Don’t Forget to Read
People do not know what it costs in time and effort to learn to read. I needed eighty years for this and I’m not even able to say if I have succeeded.1
Those who are familiar with Pierre Hadot’s celebrated work on the history of Greco-Roman philosophy, and with some of his most famous books, such as Philosophy as a Way of Life or What Is Ancient Philosophy?,2 will no doubt be surprised to discover that his last published monograph was devoted to a modern literary author—a poet, novelist, and playwright with scientific interests: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.3 The temptation will be great to glance at the title and back cover of this book, and to immediately and hastily conclude that the book must not be a philosophy book after all, but (at best) an exercise in literary criticism, of interest primarily to Goethe scholars.
This would be, of course, a serious mistake, albeit one that has its roots in a widespread conception that philosophers have of what counts and what doesn’t count as philosophy, and of who is and who isn’t a philosopher properly speaking. It has been, and still is, an occupational obsession for philosophers to trace the boundaries of their discipline and enforce them against any unwanted intrusion. A real philosopher, we are told, must work on a set of well-defined (metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, or aesthetic) problems, and must elaborate responses to those problems that take the form of a systematic “doctrine,” or at least of a coherent “theory” with explanatory and/or normative power. As Richard Rorty already remarked in 1976:
Ever since philosophy became a self-conscious and professionalized discipline, around the time of Kant, philosophers have enjoyed explaining how different their subject is from such merely “first-intentional” matters as science, art, and religion. Philosophers are forever claiming to have discovered methods which are presuppositionless, or perfectly rigorous, or transcendental, or at any rate purer than those of non-philosophers. . . . Philosophers who betray this gnostic ideal (Kierkegaard and Dewey, for example) are often discovered not to have been “real philosophers.”4Institutional affiliation is now also systematically used as a distinctive mark of belonging: if you don’t work in a university philosophy department, you surely aren’t a real philosopher!
In Don’t Forget to Live, Hadot defies these entrenched and prejudicial narratives and problematizes the dogmatic aspect of these disciplinary practices. By putting Goethe next to canonical figures in the history of philosophy such as Plato, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, or Nietzsche, he questions the rigid idea that philosophers have of their own discipline, and their way of writing the history of philosophy itself. This, of course, should not entirely come as a surprise for the careful reader of Hadot: his redefinition of philosophy, not as a set of doctrines and theories, but as a practice of self-transformation and a way of life, entails the urgent task of redrawing the boundaries between philosophy and other disciplines. Even more radically, by characterizing philosophy’s fundamental endeavor in terms of the elaboration and practice of a series of “spiritual exercises”—which, as he insists once more in the preface to this book, do not inevitably have any religious connotation, but are “acts of the intellect, or of the imagination, or of the will,” by means of which “the individual tries to transform their way of seeing the world, in order to transform themselves”5—Hadot implicitly suggests that drawing those boundaries in advance will always lead us to exclude from the domain of philosophy figures and texts that are, in fact, fundamental to it.
One of Hadot’s main goals is to get his readers to understand that operating with a preformed and fixed idea of who should count as a philosopher and who shouldn’t will necessarily lead them to unduly limit their chances to read and experience a variety of ancient and modern texts as occasions to practice philosophy as an exercise of self-transformation, at one and the same time intellectual and ethical. This insight is crucial to understanding why Hadot treats Goethe as a philosopher tout court, attributing to his texts a philosophical relevance as significant as Epictetus’s or Nietzsche’s texts. In Hadot’s view, Goethe is one of the most important modern thinkers to reactivate the ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life. As Hadot convincingly shows in this book, Goethe reflects upon and practices some of the very same spiritual exercises that also characterized ancient philosophy: the exercise of concentration on the present moment, the so-called “view from above,” cosmic consciousness, and the “Yes” to life and the world in both their exhilarating and their terrifying aspects. Through these exercises, Goethe, as many others before him, attempts to detach himself from his particular and partial perspective, and to attain thereby universality and objectivity—at least as far as any human being can—and to conjoin the traditional memento mori (Don’t forget that you will die) with the Spinozian memento vivere (Don’t forget to live in the present), two philosophically intertwined experiences.
Hadot’s conception of philosophy, characterized by the claim that philosophical discourse should ultimately be in the service of philosophical life, thus clearly opens up the possibility of recognizing the philosophical relevance and insight of works that are traditionally considered as belonging to disciplines different from philosophy: poems, novels, plays, paintings and sculptures, pieces of music, movies—insofar as they can all (at least potentially) contribute to the transformation of ourselves and our lives. They merit being conceived of as domains that give rise to spiritual exercises analogous to those practiced by, for example, Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus.
In a general way we can say that art, poetry, literature, painting, or even music can be a spiritual exercise. The best example is the work of Proust, because his search for lost time is an itinerary of consciousness, which, thanks to the exercises of memory, rediscovers the sentiment of its spiritual permanence. This is very Bergsonian.6
The point here isn’t to treat poems, paintings, or pieces of music as interesting examples to use in a philosophy book in order to better illustrate a theoretical argument, but to attribute to them the status of philosophical contributions in their own right. Of course, not every text, work of art, or piece of music can actually play this transformative role, but there is no reason to exclude any of them a priori—just because they don’t belong to the preformed idea we have of philosophy. Moreover, not all texts belonging to the traditional philosophical canon also belong to the tradition or conception of philosophy as a way of life that Hadot uncovers and valorizes in his works. Yet the latter conception of philosophy can also be helpfully used to look at some texts in a different light, emphasizing aspects of them that would go unnoticed if all we cared about were abstract concepts and theories.
In short, Hadot urges us to rethink our idea of philosophy not in order to replace the traditional, dogmatic idea we have of philosophy with a different but equally dogmatic definition of it, but to allow us to see philosophical value in a variety of different forms of human creation—and perhaps to realize that, no matter our day job, we can aspire to and live a philosophical life, if only we make that existential choice.
Translator’s Introduction
The present work is a translation of N’oublie pas de vivre: Goethe et la tradition des exercices spirituels, the last published monograph by Pierre Hadot, who died two years after its publication in 2008.
In many ways, it is one of Hadot’s most personal works. As he looks back after eighty years of life, well aware of his approaching death, he turns to one of the guiding spirits who had accompanied him throughout his life: Goethe. Although he had published occasional short pieces in which Goethe had played a key role, this is the first and only monograph he devoted to the great German polymath.
The reader quickly notes the extent to which a lifetime of reading Goethe had rendered Hadot intimately familiar with every aspect of his wide-ranging work. For although Hadot’s main area of speciality was, of course, the history of Greek and Latin philosophy, he stood out from most of his French contemporaries by his thorough familiarity with German literature: thus, he published articles on Kant and Nietzsche and initially thought of writing a doctoral dissertation on Rilke and Heidegger. Throughout his life, however, Goethe, several editions of whose complete works lined the bookshelves of the home Hadot shared with his German-born wife, Ilsetraut, in Limours, France, held a special place in his heart. This was especially true of the older Goethe, as he appears especially in the Conversationswith Eckermann, that work, consisting of interviews with Goethe over the last nine years of his life, which Nietzsche famously called “the best German book there is.” As he grew older and faced the prospect of death, Hadot increasingly found strength and hope in Goethe’s calm acceptance of his own personal mortality and, above all, in his unabated love of life.
To a certain extent, Goethe’s intellectual development shows some parallels to Hadot’s own. After his youthful Sturm und Drang period, with its glorification of the tempestuous, individualistic, Romantic genius, and trying his hand at almost every literary genre and area of learning, Goethe gradually came to see the value and necessity of dedicating oneself to a life of service to others. In a similar way, Hadot, who had begun by working on the mystical philosophy of Plotinus and the abstruse theology and metaphysics of Marius Victorinus and Porphyry of Tyre, gradually turned toward the study of those Hellenistic philosophers, such as the later Stoics Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, who focused on more practical questions, such as how we should live our lives. Thanks in part to the influence of his beloved wife, Ilsetraut, Hadot came to see philosophy more and more as a way of life, the purpose and justification of which was to inspire as broad a circle of readers as possible to transform themselves, with a view to leading a flourishing life that was rich, full, and authentic. The means to this goal, Hadot believed, was the practice of what he famously called “spiritual exercises,” techniques of self-transformation which, he believed, constituted the essence of philosophy and could still, when suitably modified, do so today. Thus, it seems perfectly appropriate that, near the end of his life, he should return to the study of the practice of spiritual exercises in one of his most beloved authors, Goethe. He no doubt believed that Goethe served as a perfect exemplar of the results to which the lifelong, assiduous practice of such exercises could lead: a rich, full, active, and productive life lived with full appreciation of the infinite value of every moment, combined with an unconditional acceptance of even the seemingly difficult and tragic aspects of human existence.
As compared with my previous translations of Hadot’s books, the present work presented new challenges, especially when it came to translating Goethe. Following my previous practice, I first produced literal English translations of Hadot’s French versions of Goethe’s texts, and then compared them with the original German. The results were often quite different from the French translations used by Hadot, some of which were quite old and sometimes departed considerably from what I take to have been the meaning of Goethe’s original texts. In the past, when such divergences occurred, I would get together with Pierre Hadot, and the two of us would reach compromise solutions. Sadly, this was no longer an option, but I have sought a middle ground between faithfulness to the original German and faithfulness to Hadot’s interpretation of Goethe’s words and thought. The result may not always be aesthetically pleasing—I am no poet and have made no attempt to reproduce the rhymes and rhythms of Goethe’s incomparable verse. Yet I hope Pierre Hadot himself would not have considered the result a betrayal.
Michael Chase
Victoria, Canada, January 2022
Preface
Goethe has always been one of my favorite authors. It was time to collect several of the studies I have devoted to him in one publication, while rethinking them.1 This, then, is the origin of this book, which ultimately refers to the practice in Goethe of what I have called “spiritual exercises,” inspired by ancient philosophy, but taken up and developed by a long tradition in Western philosophy.
The expression “spiritual exercise,” which has been used by some historians of thought, such as Louis Gernet and Jean-Pierre Vernant, or authors, such as Georges Friedmann, does not have a religious connotation, whatever some critics may believe. They are acts of the intellect, or of the imagination, or of the will, that are characterized by their goal: by means of them, the individual tries to transform her way of seeing the world, in order to transform herself. The point is not to inform, but to form oneself.
To begin, I will study the exercise, dear to Goethe, of concentration on the present instant, which allows us to intensely live each moment of existence without letting ourselves be distracted by the weight of the past or the mirage of the future.
The second chapter refers to another exercise: the view from above, which consists in distancing oneself from things and events and trying to see them from an overall perspective, detaching oneself from one’s individual, particular, and partial viewpoint. This exercise can be purely imaginative, but it can also correspond to a physical action, like climbing a mountain.
The third chapter is devoted to the exegesis of the poem Originary Words (Urworte), which is a description of human destiny. This time, the spiritual exercise is situated at the level of hope, the figure that crowns the poem and, for Goethe, represents a fundamental attitude.
Throughout these three chapters, we can observe one constant attitude in Goethe: amazement at life and existence, despite their painful or terrifying aspects. A fourth chapter is therefore devoted to what I have called the Yes to life and to the world, and to the kinship that exists between Goethe and Nietzsche in this perspective.
Throughout this book, Goethe’s deep love for life is expressed, particularly in the poem we shall study later on,2 in which the memento mori (don’t forget to die) of the Christians, Platonists, and Romantics is opposed to Goethe’s memento vivere (don’t forget to live), inspired by Spinoza. When Wilhelm Meister, in his Years of Apprenticeship,3 visits the “Room of the past,” he reads this motto: “Gedenke zu leben,” “Don’t forget to live,” which is a translation of memento vivere.
As I was writing this book, feeling myself growing old, I was haunted by the memento mori. Yet under Goethe’s influence, I understood the full importance of the memento vivere, and then I thought that the Goethean motto “Don’t forget to live” could very well epitomize the content of my book and stand as its title.
After having made this choice, I discovered that in 2000, Hans-Jürgen Schings, the great expert on Goethe, had already written an article entitled “Gedenke zu leben. Goethes Lebenskunst” (“Don’t forget to live. Goethe’s art of living”).4 The author was kind enough to send me his text. This extremely interesting study sets forth Goethe’s art of living by means of a psychological and moral analysis of several of Goethe’s characters, as well as of the personality of Winckelmann, as it appears in Goethe’s praise of the latter.
Faust and Edward, one of the characters of Elective Affinities, represent what Goethe’s art of living rejects: Faust, because of his inability to concentrate on the present instant, and Edward by his hypochondria and his whims. Opposite them is Winckelmann, a true man of antiquity, who possesses the secret of the art of living, and Wilhelm Meister, who gradually learns to live by devoting himself to action and the service of mankind and to renunciation. The reader will thus discover in Hans-Jürgen Schings’s remarkable study many aspects of the art of living according to the author of Faust that I have not dealt with in the present work.
I thank first of all Hélène Monsacré, who suggested that I publish this work and obtained precious documents for me. Without the devotion of Concetta Luna, the book could not have been completed; I must express my deepest gratitude to her. Particular thanks also go to Jean-Pierre Fauvet, who collected an abundant documentation for me. I also benefited from the precious assistance and advice of Catherine Balaudé, Novella Bellucci, Herman Bonne, Blanche Buffet, Arnold I. Davidson, Gunter Gebauer, Ilsetraut Hadot, Dieter Harlfinger, Fabienne Jourdan, Birgitta Kessler, Klaus Schöpsdau, and Alain Segonds. My thanks to them all.
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