Philosophy as a Way of Life

"Pierre Hadot is not that well known, but the people who are aware of him really love and value his work. He was a French academic, a specialist in Neo-Platonist mysticism. One day he went into his local bakery, looked around at the people queuing for bread and thought: Neo-Platonist mysticism means nothing to these people and is not much use to them. So he started to become interested in the more practical philosophy of the Stoics and the Epicureans, and this idea of ancient philosophy not as abstract theory but as a way of life, something that ordinary people can practise every day to live better and happier lives. That idea of philosophy as a way of life and a set of daily practices is one way to get more people into philosophy. One of the reasons why people today are so into Buddhism or yoga is because it gives them something they can practise every day. One thing Hadot wrote about was the idea of keeping a journal. At the end of each day some ancient philosophers would keep track of what happened during the day – what they did well and what they did badly. The idea is that if you want to change yourself and get rid of bad habits, first you have to track yourself. Humans are such forgetful and unconscious creatures, we don’t always realise who we are or how we’re behaving. So we need to keep track of ourselves. Epictetus, for example, said if you have a bad temper count the days on which you don’t lose your temper, and if you manage to do it for 30 days then you can consider yourself to be making progress. Using a thought journal is a technique that CBT has brought back. If you have depression or anxiety and go and see a cognitive therapist, they will suggest that you keep a journal and keep track of your thoughts and habits, to bring more self-awareness into it and also so you can see the progress that you are making. You might have a day that you feel really down but you can look back and see that actually you have made a lot of progress from, say, three months ago. So that is one practical exercise which the ancients used that is really useful today. In fact, we are actively developing this technique today. Now there is a lot of new technology such as phone apps which we can use to track ourselves. There is a movement called the Quantified Self, where people develop different devices to keep track of themselves, their diet, their exercise regimes, their moods, their daily activities. Their motto is “self-knowledge through numbers”, which is a very Socratic idea. One of things I write about is the technique in ancient philosophy of choosing your role models, known as the exemplum technique. This is the idea that if you really want to take on board an ethical idea it helps if, rather than just considering it abstractly, you think about someone who really embodies that idea or that value. Then you can see that person as a role model and try to emulate them. This is very much the approach of Plutarch, a Greek philosopher and historian. He was aware to what extent we imitate the people around us. We are always consciously and unconsciously copying the behaviour of people around us, so he suggests we try to do this more consciously. We should soak our imaginations in good role models – and he tried to provide such ethical role models in his book Parallel Lives . I thought of this when I interviewed someone called Louis Ferrante. Louis grew up in a bad neighbourhood in New York and the roles models in his environment were all gangsters. They were all the people who had the power, success and money. So he became a gangster. He joined John Gotti’s mafia gang and by the age of 20 he was quite a successful hijacker, making lots of money, getting the best tables at restaurants and so on. Then he got busted and sent to a high-security prison when he was 22. At one stage the prison guard told him he was nothing but an animal. He was in solitary confinement, getting his food through a slot in the door. And he thought, I really am an animal. He looked at some of the people he had thought were role models, like John Gotti, and he said it was like seeing Caesar without his cloak. So he taught himself to read and came across the book Plutarch’s Lives in the prison library, which had stories of great figures from history like Caesar. He was so taken by this book that he stole it from the library. Then he felt bad about stealing it and brought it back. He was inspired by all the stories of people from history who had done incredible things, and had often gone through situations that were worse than his. He started reading biographies of people like Nelson Mandela, and he says that experience of finding better role models saved him. He got out of prison and became a campaigner for literacy in prison. That is just one story I really like which shows ancient philosophy in action in today’s world."

"One of Peter Brown’s first books was a biography of Augustine in 1967. He then wrote a book about late antiquity in the early 1970s. He’s an example of someone who wears his learning very lightly. What he brings that’s new is interdisciplinarity—before we even knew what that word meant—between history and anthropology, and history and psychology, as well as an openness to breaking down some of the partitions between different types and areas of historical studies."

"This is one of the first books I read that got me rolling on board The Socrates Express and started me off on the project: I just found it a great introduction to this idea that philosophy can be useful. As I like to say, only in the dictionary do the words ‘philosophy’ and ‘practical’ appear in any proximity, but this book changed my mind. Hadot was a French academic focused on ancient and Hellenistic philosophies. Looking at the chapters now, there’s one on “Ancient Spiritual Exercises” and one called “Only the Present is our Happiness.” There’s “The View from Above.” These are the chapter headings that draw you in and don’t repel you. He was my inspiration for someone who wrote about mainly ancient philosophy, but in a way that made it useful and practical without oversimplifying it. He was a serious academic and I admire people, like you, to be honest, who are grounded in the academic work but are able to convey it to others. That’s what Pierre Hadot does. The ancient part is not a coincidence. I think philosophy is one of the few fields where the further back you go, the easier it gets. The further back you go, the more accessible it gets. I would say that the heyday for therapeutic philosophy was the Hellenistic age, so roughly 300, 200 BC, when you’ve got the Stoics and the Epicureans in particular thriving in Athens, and then around the Greek world. The writing is clear and accessible and practical. Then I feel like philosophy took a millennia-long detour into scholasticism and analytical philosophy and became sort of unrecognizable from the way it started. So, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that a book called Philosophy as a Way of Life focuses almost exclusively on an ancient philosophy. I would. It is accessible. You’re going to learn about Socrates, you’re going to learn about Marcus Aurelius and you’re going to want to read more about both after this book. It’s a little more rigorous than some of the purely pop philosophy books out there, but I would definitely recommend it."