Hadot and Kierkegaards Socrates, in Volume 11, Tome II:
Kierkegaards Influence on Philosophy: Francophone Philosophy (London: Ashgate, 2012), 157-171; Brian Gregor, The
text as mirror: Kierkegaard and Hadot on transformative reading, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 28: 1 (January 2011),
6584; and Matthew Sharpe, Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, reading Kierkegaard, Sophia, vol. 55:, no. 3 (2016): 409
435.
25
See Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom, 17-22, 402-3, n. 4-5; with B.rad Inwood, Review of John Sellars, The Art of Living: the
Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004.04.04, online at www-site
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23760-the-art-of-living-the-stoics-on-the-nature-and-function-of-philosophy/, last accessed
November 2016; and M.atthew and Sharpe, What Pplace Ddiscourse , Wwhat Rrole Rrigorous Aargumentation? Against
the Sstandard Iimage of Hadots Cconception of Aancient Pphilosophy as a Wway of Llife,, Pli (2016):, 25-54.
26
Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom, 22.
27 P.ierre Hadot, Ancient Spiritual Exercises and Christian Philosophy,, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 126-143.
28
P.ierre Hadot, La Philosophie Antique: Une thique ou une Pratique?, in in tudes de Philosophie Antique (Paris: Belles
Lettres, 2010), 222.
29
C.ory Wimberly, The Joy of Ddifference: Foucault and Hadot on the Aaesthetic and the Universal in Philosophy,
Philosophy Today 53,: no. 2 (2009):, 191-202.
30
See Pi.erre Hadot, The Veil of Isis, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006); P.ierre Hadot, NOublie pas
de Vvivre: Goethe et la Ttradition des Eexercises Sspirituels (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008).
31 Hadot, Present Alone, 56.
32
See Cory Wimberly, The Joy of difference: Foucault and Hadot on the aesthetic and the Universal in Philosophy,
Philosophy Today 53, no. 2 (2009), 191-202; T.homas Flynn, Philosophy as a Way of life: Foucault and Hadot,
Philosophy and Social Criticism 31: 5-6 (2005):, 609-622; withand O.razio Irrera, Pleasure and transcendence of the self:
Notes on a dialogue too soon interrupted between Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot,, Philosophy and Social Criticism
36:9 (2010): 9951017.
33 Irrera, Pleasure and transcendence of the self: Notes on a dialogue too soon interrupted between Michel Foucault and

Pierre Hadot, 999-1102.

34
P. Hadot, Rflexions sur la notion de culture de soi,, Exercises Spirituels, 324-325.
35
P. Hadot, Un dialogue interrompu avec Michel Foucault: Convergences et divergences,, Exercises Spirituels, 308-9.
36 Hadot, Un dialogue interrompu avec Michel Foucault: Convergences et divergences, 309-310.
37
Hadot, Rflexions sur la notion de culture de soi, 331; Flynn, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 615.
38
Hadot, Un dialogue interrompu avec Michel Foucault, 308; cf. Hadot, Rflexions sur la notion de culture de soi,
324-325.
39
See P.ierre Hadot, Conversion,, Exercises Spirituels, 223-238; M.ichel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, ed.
Frederic Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (USA: Palgrave, 2005), 207-215.
40 Hadot, Rflexions sur la notion de culture de soi, 325.
41 Hadot, Un dialogue interrompu avec Michel Foucault, 308.
42
Hadot, Un dialogue interrompu avec Michel Foucault,Ibid. 309.
43
Irrera, Pleasure and transcendence of the self: Notes on a dialogue too soon interrupted between Michel Foucault and
Pierre Hadot, 999-1017.
44
See Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 10-25; but see for exceptions 71-72 (in Plato); 137 & 194-5 (in Epicureanism);
458-9 (in Stoicism).
45
Hadot, Un dialogue interrompu avec Michel Foucault, 311; Hadot, Rflexions sur la notion de culture de soi, 331 -
332.
46
Hadot, Rflexions sur la notion de culture de soi, 331.
47 Hadot, Un dialogue interrompu avec Michel Foucault, 311.
48
See Wimberly, The Joy of difference: Foucault and Hadot on the aesthetic and the Universal in Philosophy, 192 -197;
with Irrera, Pleasure and Transcendence, 1007-1008. Irrera sees this grounding in a normative exteriority with regard to
consciousness (1008) as at once necessary to Hadots position and entirely negative.
49
See M.artha Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), 5-
6. Hadot is named here, but Foucault is the express target.
50
Hadot, Un dialogue interrompu avec Michel Foucault, 308.
51 See Wimberly, The Joy of difference: Foucault and Hadot on the Aesthetic and the Universal in Philosophy, 192-197
52
P.ierre Hadot, Giordano Bruno et linspiration des Anciens, in Pierre Hadot, Discours et mode de vie philosophique
(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2014), 145-151.
53
Hadot, Giordano Bruno et linspiration des Anciens,Ibid. 148-9.
54 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura I72; cf. Hadot, Giordano Bruno et linspiration des Anciens, 148-9.
55
See Hadot, NOublie pas de vivre: Goethe et la tradition des exercises spirituels.
56
Wimberly, The Joy of difference: Foucault and Hadot on the Aesthetic and the Universal in Philosophy, 195.
57
Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 273.
58
Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 273Ibid.
59
In the contents forSee Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life , v, 215.
60
See B.rad Inwood, Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005).
61 See in particular P.ierre Hadot, Only the Present is Our Happiness: The Value of the Present Instant in Goethe and the

Present Instance,, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 217-237.

62
See Hadot, Only the Present is Our Happiness, 217-220; NOublie pas, 16-23.
63 Hadot, NOublie pas, 42; Philosophy as a Way of Life, 69, 88, 224.
 22

64
See Wimberly, Joy of Difference, 194-196.
65 P.ierre Hadot, The View from Above, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 238-250.
66
Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 306-7, n. 307.
67
P.ierre Hadot, Le Sage et le Monde, in Exercises Spirituels, 346. The quote comes from a section of the essay not
present in the English translation.
68
See Hadot, NOublie pas, 119, 229, 237-239.
69
P.ierre Hadot, La Figure du Sage dans LAntiquit Grco-Latine, in tudes de Philosophie Antique, 254.
70
Compare Flynn, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 615-616.
71 P.ierre Hadot, The Sage and the World, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 251.
72
Hadot, Le Sage et le Monde,Ibid. 349.
73 Hadot, Le Sage et le Monde,Ibid. 349-352.
74
Ibid. Hadot, Le Sage et le Monde, 349-352.
75 P.ierre Hadot, Lhomme antique et la nature, in tudes de Philosophie Antique, 307-318.
76
Hadot, Lhomme antique et la nature,Ibid. 310.
77 Hadot, Veil of Isis, 182-189, 247-314; NOublie pas, 236-266.
78
Hadot, Veil of Isis, 277.
79 On which, see the classic study T.erry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1990).
80
Hadot, Veil of Isis, 247-314.
81
P.ierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy (USA: Belknap, 2002), 275.
82 Hadot, Lhomme antique et la nature, 310.
83
Wimberlys argument is that Hadot is at his core a mystic. His theoretical agnosticism reflects a larger epistemic
scepticism about the limits of language, seen most clearly in the works on Wittgenstein (but it might also be sought in
Hadots near-life-long work on Plotinus). It follows from this that people are free to choose different philosophical forms of
life, and this is only a matter of taste: whence aesthetic (Wimberly, Joy of Difference, 196). We have argued here that the
aesthetic is more clearly central in Hadots attempt to capture the core dimensions of the sages sense of the natural world,
and of his place within it. Wimberlys argument concerning the place of mysticism in Hadots thought has been skirted here,
due to the demands of space. It seems to us fundamentally correct, but to omit the other particular dimensions of Hadots
masked philosophy we have highlighted here.
84
P.ierre Hadot, Spiritual Exercises, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 108.