Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) was a careful empirical scholar of ancient thought and a clear and

modest writer, yet he defended a conception of philosophy that was exciting enough to attract
the enthusiastic support of Michel Foucault. Im becoming directly acquainted with Hadot for
the first time via a collection entitled Philosophy as a Way of Life, edited by Arnold Davidson
(1995). These are some of Hadots most important points:
In the Greco-Roman world, a philosopher was someone who lived the good life. What made a
life fully good was a matter for debate, but it was widely understood to involve equanimityin-community (borrowing a phrase from Owen Flanagan): that is, inner peace or control over
ones own emotions combined with active and ethical engagement with other people. Another
essential element of the good life was freedom from error. That didnt mean full
understanding, which was impossible, but the avoidance of logical, scientific, and moral
mistakes.
A philosopher need not develop or hold original views or arguments. Socrates was the model
sage of all the ancient schools, and he didnt even write anything, let alone teach positive
doctrines of his own. His lifeincluding his dialogic relationships with other Athenians, and
the equanimity he displayed on the point of deathwas what made him a philosopher.
All the ancient schools developed spiritual exercises designed to train the practitioner to be
more philosophical. These exercises included, for instance, describing emotionally fraught
situations from the dispassionate perspective of nature or science, and learning to focus on the
living present, because it is all that really exists, while the past and future are sources of
irrational emotions. Debating abstract issues with other people was yet another spiritual
exercise. While participating in an argument, one took the propositional content seriously, but
the point of the dialogue was to improve the participants personalities and their relationships.
The philosophical writing that comes down to us, then, wasnt what the ancients called
philosophy. It was just the offshoot of one of their philosophical exercises: abstract
disputation. Writing was not a satisfactory substitute for actual dialogue, which must involve
real people who were friends as well as debating partners. All the schools disparaged as
sophistic the view that a text could suffice. Nevertheless, the philosophical writing that
survives is excellent, especially if one reads it with proper attention to genre, purpose, and
form. For example, Marcus Aurelius didnt report his actual mental states or try to advance
true and original propositions. Instead, he recorded standard Stoic moral exercises, beginning
with his daily thanks to each of his moral teachers (book 1), and ending with a reminder that
all famous men end as smoke and ash and a tale (book 12). He listed his own teachers and
the exemplary men by name because he would actually visualize each of these people in turn.
Those were just two spiritual exercises for which the Meditations was a notebook.
Hadot argues that the ancient conception of philosophy as an integrated way of life
shifted, during the Middle Ages, into philosophy as argumentative writing about abstract
topics. Early Christians fully understood the ancient ideal, but they split it into two parts.
Monks borrowed, developed, codified, taught, and described the spiritual exercises of the

ancient schools. The life of a hermit, monk, or friar became philosophical, in the ancient
sense. Meanwhile, the task of reasoning about logic, metaphysics, and ethics was assigned to
universities and understood as a tool for improving theology, supplying the latter with the
conceptual, logical, physical, and metaphysical materials it needed. Hadot observes,
One of the characteristics of the university is that it is made up of professors who train
professors, or professionals who train professionals. Education was thus no longer directed
toward people who were to become educated with a view to becoming fully developed human
beings, but to specialists, in order that they might train other specialists. In modern
university philosophy, philosophy is obviously no longer a away of life or form of life unless
it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy [pp. 270-1].
Although Hadot admires the ancient conception of philosophy and argues that it has been
forgotten in the Continental European university, he is not given to pessimism and cultural
nostalgia. Matthew Sharpe writes,
Unlike many of his European contemporaries, Hadots work is characterized by lucid,
restrained prose; clarity of argument; the near-complete absence of recondite jargon; and a
gentle, if sometimes self-depreciating, humor. While Hadot was an admirer of Nietzsche and
Heidegger, and committed to a kind of philosophical recasting of the history of Western ideas,
Hadots work lacks any eschatological sense of the end of philosophy, humanism, or the West.
Late in life, Hadot would report that this was because he was animated by the sense that
philosophy, as conceived and practiced in the ancient schools, remains possible for men and
women of his era: from 1970 on, I have felt very strongly that it was Epicureanism and
Stoicism which could nourish the spiritual life of men and women of our times, as well as my
own.
Hadot argues that the ancient tradition of philosophy has lingered among influential writers
deeply schooled in Hellenistic thought: Montaigne, Spinoza, Goethe, the young Marx,
Nietzsche, Bergson, and Wittgenstein, among others. And it has the potential to flourish again
today.
I dont know whether Hadot addressed the vexing questions that arise for me in reading his
work on the ancients: Should philosophy be a way of life? How that would be practiced? By
whom would it be taught? And what it would mean for the evidently fruitful and impressive
enterprise of modern academic philosophy?
I would be most excited by a revival if it took seriously all three parts of the ancient ideal:
equanimity or inner peace; avoidance of error; and ethical political participation. The last is
easiest to overlook in an era of psychotherapy, when the self-help section of the bookstore
is full of ancient philosophical works and modern popularizations, but we dont seriously
study how to improve the world. Hadot ends,
This concern for living in the service of the human community , and for acting in accordance
with justice, is an essential element of every philosophical life. In other words, the

philosophical life normally entails a communitary [sic] engagement. This last is probably the
hardest part of carry out. The trick is to maintain oneself on the level of reason, and not allow
oneself to be blinded by political passions, anger, resentments, or prejudices. To be sure, there
is an equilibriumalmost impossible to achievebetween the inner peace brought about by
wisdom, and the passions to which the sight of the injustices, sufferings, and misery of
mankind cannot help by give rise. Wisdom, however, consists in precisely such an
equilibrium, and inner peace is indispensable for efficacious action [p. 274].
Cf. some of my own thoughts: happiness and injustice are different problems; If you
achieved justice, would you be happy?; three truths and a question about happiness
(inspired by Buddhism rather than stoicism); Must you be good to be happy? (exploring
some relevant psychological evidence); and the importance of the inner life to moral
philosophy (arguing that the main schools of modern ethics neglect equanimity).