Pierre Hadot, inventor of ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ (PWL), would have considered this title an oxymoron. For him, scholasticism, of which Aquinas is usually seen as the arch-representative, was not only the opposite of PWL but the very agent of its destruction (Sections 1 and 2). In part, Hadot’s view of Aquinas is the result of confusing ‘philosophy’ in the broad sense, which is how it needs to be understood in relation to PWL, with ‘philosophy’ in the narrower sense that it had for Aquinas himself (Section 3). When Aquinas’s life and work are examined with this distinction in mind, he is seen to be as much an exponent of PWL as the medieval and modern thinkers (Boethius of Dacia, Dante, Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche) usually cited by Hadot and his followers (Section 4). This conclusion puts into doubt the historical narrative proposed by exponents of PWL. But some of Hadot’s remarks leave room for a restricted version of PWL, stripped of its historical narrative and suggestions about the content of a philosophical life. This pure methodological Philosophy as a Way of Life, MPWL, does not make the unsustainable claims of PWL and helps to show how analytical, historical, and more broadly philosophical approaches to Aquinas can be brought together (Section 5)
1. Philosophy as a way of life
‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ was introduced as a label by Pierre Hadot, although it was only towards the end of his life, and through his Anglophone followers, that it crystallized as a metaphilosophical approach, the subject of conferences, projects, and collective volumes.Footnote 1 A leading specialist on the earliest Christian Latin Neoplatonist, Marius Victorinus, Hadot had in a 1966 study of Plotinus emphasized the life-changing aspect of his thought, and in a 1977 essay, ‘Exercises spirituels’, he began to set out his broader ideas about ancient philosophy.Footnote 2 He developed them most systematically in a book he published in 1995, after his retirement, Qu’est-ce que c’est la philosophie antique?, while the richest presentation of his position is to be found in a set of interviews, La philosophie comme manière de vivre, published in 2001.Footnote 3
At the time Hadot was working out his ideas, others were thinking along similar lines: most importantly Michel Foucault, who acknowledged Hadot’s influence but arrived at somewhat different views, and also Juliusz Domański and John Cooper (discussed below).Footnote 4
There are three main elements in Hadot’s PWL: an historical judgement about the character of ancient philosophy; a normative view about what philosophy and its study should be; and a narrative about how philosophy changed in nature after antiquity.
PWL began for Hadot as a way of understanding ancient philosophy. Hadot claimed that for the ancients philosophy was not, as it is regarded now, a collection of ideas, arguments and theories expounded in written texts, but a way of life, which made its followers into better, happier people. It was by trying to understand the texts we have of it that Hadot was led to see that ancient philosophy went beyond its written expression. Many parts of these texts, he said, look incoherent or badly written, when their intention is presumed to be expository.Footnote 5 Their sense becomes evident once it is realized that their aim is not to inform, but to form.Footnote 6 They are intended to change their readers’ outlook and to help them stick to their chosen way of philosophical life. A particularly clear example for Hadot are the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, where the author, writing for and to himself, is trying to ‘awaken in himself the Stoic dogmas that ought to govern his life, but have been losing their persuasive force, and so he must go on persuading himself again and again’.Footnote 7 It is a matter, Hadot explains, referring explicitly to Newman, of moving from notional to real assent.Footnote 8
Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations are what Hadot calls ‘exercises spirituels’ – but he himself was dissatisfied with the term, which translates conveniently but badly as ‘spiritual exercises’.Footnote 9 Ancient philosophy, he said, is a spiritual exercise ‘because it is a way of life, a form of life, a choice of life’.Footnote 10 ‘Spiritual exercises’ describes all the activities involved in trying to live a life of philosophy, such as meditating on the wonders of nature, God, or death, recalling pleasant experiences, preparing oneself for difficulties, examining one’s behaviour, increasing strength through fasting, engaging in reasoned dialogue, but also all the texts that describe and support these activities – indeed, all of what are usually called philosophical texts. Hadot warns against the misimpression he may have given that spiritual exercises are something added to philosophical discourse, ‘a practice that completes the theory’: on the contrary, ‘the whole of philosophy is an exercise, the discourse of teaching as much as the inner discourse that guides our actions’.Footnote 11 Hadot, therefore, regards even completely theoretical philosophical discussions as spiritual exercises, although to benefit from them the reader or hearer must also make an interior effort.Footnote 12 Not only Aristotle, but even his Neoplatonic commentators – who on the surface seem as dry, merely academic philosophers as there could be – are seen by Hadot as exponents of PWL: Aristotle, because in his school men were prepared for political responsibilities, and the spirit of free discussion reigned; the commentators, because the aim of their structured course was their pupils’ spiritual progress.Footnote 13
PWL is not just a way of understanding ancient philosophy. For Hadot and his followers, it involves a normative judgement: PWL is better than merely academic, theoretical philosophy. Indeed, because the philosophical life is the best life, the philosophizing that leads to it and in which it consists is of inestimable worth. In particular, Hadot values PWL for helping us to escape from ourselves and our own interests, opening us to wonderment at the existence of the world, and allowing us to look at all thing as if from above and to see ‘the present as our sole happiness’.Footnote 14
The third element in Hadot’s PWL ties together the other two. Ancient philosophy was, Hadot contended, universally (and even in its most unlikely manifestations, such as the work of the Neoplatonic commentators on Plato and Aristotle) a way of life, and to be thought of as spiritual exercises. But since antiquity, he argued, most philosophy has not been PWL. Originally Hadot suggested that it was not until Nietzsche and Bergson that PWL re-emerged; later, he accepted it had been more widespread but still, after antiquity, very much the exception.Footnote 15 The third element is the historical narrative that explains how – most unfortunately, Hadot would contend – PWL ceased to be generally practised. It concerns the Middle Ages, and Aquinas – though Hadot does not name him – is at the centre of it.
2. Philosophy as a way of life and the middle ages
Early Christians, especially monks, often described their way of life as a philosophy. Hadot not only recognized this continuity between PWL and Christianity but used it as a striking example of how philosophy was seen in the ancient world as a way of life. Nonetheless, he did not regard the monks as philosophers, because although they engaged in the spiritual exercises characteristic of ancient philosophy, they did not engage in philosophical discourse. Then, as Hadot already formulated it in 1977, theology and philosophy were separated with the advent of Scholasticism. Theology was seen as the supreme discipline and philosophy was stripped of its spiritual exercises, and became the handmaiden of theology, charged with providing purely conceptual material to theology. Even with the coming of modern times, when philosophy ‘regained its autonomy’, it remained purely theoretical.Footnote 16
Hadot stuck to the main lines of this narrative. After he became familiar with the work of Juliusz Domański, Hadot became willing to accept some of the thirteenth-century radical Arts Masters, some of whose views Aquinas attacked, especially Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, as exponents of PWL, because of their explicit (and showy) pronouncements about philosophers leading the best, and only truly human, lives.Footnote 17 Hadot’s followers recognize a variety of medieval figures as continuing PWL through the Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century: as well as the radical Arts Masters, Abelard, Dante, Petrarch, and Montaigne.Footnote 18 Aquinas, however, remains firmly excluded.
3. The implicit philosophy assumption and the meaning of ‘philosophy’
When Hadot explains (justly in some cases, unjustly in others – see below, 4 (i)) that medieval monks are not to be thought of as philosophers, although they sometimes described their way of life as ‘philosophia’, he is relying on an assumption that he has not spelled out explicitly. He writes as if he had set down previously a rule that a necessary condition for PWL is that it contains philosophical discourse. In the full discussion of his historiography in Qu’est- ce que c’est la philosophie antique? he certainly does not explicitly lay down such a rule. But the omission is understandable. In discussing the ancient world, Hadot has not needed to insist on the presence of philosophical discourse, because all the philosophical schools of antiquity, except for the Cynics, did in fact engage in it. Everyone knows that! The new, important point that Hadot wishes to put is that the ancient thinkers did not think discourse alone was enough to make someone a philosopher. Hadot, then, made an ‘Implicit Philosophy Assumption’ – that, for there to be philosophy at all, and so PWL, there must be some sort of philosophical discourse. The Implicit Philosophy Assumption needs to be made explicit where, as in (some) late ancient and medieval monasteries, there was a way of life organized around spiritual exercises and described as philosophia, but without philosophical discourse.
But how is ‘philosophical’ to be understood in the Implicit Philosophy Assumption? It cannot be a matter of self-naming, whereby something is philosophical because that is how it was called. After all, the monks said that they were engaged in ‘philosophy’, and they did engage in various sorts of discourse, but not (so Hadot contends) in a philosophical one. The absence to which Hadot is obviously pointing is of the sort of discourse we would usually call philosophical. ‘Philosophical’ is being used with a descriptive content, rather than to apply to what is associated with those who describe themselves as engaged in philosophia or call themselves ‘philosophers’. This point is easily missed, as is the Implicit Philosophy Assumption, by those who work on the ancient world, because of the coincidence between the texts (or later accounts of their thought) from the schools that described themselves as ‘philosophical’ and what is generally thought of as philosophical.
Although Hadot developed his thinking about PWL in connection with the ancient world, even in his early work he did not restrict it to there, and later he and his followers have applied it to every period (and because of its normative dimension, it has from the start had a contemporary resonance). Moreover, Hadot tentatively, and his followers today vigorously, have applied PWL to Jewish and Islamic and non-Western thought.Footnote 19 Given this range, ‘Philosophy’ in ‘PWL’ cannot be taken as mere self-labelling. It must be a description. But what are its contents?
A follower of Hadot’s, but also one of his sharpest critics, John Cooper, has argued for a very strict criterion for the meaning of ‘philosophy’ in PWL.Footnote 20 Philosophers, he says, make reason ‘authoritative for all aspects of human life’; for them reason is ‘the final and sole authority as to what really is true’.Footnote 21 Making philosophy a way of life is to regard reason in this way and so base one’s living purely on the results of rational argument, ranging over physics, metaphysics and epistemology, as well as ethics.Footnote 22
Cooper thinks that any intrusion of religious ideas, worst of all that of revealed truths, destroys the claim of a type of thought or way of life to be philosophical. He accepts that his ideal is confined to Ancient Greek philosophers: it is to them, he says, that contemporary readers need to return if they wish to live philosophical lives. But it is questionable whether even in the ancient world many philosophers apart from the Stoics thought that they were relying on reason alone; and many would argue that, in fact, no philosophical construction is purely based on reason. Given the wide application that Hadot and his followers wish to make of PWL, ‘philosophy’ must be understood in a wider way that includes a necessary, but not exclusive, involvement of reason. It is best to give an institutional definition, along the following lines: philosophy is the sort of pursuit, the written expressions of which are considered to be philosophy by those professionally involved in the subject now, in universities throughout the world, in publishing and generally in intellectual life.
4. Philosophy as a way of life: the case of Thomas Aquinas
The PWL narrative about the Middle Ages, as modified by Hadot after his contact with Domański and extended by recent writers, has the merit of drawing attention to areas of philosophy in the period too often neglected. But it is open to challenge, not least because it omits much relevant material and treats the Latin tradition as the only successor of ancient philosophy. I pursue that line of criticism elsewhere.Footnote 23 My strategy here is different. It is to start from Aquinas and his work, asking the question whether they fit the model of PWL, and then to consider the consequences of the answer. Since PWL is about how people live, the place to start is with Aquinas’s chosen life and its pattern, and his aims of his activity as a teacher, whether Aquinas’s comments and procedure bear out Hadot’s thesis that philosophy, reduced to the position of handmaiden of theology, could no longer be a way of life, ending with a look at Aquinas’s own thoughts about the different types of human life.Footnote 24
4.1. A philosopher’s life
When the anti-mendicant Arts Master William of Saint-Amour demanded that friars such as Aquinas ‘return’ to their monasteries, his mistake was not in linking their way of life to monasticism, but in failing to see how, in their different ways, St Francis and St Dominic had changed, adapted, and renewed the monastic ideal. For Hadot, as explained, although Christian monasticism drew on the tradition of PWL, it lacked the accompanying philosophical discourse: much of the way of life prescribed in the Rule of St Benedict consists of what he would class as spiritual exercises. But, although monasticism was regularly described as a philosophia, there is no requirement in the Rule for philosophical training, discussion, writing, or reading. The time left over from the life of prayer is to be given to ‘divine reading’ (lectio divina) and manual work. But from Cassiodorus’s Vivarium in the sixth century (anticipated by the communal life led by Augustine and his companions in the first years after his conversion), there were forms of monasticism where intellectual pursuits, including philosophical instruction and discourse, were central. Consider Anselm’s monastic life, or the Rule that Abelard, with Heloise’s help, devised for her convent.Footnote 25 Sometimes, it may have been only a few members of a monastery who embraced a more philosophical monastic life, but Abelard was intellectually ambitious for all Heloise’s nuns. St Dominic and his disciples followed the Rule of St Augustine, which they were allowed, step by step, to mould into a set of provisions to govern their community, adding to the ideals of monastic life a new and overriding purpose – that of preaching, so making a discursive and potentially philosophical activity central to the Order.Footnote 26
It was this life that, in his late teens, Aquinas chose against the strong opposition of his aristocratic parents, who had given him as a child oblate to Monte Cassino, where he was to live the pious, comfortable, and in no way philosophical life of a Benedictine in one of the Order’s great abbeys. He had been moved when he was 14 to Naples to avoid dangers arising from the political circumstances, and he attended the university there. After joining the Dominicans, Aquinas probably spent a couple of years in Paris, studying in a Dominican setting, before leaving for Cologne in 1248 with Albert the Great to study with him there. Albert had been asked to set up a studium generale – a top-tier Dominican educational centre – there, but Cologne, unlike Paris, was not a university town.Footnote 27 Chosen by his order to go to Paris as a Bachelor of Theology in 1251, for eight years Aquinas was involved in university life, commenting on the Sentences and, after a year as ‘formed bachelor’, becoming the Dominican Regent Master of Theology and, as such, presiding at disputations, as well as commenting on Scripture and preaching. Yet even during this period his life would have centred on the Dominican convent of St Jacques. Aquinas was primarily a teacher of Dominicans, and it is likely that many of his disputations were private ones that took place in his convent.Footnote 28
From 1259 until 1268, Aquinas was unattached to a university. For most of this time, he was a teacher within the Dominican sub-university system of education. From 1261 to 1265 he was lector at the convent in Orvieto, in charge of the intellectual formation of ordinary Dominicans, who lacked the intellectual gifts to be chosen to study at higher-level Dominican institutions. In 1265, he was asked to set up a studium in Rome, also dedicated to training ordinary Dominicans, but where, it seems, he had a freer hand (see below). As a rule, mendicant Masters of Theology left the University of Paris after the short period of their regency and did not return. Unusually, Aquinas was summoned back to Paris as a Dominican Master, where he taught from 1268 or 1269. But in 1272, Aquinas was again working in the Dominican sub-university system at the newly created studium generale of Naples until 1274, the year of his death.
Therefore, although Aquinas spent far longer as regent Master of Theology than most other mendicants, his academic life was ruled by and given over to the exigencies of the Dominican educational system. He should be seen as living the life, not just of a university teacher, but of the member of an order that developed the monastic tradition that, on Hadot’s account, looked back to ancient PWL. According to Hadot, PWL did not continue in the monasteries, because of the lack of an accompanying discourse. This charge, however, can hardly be levelled against an Order that defines itself through preaching, which is a type of discourse; and even less against Aquinas himself, whose writings – commentaries on the theological works, the Bible, Aristotle and other ancient philosophers, summae, disputations, occasional treatises, and sermons – fill a bookcase rather than a bookshelf. But what of the Implicit Philosophy Assumption? Aquinas, it will be said, was a Master of Theology and, as a Dominican instructor, his task was to teach theology, indeed to a large extent practical theology. As argued in Section 3, however, in the context of PWL ‘philosophy’ should be taken descriptively, for the sort of activity recognized today as broadly philosophical. While there are parts of Aquinas’s work that are not by this account philosophy, there are thousands of pages that are – among both those considering exclusively with what can be known by natural reason, and those dealing, philosophically, with the mysteries of Christian doctrine.
4.2. Aquinas as a teacher of PWL
As a teacher of his fellow Dominicans, Aquinas’s job was to form them as preachers of the Gospel and of Christian doctrine, not as philosophers. But philosophy can play a lesser or a greater part in a Christian life. Philosophy can be a way of Christian life (although there will be aspects of such a life that lie outside it), and Christianity a way of philosophical life, especially for thinkers who, like Aquinas, hold that both Christianity and philosophy converge on the truth. Aquinas wished, not just to lead a philosophical Christian life himself, but to make the Christian lives of others more philosophical. The Summa Theologiae, as he explains in the Proemium, is a work for beginners (incipientes). There are strong grounds, indeed, to identify its first audience, when Aquinas started work, as his students at the Rome studium. Footnote 29 If so, the contrast between the aims and manner of the Summa and the standard Dominican texts, such as Raymond of Peñafort’s Summa de casibus, is particularly striking.Footnote 30 But, whatever beginners he had in mind, Aquinas demonstrated a strikingly, indeed, shockingly, philosophical conception of theology through the scope, sources, and structure of the text. The Summa Theologiae aims to explain Christian doctrine within a metaphysical and scientific understanding of the world, which is itself illuminated by the mysteries of faith. It makes use of an array of highly argumentative authorities, Christian and pagan, especially the works of Aristotle. And, by using the quaestio form, Aquinas ensured that for every point the reasons to take the opposite view to the one he considered correct would be considered and rejected. In his earlier Summa contra Gentiles, Aquinas also considered objections and replies, but without using the quaestio form. By using this form, normally reserved for products of university teaching, in this work for beginners, Aquinas shows how keen he was to instil the practice of considering and arguing against objections as a matter of intellectual habit from the very start.
4.3. Philosophy the handmaiden of theology
The central point in Hadot’s historical narrative of how medieval scholasticism destroyed PWL has not yet been directly addressed here. Philosophy became the handmaiden (ancilla) of theology, he argued; as such, it was reduced to providing a merely theoretical preliminary, rather than being able to set out a way of life.
Hadot is right to say that philosophy is often described in medieval sources as theology’s ancilla: indeed, Aquinas refers to this description in the methodological first question of the first part of the Summa Theologiae (article 5). But what are the implications for him of this description? They are not, as Hadot’s theory would suggest, that philosophy is an inferior and distinct subject, left to develop as a purely theoretical discipline. On the contrary, it is just because sacra doctrina, theology, uses the philosophical disciplines that Aquinas wishes to stress that this dependency does not show that they are superior to it (arg. 2 and reply). The area treated by the branches of philosophy coincides largely with that treated by theology, Aquinas says (article 1, ad 2), although it treats it in a different way. Theology is needed as well as philosophy, partly because the overlap is not complete – there are matters beyond reason with which philosophy cannot deal – and partly because revelation provides a completely reliable short cut to the truths reason reaches slowly and falteringly (article 1, corpus).
In his commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate (pars 1 q. 2 a. 3 co.), Aquinas sets out three ways in which sacra doctrina properly uses philosophy. First, there are a number of praeambula fidei, such as the existence and unity of God, which Christians need to know. Second, it provides likenesses to some doctrines that cannot rationally be proved (Aquinas refers to the way in which Augustine uses philosophical ideas about the workings of our mind to illuminate the Trinity). Third, any view that contradicts the faith must be untrue, and so philosophical argument will often be able to show that such a view is false, and always, at least, that it cannot be demonstrated to be true. Although scholars are not agreed over how to place the praeambula fidei in relation to his thought as a whole, these comments show clearly that Aquinas considers his work in philosophy (in his sense of the word) as completely bound up with his work as a theologian. In the same article Aquinas expresses the idea (ad 5) in an arresting metaphor when, answering the objection that those who mix philosophy with sacra doctrina are like inn keepers who dilute their wine with water, he explains that, rather, they should be seen as turning water into wine.
Moreover, Aquinas is using ‘philosophy’ in a special sense, which is narrower than the broad meaning with which, as argued in Section 3, the word needs to be used in connection with PWL. Aquinas envisages branches of knowledge in the manner of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, as constructions of reason based on foundational first principles. The first principles of ‘philosophy’ are (supposedly) self-evident; those of sacra doctrina must be revealed to mortals, although they are self-evident to those enjoying the beatific vision. Much discussion that, even given his relatively integrated view of theology and ‘philosophy’ in his narrow sense, Aquinas would describe as belonging to sacra doctrina is philosophical in the broader sense. Indeed, although it does not perfectly correspond, Aquinas’s category of ‘argumentative’ disciplines comes closer to the broad sense of ‘philosophy’ than ‘philosophy’ as he uses the term. And Aquinas argues explicitly (Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, art. 8) that theology is an argumentative discipline. There was an anti-philosophical (in the broad sense) tradition within Christianity, represented by Gregory the Great’s statement that, when human reason makes evident a matter of faith, then faith ceases to be meritorious. Aquinas cites it as an objection to regarding theology as argumentative: in his answer, he explains (ad 2) that Gregory’s point applies only to attempts to prove the articles of faith: in working from them, and in showing why any view discordant with revealed truth is based on unsound arguments, he gives theology free rein to use reason, that is, to be in the broad sense philosophical.
4.4. Aquinas on ways of life
Aquinas himself thought carefully and explicitly about ways of life – which he simply called ‘lives’. Each person’s way of life is defined by what they care about most – ‘that in which they take most pleasure and to which they most aim’ (a. 1).Footnote 31 There are, Aquinas thinks, three main sorts of guiding principle. For some, it is bodily pleasure; for others external actions, such as those involved in political life; and for others the contemplation of the truth. But non-human animals also seek bodily pleasure, and so the life aiming at bodily pleasure is not a type of (specifically) human life (q. 179, a. 2 ad 1). What remains, therefore, is the traditional division into active and contemplative lives, which, as Aquinas explains (q. 179, a. 2 co.), is appropriate because human life should be considered according to our intellect (because, as he does not need state, the intellect is what distinguishes humans from other animals), and the intellect is itself divided between the active (or practical) intellect and the contemplative one.
Aquinas goes on to give a rich account of the contemplative life. Three points are especially striking. The first is that the contemplative life is not seen as consisting solely in the activity of the intellect. Certainly, the essence of the action that aims at contemplating the truth belongs to the intellect, but the intellect has to be moved to its activity, and that is the function of the will. Why do we will to contemplate the truth? In general, says Aquinas, we are motivated to seek to look at something sometimes through love of it, sometimes through love of the knowledge that will come from looking it. ‘And for this reason’, Aquinas continues,
Gregory based the contemplative life on the love of God, in that from love of God a person burns inwardly to see his beauty. And because everyone is given pleasure when they gain what they love, the contemplative life ends in pleasure, which is an emotion (in affectu), as a result of which the love becomes more intense. (q. 180, a. 1 co.)
Second, as the language used in this quotation illustrates, Aquinas links contemplation especially with the appreciation of beauty. How, it will be asked, can the moral virtues not belong to the contemplative life (as Aquinas insists they do not), since they are the soul’s beauty (q. 180, a.2, ob. 3)? Aquinas answers (ad 3) that beauty consists in brightness (claritas) and due proportion. The moral virtues do, indeed, participate in beauty, whereas ‘in the contemplative life, which consists in the act of reason, beauty is found essentially and for itself’.
Third, although contemplation is, ultimately, contemplation of God, and Aquinas believes that in heaven we shall enjoy this contemplation directly, face to face, in this life contemplating the effects of God leads to the contemplation of God, just as the moral virtues and acts other than that of contemplation lead to the contemplative life (q. 180, a. 4, co.). Aquinas, therefore, leaves room for the pursuit of theoretical knowledge of all kinds within the contemplative life, exactly as Aristotle did – and Aristotle is, indeed, quoted explicitly to strengthen the point that our ultimate happiness is in contemplation of the best intelligible thing.
When Aquinas comes to look at the active life, one important point he apparently makes (q. 181, a.3 co.) is that teaching belongs to it, not the contemplative life. Even where the understanding being passed from the teacher’s mind to the student’s is not of a practical matter, and so in itself belongs to the contemplative life, the transfer is by means of spoken words, and since the action of speaking is different from that of contemplation, teaching must therefore be part of the active life. Still, clearly there is a certain mixing here of the two sorts of lives. Aquinas’s position need not be thought to differ from the one that he had taken years earlier, commenting on the Sentences (III, d. 35, q. 1, a.1 ad 5), when he identified teaching and preaching – the two sorts activities other than contemplation in which he, as a Dominican, was mainly engaged – as belonging to both active and contemplative lives at once, since they begin in contemplation and end in action.
The scheme of the active and contemplatives lives was a traditional one, but in Aquinas’s hands it became an instrument for thinking about ways of life. It addresses the same concerns as Hadot’s idea of philosophy as a way of life, but one may be left thinking that it understands them in a subtler way, and that Aquinas left a better understanding of his own life, as contemplative but also active, than if we try to see whether or not it qualifies as PWL.
5. Aquinas and a methodological PWL
If the arguments made in the previous long section are convincing, a simple response would be to add Aquinas to the ever-lengthening list of great thinkers who can be classed as exponents of PWL. But perhaps that response is too simple. As developed by Hadot and now championed and extended by his (mainly Anglophone) disciples, PWL involves both a historical narrative, and it is built around an opposition between academic, text-based philosophizing and philosophy as a way of life. Once Aquinas is admitted to the ranks of PWL, what remains of either? The story about scholasticism and the origins of a purely theoretical philosophy will need to be rejected, and replaced with what? A story about nineteenth- and twentieth-century university curricula?
There is also another reason for not trying to save PWL as it stands. It is highly questionable whether Hadot’s claims about ancient philosophy, on which the whole theory is founded, are sustainable. Hadot deserves great credit, as an historian, for not being content to look at the ancient philosophical texts in isolation, but to have asked how and why they were produced. But more recent research, taking further the social and cultural approach he championed, suggests that Hadot’s conception of ancient philosophy as PWL is over-simplified. Pierre Vesperini argues that one of three main meanings of philosophia by about 200 BC was, indeed, that ‘which makes philosophy into an art of life (ars vitae), of conduct, of how to behave’. But the term was also used to designate an encyclopaedic pursuit of knowledge, and also what Vesperini calls ‘initiatic’ philosophy, which offers ‘a “way” to gain access to a “knowledge” of the divine, which at the same time gives access to a superior condition than that of other mortals’.Footnote 32
Yet it would be a pity altogether to abandon the idea of PWL. PWL distinguishes itself from other approaches to philosophy and its history because it combines an historiographical with an existential aim. It poses both an historical question about the material from the past and an existential question for today’s interpreters of the material. It tells the interpreters to consider how what we recognize as philosophical activity fitted into the lives, aspirations, and ideals of those who engaged in it, and it asks them how the philosophical activity, of which this interpretation is part, fits into their own lives, aspirations, and ideals.
For these reasons PWL should be modified into a methodological doctrine (MPWL), which retains its two aspects, historiographical and existential, but does not fill them with a ready-made historical and gnomic content. PWL needs to be stripped of its questionable historical narrative and its default settings for the character of a philosophical life (an objective view of humanity – looking at the world as if from above, the present alone is our happiness, wonderment at the existence of the world). Rather than assume, almost certainly wrongly, that all ancient philosophy set out a way of life, the ‘as a way of life’ should be taken more broadly, as raising the question: how, in each case, ancient, medieval or modern, does engaging in philosophy (in the broad sense discussed in (3)) relate to the philosopher’s life, aspirations, position and social relationships? In some cases, the answer will be along the lines Hadot envisages for PWL: the philosopher builds their whole life around philosophy, which thus involves far more than producing texts. In other cases, the way of life may be an academic one: the philosophical questions are puzzles to be solved, in order to retain a job or gain promotion, or gain social cachet – or just because someone enjoys solving them (as if they were crossword puzzles). In MPWL, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ changes from being a description of how some philosophers philosophized to being a methodological maxim for historians of philosophy: ‘Always consider how philosophical texts fitted into a philosopher’s life, not just their life as an individual, but as a member of society, with social needs, aspirations and responsibilities.’ This is not, of course, an injunction to ignore the conceptual content of the texts, which should always be an historian of philosophy’s priority. Rather, it arises because just discerning the conceptual content is not only bad history; it is likely to be bad philosophy, because the bare conceptual content is rarely the full conceptual content.
MPWL retains the existential dimension of PWL. By going beyond the mere conceptual and argumentative content, the exponent of MPWL can share in what PWL most importantly offers: the opportunity actively to learn from great philosophers of the past, not just some solution to a problem or passing idea, which might with much adaptation be incorporated into the dialectic of a contemporary dispute, but rather how to philosophize and why.
Hadot himself may not have been far from such a conception. In the interviews he gave late in his life, he emphasized that one of his constant concerns was to avoid anachronism, which requires
the effort to put works back as much as possible into the concrete conditions in which they were written, intellectual conditions (conditions spirituelles) on the one hand, that is to say, philosophical, rhetorical and poetic traditions, and on the other hand material conditions – social and educational setting, constraints imposed by the need for the physical materials for writing, historical circumstances. Every work should be put back into the praxis from which it comes.
Here, then, he suggests the historiographical aspect of MPWL; and he goes on to adumbrate its existential side:
But there is … a supplement that is added when we try to be objective, an increase: the possibility of finding intellectual nourishment for ourselves (notre nourriture spirituelle) there. Here we are, in a certain way, involved in the interpretation. If we try to understand a text well, I believe we can then be led, almost spontaneously, to discover its human sense, that is to say, to situate it – even if it is not in any way a work of edification – in the general problem of humanity, of man.Footnote 33
For Hadot, as he continues by explaining, this ‘involved’ interpretation requires stripping away the outdated ideology (for example, Stoic metaphysics or Epicurean atomism), removing the mentality of the past period, ‘demythologizing’, so as to reach the inner line of thinking and the concrete attitude it implies. The results Hadot gives are rather bathetic – they amount to extracting his favoured maxims of conduct from their complex settings in the work of ancient philosophers (for example, ‘Concentrate on the present, do not be crushed by the past or worried by the future’ from Stoicism), or presenting forever relevant citations, of the sort that used to figure in commonplace books (for example, from Marcus Aurelius: ‘Soon you will have forgotten everything. Soon everyone will have forgotten you’).
Hadot takes the wrong path here because he imagines that there is a timeless true philosophy to be discerned beneath its historical manifestations, and so we must strip off whatever is redolent of the particular setting in order to arrive at the underlying thought, which might still be relevant to us. MPWL, rather, makes a dispensable historicist assumption. It presumes, in historicist fashion, that all philosophizing is essentially bound to its context, but that, by understanding a text fully within its context, as a way of life (in the extended sense explained above), we are in a position to go beyond historicism not only by grasping the full meaning and implications, but by being able use it, if we wish, in our own philosophical investigations – not just the content of the text, but also its author’s explicit or implicit view of the place and value of philosophy.
It is this final point that makes MPWL especially relevant to the study of Aquinas. In recent decades the historical understanding of Aquinas as a Dominican and as a theologian has greatly increased, but much of the best work on his philosophy has been done from within an analytic setting, whether by those who, following John Haldane, see themselves as ‘analytical Thomists’, or those who are simply following the standard Anglophone approach to the history of philosophy. These scholars know the latest historical work and use it for dating Aquinas’s texts, considering their relations to each other and to contemporary writing and to sources. But they concentrate on explaining (and sometimes criticizing) the arguments. The result is that many areas in his work that have been neglected or remained obscure are now understood with an analytic clarity that Aquinas himself, though one of the clearest medieval philosophers, cannot always equal. But the analytic method has brought to Aquinas, as to the other philosophers of the past it studies, its own narrowness of scope and aspirations. It provides a sophisticated understanding of what Aquinas said, but for what end?
MPWL invites philosophers who work on Aquinas to put his individual arguments back into the rich framework of his own life, aims, and conception of philosophy (in the broad sense), which – as indicated above in discussing his views of the active and contemplative lives – was as rich and all-encompassing as the analytical view is narrow and impoverished. In this way, they might at last, after 800 years, give Aquinas what, strangely – despite his pre-eminence within that strange construction, Catholic philosophy – he has never enjoyed: a firm place, not as a medieval cul-de-sac, in the mainstream tradition of great philosophers.
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