Pierre Hadot  THE PRESENT ALONE IS OUR HAPPINESS

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, corresponding 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 being there, immersed in the world. … called by Romain Rolland “the oceanic feeling.” 5

Dialogue is a living relationship between people, rather than an abstract relation to ideas. It aimed to form rather than to inform, to take of Victor Goldschmidt’s phrase used in reference to Plato’s dialogues. 54

I was influenced by Newman’s distinction between notional and real assent. Notional assent is the acceptance of a theoretical proposition to which one adheres in an abstract way. Real assent is something that involves the whole of one’s being: one understands that the proposition to which one adheres is going to change one’s life. 58

Science must be disinterested. To study a text or microbes or the stars, one must undo oneself from one’s subjectivity. Let us say that objectivity is a virtue, one that is very difficult to practice. One must undo oneself from the partiality of the individual and impassioned self in order to elevate oneself to the universality of the rational self. 67

Jean del la Croix codified the steps of the mystical itinerary, distinguishing three paths: the purgative path, the illuminative path, and the unitary path, which we inherited from Plotinus and Neoplatonism. … In Plotinus, there are two paths that prepare one for mystical experience: there is the cognitive path, notably negative theology, and there is the practical path, which consists of purifications, ascesis, spiritual exercises, the practice of virtues, and the effort to live according to the Spirit. This is the real path that leads concretely to experience. 75

In Plotinus, conjugal love can be a model for mystical experience. 79

Porphyry tried to be present to himself and to others, an excellent definition of what every philosophical life should be. 81

There are three levels of the self, plus one. First, sensible consciousness, whereby the self behaves as if it were indistinguishable from the body; second, rational consciousness, whereby the self becomes aware of itself as soul and as discursive reflection; and finally, the level of spiritual consciousness,, in which the self discovers that it has always been, unconsciously, Spirit or Intellect, and attains a kind of intuitive lucidity. The mystical state would be a different level, of union with the One, in which the self overcomes its state of identification with the Spirit and dilates itself in infinity. 85

I think of the fundamental philosophical choice as an overcoming of the partial, biased, egocentric, egoist self in order to attain the level of a higher self. This self sees all things from a perspective of universality and totality, and becomes aware of itself as part of the cosmos that encompasses the totality of things. 86

In Socratic discourse, which is itself a form of spiritual exercise, one must subject oneself to objective laws, e.g. (1) to recognize the other’s right to self-expression, (2) recognized that what is obvious is to be welcomed, which is often difficult when one is wrong (3) to recognize the norm, above the interlocutors, of what the Greeks call logos—a discourse that is or aims to be objective. In fact, from the moment of attempts to subjugate oneself to reason, one is almost necessarily obliged to renounce egoism. 89

Real logic is not the pure theory but lived logic, the act of exercising one’s thinking in the correct way in everyday life, criticizing one’s representations, not to rush to say a given thing is evil or good, but to reflect. Genuine ethics is also not ethical theory but ethics lived in life with other people. Even real physics is not the theory of physics but a certain attitude toward the cosmos—seeing things as they are, not from an anthropological and egoistical point of view, but the perspective of the cosmos and nature, e.g. that death is a natural phenomenon. This lived physics is what is meant by cosmic consciousness; it also consists in becoming aware of the fact that we are a part of the Whole and must accept the necessary unfolding of the Whole with which we identify. 95

If one sells a house, does one have the right to hide the house’s faults or must one disclose them? If you ask this question alongside the distinction I have been talking about—between the partial and egoistic vs. the universal and rational self—it answers itself, doesn’t it? We must choose, however, which self we are to be.  101

It is the choice of life that leads to enlightenment, and enlightenment that guides one on the journey. It is as if by pedaling you were to start and keep lit the light you would use to follow the path. 104

Probably of all the spiritual exercises, the one that meant the most to me has been that “to do philosophy is to learn to die.” Again, we have here the spiritual life, the passing from the empirical, sensual, and materialist self to the rational, principled and transcendental self. To prepare for death is to discover the seriousness of life, but also to be liberated from a false sense of its seriousness, its ‘weight’. How can you worry about little things when you are aware that your existence is, from a cosmic perspective, no more than a spec in the night? At the same time, to prepare for death is to realize that the moment one is living now is of infinite value. This is why we must live in the moment, carpe diem. There is nothing else, and every moment of living, of coming to be, is also a moment of dying, of passing away. So “rejoice in the day!” 105

The care of the self or of the soul is not a care for well-being, in the modern sense. It consists in becoming conscious of what one really is, our identity with reason. 108

To take care of others one must first transform oneself, but this self-transformation consists precisely in becoming attentive to others. 109

I learned from both Heidegger and Bergson to distinguish the authentic or philosophical attitude, by which you look naively in yourself and around oneself, as opposed to the everyday way of being, in which we think and act out of stereotypes, a kind of depersonalized existence in which we are always set on some determinate goal and unconscious both of our finitude (in the sense of our being doomed to death, as Heidegger puts it) and our infinitude, our transcendence. 128

There is the distinction mystery and problem. Problems are questions that can be answered and resolved. Mysteries encroach on their own given so that one is stuck inside, e.g. the mystery of the body, because one is one’s own body. 131

The meaning of the spiritual exercise of death consists in the change of vision of things, a passage from the individual and passionate to the rational and universal perspective. 149

Ordinarily our life is always incomplete, because we project all of our hopes, our aspirations, our attention into the future, telling ourselves that we will be happy when we attain this goal. We do not live, we hope to live, we are waiting to live. The Stoics and Epicureans invite us to effect a total change in our relation to time, to live only in the moment we live in, the present—to live as well as we can, as if this were the last day, the last moment, in our relationships to ourselves and those around us. We can tell ourselves: I apply myself to this action, I will do it as well as possible. We can tell ourselves: I am here, alive, and that is enough. We can even add: Here I am, in an immense and wonderful world. To live in the present is to live as if we were seeing the world for the first and for the last time. Every present moment can therefore be a moment of happiness. To do this, we must make a difficult effort to liberate ourselves from fascination with the future and with daily routine. 167

In Plato, in Epictetus and Aurelius and Epicurus, in Montaigne—there is an intimate relationship between becoming aware of one’s place in the universe, the Whole of nature, detaching oneself from one’s egoistical point of view, and becoming aware of one’s belonging to the Whole of the human community, putting oneself in the place of others and serving them. This is what connects the ascent from the level of particularly and selfishness to the level of reason and the universal – the passage from a partial to a universal vision -- with the awareness of a duty to put oneself in the service of the human community – the passage from amour propre, in the negative sense that even Aristotle discusses, to the eros that would ‘give birth in beauty,’ that reaches out to the other and to the Whole. 169