Philosophy as a way of life

Philosophical discourse is not the same thing as philosophy: the Stoics said so explicitly, and the other schools admitted it implicitly. True, there can be no philosophy without some discourse - either inner or outward - on the part

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of the philosopher. This can take the fonn of pedagogical activity carried out on others, of inner meditation, or of the discursive explanation of intuitive contemplation. But this discourse is not the essential part of philosophy, and it will have value only if it has a relationship with philosophical life. As an Epicurean sentence puts it: "The discourse of philosophers is in vain, unless it heals some passion of the soul."

M. C. Are spiritual exercises still possible today? They were thought up in the very distant past, as responses to specific social structures and material conditions, but our current living conditions bear very little resemblance to those of antiquity. The spiritual exercises of the Stoics and the Epicureans, for example, are the consequences of the basic hypotheses of each school: on the one hand, faith in the providential Logos; on the other, atomism, belief in chance, and denial of post-mortem existence. Nowadays, however, we may no longer believe in these hypotheses. Is it still possible to practice the spiritual exercises of antiquity, separating them from the systems of which they were a part, and substituting our own basic hypotheses for the outmoded ones of antiquity?

Let's take the example of injustice. One of the greatest sources of pain for modern man is, I would think, the suffering of innocent people. Every day, the media overwhelm us with images of this suffering, and we witness it every day in the streets of our cities. How can we avoid giving in to despair if we no longer believe, like Marcus Aurelius, in a divine providence, consubstantial with ourselves, which arranges everything for the best, and ensures that injustices are only apparent?

P. H. To reply to your question, I refer you to the beginning of the chapter entitled "Spiritual exercises," where I quote the passage from the diary of Georges Friedmann which he quotes in his book La Puissance et la Sagesse:11

"A 'spiritual exercise' every day - either alone or else in the company of someone who also wants to improve himself. . . . Step out of duration . . . try to get rid of your own passions." I think this testimony suffices to prove that spiritual exercises arc still being practiced in our day and age.

Spiritual exercises do not correspond to specific social structures or material conditions. They have been, and continue to be, practiced in every age, in the most widely diverse milieus, and in widely different latitudes: China, Japan, India; among the Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

If one admits, as I do, that the various philosophical schools of antiquity were characterized above all by their choice of a form of life, which is then justified after the fact by a given systematic construction (for instance, Stoicism is the choice of an attitude of coherence with oneself, which is later justified by a general theory of the coherence of the universe with itself) -

then it is easy to understand how one can can remain faithful to one's choice of a form of life without being obliged to adhere to the systemat ic construction which claims to found it. As Ruyer haH w1·inen112 "Excel'' for s1,cc:iali111s,

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no one is very interested in the motives of Stoicism, taken over for the most part from Heraclitus, or in those of Epicurean ethics or Democritean atomism. Nevertheless, as attitudes, Stoicism and Epicureanism are still very much alive." As a matter of fact, ethics - that is to say, choosing the good -

is not the consequence of metaphysics, but metaphysics is the consequence of ethics.

You give the example of injustice and the suffering of innocent people. For Marcus Aurelius, the fact that there is a providence (that is, simply, that there is coherence in the world), does not mean that injustice is only an appearance.