Abstract
This paper compares Pierre Hadot’s work on the history of philosophy as a way of life to the work of Albert Camus. I will argue that in the early work of Camus, up to and including the publication of The Myth of Sisyphus, there is evidence to support the notions that, firstly, Camus also identified these historical moments as obstacles to the practice of ascesis, and secondly, that he proceeded by orienting his own work toward overcoming these obstacles, and thus toward a modern rehabilitation of ascesis. Moreover, in contrast to Hadot’s Platonism, Camus located the source of this practice in the pre-philosophical stage of Athenian tragedy. This points to a further contrast between these two figures, which has historical and cultural precedents, in the distinction between this pre-Platonic form of ascesis - favoured by Camus - and the latter Christian form of asceticism - favoured by Hadot, with the status of Platonic ascesis rendered in terms of prefiguring this Christian form of asceticism.
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Hadot’s ideas are explored in his books: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford; New York: Blackwell, 1995), hereafter abbreviated as PWL; What Is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap, 2004), hereafter abbreviated as WAP; and, more recently, in a collection of interviews, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Marc Djaballah (Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 2008), hereafter abbreviated as PAH.
Notebooks, 1935–1942, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Modern Library, 1965), hereafter abbreviated as N1.
‘Before Ethics: Camus’s Pudeur,’ MLN French Issue, Vol. 12 No. 4, September 1997, 674.
In Joseph McBride, Albert Camus: Philosopher and Littérateur (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), hereafter abbreviated as CMN.
Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage, 1970)
The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991), hereafter abbreviated as MS.
In Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage, 1970), hereafter abbreviated as NMC.
The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage,1992), hereafter abbreviated as R.
Notebooks, 1942–1951, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1991), hereafter abbreviated as N2.
Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? 257.
In Lyrical and Critical Essays.
For more detail regarding the relationship between ascesis and tragedy in Camus, see Matthew Lamb, ‘The Rebirth of Tragedy: Camus and Nietzsche’, Philosophy Today, vol. 55, no. 2, 2011, pp 96–108.
Jaeger, Werner, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia, (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961).
Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 164.
Peter J. Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 32.
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Lamb, M. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Albert Camus and Pierre Hadot. SOPHIA 50, 561–576 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0276-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0276-y