Ilsetraut Hadot’s Seneca

Abstract

The aim of this chapter will be both to analyse and to highlight the importance of Ilsetraut Hadot’s path-breaking work on Seneque: direction spirituelle et pratique de la philosophie. Two things in particular strongly speak to the importance of Ilsetraut Hadot’s work in light of today’s virtue-ethical turn, but also the growing literature on classical philosophy as a way of life, or form of cultura animi (cultivation of the soul), we argue. First, reading the book against the background of today’s neo-Aristotelianism and its premises, the portrait of Seneca that Ilsetraut Hadot paints would see the Roman Stoic exonerated from each of the charges characteristic of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dismissals of his work. If we follow Hadot’s own philosophical direction, Seneca reassumes something like the elevated place amongst ‘the ancients’ that he enjoyed in earlier modern admirers like Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, or Denis Diderot: as both a great thinker and a great writer. Second, Ilsetraut Hadot’s Seneque adds several vital chapters, as it were, to the growing literature examining ancient philosophy conceived as promoting given ‘ways of life’ or means of self-cultivation. Seneque argues that Seneca conceived of philosophy and philosophical writing as means of direction spirituelle or cultivating of the other. For this metaphilosophy, the goal of philosophising is to guide others towards the best kind of life. This conception of philosophy is thus intersubjective from the ground up. In particular, it supposes a particular brand of relationship between a philosophical teacher and his student(s), in ways that other accounts of philosophical self-cultivation or, in Foucault’s formulation, ‘the care of the self’ can sometimes obviate.