In a comment on my last post, my friend Kurt Keefner wonders whether Socrates really should be considered a paradigm of the philosopher, since he never wrote a word - and philosophic arguments can't be properly weighed unless they're written down. It just so happens that this very topic was of great concern to Socrates and his student Plato - there's a reason why Plato wrote dialogues as representations of the true path to philosophical insight. In an essay on the philosopher as spiritual guide, Ilsetraut Hadot (wife of Pierre Hadot and a formidable scholar in her own right) just happens to have provided a compelling consideration of this matter, which I've been wanting to comment on for the last few months:
[W]hat is desired is not knowledge, but rather knowledge as habitus [i.e., ἕξις or a settled trait - PSA], the transformation of the individual through knowledge. The heterodox Stoic Ariston, who, in the statement cited here, agrees with all ancient philosophers except the Skeptics, states: "Philosophy is divided into knowledge and state of mind. For one who has learned and understood what he should do and avoid is not a wise man until his mind is metamorphosed into the shape of that which he has learned." (Ariston in Seneca Epistulae Morales 94.48) First of all, the elements of knowledge must be appropriated, which is a purely intellectual process. Then, knowledge must be impressed upon the mind in such a way that it is always at hand and that it cannot be limited or lost on account of any external circumstances - in other words, in such a way that it becomes one with the individual and a constituent part of the person's being. This second stage can be attained only through practice and habituation with the incorporation of one's emotional components. Let us take as an example the dogma "Death is not an evil," which was professed by all the ancient schools of philosophy. The philosopher-spiritual guide knows that it is not sufficient to know this and to be familiar with and to have grasped intellectually the philosophical proofs that are the foundation for this statement; one must be convinced to such a degree that one's whole inner nature is penetrated by it.
For the ancient philosophers, the goal was to attain a state of mind in which one's entire soul is suffused with wisdom. For instance, Aristotle distinguished between action κατὰ λόγον or "directed by / in accord with reason" and action μετὰ λόγου or "suffused with reason"; he also distinguished between knowledge or understanding that is a mere possession and knowledge or understanding that is actively kept in awareness and put into practice (he uses the latter distinction in his account of self-indulgence, which occurs when someone knows the right thing to do but doesn't act on that knowledge). Similarly, I've previously drawn attention to Plato's dialogue Laches, wherein the Athenian general Nikias observes that Socrates always pressed his interlocutors to "give an account" (λόγος) of how they lived. All of this is consistent with Pierre Hadot's reconstruction of philosophy as a way of life, since on that conception what's primary is how you live, whereas abstract speculation is decidedly secondary. Indeed, according to the ancients people like Cato and even Marcus Aurelius were philosophers even if they didn't generate any novel theories (do recall that the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius were merely notes to himself, never meant for publication). The point is not to know things intellectually, but to know them in your bones.
It is not only the ancients who have had such insights; just recently I noted an aphorism formulated by José Ortega y Gasset: "The easiest thing to do about anything is to write a book about it. The hard thing is to live it." What philosophy as a way of life proposes is that "living it" can itself be a philosophical act, since wisdom and sagacity are not static formulae but active practices of understanding how to live in the world with all your own particularity.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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