In the first century BC, as a consequence of the destruction of most of the permanent philosophical institutions in Athens (which had existed from the fourth to the first century BC), the four great philosophical schools - Platonism, Aristotelianism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism - could no longer be supported by the Athenian institutions created by their founders.
In order to affirm their fidelity to the founder, the four philosophical schools, scattered in different cities of the Orient and Occident, can no longer depend on the institution that he had created, nor on the oral tradition internal to the school, but solely on the texts of the founder.
The classes of philosophy will therefore consist above all in commentaries on the text. '8
The exegetical phase of the history of ancient philosophy was characterized hy the ract that the principal scholarly exercise was the explication of a text.
Exeietical philosophy conceived of the philosopher not as a "solitary thinker who would invent and construct his system and his truth in an autonomous way. The philosopher thinks in a tradition." 19 For the philosopher during this period, truth is founded on the authority of this tradition, and it is given in fhc texts of the founders of the tradition.
Perhaps the most extraordinary instance of the weight and pressures of nc:gctical thought is to be found in the example, extensively discussed by I l1ulot, of the appearance of the distinction between "being" as an infinitive (111 1•11mi) and "being" as a participle (to on). In a series of articles Hadot has
"lu1wn thnt this distinction arose as a result of the need to give a coherent L'Xcgc:11i11 of Plato's second hypothesis in the Parmenides, "If the one is, how is II 1m1111iblc that it should not participate in being [ 011sia ]?" 20 The Neoplatonist exegesis of the Parmtnitles required that each of Plato's hypotheses correspond to 11 diflcrcnt hypo11ta11ili; thui;, thi11 S'-'C<>nd hypothesis corresponded to the llL'L'otul ( >nc:. Since thi11 11ccond One mui;t 1>articipate in 011sia, and since by
6
Introduction
"participation'' the Neoplatonists meant "receiving a form from a superior and transcendent Form," the second One's participation in ousia is understood to be participation in an ousia in itself which transcends the participating subject. However, according to good Neoplatonist doctrine, above the second One there is only the first One, and this first One, absolutely simple, cannot be an ousia. The first ousia must be the second One. So how could Plato have spoken of an ousia that precedes the second One? An anonymous Neoplatonist commentator on the Parmenides, whom Hadot has identified as Porphyry, squarely confronted these difficulties: "influenced by the exegetical tradition characteristic of his school, the words of Plato evoked for him the entities of a rigid system, and the literal text became reconcilable only with difficulty with what he believed to be Plato's meaning."21 Porphyry's solution to this difficulty would consist in presenting an exegesis according ·to which Plato had employed the word ousia in an enigmatic way, instead of another word whose meaning is close to the word ousia, namely the word einai. If Plato speaks of an ousia in which the second One participates, he wants it to be understood that the second One receives the property of being a "being"
(to on} and of being "ousia" from the first One, because the first One is itself
"being" (to einai} "not in the sense of a subject but in the sense of an activity of being, considered as pure and without subject. "22 Thus, as Hadot shows, we can see appear for the first time in the history of onto-theology a remarkable distinction between being as an infinitive and being as a participle.
Being as an infinitive characterizes the first One, pure absolutely indeterminate activity, while being as a participle is a property of the second One, the first substance and first determination that participates in this pure activity.
This distinction arises from the formulation used by Plato at the beginning of the second hypothesis of the Parmenides, joined to the Neoplatonist exegesis of the Parmenides and the need for Porphyry to try to explain, from within this system of exegesis, why Plato said what he did. 21 The result, according to Hadot, was "certainly a misinterpretation, but a creative misinterpretation, sprung from the very difficulties of the exegetical method."24 This creative misunderstanding was to have a profound influence on the development of a negative theology of being, and, by way of Boethius'
distinction between esse and id quod est, was decisively to affect the history of Western philosophical thought.25
As early as 1959, Hadot described a phenomenon, constant in the history of philosophy,
that stems from the evolution of the philosophical consciousness: it is impossible to remain faithful to a tradition without taking up again the formulas of the creator of this tradition; but it is also impossible to use these formulas without giving them a meaning that the previous philosopher could not even have suspected. One then sincerely bclicvt'!I
Introduction
7
that this new meaning corresponds to the deep intention of this philosopher. In fact, this new meaning corresponds1 to a kind of possibility of evolution of the original doctrine.26
Not all such bestowals of new meaning are creative misunderstandings, as Hadot well realizes. But some of them have led to new ideas of great philosophical significance. We must study the history of these exegeses, discover how these misunderstandings have been used, what philosophical consequences and what paths of evolution have resulted from them, in order to determine whether they have indeed been creative. In the most interesting of cases, we may find that a history of misinterpretation and a history of philosophical creativity are intimately linked.27
In his inaugural lecture to the College de France, Hadot writes: It seems to me, indeed, that in order to understand the works of the philosophers of antiquity we must take account of all the concrete conditions in which they wrote, all the constraints that weighed upon them: the framework of the school, the very nature of phi/osophia, literary genres, rhetorical rules, dogmatic imperatives, and traditional modes of reasoning. One cannot read an ancient author the way one does a contemporary author (which does not mean that contemporary authors are easier to understand than those of antiquity). In fact, the works of antiquity are produced under entirely different conditions than those of their modern counterparts.2JI
Hadot's studies of the history of ancient philosophy and theology have always included the analysis of "the rules, the forms, the models of discourse," the framework of the literary genre whose rules are often rigorously codified, in which the thoughts of the ancient author are expressed.29 Such analysis is necessary in order to understand both the details of the work, the exact import of particular statements, as well as the general meaning of the work as a whole.