Socratic Ironies Reading Hadot Reading Kierkegaard

SOPHIA (2016) 55:409435
DOI 10.1007/s11841-016-0512-6
Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

Matthew Sharpe 1
Published online: 14 March 2016

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract This paper examines the seemingly unlikely rapport between the Christian
existentialist, radically Protestant thinker, Sren 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 Kierkegaards 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 Kierkegaards rapport with Hadot, then (and in contrast to Gregor, who has
also treated the two figures) we first of all consider Hadots treatment of the enigmatic
old wise man who remains central to Kierkegaards entire authorship. (Part 1)
However, to highlight Hadots Socratic proximity to Kierkegaard (in contrast to
Irina), we set up Hadots Socrates against the contrasting portrait readers can find in
John M. Coopers recent work on Socrates and philosophy as a way of life. Part II of
the essay turns back from Hadots and Kierkegaards Socrates towards Hadots own
work, and arguesagain moving beyond both Gregor and Irinas works on Hadot and
Kierkegaardthat the shape of Hadots authorship, including his remarkably classical
style, can be understood by way of Kierkegaards 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
Hadots 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.
* Matthew Sharpe
msharpe@deakin.edu.au
Arts-Education, Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, VIC 3217, Australia
410
M. Sharpe
Keywords Kierkegaard . Hadot . Philosophy . Christianity . Socrates . Irony
I am well aware that if anyone nowadays were to live as a Greek philosopher, that
is, would existentially express what he would have to call his life-view, be
existentially absorbed in it, he would be regarded as a lunatic. Be that as it may
Johannes Climacus
The deep lines of influence leading back from many strands of 20th century
European philosophy to Sren Kierkegaards remarkable authorship are by now wellestablished. 1 The challenging of the opposition between philosophy and literature or
aesthetic modes of philosophical writing; the interest in angst as an existentially
revelatory subjective mood, opening up a surfeit of possibility over actuality; the deepset hostility to modern public culture and the present age, denounced as ethically
complacent and marooned in the idle chatter and curiosities of a gluttonously
aestheticised life world; the desire to challenge Hegelian thought and upset the notion
of a speculative system capable of rationally encompassing all of the real; the
denunciation of philosophical universalisms as always potentially abstract or blind to
the particularities of existence; even, in more recent returns to theology, the
valorisation of a strongly fideist conceptions of the religious which point up singular,
exceptional experiences as the deepest repository, or origin, of meaning each of
these predominant motifs within academic European philosophy can look back to the
mercurial Danish thinker and his cast of pseudonyms.
One chapter which, however, has only begun to be written in the history of
Kierkegaards shaping influence on subsequent European thought concerns the figure
of the French thinker, Pierre Hadot (19222010). In several senses, it is unsurprising
that there have so far been only two, comparatively recent articles on this topic, The
Text as Mirror: Kierkegaard and Hadot on Transformative Reading by Brian Gregor
(2011) and Philosophy as a Way of Life: Hadot and Kierkegaards Socrates, by
Nicolae Irina.2 Hadot in many ways stands out from his better known French contemporaries of the great generations of existentialist, post-structuralist, and now post-poststructuralist theory, in whose thinking Kierkegaards paternity can be recognised and
whose work has generated a greater wealth of commentary. While Hadot was deeply
moved by elements of Heideggers thought as a young man (he even considered
1
Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heideggers Being and Time (University of California Press, 1993) shows
the extent of Heideggers 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 Kierkegaards wider influence on European thinkers last century, see Jon Stewart ed.,
Kierkegaard Research Volume 11, Tome I: Kierkegaards Influence on Philosophy: German and Scandinavian
Philosophy and Volume 11, Tome II: Kierkegaards 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, 6584; Nicolae Irina, Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a
Way of Life: Hadot and Kierkegaards Socrates, in Volume 11, Tome II: Kierkegaards Influence on
Philosophy: Francophone Philosophy (London: Ashgate, 2012), 157171.
411
writing his doctorate on Heidegger and Rilke 3), he never followed anything like the
post-Heideggerian turn that came to so decisively shape the French philosophers from
the 1960s to today. Hegel, far from being the eminent representative of a philosophical
tradition (and proponent of a fearsome dialectic) which must be overcome, scarcely
appears in Hadots work. While Hadots contemporaries in Paris were deconstructing a
Western logocentrism allegedly beginning in Greek thought and bequeathing us a
technologized, totalising modern age, Hadot was translating classical texts from the
original languages, producing annotated editions of patristic, neoplatonic and Stoic
texts and writing essays on the transition in Western culture from pagan religion and
philosophy to Christendom.4 While Levinas, to be followed by Derrida, Lyotard and
others, was aiming to unearth the legacy of Jewish ethical experience from its alleged
suppression beneath the Greek philosophical heritage, Hadot was striving to open up a
very newor trying to relocate the very oldsense of this Greek philosophical
heritage, buried (as he came to suppose) beneath two millennia of scholastic and
academic sedimentations.5
Hadots best known studies, Exercises Spirituels et Philosophie Antique (in amended
translation, Philosophy as a Way of Life) and Quest-ce que cest la Philosophie
Antique? (in translation, What is Ancient Philosophy?), stand out markedly from nearly
all influential French philosophical writing of the last 50 years. Hadots prose is
measured or classical, characterised by a quiet avoidance of technical jargon, and a
generous openness to non-specialists. 6 Hadots substantive concerns with trying to
understand classical pagan philosophical texts and figures on their own terms are hardly
la mode in the present period characterised by widespread returns to religion or
theologyby which the Jewish and Christian traditions are overwhelmingly
intendedin European post-structuralist thought. Nor do these Hadotian preoccupations scream out as likely legatees to Sren Kierkegaards work: an oeuvre which
Kierkegaard himself characterised as deeply Christian from beginning to end, aiming to
reanimate true faith in an age whose professed Christendom concealed deep-set
religious complacency.7
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: Trait
28; Hadot, Plotin: Trait 50; Hadot, Plotin: Trait 9; Hadot, tudes de Patristique et DHistoire 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 Sren 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 Bauthorship, regarded as a
totality, is religious from first to last.^ In The Point of View Kierkegaard puts it this way: Bthe 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 Kierkegaards 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).
412
M. Sharpe
Yet, I will argue in what follows that things are not as simple here as they appear,
and that Gregor (albeit focusing on the act of reading8) and Irina (focusing on the
figure of Socrates) are right to argue that Hadot owes a good deal to Kierkegaard, as
both a reader of Socrates and Greek philosophy and a philosophical author of his
own.9 Hadots famous claim, based in his early work as a philologist, is that ancient
philosophy was conceived, written and practiced in the ancient world as a bios,
way of life or manire de vivre.10 However broadly uncontroversial such a thesis
might sound to some audiences, it has nevertheless not garnered universal support
amongst classicists and scholars working on classical Greek and Roman philosophy. More widely, it runs against the grain of many deep-set contemporary conceptions of what it is to do philosophy spanning the European and analytic divide
today.
Classical philosophers of an analytic bent have expressed two cognate concerns
about Hadots work, both of which situate him as a decidedly continental classicist,
closer to the traditions of thought so indebted to Kierkegaard mentioned above than we
might imagine. The first concerns Hadots key claims that to be a philosopher in the
ancient world was to submit oneself to a series of subjective practices including forms
of meditation, contemplation, memorisation and physical exercises. 11 Hadot called
these practices exercises spirituels, arguing that they aimed at transforming students
ways of seeing and being in the world, as well as equipping them with new theoretical
opinions.12 But, Hadots critics have insisted, philosophy is and always must have been
a business of rigorous argument and inquiry alone, even when it seems impossible to
deny that the Stoics, Epicureans and sceptics thought its pursuit was supposed to have
existential relevance outside of the classroom or conference hall. 13 Secondly, Hadot
insists that to be a philosopher in the ancient sense involved a real existential commitment which Hadot occasionally describes as a form of conversion (epistroph,
metanoia) comparable to, although decisively different from, forms of religious conversion. 14 Again, analytically trained classicist John M. Cooper and others have
expressed discomfort that Hadots image of ancient philosophy, in this way, places it
too close to being a religious phenomenon15: prompting Cooper to contend that Hadots
historical interest in the period of the decline of antique philosophy and ascent of
Gregor, BText as Mirror^, 7482 concern Hadots views on reading texts specifically, after his exegesis of
Hadots general position on philosophy as a way of life, amongst the ancients.
9
Gregor, BText as Mirror^, 6284.
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, 81125.
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 Platos 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, BConversion^ in Exercises Spirituels et Philosophie Antique Prface par Arnold Davidson
(Paris: ditions Albin Michel, 2002b), 223238.
15
Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom, 2022
8
413
Christianity illegitimately coloured his ideas about philosophia per se.16 We do not mean
to assess the validity of Coopers critique of Hadot here. It is enough that it preliminarily
marks out the kinds of ways that Hadots idea of philosophy as a way of life is not as
distant from Kierkegaards existentialist heritage as we might initially think, from the
pen of someone who disapproves of this proximity.
When we turn to what is arguably Hadots magnum opus, Exercises Spirituels et
Philosophie Antique, certainly, we find that Sren Kierkegaard is one of just two
modern authors, alongside Friedrich Nietzsche, who is cited sufficiently often to justify
his own dedicated Index of Citations at books end.17 In what follows, I want then to
follow the clue of these citations to investigate the seemingly unlikely or ironic
proximities between Pierre Hadot, the mild-mannered academic classicist and admirer
of Greek philosophy, with Sren Kierkegaard, the passionate Danish existentialist,
philosopher, theologian and litterateur. With but beyond Gregor, I will argue most
broadly that Hadot and Kierkegaard are united by their deep commitment that philosophy or inquiry matters existentially, and that this shaped how Hadot approached not
simply readingas, potentially, a spiritual exercise, in the ways Gregor detailsbut
also his own writing, which Hadot explicitly conceives as his own manner of what
Kierkegaard called indirect communication.18
Following Hadots citations of Kierkegaard in Exercises Spirituels et
Philosophie Antique, as Nicolae Irina has done, directs us specifically to a single
essay in the collection: Hadots loge to the Figure of Socrates. 19 In order to
understand Hadots engagement with Kierkegaards authorship and interpretation of
Socrates, then, we will first of all (in Part I) consider Hadots treatment of this
enigmatic old wise man so central to Kierkegaards authorship from The
Concept of Irony forwards. 20 This part builds on work in Irinas excellent Pierre
Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Hadot and Kierkegaards Socrates. 21
Nevertheless, in order to show how Hadots reading of Socrates not only draws
upon, but also remains independent from, that of Kierkegaard, this Part does two
16
Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom, 2122.

See Nicolae Irina, Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Hadot and Kierkegaards Socrates, in
Volume 11, Tome II: Kierkegaards Influence on Philosophy: Francophone Philosophy, pp. 1678. 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, 121122.
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: WileyBlackwell, 1996), 147178.
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, Kierkegaards Socratic Task
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2006); also Benjamin Daise, Kierkegaards Socratic Art (Macon, GA:
Mercer University Press 1999), esp. 135; Daniel Watts Subjective Thinking: Kierkegaard on Hegels
Socrates, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 61: 2010, 2344; and Paul Muench, ;Socratic
Irony, Platos Apology, and Kierkegaards On the Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard Studies, edited on behalf
of the Sren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels Jrgen Cappelrn 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, 129149; esp. 130 where Furtak notes the proximity between Kierkegaards sense of
ancient versus modern philosophy as a bios and Pierre Hadots.
21
Nicolae Irina, Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Hadot and Kierkegaards Socrates, in Volume 11,
Tome II: Kierkegaards Influence on Philosophy: Francophone Philosophy, pp. 157171.
17
414
M. Sharpe
things differently from Irinas work. First, I set up Hadots Socrates in an illustrative, critical contrast with leading analytic classicist John M. Coopers reading of
Socrates, which depicts him as anironic and anerotic in ways Hadot, no less than
Kierkegaard, stridently disputes. Second, though, I stress those features of Hadots
Socrates, reflecting other sources (notably Nietzsche 22) and insights which bring
Hadot, independently, into proximity with Kierkegaard, without rendering his
reading of Socrates elenctic means or philosophical ends derivatively
Kierkegaardian. 2 3 Part 2 of the essay turns back from Hadots and
Kierkegaards Socrates towards Hadots own work, examining Hadots conception
of his own authorship and the nature of his practice of indirect communication, as
he himself describes it, again with reference to the Danish thinker. Our concluding
comments underscore the contrasts of his conception of pagan philosophy as a way
of life from Kierkegaards form of Christian existentialism.
The Figures of Socrates in Hadot, in Kierkegaard and in Cooper

To frame Pierre Hadots proximities, then avowed debts, to Kierkegaard when it comes
to the mediating figure of Socrates, it is worthwhile to contrast Hadots essay The
Figure of Socrates with a recent treatment of the same subject by the leading analytic
scholar of classical philosophy, John M. Cooper.
Coopers (2012) Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy is
(amongst other things) a direct response to Hadot, whose work on philosophy as a way
of life going back to the 1960s, Cooper notes, has contributed most to our heightened
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. 1567. 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?, 227228, 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 Hadots distance from
being a commentator, with aspirations to thoroughness, on Kierkegaards 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, Platos
Apology, and Kierkegaards On the Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard Studies, 78, 8384. Hegels or any other
robust philosophy of history is not a central concern of Hadots, here or elsewhere. Hegels 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 ones
individual destiny and the concerns of the state (156). The citation is taken from loc cit., 84. For
Kierkegaards debts to Hegel on the figure of Socrates, see Daniel Watts Subjective Thinking: Kierkegaard
on Hegels Socrates, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 61: 2010, esp. 2436. While Hadot argues
that Socratic irony was Kierkegaards mask, at 150, his account of Socratic irony itself at 1513 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 Kierkegaards earlier account
of the ironists infinite or absolute negativity, on which see Muench, Socratic Irony, 95100.
22
415
awareness of this aspect of ancient philosophy. 24 But, Coopers 2012 response to

Hadot looks back to a 2007 essay on Socrates and Philosophy as a Way of Life, where
Hadot is already targeted for criticism.25 For Cooper, Hadot is right that, in the ancient
world, philosophers lived their philosophyand not just in that they spent their
working hours engaged in philosophical pursuits being a philosopher, for many
ancient philosophers, meant living ones whole life a certain way philosophicallyand
encouraging others to live that way, too. 26 The essay then goes on to detail what
Cooper takes to be the features of Socrates way of living philosophically, whichafter
sidelining Pythagoreanism as a religious phenomenon 27Cooper takes to have
inaugurated this existential sense of philosophising.
The different reported features of Socrates persona that Cooper omits are as
significant for us as what Coopers depiction of Socrates includes. For Cooper,
Socratic philosophising involves the pursuit of a body of theoretical wisdom
concerning the practical virtuescourage, moderation, justice, etc.that we know
Socrates was centrally concerned with, from Xenophon and Plato. 28 This pursuit is
animated by the sense, famously expressed by Socrates in Platos Apology, that ones
soul and its condition, whether good or bad, is the most important thing for anyone.
(Apo. 30b)29 For Coopers Socrates, though, the good condition of the soul is entirely a
matter of ones ability, unfalteringly and with an inexhaustible thoroughness, to
understand, explain, and defend by philosophical argument and analysis ones own
values and commitments 30 This is because of Socrates intellectualist view,
expressed in the Protagoras and Meno, that human beings only act on the basis of
their opinions, which may be theoretically refined, concerning what is best. 31 The
Socratic cure follows from the intellectualist diagnosis and renders the Socratic bios
uncannily close to what we recognise today as analytic philosophising:
[Socrates] would emphasize in his questions (and ancillary comments) logical
relations of implication, inconsistency, and the like, in trying to work out between
himself and the respondent what the respondent actually thought as someone
with opinions about what the truth was on the subjects under exploration32
Cooper has little to say concerning Socrates eironeia, one feature which is of course
absolutely central to Kierkegaards Socrates and also, as we will see, to Hadots.
What Cooper does say renders Socratic irony as anenigmatic as is his account of the
elenchus. For Coopers Socrates, wisdom would be the possession of a complete,
unchallengeable set of opinions concerning the soul and its virtues, embodying perfection of the ability to understand and argue well about valuesthe condition in which
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, 810, 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
31
32
416
M. Sharpe
that ability is made absolutely secure and permanent.33 However, Coopers Socrates
realises, truly and without any irony, that he does not have such a complete objective
Sophia. This for Cooper is what makes Socrates inquiry a continuing zetetic vocation
or way of life. Otherwise, we note, there is nothing in Coopers account that suggests
Socrates philosophising would not simply stop, should a complete rationally examined system of values be provided him.34 The charge of eironeia as Cooper sees it is a
misrecognition that comes from others such as Thrasymachus or the young men who
love to see Socrates unmask their superiors pretensions mentioned in the Apology.35 As
for the famous Socratic maieutics and his claim in the Theaetetus that he is a kind of
philosophical midwife, sent to deliver others of their ideas, Cooper recommends that
we should leave it aside as a late-born, possibly Platonic importation: Plato reinforces
this when he has Socrates respond that up to the time of the Theaetetus conversation (at
the very end of his life) no one has had any idea that midwifery was his trade (Plato,
Thea., 149a510).36 We note finally that Cooper has nothing at all to say concerning
the rich testimony we get concerning Socrates words and actions from Alcibiades, and
from Plato, in the Symposium.
Hadots Figure of Socrates illustrates strikingly the distance of his way of thinking
and conception of ancient philosophia from Coopers analytic approach and leads us
directly to his engagement with Kierkegaard. Where Cooper omits the Symposium
completely, Hadots account of Socrates centres on this beautiful, erotic, Platonic
dialogue. 37 Where Coopers account hardly engages at all with other historical commentatorsand mentions no contemporary commentator outside the modern analytic
traditionHadot builds his essay around prolonged engagements with Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche, those two great Socratics. 38 He adds important references to Hamann,
Goethe, Hlderlin, Apelt, Gaiser, Friedlander and others. Where Cooper treats Socratic
irony with the grave scepticism we have seen, and omits or dismisses nearly all the
famous metaphors the tradition gives us of Socrates activities, the three parts of
Hadots Figure of Socrates are given over to the images of Socrates as Silenus,
Socrates as Eros and Socrates as Dionysus and the way these images have captivated
and provoked authors from Plato and Xenophon throughout the history of Western
ideas.39 Finally and most decisively, whereas Coopers account simply fails to convey
any of that gripping sense of what several Platonic characters call Socrates sheer atopia
as a singular personality or figure, 40 this dimension of Socrates as ambiguous,
troubling and strangely disconcerting occupies Hadot from beginning to end.41
One poetic sense of the Symposium, as Hadot sees it, is to position Socrates as a
new Eros, mediator between things human and divine, penia and poros. 42 Yet,
Hadot begins by noting, any sense we might have that this mediator would be a
33

35
36
37
On the centrality in Kierkegaards Concept of Irony of the Platonic Apology, as against the Symposium, see
Muench, Socratic Irony, Platos Apology, and Kierkegaards On the Concept of Irony, 8081.
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
34
417
harmonious figure, combining divine and human features in delicate nuances is

sorely deceived.43 It is worth noting that Socrates is the first great Hellene who was
ugly, Nietzsche had observed. 44 Alcibiades in the Symposium made this ugliness,
and the sheer banality of Socrates surface vocabulary and concerns, one basis for
his governing comparison of Socrates to the Sileni: purely natural beings [who]
stood for the pure negation of culture and civilization, for grotesque buffoonery, and
the license of the instincts. 45 Then again, Hadot notes, Socrates was repeatedly
charged by his interlocutors as being not simply ugly, but a deceiver or wearer of
masks: playing the part of a simpleton and child, as Alcibiades again declaims,
wrapped around himself, like a carved Silenus. 46 Such deception or mask-wearing, Hadot contends, was the true basis for Socratic irony: a phenomenon which for
him, contra Cooper, is very real, at the heart of what the elenchus involved and
underlies Socrates enduring cultural fascination.47 The man who wrote nothing and
seemed to conceal his wisdom from those around him, Socrates nevertheless
successfully communicated the idea to others that they might deploy him as their
mask. And, in these Sokratikoi logoi, Socrates became a prosopon, an interlocutor
or character and hence, if we recall the meaning of prosopon in the ancient theatre, a
mask.48
This theatrical dimension of Socrates as a wearer of masks, completely absent in
Cooper, was of course central both to Kierkegaards understanding of Socrates and
to the Danes own authorship. 49 Certainly, Hadot alike with Kierkegaard sees a
certain practice of mask-wearing as a central component of the Socratic elenchus, as
we have it via Platos testimony in particular. The reason is that, in another
dimension of Socratic activity Cooper elides, 50 this elenchusbeyond being an
exercise in semantic analysiswas an interpersonal drama in which peoples living
psychologies were engaged, including all the effects of doubt, curiosity, love and
hate, and all the vicissitudes of eros, identification, recognition and projection. In
almost all Platos Socratic dialogues, Hadot observes, there comes a moment of
crisis, almost like the peripeteia Aristotle places at the heart of classical drama. At
this point, Hadot commentsdrawing here on the work of Konrad Gaiserthe
interlocutors are overcome by discouragement. They no longer have confidence in
the possibility of continuing the discussion, and it seems as though the dialogue is
about to be broken off.51 This is the famous sting Socrates delivers, compared by
Meno to that of a stingray, and evoking the Apologys depiction of Socrates as a
proverbial gadfly. 52 At this moment, Hadot continuesthink of when Euthyphro,
43

45
46
47
Cf. Irina, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 1612.
48
49
Hadot, Figure of Socrates, 150151. 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
52
Plato, Apology, 30e-31a; Plato, Meno, 80a.
44
418
M. Sharpe
for one, has nearly had enough concerning what and why the gods love53Socrates
will change gear and change place,54 going from analyst and interrogator to stand-in
and prosopon for the interrogated:
he takes the others doubt, uneasiness, and discouragement upon himself. He
assumes all the risks of the dialectical adventure, and carries out a complete
switching of roles. If the enterprise fails, it will henceforth be his responsibility. In
this way, he shows his interlocutors a projection of their own selves. They can
now transfer their personal uneasiness onto Socrates, and regain confidence in
dialectical research and in the logos itself 55
It is specifically in the context of trying to understand why, from Plato onwards,
other authors have felt the need to use the figure of Socrates, this Silenic mask-wearer
himself, as their own mask for conveying their philosophies that Hadot first directly
introduces Sren Kierkegaard. It is fair to say, as we will see, that Kierkegaard figures
throughout Hadots Figure of Socrates first as his own exemplar of a modern
Socratism, and secondly as a means or source to cast light on the Athenian originals
means and his ends.56
First of all, Hadot contends, the lure of writing or teaching through the figure of
Socrates is tied to the sense a thinker has that their thought is profoundly challenging to existing cultural norms and ways of thinking. Whenever thinkers have
been aware ofand frightened bythe radical renewal of which they were the
bearers, they too have used a mask to confront their contemporaries, Hadot writes:
often the mask has been Socrates himself. 57 His first example is Hamannalso
important for Kierkegaardwho used Socrates (for the 19th century, as Hadot
notes, the rationalist par excellence) as a means of teaching Christianity. But, what
was in Hamann a passing device, so Hadot opines, became a fundamental, existential attitude for Kierkegaard. 58 We are, Hadot claims, to understand the entire
so-remarkable, so-peculiar shape of Kierkegaards authorshipdivided between
the pseudonymous works and the upbuilding discourses, with the former moving
from more aesthetic creations headed by Either/Or towards works concerning the
religious, such as Fear and Tremblingas a grand exercise in Socratic maskwearing.59
Kierkegaard for Hadot realised the profound pedagogical necessity behind Socrates
peculiar manner of self-presentationand in particular, at the heart of his irony, what
53
Plato, Euthyphro, 11b-12a

Irina, Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life, 160161 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
56
Respectively, at Hadot, Figure of Socrates, pp. 150152, then pp. 1545 (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
59
Hadot Figure of Socrates, 1501; cf. Muench, Kierkegaards Socratic Task, 2941; Irina, Philosophy as
a Way of Life, 162; Daise, Kierkegaards Socratic Art, especially Chapter 1, Indirect Communication.
54
419
Hadot calls Socrates pretending to concede that ones interlocutor is right and to adopt
the point of view of ones adversary.60 This is that, when the matters we are discussing
are things that matter existentially to our interlocutors, and when they are convinced
that their opinions on these subjects are justified and in order, we cannot expect them to
respond favourably by directly stating, or shouting, their errors to them. The situation is
instead as Kierkegaard describes things concerning the fire-and-brimstone preachers of
his day who aimed at the same renewal of Danish Christendom which was his own
more hidden intent:
Every once in a while a religious enthusiast appears. He makes an assault on
Christendom; he makes a big noise, denounces nearly all as not being
Christianand he accomplishes nothing. He does not take into account that
an illusion is not so easy to remove. If it is the case that most people are under
an illusion when they call themselves Christians, what do they do about an
enthusiast like that? First and foremost, they pay no attention to him at all, do
not read his book but promptly lay it ad acta [aside]; or if he makes use of the
Living Word, they go around on another street and do not listen to him at
all They make him out to be a fanatic and his Christianity to be an
exaggeration.61
Instead, as Hadot comments concerning Kierkegaards writings, if one hopes to
effect real existential change in others, the best we can do is set down their opinions
before them in such a way that their inconsistency with other deeply held commitments
is shown and can be seen by the person for themselves: this is as Socratic as can be.62
This is why Socrates always was only concerned to discuss with the generals military
matters, with the soothsayers the subject of piety, poetry and recitation with the
rhapsodes, etc. 63 It is also, as we add, why Socrates so often argues by the most
innocuous analogies (training horses, building houses, steering ships, etc.) open to even
the dullest of Greeks or itinerant sophists. The Socratic teacher must begin where his
interlocutors are at, wearing a mask of innocuousness, and directing his inquiries as
speaking to and from their concerns, if his questioning is to engage them, and they are
to assume responsibility for what is at stake. Hadot therefore cites Kierkegaards Notes
on My Task as an Author as illustrative here, reflecting on why his early pseudonymous works truck in the aesthetic concerns predominant amidst the Danes of his day,
rather than the religious matters closer to his heart:
But from the total point of view of my whole work as an author, the aesthetic
writing is a deception, and herein is the deeper significance of the pseudonymity.
But a deception, that is indeed something rather ugly. To that I would answer: Do
not be deceived by the word deception. One can deceive a person out of what is
true, and to recall old Socrates one can deceive a person into what is true. Yes,
Kierkegaard, On My Work as an Author, 423; cf. Muench Kierkegaards Socratic Task, 3739; Antony
Aumann, Kierkegaard and the Need for Indirect Communication, 104107.
62
At Hadot, Figure of Socrates, 152.
63
See Hadot, Figure of Socrates, 148 and 150.
60
61
420
M. Sharpe
in only this way can a deluded person actually be brought into what is true by
deceiving him 64
For Hadot as for Kierkegaard, then, the Socratic elenchus is far from what Cooper
depicts it as being: a kind of process of conceptual analysis in which Socrates
interlocutors feature as the mere occasions for Socrates to hone and incrementally
complete his objective-systematic account of the virtues, adding one more stone to the
system, as Johannes Climacus might have put it.65 It is a complex psychological drama
or comedy, into which the masked Socratic figure draws his interlocutor, in order to
execute a change in their opinions and selves beyond anything the interlocutors had
anticipated. Hadot is fond of citing the Laches on this uncanny moment of anagnorsis
that the elenchus aims at eliciting, and Laches complaint that Anyone who enters into
conversation with Socrates is liable to be drawn into an argument, and whatever subject
he may start, he will be continually carried round and round by him, until at last he
finds that he has to give an account both of his present and past life.66
To explain the dramatic dynamics of the elenchus further, Hadot draws on the
German scholar Otto Apelts description of the mechanisms of Spaltung (splitting)
and Verdoppalung (redoubling). Socrates splits himself into two, so that there are two
Socrates: the Socrates who knows in advance how the discussion is going to end and
the Socrates who travels the entire dialectical path along with his interlocutor.67 This
latter, masked Socrates draws the interlocutor into his confidence, asking him, on a
matter of his own concern or imagined expertise, to give only such replies as he
believes to be true. Then, the part of the process Cooper hypostasises takes place:
Socrates draws out, through analytic questioning, the different inferential consequences
of the interlocutors various beliefs. The invariable result of this process is that the
inconsistencies between the persons various convictions emerge, and he is invited to
recognise them and his own inauthenticity, for the first time. In this way, as Hadot
comments, it is not only Socrates who is divided. In the remarkable resulting philosophical theatre, the splitting is redoubled:
64
Kierkegaard, On My Work as an Author, 53. There is a third explanation Hadot sees for Kierkegaards
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. Kierkegaards host of pseudonymsa 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 interlocutorsalso served a psychological function for Kierkegaard himself. Hadot here cites Kierkegaards reflection on his own melancholy as
evidence for this claim: Because of my melancholy, it was years before I was able to say Bthou^ to myself, he
reports: Between my melancholy and my Bthou^, there was a whole world of fantasy. I exhausted it, in part, in
my pseudonyms. (Kierkegaard at Hadot, Figure of Socrates, 152; cf. Irinas treatment of this psychological
interpretation in Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life, 1612.)
65
At Ferreira, Kierkegaard, 83. The original text Ferreira cites, in the Danish, is Kierkegaards 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
421
the interlocutor, too, is cut in two: there is the interlocutor as he was before his
conversation with Socrates, and there is the interlocutor who, in the course of
their constant mutual accord, has identified himself with Socrates, and who
henceforth will never be the same again.^68
So, irony here is essential. And again, as Cooper entirely misses, this ironic elenchus
is an essentially inter-subjective phenomenon, reflecting not only Socrates theoretical
ignorance (although this also applies69) but also, and primarily, Socrates pedagogical
concern to effect existential change in the other:
The absolutely essential point in this ironical method is the path which
Socrates and his interlocutor travel together. Socrates pretends he wants to
learn something from his interlocutor, and this constitutes his ironic selfdeprecation. In fact, however, even while Socrates appears to identify himself
with the interlocutor, and enter completely into his discourse, in the last
analysis, it is the interlocutor who unconsciously enters into Socrates discourse and identifies himself with him. Let us not forget: to identify oneself
with Socrates is to identify oneself with aporia and doubt, for Socrates
doesnt know anything; all he knows is that he knows nothing. Therefore, at
the end of the discussion, the interlocutor has not learned anything; in fact, he
no longer even knows anything. And yet, throughout the duration of the
discussion, he has experienced what true activity of the mind is. Better yet,
he has been Socrates himself.70
The reader will not be surprised by this stage to find that Hadot accordingly finds
the maieutic metaphor for Socrates activity, giving birth to the ideas (or at least
questioning) of others, as deeply revelatory as did Kierkegaard. 71 His second of
three pivotal recourses to Kierkegaard in The Figure of Socrates in fact sees him
using the Danes reflections on pedagogy in general, then Socrates in particular, to
highlight this dimension of the ancient original. As Kierkegaard was well aware,
Socratic maieutics stands the master-disciple relationship on its head, Hadot
comments. The teacher does not aim simply to instruct or inform the other but to
form or transform him: what Climacus tells us in the Philosophical Fragments is
the highest relation possible between human beings. 72 And herein, Hadot contends, lies the true meaning of Socrates I only know one thing: that I dont know
anything, insofar as it concerns his pedagogic elenchus.73 Socrates really does not
know or possess the object of his inquiry, but this is because in each case that
object is a transformed existential attitude in the other that can only be actualised
See Hadot, Figure of Socrates, 157; Irina, Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life, 164166.
70
Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 152. Cf. Irina, Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life, 168170,
who rightly positions the assumption of subjective responsibility as the goal of Socratic philosophising, as
seen by Hadot via Kierkegaard.
71
Cf. Gregor, BThe 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, 7076; Muench, Kierkegaards Socratic
Task, 98100; Howland Kierkegaard and Socrates, 4345
73
At Hadot, Figure of Socrates, 154.
68
69
422
M. Sharpe
by that other, from within. 74 Socrates masterfully ironic response to Alcibiades

attempted seduction in the Symposium says this perfectly: what Alcibiades seeks in
Socrates is just not there, but in the erotic gaze and soul of his beholder (Plato,
Symp., 218e75).
In his final decisive recourse to Kierkegaard in the piece, Hadots Figure of
Socrates hence draws on Kierkegaards admiration for Socrates as an existing thinker,
not a speculative philosopher who has forgotten what it means to exist to home in on
what for him is the enigma of Socrates: Kierkegaards fundamental category of
existence is the individual, or the unique, isolated in the solitude of his existential
responsibility. For Kierkegaard, Socrates was its discoverer.76 Hadot does not proffer
disagreement. Kierkegaards entire authorship, Hadot notes, was animated by the sense
that his contemporaries, who to a man proclaimed themselves Christian, had forgotten
what it meant to truly be a Christian, in profound and genuine existential relationship
with Christ.77 This is why Kierkegaard could finally present himself to Socrates in The
Instant as his only confidant or teacher:
O Socrates, you had the accursed advantage of making it painfully obvious, by
means of your ignorance, that others were even less wise than you. They didnt
even know that they were ignorant. Your adventure was the same as mine. People
become exasperated with me when they see that I can show that others are even
less Christian than I; I who respect Christianity so much that I see and admit that I
am not a Christian!78
For Socrates, Hadot contends, the operative ideal before which the Greek philosopher felt himself unworthy was that of the Sophos or sage, the man of perfected
theoretical and lived wisdom. 79 But although he could not himself claim complete
wisdom, or directly teach this wisdom to others, the labours of Socrates elenchuslike
those of Kierkegaards pseudonymous textsremain for Hadot the uniquely sage,
indirect means to implicate others in such a search:
For the existential thinker, banality and superficiality are a vital necessity. The
existentialist must remain in contact with mankind, even if the latter is at a
level of less-than-adequate consciousness. At the same time, however, we
have here to do with a pedagogical artifice. The circuitous detours of irony,
and the shock of aporia, can cause the reader to attain to the seriousness of
Cf. Paul Muench, Kierkegaards Socratic Point of View, in A Companion to Socrates, eds. Sara AhbelRappe and Rachana Kamtekar (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009b), 390.
75
This insight is central to Jacques Lacans 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 Platos Agalmata, The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 14:5 (2009), 535547.
76
Hadot, Figure of Socrates, 156; cf. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 2412, 2823
77
Hadot, Figure of Socrates, 157. Cf. Irina, Philosophy as a Way of Life^ 168170.
78
Kierkegaard, The Instant, at Hadot, Figure of Socrates, 157. See Daniel. 2010. Subjective Thinking:
Kierkegaard on Hegels Socrates, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 61 (2010), 2324.
79
Hadot Figure of Socrates, 1567; cf. Hadot, La Figure du Sage dans LAntiquit Grco-Latine, in tudes
de Philosophie Antique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2010c), pp. 233258; cf. also on this Socratic knowledge
that he was not a sage, Irina, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 1634.
74
423
existential consciousness, especially if the power of Eros is thrown in for

good measure.80
Indirect Communication: Reading Hadots Writing, After Kierkegaard

With this emphasis on Socratic philosophy as an existentially serious pursuit, we reach
the wider crux of the proximity between Pierre Hadots thought and the authorship of
Sren Kierkegaard. In the Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaards Climacus expresses
this crux in the famous anti-Hegelian declarations that truth is subjectivity and
subjectivity is truth. Knowing [t]he objective truth as such about some matter
for instance through a scientific account of the phenomenadoes not at all decide that
the one stating it is sensible, 81 Kierkegaard notes. The man who tries to convince
others that he is not mad by bursting into a room and reeling off facts, like the earth is
round! says something objective. But, he only underscores his insanity. 82 There are,
moreover, situations where what is decisive is less knowledge of a body of facts than
the individuals comportment towards what is at stake: not what is known, but how the
individual appropriates what she knows. These situations include, for Kierkegaard, those
where what is at stake are the most essential ethical and religious matters in any individuals
life. As Climacus explains in a note: what is being discussed here [in the claim that
subjectivity is truth] is essential truth, or the truth that is related essentially to existence,
and that it is specifically in order to clarify it as inwardness or as subjectivity that the contrast
[with objectivity] is pointed out.83 In a famous example, Climacus goes as far to compare,
unfavourably, someone who enters with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house
of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth with a second figure, who lives in an
idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon
the image of an idol 84 While he does not without qualification sponsor the passionate
idolater, Kierkegaard can be read (as he is, for instance, by Ferreira) as suggesting that it is
the idolater who is closer to an authentically religious stance.85
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 idolwhere, 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 Bin 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 Kierkegaards 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 subjects radical difference to God and in Christianity. See the Concluding
Remarks (SPI: Please link) section.
80
81
424
M. Sharpe
The context of these claims is the famous Postscript to the Philosophical

Fragments. This work has opened with a Thought-Project in which our author,
Johannes Climacus, contrasts what he calls a Socratic positionthat the truth comes
from recollection of knowledge already within the soul of the studentwith a second,
crypto-Christian position in which the Teacher brings to the learner, from outside, both
the condition for learning the truth, and that truth itself.86 The reader can be drawn to
infer that Climacus critical target in the Fragments and Postscript is the kind of ancient
philosophical position represented by Socrates. In contrast to this, Climacus seems to
be concerned to highlight a religious position in which the teacher, as lover, bends to
the learner, proffering her the condition and the truth as pure gifts. 87 Nevertheless,
Kierkegaardsand Climacusstatements about the meaning of these works suggests
that it is not ancient, Socratic philosophy that he wishes to lead his readers to
criticise. Instead, as Climacus autobiographical account of how he became an
author recounts, his work aimed to find out where the misunderstanding lies
between Christianity and the modern, speculative philosophy represented in Denmark
by figures led by Martensen and Heiberg, which has presumed the right to reduce
faith to an element in its impersonal theological system. 88 Here is Climacus, using
the first person pronoun:
I need not report my many mistakes, but it finally became clear to me that
the deviation of speculative thought and, based thereupon, its presumed right
to reduce faith to an element [et Moment] might not be something accidental,
might be located far deeper in a tendency of the whole ageprobably in
this, that because of much knowledge [den megen Viden] people have
entirely forgotten what it means to exist and what inwardness is. / My main
thought was that, because of much knowledge, people in our day have
forgotten what it means to exist, and what inwardness is, and that the
misunderstanding between speculative thought and Christianity could be
explained by that.89
Intriguingly, that is, Kierkegaards Climacus sees a deep speculative identity
between what we may always, as academics, comfort ourselves must be profoundly
opposed: viz. the kind of recondite, wholly theoretical philosophy we teach our
students, in tones which assure them and ourselves that this philosophy is far above
the wider, frivolous mass culture and that culture itself. In neither, Climacus
challenges us, are people drawn to face up to, and take on responsibility for, their
lives. Instead, in both, we forget ourselves aesthetically beneath the profusion of
entertainments or textual information that has continued to expand to glut every moment
of our collective attention, from Kierkegaards Copenhagen to the cyberage.
Climacus is characteristically eloquent in his denunciations of this spiritual malaise,
86
Kierkegaard Philosophical Fragments, 1021; cf. Ferreira Kierkegaard, 7076; Howland Kierkegaard and
Socrates: A Study in Faith and Knowledge, 435.
87
Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 1021; cf. Howland, Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in
Philosophy and Faith, 4856
88
89
425
as it touches academic philosophy. To know how to expound [a text], in a certain sense

quite correctly, he chargesthinking of what remains a large part of our work as
academic teachersis one thing. But:
it is enough to drive one both to laughter and to tears to see that all this
knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over peoples lives, that
their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but
rather the opposite.90
Or again, more humorously, we find Climacus to our surprise denouncing someone
who en effet may well be one of our colleagues, or we ourselves:
Alas, while the speculating, honourable Herr Professor is explaining all existence,
he has in sheer absent-mindedness forgotten what he himself is called, namely,
that he is a human being, a human being pure and simple, and not a fantastical
three-eighths of a paragraph.91
Yet things were not always so with the philosophers, Kierkegaard notes. And,
this is why the image of Socrates in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and
Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est self-consciously corrects the
one-sided image of the Socratic position we had been given at the opening of the
Fragments.92 Modern philosophy, Kierkegaard now argues, differs from the older
philosophy by having discovered that it is ludicrous to [actually] do what a person
himself said he would do or had done93 This is its detestable untruth, for which
our encyclopaedic learning is a poor aesthetic consolation. (loc cit.) Greek philosophy was characterised, in Kierkegaards characteristic language, by a passion of
thought. 94 This, by contrast with modern academic theorising, aimed exactly at
uniting reflection and action, thinking and living: so each of its adherents would
existentially express what he would have to call his life view, be existentially
absorbed in it , as Climacus reflects.95 Ancient philosophy, as Corinthians 1:23
famously registered, had the existential spine to be offended by the Christian
Paradox, rather than comforting its initiatesen mode de Hegelthat we have now
objectively understood its absurdity, or reconciled it within our higher speculative system or categories.96
Pierre Hadot, of all near- contemporary thinkers, shared Sren Kierkegaards
and Johannes Climacus concern that, to cite a Greek philosopher, Much learning
does not teach wisdom [polymathin noun ou didaskei], otherwise it would have
taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus, let alone
Kierkegaards venerable Professor (Heraclitus, fragment 6). Of course, the ancient
90
Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 90.

92
Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 204, 3334, 545; Ferreira, Kierkegaard, 99100.
93
Kierkegaard, cited at Muench Kierkegaards Socratic Task, 83. Cf. Furtak, Kierkegaard and Greek
Philosophy, 130131.
94
95
96
Cf. here Paul Muench, Kierkegaards Socratic task, 123.
91
426
M. Sharpe
philosophers as Hadot sees them produced the theoretical edifices encompassing

physics, metaphysics, the gods, the soul, etc. which we still teach students in
courses on classical philosophy. Yet Hadot, drawing on the Stoics distinction
between philosophical discourse (ton kata philosophian logon) and philosophia
herself, 97 argues that we cannot correctly understand the meaning of these
philosophical discoursesand their extraordinary literary presentationswithout
understanding the concrete conditions in which they wrote, all the constraints that
weighed upon them: the framework of the school[s], the very nature of
philosophia, literary genres, rhetorical rules, dogmatic imperatives, and traditional
modes of reasoning.98
And, we have already in fact met in Part I the key feature of ancient, in contrast
to modern philosophia herself after Socrates, as Hadot sees it. This is the primacy of
the spoken word, and the direct dialogical exchange between teachers and pupils,
that Socrates enshrined in the Greek tradition. 99 When we speak to others, we
shape what we say according to the context, audience and specific purposes of
the exchange. We also direct our words at producing specific effects upon our
listener(s): whether to inform or charm, seduce or repel, invite or commit,
promise or threaten. Just so, Hadot argues, we misunderstand the ancient texts
if we abstract them from the way written texts in Greek culture, a new and
ambivalent phenomenon, always aimed to replicate the conditions of dialogue
sometimes directly, as in the Platonic texts or Xenophontic Memorabilia, but also
in the predominant medium of the open epistle to a specific addressee. 100 Just as
in dialogues, these ancient texts aimed in different cases at doing many more
things with words than are attempted in most modern philosophy, restricted to
the media of denotative-exegetical papers and monographs. Ancient philosophical discourse, in Hadots words, was a privileged means by which the
philosopher could act upon himself and others: the expression of the existential option of the person who utters it, [this] discourse always had, directly or
indirectly, a function which was formative, educative, psychagogic, and therapeutic.101 It is just this greater sense of the different language games available
to ancient philosophical authors than our monographs or articles that the proliferation of now-lost genres in the classical world reflects.102 This generic proliferation was the subject of Hadots 197980 course at the cole pratique des hautes tudes,
in which he distinguished well over a dozen forms of philosophical writing according to
Aristotles four aitia: protreptic, paranetic or biographical, consolatory, therapeutic,
laconic or paratactic, systematic, apophatic texts; lectures, conversations, diatribes,
97
Diogenes Laertius, Lives, book VII 3940 (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 thique ou une
Pratique? in tudes de Philosophie Ancienne (France: ditions des Belles Lettres), 207232, at pp. 220221.
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, 6264.
100
101
102
For Hadots 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 Mtaphysique et de Morale 67 (3),
1962: 330343.
427
didactic poems, letters, the list goes on 103 (See Fig. 1 below). It was his scholarly
attempts, as a philologist, to understand what metaphilosophical self-conception
could best explain such a rich literary, philosophical culture in the classical world;
Hadot indeed insistsnot any considrations moins ou plus difiantes sur la
philosophie thrapeutique, etc.,104 which Hadot insists put him on the path towards
his mature works on philosophy as a way of life.
Yet someone might say: Hadots learned return to ancient philosophy, based in his
philological sensitivities and paideia, is one thing. And it might alert us to the proximity
between Kierkegaards proliferation of literary forms and conceits and that of the
ancients. But this is to say nothing concerning Hadots oeuvre itself. Indeed, it would
be difficult to think of an authorship which on its surface could look more different to that
of Sren Kierkegaards than Pierre Hadots. Hadot did not, as far as anyone knows,
deploy pseudonyms or masks. His works, indeed, are always exemplarily academic,
attended by scholarly hosts of footnotes, qualifications, explanatory notes, citations from
original languages, and encyclopaedic erudition. Whatever he may have discovered
about others philosophy, Hadot always availed himself of the guise of the commentator:
writing on Victorinus, Porphyry, Plotinus, Aurelius, Epictetus, etc., and essays on themes
he finds in the works of these others. There is nothing in his many essays on philosophical conceptions and practices in the Hellenistic or Roman world, on the conception of
Being in Porphyry, or of mystical experience in Plotinus; on the evolution of the notion of
person in early Patristic thought, on the different conceptions of the Trinity in Victorinus
and Augustine as these reflect the influences of Porphyry or Plotinus; on the changing
religious conceptions of later paganism; on changing Western conceptions of nature; on
the figure of the magus in the Renaissance, and even on ancient philosophy as a bios,105
that speaks directly to the urgent existential needs of modern men and women in the
manner that a Kierkegaard, a Climacus or an anti-Climacus would demand. Even the
many interviews Hadot gave late in life after all belong to an established tradition in
French letters: that of the reverential entretiens with the established don.
The person who speaks thus appears to speak justly, to paraphrase the Socrates of
Platos Apology (Apo. 20d). Yet, one final time, I want to suggest that the appearances
here are potentially deceptive. Climacus comments, per the epigraph of this essay, that he
for one is well aware that if anyone nowadays were to live as a Greek philosopher, that
is, would existentially express what he would have to call his life view, be existentially
absorbed in it, he would be regarded as a lunatic.106 Consider then that Pierre Hadot, by
the early 1970s, had become convinced that the ancient philosophical writingsto take
a very clear case, a text like Marcus Aurelius Ta Eis Heauton or Meditationscould
103
Hadot, cole pratique des hautes etudes: Anne 19791980, in tudes de Patristique et DHistoire des
Concepts (Paris: Les Belles Lettres), 162167.
104
Hadot, La Philosophie Comme Manire de Vivre Entretiens avec Jeannie Cartier et Arnold I. Davidson
(Paris: ditions Albin Michel) 104; Present Alone, 59.
105
Here, I am pointing to Hadots work in respectively Pierre Hadot, tudes de Philosophie Ancienne; Hadot,
tudes Noplatoniciennes; Hadot, Porphyre et Victorinus; Hadot, tudes de Patristique et DHistoire des
Concepts; Hadot, BLa Fin du Paganisme^ in tudes de Philosophie Ancienne; Pierre Hadot, BLAmour
Magicienne^: Aux Origene de la Notion de BMagia Naturalis^: Platon, Plotin, Marsile Ficin Revue
Philosophique de la France et de ltranger, T. 172, No. 2, tudes de Philosophie Ancienne: Hommage
Pierre-Maxime Schuhl pour son quatre-vingtime anniversaire (Avril-Juin 1982), pp. 283292; Hadot, The
Veil of Isis; finally Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life.
106
428
M. Sharpe
Fig. 1 Ancient philosophical genres. I derive this diagram from Pierre Hadot, cole pratique des hautes
etudes: Anne 19791980, 162167
only be understood as the written testimony to a very different conception of philosophy than anything we recognise today. 107 For this conception, to philosophise
involved a way of life including, as in Aurelius text, repetitive mnemonic, meditative
and imaginative exercises clearly aimed in no way at generating new theory but,
written in the second-person and often in the imperative, and never published by the
philosopher-emperor but found amidst his mortal remains, instead seem to document
Marcus attempts to renew himself by so deeply impressing the dogmata of his
philosophical school on his psyche that he could at any time call these principles to
mind, as they bore upon the most mundane challenges facing him as an
embodied, social, finite, passionate, illusion-prone, ageing human being. In interviews,
Hadot drew upon Cardinal Newmans Grammar of Assent to try to get at what he saw
at stake in such a written hypomnmata as Marcus text, but more widely in ancient
thought. Such ancient philosophy, he says, aimed not merely at garnering intellectual or
nominal, but real assent, involving exactly the kind of inward conviction engaging
tout ltre108 that Kierkegaard aimed to provoke in his readers.
Anyone who, like Hadot, has uncovered such an alternative sense of philosophy is,
now as in 1970, faced with a choice and a difficulty. The choice is whether or not to
heed the call that becoming privy to such a philosophical practice inescapably makes
upon a reader: to try it for ourselves or else to objectify it as one more subject for
articles, monographs, conference presentations and what one modern critic has called
the omnivorous discourse of the university. 109 The difficulty comes, supposing she
does take up Climacus challenge of trying thus to live in the categories in which she
has come to think. It concerns how to proceed in an academic world wherein such a
sense of philosophy is foreign, or considered superseded or faintly quaint, and wherein we
are all required, as a matter of professional survival, to publish more or perish, attract grant
funding and tokens of prestige, etc.
Compare Pierre Hadot, Marcus Aurelius, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 179206; and Hadot, The Inner
Citadel.
108
Hadot, Philosophie Comme Manire, 102; Present Alone, 5758.
109
Cf. Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.
107
429
I want to suggest that Hadot did take this choice and that his writings as we have
them respond to the difficulty. From 1970 on, Hadot once confided, I have felt very
strongly that it was Epicureanism and Stoicism which could nourish the spiritual life of
men and women of our times, as well as my own. 110 An important concluding
paragraph of Spiritual Exercises, the article that converted Foucault to reconsidering
Greek thought, reads:
Vauvenargues said, A truly new and truly original book would be one which
made people love old truths. It is my hope that I have been truly new and truly
original in this sense, since my goal has indeed been to make people love a few
old truths. Old truths: there are some truths whose meaning will never be
exhausted by the generations of man. It is not that they are difficult; on the
contrary, they are often extremely simple. Often, they even appear to be banal.
Yet for their meaning to be understood, these truths must be lived, and constantly
re-experienced. Each generation must take up, from scratch, the task of learning
to read and to re-read these old truths.111
Hadot reports his own practicing of the various spiritual exercises like viewing
oneself from above that he wrote learnedly upon112: although with characteristic irony,
he confesses also that many times as he faced ageing and illness, he was nowhere near
the sage he would have wished. Perhaps more deeply than this, Hadots reflections on
his young life in the interviews of The Present Alone is Our Happiness confess
disarmingly to what it seems was the shaping influence upon his entire life and career:
namely, a mystical experience Hadot reports having one evening on the way home from
the seminary on the rue Ruinart when he looked up at the sky and for the first time as it
were saw the sky above him:
The night had come. The stars were shining in the immense sky. At this time, one
could just already see them My experience was one of being filled by an
anxiety that was both terrifying and delicious, provoked by a sentiment of the
presence of the world, or of the Whole, and of me in that world. In fact I was not
able to formulate my experience but, afterwards, I sensed that it might correspond
to such questions as What am I? Why am I here? What is this world I am in? I
experienced a sentiment of strangeness, of astonishment, and of wonder at beingthere. At the same time, I had the sense of being immersed in the world the
world was present to me, intensely present. Before long, I would come to
discover that this consciousness of my immersion in the world, this impression
of belonging to the Whole, was what Romain Rolland called the the oceanic
sentiment113
110
Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 280. Elsewhere, he cites approvingly Nietzsches 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
112
Hadot, Hadot, Present Alone, 161163.
113
Hadot, Present Alone, 56.
430
M. Sharpe
The direct exploration or expression of such a sense of existing is in many ways

almost impossible for an academic philosopher qua career-professional today,114 being
something we are more likely to assign to the province of literature or belles-lettres. It is
likely to provoke charges or sentimentalism, romanticism, a failure of critical nerve, the
sacrificio intellectus, a false longing for immediacy, or the false importation of religion (here coded negatively) into philosophy and the history of ideas. Yet, Hadot, as
we have seen above, understood Socratic irony and elenchus as a means of indirect
communication, guided in part by the example of Kierkegaard.115 We have seen Hadot,
also, suggesting that Socratic masks have been used again and again, including by
Kierkegaard, when writers wanted to communicate something heterodox to accepted
opinion, by first of all presenting the views in question as inoffensive, mediocre or
conventional. In the contemporary academic milieu, then, anyone who did believe that
philosophyfar beyond its contemporary understandingshould aim at the cultivation of a transformed mode of attention or prosoch to the world could on this Socratic
or Kierkegaardian understanding only do so by writing grave, serious, erudite, careful,
objective commentaries on established authoritiesalmost as if he had nothing new or
different to argue for at all. We recall Hadot above, on Socrates: For the existential
thinker, banality and superficiality are a vital necessity 116 If ones own existential
commitment to the views one thereby examined might be announced at all in these
works, this subjectivity (as Kierkegaard might put it) could only be announced
between the lines: in momentary flashes of individuality; a poetic turn of language in
presenting the positions one is drawn to; occasional expressions in the first person
singular or plural, perhaps in the closing statements of essays wherein present concerns
and practices would also be raised. Alternatively, if the heterodox position in question
was an advocacy of the idea that Epicureanism and Stoicism could nourish the
spiritual life of men and women of our times, as well as my own, 117 the author in
question would be well advised to adopt a style whose classical simplicity and absence
of technical jargon would mirror the ancient models it described and express the same
equanimity of mind he found within them. Finally, the author in question might then
only make more direct statements about his existential commitments in interviews
marginal to his major studies
In short, this profile of how a Socratic writer committed to the regeneration of
philosophy as a way of life might proceed in the later modern academy exactly
describes the literary features of Pierre Hadots authorship. While (certainly) not
mirroring every one of Kierkegaards different species of indirect communication,
the absence of Hadotian personae, or of wilful retractions or revocationsthese very
differences, reflecting Hadots sense of his different contexts, audiences and aims than
the Danes, make his practice more true to what Kierkegaard had indicated. 118 As
114
See Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, xiv, 70, 151, 2623

Hadot, Figure of Socrates, 156. See note 74 above.
117
118
I.e. as a kind of repetition or emulation at the level of form, implying new content, rather than mere
copying of Kierkegaards every content and device.
115
116
431
Jeanne Carlier puts it in introducing the interviews of La Philosophie Comme Manire

de Vivre, Hadots works have their own indirectly protreptic character, aiming to turn
(trepein in Greek) the reader towards philosophical life.119 And so, it is not surprising
that we find Hadot, in the closing interview in The Present Alone is Our Happiness, in
effect spilling the beans about his project as just such an advocacy for the renewal of
ancient ways of philosophising: very modestly [trying] to propose a theory of existential practices. 120 Nor is it by now surprising that, in conceiving this endeavour,
Hadot cites Sren Kierkegaards indirect communication121 as his guide:
I would say that, for my part, it is a matter of what Kierkegaard calls indirect
communication. If one says directly, do this or that, one dictates a conduct with a
tone of false certainty. But thanks to the description of spiritual exercises lived by
another, one allows a call to be heard that the reader has the freedom to accept or
refuse. It is up to the reader to decide. He is free to believe or not to believe, to act
or not to act. If I can judge by the numerous letters I have received, written by the
most diverse kinds of people, from France, Germany, the United States, who tell
me that my books have aided them spirituallysomeone has even written Byou
have changed my life^I think that the method is good, and I always respond to
these people, with reason, that it was not me, but the ancient philosophers, who
have brought them this aid.122
Concluding Remarks: the Subjective Universality of Hadots Philosopher

We have now explored the proximities between the unlikely, ironic pairing of Sren
Kierkegaard and Pierre Hadot. For both, philosophising or thinking is and ought to be
an existentially serious affair, tied intimately with individuals attempts to live well.
According to both, the figure of Socratesand his remarkable irony, maieutics and
elenchusstands at the head of the rich Western legacies of this existential conception
of philosophising: a kind of unsurpassable sage or philosopher, lover of wisdom.
Hadots apparently highly conventional, purely academic writings, I have argued, in
fact took a leaf out of Kierkegaards remarkable books. While not trying to simply copy
or reproduce Kierkegaards remarkable arts of direct communication, Hadot instead
adapted himself to his surroundings by adopting (and of course truly practicing) the
innocuous guise of the commentatorof being, in Climacus words, one more Herr
Professor who has turned his life into a dozen books. He did this in order to indirectly
try to reawaken new generations of men and women to the calling of philosophy as a
way of living, a transformed way of being in, and seeing, the world.
Jeanne Carlier, Introduction to Hadot, Philosophie Comme Manire, 7.
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, 7374, who raises this, before turning to his focus on reading as a
spiritual practice, at 7482; 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.
119
120
432
M. Sharpe
But the essay, as a piece of writing on Hadot and Kierkegaard, would be

untrue to Kierkegaards spirit and thought, if we ended with this simple
rapprochement or mediation: since it was his entire project to awaken us to
the need to decide and to warn us against attempts epitomised by Hegelian
philosophy to reconcile positions which, conceived rightly, represent fundamental alternatives demanding our more exclusive, perhaps passionate existential
allegiances. For all of their common loves of Socrates, and sense of thinking as
an existentially serious profession, it remains that Hadots life course took him
away from the Catholic Church of his youth, which he soon came to feel did
not allow his emerging mystical spirituality a voice. But, he did not then pass
over into the Lutheranism of Kierkegaard. Nor, remembering Fear and
Trembling alongside The Concluding Unscientific Postscript, is it possible to
say that Hadot was attracted by what Kierkegaard called the Christian paradox
123
towards anything like a Kierkegaardian, infinite resignation or leap to
embrace the kind of extra-rational faith Silentio dramatizes for us so bracingly
in his reconsideration of the story of Isaac and Abraham.124 Indeed, if Hadots
work isbeneath its scholars clothingarguably such a provocative intervention in contemporary philosophy, it is because, quite singularly in the context of
recent French thought, he contests many of the vital opinions shaped in
Kierkegaard and transformed, via Heidegger, by most more recent continental
thinkers: in favour of singularity, the rapturous vnement or decision, or even
different forms of fideistic or messianic impossibility.125 Hadot tries today to
do what seems, ironically, to have itself become almost impossible: to defend
Greek philosophical thought and philosophical universality on what we might
term the existential grounds laid out in modern European thought by Sren
Kierkegaard.
Greek philosophy, Hadot argues, aimed at the existential transformation and
self-overcoming of individuals in just the way Kierkegaard calls for, and
admired so greatly in that remarkable pagan, Socratesbut also more widely
in post-Socratic Greek thought, as Fartuk has recently examined.126 Yet, unlike
Kierkegaard and most recent European thinkers who are his conscious or
unconscious legatees, the Greek philosophoi Hadots writings aim to reanimate
held that such self-transformation would not take place through suspending or
123
Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 4349; see Ferreira, Kierkegaard, 7476, 96, 107, 114.
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 923.
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, BKierkegaard and
Greek Philosophy^, 132142.
124
125
433
transcending ethical universality: certainly not on anything like the fideistic,

Abrahamic model of the religious Silentio presents us with in Fear and
Trembling or the religiousness B of the Postscript. 127 Rather, they prompt
us to aspire to see our lives sub specie aeternitatis et universalis: as one
moment of the larger social and natural Whole who nevertheless, because of
our mindedness, are capable of comprehending and taking on responsibility for
the small part of that whole we can change, affect or preserve. The primary
danger for such a neoclassical, Greek or philosophical position is not simply, or
primarily, those forms of abstract universality that threaten to violently reduce
or eliminate particularity or otherness, oras Kierkegaard sometimes worried
individual responsibility. It is also passionate, exclusivist reaffirmations of
extra-rational particularisms that cannot or will not respect the common humanity of people of different traditions, including traditions with different revealed
or revered sources of their own.
However that may be, Hadot ends a discussion of the history of slavery, and the
imperfect records of both the Christians and pagan Greeks on this score:
it seems to me that seeing things in a universal perspective necessarily leads to
recognizing certain permanent values: respect for the human person, respect for
life, respect for the gift of language, to mention only a few.128
127
Abrahams 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, 555559; M. Jamie Ferreira. Kierkegaard, 59. Compare Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), 5585 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 Kierkegaards 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 Platos case, by recollecting the worldshaping Ideas) with Stoic, peripatetic and Epicurean analogues, each of living according to nature. On this
conception of Greek philosophy, and Kierkegaards response to it, see Furtak, Kierkegaard and Greek
Philosophy, 1323; on Kierkegaards criticism of the Stoics concerning apatheia, and the role of emotions,
led by love, in a good life, see loc cit. 138142. 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. 167171.
434
M. Sharpe
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Socratic Ironies Reading Hadot Reading Kierkegaard

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SOPHIA (2016) 55:409435

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

Published online: 14 March 2016

Arts-Education, Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, VIC 3217, Australia

Keywords Kierkegaard . Hadot . Philosophy . Christianity . Socrates . Irony

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom, 2122.

The Figures of Socrates in Hadot, in Kierkegaard and in Cooper

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

awareness of this aspect of ancient philosophy. 24 But, Coopers 2012 response to

Cooper, loc cit., 31.

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

harmonious figure, combining divine and human features in delicate nuances is

Hadot, loc cit., 147.

Plato, Euthyphro, 11b-12a

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

by that other, from within. 74 Socrates masterfully ironic response to Alcibiades

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

existential consciousness, especially if the power of Eros is thrown in for

Indirect Communication: Reading Hadots Writing, After Kierkegaard

The context of these claims is the famous Postscript to the Philosophical

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

as it touches academic philosophy. To know how to expound [a text], in a certain sense

Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 90.

philosophers as Hadot sees them produced the theoretical edifices encompassing

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

The direct exploration or expression of such a sense of existing is in many ways

See Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, xiv, 70, 151, 2623

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

Jeanne Carlier puts it in introducing the interviews of La Philosophie Comme Manire

Concluding Remarks: the Subjective Universality of Hadots Philosopher

But the essay, as a piece of writing on Hadot and Kierkegaard, would be

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

transcending ethical universality: certainly not on anything like the fideistic,

Socratic Ironies: Reading Hadot, Reading Kierkegaard

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