1. Introduction
Over the past 40 years, thanks especially to the work of Pierre Hadot, there has been a notable shift toward a philosophical approach more attuned to the Socratic question, “How shall one live?” On this account, the primary task is not merely to engage in theoretical discussions about the nature of knowledge and reality but to guide and regulate one’s life in light of such reflections. The goal is not merely to contemplate the good life, but to make one’s own life an example of it. This orientation to philosophy is often described as “philosophy as a way of life” (Hadot), “the art of living” (Alexander Nehamas), “care of the self,” and “aesthetics of existence” (Michel Foucault), all of which convey the idea that askesis — or the practice of “working on oneself” and “care of the soul” — is the defining feature of this approach to philosophy.Footnote 1
Philosophy as a way of life, in other words, is centrally concerned with transformation of the self. But such a radical expectation of what philosophy might deliver — namely, self-transformation — raises equally difficult questions: How can philosophy, as an academic discipline, with its established focus on epistemological, ontological, and ethical questions and as it is currently taught in philosophy departments, truly transform our way of seeing and being in the world? How does the transformation of one’s way of life, informed by philosophy, differ from the way religious traditions or cultural norms shape and inform our way of seeing the world? For if philosophy as a way of life can transform us, so too can religious beliefs, which not only provide doctrines about the divine but also guide our perception, shape our moral sensibility, and orient us toward what matters. If philosophy as a way of life can serve as a framework of meaning for us, so too can religion.
A major concern with such an account of philosophy is the risk of losing philosophy in the process of “self-fashioning” (Nehamas, Reference Nehamas1998, p. 11) — the risk of taking philosophy proper as rigorous argumentation and systematic reasoning to a point of irrelevance (Cooper, Reference Cooper2012; Flynn, Reference Flynn2005; Nussbaum, Reference Nussbaum1994). In other words, the concern is that we might slowly reach a point where we focus entirely on the “aesthetics of existence” and the cultivation of a character skilled in the art of living without the need to do philosophy. As such, philosophy as a way of life could emerge as a poor alternative to philosophy as rigorous and systematic reasoning. It could undermine philosophy’s unflinching commitment to the authority of reason — not tradition or religion — but autonomous human reason alone. John Cooper’s arguments against Hadot’s conception of philosophy are shaped by such concerns.
The starting point of this article is the following question: Does a competition exist between philosophy conceived as a theoretical domain of enquiry and philosophy as a way of life? If such a competition exists, what implications would this rivalry have? And if no such competition exists, how can we reconcile these seemingly contradictory conceptions?
In what follows, I first argue that Socratic philosophers believed in the transformational power of philosophy not merely because they shared certain assumptions about the motivational power of truth and reasoning, but because they were convinced that without some form of self-transformation, neither truth nor reasoning alone could meaningfully guide one’s life. The failure to realize this is embodied in the problem of akrasia — the tendency to act against one’s better judgement. Building on the arguments made in the first part, in the second part of this article, I examine Cooper’s position against the continuity of the tradition of philosophy as a way of life in the works of post-Renaissance philosophers. I will be using the terms “philosophy as a way of life,” “philosophy as spiritual exercises,” and the “Socratic tradition of philosophy” interchangeably. I argue that the lines between what is called “professional philosophy” and “philosophy as a way of life” are far more intertwined than is commonly assumed. Philosophy as a way of life has evolved through the work of numerous academic philosophers whose approaches to philosophy echo both the orientation and style of Socratic philosophers.
2. Three Fundamental Assumptions of Ancient Philosophy
Cooper argues that for ancient philosophers, living a philosophical way of life was fundamentally a life guided by reason alone. For ancient philosophers,
only reason, and what reason could discover and establish as the truth, could be an ultimately acceptable basis on which to live a life — and for them philosophy is nothing more, but also nothing less, than the art or discipline that develops and perfects the human capacity of reason. (p. 6)Footnote 2
These thinkers, Cooper argues, shared three fundamentally interconnected assumptions about the power of human reasoning and its capacity to arrive at truth. First, they believed in the liberating power of truth. That is, for ancient philosophers, our capacity for reasoning inherently possesses the power to move us to action (p. 12). In the process of our wholehearted reflective reasoning, we come to recognize the truth, and truth itself carries a normative force capable of guiding our actions.
The second assumption was a belief in the central authority of philosophy as the ultimate expression of the exercise of reason. Through the process of philosophizing, one arrives at a conception of the good life, which by definition, and in line with the first assumption, possesses sufficient motivating force to be translated into lived experience. In this view, to acquire knowledge of the good life is already to acquire the willingness and determination to orient one’s life accordingly. To philosophize, then, is to embody the pursuit of the good life.
The third assumption, closely related to the first, is a belief in “the psychologically decisive power of knowledge” (p. 13). According to this view, as expressed in Plato’s words, knowledge is “a powerful thing” that is “capable of ruling a person, and if someone were to know what is good and bad, then he would not be forced by anything to act otherwise than knowledge dictates” (Protagoras, 352c).Footnote 3
According to Cooper, modern and contemporary philosophers generally do not embrace the conception of philosophy as a way of life that characterized much of ancient philosophical practice. This divergence stems primarily from their rejection of the fundamental assumptions ancient philosophers held regarding the transformative power of reason and philosophy’s role in human life. In antiquity, philosophers assumed that rational reflection could ultimately lead to human flourishing.
In contrast, contemporary philosophical practice is marked by what Cooper calls a “psychological gap” between philosophical conceptions of the good life and individuals’ actual ways of living. Modern philosophers often develop ethical theories that bear little relation to how people actually make decisions or experience their lives. In other words, there is a disjunction between normative philosophical ideals and the lived psychology of everyday human agency. One can write an entire thesis on an ethical theory with little or no bearing on one’s moral life — that is, the way one carries oneself in daily life in the face of little or significant injuries, or one’s habitual dispositions that often guide overall attitudes toward oneself and others. This gap also points to a tectonic shift in the history of philosophy: the existential and therapeutic urgency that gave ancient philosophy its force has not been widely embraced since the Renaissance.
As a result, philosophy has become an increasingly technical and professionalized discourse. Within the institutional setting of the modern university, philosophical work is often highly specialized, abstract, and primarily written for other academic philosophers. Its language, methods, and aims are geared toward intellectual problem-solving and critical analysis, not toward reshaping the life of the philosopher or the reader. In this academic climate, the idea that philosophy might serve as a guide to the good life — an ideal central to Socratic, Stoic, Epicurean, and even early Christian thinkers — has largely faded from view. Philosophy has become detached from everyday life.
This suspicion about philosophy’s disconnect from life, however, is as old as philosophy itself and can be traced back to Gorgias’ trivializing remarks about its irrelevance to real life (Gorgias, 484c–3). But from the 19th century onward, this list of grievances against philosophy resurfaced with more intensity — in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and William James, and continuing into the 20th century with figures such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Cavell and Bernard Williams. Thoreau, for example, distinguishes between “professors of philosophy” and “philosophers” (Thoreau, 1854/Reference Thoreau and Shanley2004, p. 14).Footnote 4 In Williams’ words, philosophy today is generally considered a discipline that offers no straightforward answers or “no answers to any question that any grown-up person would worry about, or no answer which would be worth worrying about, even if the question were” (Williams, Reference Williams1996). Indeed, much of what professional philosophers produce is “unhelpful, boring, sterile. The awful fact is that some of it hardly tries to be anything else” (Williams, Reference Williams1996). As Cooper writes, for those who come to philosophy hoping it might somehow change their lives, “there seems to be no viable alternative except to study ancient philosophy — or rather, the ancient philosophies, in the plural — in the spirit in which they were written, that is, with a view to one’s own self-improvement” (p. 16).
To the extent that the connection between philosophy and one’s way of living is concerned, both Cooper and Hadot agree that the current model of academic philosophy, with its hyper-specialization and its theoretical orientation, does not claim to advance a way of life, unless, as Hadot observes, we call it “the form of life of a professor of philosophy” (Hadot, Reference Hadot, Davidson and Chase1995, p. 271).
Cooper, however, is not convinced that the defining feature of ancient philosophies was the practice of what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises.” These “nonrational practices,” he argues, could have had “at most a secondary and very derivative function in the philosophical life during the heyday of ancient philosophy” (p. 22). According to Cooper, it was only in late antiquity that the philosophical way of life began to adopt “features of a religious way of life” (p. 19). For the ancient philosophers, philosophy as a way of life was nothing but a “fundamental commitment to living a life on the basis of philosophical reason” (p. 19).
As I elaborate in the next section, Cooper’s position on the limited role of spiritual exercises is based on a narrow definition of what can count as such, whereas Hadot refers to both narrow and broad definitions of spiritual exercises in his work. The latter, more inclusive definition avoids the charge that these exercises were merely “nonrational practices.” According to this broad definition, the very act of theoria or contemplation can be considered a spiritual exercise. On various occasions, Hadot has sought to clarify what he means by the term. Overall, however, his characterizations are expansive enough to encompass a wide spectrum of practices and attitudes. We could argue that the common thread among them, beyond their “voluntary” and “personal” nature, is that their ultimate aim is “a transformation of the self” (Hadot, Reference Hadot and Chase2002, p. 176). On this view, devoting one’s life to asking philosophical questions, as Nehamas observes, is not in itself sufficient to constitute a philosophical life. The philosophical life, rather, revolves around two key questions: “What is it to live well? And how is it possible to do so?” (Nehamas, Reference Nehamas2015, p. 90). To approach philosophy from this vantage point is an exercise that moves beyond speculative reflections or reasoning alone; it is, in its broader sense, a spiritual exercise insofar as the ultimate goal of asking such questions is to live a life genuinely guided by their findings.
By focusing on Socrates and Aristotle in the next section, I argue that realizing the psychological gap between one’s conception of the good life and one’s actual way of life was a major feature of ancient philosophers’ moral psychology. And, in the final section, I demonstrate the various ways in which the tradition of philosophy as a way of life has survived the professionalization of philosophy, even within the work of those same “professional” philosophers for whom, according to Cooper, philosophy as a way of life is no longer a viable option.
3. The Limits of Reasoning in Guiding Our Actions
Commentators who take issue with Cooper’s characterization of philosophy as a way of life either flesh out the “limits” of philosophical reasoning alone in guiding our actions (Grimm & Cohoe, Reference Grimm and Cohoe2020) or highlight the variety of ways in which spiritual exercises can bridge the gap between our conceptions of the good life and our practical commitment to them in our everyday way of living (Hidalgo, Reference Hidalgo2020). As Meghan Sullivan argues, Cooper’s emphasis on the pivotal role of reason alone in shaping ancient philosophers’ conceptions of the good life is based on an exclusivist perception of philosophy. “Philosophical exclusivism” — the idea that philosophy should be the sole authority in guiding our actions — fails to appreciate the variety of ways in which individuals may be self-motivated without presupposing philosophy as the only “source of motivation” (Sullivan, Reference Sullivan2023, p. 601). People consider their lives to be fulfilling, unfulfilling, or somewhere in between not merely in proportion to their level of success or failure in discovering the right set of arguments for the good life. In Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the contrast between Anna’s and Levin’s perspectives on life is more intricate than a simple opposition of two arguments about its purpose. Different traditions of philosophy as spiritual exercises offer distinct programmes that include not only philosophical reasons but also, equally important, reasons for the change of heart. The ultimate aim of these programmes is not merely to provide philosophical reasons in defence of a way of life, but also to instill in the practitioner a set of propositional attitudes aligned with the requirements of that way of life. In Aristotle’s words, “argument and teaching are not powerful with all men, but the soul of the student must first have been cultivated by means of habits for noble joy and noble hatred, like earth which is to nourish the seed” (Aristotle, 350 B. C./Reference Ross2009, IX, 1179b24–6).Footnote 5 In other words, the idea or the hope is that arguments may “form” the soul of the student with the aid of these habits. On this view, one might say that such practices are the means through which arguments acquire their transformative power. As Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure argue, by “advocating regiments of spiritual exercises, these philosophers wanted to extend, not diminish, the hold of reasoned philosophical positions on our lives” (Sharpe & Ure, Reference Sharpe and Ure2021, p. 323). The truth of an argument for students is demonstrated to the extent that it has shaped and formed their lives. Or, as Socrates puts it in the Apology, the form of one’s life can be a “convincing witness” that one speaks “the truth” (31c3). It is, therefore, not the argument per se, but its habituation in the soul that constitutes what Cooper aptly calls the “inherent power” of truth in moving us to action (p. 12). Otherwise,
[I]f arguments were in themselves enough to make men good, they would justly […] have won very great rewards; but as things are, […] they are not able to encourage the many to nobility and goodness. For these do not by nature obey the sense of shame, but only fear, and do not abstain from bad acts because of their baseness but through fear of punishment; living by passion they pursue their own pleasures and the means to them, and avoid the opposite pains, and have not even a conception of what is noble and truly pleasant, since they have never tasted it. What argument would remould such people? It is hard, if not impossible, to remove by argument the traits that have long since been incorporated in the character. (Aristotle, 350 B.C./2009, X, 1179b5–17)
Thus, the “tincture of virtue” one hopes to instill in the interlocutor or the student, the remoulding of character, is made possible when they come to “taste” what it is like to live a “noble” life. It is not reasoning alone but a first-hand experience of nobility that becomes the deciding factor. This, in turn, is a matter of exercising or practising what “justice” or “temperament” would require. For “it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced” (Aristotle, 350 B. C./2009, II, 1105b9). In sharing an insight that would become a crucial point of reference in the works of Socratic philosophers — from Epicurus and Seneca to Thoreau and Wittgenstein — Aristotle also reminds us that “most people” do not commit themselves to such spiritual exercises, but
take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy. (Aristotle, 350 B. C./2009, II, 1105b12–17)
In the background of such acute awareness among ancient philosophers about the limits of reasoning alone, we may have good reasons to revisit the implied suggestion that post-Renaissance philosophers were first to discover that our philosophical enquiries about the good life have little to no impact on our actual manner of living. Cooper is certainly right to argue that, overall, there is “a psychological gap to be bridged” between modern and contemporary accounts of the good life or good action, and the actuality of living up to such accounts. As he puts it, “The question remains how to link these philosophical views to whatever it is in one’s psyche from which actual felt preferences and actual decision making derive” (p. 15). However, the suggestion that such disconnect between philosophy and the good life is a defining feature of post-Renaissance philosophy overlooks the fact that reflecting on how to bridge the gap between theory and action was already a central concern in the works of Socratic philosophers from the very beginning.
Psychagogia, as Plato famously argues in the Phaedrus, always stands in need of something more than argument alone; it requires a moving force that animates one’s words and inspires and directs the soul (Phaedrus, 271d). In fact, one might argue that the reason Socrates engages his interlocutors the way he does is precisely to motivate them to live up to the implications of what the enquiry brings to light. For if my initial self-confidence about my fundamental beliefs had turned out to be deficient, Socrates then hopes that I will be motivated to embrace a way of life in line with the new realization — that I could have known better, and that I can and will do better.
This “guidance of the soul” through persuasion, one might argue, serves as the connecting link among all Socratic philosophers. In the works of Stoics, such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, the pivotal role of psychagogia is evident in shaping the orientation and tone of their writings. The ultimate aim, one might say, is to move, educate, and transform the soul. For Seneca, philosophy is not an abstract exercise but a medicine for the soul (animi medicina). His writing is a blend of rational arguments with an appealing rhetoric and imagery that engage the reader on a personal level. This style of writing is, in fact, the defining feature of psychagogic writing. His emphasis that one must become an embodiment of wisdom is informed by the realization that moral authority arises not only from arguments but from the philosopher’s way of life. The transition from illusion to clarity, from bewilderment and despair to inner freedom (ataraxia) is not merely a matter of acquiring the right set of arguments, but of being moved in one’s soul by them. Philosophical arguments, then, should not only inform but also transform the interlocutor (see Hadot, Reference Hadot, Davidson and Chase1995, p. 91).
Likewise, in the works of Marcus Aurelius, the same psychagogic considerations are at play. His Meditations can be described as a form of self-directed psychagogia, as an attempt to reorient his own life toward reason and virtue. His constant reflections on mortality and the transience of life, one might argue, function as imaginative exercises designed to move his soul, similar to Plato’s description of effective rhetoric in the Phaedrus. Through these meditations, Marcus Aurelius engages in a form of philosophical training or spiritual exercise aimed at educating the “guiding part of the soul” or “hēgemonikon” (Hadot, Reference Hadot and Chase1998, p. 106). By scrutinizing his impulses and his judgements, he attempts to align his inner life with the ideals of Stoic wisdom. On this view, perhaps the whole idea behind practising philosophy may have been to “transform the soul” to the point that it becomes receptive to what Cooper calls the motivating “power of truth” (p. 14). Socrates’ goal in his definitional dialogues was not merely to bring his interlocutors to a state of aporia, only for them to disperse afterward in resentment and disillusionment. On the contrary, Socrates believed that by dismantling the interlocutors’ self-assured system of belief, his interlocutors might come to appreciate the urgency of examining their lives in a state of receptivity and vulnerability, after experiencing the shame of refutation and acknowledgement of ignorance at the end of the dialogue. Socratic elenchus (refutation) was not simply a method for exposing ignorance, but also a tool for initiating moral self-examination and transformation (see Brickhouse & Smith, Reference Brickhouse and Smith2010). In the midst or in the end of these involved conversations, interlocutors might realize that thinking about virtue is itself a virtuous act.
When Socrates reflects in the Meno and the Protagoras on the teachability of virtue as a form of knowledge (Meno, 87c), his reflections are guided by the awareness that such knowledge “is not something that can be imparted from one human being to another” (Protagoras, 319b4). In these dialogues, he wants to draw the attention of his interlocutors to a key challenge. On the one hand, if we suggest that virtue is a form of knowledge, then, in principle, it must be teachable. On the other hand, such knowledge isn’t teachable in a conventional manner as it is not simply transferable from one person to the next. Acquiring such knowledge, therefore, requires a special kind of education that goes beyond instructions alone. He wanted to highlight the fact that a genuine appreciation of the knowledge of virtue is a profoundly personal process.Footnote 6 For Socrates, philosophy functions as a form of moral therapy, “a form of resistance” against the authority of unexamined opinions — that is, against conformity. In this self-reliant yet interdependent excursion of the life of the mind, Socrates believed that one acquires a kind of knowledge that inevitably leads to a transformation in one’s way of life.
As a result of this conversion, one could overcome a sense of incongruity between one’s system of value judgements and the actual form and orientation of one’s life. In the process of knowing and understanding justice, one hopes to live justly. The goal is to cultivate moral character despite the realization that there is a “psychological gap” between one’s conception of the good life and one’s actual way of life. In Aristotle’s words, “we are enquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our enquiry would have been of no use” (Aristotle, 350 B. C./2009, II, 103b30). Put differently, the ancient philosophers’ focus on the motivating power of truth was not based on a simplistic understanding of the human psyche. It was informed by an acute realization that only by consistently “working on the self” — or askesis — could one hope to transform one’s life.
The reason Socrates says in the Apology that the “greatest good for a man” is to enquire about virtue every day is not to idealize the life of armchair contemplation, but to emphasize that we can arrive at a way of life “worth living” only through such engaged practices and examinations (Apology, 38). He knew that his elenctic method of enquiry required “a radical break […] with the habits and conventions of everyday life” (Hadot, Reference Hadot and Chase2002, p. 36). As such, for Socrates, philosophy is not the sum total of its arguments. There is a life that breathes fire into all these arguments. This realization can arguably be considered the connecting link in Socratic tradition of philosophy: philosophers who, despite their differences, are united by the kinds of questions they ask, their psychagogic style, and their deep commitment to the idea that the ultimate task of philosophy is “care of the soul.”
4. Philosophy as a Way of Life Beyond Antiquity
In the previous section, I discussed the limitations of reason alone as a motivating force, and the reasons that Socratic philosophers believed that arguments by themselves were insufficient to guide the soul. In this final section, I turn to Cooper’s claim that given the professionalization of philosophy as an academic discipline, philosophy as a way of life is no longer a viable option. While there are indeed increasing numbers of commentators who defend Hadot’s continuity thesis and advance philosophy as a way of life as a viable “metaphilosophical option” for today (Sellars, Reference Sellars2017, p. 41; see also Faustino, Reference Faustino2020; Sharpe & Ure, Reference Sharpe and Ure2021; Sullivan, Reference Sullivan2023), I argue that the tradition has endured within the very framework of professionalized philosophy.
There exists a substantial list of “professional” philosophers whose works have been informed and inspired by the tradition of philosophy as a way of life. While Cooper is correct in his assessment that post-Renaissance philosophy exhibits a disconnect between philosophers’ conceptions of the good life and their actual ways of living, there also persists a resilience among certain modern and contemporary philosophers who, like their ancient predecessors, remain concerned, in their own complex and unique ways, with the care of the soul. Cooper’s claim that anyone seeking philosophical guidance to the good life must turn exclusively to the ancients thus rests on a narrow conception of what philosophy as a way of life is and what it can continue to bring about.
The Socratic tradition of philosophy has survived the professionalization of the discipline in the works and lives of philosophers who are invested in reconnecting philosophy to life. This survival has taken various forms. To mention but a few examples: a return to the ordinary (Stanley Cavell); a renewed focus on the moral dimensions of literature (Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum); a retreat to the ancient genre of hypomnemata (Ludwig Wittgenstein); a fresh reinvestment on the interlink between moral persuasion and literary excellence (Ralph Waldo Emerson); and the example of solitary excursions into nature as a spiritual exercise (Henry Thoreau). It also includes persistent challenges to dominant moral theories in favour of more psychologically realistic and ethically pluralistic visions of human life (Bernard Williams), as well as efforts to restore ethics through tradition and virtue (Alasdair McIntyre, Thaddeus MetzFootnote 7 ). With few exceptions, nearly all of these philosophers have been “professional” philosophers, yet they have each invested in ways of transforming our way of seeing so as to bring about a change in our way of life, and in doing so, have sought to reconnect philosophy to life. Each has endeavoured to ground their abstractions in the realities of lived experience.
In this regard, it would be problematic to assume that philosophy as a way of life is just practical philosophy, narrowly focused on offering rules of life or encapsulated words of wisdom to those who turn to it for guidance. For it fails to recognize the variety of ways in which philosophy has evolved to move beyond abstraction and, in Williams’ words, to return, as philosophers, to the old values of “truthfulness” and “clarity” (Williams, Reference Williams1996). Ultimately, if the goal of philosophy as a way of life is cultivation of a virtuous character, then a scholarly life itself could be considered a philosophical way of life, as one cultivates the capacity to appreciate what clarity of vision and truthfulness really mean.
5. Conclusion
I asked earlier if there is a competition between philosophy conceived as a theoretical domain of enquiry and philosophy understood as a way of life. In my response, I argued for an inclusive account of philosophy as a way of life — one that is mindful of its evolving nature and of the multifaceted ways it manifests care of the soul, from Socrates’ definitional dialogues to contemporary philosophers who, in Cavell’s words, are as concerned with “what used to be called the state of one’s soul” (Cavell, Reference Cavell1990, p. 2) as their ancient counterparts. For to be concerned with the state of one’s soul, fundamentally, is to be concerned with one’s way of seeing and being in the world. The above-mentioned philosophers, to borrow a term from Wittgenstein, aim at bringing about “precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’” (Wittgenstein, 1953/Reference Wittgenstein, Anscombe, Hacker and Schulte2009, § 122). With an engaging style of writing, fresh ways of approaching philosophical problems and their implications, and a composed sense of urgency, they show the “connecting links” between life and philosophy: life as in our day-to-day lived experience, life as in the eyes of Plato’s interlocutor upon returning to the cave after seeing the sun (Republic, VII, 516e1). In short, life is viewed here as the endless varieties of human endeavour that capture and record what Thomas Nagel describes as the tremendousness of existence (Nagel, Reference Nagel2010, p. 34). A philosophy that is receptive to such torrents of discovery and awe would, by definition, be a philosophy as a way of life. Such a philosophy, as John Cottingham puts it, is marked by the awareness that one’s search for the good life should “draw on the full range of resources available to the human mind, including those that depend on literary, artistic, poetic, imaginative, aesthetic, and emotional modes of awareness” (Cottingham, Reference Cottingham2020, p. X). Why, then, is it important to remain receptive and open to our diverse modes of awareness? There are many ways to answer this question, but perhaps the most compelling response comes from Thoreau: we must stay open to the full range of human experience, for few realizations are more haunting than the discovery that we had failed to live — that we had, in his words, pursued “what was not life” (Thoreau, 1854/Reference Thoreau and Shanley2004, p. 90). Socrates, famously, calls it the “unexamined life.”
In the final analysis, whether one advances the consolations of philosophy as a way of life or upholds the assurances of professional philosophy as rigorous argumentation, there remains a question we all seem to ask in moments of vulnerability: How shall one live? In his philosophical autobiography, R. M. Hare recounts a “strange dream, or half-waking vision” he had “not long ago”:
I found myself at the top of a mountain in the mist, feeling very pleased with myself, not just for having climbed the mountain, but for having achieved my life’s ambition, to find a way of answering moral questions rationally. But as I was preening myself on this achievement, the mist began to clear, and I saw that I was surrounded on the mountain top by the graves of all those other philosophers, great and small, who had had the same ambition, and thought they had achieved it. And I have come to see, reflecting on my dream, that, ever since, the hard-working philosophical worms have been nibbling away at their systems and showing that the achievement was an illusion. (Hare, Reference Hare2002, p. 269)
Could philosophy as a way of life achieve what Hare had thought he had achieved in his dream? Perhaps, one might say, the ambitions of Socratic philosophers are slightly different as they are of the conviction that a “rational” answer to our “moral questions” is not enough. One must become a living embodiment of the answer one gives to such questions. On this view, even if the eventual acquiescence or despair may appear similar, the reasons will be different. For, as Cavell — and before him Emerson in 1842 — has shown us, even for a moral perfectionist, philosophy may become “the perplexed capacity to mourn the passing of the world” (Cavell, Reference Cavell and Hodge2003, p. 115).
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge in gratitude the valuable insights and suggestions I received from anonymous reviewers of my work.
Competing interests
Author declares none.
