The Shape of Thought to Come
Askēsis and the Future of Philosophy
These notes were prepared for a talk I gave approximately 1.5 years ago. Originally, I had planned to develop them into a more extensive piece. However, in place of that larger effort being possible in the near term, I have instead cleaned up the notes as a kind of study or preliminary sketch for a future, more comprehensive work. Still, this is also the longest piece I’ve posted at The Base Camp so far. It comes in at just over 6,300 words. I think that’s a bit too long for a Substack post, so I’ve tried to break up the essay into four distinct sections for easier reading.
So, what’s the essay about?
In the talk, I wanted to explore Pierre Hadot’s recovery of the role of askēsis, or spiritual exercise, in philosophical life. I aimed to show that askēsis is not directed at any single image of philosophy, but rather at the fundamental practices that enliven the philosopher’s soul itself. My goal was to demonstrate that philosophy, in this view, consists in the shaping of thought and attention through practice—a shaping that influences not only the intellectual form of our minds, but also the aesthetic quality of our senses, the granularity of our feeling, and the moral skillfulness of our action.
I wanted to illustrate how this shaping emerges from the practicing life and responds to the imperatives set by the contours of our historical epoch—an epoch that exists within a unique metaphysical ground, however dimly or brightly apparent it may be. My intention was to sketch potential future shapes of thought and practice by drawing on age-old tensions among universality and contingency, timelessness and history, and freedom and determinism. To achieve this goal, I moved between themes found in Plato and Nietzsche, Hadot and Foucault, and back again, engaging in what I hope is an exercise in the timely repetition of timeless questions. While these notes remain in a somewhat raw form, they represent the core ideas and structure of that talk, and they serve as a foundation for future development of these ideas.
I start with Hadot’s biography. The link between a person’s biography and their philosophy is often a strong one, but for reasons I explore below, the link is especially prescient for Hadot, owing to his early rearing in the Church met in turn with his innately philosophical nature. I turn then to a discussion of Platonic metaphysics as an example of a traditionally grounded approach to philosophical practice. The final two sections take up, first, Nietzsche’s inversion of Plato, exploring what this inversion means for our sense of practice today—with a passing note to Zen Buddhism—before, finally, contrasting Hadot’s and Plato’s sense of practice with Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s. Through this exploration, I wanted to pose two crucial questions:
What does today’s historical epoch demand of philosophy? And within what metaphysics should we interpret philosophical practices?
In the end, the piece is a meditation on the role of practice in the vacillating worlds of transcendence and immanence, being and becoming, and cosmic universality and historical particularity. In what kind of world do we practice . . . ?
Pierre Hadot’s Life and Work
Recommended readings:
Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?
Jeannie Carlier and Arnold Davidson, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness (interviews w/ Hadot)
Pierre Hadot, The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot
Pierre Hadot was a French philosopher and historian who lived from 1922 to 2010. His work has had a significant impact on our understanding of ancient philosophy and its practices. Born in Paris, Hadot’s early life was shaped by contrasting religious influences. His mother was a devoted Catholic, while his father was more of a skeptical agnostic. This dichotomy would play a crucial role in shaping Hadot’s thinking. His education was deeply Christian from a young age, and his mother was determined that the young Hadot and his two brothers would become priests.
However, Hadot himself says he felt disconnected from the church at an early age. His concern with the priests was that their austere mode of asceticism and rote repetition of scripture felt lifeless and mechanical. His Christian education lacked the sacramentality that Hadot felt was actually at the heart of the religion. A pivotal moment in Hadot’s intellectual development occurred during his teenage years, when he had a series of experiences triggered by viewing the night sky—these were early intuitions that he belonged to a larger whole, a cosmos—and he says these experiences enacted a shift in him that made him a philosopher from that point on.
This is also around the time when he begins to write, as an attempt to explain to himself what had happened in these encounters. And here Hadot encounters this fact that life is full of significant experiences that cannot be spoken about or put into words. He says of these experiences, “I felt for the first time that there are things that cannot be said” and that “what [is] most essential for us could not be expressed.” These kinds of transformative but unsayable experiences will remain a theme for Hadot throughout his life, and it’s here in philosophy that he finds something of unique value. At this point in his intellectual development, Hadot finds himself connecting more with the philosophy of existentialism and Martin Heidegger than he is with the Church, as this sense of developing an openness to Being was resonant with his own experiences. But it was in Henri Bergson’s philosophy that he first began to find a philosophical home. Hadot’s high school thesis on Bergson was titled, “Philosophy is not the construction of a system, but the resolution once made to look naively at the world in and around oneself,” a statement that describes well these early philosophical leanings, as well as his more mature philosophical perspective.
Hadot is concerned with practice as a kind of driving force of language and theory.
On Hadot’s telling, later in his education he would rediscover a connection with Christianity through its mystical tradition, found in people like John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila, as well as through the Church’s historical inheritance from neoplatonism. Hadot’s scholarly development was also significantly influenced by Biblical exegesis and his teachers’ emphasis on entering into the “collective mentalities” of the people he was studying. This twin fascination with language and forms of mentality no doubt underscored his later fascination with Wittgenstein. Hadot was one of the earliest translators of Wittgenstein into French, and we can say that Hadot maintained a life-long fascination with language and its limits, on the one hand, and the nonverbal forms of life and practice that saturate it, on the other.
In the end, Hadot would enter the priesthood but ultimately leave it for a number of reasons: the Church’s views on the impurity of women, sexuality, and childbirth; the politics of his local parish priests; the condemnation of Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary thinking in 1950; the development of what he calls a “martial theology” that seemed to Hadot divorced from the essence of Christianity; and then, finally, because he fell in love and wanted to marry, and this would mark his departure from the Church. And so we have here an intellectual and biographical portrait of Hadot that plays a substantial role in his later and mature philosophy. He is straddling the line between religion and philosophy at the outset. His context is Christian education and the priesthood, but his attachment grows increasingly towards philosophy. He’s concerned with scholarship and exegesis and language, but also with mysticism and cosmology, and above all with practice as a kind of driving force of language and theory. He’s a Thomist and a mystic who reads Heidegger and the existentialists.
With this background in mind, let’s get to one of his central concepts then.
Philosophy as spiritual exercise (askēsis) means, roughly “practices intended to effect a modification and a transformation in the subjects who practice them.”
Hadot’s concept of askēsis encompasses a wide range of practices, including:
Physical exercises (athletics and gymnastics)
Nutritional practices (diet and fasting)
Discursive or theoretical practices (studying, reading, dialogue and dialectic)
Aesthetics and art
Mysticism and intuition
Meditation and contemplation
Prayer
These exercises often involve a teacher and a student, fostering a sense of community as well as friendship. There’s also a synthesis here between knowing and caring, so that philosophy in this image is as much a type of medicine or therapy as it is a pursuit of truth or understanding. Philosophical discourse is in this sense a means of shaping the self, but also of overcoming the self, so that one might, in Hadot’s words, undo one’s own subjectivity, overcoming one’s own selfish needs and interests so that one might join the human community as a citizen of the world.
These practices of self-overcoming are sometimes grouped under the phrase meletée thanatou, or “death exercises”—means of living by dying to one’s own self. (cf. Phaedo: “In truth, those who practice philosophy correctly practice dying.”) By transforming perception to transform one’s being, or transforming one’s being to transform perception, spiritual progress can be made—a key idea we’ll return to later.
The soul has a shape that can be shaped through practice.
These practices are properly understood as part of the philosopher’s journey of transformation, and much of Hadot’s writing is a historical working out of the role these practices played in philosophies ancient and modern, from Plato to Aristotle to the Stoics and the Neoplatonists to the works of Goethe, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and others. He finds in spiritual exercise a uniting theme with which to read the history of philosophy. When we look at the full variety of these practices, we see that askēsis breaks down the dualism between intelligence and sense, and instead suggests something of a blended continuum of cognition, feeling, perception, and sensation. Shaping thought, attention, feeling, will, sensation, imagination, and aesthetic experience—the main idea is that perception is itself malleable.
Attention is a kind of art form cultivated through practice, we can say.
In short, the ascetic exercises of philosophy are aimed at shaping the soul. The soul has a shape that can be shaped. Askēsis is the name we give to practices of shaping and transformation. Askēsis thus aims not at any one image of thought and world, but back to the moves themselves that enliven the philosopher’s soul. In taking up the soul as their object, these exercises are properly spiritual in a sense that draws religious and philosophical practice closer together in a way that modern scholars are often uncomfortable with. Despite the profound influence of Hadot’s work on our understanding of ancient philosophy and its practices, his approach has not been without its critics. These criticisms strike at the core of Hadot’s interpretation of philosophy as a way of life and raise important questions about the nature and purpose of philosophical inquiry.
Let’s examine some of the main objections to Hadot’s perspective:
The Authenticity of Spiritual Exercises in Ancient Philosophy: Some scholars argue that Hadot exaggerates or even fabricates the role of spiritual exercises in ancient philosophy. They contend that while certain practices may have existed, Hadot’s emphasis on them as central to philosophical life is an anachronistic projection of modern concerns onto ancient texts. This criticism challenges the historical basis of Hadot’s interpretation and suggests that he may be reading too much into the limited evidence available from ancient sources.
The Nature of Professional Philosophy: A significant criticism comes from within the contemporary philosophical community itself. Many argue that philosophy as a profession today isn’t primarily concerned with spiritual exercises in Hadot’s sense. Instead, they assert that the focus of professional philosophy is on rational argumentation, logical analysis, and the development of theoretical frameworks. This view sees Hadot’s approach as potentially undermining the rigor and objectivity that many consider essential to philosophical inquiry.
The Relationship Between Theology and Philosophy: Some critics, particularly those specializing in medieval philosophy, argue that Hadot misunderstands or misrepresents the relationship between theology and philosophy in the Christian tradition. They contend that Hadot’s view oversimplifies the complex interplay between faith and reason that characterized much of medieval thought, and fails to appreciate the nuanced ways in which Christian thinkers engaged with philosophical ideas.
The Critique of Contemporary Academia: Hadot’s criticisms of modern academic philosophy have been seen by some as unfair or overly harsh. His use of Thoreau’s quote, “We have philosophy professors but no philosophers,” implies that contemporary academic philosophers have lost touch with the true spirit of philosophy as a lived practice. This critique has been met with resistance from those who see value in the specialized, professional nature of modern philosophical scholarship, as well as from those professors who (like Hadot) still hold a place for philosophy as a way of life, rooted in spiritual exercise.
These criticisms notwithstanding, there can be no doubt, as we’ll see in the section below on Foucault, that Hadot’s influence has been substantial, and that he survives each of these criticisms (an explication of which is part of my larger project).
But back to the task at hand:
In this first section, we’ve explored Pierre Hadot’s life and philosophical development, tracing his journey from a Christian upbringing to his unique perspective on philosophy as spiritual exercise. Hadot’s concept of askēsis, encompassing a wide range of practices aimed at transforming the self, provides a framework for understanding philosophy as a way of life rather than merely an intellectual pursuit. This view of philosophy as a transformative practice sets the stage for our exploration of how similar ideas have been expressed throughout the history of Western thought, beginning with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, especially as it relates to the transformational potential of paideia (education).
Plato and Paideia in the Cave Allegory
Recommended readings:
Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (Vol. 2)
Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine on Truth” (in Pathmarks)
When we think of paideia, we often consider it as the well-known Greek system of education designed to give students a broad cultural understanding, particularly geared towards public life and the formation of political virtue. Its role is the formation of the soul in the direction of justice—politeia and paideia are closely linked concepts in Greek thought. This educational system typically includes intellectual education, moral development, and aesthetic refinement, often associated with the formation of an elite class within society, and generally encompasses music, art, grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, gymnastics, and related disciplines.
Paideia is the capacity for movement, for turning back to the sources of our thinking.
Our modern notion of the humanities (from the Latin studia humanitatis) is recognizably descended from this concept. However, for our purposes, I want to focus less on paideia as a formal system of education and more on the etymology of the word as a kind of turning around or training in a circle. The real potency of the concept lies not in the educational system itself, but in the movement it describes. The etymology of paideia is particularly illuminating. Enkyklios paideia, meaning “circular education,” shares its root with words describing a “turning wheel” or “training in a circle” (which also gives us the modern word “encyclopedia”).
To illustrate this concept of movement in thought, let’s examine a famous historical example of how paideia is deployed in philosophy: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Werner Jaeger, in his work Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (Vol 2), provides a detailed analysis of the Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic. The allegory on Jaeger’s telling begins with Socrates saying, “And now, compare our nature, from the point of view of paideia and lack of paideia, to an experience like this.” He then describes the famous scene of prisoners chained in a cave, only able to see shadows cast on the wall by objects passing in front of a fire behind them.
In this allegory, the cave represents the visible or sensible world of appearances, the fire corresponds to the Sun, and the ascent to the world above symbolizes the soul’s ascent to the intelligible world of reality. The key point here is that for the ascent to begin, a turning must occur. The ability to turn must be exercised (turning is a kind of askēsis). Crucially, for Jaeger, this movement of turning, this paideia, cannot occur in any direction whatsoever. It’s not just a turning around and round or a turning away, but a turning towards. This turning towards has a name that Jaeger identifies as a type of metanoia—a “conversion experience” or “turning towards.” Metanoia involves the soul’s redirection and reformation in both body and mind. In Latin, the prisoners in Plato’s cave undergo a conversio or “turning about” that’s also a turning towards.
But what do they turn towards in this story?
They turn towards the Sun, or the Platonic Ideal of the Sun (itself a symbol of the Good). The Good, for Plato, is in turn the source of Being which makes possible the perception of individual beings. As Brett Bertucio notes, “The soul, with all its faculties—intellectual, affective, volitional—turns its gaze towards the ordering principle of reality.” Jaeger emphasizes that the essence of philosophical education is “conversion,” which literally means “turning round.” As he says, “‘Conversion’ is a specific term of Platonic paideia, and indeed an epoch-making one. It means more specifically the wheeling round of the ‘whole soul’ towards the light of the Idea of Good, the divine origin of the universe.”
Growth in familiarity with the Good implies transformation. The knower becomes a new being.
Martin Heidegger, in his “Plato’s Doctrine on Truth,” further develops this understanding of paideia. He defines it as “the turning around of the whole human being in the sense of displacing them out of the region of immediate encountering and accustoming them to another realm in which beings appear.” Heidegger’s analysis emphasizes that paideia is not mere intellectual change, but involves the reorientation of one’s being. Growth in knowledge, or familiarity with the Good, implies a decidedly ontological transformation. The knower becomes, in a certain way, a new being.
For Heidegger, Plato’s paideia is the formation of a person according to a prototype (here, the Good as ordering principle of reality), which bears an innate correspondence with the person even before the passage from apaideusia (lack of education). As such, the conversion process is better described as the flowering or manifestation of the individual’s essential nature, a nature the source of which is a Platonic ideal. Heidegger also emphasizes the crucial distinction between paideia and its opposite, apaideusia, the lack of formation, or more precisely, the inability to turn. In the state of apaideusia, one is locked into place, unable to turn towards the sources of one’s own representations. This inability to turn, I contend, is the space of idolatry, ideology, fundamentalism, and dogmatism. It’s a state of unacknowledged ignorance as opposed to the space of acknowledged ignorance of Socratic philosophy.
Paideia, then, is this capacity for movement, for turning back to the sources of one’s representations, loosening them up for reconfiguration or transformation. Askēsis marks a set of practices that keep you mobile and able to turn. This understanding of philosophy as spiritual exercise provides a set of enabling conditions that activate paideia and metanoia. It forms the metaphysical backdrop against which we can understand the role of askēsis in philosophical practice. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the concept of paideia offer a powerful illustration of philosophical education as a process of turning and transformation.
The emphasis on turning towards the Good as the source of Being resonates with Hadot’s understanding of askēsis as a means of shaping the soul. However, this Platonic view of reality and truth would face significant challenges in the modern era, particularly from thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche. As we turn to Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics, we’ll see how the very foundations of this worldview are called into question, forcing us to reconsider the nature and purpose of philosophical practice.
Friedrich Nietzsche and the End of Metaphysics
Recommended readings:
John Sallis, Platonic Legacies
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity
Having explored Hadot’s concept of askēsis and its exemplar in Platonic thought, we now turn to a figure who would radically challenge the metaphysical foundations upon which these ideas rest: Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s critique of traditional philosophy and his concept of “inverted Platonism” present a formidable challenge to the notion of philosophical practice as a turning towards transcendent truth. In this section, we will examine how Nietzsche’s ideas both disrupt and potentially reinvigorate our understanding of askēsis and philosophical transformation.
We begin with John Sallis’s essay on “Nietzsche’s Platonism,” which provides a deep framework for understanding the relationship between Platonic thought and Nietzsche’s philosophy. Sallis positions these two thinkers along a single, giant interval that spans the history of Western metaphysics:
The interval is gigantic, this interval between Plato and Nietzsche, this course running from Plato to Nietzsche and back again. It spans an era in which a battle of giants is waged. . . . It is a battle in which being is at stake. . . . Along the historical axis, in the gigantic interval from Plato to Nietzsche, the contenders are similarly positioned for the ever-renewed battle. They, too, take their stance on one side or the other of the interval—again, a gigantic interval—separating the intelligible from the visible or sensible. . . . And yet, finally, with Nietzsche it seems that the battle has come to an end. From the Platonic beginning, from the inaugural staging, the history of metaphysics would have run its course, coming to its end at the moment when Nietzsche, the last metaphysician, confounds beyond hope the very interval at stake throughout that history. What was way up high is cut loose and drifts out of sight. There is no longer anything to drag down to earth, and in a sense nothing is required in order to remain true to the earth—nothing except the utmost insistence on the surface that remains once the gigantic interval is no more and the sensible has been twisted free of the intelligible.
Now, what’s interesting here is that instead of proceeding with an exegesis of Nietzsche after the death of Platonism and metaphysics, Sallis does the opposite, and suggests that Nietzsche, for all this work, is still something of a Platonist, a fact that Nietzsche himself affirmed. But what kind of Platonism is this?
Nietzsche tells us in The Birth of Tragedy that his philosophy is an inverted Platonism “the further removed from true being, the purer, the more beautiful, the better it is. Living in Schein as goal.” That word Schein is German for “semblance” or “appearance,” but also, in keeping with Nietzsche’s celebration of it, the Schein also shines, it has its own brightness, its own source of light; it gleams a brilliance rooted in the immanence of becoming rather than through the supplementation of transcendent and eternal Being. So here we see the Allegory of the Cave inverted—in this version of the story, it is Nietzsche who pulls us out of the cave of intelligibility and into the open air of Schein, the sensible world of appearances.
Nietzsche inverts Plato’s philosophy, celebrating the world of appearances over the intelligible realm.
We have, then, on Nietzsche’s account, inverted the priorities of Being, or, on his terms, of the Being that is actually a becoming. In this image, the distinction between appearance and reality—if we can hold onto it for a moment before releasing it—shouldn’t be construed along the lines of a more primary occluded reality of intelligibility that sits behind appearances, shaping them, generating them, giving them being and existence. Rather, it is the world of appearances—the world of Schein—that generates the fiction of a reality that stands behind it, organizing it. The so-called real world is, one might say, an elaborate—and often beautiful—fiction that emerges from the play of Schein. Nietzsche’s move here is neither anti-metaphysical nor anti-realist, nor is it an abandonment of truth. Nietzsche more precisely wants to tell the truth about the truth. Nietzsche here unwinds the truth about the truth by positioning the reality of truthfulness as an emergent form—as a work of art, in its higher registers—of a creative will-to-power turning its own self-circumstance against itself to overcome itself.
Each turning in history is a turning of wills against themselves and against one another, overcoming themselves through an unstoppable drive that seeks only its ongoing transformation by turning itself against itself to overcome itself. The human part in this great drama, if one can manage it, is to will positive affirmation towards this ceaseless roil of turning. For there is no other option; rejoice or perish. Amor fati, as Friedrich says. There is much to explore here.
I return to John Sallis. “Let it be said,” he writes, “that [Nietzsche’s] story sets everything adrift: for it is a story of the ground in which all would be anchored begins to drift away, becoming more and more remote until it remains only something told of in a story, in the story that will have just been told.” Readers, I trust you can see here the multiple connections with Plato and with paideia that I mentioned earlier. We have already discussed Nietzsche’s inversion of the cave—the inversion of the priority among intelligibility and Schein—but the other perhaps more profound connection recalls Nietzsche’s use of the notion not only of turning but of eternally re-turning.
If we follow Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism—a freeing of ourselves from the Platonic schema—then we may still be able to turn, but the bigger question remains open to us, to what should we turn towards and to what should we turn away from? I quote Sallis one more time, “A twisting free from Platonism into—what? Into a space lacking all the bounds, limits, and measure previously installed by two and a half millennia of Western thought; into a space—or, rather, an abyss—in which all bounds would be crossed out, all measure exceeded.” I want to recall one more time that in our discussion of paideia, the exercise of turning was paired with the experience of metanoia, of conversion, and a turning towards, in this case towards the Sun, which represents both the Good, and the ground of Being that makes beings visible and apparent. The Sun is of course precisely what’s missing in Nietzsche.
We find that the Good, exemplified by the Sun, is missing—it has been wiped from the horizon, as Nietzsche says.
I’ll quote the infamous passage from “The Parable of the Madman” in The Gay Science:
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
In Nietzsche we certainly have a sense of paideia and a sense of turning, but nothing like the turning away from beings towards the common source of all Being, the Good, since here, in this new turning, we find that the Good, exemplified by the Sun, is missing—it has been wiped from the horizon, as Nietzsche says.
I ask again, to what, then, do we turn?
There are multiple directions we can take the discussion from here.
Michael Allen Gillespie alleges that for all his attempts to wrestle with the problem of nihilism, Nietzsche’s method actually entangles us more deeply within it. For Gillespie, the problem is that Nietzsche has internalized a deep and pervasive type of scholastic nominalism that began to dominate post-Reformation Europe. There can be no ontological account of which direction we should turn to from this stance, and therefore we are left after the death of God in a nihilistic mode of damaging and ineffectual thinking. Heidegger would likewise eventually conclude that Nietzsche’s will-to-power amounts to a thoroughgoing nihilism operating at a metaphysical register. In both accounts, there is in Nietzsche no transcendent outside—no Sun, no Good, no Ground of Being—to orient our turning, and because of this we are left in the last analysis with nihilism, the very condition Nietzsche so presciently diagnosed and warned against.
But there are alternatives to this view, stemming from the surprising location of the comparative philosophies of Keiji Nishitani, speaking from and to a Zen tradition in renewed dialogue with Nietzsche. I’ll share just one quote here from Nishitani’s The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism:
The eternal recurrence may be called the intuitive experience of insight into eternity from within the world of becoming. The search for eternal life in another world that transcends the world of becoming is, of course, negated by Nietzsche in his radical pursuit of the nihility that such an other world hides from view. For him only the world in which all things are ever-changing flux remains. The world of flux, of impermanence, comes to be seen as the activity of bottomless will, an activity without any transcendent meaning or purpose; it becomes the play (Spiel) of bottomless will in the joy (Lust) of life which is absolute affirmation. That all things are ceaselessly changing and passing away is a source of suffering and grief; yet this suffering and its source can, just as they are, be transformed into joy. . . . When joy, the innocent play of life, wants itself, all phenomena of the world are dissolved into this joy and innocent life. This is the absolute affirmation of life, the form of life that affirms itself absolutely. There is the eternity in the midst of the transiency of becoming; there is divine life in a new and Dionysian sense, in a world without God.”
Instead of turning us towards a specific goal or transcendent telos, then, Nietzsche gives us a different type of philosophical maneuver, a set of dance moves exemplified by Dionysian frenzy. There is here no point of metaphysical transcendence to aim towards. There are, however, celebratory modes of immanent transcendence achieved through self-overcoming, where overcoming is something more like ecstasis, which means to be or stand outside of oneself, transcending oneself to transform oneself.
Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism and his proclamation of the death of God represent a radical departure from traditional metaphysics, achieved by operating against this tradition’s own vocabulary. By prioritizing the world of appearances (Schein) over any transcendent reality, Nietzsche challenges us to reconsider what it means to “turn” in a philosophical sense. If there is no fixed point of orientation, no “Sun” to turn towards—just the eternal return of becoming—how can we understand and practice philosophy as a transformative exercise that makes spiritual progress?
This question leads us to the contemporary debate between Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault on the nature of askēsis and its relevance to modern philosophy.
Hadot’s and Foucault’s Askēsis
Recommended readings:
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life
Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject
Marta Faustino and Hélder Telo, eds., Hadot and Foucault on Ancient Philosophy
While this section was initially planned to be more extensive, we can briefly touch on the comparison between Hadot’s and Foucault’s interpretations of askēsis and their implications for contemporary philosophy. Both Hadot and Foucault were interested in the concept of askēsis and its role in ancient philosophy, but they approached it from different angles. Hadot saw askēsis as a means of transforming one’s entire being, aiming at wisdom and virtue. For him, philosophy was fundamentally a way of life, not just an intellectual exercise. Foucault, on the other hand, was more interested in askēsis as a technology of the self, a means by which individuals could shape themselves in relation to power structures and societal norms. He saw these practices as ways of resisting dominant power structures and creating spaces of freedom.
Hadot and Foucault differ on accounts both substantive and historical when it comes to understanding practice. For example, Foucault diagnosis a certain “Cartesian moment” in the history of philosophy wherein the transformations of the self, underwritten by askēsis, are replaced by the simpler and more universal requirements of the twin acquisition of knowledge and evidence. Foucault’s argument is that there is a point in modern philosophy, marked by Descartes, where acquiring knowledge without the need of a corresponding transformation of the self comes to prominence, a point where evidence replaces askēsis as the primary object of knowledge. At this stage, according to Foucault, “the history of truth enters its modern period” and truth becomes associated with knowledge (connaissance, in the French), rather than with the efforts of a practicing subject. This moment marks a shift in definitions of truth understood as practice (askēsis), or as the “return effect” of truth encounters, and towards truth understood as proposition (mathemata).
Hadot for his part is skeptical that Foucault’s reading in this area really captures the essence of Descartes’s philosophy and method. Descartes’s major work is after all titled Meditations, which Hadot reads appropriately as an explicit reference to the type of practice of self-transformation that askēsis implies. “Concerning these Meditations,” writes Hadot, “Descartes advises his readers to dedicate a number of months, or at least a number of weeks, to ‘meditate’ the first and second meditations . . . This clearly shows that for Descartes also ‘evidence’ can only be recognized on the basis of a spiritual exercise.” Descartes in this way belongs to an older tradition linking philosophy and spiritual exercises for self-mastery, attuning thought and action to moral and metaphysical truth. Hadot’s account is the more accurate, I think.
Contemporary philosophy must navigate between self-creation and cosmic attunement.
The historical dispute aside, the more important disagreement between Hadot and Foucault centers on Foucault’s interpretation of the Greek and Roman practices of philosophy as being centered on the self, on an “aesthetics of existence” as he calls it. While Hadot agrees with Foucault that these ancient practices were geared towards a conversion of the self, and that they incorporated a set of further practices designed to free this self from the determinism of external and internal conditions, with the goal of achieving happiness, freedom, and independence, he nevertheless felt that Foucault was missing a sense for how cosmic or universal perspectives are necessarily involved in these practices. The inclusion of the universal, as a lived practice of physics, says Hadot, “implies a radical transformation of perspective, and contains a universalist, cosmic dimension, upon which, it seems to me, M. Foucault did not sufficiently insist. Interiorization is a going beyond oneself; it is universalization.”
In this sense, Hadot criticized Foucault’s interpretation of Greek askēsis, arguing that it was too focused on the self and missed the cosmic dimension of ancient philosophy. For Hadot, the goal of philosophical practices was not just self-transformation, but a transformation of one’s relationship to the cosmos and to others. The risk of Foucault’s account for Hadot is that we reduce the cosmic and universal dimension of practice to a set of aesthetic transformations robbed of their deeper and more consequential metaphysical entailments. In Hadot’s words:
This is why, instead of a “culture of the self,” it would be better to speak of the “transformation,” “transfiguration,” or “surpassing of the self.” In order to describe this state, one cannot avoid the term wisdom, which, it seems to me, appears very rarely, if ever in Foucault. Wisdom is that state at which the philosopher will perhaps never arrive but towards which he aims, by striving to transform himself in order to go beyond his present state. It is a mode of existence which is characterized by three essential aspects: peace of mind (ataraxia), inner freedom (autarkeia) and, except in the sceptics, cosmic consciousness: that is to say, the process of becoming aware of belonging to the human and cosmic Whole, a sort of dilation or transfiguration of the self which realizes greatness of soul (megalopsychia).
This disagreement raises important questions about the nature and purpose of philosophy in the contemporary world. Should we see philosophy primarily as a means of self-creation and resistance, as Foucault suggests? Or should we, following Hadot, see it as a way of life aimed at wisdom and virtue, with a cosmic dimension? These questions become even more pressing in light of Nietzsche’s critique of traditional metaphysics—critiques that Foucault will share and build upon. If we can no longer turn towards a transcendent Good or Truth, what becomes of philosophical practice and its progression? Can we still engage in askēsis without a fixed point of orientation? Or does it reduce philosophy, as Hadot argues against Foucault, to a “dandyism,” a project of individualized self-fashioning without larger comportment?
These are the challenges that face contemporary philosophy as it grapples with its own history and tries to chart a path forward in a post-metaphysical world. The dialogue between Hadot, Foucault, and Nietzsche offers us rich resources for thinking through these issues, even as it leaves us with more questions than answers.
Conclusion
As we’ve seen, the concept of askēsis and the practice of philosophical turning have taken on different forms throughout the history of Western thought. From Plato’s paideia to Nietzsche’s eternal return, and from Hadot’s spiritual exercises to Foucault’s technologies of the self, philosophers have grappled with the question of how thought and practice can transform the individual and their relationship to the world. The challenge for contemporary philosophy is to navigate these perspectives and find a way forward that honors the transformative potential of philosophical practice while remaining responsive to the critiques of traditional metaphysics and the complexities of modern life. The shape of thought to come will likely emerge from this ongoing dialogue, as we continue to explore new ways of turning, new forms of askēsis, and new understandings of what it means to live a philosophical life in the 21st century. In reflecting on this exploration of askēsis and its place in philosophical thought, I find myself returning to the central question that motivated this inquiry:
What shape might philosophical thought take in our current epoch?
The challenge for philosophy today, as I see it, is to find new and old ways of turning alike, of practicing askēsis, that are genuinely responsive to our current situation while still maintaining a vital connection to the deepest insights of these ancient philosophical traditions. This may require us to reimagine what philosophical practice looks like in a world where the “Sun” of transcendent truth seems to have been wiped from the horizon, as Nietzsche suggests. Or, more likely, we may need to cultivate a form of askēsis that embraces both the Platonic turn towards the Good and the Nietzschean affirmation of becoming, a practice that can navigate between the cosmic attunement Hadot advocates and the critical self-creation Foucault proposes.
As I look towards developing these ideas further, I’m struck by the ongoing relevance of this inquiry. The need for transformative philosophical practice seems as urgent as ever, yet the ground on which we might build such practices seems increasingly unstable. Perhaps the shape of thought to come will not be a fixed form at all, but a dynamic, adaptive process of continuous turning and returning, a philosophical movement that alternates between the timeless and the timely, the universal and the particular, being and becoming. In this light, I see these notes not as a conclusion, but as an opening—an invitation to further dialogue, exploration, and most importantly, practice. For if Hadot’s recovery of askēsis teaches us anything, it’s that philosophy is not merely something to be thought, but something to be lived.
The shape of thought to come will be determined not just by our theories, but by our ongoing practices of philosophical transformation.
This is sooooo helpful. Thank you.
Incredibly thoughtful and informative. You’ve done great work.