Philosophy as a way of living

The word school comes from the Greek skholé — leisure.

You did not attend the Academy just to learn — the schools of antiquity presupposed prior knowledge — but rather to be transformed.

This is the argument Pierre Hadot makes in Philosophy as a Way of Life — one of the most important works of classical scholarship of the twentieth century. 

Hadot spent decades studying the ancient philosophical schools and arrived at the following conclusion: ancient philosophy was not primarily theoretical. 

It was a set of spiritual exercises — practices of attention, meditation, self-examination, and contemplation through which a person gradually transformed how they perceived and inhabited the world.

The schools as ways of living

Each school organized these practices around a different central commitment.

For the Stoics, the fundamental exercise was the discipline of attention — learning to distinguish what is within your control from what is not, and training yourself, through daily practice, to desire only what depends on you. 

Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher who had been a slave, reduced the entire practice to a single distinction: some things are up to us, and some things are not. The philosophical life consisted in learning, slowly and with great difficulty, to act accordingly.

For the Epicureans, the goal was ataraxia — tranquility, freedom from disturbance. Epicurus established a community in a garden outside Athens where his followers lived together, practiced friendship, and cultivated the capacity to find pleasure in simple things. 

Philosophy was not a lecture but a therapy: the examination and dissolution of the fears — above all the fear of death — that prevent human beings from living well.

For the Platonists, the practice was contemplation — the gradual assimilation of the soul to the rational order of reality. 

In the Timaeus, Plato describes how the Demiurge fashioned the cosmos in the image of the eternal Forms, and how the philosopher, by studying that order, gradually brings their own soul into conformity with it. 

For Plato, to contemplate the cosmos was to be transformed by it.

What philosophy inquired into

Alongside this practical dimension, ancient philosophy constituted a structured inquiry into reality in its most fundamental dimensions. 

The Greeks asked — with a rigor and a comprehensiveness unmatched in antiquity — about the nature of beauty, justice, goodness, the soul, and being itself.

What is beauty itself? Not beautiful things — not the face, the statue, the sunset — but what makes beautiful things beautiful. What is justice? Not the laws of a particular city, but the principle that makes any law just or unjust. What is the good? Not what any individual happens to desire, but what any rational being, fully understanding their situation, would recognize as genuinely worth pursuing.

Though they appear distinct today, these questions are intimately connected. 

For Plato, beauty, justice, and goodness are not three separate subjects but three dimensions of a single reality — the Form of the Good, which is the highest object of philosophical inquiry and the source of all being and all truth. 

For Aristotle, the inquiry into the good life is inseparable from the inquiry into human nature: to know what you should do, you must first know what you are.

Why this still matters

The professionalization of philosophy in modern universities largely severed these two dimensions. 

Philosophy became a discipline — something you study, publish papers about, teach in seminars — rather than something you practice. 

The questions remained, but the commitment to being transformed by them quietly disappeared.

Hadot saw this as a loss. So did Nietzsche, who argued that every great philosophy is ultimately a confession — that the ideas a philosopher defends are inseparable from the life they are living. And so did Wittgenstein, who said that philosophy leaves everything as it is — meaning that it does not change the facts of the world, only how we see them. 

For Hadot, this is precisely where ancient philosophy went further: it aimed not just to clarify vision, but to transform the one seeing.

The ancient answer to the question "what is philosophy for?" was simple: it is for living well. Not comfortably. Not successfully. Well — in the full and demanding sense that requires knowing what you are, what the good is, and what it costs to pursue it.

That is where these newsletters have been heading. And it is, in a different register, where every serious philosophical text is heading too