Romans Not Only Had Philosophy but Used Art to Encourage Philosophical Beliefs
"Vain is the word of that philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man." 1. Epicurus
Philosophy, as it is practiced today, is abstract, theoretical, and detached from life, just i academic subject among others. In the Greco-Roman world, it was something quite different, argues the French philosopher Pierre Hadot. Philosophy was a manner of life. Not simply a subject of written report, philosophy was considered an art of living, a practice aimed at relieving suffering and shaping and remaking the self co-ordinate to an ideal of wisdom; "Such is the lesson of aboriginal philosophy: an invitation to each human being to transform himself. Philosophy is a conversion, a transformation of ane'due south way of being and living, and a quest for wisdom." 2. It is the practise of what Hadot calls "spiritual exercises" that brings about cocky-transformation and makes philosophy a way of life.
The School of Athens (Scuola di Atene) by Raphael
The Ancient Schools
For the Greeks and Romans, doing philosophy meant choosing a school and adopting their way of life. Information technology involved what today would exist called a religious conversion. "The philosophical school …demands from the individual a full modify of lifestyle, a conversion of one's unabridged being, and…a…desire to exist and live in a certain way." iii. Each school had their own set of spiritual exercises that corresponded to their respective ideals of wisdom.
The exercises the students practiced were those that we nevertheless associate with bookish report i.e., reading, writing, research, and dialogue. But they too employed exercises that we identify with religious or spiritual organizations, e.thou. exercises in self-control, therapies to calm the passions, cocky-exam, meditation, and memorization of the principles of the school.
(It should be noted that Hadot'due south picture of aboriginal philosophy is more than accurately a description of philosophy as practiced by Socrates and the Hellenistic schools of Stoicism and Epicureanism rather than the schools of Plato and Aristotle.)
The Loss of Spiritual Exercises
In 529 AD the Christian Emperor, Justinian, closed the Athenian Academy, a neo-Ideal school, and brought to an end the teaching of classical philosophy in the West. At present Christianity solitary was considered a manner of life and philosophy was reduced to being a servant or handmaiden to theology, supplying philosophical language and concepts to defend the dogmas of the church.
The spiritual exercises of philosophy became function of Christian spirituality. Hadot argues that the exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas à Kempis are but a Christian adoption of these ancient practices. In place of wisdom, the imitation of Christ became the platonic that shaped spiritual practice. In the words of Paul "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise… Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified…" iv.
For Hadot, the poverty of mod philosophy is the consequence of the abandonment of spiritual exercises. With the waning of Christianity and the ascension of secularism, there has been a re-emergence of philosophy understood as a mode of life. This can be seen in the works of philosophers like Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.
Socrates
The do of spiritual exercises in the West is first seen in Socrates who famously proclaimed that the "unexamined life is not worth living." When he stood before the Athenian court facing charges of impiety and corrupting the youth, Socrates told the judges: "I take no concern at all for what virtually people are concerned about: financial affairs, administration of property…political factions. I did not accept this path…but [instead]…where I could practise the nigh skilful to each one of you…by persuading you to be less concerned with what you have than what y'all are…" 5. Socrates, a self-described gadfly, kept harassing his fellow citizens to question their behavior and mode of life. Foucault argues that from this "care of oneself, consecrated past Socrates... [there] evolved …procedures, practices, and formulas…" 6.
Philosophy Every bit Therapy
"unless the soul is cured, which cannot be washed without philosophy, there will be no end to our miseries." 7. Cicero
The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics all believed the chore of philosophy is to treat and salvage suffering. Philosophy was viewed every bit analogous to medicine, and the philosopher was seen every bit the physician of the soul who cured u.s.a. of false beliefs, irrational fears, and empty desires.
They believed that the passions or emotions were the principal source of our suffering and unhappiness. That without philosophy, disorder, worries, fears, and unrest rules our soul. "Philosophy thus appears…as a therapeutic of the passions. Each school had its therapeutic method…linked…to a profound transformation of the individual'southward way of seeing and being." 8.
Stoic Therapy
The Stoics did not seek to command or moderate the passions, rather they sought their emptying. For them, the good life is a life without passion. The Stoic sage is apatheia, from the Greek significant without feeling.
The Stoic urges united states of america not to give importance to external things. When we adhere ourselves to what is not under our command nosotros gear up ourselves upwards for upset and grief. Beloved, for instance, brings with information technology fear of losing information technology, anger when it is threatened, green-eyed if someone else has information technology, and grief over its loss. For the Stoics, the passions are the source of all our sorrow.
There is only one thing that is safely under our control, our volition to practice good or evil. Everything else is not up to us and is neither good nor bad, just indifferent. This distinction is the constant focus of their attending. The "Stoic always has 'at mitt' the fundamental dominion of life…the distinction betwixt what depends on usa and what does not." 9.
The Stoic volition non rejoice if he inherits a fortune nor grieve if he loses a loved 1. Health and wealth, as well as poverty and illness, are equally indifferent. External appurtenances have no upshot on whether nosotros are happy or miserable. It is our bad choices that harm us, not what happens in the world. The only affair necessary for happiness is virtue.
Their model is not Achilles, weeping, rolling in the grit, tearing his hair out over the death of his friend, Patroclus. Rather, they looked to Socratics and how he calmly faced death or to the philosopher, Anaxagoras, who when told that his child had died, remarked, "I was already aware that I had begotten a mortal." 10.
Even though the Stoic belief in complete self-sufficiency is obviously fake, there is something to be said for a person who is non enslaved to the glitter of the globe. Put in a positive light the Stoic can be described as "a cocky-commanding person-i who, rather than beingness the slave of fortune, is truly gratuitous just because she doesn't care for the things that fortune controls. Commanding herself, she commands all that is important for living well…in a world in which most people value things-such as money...that announced to offer power but really offering slavery…the wise person is the only truly free person." 11.
Gluttonous Therapy
Epicureanism is a philosophy that seeks peace of heed above all else. To achieve that peace requires removing the sources of our unhappiness and unrest. (Mental pain is seen as far worse than bodily pain.) Epicurus lays the arraign on empty desires and false beliefs. "The reason people are unhappy is that they are tortured by immense, hollow desires, such every bit those for wealthy, luxury, and domination." 12 Epicurus calls such desires "hollow" considering they know no limit and tin never be satisfied. No amount of coin volition ever be enough for those who pursue a life of wealth. These desires are non natural but a consequence of false beliefs and a corrupt society. Natural desires, on the other hand, have limits and are hands satisfied. Simple nutrient tin can satisfy our hunger equally well as the near expensive delicacies.
But the greatest source of misery and unhappiness, more than living an empty life, is our fear of expiry. The fear of decease tin exist then intense that information technology tin can drive a person to suicide. As Lucretius, a Roman disciple of Epicurus wrote:
"…fear of death
Induces hate of life and calorie-free, and men
Are and then depressed that they destroy themselves
Having forgotten that this very fear
Was the first cause and source of all their woe." 13.
Epicurus argues that the fright of decease is a consequence of false behavior and he is confident that if we follow his arguments we will be persuaded that "death is nothing to us." The Skeptics and Stoics shared Epicurus' conventionalities that our fear of decease is mistaken and irrational. (In dissimilarity, almost all mod philosophers believe that it is rational to fear death.)
Epicurus main statement is that if death is bad, it has to be bad for somebody. Merely expiry cannot exist bad for the living since they are alive, nor for the dead since they don't be. There is no subject area that exists after death that can experience pleasure or hurting or be harmed in whatever fashion. Therefore, death means nothing to us. The poet Philip Larkin was not convinced. "… And specious stuff that says No rational beingness Tin can fear a affair it volition not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound, No touch or sense of taste or aroma, goose egg to retrieve with, Nil to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round." 14.
Far more disarming is the so called "symmetry argument" used by Lucretius. He argued that since we do non fear our not-existence before birth nosotros should not fear our non-existence after decease. Or in the vivid language of Seneca: "Would you not remember him an utter fool who wept because he was not alive a yard years ago? And is he not simply as much of a fool who weeps because he will not be alive a thousand years from now? It is all the same; you will not be, and yous were not." fifteen.
From the aboriginal to the modern world, Epicurus has been condemned as a hedonist and a subverter of traditional values for identifiying happiness with pleasure. He was in fact an ascetic. Pleasure, for him, is not sensuality and luxury only freedom from hurting and tranquility. If we live a elementary life, restrict our desires, costless ourselves from the fear of death, and learn to accept our mortal condition, nosotros can have a tranquil life, and recover the uncomplicated joy of existing, with a feeling of profound gratitude for life. 16
Spiritual Exercises
All the ancient schools practiced "exercises designed to ensure spiritual progress toward the ideal state of wisdom ...Generally, they consist...of self-control and meditation. Self-control is fundamentally existence attentive to oneself... In all of the schools...philosophy will be especially a meditation upon death and an attentive concentration on the present moment in order to...live in full consciousness," 17. PWL, 59
Hadot groups the exercises practiced by the different schools under three headings: i) concentration on the present, ii) viewing things from in a higher place and 3) meditation on decease. The exercise of decease was e'er practiced with the other two exercises.
Attention to the Present Moment
"…man lives in the globe without perceiving the world." eighteen. Pierre Hadot
We can simply be in the nowadays if nosotros free ourselves from the past and the future. Fourth dimension has to exist experienced in a way entirely different from everyday experience where we flit incessantly between memory and expectation, regret and worry, and in the process lose the present moment. "For the ancients...the transformation of 1'south view of the world was intimately linked to exercises which involved concentrating one's listen on the nowadays instant...such exercises consisted in "separating oneself from the future and past," in gild to'circumscribe the nowadays instant." xix.
Both the Stoics and the Epicureans stressed the importance of beingness in the nowadays moment. But what this meant in exercise for them was very dissimilar. For the Stoic being in the present moment demanded abiding tension and endeavour. For the Gluttonous being in the present meant learning how to relax and have peace of heed. "The difference between the ii attitudes [are]…the…Epicurean enjoys the present moment, whereas the Stoic wills it intensely; for the 1, it is a pleasure; for the other, a duty." xx. Though they seem like opposites, Stoicism and Epicureanism, like inhalation and exhalation, complement each other.
Death & the Present
Most of us live as if we have endless time which is why we give information technology so little thought and spend information technology so freely. Meditating on death can awaken us from our sleep, make us realize our fourth dimension is brief and each moment precious. Samuel Johnson's famous quip is to the signal: "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." 21.
The Roman emperor and Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, believed we would be radically changed if nosotros lived as if each day were our last. "The idea of imminent death…transforms our way of acting in a radical way, by forcing us to get aware of the infinite value of each instant: 'Nosotros must achieve each of life's actions as if it were the final." 22.
Dostoevsky was confronted by imminent decease and was forever changed. He, forth with beau members of the Petrashevsky Circle, a literary grouping, were placed earlier a firing squad, only to be pardoned at the last minute by the Tsar Nicholas I. This mock execution had been carefully staged by the Tsar. Ane prisoner went mad, the others permanently scarred. Dostoevsky's account appeared twenty years later in his novel, The Idiot. "But amend if I tell you lot of another man I met last year…this man was led out along with others on to a scaffold and had his sentence of death by shooting read out to him, for political offenses…he says that nothing was more terrible at that moment than the nagging thought: "What if I didn't have to die!…I would plough every minute into an historic period, aught would exist wasted, every minute would be deemed for…" 23.
View from Higher up
Homer's delineation of the Greek gods during the Trojan War calmly looking downward from the heavens at the spectacle of the warring Greeks and Trojans may be the source for the spiritual exercise of viewing life from above, from the signal of the view of the gods.
This exercise seeks to teach us to view the earth and ourselves with disengagement and objectivity, from the standpoint of universality. "The indicate is…to liberate oneself from one's individuality, in order to raise oneself up to universality…in becoming aware of oneself as a part of nature, and a portion of universal reason." 24.
From the perspective of the universal, our cares and concerns seem footling and insignificant. "The view from above changes our value judgments on things: luxury, power, war…and the worries of everyday life become ridiculous." 25.
Death & the View from Higher up
"To view things from above is to await at them from the perspective of expiry...." 26 For Plato, the philosopher is always trying to detach himself, as much as is possible, from his trunk and senses. Its this spiritual separation of the soul from the trunk that is a grooming for death. "Training for death is training to die to one's individuality and passions, in order to look at things from the perspective of universality and objectivity." 27. (Here Plato borrows the Orphic idea that the soul is trapped in the body, that the trunk is a tomb.)
The existentialists fence that this flying to the universal is an illusion and a denial of death. From a universal standpoint, expiry may seem abstract and unreal but such unconcern vanishes quickly when nosotros face the prospect of our ain death. As Montaigne observed, "When I looked upon decease as the end of my life, universally, then I looked upon information technology with indifference. Wholesale, I could principal it: Retail, information technology savaged me…" 28.
Meditation on Death
The meditation on death has been put to varied uses. It was used by all the schools to encourage concentration on the present moment, to make united states of america "seize the 24-hour interval." For the Epicureans "meditation on death is intended to make us aware of both the absolute value of being and the nothingness of death, to give us love of life and to suppress the fright of death." 29. Christian monasticism put the arbitration on death to a very different use. It was skillful not to promote love of life but hatred of it. "The lesson taught by Abbott Evagrius [a Desert Male parent] to the monks under his charge, that they should remember contiqnually of death and the pains of hell…this became the universally accepted teaching throughout the Christian centuries. One must continually despise the present life, meditate on decease as punishment for sin, think of the moment of death as one of extreme importance, and contemplate the tortures of the other world." 30.
For Epicurus, the fear of death promoted past organized religion corrupts the soul and destroys the joy of being. Likewise, Montaigne wanted to learn similar the ancients to despise death "We are to contemplate death, not, equally the Church would insist, that we may fearfulness it, and order our lives appropriately, just that we may get so inured to its presence that we are unaffected by it." 31. In short, either despise life or despise death.
Paths to the Universal
The Penitent Magdalen by Georges de La Bout
As Hadot grouped spiritual exercises nether three headings, so he also reduced them to ii directions. They either are focused on the cocky or on identifying with what is beyond the self. There is a "profound kinship that existed among all these exercises…they ultimately tin be reduced to two movements, opposed simply complementary…ane of concentration of the cocky, and the other of expansion of the self…[each] striving for a single ideal…the sage [as a universal model]…" 32.
With the exception of Skepticism, the goal of all the ancient philosophical schools was to accomplish the universal. The spiritual exercises of "concentrating on the present" and "viewing the globe from above" are but different paths to the same cease.
Spiritual Exercises & Asceticism
Hadot distinguished spiritual exercises from asceticism. The spiritual exercises proficient past the ancient philosophers were primarily intellectual and imaginative, that is, philosophical thought exercises, while asceticism involves the "complete abstinence or restriction in the use of food, beverage, sleep, clothes, and holding, and especially continence in sexual matters." 33. Although there is certainly an ascetic element in all the ancient schools.
Hadot has been criticized for limiting spiritual exercises to mental exercises. The bodily exercises as practiced in Hatha Yoga, Zen, and T'ai chi ch'uan could every bit exist considered spiritual exercises.
Spiritual Exercises in the Modern World
In virtually of the philosophical schools the conventionalities in a cosmic order was the properties and context in which spiritual exercises were skilful. The aim of the exercises was to bring the soul into harmony with the social club of the universe.
The Epicureans are the bully exception. For them, there is no universal reason or cosmic order, the world is conceived as a product of chance, and simply ane of an infinite number of universes. (In many ways the Epicureans seem similar contemporaries.) Only "the Epicureans did make utilise of spiritual exercises…however, these practices are not based on the norms of nature or universal reason." 34.
The problem with Hadot's try to revive the ancient spiritual exercises is that nosotros no longer inhabit a creation. Nosotros no longer believe, as the Stoics and Platonists did, that the universe is infused with reason and is something to imitate and society one'due south life by. We now view the universe as an accident, without purpose or direction, not as a model to imitate. We expect for meaning non in some external, objective gild, but within ourselves.
Nonetheless, Hadot was critical of Foucault's brake of the ancient spiritual exercises to techniques for shaping the self rather than an effort to reach the universal. It is "difficult to have that the philosophical practice of the Stoics and Platonists was cipher but a relationship to one's self…the feeling of belonging to a whole is an essential element…Such a cosmic perspective transforms the feeling ane has of oneself." 35.
Only Hadot is of ii minds. He believes that the practice of spiritual exercises can even so be meaningful in the modern age. You do not need to become a Hindu to practice Hatha Yoga. All the same, something has been lost; the "highest point the self can reach is…[where] one has the impression of losing oneself in something that totally overcomes ane." 36.
For us moderns, the world is neither a creation of God nor divine but purposeless and without significant. As the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg lamented, "The more than the universe seems comprehensible, the more it as well seems pointless." 37.
Nietzsche spins a legend that captures the modern condition. "In some remote corner of the universe…there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and about mendacious minute of "world history"—yet simply a infinitesimal. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
I might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, zero will have happened... only its possessor and producer gives it such importance equally if the globe pivoted effectually information technology. Just if we could communicate with the musquito, then nosotros would learn that he floats through the air with the aforementioned self-importance, feeling within itself the flight centre of the globe." 38. Nietzsche'southward vision might exist called a disenchanted view from above. A similiar fable is told past Bertrand Russell in probably his almost well known essay, "A Gratuitous Man's Worship." 39
Afterword
The revival of interest in spiritual exercises every bit a vital function of philosophy is in big part the result of Hadot. Two of the more important works influenced by Hadot is Martha Nussbaum's The therapy of want: theory and practice in Hellenistic ideals and Michel Foucault'south second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality.
For the role of spiritual exercises in Nietzsche see Horst Hutter,Shaping the Future: Nietzsche's New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices and Michael Uhr, Nietzsche'south Therapy: Self Cultivation in the Centre Works
Sources
ane. Hadot, Pierre, and Arnold I. Davidson. 1995. Philosophy equally a way of life: spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 110n15, attributed to Epicurus.
2. Hadot,Philosophy equally a style of life: spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault,275.
three. Hadot, Pierre. 2002. What is ancient philosophy? Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 3.
4. Crossway Bibles. 2007. The Holy Bible: ESV, English Standard Version containing the Sometime and New Testaments: pew and worship Bible. Wheaton, Sick: Crossway Bibles. 1 Corinthians 1:xviii-31.
5. Socrates, Amends 30 a-b, trans. Hadot, What is ancient philosophy? , 29.
vi. Foucault, Michel. 1986.The care of the cocky: Book 3 of The history of sexuality. New York: Vintage Books, 44, 45
vii. Cicero, Marcus Tullius, and J. Eastward. Male monarch. 1966.Tusculan disputations. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Academy Press, Three.13.
8. Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life, 83.
9. Ibid., Philosophy as a fashion of life,84.
ten. Nussbaum, Martha Chicken. 1994. The therapy of desire: theory and practice in Hellenistic ethics. Princeton, Due north.J.: Princeton University Press, 363.
11. Nussbaum, Martha. "Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche's Stoicism" in Richard Schacht. 1994. Nietzsche, genealogy, morality: essays on Nietzsche'due south Genealogy of morals. Berkeley: University of California Press, 146.
12. Hadot, What is ancient philosophy? 117.
thirteen. The Lucretius Carus, Titus, and Rolfe Humphries. 1968.The way things are: the De rerum natura of Titus Lucretius Carus. Bloomington: Indiana Academy Press, 69.
14. Philip Larkin, "Aubade" fromCollected Poems Larkin, Philip, and Anthony Thwaite. 1989.Collected poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
fifteen. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, and Richard M. Gummere. "On Taking 1'south Ain Life" 1953.Advertizement Lucilium epistulae morales: with an English language translation. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard. Letter 77.
sixteen. Sherefkin, Jack. Immortality and the Fearfulness of Death. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/02/04/immortality-fear-death
17. Hadot,Philosophy as a manner of life, PWL, 59.
18. Ibid., 258.
nineteen. Ibid.,, 259.
xx. Ibid, 230.
21. Boswell, James, C. P. Chadsey, and Gordon Ross. 1946.The life of Samuel Johnson. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co. September 19, 1777.
22. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. 1944.The meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus 1. ane. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Ii, 5, 2. quoted in Hadot, What is ancient philosophy, 137.
23. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky. 2003.The idiot. New York: Vintage Books, part 1, chap 5.
24. Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life, 210-211.
25. Hadot,What is ancient philosophy? 207
26. Hadot,What is ancient philosophy? 207
27. Hadot, , What is ancient philosophy 197.
28. Montaigne, Michel de, and M. A. Screech. 1993. "On Diversion" The complete Essays. London, England: Penguin Books, 943.
29. Hadot,What is ancient philosophy, 197.
30. Spencer, Theodore. 1960.Death and Elizabethan tragedy; a study of convention and opinion in the Elizabethan drama. New York: Pageant Books, 8.
31. Montaigne, Michel de, and M. A. Screech. 1993.The complete Essays. London, England: Penguin Books, 60. ???
32. Hadot, What is ancient philosophy?189.
33. Hadot, Philosophy as a Style of Life, 128.
34. Ibid., 208
35. Ibid. 208
36. Hadot, Pierre, Marc Djaballah, Jeannie Carlier, and Arnold I. Davidson. 2009.The present alone is our happiness: conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Printing, 84.
37. Weinberg, Steven. 1993.The first 3 minutes: a modern view of the origin of the universe. New York: Basic Books, 154.
38. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Walter Arnold Kaufmann. "From On Truth and Prevarication in an Actress-Moral Sense" 1976.The portable Nietzsche. New York: Penguin Books, 42.
39. Russell, Bertrand. "A Costless Homo's Worship". http://www.skeptic.ca/Bertrand_Russell_Collection.pdf
Source: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2017/09/13/philosophy-way-life
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