School of Athens: Philosophy Should Be a Way of Life

[ Raphael's painting: The School of Athens ]

Raphael's painting of the philosophical "school" (philosophical life) of Athens. Note that, while Plato and Aristotle occupy center stage, they are not the universal center of attention: In thinking, each person must think for themself, even though most of us receive most of our resources for thinking from "the greats". As Nicholas Cusanus wrote: In an infinite world, the center is everywhere, and the periphery nowhere.

(Picture from John Scott Harrison's website.)

"	[A]t all times and in every place, in everything that happens to us, daily life gives us the opportunity to do philosophy."

(Plutarch, quoted by Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, p.38)

Looking to the Ancients, Pierre Hadot Says Philosophy Should Be a Way of Life


ierre Hadot... is a philosopher who makes use of the ancients for his own ideas. His... essays... show how these... figures speak in modern voices [e.g.]... Marcus [Aurelius] as... someone struggling in the privacy of his personal meditations to do "what we are all trying to do," to "give a meaning to our life."

Through the last 40 years or so... Hadot has returned again and again to particular themes -- that philosophy is a lived experience, not a set of doctrines; that philosophers consequently should be judged by how they live their lives, what they do, not what they say; that philosophy is best pursued orally, in dialogue and community, not through written texts and lectures; that philosophy as it is taught in universities today is for the most part a distortion of its original, therapeutic impulse....

Hadot explains that it was Socrates who defined the image of the philosopher for antiquity.... Socrates taught that knowledge was not a collection of propositions to be passed on from teacher to pupil, but a manner of being, communicated through dialogue. Famously, Socrates declared that he did not know anything.... Once, when challenged to quit his annoying irony and offer his own definition of justice, he replied: "I never stop showing what I think is just. If not in words, I show it by my actions." At the heart of what Socrates meant by knowledge, Hadot says, is a way of life, "a love of the good." That love comes from within the individual, and after it is awakened it must be renewed through self-questioning, self-examination, a personal commitment to a life of philosophy.

"What characterized Socrates' pedagogy," Hadot says, "was the fact that it attributed capital importance to living contact between human beings; and here Plato agreed." But if Plato played down the written word in favor of an "ethics of dialogue," why, then, did he write so much? ...Plato wrote, Hadot suggests, "because he wanted above all to address not only the members of his school, but also absent people and strangers...."

Hadot... addresses the question... when and how did philosophy change course and become the academic discipline we know today? Already in the Roman world the various schools had lost touch with their founders' intentions and become more text-oriented, giving rise to what Hadot terms "the Age of the Professors," a phrase that this professor of ancient philosophy does not use with approbation. He quotes Seneca on teachers who talked the talk but did not walk the walk: "They turn love of wisdom into love of words."

"The goal is no longer, as it was in antiquity, to train people for careers as human beings, but to train them for careers as clerks or professors -- that is to say, as specialists, theoreticians and retainers of specific items of more or less esoteric knowledge."

adot does point to a countertradition, mainly but not wholly outside the university, that continues to uphold the ancient ideal, and it is clear that the names he names constitute his own syllabus for modern philosophy. Among those names are Erasmus, Montaigne ("My trade and my art is living"), the Descartes of the "Meditations," Kant ("The idea of wisdom must be the foundation of philosophy"), Emerson, Marx, Nietzsche, William James, Wittgenstein, Jaspers... Hadot speaks... about "an urgent need to rediscover the ancient notion of the "philosopher".... [T]he last, sermonlike pages of "What Is Ancient Philosophy?" sound very much like an elaborated version of the admonition that closes Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo": "You must change your life."

(--The New York Times Book Review, 18Aug02, p.10. Review of Pierre Hadot's What is Ancient Philosophy, by Barry Gewen)

Philosophy in action (09 Dec 02): I wrote a review of What is Ancient Philosophy?, and sent it off for a journal editor to consider. Hadot emphasizes that ancient philosophers did not intend their writings to be comprehensive compendia: they wrote to address particular needs of students or others (Hadot says this explains a lot of the incoherence and other "flaws" moderns find in ancient philosophy texts). In my cover note to the journal editor, I emphasized that I would try to revise and tailor my review to address particular interests or questions he had. After I sent the draft, I reflected and saw that in my endeavor to adapt my communication to my particular audience, I was pursuing a virtue for which Hadot says ancient philosophers strove.

Leisure is the basis of culture.
Toward a place for study in a world of instruction.

Enjoy

good conversation with good friends with good food and wine (the French way).

Read	about my introduction to the history of art as a Yale freshman (Abbot Suger and the cathedral of St. Denis).

Learn more of my (BMcC) ideas about education and training.

Read	Edmund Husserl's lecture: Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity (1935).

Return to Husserl Quote page (Philosophy and daily life).

Read my aphorisms for a human[e] world.
Learn why a city can deserve to exist (Louis Kahn).

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01 March 2006 (2006-03-01 ISO 8601)
v02.25

[ Read Edmund Husserl's Vienna lecture (1935)! ]