Foreword to Finding Everett Ruess

 In the spring of 1992, a twenty-four-year-old man from suburban Washington, D.C., seeking self-knowledge and a meaningful challenge, hitchhiked to Alaska and walked into the wilderness to live off the land. His name was Chris McCandless. As one of his last acts before heading into the bush alone, he mailed a postcard to a friend that cheerfully declared,

Greetings from Fairbanks! This is the last you shall hear from me Wayne.… Please return all mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long time before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again, I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild.

Four months later, when McCandless’s emaciated remains were discovered by moose hunters near the northern boundary of Denali National Park, Outside magazine assigned me to write an article about the tragedy, which I subsequently expanded into a book that was published in 1996 as Into the Wild. In the summer of 1993, while immersed in the research for the book, I was chatting about the project with David Roberts when he remarked, “You know, McCandless sounds a lot like Everett Ruess …”

“Uh, who’s Everett Ruess?” I sheepishly inquired. Appalled at my ignorance, Roberts commanded me to get my hands on a copy of Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, a collection of Ruess’s letters and diary entries edited by W. L. Rusho, which had been published ten years earlier. As soon as I hung up the phone, I hurried out to my local bookstore and bought a copy, then stayed up the rest of the night reading it. By the time the sun came up I realized that Roberts was absolutely right: A number of the parallels between Ruess and McCandless were extraordinary.

Ruess disappeared in 1934, at the age of twenty, while on a solo trek through the red-rock canyon country of southern Utah—at the time a daunting expanse of wilderness imbued with a mystique comparable to that of present-day Alaska. Like McCandless, he was an idealist and a romantic. Both men felt a passionate attraction to risky endeavors in untrammeled landscapes. Here, for example, are two sentences from a postcard McCandless wrote while paddling alone down the Colorado River, sixteen months before embarking on his fatal Alaskan adventure:

I’ve decided that I’m going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up.

And here are a couple of lines from a letter Ruess sent in November 1934, shortly before he vanished without a trace:

As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time.

The uncanny resonance between these and other bits of writing by the two young adventurers was so arresting that a week after learning about Ruess from Roberts, I drove 1,200 miles from my home in Seattle to the headwaters of an obscure ravine called Davis Gulch, the site of Ruess’s last known camp. For most of its four-mile length, as I later described the defile in Into the Wild, it

exists as a deep, twisting gash in the slickrock, narrow enough in places to spit across, lined by overhanging sandstone walls that bar access to the canyon floor.… The country surrounding Davis Gulch is a desiccated expanse of bald rock and brick-red sand. Vegetation is lean. Shade from the withering sun is virtually non-existent. To descend into the confines of the canyon, however, is to arrive in another world. Cottonwoods lean gracefully over drifts of flowering prickly pear. Tall grasses sway in the breeze. The ephemeral bloom of a sego lily peeks from the toe of a ninety-foot stone arch, and canyon wrens call back and forth in plaintive tones from a thatch of scrub oak. High above the creek a spring seeps from the cliff face, irrigating a growth of moss and maidenhair fern that hangs from the rock in lush green mats.

Standing on the canyon floor, pondering the precise spot where Ruess cooked his beans and grazed his burros and slept under the stars, I hoped to divine something from the particulars of the setting—some clue about his essence—that would by extension shed some light, however obliquely, on McCandless. I was not disappointed. My visit to Davis Gulch motivated me to learn as much as I could about Ruess, and ultimately led me to include a chapter describing his abbreviated life and baffling disappearance in Into the Wild.

At the time, the best source of published information was Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty. Now, twenty-eight years after the publication of Rusho’s compilation, David Roberts has written the first comprehensive biography of Ruess. An irresistible read, Finding Everett Ruess is a remarkable book, the best thing Roberts has ever written. Although he doesn’t claim to solve the riddle of his subject’s death, Roberts presents an abundance of provocative new evidence that makes the mystery of Ruess’s evanescent existence more compelling than ever.

Anyone who was intrigued by the story of Chris McCandless is likely to find Finding Everett Ruess utterly fascinating.

Jon Krakauer

Nietzsche A Philosophical Biography

 

Man, Nietzsche contended, is a being that has leapt beyond the "bestial bounds of the mating season" (8,432) and seeks pleasure not just at fixed intervals but perpetually. Since, however, there are fewer sources of pleasure than his perpetual desire for pleasure demands, nature has forced man onto the "path of pleasure contrivance." Man, the creature of consciousness whose horizons extend to the past and future, rarely attains complete fulfillment within the present, and for this reason experiences something most likely unknown to any animal, namely boredom.
This strange creature seeks a stimulus to release him from boredom. If no such stimulus is readily available, it simply needs to be created. Man becomes the animal that plays. Play is an invention that engages the emotions; it is the art of stimulating emotions. Music is a prime exam-ple. Thus, the anthropological and physiological formula for the secret of art: "Flight from boredom is the mother of all art" (8,432).

Not a trace remains of the pathos of art when it is viewed in this manner. Could the so-called secret of art be any more trivial? Must the ecstasy of enthusiasm for art be reduced to a flight from the unalluring desert of the ordinary? Is art being degraded to mere entertainment?
Nietzsche flirted with this demystifying viewpoint devoid of pathos. He sought to desecrate art, which had been sacrosanct to him, and to cool his fervor in "antiromantic self-treatment" (2,371; HHH Preface § 2) to determine "how these things look if they are turned around" (2,17; HH I Preface § 3). This process involves not only an inversion of the order of precedence of moral values but also a shift from a metaphysical to a physical and physiological oudook.

However, even "boredom" has its aura of mystery and is imbued with a singular pathos by Nietzsche. Boredom, from which art provides a refuge, becomes terrifying—the yawning abyss of being. When people are bored, they regard the moment as an empty passage of time.

External events, as well as people's sense of self, become inconsequential. The phases of life lose their intentional tension and cave in on themselves like a soufflé removed from the oven too soon. Routines and habits that otherwise provide stability suddenly prove to be nothing more than façades. Finally, the eerie scenario of boredom reveals a moment of true feeling. When people find nothing to do with themselves, nothingness besets them. Against this backdrop of nothingness, art performs its task of self-stimulation—a virtually heroic enterprise, because people on the verge of a breakdown need to be entertained. Art steps in as a bridge to prevent succumbing to nihilist ennui. Art helps us live; without it, life cannot stem the onslaught of meaninglessness.

The formula of art as "flight from boredom" is rich in significance, assuming we take boredom to be an experience of nothingness. If we do so, however, we switch from the physiology of self-stimulation to the metaphysics of the horror vacui Nietzsche was a virtuoso of this leap from physics to metaphysics. He knew how to imbue his physiological disenchantment with a new metaphysical magic. For him everything was ultimately colossal.

Anything can take on colossal proportions—one's own life and perceptions or the world as a whole. Music is so attuned to the colossal power that it helps us endure despite everything. Colossal power became Nietzsche's lifelong theme.

from the book Nietzsche A Philosophical Biography
by Rudiger Safranski

Transformative Exemplars

 Pierre Hadot has transformed our idea not only of ancient philosophy, but of philosophy as such. From his early works on Neoplatonic philosophy to his last book on Goethe and the tradition of spiritual exercises, 1 Hadot has made us see and understand the value of ancient philosophy for the entire history of philosophy. According to Hadot, in ancient philosophy, all philosophical discourses, theories and abstractions are in the service of the philosophical life—the concrete practice of philosophy. Philosophy without flesh and soul, that is, without philosophers, is but an intellectual pastime, since it lacks the dimension of an existential choice to live in a certain way.

Hadot summarises his fundamental idea as follows:

[A]ll ancient philosophical schools refused to consider philosophical activity as purely intellectual, purely formal or theoretical. Rather, the ancients considered philosophy as a choice which committed a person’s entire life and soul. This is why the exercise of philosophy was not solely intellectual but could also be spiritual. The philosopher did not finally form his disciples only in the sense of a knowing how to speak or to debate, but a knowing how to live in the strongest and noblest sense of the term. It is to an art of living, a way of life that the ancient philosophers invited their disciples. 2 

This spiritual force of philosophy is not simply located in its ethical dimension. The practice of philosophy is found within each of its traditional disciplines: ethics, logic, physics. Philosophy is at one and the same time a practiced ethics, a practiced logic and a practiced physics. Each part of philosophy comprises a theoretical discourse and a lived practice. Hence:

lived philosophy is not limited to the practice of moral duties. It also involves a control of the activity of thought and a cosmic consciousness. Lived philosophy is thus a practice or a way of life which embraces all human activity; it is not only an ethics in the narrow sense of the word. 3

Living philosophy requires an appeal to the guidance of an exemplary figure who, in antiquity, was called a sage: “The philosopher will ask himself in all circumstances: ‘what would the sage do in this circumstance?’ ” 4 If some ancient philosophical schools considered the sage as “an ideal which is nearly inaccessible, more like a transcendent norm than a concrete figure,” 5 we must not forget that “the ideal figure of the sage has not been abstractly projected in the absolute, it is not a theoretical construction.” 6 Rather:

the figure of the perfect sage ultimately corresponds to the idealisation, the transfiguration or, as we might say, the canonisation of very concrete figures, who are these righteous men [ hommes de bien ], these sages living amongst human beings. 7  It thus becomes possible to understand why, in antiquity, biography was a philosophical genre of great value. The concept of figure , so important for Hadot’s interpretation, is strictly linked to this vision of philosophy. The exemplary life of the sage (a state of ideal and transcendent perfection) and the exemplary life of the philosopher (at least a relative perfection, a limited wisdom) delineate not merely an example (too particular and individual) but a figure, namely “a model, an ideal, that orients and inspires the way of life.” 8 

As the figure of the ancient sage is a model that orients human conduct, Hadot’s own work constitutes for us both the model of a radically new way of writing the history of philosophy, and of practicing philosophy as such.

Indeed, in order not to impose our own, modern categories and prejudices on the ancient texts that we read, and thus allow them to transform our idea of what philosophy is, we need to consider the activity of reading itself as a spiritual exercise. Hadot teaches us how to re- read the history of philosophy in order to create space for the idea of philosophy as a way of life.

When one reads a philosophical text—whether written by Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, Descartes, or Merleau-Ponty—it is critical, Hadot argues, that one tries to “undo oneself from one’s subjectivity,” thus overcoming one’s prejudices, habits and passions. And although a state of perfect objectivity is probably unattainable, it is still (as in the case of the figure of the sage) an “ideal that one must attempt to attain through a certain practice.” 9 As with the practice of other spiritual exercises, we can strive for spiritual progress, but without expecting spiritual perfection. Human, all too human, spiritual exercises never come to a definitive end for us; they are existential exercises that continue throughout the stages of our life. Yet objectivity for Hadot is nothing less than a guiding virtue, or better, a “spiritual exercise of detachment from the self” which allows one to “undo oneself from the partiality of the individual and impassioned self in order to elevate oneself to the universality of the rational self.” 10 If something like wisdom is still possible today, it depends, at least within the practice of philosophy, on the practice of this spiritual exercise.

Learning to read is a spiritual exercise that requires us to move away from the idea of an egoistic reading and to conceive of the practice of reading philosophical texts as essentially dialogical —the foundation of a genuine encounter both with others (the authors of the texts) and with oneself that transforms our way of seeing the world and of living. Thus, Hadot invites us to conceive of each philosophical text as a living reality, the result of an intellectual and social practice that we must take into account if we want to be able to really understand the force of the words we read. Just as a sage can be an exemplary figure, so a dialogical text can also become an active exemplar. Self-formation includes reading, meditating on, such exemplary texts. Hadot shows us how to engage in this practice of self-(trans)formative reading. At the end of his article “Spiritual Exercises,” quoting Vauvenargues, Hadot expresses the wish that his article be able to make his readers love “a few old truths,” and he continues:

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.” 11 

Reading as a spiritual exercise has three main aspects. To understand the meaning and scope of a philosophical text, Hadot argues, one must first ask what the author must say—for example, because he belongs to a certain philosophical school, or because of the literary genre being employed, or because he addresses “a particular audience that is more or less formed.” Second, one must ask what the author can say—for example, he may exaggerate the presentation of a doctrine in order to produce a more striking effect on the mind, or be unfaithful to the dogmas of his own school because he wants “to adapt to a certain audience.” Finally, one must ask what the author wants to say, his “deep intention,” provided however that one does not try to decipher his “more or less secret psychology,” but attempts to understand the “choice made with regard to the goal of his work, his mode of presentation, his method, the way in which he has been able to play with all the rules that impose themselves upon him.” 12 

Thus, by criticising historical psychology, Hadot once again clearly suggests that looking at the past from our own, modern point of view necessarily implies missing its distinctiveness—and its value.

If it is true, as Michel Foucault once claimed, that one of our main tasks, today, is to elaborate an ethics which does not rely on religion, law or science, and that Greco-Roman society provides us with the example of an ethics which does not depend on these points of reference, 13 then learning how to read ancient philosophical texts is one of the most crucial spiritual exercises that we should learn how to practice. Thus, according to Hadot, “there is no point in distorting the meaning of a text in order to adapt it to the requirements of modern life, or to the aspirations of the soul, and so on.” 14 What we must learn to do is precisely to overcome our modern demands and our purely personal aspirations. Otherwise, self- transformation will be, at best, limited and superficial. Hadot’s lifelong philosophical work, and the exemplary texts collected in this volume, constitute for us a model of this fundamental philosophical task.

January 2020  Arnold I. Davidson 15 & Daniele Lorenzini 16

from the book The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot Philosophy as Practice

Writing as a spiritual exercise

 

As we have seen throughout these analyses, the Meditations appear to be variations on a small number of themes. The result of this is the large number of repetitions they contain, which are sometimes almost verbatim. We have already encountered several examples of this, and the following ones can be added:

How could that which does not make a man worse, make life worse? (II, 11, 4)

That which does not make a man worse than he is, does not make his life worse, either…. (IV, 8).

All is ephemeral: that which remembers, and that which it remembers (IV, 35).

Ephemeral… is he who remembers and that which he remembers (VIII, 21, 2).

Nothing is so capable of producing greatness of soul (III, 11, 2).

Nothing is so capable of producing greatness of soul (X, 11, 1).

Many more examples could be cited, including long developments such as VIII, 34 and XI, 8, both of which are structurally parallel, and are devoted to the power which man has received from God to reunite himself with the All from which he has separated himself.

The advice on distinguishing within each thing “that which is causal” from “that which is material” is repeated almost ten times, with only very slight variations. Here we can recognize one of the fundamental structures of Stoic physics,8 and therefore—once again—the technical nature of the formulas Marcus uses. But Marcus does not merely repeat this distinction as if he were reproducing something he had learned in a Stoic school; for him, it has an existential meaning. To distinguish the causal element is to recognize the presence within oneself of the hēgemonikon, that is, the principle which directs all being. This is that principle of thought and judgment which makes us independent of the body, and the principle of liberty which delimits the sphere of “that which depends on us,” as opposed to “that which does not depend on us.”

Marcus does not say this; however, we can deduce it from the overall structure of his system. He is content merely to recommend to himself to apply this distinction, without ever giving an example which might help us to understand what this exercise might mean. The reason is that Marcus has no need of examples; he knows perfectly well what he’s talking about. These formulas, which are repeated throughout the Meditations, never set forth a doctrine. Rather, they serve only as a catalyst which, by means of the association of ideas, reactivates a series of representations and practices, about which Marcus—since he is writing only for himself—has no need to go into detail.

Marcus writes only in order to have the dogmas and rules of life always present to his mind. He is thus following the advice of Epictetus, who, after having set forth the distinction between what does and does not depend on us—the fundamental dogma of Stoicism—adds:

It is about this that philosophers ought to meditate; this is what they should write down every day, and it should be the subject of their exercises (I, 1, 25).

You must have these principles at hand (procheira) both night and day; you must write them down; you must read them (III, 24, 103).

The Stoic philosophical life consists essentially in mastering one’s inner discourse. Everything in an individual’s life depends on how he represents things to himself—in other words, how he tells them to himself in inner dialogue. “It is not things that trouble us,” as Epictetus said (Manual, §5), “but our judgments about things,” in other words, our inner discourse about things. I will have a great deal to say later on about the Discourses of Epictetus, which were collected by his disciple Arrian. They depict Epictetus speaking with his students during his philosophy classes, and, as Arrian says in his brief preface, “When he spoke, he certainly had no other desire than to set the thoughts of his listeners in motion toward what is best… when Epictetus spoke these words, his audience could not help feeling just what this man wanted them to feel.”

Epictetus’ speech, then, was intended to modify his audience’s inner discourse. We are thus in the presence of two therapies: one was that of the word, practiced in a variety of forms, by means of striking or moving formulas and with the help of logical and technical rational processes, but also with the help of seductive and persuasive imagery. Another was the therapy of writing for oneself, which, for Marcus, consisted in taking up the dogmas and rules of action as they were stated by Epictetus—all the while addressing himself—and assimilating them, so that they might become the principles of his inner discourse. Therefore, one must constantly rekindle the “representations” (phantasiai) within oneself, in other words, those discourses which formulate dogmas (VII, 2).

Such writing exercises thus lead necessarily to incessant repetitions, and this is what radically differentiates the Meditations from every other work. Dogmas are not mathematical rules, learned once and for all and then mechanically applied. Rather, they must somehow become achievements of awareness, intuitions, emotions, and moral experiences which have the intensity of a mystical experience or a vision. This spiritual and affective spirituality is, however, quick to dissipate. In order to reawaken it, it is not enough to reread what has already been written. Written pages are already dead, and the Meditations were not made to be reread. What counts is the reformulation: the act of writing or talking to oneself, right now, in the very moment when one needs to write. It is also the act of composing with the greatest care possible: to search for that version which, at a given moment, will produce the greatest effect, in the moment before it fades away, almost instantaneously, almost as soon as it is written. Characters traced onto some medium do not fix anything everything is in the act of writing. Thus, we witness a succession of new attempts at composition, repetitions of the same formulas, and endless variations on the same themes: the themes of Epictetus.

The goal is to reactualize, rekindle, and ceaselessly reawaken an inner state which is in constant danger of being numbed or extinguished. The task—ever-renewed—is to bring back to order an inner discourse which becomes dispersed and diluted in the futility of routine.

As he wrote the Meditations, Marcus was thus practicing Stoic spiritual exercises. He was using writing as a technique or procedure in order to influence himself, and to transform his inner discourse by meditating on the Stoic dogmas and rules of life. This was an exercise of writing day by day, ever-renewed, always taken up again and always needing to be taken up again, since the true philosopher is he who is conscious of not yet having attained wisdom.

From:

The inner citadel: the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius / Pierre Hadot; translated by Michael Chase.

Goethe and the Tradition of Spiritual Exercises Pierre Hadot

 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.

Who can climb And remain silent?

On the way to Toulon they visited the notorious fortress where Louis XIV kept for many years a state prisoner in detention -the mysterious, unidentified Man in the Iron Mask. For Arthur this was a mental preparation for the impressions he would gain in the great arsenal of Toulon, the quarters of the galley slaves. Visitors were admitted there as if to a zoo: the convicts were chained up but could be viewed. Anyone was bound to be seized with horror. Arthur's mother reflected in her travel account on what might happen if the slaves were to break out one day: 'a neighbourhood full of horror'.

Arthur reacted differently. His imagination was stimulated not by fear for the intact world outside but by dismay at the pitiable world inside. 'They [the galley slaves] are divided into three classes,' he wrote in his diary on 8 April 1804; 'the first is made up of those who have committed only minor crimes and are here for a short time, deserters, soldiers guilty of insubordination, etc.: they only have an iron ring around one of their feet and walk about freely, i.e. within the arsenal, for no for<;at is allowed into the city. The second category consists of major criminals: they work in twos, chained together by their feet with heavy chains. The third category, the most serious criminals, are forged to the benches of the galley which they do not leave at all: these are employed on such work as they can perform sitting down. The fate of these unfortunates seems to me far more terrible than a death sentence. The galleys, which I have seen from the outside, seem to be the dirtiest, the most revolting place of sojourn imaginable. The galleys no longer put out to sea; they are old condemned ships. The beds of the for<;ats are the benches to which they are chained. Their food is only water and bread, and I do not understand how, without more substantive nourishment and consumed by grief, they do not succumb to their heavy labour; for during their slavery they are treated entirely like beasts of burden: it is terrible to think that the life of these miserable galley slaves, if that is not an exaggerated word, is totally devoid of joy: and for those whose sufferings have no end even after twenty-five years, also totally devoid of hope: can one imagine a more terrible sensation than that of one of those wretches, chained to a bench in the dark galley, from which nothing but death can sever him!-For some perhaps his sufferings are made worse by the inseparable company of the one chained to him by the same chain. And when finally the moment arrives which he has longed for with desperate sighs for ten or twelve years: the end of his slavery: what is to become of him? He returns to a world for which he has been dead for ten years: what prospects he might have had when he was ten years younger have vanished; no one wants to take in anyone coming from the galley: and ten years of punishment have not purged him of a moment's crime. He is bound to become a criminal for a second time and to end up on the gallows - I had a shock when I heard that there were six thousand galley slaves here. The faces of these men might provide appropriate material for physiognomical reflections' (TD, 15 5 ).

Arthur Schopenhauer attached more than mere physiognomical reflections to these impressions. The arsenal of Toulon left in him a supply of garish images, to which he was to refer back later in elucidating, in his Metaphysics of the Will, the fettering of individual existence and reason to the anonymous will to live: we are all galley slaves of the will that passes through us. Before all reason we are chained to a blind urge of self-assertion. The chain from which we are dangling simultaneously links us to our fellow men. Any movement we make ultimately causes pain to another being.

In Toulon, Arthur experienced that captivity from outside, as a kind of spectacle approached by an observer. But if captivity is universal, where then is the point of the observer? Where is there an outside? How can the universal become a spectacle? To this question Arthur Schopenhauer would subse-quently give a very delicate answer, an answer formulated in the language of subject philosophy, of Buddhism, of Pietist mysticism and of Platonism: there is a transcendental immanence, there is a super-earthly height without a heaven, there is divine ecstasy without God: the ecstasy of pure cognition is possible; the will can turn against itself; it burns in itself and becomes all eye: it no longer is, it only sees.

Still on his tour young Arthur Schopenhauer found occasion to experience the first models of such metaphysics of height. These were experiences of height in the literal sense.

Three times on his journey Arthur climbed a mountain: first the Chapeau near Chamonix, then Mount Pilatus, and finally the Schneekoppe in the Bohemian Giant Mountains. Each time he wrote an extensive report in his diary. The entries are high flights stylistically as well. Whereas normally he recorded his experiences with what could be a good deal of dutiful pedantry, these accounts of his climbs vibrate with the sense of an overwhelming experience, lending the report vigour and splendour.

First the ascent of the Chapeau. His way led him past an extensive glacier massif known as the Mer de glace. It was furrowed by rifts and crevasses, and at times masses of ice hurtled thunderously into the abyss. 'This spectacle, the sight of the huge masses of ice, the booming crashes, the roaring torrents, the rocks all round with waterfalls, up above the floating summits and snow-capped mountains, all this bears an indescribably wonderful imprint, one sees the enormity of nature, it is no longer everyday nature here, it has stepped out of its bounds, one feels one is closer to it' (TD, r 86).

This was an ennobling, a proud proximity; up there like and like were joined, down below were everyday things. Whoever climbs a mountain seeks nature at its best, but also at its most merciless, when anything human is rejected. 'In striking contrast to this sublime grand view was the laughing valley far below!' (TD, r 86). Up there, where Arthur stood, there was nothing to laugh about. Man is eclipsed, nature can step out of its 'bounds'. Whoever stands up to it passes the test of heroic solitude.

All this, of course, is still half play-acting; there was no real danger about this mountain tour. The height reached was considerable only to a lowlander. But realism is of no importance here. Arthur Schopenhauer experienced the mountain as meaning. Scenery gave him an experience, and his experience chose a definite scenery: that of height.

Three weeks later, on 3 June 1804, he climbed Mount Pilatus with a guide. 'I felt dizzy as I cast a glance at the crowded space I had before me .... I find that such a panorama from a high mountain enormously contributes to the broadening of concepts. It is so utterly different from any other view that it is impossible, without having seen it, to gain a clear idea of it. All small objects disappear, only what is big retains its shape. Everything blends; one sees not a multitude of small separate objects but one big colourful radiant picture, on which the eye lingers with pleasure' (TD, 219).

Arthur sees what is flattering to him. What is small disappears, blends, swarms. One is no longer part of it. What is big retains its shape. And he who views what is big and is removed from the swarm, is great himself. One is no longer tied to 'separate objects', one is now only an 'eye' resting on a 'colourful radiant picture'. Later, Schopenhauer would call this distant-view enjoyment the 'world eye'.

Finally, on 3 o July 1804 -the journey was nearing its end-came the ascent of the Schneekoppe. It was a two-day excursion. At the foot of the peak Arthur and his guide spent the night at a chalet: 'We entered a room full of carousing servants .... It was unbearable; their animalic warmth ... gave off a glowing heat' (TD, 265). The 'animalic warmth' of humans crowding together - later Arthur Schopenhauer would find for this the image of porcupines huddling together against cold and fear.

Having torn himself away from the spiky proximity of humans, Arthur reached the peak of the mountain at sunrise. 'Like a transparent ball and much less radiant than when one views it from below, the sun floated up and cast its first rays on us, mirrored itself first in our delighted glances, below us in the whole of Germany it was still night; and as it rose higher we watched the night creeping back lower and eventually yielding also down below' (TD, 266).

He was already in the light while down below darkness still reigned. 'One sees the world in chaos below one.' On top, however, all is of incisive clarity.

And when the sun finally lights up the valley, it does not discover there smiling, delightful plains but offers to the gaze 'the eternal repetition and the eternal alternation of mountains and valleys, forests and meadows and towns and villages' (TD, 266).

Why then undergo the hardships of descent? Eventually, however, it grew too cold at the top. In the chalet on the mountainside was a book in which hikers could leave their names for posterity. Arthur's entry has been found there:

Who can climb 

And remain silent?

Arthur Schopenhauer from Hamburg.

Quote from the book Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy
by Rudiger Safranski

Max I. Dimont - The Indestructible Jews

Max Dimont - The Indestructible Jews ... is a candid exposition of the concept of Jewish supremacy. ...Dimont says that Israel did not tie her fate to an outside power. Nothing could be further from the truth....Dimont’s audacity, his hypocrisy—call it “chutzpah,” if you will— reflects, in fact, the very attitude that has always dictated the Jewish attitude toward the rest of the world: those whom they refer to as “the Other,” “the Gentiles,” “the Goyim”—the non-humans, the cattle, the instruments of Satan.

Michael Collins Piper:

Talking of the birth of Israel as a nation-state in 1948, Dimont wrote:

"She was the only country born in the aftermath of World War II which, without enslaving other nations, without exploiting a segment of her own population, or without tying her fate to an outside power, succeeded in securing a standard of life, liberty, and law on a par with that of the most advanced Western nation.

How was all of this achieved in such a short time, in less than the lifespan of one generation? How could this small country, ravaged,denuded and despoiled for two thousand years by Romans, Byzantines, Sassanids, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamelukes,Turks, and Englishmen, have hoisted herself from serfdom to independence, from beggary to affluence, from cultural poverty to intellectual eminence in five short decades ...?

Where did the capital come from to pay for the industrial plants, for the high standard of living, for her cultural activities?"

Dimont goes on at some length in this grandiose manner of expression, never recognizing the fact that this country (Israel) which was born in the aftermath of World War II did, in fact, enslave other nations in assuming its statehood. We refer, of course, to the Christian Palestinians and the Muslim Palestinians.We refer, also, to the German people whose future as a nation-state seems (at least at this point) to be forever interconnected with the state of Israel due to the fact that the German people have been oppressed, they have been enslaved, through the massive billions of dollars in annual “reparations” that are extracted from the German people and paid to Israel.

Voltaire—the great French freethinker of the Enlightenment—although considered an “atheist,” very much shared Christ’s concerns and in his frequent writings on the Jewish Problem—also known as “the Jewish Question”—he reflected a point of view that, in its own fashion, acknowl-edges the very Jewish mindset set forth by Max Dimont so many centuries later.Voltaire wrote:

"The Jews are nothing but an ignorant and barbarous people who for a long time combined the most loathsome avarice with the most abominable superstition and an inextinguishable hatred toward all people by whom they are tolerated and through whom they are enriched.

The Jews are a horror to all people by whom they were admitted . . . at all times Jews have disfigured the truth by absurd fables. The Jews are the greatest scoundrels who ever besmirched this earth. The small Jewish nation dares to show an irreconcilable hatred toward other people’s possession."

And while Max Dimont bragged of the “indestructible” nature of the Jews and of how they survived the decay and collapse and destruction of other religions and civilizations, Charles Newdigate, a forthright member of the British House of Commons, said in 1858 that he had gleaned the nature of the Jewish role in history, based precisely on theTalmud of which Dimont later wrote so glowingly. Newdigate spoke of the Talmud’s “tendencies” which were of an “immoral,anti-social and anti-national character.” He said:

"The Jews have directly and indirectly brought about agitations and revolutions.They have caused ruin and misery to their fellow creatures by the most wicked and cunning devices.The cause of the odium against them lies in the character of Judaism itself which affords its votaries no point of centralization based on morality."

And while much has been written about the vile anti-Christian and anti-Christ ravings within the Talmud, it is often forgotten that the Talmud, as it emerged in Babylon,that has indeed been the foundation—as Max Dimont (among many others) has attested—for the long term Jewish world view, one which foresees ultimate Jewish triumph, the institution of what we know today as the New World Order.

from the book The New Babylon Those Who Reign Supreme, a Panoramic Overview of the Historical, Religious and Economic Origins of the New World Order by Michael Collins Piper

**

Even today, 12 centuries after the fact, Jews still gather in their synagogues on holidays to gloat over their destruction of the Goths, and Jewish writers openly boast of their treachery. The popular Jewish author and lecturer, Max I. Dimont, has taken particular satisfaction in the fate of the Gothic women, both in Spain and in those areas of Gaul subject to Moorish raiding parties from the south. In his best-selling book, The Indestructible Jews, Dimont writes: "As blond Christian maidens fetched fancy prices in the slave markets, raids in Christian lands by Muslim private entrepreneurs became big business. Female captives were pedigreed like dogs. Their Christian antecedents, their genuine blondness, their virginity, and their ability to bear children were all ascertained and notarized before they were marketed."

Dimont discreetly avoids mentioning that the slave merchants doing the pedigreeing and marketing of these White girls were, in most cases, Jews. What he does say is: "From the inception of Islam's conquest, Spanish Jews had soared to the highest government posts. A series of brilliant Jewish viziers -- viceroys -- enriched the caliphate's coffers and helped usher in an age of splendor and learning."