Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, translated by Michael Chase (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1998) ("The discipline of assent consists essentially in refusing to accept within oneself all representations which are other than objective or adequate." Id. at 101.).
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, edited with an introduction by Arnold I. Davidson, & translated by Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1995) (From "Spiritual Exercises": "One conception was common to all the philosophical schools: people are unhappy because they are the slaves of passions. In other words, they are unhappy because they desire things they may not be able to obtain, since they are exterior, alien, and superfluous to them. It follows that happiness consists in independence, freedom, and autonomy. In other words, happiness is the return to the essential: that which is truly 'ourselves,' and which depends on us." Id. at 81, 102. One wonders how Americans would actually act in their daily lives were they to interpret "happiness" in this manner when reading and proclaiming the values in the Declaration of Independence about the 'pursuit of happiness.' "We spend our lives 'reading,' that is, carrying out exegeses, and sometimes even exegeses of exegeses. [] And yet we have forgotten how to read: how to pause, liberate ourselves from our worries, return into ourselves, and leave aside our search for subtlety and originality, in order to mediate calmly, ruminate, and let the texts speak to us. This, too, is a spiritual exercise, and one of the most difficult, As Goethe said" 'Ordinary people don't know how much time and effort it takes to learn how to read. I've spent eighty years at it, and I still can't say that I've reached my goal.'" Id. at 108-109 (citing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, trans, John Oxenford, 2 vols, 1850, 25 January, 1829).From "'Only the Present is our Happiness': The Value of the present Instant in Goethe and in Ancient Philosophy": "The fundamental attitude that the Stoic must maintain at each instant of his life is one of attention, vigilance, and continuous tension, concentrated upon each and every moment, in order not to miss anything which is contrary to reason." Id. at 217, 226. "In the present, say the Stoics, we have everything, and only the present is our happiness. There are two reasons why the present is sufficient for our happiness: in the first place, Stoic happiness--like Epicurean pleasure--is complete at every instant and does not increase over time. The second reason is that we already possess the whole of reality within the present instant, and even infinite duration could not give us more than what we have right now." Id. at 228. "Whoever practices the rt of living must also recognize that each instant is pregnant: heavy in meaning, it contains both the past and the future; not only of the individual, but also of the cosmos in which he is plunged." Id. at 232.).
Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or The Simplicity of Vision, translated by Michael Chase, with an introduction by Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1993, 1998) ("It is not life within the body which prevents us from being aware of our spiritual life; the former is, as such, unconscious. Rather, it is the concern we have for our bodies. This is the true fall of the soul. We allow ourselves to be absorbed by vain preoccupations and exaggerated worries..." Id. at 31.).
Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson (Cultural Memory in the Present), translated by Marc Djaballah (Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Press, 2009) ("It is all well and good to confess that one is a sinner, but it would be even better to think of the harm that one does to another through one's sin. In Le Canard enchaine of December 6, 2000 (yes, I do read Le Canard enchaine from time to time), the following remarks of Monseigneur Jacques David, bishop of Evreux, who had advised a pedophile priest to turn himself in, were reported: 'I had also advised colleagues [that is, other bishops] confronted by priests in difficulty to do the same thing.' This is all well and good but, Le Canard added, accurately, 'It is especially the kids who are in difficulty.' Here we are in fact in the presence of a rather ecclesiastical reaction. What counts about all, in the aim of the Church, is the priest in difficulty, and the Church he puts into difficulty. The victims are not considered first; it is not thought that the danger to which they are exposed should be put to an end immediately. One can imagine all the unhappy children who, in the past were, and still now are, victims of the conspiracy of silence that surrounded such actions. The Church is not, for that matter, the only one practicing hypocrisy. In analogous situations, the army or the police are not outdone; they also have esprit de corps. Reasons of state, reasons of the Church--there are always good reasons." Id. at 27. "Basically . . . in antiquity the philosopher is always regarded somewhat like Socrates himself; he is not 'in his place,' he is atopos. He cannot be put in a particular place, is a special class. He is unclassifiable. For quite different reasons there is a rupture of all these schools with the everyday, even among the skeptics, who approach everyday life with a total inner indifference, But at the same time, philosophy governs everyday life and sometime even gives detailed prescriptions. Thus the Stoics were reputed to have textbooks that might be called casuist textbooks--to use the seventeenth-century term--and that detailed proper conduct in all the situations of life. Alexander of Aphrodisias, Aristotle's commentator, mocks the Stoics' asking themselves whether one has the right to cross one's leg during philosophy class, or whether one has the right to take the biggest portion of the meal when eating with one's father! In an article about Roman Stoicism, about the Gracchi brothers but also about Cicero's treatise On Duty, my wife has shown that the Stoics displayed two opposing attitudes during this casuist period. For example, one would ask oneself the following question: if one sells a house, does one have the right to hide the house's faults or must one disclose them? There were rather heretical Stoics who would say yes, one can hide the faults; but the orthodox Stoics would say no, one does not have the right to do that. Thee is also the case of the grain dealer whose boat full of wheat arrives in a port during a famine. Will he say that there are other loads coming behind him, which would have the consequence of a plunge in prices? All sorts of possible behaviors in everyday life were foreseen, but as you can see, the problem was always to determine the attitude that conformed to the philosophical ideal. Nothing is more opposed to the cult of profit, which progressively destroys humanity, than this Stoic morality that requires of everyone absolute loyalty, transparence, and disinterestedness." Id. at 100-101.).
Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, translated by Michael Chase (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2006) ("As we come to the close of this parenthesis, let us say: to write the history of thought is sometimes to write the history of a series of misinterpretations." Id. at 14. "It is interesting to note that for the Stoic philosophers, from the perspective of knowledge of the cosmos, the seriousness of research takes on a sacred value." Id. at 171.).
Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, translated by Michael Chase (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2002) ("Around the beginning of the Christian period, Neopythagoreanism takes up in a moral sense the mnemonic exercises practiced by the ancient Pythagoreans. We can see this in the Golden Verses: 'Do not let sleep fall upon your soft eyes / Before you have gone over each act of your day three times: / Where have I failed? What have I done? What duty have I omitted? / Begin here, and continue the examination. After this, / Find fault with what was badly done, and rejoice in what was good.' These lines from the Golden Verses were frequently cited or alluded to later on by writers advocating examination of the conscience--by Stoics such as Epictetus, independent philosophers such as Galen, and especially Neoplatonists such as Porphyry and Iamblichus when they describe the life of Pythagoeran communities as the ideal model for the philosophical life." Id. at 200 (citations omitted).).
