SOPHIA (2011) 50:561–576

DOI 10.1007/s11841-011-0276-y

Philosophy as a Way of Life: Albert Camus

and Pierre Hadot

Matthew Lamb

Published online: 24 September 2011

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract This paper compares Pierre Hadot’s work on the history of philosophy as
a way of life to the work of Albert Camus. I will argue that in the early work of
Camus, up to and including the publication of The Myth of Sisyphus, there is
evidence to support the notions that, firstly, Camus also identified these historical
moments as obstacles to the practice of ascesis, and secondly, that he proceeded by
orienting his own work toward overcoming these obstacles, and thus toward a
modern rehabilitation of ascesis. Moreover, in contrast to Hadot’s Platonism, Camus
located the source of this practice in the pre-philosophical stage of Athenian tragedy.
This points to a further contrast between these two figures, which has historical and
cultural precedents, in the distinction between this pre-Platonic form of ascesis -
favoured by Camus - and the latter Christian form of asceticism - favoured by Hadot,
with the status of Platonic ascesis rendered in terms of prefiguring this Christian
form of asceticism.

Keywords Ascesis . Asceticism . Albert Camus . Pierre Hadot .

Philosophy as a way of life

I.

Pierre Hadot’s studies in ancient philosophy are initially concerned with the
distinction between philosophy as a way of life and philosophy as a written
discourse.1 Hadot argues that philosophy in ancient Greece was a way of life, first
and foremost, and only later developed into being regarded as primarily a written
1
Hadot’s ideas are explored in his books: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to
Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford; New York: Blackwell, 1995), hereafter abbreviated as PWL;
What Is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap, 2004), hereafter
abbreviated as WAP; and, more recently, in a collection of interviews, The Present Alone Is Our
Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Marc Djaballah (Stanford,
Ca: Stanford University Press, 2008), hereafter abbreviated as PAH.
M. Lamb (*)
The School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, The University of Queensland,
St Lucia, QLD 4101, Australia
e-mail: m.lamb@uq.edu.au
562 M. Lamb

discourse. Behind Hadot’s historical analysis, however, is a question levelled

squarely at the present:
If ancient philosophy established an intimate link between philosophical
discourse and the form of life, why is it that today, given the way the history of
philosophy is usually taught, philosophy is presented as above all a discourse,
which may be theoretical and systematic, or critical, but in any case lacks a
direct relationship to the philosopher’s way of life? (WAP 253)
In this, Hadot argues that contemporary (academic) philosophy has uprooted itself
from its initial ground and purpose – which is to train human beings to live in the
world – and has thereby ceased to be a way of life – ‘unless it be the form of life of a
professor of philosophy’ (PWL 271).
Forty years before Hadot took up this distinction, Albert Camus, in an early
notebook entry,2 raised a similar issue:
The ancient philosophers (quite understandably) meditated more than they
read. That is why they clung so closely to the concrete. Printing changed all
that. We read more than we meditate. We have no philosophies but merely
commentaries. This is what Gilson says, considering the age of philosophers
concerned with philosophy was followed by the age of professors of
philosophy concerned with philosophers. Such an attitude shows both modesty
and impotence. And a thinker who began his book with these words: ‘Let us
take things from the beginning,’ would evoke smiles. It has come to the point
where a book of philosophy appearing today without basing itself on any
authority, quotation, or commentary would not be taken seriously. And yet…
(N1 66–67)
This ellipsis – present in the original – is important to note, because it marks the
point where, for Camus, a discursive limit is reached, allowing the life of the author
outside of that discourse to adopt the lead. Such discursive strategies are important in
Camus’ writing, as they suggest that his work was written – and therefore should be
read – in a very particular way.
Hadot’s understanding of ancient philosophy as a way of life also carries with it
an obligation to read philosophical discourses in a certain way:
We will not be concerned with opposing and separating philosophy as a way of
life, on the hand, and, on the other, a philosophical discourse that is somehow
external to philosophy. On the contrary: we wish to show that philosophical
discourse is a part of this way of life. It must be admitted, however, that the
philosopher’s choice of life determines his discourse. (PWL 5)
For Hadot, this understanding carries with it the acceptance that philosophical
discourse is at one and the same time distinct and yet inseparable from the way of
life of the ancient philosopher. It is distinct in the sense that, as Hadot states, ‘for the
ancients, one was a philosopher not because of the originality or abundance of a
philosophical discourse which one conceived or developed, but as a function of the

2
Notebooks, 1935–1942, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Modern Library, 1965), hereafter abbreviated
as N1.
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Albert Camus and Pierre Hadot 563

way one lived. Above all, the goal was to become better; and discourse was
philosophical only if it transformed into a way of life’ (PWL 172–173). But such a
discourse is, at the same time, inseparable from the life of the ancient philosopher to
the extent that it is put toward the use of justifying their way of life, of exploring all
its possibilities. ‘We could say that through a kind of reciprocal causality,’ Hadot
states: ‘the choice of life determines discourse, and discourse determines our way of
life, as it justifies it theoretically’ (WAP 175)
What choices did Camus make, regarding the way of life he would pursue, and
the type of discourse he would produce to best reflect this choice? 1935 marks the
beginning of Camus’ writing life, when he was 22 years old. This was the year he
made his first entry in his first notebook. These notebooks became his most
sustained piece of writing, spanning the rest of his life. Marc Blanchard, in a
sensitive essay on the relationship between these notebooks and Camus’ ethics,
states: ‘In their properly Camusian, nonphenomenological, non-Sartrean word, the
Notebooks must remain annotations to a life being lived.’3 The second piece of
research and writing Camus began that year was his diploma dissertation, Christian
Metaphysics and Neoplatonism4 (published posthumously). In 1942, Camus
published his first major works, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. In the
intervening eight years, Camus did a lot of writing, mainly in Algeria, before he
went to Paris. He published two collections of lyrical essays (1937 & 1938),5 and he
wrote a draft of his first novel, A Happy Death (published posthumously). He also
wrote book reviews and articles for various magazines and newspapers, and wrote,
directed and acted in plays for two theatre companies.
It is instructive to look briefly at Camus’ early notebooks, if only to provide a
glimpse at the background against which he wrote during this preparatory period,
from his diploma dissertation, submitted in 1936, through to the publication of The
Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. Here a more complete picture of how, during this period,
Camus began to conceive of philosophy as a way of life unfolds. In an early entry,
Camus argues that one ‘must not cut oneself off from the world’, that a person’s
‘whole effort, whatever the situation, misfortune or disillusion, must be to make
contact again’ with the world; and the way he himself intends to do this is ‘by
constantly exercising an authority over myself’ (N1 25). In another entry, Camus
speaks of the need for ‘conquering yourself’ (N1 26). Later he expands on this: ‘To
keep a balance between an active concern for the body and an attentive awareness of
being alive. . . To have rules and stick to them’ (N1 85). Again: ‘The first rule is to
learn to rule over oneself’ (N1 114). And then: ‘Once again, the first thing is to learn
to govern yourself’ (N1 117). What Camus is only sketching here in his notebooks is
articulated more fully in the final pages of The Myth of Sisyphus where he introduces
the term ascesis.6 In the first instance, he refers to the ‘difficulty’ of maintaining an
‘ascesis’ and ‘the necessity of unfailing alertness,’ which it involves (MS 113). In
the second instance, he defines the term more clearly as referring to a ‘discipline’:

3
‘Before Ethics: Camus’s Pudeur,’ MLN French Issue, Vol. 12 No. 4, September 1997, 674.
4
In Joseph McBride, Albert Camus: Philosopher and Littérateur (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993),
hereafter abbreviated as CMN.
5
Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage, 1970)
6
The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991), hereafter abbreviated as MS.
564 M. Lamb

that is, as ‘a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth,
measure, and strength’ (MS 115).
Forty years later, Hadot will also associate his notion of philosophy as a way of life to
what he considers as certain ancient Greek ethical practices referred to as askēsis,
translated literally as ‘self-training’ or ‘exercise’. Hadot shows that the two most
important aspects of this practice of ‘self-training’ are attention (prosoche) to the
present moment and self-mastery (enkraetia). What is interesting for Camus, however,
in prefiguring Hadot, is not so much the term itself – after all, Camus mentions the term
ascesis only twice, in nearly as many pages – but the underlying bundle of practices
that it engenders, and which point outside of his discourse. A brief survey of The Myth
of Sisyphus shows how pervasive this gesture is. In the first part, Camus speaks of
adapting his behaviour to certain truths: ‘I am speaking here of decency’ he says (MS
22); how he wants to ‘accommodate himself to what is’ (MS 53); or else he speaks of a
‘discipline that the mind imposes on itself, that will conjured up out of nothing, the
face-to-face struggle [which all] have something exceptional about them’(MS 55) and
of that ‘activity of consciousness’, which he evolves ‘into a rule of life’ (MS 65). In the
second part, he provides sketches of such ways of being – the Don Juan, the Actor or
the Conqueror – which, he states: ‘do not propose moral codes and involve no
judgements. They merely represent a style of life’ (MS 90). Here, for example,
regarding the Conqueror, Camus states: ‘Conquerors sometimes talk of vanquishing
and overcoming. But it is always “overcoming oneself” that they mean’ (MS 88).
Already a tentative sense of what Camus is referring to when he talks of ascesis may
be seen: it is a practice, as well as a self-conscious intellectual activity, a discipline, an
act of self-mastery or an overcoming of oneself. It requires a vigilant attention to
oneself and one’s surroundings. It involves an awareness of one’s limitations and a
sense of measure. It is, in sum, that which provides a style of life, adapting one’s
behaviour to match, on the one hand, a person’s experiences (outside written
discourse), and on the other hand, the arc of their thinking about those experiences
(within written discourse). ‘A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming’,
Camus states: ‘it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape’ (MS 114).
From the little that has already been seen of Camus’ work, we can tentatively
suggest that his understanding of ascesis prefigures Hadot’s more recent rediscovery
of the idea. Where Hadot speaks of ‘the art of living’, Camus speaks of a ‘style of
life’; where Hadot speaks of prosoche and enkrateia, Camus speaks of ‘unfailing
alertness’ or ‘lucidity’ and ‘self-mastery’. What is initially interesting for the current
essay is this intersection between the work of Camus and Hadot. From Hadot, we
can identify basically three steps in the historical deformation of ascesis. The first
step is Imperial Rome, the rise of Neoplatonism, and the collapse of Epicureanism
and Stoicism; the second step is the rise of Christianity and its appropriating of
Greek philosophy, and the culmination of this in the development of the medieval
university and scholasticism; and the third step is the reaction of philosophy against
scholasticism, beginning with the work of Descartes.
In the pages that follow, I would like to present a brief overview of Hadot’s
history of the deformation of ascesis. In doing so, I will argue that in the early work
of Camus, up to and including the publication of The Myth of Sisyphus, there is
evidence to support the notions that, firstly, Camus also identified these historical
moments as obstacles to the practice of ascesis, and secondly, that he proceeded by
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Albert Camus and Pierre Hadot 565

orienting his own work toward overcoming these obstacles, and thus toward a
modern rehabilitation of ascesis. Moreover, in contrast to Hadot’s Platonism, Camus
located the source of this practice in the pre-philosophical stage of Athenian tragedy.
This points to a further contrast between these two figures, which has historical and
cultural precedents, in the distinction between this pre-Platonic form of ascesis –
favoured by Camus – and the latter Christian form of asceticism – favoured by
Hadot, with the status of Platonic ascesis rendered in terms of prefiguring this
Christian form of asceticism.

II.

During the period of Imperial Rome (14–180 AD), philosophy became a fusion of Plato
and Aristotle, and its teaching was conducted under the patronage of the state. Hadot
argues that in these precursors of the medieval universities the theoretical and textual
elements of ancient Greek philosophy predominated, due mainly to the vagaries of time,
and the distance that stood between the original lives of the masters – such as Plato and
Aristotle – and their current students. The masters may have been absent, but their texts
remained. ‘The situation called for a return to the sources’, Hadot states,
From this point on, instruction would consist in explaining the texts of the
‘authorities’ – for instance, the dialogues of Plato, the treatises of Aristotle, or
the works of Chrysippus and his successors. During the preceding period, by
contrast, scholarly activity had consisted above all in training students in
methods of thought and argumentation, and the important members of a school
often had very different opinions; but during the period we are now examining,
the teachings of a school orthodoxy became essential. Freedom of discussion
had always existed, but it became much more restricted. (PWL 148–49)
The result of this is a certain abstraction: the words and ideas of these ancient
philosophers had become separated from the lives the philosophers initially led.
Unable to have direct access to these lives, students of philosophy in Ancient Rome
became more dependent on their instructor’s ability to unlock the secrets of the texts,
and on their own practice of exegesis. ‘Historical tradition was thus the norm for
truth’, Hadot states: ‘truth and tradition, reason and authority were identified with
each other. . . . Students thus learned philosophy by commenting on texts, in a way
which was both highly technical and highly allegorical’ (PWL 153). The focus was
still largely on how to live, but the emphasis had shifted further toward this being linked
to how one interprets authoritative texts, rather than on how one actually went about the
task of living and interacting with other people outside of these philosophical schools.
‘Insofar as philosophy was considered exegesis,’ Hadot states,

the search for truth, throughout this period, was confounded with the search for
the meaning of ‘authentic’ texts; that is, of those texts considered as
authoritative. Truth was contained within these texts; it was the property of
their authors, as it was also the property of those groups who recognized the
authority of these authors, and who were consequently the ‘heirs’ of this
original truth. (PWL 73)
566 M. Lamb

In 1937, the year after submitting his diploma dissertation, the 25-year-old Camus
gave a lecture in Algiers, called ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’.7 One of the
purposes of this lecture was to reappropriate the idea of a unified Mediterranean
culture from the ideology, popular at that time, propounded by Charles Maurras, the
right-wing writer and journalist. What is interesting about this lecture, however, for the
current discussion, is that Camus locates Maurras’ error in interpreting Mediterranean
culture on the latter’s insistence that such culture derived mainly from Roman and
Latin sources, rather than from Greek sources. ‘The whole error lies in the confusion
between Mediterranean and Latin’, Camus states, ‘and in attributing to Rome what
began in Athens’ (NMC 190). What’s more, Camus sees the result of this as marking a
step away from the concrete, and a step toward an increasing reliance of thought upon
abstraction and hollow theorising. ‘Even when they copied’, Camus observes,
the Romans lost the savor of the original. And it was not even the essential
genius of Greece they imitated, but rather the fruits of its decadence and its
mistakes. Not the strong, vigorous Greece of the great tragic and comic writers,
but the prettiness and affected grace of the last centuries. It was not life that
Rome took from Greece, but puerile, over-intellectualized abstractions. The
Mediterranean lies elsewhere. It is the very denial of Rome and Latin genius. It
is alive, and wants no truck with abstractions. (NMC 193)
Indeed, Camus sees the Mediterranean culture as something that primarily resists
such abstractions. ‘Each time a doctrine has reached the Mediterranean basin, in the
resulting clash of ideas the Mediterranean has always remained intact, the land has
overcome the doctrine’ (NMC 191–92).
Here can be seen an early example of Camus’ later fundamental distrust of
abstractions. It appears again in The Myth of Sisyphus, in his various criticisms of what
he calls ‘abstract philosophers’. This struggle against abstraction becomes central to
The Rebel, which is concerned with trying to define a way of overturning abstractions
without, in turn, creating a new abstraction to replace the old.8 Significantly, the final
part of this work – ‘Thought at the Meridian’ – reconsiders and expands the ideas
Camus presented 15 years earlier in his lecture on Mediterranean culture. In 1952,
Camus writes: ‘But historical absolutism, despite its triumphs, has never ceased to
come into collision with the irrepressible demand of human nature, of which the
Mediterranean, where the intelligence is intimately related to the blinding light of the
sun, guards a secret’ (300). In 1937, Camus discusses this secret: ‘Whatever people
may say, revolutions come first and ideas afterward’: ‘For if it is not indeed the task of
intelligence to modify history, its real task will nevertheless be to act upon man, for it
is man who makes history’ (NMC 196). These ideas are the précis of Camus’ future
work on rebellion and his criticism of ‘abstract’ philosophies. Like Hadot, Camus
recognises this ascent into abstraction in the shift from a Greek to a Roman culture. It
is this context that Camus sees as the background to what Hadot would later consider
as the second stage in the deformation of ascesis: the rise of Christianity.

7
In Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage, 1970), hereafter
abbreviated as NMC.
8
The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage,1992), hereafter
abbreviated as R.
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Albert Camus and Pierre Hadot 567

III.

According to Hadot, the previously held emphasis on philosophy as a way of life

was shifted even more radically during the ascendency of Christianity. From about
the second century AD onwards, Christianity took centre stage in Europe, and Greek
philosophy became relegated to being simply the ‘handmaid of theology’. Before
Christianity, Greek philosophy was focused on being a way of life. Christianity was
already a way of life, a Christian way of living, but it was in need of some
conceptual framework in which to promote itself to a wider audience. Greek
philosophy possessed such a framework and over time – during the Greco-Roman
period – its direct links to being a way of life had been considerably weakened,
enabling it to be usurped by Christianity. Greek philosophy was thus emptied of its
practical content and put in the service of justifying a uniquely Christian way of life.
Over time, this process worked its way through the monastic orders and
culminated, in the Middle Ages, in the university system. As Hadot contends,

Philosophy was now no longer the supreme science, but the ‘servant of
theology;’ it supplied the latter with the conceptual, logical, physical, and
metaphysical materials it needed. . . If we disregard, for the moment, the
monastic usage of the word philosophia, we can say that philosophy in the
Middle Ages had become a purely theoretical and abstract entity. It was no
longer a way of life. (PWL 270)

In the year before presenting his lecture on Mediterranean culture, Camus

submitted his diploma dissertation to the University of Algiers. In Christian
Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, Camus investigates the historical development that
led from the ‘Greek mind’ toward that of the ‘Christian mind’, or what he called the
Hellenization of Christianity.
But behind the detached, pseudo-academic veneer of this diploma, Camus’
intentions and biases are clear. His youthful sympathies are with the ‘Greek mind’ as
opposed to the ‘Christian mind’, but his final judgement is against both. He is
opposed to the ‘Christian mind’ because it results in a separation of the individual
from this world (preferring instead some other world), and he is opposed to the
‘Greek mind’ for not being able to resist the infiltration of Christianity. Prior to
coming into contact with Christianity, the ‘Greek mind’ had become increasingly
more decadent, in its Greco-Roman or Hellenic formulations. This weakened it to
the point that it could become ‘Christianised’. Or so Camus argues. This is an idea
developed further the following year in Camus’ lecture of Mediterranean culture.
There is, in this diploma dissertation, an interesting prefiguring of Hadot’s
future arguments against Christianity. Camus argues that the decadence of the
Greco-Roman period resulted in the loosening of the grip that lived experience
held over the written discourses of the various philosophical schools, left over
from earlier periods. This allowed the way of life espoused in the Christian
Gospels to assume the theoretical and doctrinal framework presented in these
philosophical writings. It was only a matter of time before this process became
complete and the Augustinian ‘second revelation’ took place, which transposed
Christianity into metaphysics.
568 M. Lamb

Significantly, in his diploma dissertation, Camus links his opposition to the

‘Christian mind’ to the idea of asceticism. In the chapter on Gnosticism, he speaks
about how the Gnostic ‘mythologises the body’, and then produces asceticism, in
imitation of Christ, in order to provide an escape from it: ‘Christ does not escape the
universal law of sin. But at least it shows us that the Cross delivers us from it.
Basilide and his son Isidore were, for this very reason, the first to favour a certain
asceticism’ (CMN 113). Camus shows also the extremes to which this asceticism can
extend, particularly in his examination of the Gnostic Marcion, who proposed a
worldview that included two divinities, the true God of the otherworld (the Christian
God) and then the god of deception, who is responsible for this world. Regarding
Marcion’s preference for the former God over the latter god, Camus states: ‘The rule
of life which Marcion proposes is an ascetical one. But its asceticism is based upon
pride. The goods of this world should be scorned out of hatred of the Creator. . .
From this comes the most extreme asceticism’ (CMN 116).
More significantly, when Camus criticises the decadence of the latter ‘Greek
mind’ when it meets the ‘Christian mind’, he does so by linking it back with the idea
of an ascesis, which, at this stage, remains undefined. Regarding Plotinus, he states:
‘But even here reflection is transformed, as it becomes conversion and interior
ascesis, of which we will say nothing for the moment’ (CMN 130). And again:
‘However, Christian morality cannot be taught; it is an interior ascesis which serves
to ratify a faith. We should speak, on the contrary, as our work shows, of the
Christianization of decadent Hellenism’ (CMN151-152). The end result of this
process is, as Camus states in his conclusion, ‘the substitution of a “Christian” man
for the “Greek” one’ (CMN 152).
In his notebooks entries, composed between The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel,
Camus returns again to the ideas of his diploma dissertation. In 1948,9 he writes: ‘If, to
outgrow nihilism, one must return to Christianity, one may well follow the impulse
and outgrow Christianity in Hellenism’ (N2 183). In the early 1950s, he writes: ‘For
the past two thousand years the Greek value has been constantly and persistently
slandered. In this regard Marxism took over from Christianity. And for two thousand
years the Greek value has resisted to such a degree that, under its ideologies, the
twentieth century is more Greek and pagan than Christian and Russian’ (N2 263). And
again, in 1951, in a note to himself, Camus states: ‘Go back to the passage from
Hellenism to Christianity, the true and only turning point in history’ (N2 267).

IV.

For Hadot, the third and final stage in the deformation of ascesis occurs during the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment periods of European history, when philosophy
asserted its independence from Christianity. Here philosophy as a way of life
becomes completely usurped by philosophy as a discourse. This is due largely to the
widespread dissemination of various translations of the works of Aristotle and other

9
Notebooks, 1942–1951, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1991), hereafter
abbreviated as N2.
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Albert Camus and Pierre Hadot 569

Greek writers (WAP 257).10 But the key factor here for Hadot is that, in returning to
the texts of these ancient philosophers, the focus of philosophy remained at a
discursive level, concentrating on the theoretical, conceptual and doctrinal content of
these works, rather than on philosophy as a way of life:
Christianity, particularly in the Middle Ages, was marked by a divorce between
philosophical discourse and way of life. . . ‘Philosophy,’ when placed in the
service of theology, was henceforth no more than a theoretical discourse, and
when in the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century, modern
philosophy conquered its autonomy, it retained the tendency to limit itself to
this point of view. (WAP 254)
Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche and Leibniz all thought in opposition to
Scholasticism. But, as Hadot states: ‘In opposition to one kind of theoretical
philosophical discourse, there arose yet another theoretical discourse’ (PWL 271).
Hadot argues that this trend of philosophy as discourse has more or less – with only a
few exceptions, such as, to some extent, the work of Nietzsche – remained with us up
until the modern day. ‘The idea of a philosophy reduced to its conceptual content has
survived to our own time’, he states: ‘We encounter it every day in our university courses
and in textbooks at every level; one could say that it is the classical, scholastic, university
conception of philosophy. Consciously or unconsciously, our universities are still heirs
of the “School” – in other words, of the Scholastic tradition’ (WAP 258).
The philosopher who best exemplifies this final stage in the deformation of
ascesis is René Descartes. Descartes’ methodical doubt separates the ideas of the
mind from the body and the physical world, but he must rely upon God to hold them
both together; on this faithful reasoning he built what he thought was a secure basis
for knowledge. The result ushered in a philosophical idealism that saw a reversal of
the primacy of the physical and the metaphysical worlds, and, with it, a discourse
that posited the abstract as being more clear and distinct, and the theoretical as being
more real and telling, than the concrete world.
In an essay written in 1950,11 in an effort to clear away certain misconceptions
surrounding The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus compares his earlier project to Descartes’
project:
What is the point of saying yet again that in the experience which interested
me, and which I happened to write about, the absurd can be considered only as
a point of departure – even though the memory and feeling of it still
accompany the farther advances. In the same manner, with all due sense of
proportion, Cartesian doubt, which is systematic, was not enough to make
Descartes a skeptic. (159)
This point is repeated the following year, in an interview, when questioned about
the absurd: ‘When I analyzed the feeling of the Absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus’,
Camus responds, ‘I was looking for a method and not a doctrine. I was practicing
methodical doubt’ (356). On the surface, these references to Descartes seem to
indicate an affiliation and the acknowledgment of influence. I would argue the

10
Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? 257.
11
In Lyrical and Critical Essays.
570 M. Lamb

opposite, however: that these comments – made in the context of trying to clear
away misconceptions about his earlier work – mark a challenge that went largely
unnoticed when The Myth of Sisyphus first appeared. In 1952, Camus incorporated
these comments into The Rebel. In the introduction – again discussing the absurd
and his earlier work – he writes that ‘it is an experience to be lived through, a point
of departure, the equivalent, in existence, of Descartes’s methodical doubt’ (R 8).
Here he intimates that The Myth of Sisyphus is equivalent to Descartes’ Discourse on
Method. But in the opening sections of The Rebel, after positioning the individual in
a rebellion against his metaphysical condition, Camus explicitly refers to Descartes,
but in opposition to what is most Cartesian: the individual mind isolated from a
human community and dependent upon God. Camus states: ‘In our daily trials
rebellion plays the same role as does the “cogito” in the realm of thought: it is the
first piece of evidence. But this evidence lures the individual from his solitude. It
founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel – therefore we exist’ (R 22). In
other words, Camus is replacing the isolated and disembodied cogito with the corporeal
struggles of a man among men, living amidst the struggles of the concrete world.
Such rebellion is associated by Camus with ascesis in The Myth of Sisyphus. By
claiming The Myth of Sisyphus as being equivalent, and yet in opposition to,
Descartes’ Discourse on a Method, Camus is both acknowledging the historical
significance of Descartes’ work, but at the same time he offers an alternative way of
thinking. Even a brief survey of this work in question shows an almost purposeful
counterpoint to the method employed by Descartes, and the consequences he draws
from it. ‘The mind’s first step is to distinguish what is true from what is false’ (MOS
16), Camus states, mirroring Descartes’ own starting point. But Camus goes on to
criticise the usefulness of this approach:
It is essential to consider as a constant point of reference in this essay the
regular hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really know,
practical assent and simulated ignorance which allows us to live with ideas
which, if we truly put them to the test, ought to upset our whole life . . . If the
only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to
be the history of its successive regrets and failures. (MOS 18)
Here Camus dismisses discursive acrobatics, preferring instead the immediate and
the concrete, while maintaining an understanding of what consequences this entails.
In the absence of God – for the absurd separates the human from the divine – Camus
finds himself returned to his body and the physical world, yet without any secure
basis of knowledge. Camus’ method, then, is practically the opposite of Descartes
method. As Camus concludes:
It is clear that in this way I am defining a method. But it is also evident that
that method is one of analysis and not of knowledge. . . . The method defined
here acknowledges the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible. Solely
appearances can be enumerated and the climate make itself felt. (MOS 11–12)
In adopting this ‘method’, we can see how in Camus’ early work, up to and
including the publication of The Myth of Sisyphus, there is evidence to support the
notions that, firstly, Camus has identified a series of historical moments –
prefiguring Hadot’s historical analysis – as obstacles to the notion that ancient
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Albert Camus and Pierre Hadot 571

philosophy was, first and foremost, a way of life, as opposed to being simply a
discourse, and secondly, that Camus proceeds by orienting his own work toward
overcoming these obstacles, toward a rehabilitation of ascesis.

V.

So far I have focused on the points of similarity between Hadot and Camus. Hadot
has stated that his initial work on philosophy as a way life was inspired, in part, by
Camus, amongst other ‘Existentialists’ in the 1940s (PWL 278). In the early 1950s
Hadot favourably reviewed Camus’ The Rebel, and he received personal
correspondence from Camus in this connection (PAH 21). I suggested earlier,
however, that there is also a point of distinction between these two figures, and it is
with regard to the starting point of ascesis.
Hadot’s work explicitly aims to overturn what he calls a ‘classical prejudice’ that
idealises the pre-Socratic period of tragic poets at the expense of the post-Platonic
period of Hellenic philosophy; he refutes the idea that following Plato, philosophy
entered a period of ‘decadence’ (WAP 92). Camus, however, explicitly grounds his
understanding of ascesis in this pre-Socratic period of tragic poets, but without
idealising it.12 What Hadot sees as the first stage in the history of philosophy as a
way of life – the shift from Greek to Roman culture – is, for Camus, the second
stage. For Camus, the first stage is the shift from ascesis grounded in tragedy to
ascesis grounded in Platonic philosophy. Unlike Hadot, Camus does not refute the
idea that post-Platonic philosophy is decadent; rather, he sees this ‘decadence’ as one
of the conditions that allowed the shift from tragic ascesis to Christian asceticism to
occur. As cited earlier, from his diploma dissertation: ‘We should speak, on the
contrary, as our work shows, of the Christianization of decadent Hellenism’ (italics
added, CMN151-52).
Although this idea of a distinction between Greek ascesis and Christian
asceticism is largely undefined at this preliminary stage of his thinking, Camus’
diploma dissertation does provide several hints as to his future thinking on this point.
Ascesis and asceticism are cognate terms, they are almost interchangeable. Both
suggest self-discipline or training. But by distinguishing between them, and by
associating one with the ‘Greek mind’ and the other with the ‘Christian mind’,
Camus is pointing toward a substantive difference between the terms that he, at least,
considers important. What could this difference be? As Camus states: ‘Christianity
will only serve to give rise to the idea, though there is little Greek about it, that the
problem for man is not to perfect his nature but to escape from it’ (CMN 96). For
Camus, ascesis – a Greek practice – provides the means by which man can ‘perfect
his nature’, while asceticism – a Christian deformation of the Greek practice – only
provides humans with a method of escaping their nature (or by creating the illusion
of escaping human nature altogether); the former confers self-mastery, while the
latter results in self-denial. First and foremost, asceticism is a denial of this world in
favour of another; while for ascesis, this world is all there is. ‘In a certain sense the

12
For more detail regarding the relationship between ascesis and tragedy in Camus, see Matthew Lamb,
‘The Rebirth of Tragedy: Camus and Nietzsche’, Philosophy Today, vol. 55, no. 2, 2011, pp 96–108.
572 M. Lamb

Greeks believed that existence could be justified by reference to sport and to beauty’,
Camus states in the introduction to his diploma dissertation, adding to this an
autobiographical note, reflecting his life in Algiers and his love the sun and the sea:
‘The shape of their hills, or a young man running on a beach, revealed to them the
whole secret of the universe’ (CMN 94).
This distinction between ascesis and asceticism is significant because it recurs
throughout Camus’ work, as does his associated distinction between the Greek and
Christian world views. It is an idea that undergirds Camus’ understanding of measure
and limits. In fact, the argument of The Rebel is constructed around the discussion of
limits and measure in human action, arguing for their presence, and examining what
results when they are denied. Camus argues that there is a point when an individual’s
actions may overstep the limit, and this brings into question the legitimacy that created
the need for the initial action and that, in creating this need, also creates the limit
beyond which this initial legitimacy may be called into question. What this idea of
limits and measure shows in Camus’ work is that these modes of practice – ascesis
and asceticism – are not binary opposites, let alone a dualism of any sort. Rather they
are continuous with one another. Here ascesis marks the initial practice, whereby a
person can ‘perfect his nature’, and asceticism marks the point when this initial nature
is denied and the limits created by the practices of ascesis are transgressed.
Werner Jaeger, an historian of ancient Greece – writing around the same time that
Camus was writing his diploma dissertation – offers a useful comparison in which to
better grasp what I believe Camus, as an amateur Greek historian, was edging
toward in this implicit distinction between (Greek) ascesis and (Christian)
asceticism. In his book, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia, Jaeger makes the
following distinction between the Greek and Christian forms of self-training: the
former is based on morphosis and the latter on metamorphosis (91). Here the Greek
practice of training or education is based on forming the self, while the Christian
method is more concerned with transforming the self or making the self other. For
the Christian, this other is Christ and this metamorphosis is achieved through the
imitation of Christ: ‘imitatio Christi: Christ must take shape in him’ (93).13 Such a
metamorphosis is a normalising process, subordinating the individual to a universal
ideal, while morphosis remains a practice proportional to the individual.
This possible slip between ascesis and asceticism surfaces again and again in
Camus’ work, in various modalities that are expressed in other pairings of terms:
rebellion and revolution; unity and totality; creation and nihilism; defiance and
denial, and so on. None of these pairs of terms denotes a binary opposition, or even a
dualism. The source of the second term is always to be found in the first term, and
yet it represents an activity which has transgressed the self-imposed limits of the first
term, an end point which has become separated from its point of origin, thus
rendering the additional activity illegitimate.
What is interesting about the Christian method is that it implies an already formed
human self, an already achieved, or partially achieved, morphosis, which it can then
trans-form, or meta-morphose, into an-other, supposedly higher self. For Camus, the
Greek view is more modest and never sees this initial human self as ever being fully

13
Jaeger, Werner, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia, (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1961).
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Albert Camus and Pierre Hadot 573

formed; its ascesis terminates only in death, while, for the Christian view, death
marks the point at which this higher self can be finally realised. Asceticism, in this
respect, is a way of harnessing death in life, and is concerned with denying the
individual human self. Significantly, Hadot draws a similar distinction between these
two notions early in his work:
Before we begin our study, we must be more specific about the notion of spiritual
exercises. ‘Exercise’ corresponds to the Greek term ascesis. . . Let us be clear at
the outset about the limits of the present inquiry: we shall not be discussing
‘asceticism’ in the modern sense of the word. . . On the one hand, there is the
Christian – and subsequently modern – use of the word ‘asceticism’. . . On the
other, there is use of the word askesis in ancient philosophy. (PWL, 128)
But – and this is the main point of contention between Camus and Hadot – Hadot
himself does not maintain this distinction throughout his analysis. He constantly
describes Greek askesis in terms of Christian asceticism, and in the process, I would
argue, he recreates the conditions in his own discourse of the initial stages of the
deformation of this ethical practice.
Nowhere is this more obvious in Hadot’s work than in his interpretation of what is
most significant about the figure of Socrates. For Hadot, philosophy as a way of life
begins with Socrates, and then develops in the schools of Plato and Aristotle.
‘Socrates exposed himself to death for the sake of virtue’, Hadot states.
He preferred to die rather than renounce the demands of his conscience, thus
preferring the Good above being, and thought and conscience above the life of
his body. This is nothing other than the fundamental philosophical choice. . .
We can perhaps get a better idea of this spiritual exercise if we understand it as
an attempt to liberate ourselves from a partial, passionate point of view –
linked to the sense and the body – so as to rise to the universal, normative
viewpoint of thought, submitting ourselves to the demands of the Logos and
the norm of the Good. Training for death is training to die to one’s
individuality and passions, in order to look at things from the perspective of
universality and objectivity. (PWL, 94–95)
Already, it can be seen here that Hadot is rendering Socrates’ death in terms of a
metamorphosis, based upon the denial of his individuality, his body and his human
imagination, in other words, of practicing an asceticism. From this, Hadot latches
upon Plato’s later definition of philosophy as being a ‘training for death’ and then
uses this as a measure against which a philosopher’s way of life must be assessed.
‘The most famous practice is the exercise of death’, he writes: ‘Plato alludes to it in
the Phaedo, whose theme is precisely the death of Socrates. . . It is an exercise of
death because death is the separation of the soul and the body, and the philosopher
spends his time trying to detach his soul from his body’ (WAP, 66). This move is all
the more surprising when Hadot then explicitly compares this – what he claims is an
‘askesis’ – with the way Christian asceticism was originally conceived:

Asceticism was often conceived in a Platonic way, as the separation of the

body from the soul, which was a precondition for the vision of God. . .
Evagrius of Pontus takes up the same theme in clearly Neoplatonic terms: ‘To
574 M. Lamb

separate the body from the soul belongs to Him who has united them, but to
separate the soul from the body belongs to the person who tends toward virtue.
For our Fathers call anachōrēsis [the monastic life] a training for death and a
flight from the body.’ (WAP, 240)
Furthermore, this asceticism is defined by Hadot in terms of the imitation of
Christ: ‘Often, training for death was linked to the remembrance of the death of
Christ, and asceticism was understood as participation in the Passion’ (WAP, 248).
And again:
Obedience – the renunciation of one’s own will, in complete submission to the
orders of a superior – completely transformed the philosophical practices of
spiritual direction. . . In the final analysis, all these virtues were transfigured by
the transcendent dimension of the love of God and of Christ. Thus, to train for
death, or to separate the soul from the body, was at the same time to participate
in the death of Christ. To renounce one’s will was to adhere to divine love.
(PWL, 139–140).
This process recalls Jaeger’s conception of metamorphosis, and the transforming
of an already partially formed self into being another ‘self’, an imitation of someone
else; for Christians, this someone else is Christ. For ancient philosophers, according
to Hadot, this someone else is Socrates.
This conclusion is not at all surprising if one considers the fact that the early
schools of philosophy, especially those of Plato and Aristotle, were not particularly
interested in actually imitating Socrates’ way of life (that is, the way of life of a
citizen within the polis). Rather, they preferred the contemplative life, predicated
upon the distinction between action and contemplation that was born of the conflict
between the polis and the philosophers in fourth century Athens. In this context, it is
not difficult to see how Plato reached the conclusion he did. In fact, Hadot provides
the key in his discussion on the death of Socrates:
It is most interesting to note that here knowledge and lack-of-knowledge have
to do not with concepts, but with values: on the one hand, the value of death;
on the other, the value of moral good and moral evil. Socrates knows nothing
about the value which ought to be attributed to death, because it is not in his
power, and because the experience of his own death escapes him by definition.
(WAP, 33)
In other words, Socrates cannot raise his own ‘death’ to the level of a conceptual
understanding, because it is beyond his experience. But experience of Socrates’
death at the hands of the polis did not escape Plato and others who survived him and
who consequently attributed a value to that particular death. In doing so, Plato
deformed the significance of Socrates’ life, which should perhaps be focused on the
way he lived – not the way he died. This is a point made by Josiah Ober:
Plato was not convinced to abandon politics by anything that Socrates said or
taught by example (i.e., by his argument [logos] or way of life [bios]), but
rather by the fact (ergon) of his ultimate fate. And thus a distinction can be
drawn between the historical Socrates, whose actual teaching (to the extent that
Plato absorbed it) was not necessarily antithetical to the active engagement in
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Albert Camus and Pierre Hadot 575

political activity in a democracy by someone like Plato, and the works of Plato
himself, which were written in the shadow of what he regarded as the judicial
murder of the best of men. ‘Socrates’ (Plato’s character) expounds his
arguments in light of a devastating fact that Socrates (the man) did not
actually know until the very end of his life. It is the monstrous ergon of the
circumstances surrounding Socrates’ death that stands between teacher and
student, as well as between the might-have-been Plato (the philosophical
politician) and the real Plato (the political philosopher).14
‘Philosophy’, from Plato onwards, therefore repeats this imitation of the death of
Socrates. This was – or so Camus implies – the actual beginning of the process of
the deformation of ascesis, in which eventually the mastery of oneself shifted toward
allowing oneself to be mastered, to be reformed by an external authority. Such
authority, within the philosophical schools, henceforth became associated with the
written discourse, and, more importantly, in the abstract, theoretical and doctrinal
content of these discourses.

VI.

This, I believe, is the fundamental difference between Hadot and Camus. Hadot fails
to maintain the necessary distinction between ascesis and asceticism, while Camus
begins his own project on the principle of this separation – what he calls the absurd –
behind which he can maintain the balanced mastery of his own individuality, his
body and imagination. In contrast to Hadot’s starting point in Platonism, this practice
of wisdom as being a ‘way of life’ finds its origins – not in the anti-tragic theatre of
philosophy – but in the pre-Platonic theatre of tragedy; as Peter J. Euben states,
In the opening scene of the Eumenides, the Priestess refers to the Athenians as
road builders (keleuthopoioi) who, in honor of Apollo, ‘transformed a
wilderness into a land no longer wild’ (924–25). Literally, keleuthos means
road, track, or path on land or sea; metaphorically, it indicates a way of life.
(The word can also mean a journey, voyage, or a way of walking.) This
suggests that the Athenians have, in alliance with the god, defined a way of life
as well as a human place; that they have charted a moral and political
wilderness as well as a physical one. Where before darkness and confusion
reigned there is now light and order.15 (32)
It is an ‘ancient path’ that Camus traversed in his own writings, from his first
lyrical essays, through to The Myth of Sisyphus, and beyond. As he states in the
preface to the republication of his lyrical essays,
But, in the end, my needs, my errors, and my infidelities have always brought
me back to the ancient path I began to explore in The Wrong Side and the Right

14
Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton, N.
J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 164.
15
Peter J. Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1990), 32.
576 M. Lamb

Side, whose traces are visible in everything I’ve done since, and along which
on certain mornings in Algiers, for example, I still walk with the same slight
intoxication. (LC, 14–15)
And so, in this context, it may be seen how in Camus’ early work, up to and
including the publication of The Myth of Sisyphus, there is evidence to support the
ideas that, firstly, Camus has identified a series of historical moments – prefiguring
Hadot’s later historical analysis, while going further still – as obstacles to the notion
that ancient philosophy was, first and foremost, a way of life, as opposed to being
simply a discourse, and secondly, that Camus proceeds by orienting his own work
toward overcoming these obstacles, toward a rehabilitation of ascesis.
‘The preceding merely defines a way of thinking’, Camus says in The Myth of
Sisyphus. ‘But the point is to live’ (MS, 65).