Controlling the Philosophical Imaginary: Reading Pierre Hadot with Luiz Costa Lima

Abstract

This essay proffers a critical complement to Luiz Costa Lima's claims concerning the nature, history, and control of the imagination in Western culture. Accepting the wide scope of Costa Lima's critical claim about the socio-political control of imaginative literature in Western history, we claim that Pierre Hadot's work on philosophy as a bios in the ancient West cautions us lest we position philosophy in this history as always and necessarily an agency of control. At different times, philosophy has rather stood as an ally in practicing and promoting forms of criticity, and the playful, creative, and transformative envisaging of alternative ways of experiencing the world Costa Lima theoretically celebrates in literary fiction. Any critique of philosophy as always opposed to the critical imagination can only stand, we have argued, relative to philosophy as conceived on what Hadot suggests is but one, albeit the now hegemonic model: namely, as a body of systematic rational discourses, including discourses about the literary, poetics, and imaginary. What this vision of philosophy misses, Hadot shows, is how the ancient conception of philosophy (which survives in figures like Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Goethe) as a way of life promoted distinctly literary, aesthetic, and imaginative practices; first, to assist in the existential internalisation of the schools' ideas; secondly, to envisage in the sage and utopias edifying counterfactuals to help students critically reimagine accepted norms; and thirdly, in the conception of a transformed way of living and perceiving ‘according to nature’, whose parameters of autonomy and pleasurable contemplation of the singularity of the present experiences anticipate the experiences delineated in modern aesthetic theory.

Notes

¹‘What is termed the control of the imagination should not be confounded with censorship either of literary works or tendencies. Censorship is rather a punctual prohibition, sanctioned by norms, and condemns the circulation of works with a given combination of characteristics. In contrast, control involves a more delicate decision: something is perceived as unacceptable, improper, or base, but its production is not simply prohibited . . . Thus, it would make no sense to speak of the control of avant-garde art under Nazism or Stalinism or to say that Baudelaire and Flaubert were controlled. No, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the avant-garde were censored’ (Costa Lima 2008a: 150).

²As Costa Lima specifies, the control he means is: ‘associated with values on a philosophical-religious spectrum and, consequently, how the variables inherent in the process of controlling domestication comprised elements that were aesthetic, political (the nation), pragmatic (utility), philosophico-religious, and concerned with public interest’ (Costa Lima 2008a: 153).

³At another point, Costa Lima closely identifies the emergence of the theory, and practice of critical, mimesis with the birth of tragic poetry: in the particular, democratic or republican context of 5th–4th century Greece, which is also the birthplace of philosophy.

⁴Costa Lima also notably observes that the tale (which is itself about a man who can't tell fiction from historical fact [1992: 5–7]) includes frequent digressions, showing (as he approvingly cites Nick Spadaccini) that the book ‘was intended for private consumption so that demystifying and subversive material could be included’ (Costa Lima 1992: 10). The frequent digressions in many ancient philosophical texts can be, and have been, argued by critics to have served a similar literary and political purpose (Strauss 1978).

⁵Other Platonic examples might be cited, including the opening of the Protagoras. But consider here the play at the opening of Plato's Theaetetus, which opens with the character Euclides being asked by a character Terpsion to recount the conversation of Socrates with the young Theaetetus many years ago (a first distancing), which one ‘Euclides’ had written down, since Terpsion has a bad memory (a second distancing). When we note that ‘Euclides’ in fact is known to have written now-lost Socratic dialogues, and hence to have been a rival of Plato – as well as evoking the name of the great ancient mathematician in a dialogue principally featuring the mathematician Theaetetus – it seems very difficult to resist the claim that something very like Cervantes' literary distancing of himself from the truth or verisimilitude of his tale in Don Quixote is operative already in this philosophical dialogue.

⁶The contrast between Cooper's and Hadot's work on philosophy as a bios is remarkable. Cooper spends nearly no time on the literary forms of ancient philosophical texts. Cooper argues that Hadot's conception of ‘spiritual exercises’ is drawn from Ignatius Loyola, and that the earliest textual evidence of such practices comes in Seneca's De Ira, circa 50 CE: with the exception of Epicurus (Cooper 2011: 21; see note 4: 402). These practices, he claims (but see his qualifications in lengthy notes 4 and 5: 402), are ‘nonrational’, and a departure from ‘philosophy as grounded in an individual's personal grasp, through fully articulated reasoning and argument, of the true reason why a certain way of life is best’ (Cooper 2011: 21). He argues that the integration of such exercises into philosophy marked a departure from its Hellenic and Hellenistic origins, shaped by the ‘spiritual tension . . . [or] anxiety’ of late antiquity, which paved the way for the withdrawal into self, ascendant mystery cults, neo-Platonic mysticism, and Christianity. We cannot deal with these criticisms here (Cooper 2011: 21–22). We only suggest that Cooper's criticisms of the spiritual exercises would need to be considered alongside his abstraction from their literary framing, from which Hadot begins towards his conception of philosophical bios.

⁷The force of this reconception of ancient philosophical writing can be seen most clearly in works like Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy; wherein Lady Philosophy appears to Boethius to reconcile him to his prison-bound state; or Seneca's Consolations addressed to his particular persons, including his own mother, to minister to specific losses. However, notably, Hadot sees the highly stylised forms of Socratic elenchus in the Platonic dialogues as just what the Statesman at one point states that they are: often as much concerned with inculcating procedures for thinking in students (‘so . . . we may become better dialecticians on all topics’ [Statesman: 285c–d]) as with delivering a specific conclusion, for instance concerning the particular nature of the politikos in that dialogue (Hadot 2002: 73–74).

⁸Hadot's wife, Ilsetraut Hadot, has captured this sense well in a work on literary consolations in ancient philosophy: ‘These exercises are certainly exercises of meditation, but they do not only concern reason; in order to be efficacious, they must link the imagination and affectivity to the work of reason, and therefore all the psychagogical means of rhetoric’ (Hadot 2009: 23).

⁹The Epicurean school was, short of the Cynics, arguably the most extreme in its critique of existing Greek civilisation and values. Lucretius' De Rerum Natura recurs to idyllic visions of precivilised men ‘in their own company, . . . [lying] beside a river on soft grass, 30 under the branches of a towering tree, and, with no great effort, enjoying themselves, restoring [sic.] their bodies, especially when the weather smiles and annual seasons scatter flowers across the greening turf ’ (Lucretius 2010: II.29, compare V.1195–1202) As John Nichols notes, Lucretius indeed comes close in Book V to arguing that every document of civilization has been a document in barbarism (1976: 168–170).

¹⁰‘Spatially’, the sage views each event in life sub specie eternitatis, in what Hadot calls ‘physics as a spiritual exercise’: learning to see the events of his own life, imaginatively, from outside or as if ‘from above’, in a way that relativises one's ordinary passions and commitments. ‘Temporally’, Hadot tells us, the sophos as envisaged in the ancient schools would view each moment simultaneously as if what he were seeing, he was seeing for the first time (tam quam spectator novus, as per Seneca Letters 64); and at the same time, as if he was fully aware that these were the last things he would see; fully attentive to the present moment, without anxiety or fear for the future (which is not yet) or about the past (which cannot be changed). Hence, Hadot comments, the sage experiences a constantly renewed awareness of ‘the irreplaceable’ character of ‘each instant, [and with it] the marvellous presence of the world’ (Hadot 2010c: 315; 2010d: 354–351; 356–358; Lucretius 2010: II, 1023 ff.).