>>54681Pierre Hadot’s topic is sweeping. He presents a new understanding of the nature of ancient philosophy and how we should read it…
Hadot argues that most modern scholars misunderstand the nature of ancient philosophy from Socrates to the rise of Christianity. Since the collapse of classical civilization, our primary access to ancient philosophy has been the written word: either the writings of the philosophers themselves or the reports of others about their lives and teachings. This has led to a tendency to interpret ancient philosophies as primarily theoretical in aim. Ancient philosophers, like the great speculative philosophers of the middle ages and the modern period, were supposedly concerned to elaborate comprehensive and consistent “systems” of ideas. And, like them, the ancients supposedly wrote to communicate these systems of ideas to the larger “republic of letters.”
Hadot, by contrast, argues that ancient philosophy was primarily practical in its aims, not theoretical. Wisdom was not identified with knowledge of the whole, but with happiness or well-being, which was to be attained by bringing about the proper internal ordering of the soul. Any and all accounts of the cosmos were subordinated to this goal. One did not have to be an original theorist in order to be a philosopher. Nor did one have to be current on the opinions of various theorists. Instead, one had only to adopt a particular way of life: a life centered on the pursuit of wisdom. Thus, one can be an original theorist or an erudite scholar, but not a philosopher in the classical sense. Just as professors who teach novels do not thereby call themselves novelists, so professors who teach philosophy should not thereby call themselves philosophers. Being a philosopher was not a matter of education or vocation, but a new way of being in the world arising from an internal spiritual conversion.
https://www.counter-currents.com/2015/06/philosophy-as-a-way-of-life/