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 DOI: 10.1177/0191453705055492

2005 31: 609Philosophy Social CriticismThomas Flynn

Philosophy as a way of life : Foucault and Hadot  

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Thomas Flynn

Philosophy as a way of lifeFoucault and Hadot

Abstract Michel Foucault surveyed the history of Western philosophy interms of the Delphic ‘Know thyself’ and the Socratic ‘care of the self’. Theformer generates academic philosophy as we know it today whereas thelatter conceives of philosophy as a ‘way of life’. At issue are competingnotions of ‘truth’ and the philosophical relevance of the discursive/non-discursive domains. Comparing this account with a similar but distinctreading of the same Greek texts by Greco-Roman historian Pierre Hadot,I underscore the ‘existentialist’ tenor of this distinction and assess thechallenges and liabilities of pursuing philosophy as a ‘way of life’.

Key words Alcibiades · care of the self · existentialism · Foucault ·Hadot · Herméneutique du sujet · ‘Know thyself’ · philosophy as a way oflife · philosophy’s nature · Plato · Socrates · spirituality

In his later lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault surveyedthe history of Western philosophy in terms of two rubrics, the Delphic‘Know thyself’ (gnothi seauton) and the Socratic ‘care of the self’(epimeleia heautou). Though his overview was more nuanced than thisrather stark dichotomy suggests, one can summarize roughly his claimthat the former hardens into the theoretical disciplines of academic phil-osophy as we find them today: metaphysics, philosophical anthropol-ogy, philosophy of mind, and the like, conveyed by a detached mode ofreflection and an antiseptic notion of truth that is emblemized in whatFoucault calls the ‘Cartesian moment’ in philosophical thought. Thecareer of ‘care of the self’, on the other hand, moves through the Stoics,Epicureans and Cynics toward such non-academic domains of self-formation or ‘spiritual exercise’ as catechesis, political training, andpsychological counseling.

PSCPHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 31 nos 5–6 • pp. 609–622Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453705055492

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If both these branches of ‘philosophy’ stem from Platonic roots,Foucault argues, the concepts of truth operative in each domain cometo differ significantly. The properly academic or scholastic version iscognitivist, scientific and/or ‘epistemological’, as that term came to becanonized in the profession. The distinguishing feature of ‘truth’ forphilosophical practice as care of the self, on the other hand, is theharmony or coherence that obtains between the sage’s life and teaching.As Plato’s Laches explains in a dialogue by that name:

I take the speaker and his speech together, and observe how they sort andharmonize with each other. Such a man is exactly what I understand by‘musical’ [mousikos] – he has tuned himself with the fairest harmony, notthat of a lyre or other entertaining instrument, but has made a true concordof his own life between his words and his deeds . . . Now of Socrates’ wordsI have no experience, but formerly, I fancy, I have made trial of his deeds.1

On this account, it would seem that Socrates was admired more for hismanner of living and dying, Foucault notes, than for his doctrine. Thisview can be gleaned from the sets of public lectures that Foucault deliv-ered at the Collège de France in the years immediately preceding hisuntimely death in 1984.

Foucault’s colleague at the Collège de France, Greco-Roman intel-lectual historian and philologist Pierre Hadot, agrees in large part withthis reading of Socrates and insists that almost without exceptionclassical philosophy was primarily formative (protreptic) rather thaninformative in character, to use a contrast he borrows from classicistVictor Goldschmidt. On this reading, the wisdom which philosophy bydefinition seeks consists in a manner of existing, a way of life, morethan a systematic discourse on the nature of man and/or the world. Abrief review of the course offerings in Departments of Philosophy in theUnited States today would scarcely exhibit an explicit concern with‘wisdom’ in that ‘Socratic’ sense. Rather, these academic programsappear to have inherited the Delphic legacy and the cognitivist under-standing of truth to which they strenuously adhere.

Nonetheless, recent revival of interest in Hellenistic ethics lendscredibility to the attractiveness of the ‘Socratic’ notion of philosophy ascare of the self, if not to the validity of Foucault’s original distinctionand separation of it from the Delphic prescription. At issue is therelevance of the very differentiation between theoretical and practicalphilosophy as well as the corresponding conception of knowledge andtruth claimed to be operative in each alternative. As long as the idealof dispassionately ‘objective’ knowledge and absolute truth in thenatural and human sciences continues to hold sway, so too will theDelphic prescription as Foucault describes it. But as these ideals losetheir luster, especially in the face of personal failure and social disaster,

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the Socratic attractiveness of philosophical wisdom as the fruit of ‘self-care’ seems to be growing apace.

All of this sounds quite ‘existentialist’ in tone – a feature not loston Foucault’s interlocutors and one readily admitted with qualificationsby Hadot himself. What I would like to pursue in the concluding portionof my remarks is the existentialist significance of this turn or return inrecent French thought and to add several cautionary observationsregarding the shift in philosophical interest that it portends.

Foucault and ‘care of the self’

Foucault described his overall project or, better, ongoing interest indifferent ways at various times of his life. He thereby invited us to viewor review his work from different, arguably complementary, perspectives.The three best known in order of their explicit emergence in his historiesare the pairs knowledge/truth, power/governmentality, and subjectiva-tion/ethics. He closes this triangle of what late in his career he calledthree ‘axes’ for proposed analysis of problems and practices when heinforms us that the relation of subjectivation and truth has been his con-tinuing concern.2 It is in the context of that problematic that he appealsto what we have designated the ‘Delphic’ and the ‘Socratic’ aspects oftruth and self-constitution.

Foucault’s interest in history was never antiquarian. As he remindsus on several occasions, his histories are histories ‘of the present’; thatis, they arise from current problems on which they seek to gain insightby addressing how what traditionally are taken for analogous issueshave been problematized in other historical and cultural contexts. Thiscarries the twofold advantage of bringing into focus how different ourperception and ordering of seemingly similar phenomena often are fromthose of others and how the perceived contingency of our present prac-tices converts into live possibilities several alternatives that we hadheretofore dismissed as beyond the pale. In other words, what we mightcall ‘philosophical history’ at his hand reveals how ‘Other’ they are fromus and how ‘other’ we too could become from what we are. This lastis the ‘critical’ dimension of his investigations. As he admitted in hisTanner Lectures: ‘Experience has taught me that the history of variousforms of rationality is sometimes more effective in unsettling our certi-tudes and dogmatism than is abstract criticism.’3 So we may concludethat one of the uses of his ‘history’ of the distinction between the Delphicand the Socratic maxims is to underscore the changeable nature of philo-sophical practice itself as a prelude to reassessing its character and statusin our day. In fact, one could view his own method of ‘problematizing’the marginalization of ‘care of the self’ in philosophical discourse and

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practice since the Hellenistic era as a means of inviting us, as he said inan interview, ‘to experience our modernity such that we might come outof it transformed’ (Essential Works [hereafter EW], vol. 3, p. 242).‘Transformation’ is the goal of philosophical practice as a way of life,on Foucault’s reading, whereas, as Hadot acknowledged, information isthe objective of classical self-knowledge. In other words, Foucault’smethod of ‘problematizing’ can be seen as ingredient in the practice ofphilosophy as a way of life.

On what, then, does Foucault base this crucial distinction and whatis its philosophical import? As the work of a philosophical historian (forwant of a better label), his ‘case’ focuses on texts from classical an-tiquity, but initially on a Platonic text whose attribution is disputed butwhere the distinction, he seems to believe, is most clearly drawn, namely,the Alcibiades.4 Though his ‘argument’ and this text appear in severalof his lectures and interviews, I shall concentrate on his discussion of itin the course he delivered at the Collège de France during the 1981–2academic year, entitled ‘The Hermeneutic of the Subject’ (Herméneu-tique du sujet [hereafter HS]). There the topic is the relation betweentruth, becoming a subject, and the practices (askeseis) that connect themreciprocally.

As is often the case in his later lectures and writings, Foucault seesPlato’s works as the trunk from which two distinct limbs branch, namelythe ‘intellectualist’ understanding of self-knowledge based on insightinto the nature of the ‘true self’ in its form or essence and the ‘existen-tial’ (my term) limb of self-concern that is concrete, practical and thefruit of certain askeseis that Foucault calls ‘practices’ or ‘technologiesof the self.’

Though we have just observed the point being clearly made in theLaches, a text that Foucault scarcely ignores, it is the Alcibiades major(or the First Alcibiades, as it is known in the English-speaking world)that Foucault mines for the distinction between the regard its interlocu-tors have for the doctrine of Socrates and their respect for the harmonyand consistency they observe between his teaching and his style of life.Foucault intends to show from that text ‘how the epimeleia heautou(care of the self) is the frame, the soil, the foundation on which theimperative to know oneself is justified’ (HS 10). And, of course, this dis-tinction is at work in Socrates’ famous self-defense before the Atheniancourt in the Apology. But Foucault extends this foundational rolebeyond Socrates/Plato to the ‘philosophical attitude’ of subsequentGreek, Hellenistic and Roman culture (ibid.). Though the imperative toknow thyself is commonly associated with Socrates, Foucault insists thatSocrates in the final analysis ‘is the man of care of the self and willcontinue to play that role’ (ibid.).

If these two maxims are intertwined in Plato, how did they become

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undone? The answer, Foucault believes, lies in their respective conceptsof truth and of the labor of the subject to attain it. As he describes thesituation, each has its corresponding sense of ‘truth’ and of how onereaches it. Self-knowledge is achieved by intellectual discipline: study,focus on the really real or the universal and impersonal. Dialectic andinduction play a major role in this process of investigation. It is a dis-cursive operation that yields knowledge as grasp of the necessary andthe changeless. Correspondingly, the subject must try to remove himselfor herself from the process entirely in the sense that the divine powerof the thinker is to prescind from the particular and its contingencies.‘There is no science of the singular’, as Aristotle famously proclaims5

and as Foucault disproves in detail in his The Birth of the Clinic.6Episteme as opposed to doxa is necessary and universal. Its achievementmakes no moral demands on the knower; hero and villain have equalaccess to science. Though he admits that there is a refinement in thishistory as it continues through the practice of philosophical inquiry inthe West, the ‘Cartesian moment’, as we mentioned, captures the careerof this maxim in the modern age. Following the model of scientificinvestigation, ‘one merely has to open one’s eyes, reason correctly, andfollow the line of evidence tenaciously in order to be capable of truth’.With Kant, Foucault claims, this process is re-enforced by appeal to thetranscendental condition for any possible experience: ‘What we are notcapable of knowing constitutes [fait] precisely the very structure of theknowing subject that brings it about that we are unable to know it’ (HS183). This makes any ‘spiritual’ transformation of the subject that mightgive it access to the truth chimerical and paradoxical.

Care of the self, on the other hand, makes greater demands on theone who would pursue the truth it proposes. Rather than a theoreticalinsight or an informative conclusion, the ‘truth’ toward which care ofthe self strives is ongoing and existential. ‘What is the price that I mustpay to gain access to this truth?’ Foucault challenges. ‘What is the laborthat I must undertake on myself . . . what is the modification of beingthat I must set about to gain access to the truth?’ (HS 182). HereFoucault introduces the expression ‘the condition of spirituality foraccess to the truth’ (HS 184). He sees a kind of Platonic or better neo-Platonic circularity or at least reciprocity between the subject and thetruth it seeks at work here. This truth is not primarily cognitive butmoral; it is not something one has but a way one is. It is redolent ofExistentialist ‘authenticity’ or being ‘true to oneself’. One thinks ofKierkegaard’s famous ‘truth as subjectivity’ in this regard. It is aquestion of a truth that one is rather than a truth that one possesses(again contrast this with Kierkegaardian truth as objectivity).7 Whatkind of person must one become and how does one become it in orderto gain access to the truth that, in turn, facilitates this very access?8

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What, then, is this ‘spirituality’ that makes its appearance and playsan increasingly important role in Foucault’s later works?9 In sum, it isthat process of self-transformation that includes such practices as medi-tation, control of one’s appetites and desires, writing moral maximsfor ease of recollection, examination of conscience, and the like, whichfound widespread use among Hellenistic and Roman philosophers butwhich occur in the space, the ‘break’, between discourse and living-through (le Vécu) that we already find in the Alcibiades. Foucault admitsthat such practices predate Socrates and Plato. But their introductioninto the Western philosophical tradition bears important consequencesfor the career of philosophy and its exercise in our day.

The fact that ‘spirituality’ and ‘spiritual exercises’ came to be associ-ated with religious, especially Christian, aesceticism, served to accentu-ate the unbraiding of these two maxims that Platonism has bequeathedto philosophical discourse in the West. Spirituality buried itself in themonasteries and, in a more secular age, marshaled its powers in theexhortations of Marx to change the world rather than merely to under-stand it and the transformations pursued by Freudian psychoanalysis.Foucault observes that ‘Western philosophy can be read in its entirehistory as the slow disengagement of the question: “How, on what con-ditions, can one think the truth?” from the question: “How, at whatprice, according to what procedure, must one change the modes of beingof the subject in order to gain access to the truth?”’ (HS 172 n.). Andhe claims that the challenge facing philosophy in our day is to recon-cile our knowledge of the world gained by mastery of an objectifyingtechnique (techne) with the task to ‘accomplish the truth of the subjectthat we are’ (HS 467). No doubt, the cognitive and transformativepower of philosophical spirituality became intertwined once more in thework of Hegel. In fact, Foucault concludes his lectures on the hermeneu-tic of the subject with the claim that the Phenomenology of Spirit ‘is thesummit of this philosophy’ that would address this challenge. Perhaps,as he opined somewhat hyperbolically in his inaugural lecture ten yearsearlier, ‘we have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianismis possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which hestands, motionless, waiting for us’.10

Hadot on Foucault’s Delphic/Socratic distinction

Though they never met until Foucault invited Hadot to accept candidacyfor election to the Collège de France, Foucault was quite taken withHadot’s work, especially, so it seems, with his seminal essay on spiri-tual exercises in ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophy.11 At a con-ference commemorating the fourth anniversary of Foucault’s death,

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Hadot delivered a communication entitled ‘Reflections on the notion of“the cultivation of the self”’.12 His topic was Foucault’s use of ‘tech-niques of the self’ as the equivalent of what Hadot called ‘spiritual exer-cises’ and he was critical of the equivalency on two counts. First, itoveremphasizes the ‘self’ as individual and self-constituting whereasHadot believes that the ‘self’ for which the Platonists and Stoics caredwas the ‘true’ self, the ‘best’ or ‘superior’ part of the self. Stoic ‘spiri-tual exercises’, for example, are aimed at moving beyond the ‘self’ to‘thinking and acting in union with universal reason’ (Michel Foucault,Philosopher [hereafter MFP], p. 226). This is a criticism that Hadotlevels against the Existentialists in more recent times as well. In bothcases (Foucault’s and the Existentialists’), he believes, it leads to anaestheticism or ‘dandyism’ – a word that has re-entered the activephilosophical vocabulary with the postmodern interest in Baudelaire.Yet even the Epicureans, with whose ethics Foucault’s ‘aesthetic ofexistence’ has more in common, propounded a social dimension that,in Hadot’s view, is missing in Foucault’s approach. In fact, Foucault’sconstructivism (not Hadot’s term) seems unable to avoid a certain aes-theticism when it comes to offering us an ‘aesthetics of existence’ as themodel for a contemporary ethics (MFP 230 and Hadot’s La Philosophiecomme manière de vivre, hereafter [PV], p. 227), and this is Hadot’ssecond criticism of the equivalency between his ‘spiritual exercises’ andFoucault’s ‘technologies of the self’.

As for Foucault’s reading of the Alcibiades and his sharp distinctionbetween what we have been calling the ‘Delphic’ and the ‘Socratic’maxims, Hadot claims that in this dialogue self-knowledge and care ofthe self are ‘in a sense on the same track’ (en quelque sorte une seule etmême démarche).13 This rather ambiguous statement need not be readas countering Foucault’s position, especially when one reads ‘care of theself’ as providing the basis and/or frame for practices of self-knowledge.But it scarcely endorses the sharp distinction that Foucault wishes todraw and subsequently exploit.14 And it seems to be Foucault’s later useof ‘care of the self’ to sketch an ‘art of living’ for our day that occasions Hadot’s objection: ‘Foucault proposes an art of living, anaesthetic of existence, a style of life that obviously would not reproducethe spiritual exercises of antiquity but which would open for the subjectthe possibility of constituting himself in freedom in opposition toexternal powers’ (ibid., p. 22).

Hadot favors the Stoic wisdom of Marcus Aurelius, namely, ‘attempt-ing to practice objectivity of judgment, attempting to live according tojustice in the service of the human community, and attempting to becomeaware of our situation as belonging to the universe (that is, acting on thebasis of the lived experience of ourselves as concrete, living and perceiv-ing subjects)’ (MFP 320). He believes that our contemporaries are quite

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capable of performing the spiritual exercises requisite for the pursuitof such wisdom, once the philosophical and mythical discourses thataccompany them are removed. And he points to the abiding ‘existentialdensity’ of the ‘internal experiences [to which such exercises appeal] thatescapes all attempts at theorization and systematization’ (MFP 321). Itis these ‘internal experiences’ and their ‘existential density’ that I wouldlike to underscore because I believe they resonate with what I wish tocall the ‘existentialist revival’ to which philosophy as a way of life giveswitness.

Hadot’s sensitivity to the ‘existentialist’ dimension of care of the selfcomes to the fore in his Eloge de Socrate that appeared as part of thethird edition of his Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique.15 Afterconceding that the ‘historical’ Socrates is in the main inaccessible, Hadotturns to two of his 19th-century interpreters whose role in conveyingthe living sense of ‘care of the self’ to the contemporary mind he con-siders decisive. For both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Socrates was anambiguous figure, the object of a kind of love–hate relationship. Thereis much to parse in these relations that can only be sketched here. Inthe case of Kierkegaard, Hadot parallels Kierkegaard’s protestation thathe was not a Christian with the Socratic insistence that he was not asage. In both instances the ironist thereby gained a freedom of thoughtand action to pursue authentic faith and wisdom respectively whileinviting us to do the same. Hadot likens these moves to the adoptionof so many masks: ‘This Socratic mask is the mask of irony’ (Eloge 21).In Nietzsche’s case, Schopenhauer and Wagner served this ironicmasking function. He made use of them the way Plato used Socrates toconceal and reveal himself. The famous indirect communication usedby Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also imitates the Socratic method ofeffecting a ‘change of heart’, a ‘conversion’, a revaluation of the direc-tion of one’s life. As Hadot observes: ‘By this appeal to the being of theindividual, the Socratic approach [démarche] is existential. That is whyKierkegaard and Nietzsche wished to repeat it, each in his own way’(Eloge 32).

Seconding Foucault’s major thesis, Hadot insists: ‘In a certain sense,one could say that there have always been two opposing conceptions ofphilosophy [in the West]: one placing its accent on the pole of discourseand the other on the pole of choice of life’ (PV 102). Though he doesnot call these respective poles the Delphic and the Socratic, Hadot doesadmit with seeming resignation that ‘philosophers will never succeed inovercoming their self-satisfaction felt in “the pleasure of talking”’. Buthe goes on to counsel that, in order to remain faithful to the

. . . Socratic inspiration of philosophy, a new ethic of philosophical dis-course must be proposed in which one would renounce taking oneself asan end in itself [comme fin en soi] or, still worse, as a means for the showy

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display [étalage] of the eloquence of a philosophe but instead wouldbecome a means of moving beyond oneself and of reaching the level ofuniversal reason and of opening to others. (PV 102–3)

While Foucault would not subscribe to Hadot’s transcendent ‘uni-versal reason’, he could admit the normative force of ‘Western ratio’ ashe did in The Order of Things with the proviso that we acknowledgedthe dangers and minimized the harm that such Reason tends to bringin its wake.16 And he has repeatedly insisted that ‘care of the self’ in itsfull exercise necessarily involves care of others. Finally, Foucault wouldadd a further dimension to Hadot’s ideal of moving beyond oneself toinclude ‘taking distance on oneself’ or ‘thinking otherwise than before’(se déprendre de soi-même) which he considers ‘the ethic of an intellec-tual in our day’.17

The existentialist presence

Let us acknowledge at the outset that ‘existentialism’ like ‘postmod-ernism’ is so broadly and inconsistently employed as to have become anearly meaningless term. Still, people familiar with the movementacknowledge that a set of shared theses and themes can be extractedfrom so-called ‘existentialist’ writings to delineate a school of philo-sophical thought and practice which, despite major 19th-century pre-cursors, flourished in the 20th century, especially in the years betweenthe two world wars and immediately after the second one. Several ofthese features have appeared in the foregoing characterization of phil-osophy as ‘care of the self’. Let us recall three of the most distinctive:emphasis on ethics over metaphysics; stress on exercises/techniques thatfoster individual choice; and, finally, relative neglect of, if not openhostility toward, systematic thought. That Hadot finds Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (the commonly acknowledged ‘fathers’ of theistic andatheistic existentialism respectively) to be the models of the ‘Socratic’approach in recent thought confirms the affinities that Hadot andperhaps even Foucault recognize between philosophy as a way of lifeand vintage existentialist thought and practice.

The place where Hadot would qualify his adoption of the existen-tialist style is the space where universal reason holds sway. And yet headmits with regard to Platonic dialogues that, ‘besides the dialecticalmovement of logos’, there is the path of dialogical exchange itselfbetween Socrates and his interlocutor, which Hadot calls ‘that commonwill to reach agreement’ and which he characterizes as ‘de l’amour’.‘Philosophy’, he insists, ‘resides much more in that spiritual exercisethan in the construction of a system.’ As he explains: ‘the task ofdialogue consists, even essentially, in showing the limits of language, the

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impossibility for language to communicate moral and existential experi-ence’ (Eloge 54). Neither Kierkegaard nor Sartre could have phrased itbetter.

Foucault, for his part, seemed to bristle when compared to Sartre.And yet there were sufficient indications of similarity between them thatDreyfus and Rabinow could ask: ‘But if one is to create oneself withoutrecourse to knowledge or universal rules, how does your view differfrom Sartrian existentialism?’ Foucault responds that, despite a theor-etical commitment to self-creativity, Sartrean ‘authenticity’ in practiceappeals to a self as given and to which one must be true.18 But it iscommonly acknowledged that this understanding of Sartrean ‘authen-ticity’ is mistaken and that it more closely resembles Foucault’s notionof self-creation than the latter may wish to allow. Moreover, Sartre’sversion avoids the ‘aestheticism’ that Hadot found offensive inFoucault’s version of self-creation as an ‘aesthetics of existence’. In hisfamous lecture, ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, Sartre observes:

Doubtless [the moral agent] chooses without reference to any pre-estab-lished values, but it is unjust to tax him with caprice. Rather, let us saythat moral choice is comparable to the construction of a work of art. Buthere I must at once digress to make it quite clear that we are not propound-ing an aesthetic morality, for our adversaries are disingenuous enough toreproach us even with that.19

The political commitments of both Sartre and Foucault seem incompat-ible with either aestheticism or, for that matter, the individualism withwhich their critics have tried to harness them.

Concluding reflections

So the redirection of our attention to Hellenistic ethics and, more gener-ally, to the concept of philosophy as ‘care of the self’ that it presumesand fosters suggests that we review the cognate insights of existentialistthinkers in our own day. But before slipping into an easy accommodationwith philosophers whom many have grown accustomed to dismiss asfuzzy or given to hyperbole and histrionics, let us test the ground bysoberly considering some of the problems such a ‘mixed marriage’ mightengender. At least three such problems suggest themselves.

(1) The role of reflective critical and self-critical inquiry in such aquasi-existentialist conception of philosophy as ‘care of the self’ seemsto be seriously weakened if not relinquished entirely. Does the ancientcounsel repeated from Plato onward to judge from the impersonal, uni-versal perspective of Reason suffice to preserve this critical function? Inother words, is the theoretical/practical distinction so widespread in

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present-day academic philosophy still valid? Hadot concedes that theconcept of philosophy as a way of life includes linkage with a certainkind of discourse: ‘One should no longer oppose way of life and dis-course as if they corresponded to practice and theory. Discourse canhave a practical aspect insofar as it tends to produce an effect in thelistener or reader. And style of life, evidently can be not theoretical butcontemplative.’20 But the nature of that relationship is left vague.Indeed, despite his respect for the Stoic (Aurelian) model mentionedearlier, he betrays a certain sympathy for the non-discursive and thelived with such remarks as ‘Philosophical discourse takes its origin in achoice of life and an existential option, not the reverse’ (Hadot’s Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? [hereafter PA], p. 18) and ‘one mustrecognize that the philosopher’s choice of life determines his discourse’(PA 21). And this plunges us into the midst of the paradox ofKierkegaardian–Sartrean fundamental option or criterion-constituting‘choice’, with its charges of decisionism and/or irrationalism.

(2) The contextualist nature of this so-called ‘Socratic’ rubric seemsto have brought in its wake a corresponding abdication in favor of thenatural and human sciences of responsibility for the kind of questionstraditionally addressed by philosophy whether in terms of metaphysicalor at least epistemological and methodological considerations. Think ofthe sociology of knowledge, for example, or ‘cultural’ studies, or thevarious ‘cosmologies’ that have sprung up with the advance of spaceresearch. In other words, it threatens to make contemporary philosophyadjectival to the ‘human sciences’, as the recent appearance of ‘philo-sophical counseling’ attests. Philosophy as ‘therapy’, as life-choice, as‘walking the walk’, seems to be a reasonable translation of ‘philosophyas a way of life’ in this Socratic mode. Indeed, one must not forget thatthe ancient sage was doctor (medicus) as well as enlightener. In Wittgen-steinian terms, his judgments were as much therapeutic as epistemic innature and intent.

(3) One immediately encounters the ambiguity of the ‘spiritual’ asdistinct from the ‘religious’ in such a contrast. This applies to bothFoucault’s and Hadot’s uses of the term ‘spiritual’. The view of phil-osophy as a way of life and its practice as requiring ‘technologies of theself’ (Foucault) or ‘spiritual exercises’ (Hadot) demands a clearer articu-lation of the ‘religious’ than is found in this conversation as presentlypursued. For example, Hadot, appealing to the Roman connectionbetween ‘religion’ and civic ‘obligation’, associates ‘religion’ with riteand ritual and is critical of philosophers like Proclus or Auguste Comtewho would mesh it with philosophy. In fact, he propounds such ‘spiri-tual’ exercises as affording ‘those who cannot or do not want to live areligious mode of life the possibility of choosing a purely philosophicalway of life’ (PV 68). This bivalence of the religious and the non-religious

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styles of life mirrors the existentialist movement as it has developedhistorically. That Hadot could attend the exclusive ‘Vendredis de GabrielMarcel’ in the mid-1940s where ‘Christian existentialism’ was beingpromoted and Sartrean ‘nihilism’ was under attack and yet championthe Nietzschean, Epicurean and generally ‘pagan’ dimension of ‘spiritu-ality’ exemplifies the ambiguities of the spiritual/religious distinction.

But Foucault, perhaps because of the influence of Georges Duméziland the comparativist study of mythology and symbol, takes a more far-ranging approach to the topic – when he discusses it obliquely, if at all.As we have seen, Foucault offers a tentative definition of ‘spirituality’as ‘the subject’s attainment of a certain mode of being and the trans-formations that the subject must carry out on itself to attain this modeof being’. He adds his belief that ‘spirituality and philosophy were iden-tical or nearly identical in ancient spirituality’ and asserts that ‘phil-osophy’s most important preoccupation centered around the self, withknowledge [connaissance] of the world coming after and serving, mostoften, to support the care of the self’ (EW 1: 294). His view of thereligious aspect of spirituality focuses on the introduction of Text, Wordand subsequently Law into the practices by which subjects were formedand ‘truth’ attained. As Law came to predominate, a particular kind ofsubject was constituted and ‘spiritual exercises’ were subsumed into dis-ciplines. The modern, secular self is born.

It is against the limits of that ‘self’ and the identity imposed uponit that the existentialists rebelled. Foucault’s appeal to an ‘aesthetics ofexistence’ and to the Nietzschean project of ‘making one’s life a workof art’ is not the promotion of yet another formula to supplant acurrently established one. Similarly, his genealogical counsel to resist ordismantle the apparatus by which the modern disciplines have consti-tuted the individuals that we are, though it resonates with the Marxianprescription of a potential change in human ‘nature’, is more a modestindicator of the current ‘problem’ than the proposal of a definitive‘solution’. He often insisted that his was not the role of telling us howto live our lives. Rather, as he famously called for the destruction of the‘anthropological quadrilateral’ that established the ‘grid’ by which themodern subject perceives and conceives the world, so his appeal to aes-thetics is just a hypothesis for testing these limits to discover where the‘through path’ lies along which we are once more able not only to ‘think’but to ‘act’. Habermas understandably dismissed this as ‘anarchism’.But Foucault would see it as ‘thinking against oneself’ (se déprendre desoi-même); again, the ethics of an intellectual in our day.

Just as the work of MacIntyre and others in the 1960s and 1970scalled us back to an ancient but largely neglected tradition in ethical dis-course, so the later writings of Foucault and those of Hadot reintroduceinto the philosophical discussion a hitherto marginalized conception of

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the nature of philosophy itself. The challenge which such a view offersour professional habits and practices is not without its problems. I havementioned three such by way of conclusion. But I have also suggestedthat such difficulties are not insurmountable. Rather, they invite seriousdiscussion as one is challenged to renew, if not to revive, the ancientview of philosophy as a way of life in pursuit of wisdom.

Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Notes

1 Plato, Laches, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 165(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), p. 39 (188 D–E).

2 See Michel Foucault, Essential Works, ed. Paul Rabinow, 3 vols (NewYork: New Press, 1997), 1:281 and 3:253; hereafter cited as EW, plusvolume and page numbers; as well as Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure,Vol. 3 of his The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985),p. 11.

3 Michel Foucault, ‘Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of PoliticalReason’, in EW, 3:323.

4 For a brief discussion of the Platonic authorship of this dialogue, see MichelFoucault, Herméneutique du sujet: Cours du Collège de France, 1981–1982(Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2001), p. 77, n. 12; hereafter cited as HS, plus pagenumber.

5 Posterior Analytics 81b 5 (Book I, ch. 18).6 See Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical

Perception (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1975). Though thisis a general thesis of the book, see especially p. 126ff.

7 See Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. HowardV. Hong, Edna H. Hong et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1992), pp. 189ff. Frédéric Gros claims that Foucault was an avid reader ofKierkegaard (see HS 25 n. 46).

8 Though Foucault explicitly excluded from this reciprocity Aristotle, whomhe characterizes as always the exception to generalizations in ancient phil-osophy, one cannot ignore the Stagirite’s account of the virtuous personbecoming so by practicing the acts that define the virtuous person. Ofcourse, Aristotle will try to avoid circularity by appeal to the metaphysicsof potency and act. But this may simply move the circularity back one stepin the process. Here too one is dealing with the ancient paradox of‘becoming what you are’.

9 For a thorough discussion of this topic see the following: Michel Foucault,Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (London: Routledge, 1999);Jeremy R. Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality andPolitical Spirituality (London: Routledge, 2000); and Michel Foucault and

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Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience, ed. James Bernauer andJeremy Carrette (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004).

10 ‘The Discourse on Language’, appendix to The Archeology of Knowledgeand the Discourse on Language (New York: Harper Colophon Books,1972), p. 235.

11 See Pierre Hadot, La Philosophie comme manière de vivre (Paris: AlbinMichel, 2001), p. 214; hereafter cited as PV.

12 Published in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong(New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 225–31; hereafter cited as MFP.

13 ‘Pierre Hadot: histoire du souci’, interview with François Ewald, Magazinelittéraire 345 (juillet–août, 1996): 19.

14 As a matter of proper textual interpretation regarding the identification ofPlatonic self-knowledge and sophrosune (sound-mindedness), see HelenNorth, Sophrosune: Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Literature(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966).

15 Pierre Hadot, Eloge de Socrate (Paris: Editions Allia, 1998) and Exercisesspirituels et philosophie antique, 3rd edn, augmented (Paris: Institut d’étudesaugistiniennes, 1992).

16 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the HumanSciences (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1973), p. 377.

17 Michel Foucault, ‘Le Souci de la vérité’, interview with François Ewald,Magazine littéraire 207 (mai, 1984): 22.

18 Michel Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work inProgress’, Afterword (1983) to Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, BeyondStructuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn, enlarged (Chicago, IL: Universityof Chicago Press, 1983), p. 237; reprinted in EW 1:262.

19 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, in Walter Kaufmann (ed.)Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (Cleveland, OH: World Publish-ing, Meridian Books, 1956), p. 305.

20 Pierre Hadot, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? (Paris: Gallimard,1995), p. 20; hereafter cited as PA.

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