Pierre Hadot as a Reader of Wittgenstein

Paragraph ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Laugier
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Ethical Reflection ◽  
Spiritual Exercise ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
Pierre Hadot ◽  
Point Of Departure

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010), professor of ancient philosophy at the Collège de France, published, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of the earliest work on Wittgenstein to appear in French. Hadot conceived of philosophy as an activity rather than a body of doctrines and found in Wittgenstein a fruitful point of departure for ethical reflection. Hadot's understanding of philosophy as a spiritual exercise — articulated through his reading of ancient philosophy but also the American transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson — will find an echo in Wittgenstinian thinkers such as Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond. Ultimately philosophy for Hadot is a call to personal and political transformation.

scholarly journals Senses of Echo Lake: Michael Palmer, Stanley Cavell, and the Moods of an American Philosophical Tradition

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
Richard Deming
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Active Reading ◽  
Moral Perfectionism ◽  
The Way

This essay explores a philosophical tradition that Stanley Cavell has traced out and which he emphasizes as being American inasmuch as it is arises out of the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It then investigates how the poems of the avant-garde poet Michael Palmer link with, overlap with, this strain of American philosophy in terms of how it enacts an understanding of what we might call “philosophical mood,” on outlook based on the navigation of representation, generative self-consciousness, and doubt that amounts to a form of epistemology. The essay does not trace the influence—direct or otherwise of Cavell and his arguments for philosophy on the poems, despite a biographical connection between Cavell and Palmer, his former student. Instead it brings out the way that one might fruitfully locate Palmer’s work within an American literary/philosophical continuum. The article shows how that context opens up the work to a range of important existential and ethical implications. I endeavor to show that Notes for Echo Lake, Palmer’s most important collection, locates itself, its language, within such a frame so as to provide a place for readerly encounters with the limitations of language. These encounters then are presented as an opportunity for a deeper understanding of subjectivity and for attuning oneself to the role that active reading and interpretation might play in moral perfectionism.

Barthes and the Lessons of Ancient Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 137-153
Author(s):  
Lucy O’Meara
Keyword(s):  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Art Of Living ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
Pierre Hadot ◽  
Moral Perfectionism

Roland Barthes was a classicist by training; his work frequently alludes to the classical literary canon and the ancient art of rhetoric. This chapter argues that ancient Greco-Roman philosophy permits insights into Barthes’s very late work, particularly when we understand ancient philosophy not as an academic discipline, but as a mode of thought which prioritises an art of living. This chapter will focus on Barthes’s posthumously published Collège de France lecture notes (1977–80) and on other posthumous diary material, arguing that this work can be seen as part of a tradition of thought which has its roots in the ethics and care of the self proposed by ancient Greco-Roman philosophical thought. The chapter uses the work of the historian of ancient philosophy, Pierre Hadot, to set Barthes’s teaching in dialogue with Stoic and Epicurean thought, and subsequently refers to Stanley Cavell’s work on ‘moral perfectionism’ to demonstrate how Barthes’s final lecture courses, and the associated Vita Nova project, can be seen as efforts by Barthes to transform his ‘intelligibility’. Barthes’s late moral perfectionism, and the individualism of his teaching, corresponds to the ancient philosophical ethical imperative to think one’s way of life differently and thereby to transform one’s self.

scholarly journals UM ESBOÇO DE UMA PERSONALIDADE MÍSTICA - DOI 10.5752/P.1983-2478.2014v10n17p13

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (17) ◽  
pp. 13-24
Author(s):  
Luiz Felipe Pondé
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Spiritual Exercises ◽  
Short History ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pierre Hadot ◽  
Do So

ResumoA intenção deste artigo é fazer um esboço do que seria uma personalidade mística portadora de uma ciência mística. Para tal, levantamos alguns instrumentos conceituais para este fim. Percorremos um breve histórico semântico da palavra “mística” no cristianismo. Em seguida, identificamos o que seria o elemento místico nas religiões, segundo o pesquisador Friedrich Von Hügel. Na sequência, analisamos os conceitos de exercícios espirituais do filósofo Pierre Hadot na filosofia antiga e de transcendentalismo (autoconfiança) no romantismo americano de Ralph Waldo Emerson, a fim de neles iluminar o que seria uma filosofia mística. Como último instrumento, vimos o conceito de aristocracia espiritual do filósofo russo Nicolai Berdiaev. Os principais traços dessa personalidade identificados são: ausência do problema de sentido da existência, enfrentamento da contingência, amor espontâneo pela vida, vontade autoconfiante, coragem, generosidade e atenção a presença da dimensão transcendente.Palavras-Chave: Mística. Cristianismo. Exercícios espirituais. Transcendentalismo. AbstractThis article intends to a make a sketch of what would be a mystical personality and its mystical science. In order to do so, we have identified some conceptual tools. First, we have followed a short history of the semantics of the word “mysticism” in Christianity. From there, we have moved onto Friedrich Von Hügel’s concept of mystical element, Pierre Hadot’s spiritual exercises in ancient philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalism (self reliance), and, last, but not least, Nicolai Berdiaev’s concept of spiritual aristocracy. The main traits of the mystical personality we have identified are: lack of fear concerning the problem of meaning life, facing of contingence, spontaneuos love for life, self reliance, courage, generosity and atention to the transcendent dimension.Key words: Mysticism. Christianity. Spiritual exercises.Transcendentalism.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Rebecca A. Sheehan
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Cinema Studies ◽  
Avant Garde

The book’s introductory chapter situates its study of American avant-garde cinema in the context of the field of film-philosophy and the post-theory debates within cinema studies. The chapter rectifies influential misreadings of American avant-garde films by film-philosophers, and goes on to trace philosophy’s influences on the avant-garde, laying the groundwork for putting their films in conversation with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This chapter outlines the various kinds of dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens at work in American avant-garde cinema, and explains the various ways in which American avant-garde filmmakers have used this figure to advance a philosophy that promotes behaviors of re-encounter and review applicable to the off-screen world.

“American” Individualism, Variations on a Theme

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
AnaLouise Keating
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Personal Freedom ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
American Individualism ◽  
Conventional Models ◽  
Variations On A Theme ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Point Of Departure

This chapter investigates and revises conventional models of individualism and personal selfhood. Given the central roles Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau have played in constructing an “American” self and an “American” literary tradition, canonical transcendentalist texts like Emerson's “Self-Reliance” and Thoreau's Walden offer a useful point of departure for this investigation. This chapter redefines individualism—including canonical versions of individualism—in more relational terms. When we (re)read mainstream versions of “American” individualism and self-reliance through the work of contemporary U.S. women of colors, all parties are transformed: self-reliance becomes a highly democratic, relational endeavor that simultaneously extends canonical interpretations of personal freedom outward to include previously ignored groups and redefines “American individualism” by reconfiguring the relationship between personal and communal identities.

The American Art of Memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-98
Author(s):  
John Michael Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Interior Space

Abstract This article provides a genealogy of the architectural figuration of human cognition from the ancient world to Renaissance Europe and, finally, to the American Renaissance where it came to possess a striking cultural and literary potency. The first section pursues the two-fold task of elucidating this archetypal trope for consciousness, both its ancient moorings and its eventual transmission into Europe. The second section shows that three of the most prominent writers of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—engaged this mystically inspired architectonic symbolism, employing far older techno-cultural suppositions about interior space. I thereby offer an account of the intellectual and spiritual heritage upon which Romantic writers in the United States drew to articulate cognitive interiority. These Romantics did more than value creativity in contradistinction to Enlightenment rationalism; they were acknowledging themselves as recipients of the ancient belief in cosmogenesis as self-transformation.

Romantic Influence and Nature Reconsidered: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
British Romanticism

This chapter reads the thought and writing of Emerson and Thoreau as exhibiting a knowing self-consciousness about their treatment of self and nature and its use of allusion to the literary and cultural tradition of British Romanticism. What is offered is a fresh awareness of the intellectual and imaginative engagement of the thought of Emerson and Thoreau with the works of Byron, Shelley and Keats. The chapter also points up the affinities rather than the divisions between these two important American writers and their ideas about self and nature.

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