Skip to main content
Log in

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

  • Published:
Sophia Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper examines the seemingly unlikely rapport between the ‘Christian existentialist’, radically Protestant thinker, Søren Kierkegaard and French classicist and historian of philosophy, Pierre Hadot, famous for advocating a return to the ancient pagan sense of philosophy as a way of life. Despite decisive differences we stress in our concluding remarks, we argue that the conception of philosophy in Hadot as a way of life shares decisive features with Kierkegaard’s understanding of the true ‘religious’ life: as something demanding existential engagement from its proponent, as well as the learning or recitation of accepted doctrines. The mediating figure between the two authors, the paper agrees with Irina (2012), is Socrates and his famous irony. In order to appreciate Kierkegaard’s rapport with Hadot, then (and in contrast to Gregor, who has also treated the two figures) we first of all consider Hadot’s treatment of the enigmatic ‘old wise man’ who remains central to Kierkegaard’s entire authorship. (Part 1) However, to highlight Hadot’s Socratic proximity to Kierkegaard (in contrast to Irina), we set up Hadot’s Socrates against the contrasting portrait readers can find in John M. Cooper’s recent work on Socrates and philosophy as a way of life. Part II of the essay turns back from Hadot’s and Kierkegaard’s Socrates towards Hadot’s own work, and argues—again moving beyond both Gregor and Irina’s works on Hadot and Kierkegaard—that the shape of Hadot’s ‘authorship’, including his remarkably classical style, can be understood by way of Kierkegaard’s notion of indirect communication. In our concluding remarks, in the spirit of Kierkegaard, we pinpoint the fundamental difference between the two thinkers, arguing that for Hadot in contrast to Kierkegaard, a stress on existential commitment in no way speaks against the philosophical defence of a form of rational universalism. Reading Hadot via Kierkegaard allows us to appreciate Hadot’s novelty as attempting to ‘squaring the circle’ between an emphasis on subjectivity and, as it were, the subjective dimensions of philosophers’ pursuit of rational universality.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (University of California Press, 1993) shows the extent of Heidegger’s debts to Kierkegaard, and other Christian and theological sources, in his earlier opus which is widely accepted as a foundational document in 20th century, non-Marxist European thought. For dedicated studies on Kierkegaard’s wider influence on European thinkers last century, see Jon Stewart ed., Kierkegaard Research Volume 11, Tome I: Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy: German and Scandinavian Philosophy and Volume 11, Tome II: Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy: Francophone Philosophy (London: Ashgate, 2012).

  2. Brian Gregor, ‘The Text as Mirror: Kierkegaard and Hadot on Transformative Reading’, History of Philosophy Quarterly Vol. 28, no. 1, January 2011, 65–84; Nicolae Irina, ‘Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Hadot and Kierkegaard’s Socrates’, in Volume 11, Tome II: Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy: Francophone Philosophy (London: Ashgate, 2012), 157–171.

  3. Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone is our Happiness: Conversations with Arnold Davidson and Jeannie Carlier, translated by Marc Djaballah (Stanford University Press, 2009), 19.

  4. See Pierre Hadot, Plotinus, Or the Simplicity of Vision; Hadot, Porphyre et Victorinus; Hadot, Plotin: Traité 28; Hadot, Plotin: Traité 50; Hadot, Plotin: Traité 9; Hadot, Études de Patristique et D’Histoire des Concepts.

  5. See in translation, Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life trans. M. Chase (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996); and Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2002a). In what follows, where English-language translations are available, I shall cite these; where not, obviously, I will cite the originals.

  6. See Hadot, Present Alone is Our Happiness, 130 for his criticism of post-Heideggerian philosophical writing styles.

  7. See e.g. Mark Ferreira, Kierkegaard (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 5. In Søren Kierkegaard On My Work as an Author (in Kierkegaard Works: Volume 22 eds. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998: p. 6), Kierkegaard avows that his “authorship, regarded as a totality, is religious from first to last.” In The Point of View Kierkegaard puts it this way: “the content, then, of this little book is: what I in truth am as an author, that I am and was a religious author, that the whole of my work as an author pertains to Christianity, to the issue of becoming a Christian.” (in loc cit., p. 23) There is some issue as to just how far we should trust Kierkegaard’s late assertions that he was a religious author ‘from first to last’ – and it can be argued that he makes the authorship seem too neatly programmatic in retrospect. With that said, there is clearly an ultimate religious ‘upbuilding’ purpose even behind Either/Or, which Kierkegaard regarded as the beginning of the authorship proper (thus excluding From The Papers of One Still Living, The Concept of Irony and his early polemical student pieces).

  8. Gregor, “Text as Mirror”, 74–82 concern Hadot’s views on reading texts specifically, after his exegesis of Hadot’s general position on philosophy as a way of life, amongst the ancients.

  9. Gregor, “Text as Mirror”, 62–84.

  10. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life; Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, per note 5 above.

  11. Pierre Hadot, ‘Spiritual Exercises’, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 81–125.

  12. Loc cit.

  13. See for instance John M. Cooper, in his book on classical philosophical conceptions of philosophy as a way of life. ‘I have been assuming that for the ancients with whom I am concerned, exactly as with us, the essential core of philosophy is a certain, specifically and recognisably philosophical, style of logical, reasoned argument and analysis’, Cooper writes on page 17, before commencing any close analysis of any classical text. He continues in the same vein to beg one question his analysis should be about to weigh: ‘Anyone who has read any philosophy at all is familiar with this style, whether it takes the form we find in the question-and-answer dialectic of the character Socrates in Plato’s Socratic dialogues, … or, again, in the writings of a contemporary analytic philosopher’. John M. Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012), p. 17.

  14. Pierre Hadot, “Conversion” in Exercises Spirituels et Philosophie Antique Préface par Arnold Davidson (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2002b), 223–238.

  15. Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom, 20–22

  16. Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom, 21–22.

  17. See Nicolae Irina, ‘Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Hadot and Kierkegaard’s Socrates’, in Volume 11, Tome II: Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy: Francophone Philosophy, pp. 167–8. Hadot recognises that the modern figures who take most from Socrates are existentialists, or thinkers known widely as existentialists: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, at Present Alone is our Happiness, 121–122.

  18. Hadot, Present Alone, 147.

  19. In what follows, I will cite the English language version of this text, Pierre Hadot, ‘The Figure of Socrates’, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. and trans. Michael Chase, Introduction by A. Davidson (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), 147–178.

  20. For dedicated studies on Kierkegaard and Socrates, see Jacob Howland, Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008) and Paul Muench, ‘Kierkegaard’s Socratic Task’ (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2006); also Benjamin Daise, Kierkegaard’s Socratic Art (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1999), esp. 1–35; Daniel Watts ‘Subjective Thinking: Kierkegaard on Hegel’s Socrates’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 61: 2010, 23–44; and Paul Muench, ;Socratic Irony, Plato’s Apology, and Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony’, Kierkegaard Studies, edited on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser Yearbook (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009a). On Kierkegaard and classical philosophy more widely, see J. Wild, ‘Kierkegaard and classical philology’, Philosophical Review 49 (1940); Rick Antony Furtak, ‘Kierkegaard and Greek Philosophy’, 129–149; esp. 130 where Furtak notes the proximity between Kierkegaard’s sense of ancient versus modern philosophy as a bios and Pierre Hadot’s.

  21. Nicolae Irina, ‘Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Hadot and Kierkegaard’s Socrates’, in Volume 11, Tome II: Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy: Francophone Philosophy, pp. 157–171.

  22. Nietzsche also understood Socrates as a mask-wearer, Hadot claims at ‘Figure of Socrates’, 148; drew on this mask-wearing to develop his own pedagogical self-conception and mask-wearing, at loc cit., 151; understood his irony as assuming the face of mediocrity to initiate the pedagogical process, at loc cit., 152; and understood and even envied Socrates’ ‘existential’ aims at loc cit. 156–7. As we will see, this profile mirrors that of his claims on behalf of Kierkegaard and Socrates. On Nietzsche for Hadot, see also Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, 227–228, 323.

  23. The author thanks the incisive comments of the reviewers of this article, which have drawn me to more precisely specify this relationship here and in what follows. As a preliminary marker of Hadot’s distance from being a commentator, with aspirations to thoroughness, on Kierkegaard’s Socrates, rather than an author who comes into proximity with and draws inspiration from the Dane, we note that Hadot cites The Concept of Irony only twice in his essay on Socrates, concerning Socrates as ‘cobold’, and his art of Eros, at ‘The figure of Socrates’, 148 and 159. While Hadot does see in Socrates ‘a widespread influence of the greatest importance on the entire Western tradition’, he does not speculate on anything like what Kierkegaard calls ‘the meaning of [Socrates’] existence in the world, of the moment in the development of the world spirit that is symbolically indicated by the singularity of his existence in history…’, on which, see Paul Muench, ‘Socratic Irony, Plato’s Apology, and Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony’, Kierkegaard Studies, 78, 83–84. Hegel’s or any other robust philosophy of history is not a central concern of Hadot’s, here or elsewhere. Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy are cited twice in ‘The Figure of Socrates’, but firstly concerning the difference between spoken and written dialogue (153) and second, in a single sentence on the tension between ‘concern for one’s individual destiny’ and the concerns of ‘the state’ (156). The citation is taken from loc cit., 84. For Kierkegaard’s debts to Hegel on the figure of Socrates, see Daniel Watts ‘Subjective Thinking: Kierkegaard on Hegel’s Socrates’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 61: 2010, esp. 24–36. While Hadot argues that Socratic irony was Kierkegaard’s mask, at 150, his account of Socratic irony itself at 151–3 does not cite Kierkegaard, but instead draws primarily on Cicero, the Platonic Symposium and Republic and then, of more recent commentators, Apelt. (See below) Likewise, Hadot does not engage with Kierkegaard’s earlier account of the ironist’s ‘infinite’ or ‘absolute negativity’, on which see Muench, ‘Socratic Irony’, 95–100.

  24. Cooper ‘Socrates and Philosophy as a Way of Life’, 21; Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus, x, 8–10, 18.

  25. Cooper, ‘Socrates and Philosophy as a Way of Life’.

  26. Cooper, ‘Socrates and Philosophy as a Way of Life’, 21.

  27. Cooper, loc cit., 21, n. 2.

  28. Cooper, loc cit., 25.

  29. Cf. Cooper, loc cit., 25

  30. Cooper, loc cit., 25.

  31. Cooper, loc cit., 25.

  32. Cooper, loc cit., 24.

  33. Cooper, loc cit., 31.

  34. Cooper, loc cit., 28.

  35. Cooper, loc cit., 37.

  36. Cooper, loc cit., 34–35.

  37. On the centrality in Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony of the Platonic Apology, as against the Symposium, see Muench, ‘Socratic Irony, Plato’s Apology, and Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony’, 80–81.

  38. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 147.

  39. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 148, 158. 165.

  40. Hadot, loc cit., 158.

  41. Hadot, loc cit., 148. Cf. Irina, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’, 169.

  42. Hadot, loc cit., 160–161.

  43. Hadot, loc cit., 147.

  44. Hadot, loc cit., 148.

  45. Hadot, loc cit., 148.

  46. Hadot, loc cit., 148.

  47. Cf. Irina, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’, 161–2.

  48. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 149.

  49. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 150–151. See next paragraph.

  50. Cooper denies that Socrates insists that his interlocutors should believe in the truth of their positions. He admits that characters experience ‘helpful humiliation’ when Socrates shows the inconsistency of their beliefs, but does not think that this psychological fact is of the essence of the process. At Cooper, ‘Socrates and Philosophy as a Way of Life’, 38.

  51. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 149.

  52. Plato, Apology, 30e-31a; Plato, Meno, 80a.

  53. Plato, Euthyphro, 11b-12a

  54. Irina, ‘Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life’, 160–161 on ‘erotic irony’, Socrates going from lover to beloved; and its relation to dialectic irony, Socrates’ claim to know nothing, so as to allow identification by the student with the search for knowledge.

  55. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 149.

  56. Respectively, at Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, pp. 150–152, then pp. 154–5 (on Socratic maieutics) and 156–7 (on Socrates’ end or goal in drawing out interlocutors’ individual ‘experience of existing, the authentic consciousness of being, the seriousness of life as we live it, or the solitude of decision making’: ‘in this respect, Kierkegaard can help us to understand the significance of the figure of Socrates’.

  57. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 150. Cf. Irina, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’, 162.

  58. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 150.

  59. Hadot ‘Figure of Socrates’, 150–1; cf. Muench, ‘Kierkegaard’s Socratic Task’, 29–41; Irina, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’, 162; Daise, Kierkegaard’s Socratic Art, especially Chapter 1, ‘Indirect Communication’.

  60. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 152.

  61. Kierkegaard, On My Work as an Author, 42–3; cf. Muench ‘Kierkegaard’s Socratic Task’, 37–39; Antony Aumann, ‘Kierkegaard and the Need for Indirect Communication,’ 104–107.

  62. At Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 152.

  63. See Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 148 and 150.

  64. Kierkegaard, On My Work as an Author, 53. There is a third explanation Hadot sees for Kierkegaard’s adoption of a Socratic mask, as he was to passionately declare at the end of his life in ‘My Task’: ‘0 Socrates! Yours and mine are the same adventure! I am alone. My only analogy is Socrates. My task is a Socratic task’. (Hadot ‘Figure of Socrates’, 151) However, we feel drawn to admire the extraordinary character and wit of these great ironists, Hadot comments, we should not underestimate the burden or weight that any challenger of accepted pieties finds himself having to bear. Kierkegaard’s host of pseudonyms—a proliferation in which Hadot observes, ‘he objectified his various selves, without recognizing himself in any of them, just as Socrates, by means of his skillful questions, objectified the self of his interlocutors’—also served a psychological function for Kierkegaard himself. Hadot here cites Kierkegaard’s reflection on his own melancholy as evidence for this claim: ‘Because of my melancholy, it was years before I was able to say “thou” to myself’, he reports: ‘Between my melancholy and my “thou”, there was a whole world of fantasy. I exhausted it, in part, in my pseudonyms’. (Kierkegaard at Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 152; cf. Irina’s treatment of this psychological interpretation in ‘Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life’, 161–2.)

  65. At Ferreira, Kierkegaard, 83. The original text Ferreira cites, in the Danish, is Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est (Kierkegaard 1985, 117): ‘Someone who supposes that philosophy has never in all the world been so close as it is now to fulfilling its task of explaining all mysteries may certainly think it strange, affected, and scandalous that I choose the narrative form and do not in my small way hand up a stone to culminate the system’.

  66. Plato, Laches, 187e-188b; at eg Hadot ‘Figure of Socrates’, 89.

  67. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 153.

  68. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 154.

  69. See Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 157; Irina, ‘Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life’, 164–166.

  70. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 152. Cf. Irina, ‘Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life,’ 168–170, who rightly positions the assumption of subjective responsibility as the goal of Socratic philosophising, as seen by Hadot via Kierkegaard.

  71. Cf. Gregor, “The Text as Mirror,” 73.

  72. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 11; Hadot ‘Figure of Socrates’, 154 (his other Citation here is again from Point of View as an Author, section 2); Ferreira, Kierkegaard, 70–76; Muench, ‘Kierkegaard’s Socratic Task’, 98–100; Howland Kierkegaard and Socrates, 43–45

  73. At Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 154.

  74. Cf. Paul Muench, ‘Kierkegaard’s Socratic Point of View’, in A Companion to Socrates, eds. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009b), 390.

  75. This insight is central to Jacques Lacan’s reading of the Alcibiades-Socrates relationship and its denouement in his Seminar VIII: On Transference trans. C. Gallagher (London: Karnac, 2004); see also Matthew Sharpe, ‘Hunting Plato’s Agalmata’, The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 14:5 (2009), 535–547.

  76. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 156; cf. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 241–2, 282–3

  77. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 157. Cf. Irina, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’” 168–170.

  78. Kierkegaard, The Instant, at Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 157. See Daniel. 2010. ‘Subjective Thinking: Kierkegaard on Hegel’s Socrates’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 61 (2010), 23–24.

  79. Hadot ‘Figure of Socrates’, 156–7; cf. Hadot, ‘La Figure du Sage dans L’Antiquité Gréco-Latine’, in Études de Philosophie Antique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2010c), pp. 233–258; cf. also on this Socratic knowledge that he was not a sage, Irina, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’, 163–4.

  80. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 156.

  81. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 194.

  82. See Kierkegaard Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 195; Ferreira Kierkegaard, 106,

  83. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 194n.

  84. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 201

  85. To quote the passage in full: ‘If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol—where, then, is there more truth?’ Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 201. M. Jamie Ferreira. Kierkegaard, 96. Ferreira comments as follows: ‘The implication that the passionate pagan is praying “in truth”, as opposed to the indifferent Christian who is actually worshiping an idol gains Climacus as many enemies as it does fans, and for opposite reasons. On the one hand, it puts in question any simple affirmation of the superiority of Christianity. On the other hand, what some see as tolerance and a worthy appreciation of passion in life as opposed to rote-worship, others see as endorsing relativism and arbitrary irrationalism’. Loc cit, 96. We underscore here that our purpose at this point is exegetical, so we skirt these critical hesitations and debates that this position has evoked (together with the notorious figure of the ‘passionate Nazi’, whom some uncharitable critics have raised here against Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the subjectivity of truth). It is also worth stressing that the disputed passage comes early in the Postscript, before later specifications concerning the subject’s radical difference to God and in Christianity. See the ‘Concluding Remarks’ (SPI: Please link) section.

  86. Kierkegaard Philosophical Fragments, 10–21; cf. Ferreira Kierkegaard, 70–76; Howland Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Faith and Knowledge, 43–5.

  87. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 10–21; cf. Howland, Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith, 48–56

  88. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 242–3.

  89. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 242–3.

  90. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 90.

  91. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 279.

  92. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 204, 33–34, 54–5; Ferreira, Kierkegaard, 99–100.

  93. Kierkegaard, cited at Muench ‘Kierkegaard’s Socratic Task’, 83. Cf. Furtak, ‘Kierkegaard and Greek Philosophy’, 130–131.

  94. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 293.

  95. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 353.

  96. Cf. here Paul Muench, ‘Kierkegaard’s Socratic task’, 123.

  97. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, book VII 39–40 (Life of Zeno) at www-site http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0257%3Abook%3D7%3Achapter%3D1, last accessed September 2013. Hadot makes much of this passage at Pierre Hadot ‘La Philosophie Antique: une Éthique ou une Pratique?’ in Études de Philosophie Ancienne (France: Éditions des Belles Lettres), 207–232, at pp. 220–221.

  98. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 61.

  99. Esp. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 151, & Hadot, ‘Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy’, 62–64.

  100. Hadot, loc cit., 61–63.

  101. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 176.

  102. For Hadot’s debts to Wittgenstein in his course towards rediscovering the different forms of discourse used by ancients, see Pierre Hadot, ‘Jeux de langage et philosophie’ Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 67 (3), 1962: 330–343.

  103. Hadot, École pratique des hautes etudes: Année 1979–1980, in Études de Patristique et D’Histoire des Concepts (Paris: Les Belles Lettres), 162–167.

  104. Hadot, La Philosophie Comme Manière de Vivre Entretiens avec Jeannie Cartier et Arnold I. Davidson (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel) 104; Present Alone, 59.

  105. Here, I am pointing to Hadot’s work in respectively Pierre Hadot, Études de Philosophie Ancienne; Hadot, Études Néoplatoniciennes; Hadot, Porphyre et Victorinus; Hadot, Études de Patristique et D’Histoire des Concepts; Hadot, “La Fin du Paganisme” in Études de Philosophie Ancienne; Pierre Hadot, ‘“L’Amour Magicienne”: Aux Origene de la Notion de “Magia Naturalis”: Platon, Plotin, Marsile Ficin’ Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, T. 172, No. 2, Études de Philosophie Ancienne: Hommage à Pierre-Maxime Schuhl pour son quatre-vingtième anniversaire (Avril-Juin 1982), pp. 283–292; Hadot, The Veil of Isis; finally Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life.

  106. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 352.

  107. Compare Pierre Hadot, ‘Marcus Aurelius’, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 179–206; and Hadot, The Inner Citadel.

  108. Hadot, Philosophie Comme Manière, 102; Present Alone, 57–58.

  109. Cf. Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.

  110. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 280. Elsewhere, he cites approvingly Nietzsche’s claim that the ancient ethical schools should be seen by us as a common ‘experimental laboratory’ of different spiritual techniques to be examined, by trying to subjectively live these out. At Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, 277.

  111. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 108.

  112. Hadot, Hadot, Present Alone, 161–163.

  113. Hadot, Present Alone, 5–6.

  114. See Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, xiv, 70, 151, 262–3

  115. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 151.

  116. Hadot, ‘Figure of Socrates’, 156. See note 74 above.

  117. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 280.

  118. I.e. as a kind of repetition or emulation at the level of form, implying new content, rather than mere copying of Kierkegaard’s every content and device.

  119. Jeanne Carlier, ‘Introduction’ to Hadot, Philosophie Comme Manière, 7.

  120. Hadot, Present Alone, 132; Irina, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’, 158 touches on this point in Introduction, but does not return to it

  121. See Gregor, ‘The Text as Mirror’, 73–74, who raises this, before turning to his focus on reading as a spiritual practice, at 74–82; also Irina, ‘Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life’, 159, where this remarkable claim is likewise raised and then passed over towards other subjects.

  122. Hadot, Present Alone, 147; cf. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 285.

  123. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 43–49; see Ferreira, Kierkegaard, 74–76, 96, 107, 114.

  124. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 9–23.

  125. See Gary Gutting, Thinking the Impossible: French Thinking Since 1960 (USA: Oxford UP, 2011).

  126. We have seen that Kierkegaard saw this existential concern in Socrates. For the compelling evidence that he saw it more widely amongst the Greeks, in another anticipation of Hadot, see Furtak, “Kierkegaard and Greek Philosophy”, 132–142.

  127. ‘Abraham’s act of resignation transgressed the ethical altogether and had a higher telos outside it, in relation to which he suspended it’. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 59; see 74, 82; Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 555–559; M. Jamie Ferreira. Kierkegaard, 59. Compare Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), 55–85 for one more recent ‘post-structuralist’ thinker, whose reading of Fear and Trembling pushes his ethics towards an aporetic terminus distant from the forms of philosophical practical reason Hadot extols. Yet here as elsewhere, the relation between ethical and religious across different Kierkegaardian texts is, we realise, complex, and it is more the universality and impersonality of the Hegelian system that attracts Kierkegaard’s ire than ethical universality per se. Climacus in the Postscript can tell us ‘the ethical is and remains the highest task assigned to every human being…’ Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 151, with an ‘infinite validity’. (Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 149. We have nevertheless seen his opposition to the notion of Platonic recollection, an instance of the kind of harmonisation of the I of the thinker with the larger cosmic whole (in Plato’s case, by recollecting the world-shaping Ideas) with Stoic, peripatetic and Epicurean analogues, each of ‘living according to nature’. On this conception of Greek philosophy, and Kierkegaard’s response to it, see Furtak, ‘Kierkegaard and Greek Philosophy’, 132–3; on Kierkegaard’s criticism of the Stoics concerning apatheia, and the role of emotions, led by love, in a good life, see loc cit. 138–142. Certainly, there is nothing like a comparable ethical or supraethical exemplar to Abraham in Hadot or the Greeks and Roman thinkers he examines: Socrates’ atopia, and the atopia of the impossibly ideal Sages, is as close as we get to anything of this kind, but such figures’ motives are not hidden or invisible in the ways of Abraham, and their inner dispositions are shaped ‘in accordance with nature’, according to the different schools’ models.

  128. Hadot, Present Alone, 139; cf. 167–171.

References

  • Aumann, A. (2008). Kierkegaard and the need for indirect communication. Indiana: University of Indiana.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cooper, J. M. (2007). Socrates and philosophy as a way of life. In D. Scott (Ed.), Maieusis: essays in ancient philosophy in honour of Myles Burnyeat (pp. 20–42). Oxford: Oxford UP.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Cooper, J. M. (2012). Pursuits of wisdom: six ways of life in ancient philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus. Princeton: Princeton UP.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Daise, B. (1999). Kierkegaard’s Socratic art. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ferreira, J. M. (2009). Kierkegaard. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gregor, B. (2011). The text as mirror: Kierkegaard and Hadot on transformative reading. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 28(1), 65–84.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gutting, G. (2011). Thinking the impossible: French thinking since 1960. USA: Oxford UP.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hadot, I., & Hadot, P. (2004). Apprendre à Philosopher dans l’Antiquité: L’enseignement du Manuel d’Epictète et son commentaire néoplatonicien. Paris: Poche.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hadot, P. (1962). Jeux de langage et philosophie. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 67(3), 330–343.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hadot, P. (1968). Porphyre et Victorinus. Paris: Études Augustiniennes.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hadot, P. (1982). Hadot, “‘L’Amour Magicienne’: Aux Origene de la Notion de ‘Magia Naturalis’: Platon, Plotin, Marsile Ficin” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, T. 172, No. 2, Études de Philosophie Ancienne: Hommage à Pierre-Maxime Schuhl pour son quatre-vingtième anniversaire (Avril-Juin 1982), 283–292.

  • Hadot, P. (1987). Plotin, Traité 28. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hadot, P. (1990). Plotin, Traité 50. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hadot, P. (1993 [1963]). Plotinus, or the simplicity of vision trans. Michael Chase. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Hadot, P. (1994). Plotin, Traité 9. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hadot, P. (1996). Philosophy as a way of life. London: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hadot, P. Forms of life and forms of discourse in ancient philosophy. Philosophy as a Way of Life, 49–70.

  • Hadot, P. Spiritual exercises. Philosophy as a Way of Life, 81–125.

  • Hadot, P. (2001a). La Philosophie Comme Manière de Vivre Entretiens avec Jeannie Cartier et Arnold I. Davidson. Paris: Éditions Albin Michel.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hadot, P. (2001). Inner Citadel trans. Michael Chase. Harvard: Harvard UP.

  • Hadot, P. (2002). What is ancient philosophy? trans. Michael Chase. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard UP.

  • Hadot, P. (2002). Exercises Spirituels. In Exercises Spirituels et Philosophie Antique Préface par Arnold Davidson (pp. 19–74). Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2002.

  • Hadot, P. (2002). Exercises Spirituels et Philosophie Antique Préface par Arnold Davidson. Paris: Éditions Albin Michel.

  • Hadot, P. (2002). Conversion. In Exercises Spirituels et Philosophie Antique Préface par Arnold Davidson (pp. 223–238). Paris: Éditions Albin Michel.

  • Hadot, P. (2002). Il y a nos jours des professeurs de philosophie, mais pas de philosophes. In Exercises Spirituels et Philosophie Antique Préface par Arnold Davidson (pp. 333–332). Paris: Éditions Albin Michel.

  • Hadot, P. (2006). The veil of Isis, translation by Michael Chase. Cambridge: Belknap Press.

  • Hadot, P. (2009). Present alone is our happiness: conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold L. Davidson, translated by Marc Djaballah. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

  • Hadot, P. (2010a). Études de Philosophie Ancienne. France: Éditions des Belles Lettres.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hadot, P. (2010). La Philosophie Antique: une Éthique ou une Pratique? In Études de Philosophie Ancienne (pp. 207–232). France: Éditions des Belles Lettres.

  • Hadot, P. (2010). La Figure du Sage dans L’Antiquité Gréco-Latine. In Études de Philosophie Antique (pp. 233–258). Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

  • Hadot, P. (2010). La fin du paganisme. In Études dephilosophie ancienne (pp. 341–74) Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

  • Hadot, P. (2010e). Études de Patristique et D’Histoire des Concepts. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hadot, P. (2010). Course de L’École Pratique des Hautes Études. Année 1979–1980. In Études de Patristique et D’Histoire des Concepts (pp. 162–167). Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

  • Howland, J. (2008). Kierkegaard and Socrates: A study in philosophy and faith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

    Google Scholar 

  • Irina, N. (2012). Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a way of life: Hadot and Kierkegaard’s Socrates. In Volume 11, Tome II: Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy: Francophone Philosophy (pp. 157–171). London: Ashgate.

  • Kierkegaard, S. (1980). Sickness unto death. In Kierkegaard works: Volume 7 eds. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  • Kierkegaard, S. (1983). Fear and trembling. In Kierkegaard works: Volume 6 eds. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  • Kierkegaard, S. (1985). Philosophical fragments. In Kierkegaard works: Volume 19 eds. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  • Kierkegaard, S. (1992). Concluding unscientific postscript. In Kierkegaard works: Volume 12 eds. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  • Kierkegaard, S. (1998). On my work as an author. In Kierkegaard works: Volume 22 eds. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  • Lacan, J. (2007). The other side of psychoanalysis: The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII trans. R. Grigg. London: W.W. Norton.

  • Lacan, J. (2004). Seminar VIII: On transference trans. C. Gallagher. London: Karnac Books.

  • Muench, P. (2006). Kierkegaard’s Socratic task. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh.

    Google Scholar 

  • Muench, P. (2009). Socratic irony, Plato’s apology, and Kierkegaard’s on the concept of irony. Kierkegaard Studies, edited on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser Yearbook. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter.

  • Muench, P. (2009b). Kierkegaard’s Socratic point of view. In S. Ahbel-Rappe & R. Kamtekar (Eds.), A companion to Socrates. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nussbaum, M. (1994). Therapy of desire: Theory and practice in Hellenistic ethics. Princeton: Princeton UP.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sharpe, M. (2009). Hunting Plato’s Agalmata. The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 14(5), 535–547.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sharpe, M. (2014). How it’s not the Chrysippus you read: on Cooper, Hadot, Epictetus, and stoicism as a way of life. Philosophy Today, 58(3), 367–392.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Watts, D. (2010). Subjective thinking: Kierkegaard on Hegel’s Socrates. Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 61, 23–44.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matthew Sharpe.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Sharpe, M. Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard. SOPHIA 55, 409–435 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-016-0512-6

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-016-0512-6

Keywords

Navigation