Hadot Spiritual Exercises

Pierre Hadot spent his career studying what the ancients meant by philosophy, and his conclusion was radical: philosophy, for the Greeks and Romans, was not a body of doctrine but a way of life. The philosophical schools — Stoic, Epicurean, Platonic, Skeptic — did not primarily differ in theoretical commitments. They differed in their practices — the daily exercises through which the practitioner cultivated specific cognitive and moral dispositions. Hadot called these practices spiritual exercises — not in the religious sense but in the sense that they worked on the pneuma, the animating disposition of the person. They were technologies for the cultivation of character. They did not add information to the practitioner's cognitive store; they shaped how the practitioner related to whatever information she already possessed.