{"id":16275,"date":"2016-03-30T12:52:35","date_gmt":"2016-03-30T16:52:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16275"},"modified":"2016-03-30T12:52:35","modified_gmt":"2016-03-30T16:52:35","slug":"does-focusing-philosophy-on-how-to-live-broaden-or-narrow-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16275","title":{"rendered":"does focusing philosophy on how to live broaden or narrow it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) built a\u00a0quietly devoted following and influenced many others indirectly, via\u00a0Michel Foucault. A classicist,\u00a0Hadot interpreted<\/a>\u00a0the Hellenistic philosophical schools (Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism, and Neoplatonism) as communities\u00a0of people devoted to improving themselves\u00a0by employing a range of mental\u00a0techniques. Argumentation was just one of their exercises, along with meditation, introspection, confession,\u00a0renunciation\u00a0and so on. These schools were similar to\u00a0classical Indian and Chinese\u00a0movements, but unlike (say) Kantianism or British empiricism, which are mainly structures of arguments.<\/p>\n

Hadot thought that the Hellenistic tradition of “philosophy as a way of life” still echoed in the work of certain post-medieval thinkers: Montaigne, Spinoza, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, among others. But it had become marginal by the 20th century, because philosophy had turned into an academic discipline, dispassionate and purely intellectual.<\/p>\n

Hadot\u00a0blamed\u00a0that situation on Christianity, which–he argued–had divided the heritage of Hellenistic thought into two distinct parts. The arts\u00a0of the self<\/a> (meditation, confession, and the like) had been assigned to the monasteries, while abstract argumentation went to the universities. Hadot had first trained as a priest and was a learned student of\u00a0early Christianity, but perhaps he\u00a0had the critical bias of an ex<\/em>-believer.\u00a0None of Hadot’s major positive examples were\u00a0Christian thinkers.<\/p>\n

In any case, Hadot suggested a choice. “Philosophy” can mean argumentation united with mental discipline to produce communities\u00a0devoted to moral improvement; or it can mean the dispassionate and often individual pursuit of truth. One can see these alternatives\u00a0oscillate over time.\u00a0The grand theoretical edifices of Plato and Aristotle give way to the Hellenistic Schools and their focus on self-improvement. Medieval scholasticism yields to humanistic writers like Montaigne and Erasmus, who are more concerned with particular inner lives. German idealism fades in favor of Nietzsche, Emerson, and other practitioners of\u00a0philosophy as a way of life.<\/p>\n

That is a provocative framework, but not the only available one. In The Rise of Western Christendom<\/a>, Peter Brown describes how a generation of great converts to Christianity–Jerome, Augustine, and their contemporaries–debated the relevance of\u00a0classical thought\u00a0and\u00a0“often took up extreme poses against the pagan classics.” But<\/p>\n

such a narrowing down of culture (drastic as it was) [was not] an altogether unique event in the long history of the ancient world. It did not necessarily betray a moment of irreparable breakdown. Rather, the history of Greek and Roman civilization had always been marked by a characteristic pendulum swing. Moments of exuberant creativity were repeatedly followed by long periods of retrenchment. And this pendulum swing was marked by constant alternation between periods of creativity in literature and in speculative philosophy followed by long periods of single-minded preoccupation with ethical problems. How educated persons should groom themselves; how they should conquer\u00a0their weaknesses; how they should overcome pain and console themselves in moments of grief; how they should stand in relation to their fellows and to the gods: these were issues pursued \u00a0by ancient philosophers, for centuries on end, with remarkable singlemindedness. [A footnote to Hadot follows\u00a0a paragraph later.]<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Brown’s framework, moments when abstract thinkers predominate–like\u00a05th<\/sup> century Athens and perhaps Vedic India, 12th<\/sup> century Paris, or 18th<\/sup> century Germany–are\u00a0exuberantly creative and expansive, but\u00a0they are followed “by\u00a0long periods of retrenchment” in which the focus narrows to how to live, including such trivial matters as “how educated persons should groom themselves.” In Hadot’s framework,\u00a0periods of disconnected, abstract, “academic” thought alternate with times\u00a0when rigorous argument\u00a0unites with spiritual\u00a0practices to produce people who can live\u00a0“in the service of the human community.”<\/p>\n

They could both the right, because intellectual history is vast and complicated.\u00a0I am left with a sense that there are two risks for any\u00a0kind of thinking that we call “philosophy.” It can degenerate into mental hygiene, focused on how to live everyday life to the exclusion of challenging questions about nature and reality. Or it can turn strictly theoretical, disconnected\u00a0from questions about how to live (or–worse–influenced by unexamined<\/em> assumptions about the good life).<\/p>\n

See also\u00a0on philosophy as a way of life<\/a>;\u00a0my notes on Pierre Hadot<\/a>;\u00a0and\u00a0Hannah Arendt and philosophy as a way of life<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) built a\u00a0quietly devoted following and influenced many others indirectly, via\u00a0Michel Foucault. A classicist,\u00a0Hadot interpreted\u00a0the Hellenistic philosophical schools (Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism, and Neoplatonism) as communities\u00a0of people devoted to improving themselves\u00a0by employing a range of mental\u00a0techniques. Argumentation was just one of their exercises, along with meditation, introspection, confession,\u00a0renunciation\u00a0and so on. These schools were similar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16275"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16656,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16275\/revisions\/16656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}