A Return to the Self: Indians and Greeks on Life as Art and Philosophical Therapy

Abstract

Of the many interrelated themes in Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, two strike me as having a particular centrality. First, there is the theme of attention to the present instant. Hadot describes this as the ‘key to spiritual exercises’ (p.84), and he finds the idea encapsulated in a quotation from Goethe's Second Faust: ‘Only the present is our happiness’ (p.217). The second theme is that of viewing the world from above: ‘philosophy signified the attempt to raise up mankind from individuality and particularity to universality and objectivity’ (p.242). Insofar as both attention to the present and raising oneself to an objective view imply the mastery of individual anxiety, passion and desire, they belong to a single conception, that conception being one of a ‘return to the self’: Thus, all spiritual exercises are, fundamentally, a return to the self, in which the self is liberated from the state of alienation into which it has been plunged by worries, passions, and desires. The ‘self’ liberated in this way is no longer merely our egoistic, passionate individuality: it is our moral person, open to universality and objectivity, and participating in universal nature or thought (p.103).