According to Xenophon, when Hippias demanded the definition of justice from Socrates, he finally responded with these words: "Instead of speaking of it, I make it understood by my acts." 137 If spiritual exercises were the core of ancient philosophy, that is because philosophy was essentially a way of life.
In order to understand the centrality of spiritual exercises to ancient philosophy, it is crucial not to limit or reduce them to ethical exercises. As I hove said, spiritual exercises involved all aspects of one's existence; they did not nl lcmpt only lo immrc behavior in 11ccord11ncc with a code of good
24
Introduction
conduct; they had, as Hadot says, not only a moral value, but an existential value. ll8 More specifically, if we recall the traditional distinction between the three parts of philosophy - dialectic or logic, physics, and ethics - we must not place the practice of spiritual exercises simply in the ethical part of philosophy.139 We must not represent logic and physics as being those parts of philosophy where theoretical discourse is located, presenting ethics as the practical part where spiritual exercises are enacted. As Hadot has argued at length, the distinction between theory and practice is located within each of the parts of philosophy; there is a theoretical discourse concerning logic, physics and ethics, but there is also a practical or lived logic, a lived physics, and a lived ethics. Ho
Ethics itself contains a theoretical discourse that sets forth principles, definitions, distinctions, and analyses of the virtues and vices. But, more importantly for the philosopher, there is also a lived ethics that puts into practice the fundamental rules of life. 141 Similarly, there is a theory of logic, which includes a conception of the proposition, and explains different forms of syllogisms, and different ways of refuting sophisms; in addition, the theory of logic was comprised of scholarly exercises in which one learned to apply the abstract rules. These rules of logic were also employed in the theoretical discourses of physics and ethics, the two other parts of philosophy. Yet, again, there was also an everyday practice of logic that had to be carried out in the domain of judgment and assent. This lived logic consisted in "not giving one's consent to what is false or doubtful." 142 Finally, the discipline of physics included not only a theory, but a lived physics, a true spiritual exercise, which involved a way of seeing the world, a cosmic consciousness, and procured pleasure and joy for the soul. Ml The spiritual exercises of ethics, logic, and physics meant that the practice of philosophy did not ultimately consist in
"producing the theory of logic, that is the theory of speaking well and thinking well, nor in producing the theory of physics, that is of the cosmos, nor in producing the theory of acting well, but it concerned actually speaking well, thinking well, acting well, being truly conscious of one's place in the cosmos." 141
The significance of locating spiritual exercises within each of the parts of philosophy can be seen clearly in Hadot's criticisms of Michel Foucault. One way of describing Hadot's misgivings about Foucault's interpretation of ancient spiritual exercises is to say that Foucault not only gave a too narrow construal of ancient ethics, but that he limited the "care of the self" to ethics alone. 145 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 sec the full scope of spirir unl
Introduction
25
exercises, that physics (and logic), as much as ethics, aimed at selftransformation. Indeed, in a very different context, Paul Vey,ne 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!' " 146
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. 147 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. 148 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." 149 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
\l;sdom"; 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." 150 As Hadot summarizes this view, "logic, physics and ethics distinguish themselvt..'S from one another when one speaks of philosophy, but not when one lives it." 151
For the Stoics the dynamic unity of reality, the coherence of reason with itself, meant that
It is the same Logos that produces the world, enlightens the human being in his faculty of reasoning and expresses itself in human discourse, while remaining completely identical with itself at all stages of reality.
Therefore, physics has for its object the Logos of universal nature, ethics the Logos of reasonable human nature, logic this same Logos expressing itself in human discourse. From start to finish, it is therefore the same force and the same reality that is at the same time creative Nature, Norm of conduct and Rule of discourse.152
This func.lnmental intuit ion of the Stoics, according to which the Logos is the common object of logic, llhysics, and ethics, is continued by those early