Reflections on Pierre Hadot's 'Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault'

Abstract

The central questions of Pierre Hadot's book are: how a philosopher should live, what does it take to dedicate one's life to philosophy, how should one philosophize? Attempting to provide an answer, Hadot explores what philosophy is, and shows that from the very beginning in classical antiquity it has been not only and not so much a kind of theoretical thinking, as a specific philosophical way of life and the way of thinking associated with the idea of wisdom. At the same time, he is convinced that the practice of philosophy is a spiritual exercise, and its mission is to transform the way one perceives the world. The present paper discusses, alongside with Hadot's ideas, the circumstances which accompanied his making his choices in philosophy and the values which determined his understanding of it. For Hadot, to understand a philosophy is, in the first place, to understand the philosopher as a person who is busy constructing his own world and is guided by how he sees his own place in it. This will be true if the person is the only factor involved in the events, but things become more complicated when culture, communication or a particular concurrence of circumstances are also to be taken into account. Though culture is inhabited by the person, it remains independent as ontological reality; culture and person can, therefore, be described as two complementary social ontologies. This is why this author, while generally following the path made by Pierre Hadot, proposes not to concentrate exclusively on the philosopher's personality, but to consider culture, communication and particular circumstances as well.