TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF SAGESSE

Abstract

This paper starts from the contention that Pierre Hadot’s unusually divided reception reflects the different dimensions of Hadot’s own scholarly profile. Hadot’s largely favourable reception amongst historians of ideas responds to the philological dimension of his work, but misses the implicit normativity involved in his recovery of the sense of ancient philosophy as a way of life. Analytic critics have registered but contested this normativity in ways that arguably also misrepresent his work. This paper contends that both receptions of Hadot have missed what can be called Hadot’s unique philosophical problematic: uncovering through the ancient sources a kind of phenomenology of how a person would perceive and evaluate the world who had, counter-factually, attained a wholly enlightened, wholly “sage” mode of living. This phenomenology of sagesse, which is predicated on a metaphysical agnosticism, proves closer to the last Foucault than Hadot sometimes suggested: albeit embodying an aesthetics of “the whole,” over against Foucault’s aesthetics of (human) existence.

Keywords:

• Pierre Hadot
• philosophy as a way of life
• problematic
• last Foucault
• phenomenology

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Matthew Sharpe is in receipt of an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant for research on modern reinventions of philosophy as a way of life.

1 See Hadot, Porphyre et Victorinus; Plotinus, Or the Simplicity of Vision.

2 For a sample of work in the history of ideas that draws from Hadot, see Gaukroger; Corneanu; Sellars, “De Constantia”; The Art of Living; Hankey; Domanski.

3 Notably Chase, “Observations on Pierre Hadot’s Conception of Philosophy” 262–86.

4 Mediating these two poles, Force argues (30–34), is Hadot’s philological and historical fascination with the large role of what we would consider “misunderstanding” (contresens) taking old ideas in new contexts, in engendering new directions in Western intellectual history.

5 On Hadot and Kierkegaard, see Irina 157–71; Gregor 65–84; Sharpe, “Socratic Ironies” 409–35.

6 See Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom 17–22, 402–03 nn. 4–5; Inwood, “Review of John Sellars”; Sharpe, “What Place Discourse?” 25–54.

7 See Wimberly 191–202; Flynn 609–22; Irrera 995–1017.

8 See Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject 10–25; but for exceptions, see 71–72 (in Plato); 137, 194–95 (in Epicureanism); 458–59 (in Stoicism).

9 The quote comes from a section of the essay not present in the English translation.

10 We note that Hadot’s thought here gives a surprising new angle on why it is that aesthetics, art and the figure of the artist have so fascinated the moderns (Eagleton). At the same time, en passant, this thought suggests an answer to the question of where, within the classical heritage, we can find the consideration of modes of experience that the European tradition has since Burke or Kant sought in aesthetic contemplation.

11 Wimberly’s argument is that Hadot is at his core a mystic. His theoretical agnosticism reflects a larger epistemic scepticism about the limits of language, seen most clearly in the works on Wittgenstein (but it might also be sought in Hadot’s near-lifelong work on Plotinus). It follows from this that people are free to choose different philosophical forms of life, and this is only a matter of taste: whence “aesthetic” (Wimberly 196). We have argued here that the aesthetic is more clearly central in Hadot’s attempt to capture the core dimensions of the “sage’s” sense of the natural world, and of his place within it. Wimberly’s argument concerning the place of mysticism in Hadot’s thought has been skirted here, owing to limitations of space. It seems to us fundamentally correct, but to omit the other particular dimensions of Hadot’s masked philosophy we have highlighted here.