It was with sadness that we learned of the passing of Pierre Hadot, one of
France's most extraordinary intellectual figures and a many-time HUP
author. There have been
obituaries in the popular press, but in the service
of furthering this memory and elaborating our understanding, we asked
Hadot's one-time student and long-time collaborator
Michael Chase,
currently of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris,
to provide us with a more in-depth look at Hadot's remarkable
intellectual trajectory. Below please find Part I, in which Chase
details that trajectory, from Hadot's early interest in philology and
mysticism to his later engagement with Marcus Aurelius and the idea of
"spiritual exercise." Tomorrow we'll publish Part II, in which Chase
shares his memories of a man who practiced what he preached, a man who
"like Plotinus ... was always available to himself, but above all to
others."
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Pierre Hadot - Part I
By Michael Chase
Pierre Hadot, emeritus Professor at the Collège de France and
Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, died on the
night of April 24-25 at the age of 88.
Born in Paris in 1922, Hadot was raised at Reims, where he received a
strict Catholic education, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1944.
But he soon became disenchanted with the Church, particularly after the
conservative encyclical Humani Generis of August 12, 1950, and he left
it in 1952 (Eros also played a role in this decision: Hadot married his
first wife in 1953).
As a Researcher at the CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research),
Hadot was now free to devote himself to scholarship. He began with
Latin Patristics, editing Ambrose of Milan and Marius Victorinus. This
was the period, from the late 1950s to the 1960s, when, under the
guidance of such experts as the Jesuit Paul Henry, he learned the strict
discipline of philology, or the critical study and editing of ancient
manuscripts, an approach that was to continue to exert a formative
influence on his thought for the rest of his life. Also during this
period, Hadot's deep interest in mysticism led him to study Plotinus,
and, surprisingly enough, Wittgenstein, whose comments on “das
Mystische” (Tractatus 6.522) led Hadot to study the Tractatus
and the Philosophical Investigations and publish articles on
them, thus becoming one of the first people in France to draw attention
to Wittgenstein.1 Hadot wrote Plotinus or the Simplicity
of Vision2 in a month-long burst of inspiration in 1963,
a lucid, sincere work that is still one of the best introductions to
Plotinus. Hadot would continue to translate and comment upon Plotinus
throughout the rest of his life, founding in particular the series Les
Ecrits de Plotin3, a series, still in progress, that
provides translations with extensive introductions and commentaries to
all the treatises of Plotinus' Enneads, in chronological order. On a
personal level, however, Hadot gradually became detached from Plotinus'
thought, feeling that Plotinian mysticism was too otherworldly and
contemptuous of the body to be adequate for today's needs. As he tells
the story, when he emerged from the month-long seclusion he had imposed
upon himself to write Plotinus or The Simplicity of Vision,
he went to the corner bakery, and “seeing the ordinary folks all around
me in the bakery, I [...] had the impression of having lived a month in
another world, completely foreign to our world, and worse than
this—totally unreal and even unlivable.”4
Elected Director of Studies at the 5th Section of the École Pratique
des Hautes Etudes in 1964, Hadot married his second wife, the historian
of philosophy Ilsetraut Marten in 1966. This marked another turning
point in his intellectual development, for it was at least in part
thanks to his wife's interest in spiritual guidance in Antiquity that
the focus of Hadot's interests would gradually shift, over the following
decade or so, from the complex and technical metaphysics of Porphyry
and Marius Victorinus to a concern for the practical, ethical side of
philosophy, and more precisely the development of his key concept of
philosophy as a way of life.
At Hadot's request, the title of his Chair at the EPHE Ve was soon
changed from “Latin Patristics” to “Theologies and Mysticisms of
Hellenistic Greece and the End of Antiquity.” In 1968, he published his
thesis for the State Doctorate, the massive Porphyre et Victorinus5,
in which he attributed a previously anonymous commentary on Plato's
Parmenides to Porphyry, the Neoplatonist student of Plotinus. This
monument of erudition arguably remains, even today, the most complete
exposition of Neoplatonist metaphysics.
It was around this time that Pierre Hadot began to study and lecture
on Marcus Aurelius—studies that would culminate in his edition of the Meditations6,
left unfinished at his death, and especially in his book The Inner
Citadel.7 Under the influence of his wife Ilsetraut, who
had written an important work on spiritual guidance in Seneca, Hadot
now began to accord more and more importance to the idea of spiritual
exercises, that is, philosophical practices intended to transform the
practitioner's way of looking at the world, and consequently his or her
way of being. Following Paul Rabbow, Hadot held that the famous Exercitia
Spiritualia of Ignatius of Loyola, far from being exclusively
Christian, were the direct heirs of pagan Greco-Roman practices. These
exercises, involving not just the intellect or reason, but all a human
being's faculties, including emotion and imagination, had the same goal
as all ancient philosophy: reducing human suffering and increasing
happiness, by teaching people to detach themselves from their
particular, egocentric, individualistic viewpoint and become aware of
their belonging, as integral component parts, to the Whole constituted
by the entire cosmos. In its fully developed form, exemplified in such
late Stoics as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, this change from our
particularistic perspective to the universal perspective of reason had
three main aspects. First, by means of the discipline of thought, we are
to strive for objectivity; since, as the Stoics believe, what causes
human suffering is not so much things in the world, but our beliefs
about those things, we are to try to perceive the world as it is in
itself, without the subjective coloring we automatically tend to ascribe
to everything we experience ("That's lovely," "that's horrible,"
"that's ugly," "that's terrifying," etc., etc.). Second, in the
discipline of desire, we are to attune our individual desires with the
way the universe works, not merely accepting that things happen as they
do, but actively willing for things to happen precisely the way they do
happen. This attitude is, of course, the ancestor of Nietzsche’s “Yes”
granted to the cosmos, a “yes” which immediately justifies the world's
existence.8 Finally, in the discipline of action, we are to
try to ensure that all our actions are directed not just to our own
immediate, short-term advantage, but to the interests of the human
community as a whole.
Hadot finally came to believe that these spiritual
attitudes—“spiritual” precisely because they are not merely
intellectual, but involve the entire human organism, but one might with
equal justification call them “existential” attitudes—and the practices
or exercises that nourished, fortified and developed them, were the key
to understanding all of ancient philosophy. In a sense, the grandiose
physical, metaphysical, and epistemological structures that separated
the major philosophical schools of Antiquity—Platonism, Aristotelianism,
Stoicism, Epicureanism9—were mere superstructures, intended
to justify the basic philosophical attitude. Hadot deduced this, among
other considerations, from the fact that many of the spiritual exercises
of the various schools were highly similar, despite all their
ideological differences: thus, both Stoics and Epicureans recommended
the exercise of living in the present.
Hadot first published the results of this new research in an article
that appeared in the Annuaire de la Ve section in 1977:
“Exercices spirituels .” This article formed the kernel of his book Exercices
spirituels et philosophie antique10, and was no doubt
the work of Hadot's that most impressed Michel Foucault, to the extent
that he invited Hadot to propose his candidacy for a Chair at the
Collège de France, the most prestigious academic position in France.
Hadot did so, and was elected in 1982. Hadot's view on philosophy as a
way of life consisting of the practice of spiritual exercises was given a
more complete narrative form in his Qu'est-ce que la philosophie
antique?.11
Another aspect of his thought was more controversial: if philosophy
was, throughout Antiquity, conceived as a way of life, in which it was
not only those who published learned tomes that were considered
philosophers, but also, and in some cases especially—one thinks of
Socrates, who wrote nothing—those who lived in a philosophical way, then
how and why did this situation cease? Hadot's answer was twofold: on
the one hand, Christianity, which had begun by adopting and integrating
pagan spiritual exercises, ended up by relegating philosophy to the
status of mere handmaid of theology. On the other, at around the same
historical period of the Middle Ages, and not coincidentally, the
phenomenon of the European University arose. Destined from the outset to
be a kind of factory in which professional philosophers trained
students to become professional philosophers in their turn, these new
institutions led to a progressive confusion of two aspects that were,
according to Hadot, carefully distinguished in Antiquity: doing
philosophy and producing discourse about philosophy. Many modern
thinkers, Hadot believed, have successfully resisted this confusion, but
they were mostly (and this again is no coincidence) such
extra-University thinkers as Descartes, Spinoza, Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer. For the most part, and with notable exceptions (one thinks
of Bergson), University philosophy has concentrated almost exclusively
on discourse about philosophy. Indeed, one might add, extending Hadot's
analysis, that the contemporary university, whether in its “analytic”
manifestation as the analysis of language and the manipulation of
quasi-mathematical symbols, or its “continental” guise as rhetorical
display, irony, plays on words and learned allusions, seem to share one
basic characteristic: they are quite incomprehensible, and therefore
unimportant to the man or woman on the street. Hadot's work, written in a
plain, clear style that lacks the rhetorical flourishes of a Derrida or
a Foucault, represents a call for a radical democratization of
philosophy. It talks about subjects that matter to people today from all
walks of life, which is why it has appealed, arguably, less to
professional philosophers than to ordinary working people, and to
professionals working in disciplines other than philosophy.12
Pierre Hadot taught at the Collège until his retirement in 1992. In
addition to Plotinus and Marcus, his teaching was increasingly devoted
to the philosophy of nature, an interest he had picked up from Bergson,
and which he had first set forth in a lecture at the Jungian-inspired
Eranos meetings at Ascona, Switzerland, in 1967.13 Combined
with his long-term love of Goethe14, this research on the
history of mankind's relation to nature would finally culminate in Le
Voile d'Isis, a study of the origin and interpretations of Heraclitus'
saying “Nature loves to hide,” published a mere 6 years before his
death.15 Here and in the preliminary studies leading up this
work, Hadot distinguishes two main currents in the history of man's
attitude to nature: the “Promethean” approach, in which man tries to
force nature to reveal her secrets in order better to exploit her, and
the “Orphic” attitude, a philosophical or aesthetic approach in which
one listens attentively to nature, recognizing the potential dangers of
revealing all her Secrets.
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Part II - HERE
via harvardpress.typepad.com
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