Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault on Spiritual Exercises: Transforming the Self, Transforming the Present

Abstract

In the last few years, the concept of ‘spiritual exercises’ has been placed at the core of an interesting philosophical debate, developed especially in contemporary French philosophy. This debate pivots on a possible refashioning of our moral thought (Davidson, 1995, 1997; Laugier, 2010). The specificity of this reflection consists in the way in which it connects an ancient practice to our present and effects a reconceptualization of spiritual exercises in order to elaborate a contemporary ethics. This renewal of moral philosophy strongly diverges from the traditional French reflection on ethics. Indeed, French philosophers such as Emmauel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricœur (Levinas 1968; Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000; Ricœur, 1992) developed an ethics rooted in the concept of the ‘priority of the other’. Instead, this new moral reflection revolves around the concept of the ‘self’ and its starting point is a work of self-transformation, in which the concept of ‘other’ plays a very limited role.