Philosophy as a “way of life” …

“Foucault not only gave a too narrow construal of ancient ethics, but that he limited the “care of the self” to ethics alone!” Foucault made no place for that cosmic consciousness, for physics as a spiritual exercise, that was so important to the way in which the ancient philosopher viewed his relation to the world. By not attending to that aspect of the care of the self that places the self within a cosmic dimension, whereby the self, in becoming aware of its belonging to the cosmic Whole, thus transforms itself, Foucault was not able to see the full scope of ‘spiritual exercises, that physics (and logic), as much as ethics, aimed at self transformation. Indeed, in a very different context, Paul Veyne has reported the following exchange with Foucault: “One day when I asked Foucault: ‘The· care of the self, that is very nice, but what do you do with logic, what do you do with physics?’, he responded: ‘Oh, these are enormous excrescences!'” Nothing could be further from Hadot’s own attitude, since for him logic and physics, as lived spiritual exercises, are as central to the nature of philosophy as is ethics. Far from being excrescences, disfiguring and superfluous, the practices of logic and physics were a necessary part of the ancient philosopher’s way of life, were crucial to his experience of himself as a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. In recent writings, Hadot has focused on the Stoic doctrine that logic, physics, and ethics are not parts of philosophy itself, but are parts of philosophical discourse (logos kata philosophian), of the discourse relating to philosophy. ‘ The Stoics held that “these parts could only appear distinct and separate in the discourse of teaching and of exposition of the philosophical dogmas,” and that philosophy, strictly speaking, was not divided into parts.!”

Although expository, didactic, and pedagogical requirements made it necessary “to cut up” philosophy into parts, philosophy proper, as an exercise of wisdom, was considered a “single act, renewed at every instant, that one can describe, without breaking its unity, as being the exercise of logic as well as of physics or of ethics, according to the directions in which it is exercised.”!” That is to say, in the lived singular act of philosophy, logic, physics, and ethics are but “aspects of the very same virtue and very same wisdom”; they are not really distinguished with respect to one another, but only by “the different relations that relate them to different objects, the world, people, thought itself.” As Hadot summarizes this view, “logic, physics and ethics distinguish themselves from one another when one speaks of philosophy, but not when one lives it.”