Physics, Periodization & Platonism:

Inflecting the Foucault-Hadot Dialogue in Light of L’Herméneutique du subjet

§1 Reframing the Foucault-Hadot dialogue after L’Herméneutique du subjet

Pierre Hadot described his relationship to the later work of Michel Foucault as a dialogue which was interrupted too

soon by his friend’s death. Foucault refers to Hadot in the second and third volumes of History of Sexuality. We can

now see that he is also an important presence in Foucault’s extraordinary 1981-82 lecture series, L’Herméneutique du

subjet. Hadot wrote two articles on his friend’s work, in which he identified both similarities and differences between

his post-1970 work on philosophy as a way of life and Foucault’s later work on the ancient Greek’s “use of pleasure”,

as well as the “culture of the self” of the Hellenistic and Roman imperial period. It is the divergences that have most

occupied scholars (Vergetti, 1986; Pradeau, 2002; O’Leary, 2003: 70-78; McGushin, 2007: 103-4; Lorenzini, 2015;

Sellars, 2020). In his 1987 “An Interrupted Dialogue with Michel Foucault: Convergences and Divergences” (2020),

Hadot challenged the notion of an “aesthetics of existence” central to Foucault’s conception of the ancients in volumes

II and III of The History of Sexuality. Stressing the place of “the good” (agathon) as well as “the beautiful” (kalon) in

classical philosophical ethics, he articulates his central criticism. “Instead of a culture of the self”, Hadot writes:

It would be better to speak of the ‘transformation’, ‘transfiguration’ or ‘surpassing’ (dépassement) of the self.

In order to describe this state, one cannot avoid the term ‘wisdom’ which, it seems to me, appears very rarely,

if ever, in Foucault. Wisdom … is a mode of existence which is characterized by three essential aspects: peace

of mind (ataraxia), inner freedom (autarkeia) and, except in the sceptics, cosmic consciousness: that is to say,

the process of becoming aware of belonging to the human and cosmic Whole, a sort of dilation or

transfiguration of the self which realizes greatness of soul (megalopsychia). (Hadot, 2020: 230)

We cannot even understand ancient philosophical therapeutics, amply recognized by Foucault, in the absence of seeing

how overcoming anxiety and achieving happiness involved for the ancient philosophers:

developing the awareness that one is a ‘natural’ being, which is to say that one is, in some way, a part of the

cosmos, and that one participates in the event of universal existence. It is a matter of seeing things from the

viewpoint of universal nature, of putting human affairs in their true perspective. (2020: 231)

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Hadot’s 1989 “Reflections on the Idea of the ‘Cultivation of the Self’” (1995) introduces further criticisms, notably

challenging Foucault concerning the distinction between pleasure (voluptas) and joy (gaudium) in Seneca.1

Nevertheless, Hadot’s reflections again rest upon this key claim that Foucault misreads how, in Stoicism (but also more

widely):

It is not the case that the Stoic finds his joy in his ‘self’; rather, as Seneca says, ‘in the best portion of the ‘self’,

in the ‘true good’… Joy can be found in what Seneca calls ‘perfect reason’ (that is to say, in divine reason) since

for him, human reason is nothing other than reason capable of being made perfect. The ‘best portion of

himself’, then, is in the last analysis, a transcendent self. Seneca does not find his joy in ‘Seneca’ but by

transcending ‘Seneca’; by discovering that there is within him--within all human beings, that is, and within

the cosmos itself--a reason which is part of universal reason. (1995: 207)2

Hadot’s criticisms of Foucault then concern what he terms the “historical point of view” (1995: 208) in Foucault’s work.

The convergence is around Foucault’s intention to “offer contemporary mankind a model of life” (1995: 208); an

intention which Hadot’s own work on ancient philosophy shares. Hadot’s claim is nevertheless that Foucault’s own

presentist concerns, and his instantiation of “a more or less universal tendency of modern thought” for which “the ideas

of ‘universal reason’ and ‘universal nature’ do not have meaning any more” have led him to read the ancients selectively

and inaccurately (Hadot, 1995: 208). As Hadot writes, in a decisive passage:

What I am afraid of is that, by focusing his interpretation too exclusively on the culture of the self, the care of

the self, and conversion toward the self – more generally, by defining his ethical model as an aesthetics of

existence – M. Foucault is propounding a culture of the self which is too aesthetic. In other words, this may be

a new form of Dandyism, late twentieth-century style. (Hadot, 1995: 211)

Hadot is not alone amongst scholars of ancient philosophy, or even amongst Foucault scholars, in making this kind of

critique of the later Foucault’s “retour aux Grecs”.3 Even Arnold I. Davidson in “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History

of Ethics, and Ancient Thought” as well as his “Introduction” to Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life, concurs that:

Foucault not only gave a too narrow construal of ancient ethics, but that he limited the ‘care of the self’ [i.e.

the sphere of spirituality] to ethics alone. Foucault made no place for that cosmic consciousness, for physics

1 He also criticizes the putative absence of much engagement with Epicureanism in Foucault’s vision, and concerning self-writing or
écriture de soi, notably including (for Hadot) its direction towards cultivating a transformed sense of the present in practitioners, as
against a recollection aimed at the past
2 Hadot is citing here Seneca’s Letters 23, 6; 23, 7; 124, 23; & 92, 27. Elsewhere, he will adduce the toti se inserens mundo of Letters

66, 6, as below.
3 Indeed, his own articles directly influence Pradeu’s criticisms in “Le subjet ancien d’une éthique modern. À propos des exercises

spirituels anciens dans l’Histoire de la sexualité de Michel Foucault” (2002), in Frédéric Gros (dir.) Foucault: le courage de la vérité
(Paris: PUF, 2002), and they are echoed and developed within Mario Vegetti’s “Foucault et les anciens” (1986) Critique: Revue
générale des publications françaises et étrangères 42 (1986) as well as, within Foucault scholarship, Timothy O’Leary in Foucault and
the Art of Living (2003),70-73, 75-81.
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 as spiritual exercise, that was so important to the way in which the ancient philosopher viewed his relation

to the world. By not attending to that aspect of the care of the self that places the self within a cosmic

dimension, whereby the self, in becoming aware of its belonging to the cosmic Whole, thus transform itself,

Foucault was not able to see the full scope of spiritual exercises, that physics (and logic), as much as ethics,

aimed at self-transformation. (Davidson, 1995: 24-25; cf. 2006, 120-122)4

One might then hold that the Foucault-Hadot debate concerning how to read ancient philosophy was now “open and

shut”, the recent attempt by Giorgio Agamben to enter the lists on Foucault’s side notwithstanding (Agamben, 2016; cf.

Sharpe & Stettler, 2021). Nevertheless, each of these critical assessments of Foucault, and most notably that of Hadot,

significantly predated the publication in 2001 in France, and then in 2006 in English, of Foucault’s Herméneutique du

subjet (Hermeneutics of the Subject¸ hereafter HS).5 As the editor of Hermeneutics of the Subject, Frédéric Gros, however

comments in a note to the manuscript, “the difference in the interpretations and uses of this tradition [the ancients’]

made by Foucault and Hadot have to be reexamined in the light of the Hermeneutics of the Subject” (HS, xxix, n. 21).

It is just such a reexamination that I want to proffer here. For reading Foucault’s extraordinary 1981-82 lecture series

presents us with a good deal of content which not only challenges several of Hadot’s minor claims contra Foucault6, but

calls for significant revision of Hadot’s central criticism of Foucault’s putative failure to account for anything like the

“cosmic dimension” in ancient thought, involving the study of, and even identification with, the larger Whole of nature

in ancient philosophy. In the lectures of Hermeneutics of the Subject, in fact, Foucault devotes considerable time to

analyzing both Epicurean physiologia (natural philosophy), as well as--and more decisively--Stoic physics and how it

shapes the concern for existential self-transformation in Seneca the Younger’s Natural Questions and Marcus Aurelius’s

Meditations. In the latter case, Foucault is so far from neglecting Hadot’s position that physics was a spiritual exercise

for the Stoics as to directly cite the latter’s ground-breaking 1973 article on “Physics as Spiritual Exercise: Optimism

and Pessimism in Marcus Aurelius” (Hadot, 2020x; HS, 292). As we say in Australia, what reading Hermeneutics of the

Subject makes clear is that the goalposts need to shift, in terms of how we understand the relationship between Hadot’s

and Foucault’s work, and how we critically understand the latter’s specific perspective on the ancients (cf. Sellars,

2020).

4 To substantiate his position, Davidson even cites testimony by Paul Veyne, whom Hadot (2020: 229) also recurs to in his first piece
on his dialogue with Foucault’s work on the ancients: “One day,” Paul Veyne reported on one revealing occasion, “I asked Foucault:
‘The care of the self, that is very nice, but what do you do with logic, what do you do with physics?’, he responded: ‘Oh, these are
enormous excrescences [ce sont d’énormes excroissances]!”
5 Hadot notes in “Interrupted dialogue’ in 1987 that he had access only to the summary of Foucault’s 1981-82 lecture course that

was published early on the Annuaire du Collège de France, from which he was able to glean the full extent of the comparison between
this work and his own.
6 For instance, Hadot claims that Foucault strangely omits consideration of the Epicureans, which is a shortcoming amply redressed

in the Hermeneutics of the Self. Cf. HS, 136-38 on Epicurean school, 193-95 on Epicurean friendship, 137-138 of parrêsia in
Epicureanism, and 238-243 on Epicurean physics; as well as below.
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Our contention here, stated schematically, is that what reading Foucault’s treatment of Stoicism particularly within

Hermeneutics of the Subject makes clear, contra Hadot, is that the line dividing his and Foucault’s assessments of the

Hellenistic-Roman philosophies should not be drawn where Hadot drew it: namely, around Foucault’s alleged failure

to consider the cosmic dimension within ancient philosophies. The Foucault of Hermeneutics of the Subject encounters

this dimension of the toti se inserens mundo in Seneca and Marcus Aurelius (Hadot, 1995: 208, 252, 273 2020, 20), as

well as within the Platonists, albeit in a way which we will show is riven with significant tensions and characterized by

contestable textual selections and omissions. The Foucault-Hadot difference concerning the ancients needs instead to

be recast, considering these tensions within Foucault’s engagement with Hellenistic-Roman physics, as looking back to

two interlinking distinctions operative in Foucault’s work on the ancient philosophies, both of which Hadot’s work

contests. The first of these is Foucault’s strong periodizing distinction between the classical-Platonic, and Hellenistic-

Roman “golden age” of philosophical “care of the self” or “culture of the self” (HS, 81; HS III, 45). The second is the

decisive difference Foucault sets up between Platonism (and Neoplatonism) and the Hellenistic and Roman

philosophical models of care of the self in Stoicism and Epicureanism, which we will argue decisively shape his

interpretations of the latter philosophies.

To make this case, in §2, I will examine in close detail Foucault’s decisive treatments of Epicurean and Stoic physics in

Hermeneutics of the Subject. This examination will show how Foucault at once grants, against Hadot, and then draws

back from unequivocally granting, with Hadot, the presence of a cosmic dimension within Stoicism. §4 contends that

this symptomatic tension in Foucault’s text is the effect of Foucault’s periodization of the ancient philosophies, and his

desire, foreign to Hadot, to effectively quarantine the Hellenistic-Roman care of the self from what he calls “the Platonic

model” which would implicate self-care with accessing the divine within oneself and the world (cf. McGushin, 2007:

105-106).

§2 Conversio ad se and the cosmic dimension in Hermeneutics of the Subject

It is important to credit that Hadot does not wholly deny the validity and significance of Michel Foucault’s identification

of a movement of conversio ad se, conversion to oneself, in the Hellenistic and Roman philosophies (HS, 210-218). As

he writes, summarizing a good deal of the itinerary which Foucault will cover in the lectures of Hermeneutics of the

Subject:

what Foucault calls ‘practices of the self’ do indeed correspond, for the Platonists as well as for the Stoics, to

a movement of conversion toward the self. One frees oneself from exteriority, from personal attachment to

exterior objects, and from the pleasures they may provide. One observes oneself, to determine whether one

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 has made progress in this exercise. One seeks to be one's own master, to possess oneself, and find one's

happiness in freedom and inner independence. (Hadot, 1995: 211)

It is nevertheless a second movement, whereby this conversio ad se involves a transcendence or overcoming of the

ordinary, egoistic self of intramundane life, which Hadot charges that his friend in the History of Sexuality texts falsely

excludes from his consideration of the ancients:

I do think, however, that this movement of interiorization is inseparably linked to another movement,

whereby one rises to a higher psychic level, at which one encounters another kind of exteriorization, another

relationship with ‘the exterior’. This is a new way of being-in-the-world, which consists in becoming aware of

oneself as a part of nature, and a portion of universal reason. At this point, one no longer lives in the usual,

conventional human world, but in the world' of nature. As we have seen above, one is then practicing ‘physics’

as a spiritual exercise. (Hadot, 1995: 211)

Given certain formulations within Hermeneutics of the Subject wherein Foucault characterizes the care for the self in

Hellenistic-Roman philosophy as one in which the self is “no longer one element among others”, but “the definitive and

sole aim of care of the self” (HS, 177), one could be forgiven for hearing this Hadotian criticism echo in the back of the

mind. Consider, for example:

The self is [now] the definitive and sole aim of the care of the self …. It is an activity focused solely on the self

and whose outcome, realization and satisfaction, in the strong sense of the word, is found only in the self, that

is to say in the activity itself that is exercised on the self. One takes care of the self for oneself, and this care

finds its own reward in the care of the self. In the care of the self, one is one's own object and end. There is, so

to speak, both an absolutization (please forgive the word) of the self as object of care, and a self-finalization

of the self by the self in the practice we call the care of the self. (HS, 177)

Nevertheless, when we look at the lectures from 10 February 1982 (HS, chapter eleven) to 24 February 1982 (HS,

chapter sixteen), one might equally be struck by the odd impression that Foucault is tracking, in advance, the course

Hadot recommends, outwards from considering care of the self, towards this “exteriorization” of the egoistic self in

philosophical physics. In the Hellenistic and Roman philosophies, it is a question of conversion to, liberation or even

salvation of, the self (HS, 179-183). But we must be careful to identify which “self” is at issue here, and what the

imperative to gnôthi seauton, “know yourself”, means in this context. Even when we look at a Cynic like Demetrius,

Foucault contends (HS, 231-237), we see that what is decisive is not a turn away from natural philosophy per se in

order to focus introspectively on who one is, let alone the Ideas one might recall or the sins one might exegetically

discern (HS, 254-57). One instead needs to focus on one’s goals and aims in the world, and how one thinks about the

events, people, and things one encounters there. Such a focus does not exclude; indeed, it requires, a comportment

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towards natural things, and oneself as a natural being for instance subject to death. What is at issue in no way implies

an exclusion of physical knowledges, that is to say, but focus on what Plutarch calls (HS, 237-38) etho-poetic, character-

shaping knowledges (cf. Sellars, 2020: 10):

another modality of knowing (savoir) … a relational mode of knowledge, because when we now consider the

gods, other men, the kosmos, the world, etcetera, this involves taking into account the relation between the

gods, men, the world and things of the world on the one hand, and ourselves on the other. (HS, 235)

We then turn directly to Epicurean physiologia, which Foucault has no issue with recognizing within the framework of

what he is calling “care of the self”. As he writes, having cited various of Epicurus’ explanations of the therapeutic need

to study nature, to quell fears of death, natural disasters, the gods, and the underworld:

What is required … is not a knowledge that would focus on themselves, not a knowledge that would take the

soul or the self as the real object of knowledge (connaissance). It is… knowledge (savoir) concerning things,

the world, the gods and men, but whose effect and function are to change the subject's being. This truth must

affect the subject. (HS, 243)

In the Stoics as in the Epicurean and Cynic traditions, Foucault notes that there is a tradition of criticism of “useless”

knowledge (HS 260-61).7 But again, as in Epicureanism, this criticism, and the Stoics’ cognate stress on the etho-poetic

value of the knowledges the philosopher should pursue, did not prevent physics from being one part of Stoic

philosophy, alongside logic and ethics. Indeed, as Foucault notes, Stoicism continued to be associated with “scientific”

pursuits throughout antiquity (HS, 260): one could think in this connection of the polymathic Middle Stoic Posidonius.

But Seneca too, addresses physical questions in his later letters to Lucilius, and we know that he also authored a work

of natural philosophy, the Natural Questions, that he sent to his pupil. So, Foucault asks, why should Seneca, precisely

as an old man preparing for death--and who we might then suppose to be most “self”-focused--think to write a major

treatise, encompassing seven books on the sky, air, rivers and seas, wind, earth, and meteors? (HS, 261) Why this

attempt in his final years, as Seneca puts it, to mundum circuire (encompass the whole world) and investigate causas

secretaque (causes and secrets), when time is fleeing him, so that it is more needed than ever that he should “ad

contemplationem sui saltem in ipso fugae impetus respiciat”, “turn around to contemplate the self, in the very movement

of flight”? (HS, 262)

As Seneca writes, and as Foucault notes, what is at issue is in fact nothing else than the search for megalopsychia,

greatness of soul, an important term for Hadot in his account of ancient philosophy’s aim (cf. 2020: 230):

7We see this at work, for instance, in Seneca’s criticisms of the liberal arts in Letter 88 to Lucilius, in his opening recommendations
to Lucilius about what and how to read, as well as in remarks about the library of Alexandria in De Tranquillitate.
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 Those who have made themselves masters of towns and entire nations are countless; but how few have been

masters of themselves! What is great down here? It is raising one's soul above the threats and promises of

fortune … What is great is a steadfast soul, serene in adversity, a soul that accepts every event as if it were

desired… What is great is to see the features of fate fall at one's feet; it is to remember that one is a man; it is,

when one is happy, saying to oneself that one will not be happy for long. What is great is having one's soul at

one's lips, ready to depart; then one is free not by the laws of the city but by the law of nature (HS, 265).

The problem is that, when we are caught up in our usual lives, we find ourselves absorbed in the pursuits of lucre,

status, power, and the pleasures: what Foucault labels “this system of obligation-reward, of indebtedness-activity-

pleasure” (HS, 273). Studying the things of nature, far outside of the circle of our ordinary concerns, is a means to

liberate ourselves from this “system”, Seneca proposes (cf. McGushin, 2007: 138-140). Firstly, as Hadot explores in

“The View from Above” (1995) and other texts, examining natural phenomena allows us to fly, flee, or “tear” ourselves

away from our flaws and vices; by detaching us from the objects of our mundane preoccupations (HS, 275). This

therapeutic dimension of Stoic physics is evidently that closest in function to Epicurean physiologia. But then, things

become very interesting in Hermeneutics of the Subject, from the perspective the Foucault-Hadot relation. For,

secondly, Foucault continues to echo Hadot’s larger claim that the examination of natural things has a specifically

elevating dimension, whereby:

it leads us to the source of light, leads us to God, … in the form that allows us to find ourselves again, the text

says, "in consortium Dei" [fellowship with God]: in a sort of co-naturalness or co-functionality with God. That

is to say, human reason is of the same nature as divine reason. It has the same properties and the same role

and function. What divine reason is to the world, human reason must be to man. (HS, 275)

A third function comes from how, through this movement of elevation, we can come to occupy exactly that point of

orientation that Hadot described as the view from above, which allows us to look down upon affairs, and attain new

insight into the secrets of nature (HS, 275-76).

So, it seems, everything is indeed here for a refutatio in textu. If Hadot’s claim, without access to Hermeneutics of the

Subject, was that Foucault’s approach prevented him from accounting for what Hadot terms the cosmic dimension of

ancient philosophical reflection, our access to this text puts matters to rights. Foucault will develop and repeat the

decisive idea that physics, for Seneca, involves elevating oneself beyond one’s ordinary perspective, to occupy a

perspective if not sub spaecie aternitatis, then in fellowship with God:

This liberation enables us to reach the highest regions of the world without, as it were, ever losing ourselves

from sight and without the world to which we belong ever being out of our sight. We reach the point from

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 which God himself sees the world and, without our ever actually turning away from this world, we see the

world to which we belong and consequently can see ourselves within this world. (HS, 276)

Echoing Hadot’s position, Foucault will maintain that for Seneca, so far is the conversio ad se from pointing towards an

egoic aesthetic, that “we can only know ourselves properly if we have a point of view on nature, a knowledge

(connaissance), a broad and detailed knowledge (savoir) that allows us to know not only its overall organization, but

its details” (HS, 278). Beyond the Epicurean physiologia, above all:

this form of knowledge involves grasping ourselves again here where we are, at the point where we exist, that

is to say of placing ourselves within a wholly rational and reassuring world, which is the world of a divine

Providence; a divine Providence that has placed us here where we are and which has therefore situated us

within a sequence of specific, necessary, and rational causes and effects that must be accepted if we really

want to free ourselves … (HS, 278)

So, we note, even the defining Stoic dimension of the rationality (Logos) of the world, which Hadot insists upon (cf.

Pradeau, 2002: 142-43, 145-46), is present here: by doing Stoic physics, we would “link” ourselves “to a set of

determinations and necessities whose rationality we understand,” Foucault says (HS, 279). As ever, contrasting this

form of self-knowledge with a “withdrawing and questioning itself” which takes different forms (he argues) within

Platonism and Christianity, Foucault will underscore the Zenonian homologoumenos of individual and cosmic Logoi:

What is actually involved in this real investigation is understanding the rationality of the world in order to

recognize, at that point, that the reason that presided over the organization of the world, and which is God's

reason itself, is of the same kind as the reason we possess that enables us to know it. To reiterate, the

discovery that human and divine reason share a common nature and function together is not brought about

in the form of the recollection of the soul looking at itself, but rather through the movement of the mind's

curiosity exploring the order of the world … (HS, 281-82)

But, at exactly this pinnacular point, Foucault makes two comments which reintroduce tensions into his apparent

rapprochement with Hadot’s conception of Hellenistic-Roman care, or transformation, of the self. The first comes when

Foucault pauses to draw out what he calls two “effects” of the Stoic natural knowledge as we find it in Seneca’s Natural

Questions. The first of these effects, as Foucault writes, is:

to obtain a sort of maximum tension between the self as reason—and consequently, as such, as universal

reason, having the same nature as divine reason—and the self as individual component, placed here and there

in the world, in an absolutely restricted and delimited spot. So, the first effect of this knowledge of nature is

to establish the maximum tension between the self as reason and the self as point. (HS, 279-80)

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One would certainly like to hear more about this “maximum tension” between the individual and reasoned self,

whereas Foucault’s text does not elaborate. For such a language seems foreign to the Stoic texts and is not supported

by any primary evidence. At best, we can suggest that Foucault means here to describe the effect of identifying with

the divine or cosmic reason, which necessarily establishes a liberating distance from one’s daily intramundane or

egoistic self: this is its therapeutic dimension. One might then suggest a “tension” between these two existential poles.

Yet, one struggles to reconcile this new language of “maximum tension” as a goal of the physio-epistemic exercise, with

the language of “liberation” from this ordinary self, and its worries and vices, which Foucault has cited in Seneca (HS,

276). Either one would wish to liberate oneself, or not, from this mundane self to identify with divine reason, less

Seneca as individual than what is best ‘in’ Seneca, which is also not simply his own: being a portion of the universal

reason, toti se inserens mundo (Seneca, Ep. 66, 6). To establish a “tension” with it seems discordant with the Stoic

concerns for tranquility, serenity, apatheia, ataraxia, euthymia and cognate terms describing the inner life of the sage.

This formulation seems more Foucaultian, perhaps more Nietzschean, than Hellenistic or Roman.

The second contentious, or at least strikingly contra-Hadotian, Foucaultian claim in his account of Stoic physics, arises

from his subsequent examination of the place and function of physics in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. In a condensed

lecture which directly refers to Hadot’s 1973 texts on physics as spiritual exercise in Marcus (HS, 292), Foucault

examines the series of spiritual exercises in the Meditations wherein the emperor-philosopher enjoins himself to cast

an analytic, disenchanted gaze on the things he encounters: analyzing them into their material constituents, as well as

“decomposing” their temporality (that of a melody, into discrete notes, for instance (HS, 301-2)), or, in the case of other

human beings, visualizing them in the most mundane nakedness (HS, 305-6; cf. Hadot, 2020: 212-217). The point of

these exercises, Foucault agrees with Hadot (2020: 216-219), is to reduce the power of external things over us--or of

externals as we ordinarily interpret them in light of our fears and desires (Hadot, 2020: 216-17, 219-220). Foucault

moreover notes, with reference to Meditations III, 11, that their intention is thereby to enable a form of greatness of

soul, megalaphrosunê, which can as it were “look down” on things others strive and angst over (HS, 305, 306; Hadot,

2020: 212, 216-20).

Nevertheless, Foucault notes that in these exercises, the point of view Marcus enjoins himself to adopt is not a view

from above, so much as a view which breaks the things he encounters down into their almost “infinitesimal” parts or

“singular elements” (HS, 306). On this basis, indeed--and, it must be said, strikingly omitting the multiple figurings of

the view from above exercise we can nevertheless find in the Meditations, as Hadot has alerted us (Hadot, 1995: 244-

45; 1998: 174-178, 254, 256)8--Foucault discerns in Marcus what he calls “a figure of spiritual knowledge” which is

“opposite, or symmetrically opposite” to Seneca’s position in Natural Questions:

8 IV, 3; IV, 32; VII, 35; VII, 47; IX.30; VII, 47 & 48; XII.24; XII, 27; cf. also IV.50; VI.24; VII.19.2; VIII.25; VIII.37; XII.27.
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 Rather, the figure in Marcus Aurelius defines a movement of the subject who, starting from the point he

occupies in the world, plunges into this world, or at any rate studies this world, down to its smallest details,

as if to focus the gaze of a near-sighted person onto the finest grain of things. (HS, 290)

Elsewhere, he will assign to Marcus the dubious role of “undoubtedly introducing [sic] a distinction, an inflection in

Stoicism”: a claim which certainly has no Hadotian analogue (HS, 306). When Foucault explains this striking claim, it

is by arguing that Marcus’ dissolution of material reality into “singular, distinct elements” is so radical as to threaten

the unity of the self:

The only unity of which we are capable and which can provide us with a foundation in what we are, in this

identity as subject that we can and must be in relation to ourselves, is our unity insofar as we are rational

subjects, that is to say as no more than part of the reason that presides over the world. (HS, 307)

At this point, that is, we seem exactly to have rejoined the identity of individual and divine reason which Foucault,

echoing Hadot, sees as the high point of Seneca’s spiritualization of physical knowledge. Nevertheless, strikingly,

Foucault has seemingly enacted a volte face. Now, he presents exactly this feature of Marcus’ Meditations as the mark

of his putative “inflection” of Senecan Stoicism:

if we look at ourselves below us, … we are nothing but a series of separate, distinct elements: material

elements and discontinuous moments. But if we try to grasp ourselves as reasonable and rational principle,

we will then realize that we are no more than part of the reason presiding over the entire world. So, the

spiritual exercise of Marcus Aurelius tends towards a sort of dissolution of individuality, whereas the function

of Seneca's spiritual exercise—with the subject's move to the world's summit from where he can grasp

himself in his singularity—was, rather, to found and establish the subject's identity, its singularity and the

stable being of the self it constitutes. (HS, 307)

Later, then, Foucault will make an even stronger claim which has the effect of positioning Marcus as not simply an

inflection within Stoicism, but within the entire orbit of ancient philosophical culture:

I just remind you of the very strange and interesting inflection found in Marcus Aurelius, in which ascesis …

leads to a questioning of the identity of the self by virtue of the discontinuity of the elements of which we are

composed, or by virtue of the universality of reason of which we are a part. However, it seems to me that this

is much more an inflection than a fully general feature of ancient ascesis. (HS, 320)

We are at this moment in Hermeneutics of the Subject faced with an opposition, not simply between Seneca and Marcus,

but between a Stoic spiritual exercise (the view from above) which would establish the subject’s identity as a

“singularity”--a further trope whose Stoic credentials we could contest--and spiritual exercises (of analysis,

10
decomposition) which would “dissolve” the individual’s identity, leading to its transformative identification of the self

with cosmic reason (HS, 307).9 The principal issue for us here is that, in the account of Seneca’s “move to the world’s

summit”, this exercise had been described exactly as enabling the recognition of consortium Dei, “that the reason that

presided over the organization of the world, and which is God's reason itself, is of the same kind as the reason we

possess” (HS, 281). The language of “singularity” to qualify the “stable being of the self” is by contrast again seemingly

at a distance from anything like a Stoic formulation, either in Seneca or in Marcus Aurelius (HS, 307; cf. I. Hadot, 2014:

62-70).

What Foucault’s analysis has granted to a proto-Hadotian account of spiritualized knowledge in physics in his account

of Seneca, it has taken away in his analysis of Marcus.10 Such a contradiction, in someone so accomplished as Foucault

competing directions operating in his thought, which I want to try to interpret in what follows.

§4 Platonism as the key to the Hadot-Foucault difference

Given Hermeneutics of the Subject, as John Sellars has contended (2020: esp. 13-15), it is clear that the line opposing

Hadot’s reading of the ancients from Foucault’s cannot be drawn, as Hadot suggests, around the role of physics in

philosophical self-formation or transformation. Instead, precisely within Foucault’s treatment of physics in the Stoics,

we have located a hesitation about the cosmic dimension, that of consortium Dei or harmonization of the individual’s

reason with that of the larger Logos. Foucault is committed on the one hand, through his engagement with Seneca’s

Natural Questions, to recognizing the view from above exercise central to Hadot’s account of the conscience cosmique.

On the other hand, he seems clearly to want to maintain that the aim of this exercise is to either maximize a “tension”

between individual and cosmic Logoi, or to shore up that “stable being” of a self which would be “singular”, rather than

“part of the reason presiding over the entire world” (HS, 307). The price of this oscillation is relegating Marcus Aurelius

to a questionable marginal position in Stoicism and ancient philosophical asceticism, as well as seemingly direct self-

9 It is telling that Foucault stresses, in his account of the view from above in Seneca, that the “fellowship with God” operates “not in
the form of losing oneself in God or of a movement which plunges deep into God”, at HS 306. This formulation sits alongside the
claim that one nevertheless discovers a “connaturality” and “cofunctionality” with God; seeing the world “from the point which God
himself” occupies; or that the reason of God is “the same kind” as human reason; “human and divine reason share a common nature
and function together”. One can certainly grant that a “fellowship” with does not amount to a “losing oneself” in the other. But the
idea of “losing oneself” in God is arguably not at stake in the Stoic texts, and seems a misrepresentation of the identification with the
divine perspective. And “connaturality” with God or the divine reason is exactly what Hadot sees at stake in the Stoic texts. Hadot in
the quotes we have seen above hence talks in ways implying a close identity, of “becoming aware of belonging” to a cosmic or divine
reason, a “participation” in the same, a “seeing things from the viewpoint of universal nature” (an idea which, we see, Foucault
accepts) and the awareness that there is within oneself a reason which “is a part of universal reason”. None of these imply a
dissolution of identity, or a “deep plunge” into something wholly other: to be a part of a larger reason, or to recognize this, is not
conceptually to lose oneself or one’s individual identity as a part, in any sense.
10 It is disappointing that, at exactly this moment, Foucault cuts off the analysis in a somewhat curt fashion. “There is a lot more I

would like to say. I would like merely, quickly, to finish this, by saying ... oh dear! ... I'm not sure if I will ... Would you like to go on?
No, perhaps we have had enough of Marcus Aurelius.” (HS, 207)
11
contradiction. What then can explain Foucault’s oscillation here, and this continuing distance from Hadot, within the

realm of physics which seemed to secure their rapprochement in Hermeneutics of the Subject?

It is striking that in Hadot’s own responses to Foucault, and in literature subsequently, more has not been made of two

interlinked, very evident differences between their assessments of the ancients. The first concerns periodization.

Hadot does not strongly distinguish between the conception of philosophy he finds in Plato and even Aristotle, the

“classical Greek” philosophers, and that operative in the Hellenistic and Roman Schools. In “Ancient Philosophy, an

Ethics or a Practice?”, Hadot challenges the prevalent 19th century “prejudice” as he calls it, which:

consists in believing that the life of the Greek cities suffered decline in the Hellenistic period, and that this

decadence led philosophers to renounce the pure and disinterested speculation that had been the essential

dimension of philosophy in Plato and Aristotle. This decadence led philosophers to content themselves,

instead, with putting forward an art of living for individuals who were, in this period, prey to anguish and

isolation. (Hadot, 2020: 70)

Recurring to Louis Robert’s work, Hadot disputes whether the Greek cities went into the decline imagined for them, as

well as noting--surely with some justice--that the idea that a supposedly purely theoretical or speculative approach to

philosophy would be “more in harmony with the life of the democratic cities than the pedagogical care which would

allegedly have been distinctive of the Hellenistic age” (2020: 70). More than this, Hadot contends that Plato’s

philosophy was from the start pedagogical in its orientation, no less than that of the Stoics or Epicureans. As he reads

Plato, the dialogues, and the place of philosophical eros within them, took aim at the ethical as well as intellectual

reform of practitioners. The Phaedo, meanwhile, enunciated the longstanding ancient idea of philosophy as a

preparation for death which would take different forms in later philosophical schools (1995: 93-99, 131, 137-38; 2020:

70-73)

By contrast, when we turn to Foucault, whether in the History of Sexuality volumes or the Hermeneutics of the Self, there

is this strong distinction Foucault draws between classical philosophy’s conception of care of the self and the “golden

age” of care of the self in the Hellenistic and Roman periods (HS, 81). Like Hadot, Foucault has hesitations concerning

the broadly post-Hegelian position which ties Hellenistic and Roman philosophy to the decline of the city state, and

positions Cynicism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism as wholly defensive philosophies of anomie and alienation. In History

of Sexuality III, The Care of the Self (hereafter HS III), he contests whether the growing interest of cultural elites in

“personal ethics” can be assigned to “decadence, frustration, and sullen retreat” (HS III, 84). Nevertheless, the new

prominence of the Stoic and Epicurean choices of life reflects what he terms “an accentuation of everything that allows

the individual to define his identity in accordance with his status and with the elements that manifest it in the most

visible way” (HS III, 85). Whereas in the classical period, Foucault tells us:

12
 ethics implied a close connection between power over oneself and power over others, and therefore had to

refer to an aesthetics of life that accorded with one’s status, the new rules of the political game [in later

antiquity] made it more difficult to define the relations between what one was, what one could do, and what

one was expected to accomplish ... (HS III, 84)

We are then not wholly distant from the Hegelian schema tying care of the self to sociopolitical withdrawal which Hadot

more decisively rejects:

It is then a matter of forming and recognizing oneself as the subject of one’s own actions, not through a system

of signs denoting power over others, but through a relation that depends as little as possible on status on

external forms, for this relation is fulfilled in the sovereignty that one exercises over oneself. (HS III, 85)

These observations concerning the divergence between Hadot’s and Foucault’s periodizations of ancient thought lead

to the second great difference in Hadot’s and Foucault’s approaches to the ancients: which concerns the central, but

almost opposing places of Platonism and Neoplatonism. Hadot worked on Neoplatonism and Patristic thought in his

earliest years as a scholar. In 1963 [1994], he produced Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision, a text in which many of the

subsequent directions of his research are laid down concerning philosophy as a way of life, involving a transformed

way of experiencing the world. As we mentioned, Hadot positions Socratic and Platonic philosophy as

metaphilosophically continuous with the great philosophies of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Throughout his

career, he would continue to lecture on and translate Plotinus, even as his focus increasingly turned towards the Stoic

and Epicurean conceptions of philosophy and spiritual exercises. Hadot’s original focus on Plotinus has led to recurrent

charges that his wider vision of ancient philosophy is overdetermined by his interest in Neoplatonism, as in John M.

Cooper (2012) and more recently John Sellars (2020: 11-12, 14-15).11

With Foucault, the case is quite different. When in Hermeneutics of the Subject, he wishes to establish the parameters

of the classical care of the self, to which he will oppose that of the Hellenistic-Roman golden age, he chooses Plato’s

Alcibiades Major. At several points in the lecture series, indeed, he recurs to what he terms a “Platonic model” of

epimeleia heautou which he draws from this text (HS, 217, 254-257).12 The Platonic model of care of the self, based

upon this single text, the Alcibiades Major, hence bears a great structural weight in Foucault’s reading of the ancient

philosophies. But that role is more or less completely opposed to that assigned to Plato’s dialogues en large in Hadot.

11 When Hadot looks at Christianity, for example, whilst he acknowledges its break with ancient pagan philosophies, his stress is
more upon the continuities between pagan-philosophical and early Christian formulations of the goal of life, and spiritual exercises,
than on this rupture. See Hadot, 1995: 125 ff.
12 Within which, en passant, we note that Foucault also finds delineated the ancient conception of the titular “subject” or, more

ambiguously, “the soul-subject” of his lectures: namely: “the self insofar as it is the "subject of" a certain number of things: the
subject of instrumental action, of relationships with other people, of behavior and attitudes in general, and the subject also of
relationships to oneself. It is insofar as one is this subject who uses, who has certain attitudes, and who has certain relationships
etcetera, that one must take care of oneself” (HS, 32). The term “subject” however, Foucault notes has no direct ancient equivalent,
certainly in Alcibiades Major (one might propose hypokeimenon), and the idea is not subjected to its own thematization as such in
the ancient texts. Cf HS, 38, 55-57.
13
Let me try to draw the features of this “Platonic model” together, from the at least six overlapping but different

enumerations Foucault gives to his students at different moments in the lecture series (HS, 36 ff., 76 ff., 173ff., 190ff.,

218ff., 256 ff.).

Firstly, decisively, care of the self, as proffered by Socrates to the young Alcibiades, is “tied to the exercise of power”

(HS, 36) or “the government of others” (HS, 39, 135).13 For it is exactly at the moment when he sees the young aristocrat

preparing to enter political life that Socrates offers him spiritual direction (HS, 32-34). It is therefore restricted to a

small elite capable of bidding for or exercising political power. When Alcibiades is convinced by Socrates at the end of

the dialogue that he should take greater care of himself, he agrees at that moment to learn about dikaiosunê (justice)

(cf. HS, 174-5). Secondly, Platonic care of the self is principally address on this model at the young, or early adult, at

the point of embarking on their political or public lives (HS, 37). Thirdly, the philosophical care of the self, with a view

to governing others, is necessitated due to the failures of existing Greek or Athenian education (HS, 36-37). Alcibiades

needs Socrates’ guidance in learning how to take care of himself, since traditional paideia is for Socrates deficient. As

a result of this, Alcibiades is ignorant of how to properly govern himself, let alone govern others (HS 37-38). The first

task of Socratic care of the self then becomes a becoming aware of one’s ignorance, to mobilize an eros to learn (HS,

254-55; cf. Hadot, 1995: 129-130).

Fourthly, and moving away from the ethico-political towards the more metaphysical dimensions, in Platonic care of the

self, there is a primacy of the imperative to “know yourself”: the Delphic-Socratic gnôthi seauton (HS, 76-77, 214-15,

257). More than this, fifthly, this self-knowledge is also deemed as necessary to gain access to the wider truth (HS, 76-

77) and, although the term is almost wholly absent in Foucault, as critics have pointed out (Vegetti, 1986: 930; Pradeau,

2002: 142-43), the Ideas seem to beckon here. In one articulation, sixthly--and in the important context of

distinguishing the Platonic model of self-care from both the Hellenistic-Roman and Christian models (HS, 256)--

Foucault stresses the distinguishing role of recollection (anamnêsis) of what he once calls, using a Stoic term, the

“seeds” of truth within oneself in Platonism (HS, 218, 254-57). Lastly and decisively, on the Platonic model access to

the truth, through self-knowledge, is also held to grant access to what is divine within the self. So, in an important

passage, Foucault says:

access to the truth enables one to see at the same time what is divine in the self is also typical of the Platonic

and Neo-Platonist form of the care of the self. Knowing oneself, knowing the divine, and seeing the divine in

oneself are, I think, fundamental in the Platonic and Neo-Platonist form of the care of the self. (HS, 76; 76-78;

cf. 171-73)

13Foucault’s claims to a difference between Platonic-classical and Hellenistic-Roman understandings of the relationships between
care of the self and care of the others (at HS, 190-206) would demand a separate consideration which we can only flag here. The
question to ask would be whether his commitment to distinguishing the Hellenistic-Roman from a Platonic model of care for the self
does not also lead to arguable claims concerning care for others in the Stoics in particular.
14
What becomes decisive is that, when it comes to delineating the features of Hellenistic-Roman care of the self in the

Epicureans, Cynics, Stoics and--more ambiguously--the Middle and Neoplatonists, Foucault becomes committed to

seeing in this “culture of the self” a kind of photographic negative of the Platonic model. Indeed, when he reflects in the

heart of his lectures upon his aims in the course, he will tell us that it is to “free” this Hellenistic-Roman model of care

of the self from the oblivion in which it has been largely encased by the predominance of the Platonic and Christian

conceptions (HS, 254-57). Just so, where (firstly) the Foucaultian-Platonic care of self was restricted to those with

sufficient power or status to govern a city, in the Hellenistic-Roman model, in principle, the appeal to care for yourself

is universal--although of course, in fact, access to the leisure and texts required remains restricted (HS, 112-114).

Secondly, the focus on youth and early adulthood is no longer abiding; it is never too early or too late to begin to

philosophize, as Epicurus enjoins Menoeceus (HS, 87-89) Thirdly, the failure of the existing Greek education system,

with the resulting ignorance of how to take care of oneself which Foucault identifies with Platonism, recedes as the

proximal cause for the urgency of epimeleia heautou: or at least, now philosophical self-care will be set involve a much

more far-reaching “stripping away of previous education, established habits, and the environment”; of nearly

everything one has learned and practiced from earliest childhood (HS, 93-97).

Fourthly, in a comparable manner, the stress on self-knowledge in care of the self will not be cast aside, but take on a

more mitigated, less unquestionably primary role. In its place, conceptions of philosophical self-care drawn from what

Foucault calls four “families” of ideas (HS, 85) will assume greater importance than in the Platonic model: first, as we

have seen, a vocabulary around conversion, turning around upon, and paying attention to oneself; second, terms

pointing to a gathering or concentrating, even a withdrawal into, the self; third, a medical vocabulary wherein

philosophical activity is depicted as therapeutic or curative (cf. HS, 97 ff.); and fourth, tropes which:

designate a certain kind of constant relationship to the self, whether a relationship of mastery and sovereignty

(being master of the self), or a relationship of sensations (having pleasure in oneself, experiencing delight

with oneself, being happy to be with oneself, being content with oneself, etcetera). (HS, 85-86; cf. 214 & above)

But with the decline in importance of the “know thyself” in the self-care of the Hellenistic and Roman philosophies, as

you can see, Foucault will contend that the Platonic links between self-knowledge and access to the truth, and access

to the truth and the recollection of the divine within the self, are both severed. This is one point of emphasis in his

accounts of Epicurean and Stoic physics as part of the conversio ad se; this is a se which can only be discovered by

looking outwards, or monitoring one’s representations of the outside, rather than withdrawing into the self, let alone

discovering Ideas which will only be fully available to one’s soul after the death of the body. So, Foucault tells us exactly,

having extrapolated the Platonic links between knowledge of the self, and the divine:

15
 These elements—or at least this organization and distribution of these elements—are not found in the other

Epicurean, Stoic, and even Pythagorean forms [of the care of the self], notwithstanding any later interactions

which take place between the Neo-Pythagorean and Neo-Platonist movements (HS, 76-77).

And at exactly this “divine” point, once more, we rejoin the Hadot-Foucault debate or question, armed now with an

hypothesis, rooted deep in Foucault’s conceptual architectonics, for that striking slippage we documented above in

Foucault’s account of Stoic physics. Whereas Hadot feels no such compunction, Foucault is operating under an

imperative to separate out, almost point for point, the Hellenistic-Roman conception of care of the self, from its Platonic

forebear. Any language of the divine, or of cosmic reason, or (as Foucault finds himself repeating in his account of

Seneca, consortio Dei) here stands under suspicion of suggesting an implication of Stoic or Epicurean ideas in the

Platonic model. Hence, Foucault’s attempt to distinguish Seneca’s Stoicism from Marcus Aurelius’s, even after having

granted that, for all that, Seneca does use language which Hadot reflects, since they point to a kind of identification of

the philosophical perspective with that of the divine, or even an identification of the self of the philosopher with the

transpersonal, divine Logos that structures all things. In short, contra Hadot, it is less that Foucault is wholly closed to

“the process of becoming aware of belonging to the human and cosmic Whole, a sort of dilation or transfiguration of

the self which realizes greatness of soul (megalopsychia)” in the ancients (Hadot, 2020: 230). It is that he aligns this

movement of “exteriorization” (to evoke Hadot’s terms (1995: 211)) decisively with a Platonism which he wishes to

quarantine from the supposedly self-finalizing Hellenistic-Rome care of the self.

Confirmation of this revised assessment of the Hadot-Foucault difference--that is, one which suggests it is the

competing stances on Platonism which is finally decisive, even in Hermeneutics of the Subject--comes when we consider

Foucault’s treatment of, exactly, Seneca’s often-noted propensity for Platonizing expressions (Wildberger, 2010). In

Letter 65, for example, we can read:

What is our body? A weight upon the soul for its torment It oppresses the soul and keeps it in chains, but

philosophy has appeared, and at last invites the soul to breathe in the presence of nature; it has made it

abandon the earth for divine realities. This is how the soul becomes free, this is how it can take flight.

Occasionally it breaks out from its dungeon and is recreated in heaven. (Seneca, Ep. 65 at HS, 281)

Such a formulation, Foucault notes, is definitively Platonic: “so clearly Platonic, in Seneca's own eyes, that he gives a

kind of little mythology of the cave ...” (HS, 281). Foucault’s response to this and like Platonizing passages--he mentions

one such in De Brevitate Vitae--is to hasten to stress that “we should not be deceived by the undeniable existence of

these references” (HS, 282). Their very existence, and Seneca’s evident comfort in using their language, nevertheless

presents his position with a problem. Foucault clarifies that Seneca’s true position holds to the parameters we now

know from his assessment of Seneca’s iterations of the view from above. What is at issue in the dilation of mind

associated with the Consortium Dei is in no way Platonizing, but:

16
 is a journey over the world, an investigation into the things of the world and their causes, rather than a

rediscovery of the soul's essence. There is no question of the soul withdrawing into itself and questioning

itself in order to discover within itself the memory of the pure forms it had once seen. (HS, 282)

However, as a further proof text underscoring this distinction between Stoicism and anything like Platonism, Foucault

turns next to the exercise of the view from above in Seneca’s Consolatio ad Marciam. In this text, he tells us, there is a

passage in §XVII which at once looks Platonizing, and indeed is evocative of Republic X, but which allows us to see the

decisive difference in proximity that demarcates the Stoic’s fundamentally opposed orientation. “Listen, imagine you

could see what is going to happen before you enter life, before your soul is sent into this world”, Foucault ventriloquizes

Seneca. As against in the Republic, Foucault stresses, Marcia is being asked by the Stoic to “imagine herself before life,

in the same position as he wishes and prescribes for the sage at the end of his life”. Here, that is, “it is the threshold of

entrance rather than departure”, as in the mise en scène of Republic X. Secondly, what she is asked to see is not the

Ideas in a supratemporal, supra-material reality (cf. Sellars, 2020: 14). Instead, she is asked to look down upon the

world, like Seneca in Natural Questions, as if it were below her. She should then note both natural wonders and the

wonders of human audacity, as well as how in the world, there will always be:

a thousand plagues of the body and the soul, wars and robberies, poisonings and shipwrecks, bad weather

and illness, and the premature loss of those close to us, and death, maybe gentle or maybe full of pain and

torture. (Seneca, ad Marc. §XVIII, at HS, 283-4)

For Foucault, what is at stake here is “a completely different kind of experience” or “myth” than anything in Plato: one

in which Marcia is not being asked to choose among possible lives after dying (as in the Republic), but to accept that,

there being no choice, once one enters this material-natural world, they will necessarily be subject to all the ills of

fortune, like the death of Marcia’s son.

Now, all this may be so, the critical reader can respond. But here, there seems to be the same issue as when Foucault

assesses Marcus Aurelius’s practice of physics, opposing it to that in Seneca, whilst ignoring the multiple voicings of

the view from above exercise in the Meditations. Here too, Foucault can only make his case for Seneca’s distance from

Platonism, by neglecting the second development of the very exercise of the view from above in the Consolatio ad

Marciam: a development whose importance is moreover underscored by it occupying the final two sections, §§XXV-

XXVI of the text. This neglect is not idle, since Seneca begins here by consoling Marcia in strikingly Platonic language

which once more confutes Foucault’s position, or would at least require his consideration, for his reading to go through.

“You need not, therefore, hasten to the burial-place of your son”, Seneca writes Marcia:

that which lies there is but the worst part of him and that which gave him most trouble, only bones and ashes,

which are no more parts of him than clothes or other coverings of his body. He is complete, and without

17
 leaving any part of himself behind on earth has taken wing and gone away altogether: he has tarried a brief

space above us while his soul was being cleansed and purified from the vices and rust which all mortal lives

must contract, and from thence he will rise to the high heavens and join the souls of the blessed: a saintly

company will welcome him thither … (Cons. ad Marc. §XXV)

Seneca, our point is, was clearly operating under no such stricture concerning the need not to blend Stoic and Platonic

conceptualizing as Foucault14, and as that which Foucault asks us to operate under when we read the Hellenistic-Roman

texts. Moreover, whereas Foucault’s operating under this stricture commits him to questionable hesitations about,

denigrations or even exclusions of those passages in Seneca and Marcus which challenge his position, suggesting

instead proximities to a post-Platonic, if Stoic, link between truth and the divine, Hadot by contrast sees in these

passages the confirmations of his metaphilosophical perspective.

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Cooper, John M. 2012. Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.

Davidson, Arnold I. 1995. “Introduction: Pierre Hadot and the Spiritual Phenomenon of Ancient Philosophy.” In
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Davidson, Arnold I. 2005. “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought”. In Gary Gutting ed.,
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Flynn, Thomas. 2005. “Philosophy as a Way of Life: Foucault and Hadot.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 31 (5-6): 609-
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Foucault, Michel. 1986. The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. London:
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(HS III) Foucault, Michel. 1988. The Care of the Self: Volume 3 The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley.
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Foucault, Michel. 2001. L’herméneutique du sujet: Cours au Collège de France (1981-1982). Paris: Gallimard/Seuil.

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Hadot, Pierre. 2020. The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as Practice. Translated by Matthew Sharpe &
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Lorenzini, Daniele. 2015. Éthique et politique de soi: Foucault, Hadot, Cavell et les techniques de l’ordinaire. Paris: Vrin.

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Indeed, in §XXVI, the putatively immortal soul of Marcia’s father (a Platonizing, non-Stoic trope) is depicted looking down on the
14

whole course of the natural world, leading to its conflagration (a Stoic teaching), at which time he will be reborn.
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Pradeau, Jean-François. 2002.“Le subjet ancien d’une éthique modern. À propos des exercises spirituels anciens dans
l’Histoire de la sexualité de Michel Foucault”. In Frédéric Gros dir., Foucault: le courage de la vérité, 131-154. Paris:
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Vegetti, Mario. 1986. “Foucault et les anciens”. Critique: Revue générale des publications françaises et étrangères 42:
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Sharpe, Matthew & Stettler, Matteo. 2021. “Pushing Against an Open Door: Agamben on Hadot on Foucault.” Classical
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PLATO IN SENECA, "EPISTULAE MORALES". Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Supplement No. 107: 205-232

19