I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
Why “do” philosophy? To figure out how to live well?
Not according to Pierre Hadot, explained by Adam Robbert:
The French historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) is best known for his reading of philosophy as a way of life. “Philosophical discourse,” writes Hadot, “originates in a choice of life and an existential option.” In linking life and philosophy, Hadot demonstrates that the choice of how to live does not lie at the end of philosophical investigation but at its beginning, that philosophy from the outset is the application of a certain ideal of life, exercised in community. Hadot continues, “I mean, then, that philosophical discourse must be understood from the perspective of the way of life of which it is both the expression and the means. Consequently, philosophy is above all a way of life, but one which is intimately linked to philosophical discourse.”
Instead, on this view, choosing to do philosophy is at the beginning a way to live well. The living well doesn’t come later, after study and contemplation.
To Hadot, and to German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk as well, philosophizing is a transformational practice that changes the doer as much as anyone who comes in contact with her or his emerging and evolving ideas.
To gain wisdom you can’t merely consume other people’s, Robbert writes, sharing Hadot’s philosophy of philosophy:
[Knowledge] and truth are not the kinds of things that can be directly received or transmitted. Humans are not data retrieval centers or simple information processing computers of any kind. As Hadot notes, neither knowledge nor truth “can be received ready-made, but must be engedered by the individual.” Philosophy on Hadot’s account is thus a kind of askēsis, a discipline of self-transformation, oriented around a set of practices unique to each school of philosophy.
Robbert quotes from Sloterdijk’s book The Art of Philosophy:
Just as the history of science usually presumes that the scientists who do their disciplines already exist, the history of art has assumed since time immemorial that artists are the natural protagonists of the business that produces works of art, and that these players have always existed as well. What would happen if we rotated the conceptual stage ninety degrees in both cases? What would happen if we observed artists in their efforts to become artists in the first place? We could then see every phenomenon on this field more or less from a side view and, alongside the familiar history of art as a history of completed works, we could obtain a history of the training that made it possible to do art and the ascetism that shaped artists.
Here Robbert uses the word ascetism rather than the word asceticism which appears in some translations of Sloterdijk’s work. Either way, the word relates to Sloterdijk’s idea that we are always enacting askēsis in our lives — training, exercise, practice.
As I get further along in my 1000-day project — almost halfway done! — I find myself spending more time with philosophy, not just studying it, but also developing my own.
I think of how I might expand this practice of mine to do it in community, to make an impact with it. Not to build an audience or to monetize it. But to make it into a community practice.
Robbert writes:
Far from being an activity of isolated individuals, the side view sees philosophy as a community practice. In this way, the practice of the self is deeply connected to a care for the city, for the community at large. At the same time, the philosopher is the one who stands partly at a distance from the community. Socrates, for example, both marks a break with and participates in the daily life of Athens, his city (polis). As Hadot writes, “Socrates is simultaneously in the world and outside it…. He is involved with people and with things because the only true philosophy lies in the everyday.”
While Socrates is involved in the city and its activities, he is also átopos—strange, extravagant, absurd, or placeless. Thus just as the philosopher lives the bios theoretikos she also lives the bios xenikos, the life of the stranger, a part of the world but a bit askew from it, neither in the world nor completely outside of it.
This reminds me of a blog post I wrote long ago, on my mom blog The Barely Attentive Mother (a reference to Buddhist bare attention, and secondarily referring to my difficulty bringing sustained attention to the difficult work of raising small children). I wrote of the idea of living orthogonal to cultural norms… of the culture but rotated relative to it. I said it was how I wanted to raise my children too. I was never a hippie granola mom but I was always dissatisfied with the prevailing norms and beliefs imposed upon me and my children.
I like the idea of living now atopically, developing philosophy that develops myself, but also develops in community.