Hadot's "Philosophy as a Way of Life" Part 2: Spiritual Exercises

Leroy SK, 2011 - Laura Anderson

Chapter 3:  Spiritual Exercises

• Spiritual exercise is the most accurate description of the practice that engages the individuals' entire psychism. psychic, moral, ethical, intellectual, of the thought, or of the soul are not sufficient.
• Stoics believed that philosophy was not the study of abstraction, but rather the study of the art of living. (83)
• Stoics request a reversal of our usual way of looking at things, a switch from a "human" vision of reality in which our values depend on our passions, to a "natural" vision of things which replaces each event within the perspective of universal nature. (83)
• The exercise of meditation allows us to be ready at the moment when an unexpected (and perhaps dramatic) circumstance occurs. (85)
• The exercise of meditation is an attempt to control inner discourse in an effort to render it coherent. (85)
• Spritual exercises are required for the healing of the soul. (87)
• The spiritual exercise of trying to live in the present moment is different for Stoics and Epicureans.  For the former it means mental tension and constant wakefulness of the moral conscience; for the latter it is an invitation to relaxation and serenity.(88)
• As a dialectical exercise, the Platonic dialogue corresponds to a spiritual exercise: it is only possible if the interlocutor has a real desire to dialogue and is an ascent towards truth and Good. (93)

Chapter 4:  Ancient Spiritual Exercises ad "Christian Philosophy"

• There was a widespread Christina tradition which portrayed Christianity as a philosophy - the one and only true philosophy.(127)
• Evangelical commandments and the words of the ancients were presented in the form of short sentences which could be memorized and meditated upon. (133)
• Like philosophical meditation, Christian meditation flourished by using all available means of rhetoric and oratorical amplification by mobilizing all possible resources of the imagination. (133)
• Two levels of knowledge are knowledge of being and knowledge of God. (137)

Works Cited: 
Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life.  trans. Michael Chase. ed Arnold I. Davidson. Malden: Blackwell. 1995. 79- 144. Print.