Ilsetraut Hadots Seneca:

Spiritual Direction and the Transformation of the Other

Matthew Sharpe, Deakin University

But how or when can we tear ourselves away from this folly? No man by himself has
sufficient strength to rise above it; he needs a helping hand, and someone to extricate him.
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 52.2

1. Introduction: Seneca in a Time of Virtue Ethics

One might have supposed that the emergence of virtue ethics as a third recognised position
in analytic moral philosophy would bode well for the return of ancient Stoicism to academic
prominence. Stoicism is in a sense the ancient virtue ethics, if we hold virtue ethics to involve
(a) the claim that the goal of life is happiness or flourishing; and (b) that the cultivation of the
virtues is very important, and maximally even sufficient for a happy life.1 The Stoics were the
only ancient school that held the latter, maximal claim: denying that either external goods or
pleasure could add anything worth humanly pursuing to virtue, securitas or tranquillity. The
modern return to favour of virtue ethics, admittedly, situates it within the concern of modern
moral theorists to define necessary and sufficient conditions for right action.2 However, here
again, the Stoics of all the ancient schools come closest to fitting this modern bill. Their term
kathkonta is usually translated duties, and all virtuous actions will perform these duties,
with wholly appropriate Stoic motivations.

Yet it remains Aristotle whom todays virtue ethicists call upon in their return to the
ancient idea of the virtues. It is the founding peripatetics account of these virtues, and (albeit
with some hesitations) the form of life they are necessary to achieve that we are asked to revisit
in order to steer a middle way between the inflexible consequentialist and deontological moral
rules, both of which give scant regard to the particular biographical, existential, or cultural
specificities of moral agents (Williams 2006, 174-196).

There are too many, and too great, historical reasons for this state of affairs to give an
adequate account of here. Despite its impressive systematic credentials, and despite its huge
influence on subsequent Western ideas (see Sellars 2016), Stoicism has fared rather badly in
the era of the professionalization of philosophy. As Katerina Ierodiakonou reflects in Topics

1
See (eg) the authors reflection on this subject in Sharpe (2013), 28-41.
2
Not simply the Stoics, but no ancient philosopher including Aristotle posed this definitional issue, at least in
these terms. In the classical perspective, as Bernard Williams (2006) in particular has reminded us, justice,
treating others fairly and equitably, was only one virtue amongst others.
in Stoic Philosophy: [c]lassicists, historians and philosophers in the nineteenth century,
working in the spirit of classicism, focused all their attention on the philosophers of the
classical period, Plato and Aristotle (Ierodiakonou 2001, 5). Tenneman, writing from a
Kantian perspective, criticised the Stoics supposed empiricism. Hegel famously situated the
Stoics ethics as a philosophical reflection of the decline of the ancient city state, and so as one,
soon surpassed stage in the historical dialectic. Historians like Zeller and Schwegler shared
this Hegelian evaluation of the Hellenistic era as one of cultural decline. As Windelband and
Ierodiakonou note, Roman philosophy, in generalincluding the great Roman Stoicscame
to be regarded, in the nineteenth century, as atheoretical and derivative, and of little scholarly
interest: the great moral principles of the Platonic and Aristotelian theory diminished in the
hands of the Stoics to a miserable utilitarian theory (Windelband, cited at Ierodiakonou 2005,
5; see 5-12).

In this light, the stocks of the Roman Stoic Senecaadmired throughout the medieval
world, and widely revered in the Renaissance and early modern periodsplummeted in the
19th century. Diderot in the last decades of the 18th century could still declaim: Seneca! You
are and you always will stand, together with Socrates, amongst all the great unfortunates and
the great men of Antiquity, one of the sweetest links between my friends and I, between learned
men of all ages and their friends (Diderot 1819, 276) Most nineteenth and twentieth
century philosophical scholars have viewed Senecas works as popular moralizing, without
deep theoretical foundations (see I. Hadot 2014, 181-194).3 Seneca, like the other Roman
Stoics, has been deemed eclectic in a pejorative sense: theoretically shallow and
philosophically inconsistent. To the extent that Seneca presents any systematic thinking,
according to such views, his is a watered-down version of the Hellenistic Stoics, mediated by
Middle-Stoicism, and shaped by a characteristically practical, Roman bent (cf. 132-140).
According to one leading American scholar, Brad Inwood, Seneca did not even have a coherent
theory about how we attain our ideas of the goal of life (cf. 375-403).

This is not to suggest that Rosalind Hursthouse and the other leading figures in todays
virtue ethical movement have been influenced by the nineteenth-century texts by which
Stoicisms decline from academic currency was instrumented. Nevertheless, their works
exclusive focus on Aristotle amongst the ancient ethicists inherits these longer-standing
evaluations. It has accordingly been quite another scholarly lineage that has been responsible
for a quite remarkable renaissance of Stoic philosophy in the new millennium. Through the
work of figures influenced by Pierre Hadot4, it has also informed the remarkable emergence of

3
Ilsetraut Hadot, Snque: direction spirituelle et pratique de la philosophie (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J.
Vrin, 2014). Due to frequency of its citation, from here on, this text will be referred to page numbers in brackets,
whereas author and date will be given for all other texts.
4
In what follows I will always refer to Pierre Hadot using his full name, reserving Hadot for Ilsetraut Hadot
exclusively.
international, virtual communities of professed Stoics or neo-Stoics. This scholarly lineage is
not moved by questions surrounding necessary and sufficient conditions for right action, and a
desire to find a third metaethical way between Kant and Bentham. It is shaped by a philological
concern to reread and understand the ancient Stoic, Epicurean, sceptical and other
philosophical writings as their authors understood themselves. It proposes that much ancient
philosophy, certainly that of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, was proposed and practiced
as a way of life or art of living, as well as a set of discourses concerning physics, theology,
logic and ethics.

For students of this lineage of contemporary scholarshipincluding work by Pierre

Hadot, Michel Foucault, Martha Nussbaum, John Sellars, Juliusz Domanski, and othersthe
2014 publication of Ilsetraut Hadots Snque: direction spirituelle et pratique de la
philosophie represents a genuine intellectual event. In large measure a French-language
translation of her 1965 PhD thesis, Seneca und die Grieschisch-rmische Tradition der
Seelenleitung (published as a monograph in German in 1969), Snque considerably expands
upon Hadots youthful text. She also makes several new philological proposals.5 Hadot
engages in heated debates with more recent continental and analytic approaches to reading
Seneca, notably including those of her bte noir, Brad Inwood (see Reydam-Shils 2015).

The aim of this chapter will be both to analyse, and to highlight the importance, of
Ilsetraut Hadots path-breaking work. Two things in particular strongly speak to the
importance of Ilsetraut Hadots work in light of todays virtue-ethical turn, but also the growing
literature on classical philosophy as a way of life, or form of cultura animi (cultivation of the
soul). First, reading the book against the background of todays neo-Aristotelianism and its
premises, the portrait of Seneca that Ilsetraut Hadot paints would see the Roman Stoic
exonerated from each of the charges characteristic of the 19th and 20th century dismissals of his
work. If we follow Hadots own philosophical direction, Seneca reassumes something like the
elevated place amongst the ancients that he enjoyed in earlier modern admirers like Michel
de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, or Denis Diderot: as both a great thinker, and a great writer.6

5
For instance, notably, that the Latin securitas for Seneca is not the equivalent of the Greek ataraxia, but is
instead related to akindunos/-s (to be without danger or fear) (224-226).
6
Point-by-point, Hadot restores Seneca as an orthodox, theoretically adept Stoic, decisively continuous doctrinally
with Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus: Senecas conception of agency is upheld as wholly consistent with Stoic
monism. Senecas (for Hadot similarly orthodox) Stoic conception of kathkonta or officia (usually translated as
duties) is defended as permitting real room for ethical progress towards wisdom and virtue (137-142; cf. 274-
276). Contra Inwood but again in a way consistent with Stoic orthodoxy (as argued by Bonhffer and Jackson-
McCabe), Hadots Seneca offers a deeply coherent account of how human beings can attain the goal of life (375-
403). We possess ek physes points of departure (aphormas), prolpseis or seeds of the virtues which we can
develop through practice and education. Virtue remains kata physin (according to nature (279; Ep. 94.9, 44-6;
49.11; 108.8)). It is just thatfor Senecas Stoicism as for Aristotle and legatees (Nic. Eth. II 1)wisdom or
 Second, Ilsetraut Hadots Snque adds several vital chapters, as it were, to the growing
literature examining ancient philosophy conceived as promoting given ways of life or means
of self-cultivation. Snque argues that Seneca conceived of philosophy and philosophical
writing as means of direction spirituelle or cultivating of the other.7 For this metaphilosophy,
the goal of philosophising is to guide others towards the best kind of life. This conception of
philosophy is thus intersubjective from the ground up. In particular, it supposes a particular
brand of relationship between a philosophical teacher and his student(s), in ways that other
accounts of philosophical self-cultivation or, in Foucaults formulation, the care of the self
can sometimes obviate (see P. Hadot 1993, 308-311).8

The structure of the chapter closely follows Hadots own structure in Snque. In
Section 2, we examine Hadots foundational reading of Senecas Epistles 94 and 95 in the
Letters to Lucilius, in the opening chapters of her work.9 For Hadot, these particular epistles
are vital for understanding Senecas larger philosophical self-conception as a spiritual
director: a self-conception which licenses not simply argument, but also counsel, rebuke and
exhortation; and not simply the work of adducing general ethical principles, but the art of
applying those principles in the mundane circumstances of a life.

Having established Hadots conception of Senecas paraenetic philosophical

discourses in Section 2, Section 3 reconstructs Hadots ensuing claims concerning the origins
and antecedents of philosophical spiritual direction in classical antiquity. Hadots book
provides an invaluable contribution to recent, French and English-language researches about
the preclassical precedents which the philosophical tradition of ethical cultivation inherited and
transformed.

Section 4 examines Hadots detailed portrait of Seneca as a Stoic, philosophical

spiritual director. Here in particular, we will be concerned to highlight just how much detail
Hadots Snque adds to other accounts of ancient philosophical cultivation. Hadot contrasts
Senecas spiritual direction directly with modern psychotherapy, showing how his work

virtue something isnt something human beings are born with, without need for habituation, education and what
Ilsetraut Hadot calls spiritual direction.
7
The term spiritual here does not indicate any supernatural dimension or mystical, extrarational commitment.
As in Pierre Hadots work, it aims to describe forms of direction that address both the body and mind of pupils,
not excluding their sentiments and imagination as well as their reason. See Pierre Hadot (1996), 82.
8
Pierre Hadot stresses the importance of schools like the Lyceum or Academy as institutional, social
embodiments of classical thought, in particular in What is Ancient Philosophy?, but our knowledge of the daily
workings of the schools remains fragmentary. See Testa (2016), 168-190. The practice of dialogue appears as
one spiritual exercise in Pierre Hadots and related accounts of ancient philosophy as a way of life, yet he did
not dedicate any extended piece or study to it (P. Hadot 2002: 28-32; 61-64).
9
In what follows, references in the text to the Letters will give the Epistle number followed by the section,
separated by a period, so (eg) Letter 15, section 4 becomes Ep. 15.4, etc. I have used the translations from the
Loeb Classical Library edition; volume 1 published 1917; volume 2 published 1920; volume 3 published 1925.
operates with a sophisticated diagnostic machinery which is matched to a set of subtle
pedagogical and therapeutic strategies, illustrated most fully in the Letters to Lucilius.

In Section 5, we draw in the threads, offering some brief remarks underscoring the
significance of this remarkable book.

2. From decreta to praecepta, the paraenetic dimension of Senecas philosophy

In Snque, Ilsetraut Hadot singles out Letters 94 and 95 of Seneca to Lucilius as having the
greatest significance for understanding Senecas entire oeuvre. In these two letters, which a
casual reading can pass over, Seneca proffers his responses to Aristo of Chios (1921, 2528),
and the latters scepticism about whether philosophical ethics can do more than adduce general
teachings (placita or decreta)competing theoretical views about the good, its different
species, the number, kind, unity or disunity of the virtues According to Aristo, there is
either no need (once we have a general ethical doctrine), or no practical possibility for
philosophers to provide any more specific praeceptio (precepts) directing people how to think
or act in particular situations. Philosophy, on Aristos view, can provide no specific guidance
about how to better a students character, and how they should live their lives (Ep. 94.2; cf.
Hadot 2014: 2527).10

In Senecas Letters 94 and 95, as Hadot stresses, the philosopher sides with the Stoic
Cleanthes against Aristo. Cleanthes, the second Stoic scholarch, had countered Aristo that to
produce a set of decreta without specific precepts to guide life is like showing the sick man
what he ought to do if he were well, instead of making him well (Ep. 94.5). Neither Seneca
nor Cleanthes means to exclude from ethics the role of decreta: general, reasoned accounts of
what it is to live well, directed in principle to all intelligent readers, by means of treatises or
textbooks. Nevertheless, as Hadot stresses, Seneca holds that if philosophy is to actually help
people live fulfilled lives, as against just talking about such lives, decreta are insufficient. The
philosopher interested in shaping practice by reasoning must also cultivate what Hadot calls a
paraenetic part of philosophy (une partie parntique (27)).

Such paraenesis (parnsis)11 presupposes and applies theoretical philosophy, and the
term is used almost synonymously by Hadot with spiritual direction itself (278).
Significantly, the paraenetic dimension to the ancient philosophical writings operate in Hadots
estimation in relative independence to the theoretical claims of the different philosophical
schoolsa claim which echoes Pierre Hadots (1996) claims about the spiritual exercises,

10
Aristos position here anticipates similar views put by Cooper (2012) or Inwood (2004).
11
Hereafter, I will render these terms paraenetic and paraenesis, acknowledging the limitation of the
translation.
like philosophical preparation for misfortunes or for death (55). Philosophical paraenesis
involves forms of persuasive speaking and writing. These assist and direct specific readers or
pupils in doing what the dogmatic ethics of Stoic theory delineates as optimally desirable, in
order to live in harmony with nature. Paraenetic philosophising hence adds specific praecepta,
addressing particular situation-types and cases, to general decreta.12 It engages in suasio:
directed counsel to people engaged in practical situations or those wrestling with particular
ethical or psychological problems. It includes also the philosophically-directed practice of
exhortatio of pupils to transform their ways of acting in the world (318). For it aims at
sculpting people (26), as by an art:

Then, comes the reply, if the other arts are content with precepts, wisdom will also be content
therewith; for wisdom itself is an art of living. And yet the pilot is made by precepts which tell
him thus and so to turn the tiller, set his sails, make use of a fair wind, tack, make the best of
shifting and variable breezesall in the proper manner. Other craftsmen also are drilled by
precepts; hence precepts will be able to accomplish the same result in the case of our craftsman
in the art of living (Ep. 95.7).

As modern commentators, we are encouraged to concern ourselves only with the

argumentative or conceptual content of philosophical writings, qua philosophy. This approach
sidelines considerations surrounding the forms of writing and rhetoric employed by the thinkers
we study. On the one hand, the resulting academic writing increasingly cultivates specialised
concerns and vocabularies, closed to extramural readerships. On the other hand, the model
presupposes that all philosophers should write in one or a restricted number of media, venues,
and styles; as if it didnt matter who was being addressed and for what ends, or as if there was
only one audience that mattered.

Like Pierre Hadot in his reading of ancient texts (P. Hadot 2009: 58-59), Ilsetraut Hadot
challenges these metaphilosophical presuppositions as parochial in two ways. First, she notes
that Seneca does not, by any means, propose to collapse philosophy into rhetoric, while he
recognises rhetorics importance for a philosophy that would provide guidance in life (Ep.
16.1). Here as elsewhere, there is no zero-sum game. Seneca shares Socrates and the Stoics
anxiety about the misuse of rhetoric for amoral, deceptive, or unphilosophical ends.
Philosophers should shape actions, not words. Simple language is better (205-8; cf. Ep. 110;
115.1; 40.4; 40.12). Second, Hadot is attentive to those Senecan passages wherein the Stoic,
echoing Cicero (cf. 204, 5055), shows that he appreciated the persuasive limits of purely
theoretical discourses. In a passage which Michel de Montaigne later cites (Montaigne [1580]
2003: 940), Seneca already criticised the idea that a purely syllogistic approach could affect
such deep path as the fear of death:

12
Compare the Introduction to Nussbaum (1994).
 Our master Zeno uses a syllogism like this: No evil is glorious; but death is glorious; therefore
death is no evil. A cure, Zeno! Will you not utter sterner words instead of rousing a dying
man to laughter? Indeed, Lucilius, I could not easily tell you whether he who thought that he was
quenching the fear of death by setting up this syllogism was the more foolish, or he who attempted
to refute it, just as if it had anything to do with the matter! (Ep. 82.9: cf. 83.4; 82.22; 94.27)13

Seneca was for a long time celebrated as a great Latin stylist. In the Renaissance, the
Senecan style was a recognised ideal. (Vickers 1968). Ilsetraut Hadot quotes Quintilian
reporting that the philosopher was already popular for this style amongst the youth of the later
Imperium (3645). As Hadot asks us to see things, Senecas style is closely related to his
philosophical persona. It is a function of his self-conception as a spiritual director. He shapes
his oeuvre around a practical awareness that to speak paraenetically involves different kinds of
rhetorical acts, with different aims, for different, specific audiences; compared with conveying
theory to an (in principle) universal audience:

Advice is not teaching; it rather engages the attention and rouses us, and concentrates the
memory, and keeps it from losing grip. We miss much that is set before our very eyes. Advice is,
in fact, a sort of exhortation (Ep. 94.25)14

The clipped Senecan sentence (cf. 5055), the well-formed verse and rhetorical
amplification (cf. 21113) for ethical effect: all of these, Hadot highlights, are valid and
necessary devices for a philosopher who wishes to ethically transform as well as intellectually
edify his charges. Senecas Letter 108 thus contrasts rhetorically crafted with unadorned prose,
with a view to their paraenetic powers to affect behavioural change. He finds in favour of the
former:

We talk much about despising money, and we give advice on this subject in the lengthiest of
speeches but our minds are struck more effectively when a verse like this is repeated: He
needs but little whose desires are few or: His wish is fulfilled, whose desires embrace nothing
/ beyond that which we truly need. When we hear such words as these, we are led towards a
confession of the truth. Even men in whose opinion no amount of money is enough, wonder
and applaud when they hear such words, and swear eternal hatred against money (Ep. 108.11-
12)

The philosophers task, qua spiritual director, is to find such persuasive words, whether in
verse or prose, treatise, tragedy or letter.

13
For criticism of these passages in Seneca, see Cooper (2004).
14
A particular example of the psychagogic value of precepts, cf. Ep. 94-25-27; 100, 5-8. Cf. the Proemium to
Ciceros Stoic Paradoxes on the need to replace staid syllogisms with lively presentation, to impress these ethical
truths upon a wider audience.
3. Hadots genealogy of philosophical spiritual direction

Before we examine further (in Section 4) the details of Hadots depiction of Senecas Stoic
spiritual direction, let us follow her argument as she presents it in Snque into her account of
the genesis of this conception of philosophy as spiritual direction. The turn to reconceiving
ancient philosophy as a way of life contrasts strikingly with most later modern understandings
of philosophical activity. It is then unsurprising that it should have implications for accepted
19th and 20th century accounts of the emergence of philosophical discourse in classical Greece,
for the basic conceptions of philosophia differ. Ilsetraut Hadots intriguing account of the
genesis of ancient philosophy as spiritual direction in the long third chapter of Snque (34
100) is much more extensive than any comparative genetic considerations in Pierre Hadots,
Michel Foucaults and related work (cf. P. Hadot 2002: 921; Foucault 2005). It is also deeply
intriguing on its own terms, and in relation to other more recent approaches to this subject.

The received, later modern account looking back to figures like John Burnet and, with
some variation, figures like Francis Cornford. Rational thought has, as it were, its official
identity papers, Pierre Vernant glosses this depiction of a parthogenetic miracle occurring,
without antecedent or cause, in the sixth century BCE, in the Greek cities of Asia Minor
(Vernant 2006: 371). In Cornfords version of this type of account, the Ionian physical
radically transformed the cosmological questions and theogonic answers posed by Homeric
and Hesiodic mythopoetic thought (Cornford [1912] 1957, 122-159). Classical philosophy
emerged through what Cornford calls a positivist search for a timeless order underlying the
temporal, disordered experience of nature. At a decisive moment in time, this positivism
came into interaction with a different, emergent set of Orphic and Pythagorean discourses that
elevated thought (with its bearer, the psych) as the medium uniquely capable of disclosing
such higher Truths (Cornford [1912] 1957, 160-283):

Among the Ionians, the new demand for positivity was from the start aimed at the absolute in the
concept of physis; in Parmenides, the new insistence on intelligibility is aimed at the absolute in
the concept of Being, unchanging and identical. Rational thought is torn between these two
contradictory demands, both of which represent a decisive break with myth (Vernant 2006:
380)

Pierre Vernant himself stands within a competing, anthropological lineage of thought on

this question in the 20th century. Thinkers in this lineage situates the emergence of philosophy
at the end of archaic Hellenic culture within at least two intersecting historical, as against purely
theoretical or intellectual, processes. On one hand, the emergence of the figure of the
philosopher, alongside the sophists, responded to a felt need in the classical perioda period
in which the traditional religious, monarchical and aristocratic orders had all been challenged
for figures commanding discourses concerning political life, able:

to describe the new political equilibrium that would make it possible to recover the harmony
that had been lost, and to re-establish social unity and stability by harmonizing the opposed
elements that were tearing the city apart (Vernant 2006: 388)
 On the other hand, figures like Louis Gernet (1981) and Marcel Detienne (1996) position
the philosopher as a legatee of a different cultural persona in the ancient Mediterranean: that
of august figures able to discern and reveal hidden or transcendent Truths. The philosopher in
this optic does not so much compete with the sophists, on political subjects; as with the poets,
on what we would call religious subjects. He indeed inherits something of the kudos of
Detiennes masters of truth in archaic Greece: the diviner, the inspired poet, the Godlike
King (Detienne 1996: 16; Vernant 2006: 382-3) or indeed of iatromanteis like Pythagoras who
emerged in the 6th and 5th centuries at the head of initiatory sects, and whose perceived access
to higher Truths was conditioned by ascetic practices of spiritual tension and concentration
(Vernant 2006: 384385; Gernet 1981, 354-360).

Hadots genealogy of philosophy as spiritual direction in Snque draws directly on

Marcel Detiennes work in particular. Yet it qualifies and adds to this anthropological lineage
of thought (cf. 7879 n. 36; 91 n. 143). Like Detienne or Gernet, and unlike Cornford and
Burnet, we can understand from Section 1 that Hadot is concerned with the philosopher as a
particular persona, as well as in philosophy as, per Cornford, a purely scientific endeavour
(Cornford 1957, 144-159). Yet Hadots notion of the spiritual director takes shape against the
background of different literary, sociopolitical and religious inheritances than those
emphasised by these anthropological accounts.15

Prephilosophical Greek culture, Hadot contends, had a vivid sensitivity to the

psychagogic power of poetic, aphoristic, incantational and ornamental language. It is this
awareness that she sees carried over into the conception of the philosopher as a spiritual
director, up to and including the Roman philosophers, like Seneca. Prephilosophical forms of
this paraenetic language included the lapidary maxims of the seven sages recorded at Delphi
(like the famous know thyself or nothing too much). Hadot examines also the ornamental
stelai in many ancient cities on which the sayings of the oracles were publicly engraved: and,
by the end of antiquity, where the edifying teachings of philosophers were engraved for public
edification, as at Oenoanda in Turkey (4245).16

Hadot sees in the highly prescriptive discourses of dietetics articulated in the ancient
medical tradition a further, different prephilosophical antecedent for the kind of prescriptive

15
Hadot in fact gives as much space in her section on the poets to the 6th century Megarian poet Theognis
Elegies as she does to Hesiod or Homer, in whose sublimation of arte from an inherited aristocratic quality into
excellence or virtue per se she sees the first rudiments of the ideal of the Stoic sage, as well as a consolation
of sorts for Theognis disenfranchised patrons (41; cf. P. Hadot 2002: 12).
16
She assigns a lasting contribution to spiritual direction in antiquity also to the sophists studies in the power
of different species of speech act, to engage the passions and move to emulation. (52; 5254; cf. P. Hadot 2002:
1214). She cites in this connection the rhetorician Isocrates founding conviction that in order to speak
persuasively, concerning the most sublime subjects, the student must be moved by the desire to themselves
become better (53-54).
paraenesis philosophers like Seneca would offer their charges, attentive to the particularities of
different individuals and situations (4750). Perhaps the key ancient antecedent of the
philosopher as spiritual director that Hadot identifies comes from classical poetry and
mythology, however. This is the mythological figure of the god-counsellor: like Athena in her
role as counsellor to Telemachus in the Iliad (I lines 118-219), or Chiron the Centaur advising
the heroes Jason (in Pindars Pythian Odes, 4.102 ff.; Nemean Odes, 3.53 f.) or Achilles
(Pindar, Nemean Odes, 3.43 ff.); or teaching the different arts to Aristeus (Apollonius Rhodius
Argonautica 2.509 f.), Theseus (Xenophon, Cynegeticus 1.2), and Actaeon (Apollodorus
Bibliotheca 3.4.4)17, all the while:

[b]y his sage counsels and his moral exhortations, [as well as] by his initiation into the
religious and mystery cults [being] also able to procure for the soul the spiritual sustenance
of which it has need (36).

Homers Iliad IX, Hadot argues, in the discourse of Phoenix to appease Achilles (lines
496528) proffers a shining preclassical exemplar of the kinds of exhortatory paraenetic
discourse, that philosophers like Seneca would undertake. The god, counselling the warrior,
indeed anticipates many of the key tropes that would later be adapted for philosophical
paraenesis in figures like Socrates, Epictetus, and Seneca: including exhortation, allegory,
inspiring mythical stories and historical examples, and situation-specific counsel (36).

Alongside the poet or God as spiritual guide, however, Hadot also examines the classical
Greek and Roman conventions concerning friendship amongst the ruling elites as one more
harbinger of philosophical spiritual direction (31319).18 As Hadot reflects, one recurrent
motif in the classical texts on friendship particularly speaks to its relevance as a precursor to
philosophical direction. This is the idea that a true friend, while on the one hand being like
another I in her interests and values, has a superior ability over the I to see the individuals
faults and vices. Hadot cites Pliny the Youngers poignant lament at the loss of his friend
Carrellius Rufus: I have lost the witness, the guide, the preceptor of my life as
illustrating the kind of counselling role assigned to the friend at stake here, although
innumerable other sources could be adduced (see 316). As Hadot reflects, in a key passage:

If the existence of a friend is the unique condition which permits us to know ourselves (and the
friend is in this sense an alter ego in the most authentic manner), and if to know oneself is a
condition indispensable to all ethical amelioration, the eminent role we must attribute to the friend
in the perfecting of the self is self-evident but a friend, or better still friends, are necessary

17
Hadot (2014, 3435). See also I. Hadot (2006), 436-459.
18
Hadot also sees the Roman norms advising male youths to attach themselves to older, more experienced and
influential men tasked with giving specific advice on major decisions, and assisting them ascend the cursus
honorum, as another precedent for philosophical spiritual direction (317). But Hadot does not elaborate upon
this.
 also for the philosophical discovery of truth, which [likewise] takes as its point of departure each
individuals knowledge of his own being (31415).

Ciceros De Officiis (I 58) tells us directly that counsel, conversation, encouragement,

consolation, and sometimes even reproof flourish best in friendships. For Hadot, these five
manners of speaking form the very bases of the pars praeceptua of philosophy as spiritual
direction (316; & above). Philosophical spiritual direction, as Hadot presents it, can thus also
be conceived as one form of classical philia. It builds upon but redirects the traditional cultures
of classical friendship, reorienting the goal of the younger friend towards wisdom [sophia],
instead of fame, influence, pleasures or honours. It is for this reason that Seneca begins Letter
38 by associating his conception of philosophy, as closely as possible, to a dialogue between
intimates or friends:

You are right when you urge that we increase our mutual traffic in letters. But the greatest benefit
is to be derived from conversation ... Lectures prepared beforehand and declaimed in the presence
of a throng have in them more noise but less intimacy. Philosophy is good advice; and no one
can give advice at the top of his lungs when the aim is to make a man learn and not merely to
make him wish to learn, we must have recourse to the low-toned words of conversation. They
enter more easily, and stick in the memory; for we do not need many words, but, rather, effective
words (Ep. 38.1; cf. Hadot 2014: 319).

And so we arrive back at the practical, paraenetic dimension to Senecas Stoic spiritual
direction, to which Hadot devotes the largest part of her book.

4. Reconstructing Senecas philosophical practice of spiritual direction

We have seen, in Section 2, the bases in Senecas important Letters 94-95 for Ilsetraut Hadots
conception of philosophy as spiritual direction in Seneca,. We have now seen, in Section 3,
how she situates this dialogical, rhetorical and paraenetic practice of philosophising as the
legatee of preclassical roles assigned to gods and wise statesmen, and of classical Hellenic and
Roman conceptions and cultures of medicine and philia / amicitia (friendship). The Hadotian
philosophical spiritual director is an experienced, respected friend and advisor. But he is also
someone who brings to his observations, and to his counsel, the full weight of a theoretical
training in the philosophical system of his doctrinal school. Studying the writings of the
philosophical school is then a vital component of ancient philosophical education, for Hadot
as for all other accounts of ancient philosophy. Yet she maintains that this study cannot be
sufficient, if what is at stake is the philosophical transformation of philosophers characters in
light of their theoretical learnings. The largest part of Snque is thus devoted to showing, by
recourse to Senecas philosophical texts, how he aimed as a spiritual director to bring his
paraenetic, as well as doctrinal, discourse to bear upon the addressees of his works: firstly,
attending to the persona of the philosopher himself as ethical exemplar and authoritative
counsellor; secondly, to the Stoics astute diagnostic awareness of the different maladies that
affect people; and thirdly, to Senecas resulting, extremely subtle prescriptions concerning how
philosophical therapeia can unfold. Let us now consider these subjects in turn.

Above all, as well as a more or less cognitively gifted mind and teacher, the Hadotian
philosophical director is also for the pupil an exemplification of the kind of life and wisdom to
which he aspires. The pupil wants to live up to this standard: for he also does not want to
disappoint his revered teacher (322).19 In psychoanalytic parlance, we could say that the
philosopher-guide aims to establish himself as an internalised ego ideal for the pupil, against
whose exacting ethical and epistemic standards the student is asked to measure their own
thoughts and conduct.20 Live just as if I were sure to get news of your doings, nay, as if I were
sure to behold them, Seneca thus tells Lucilius in Letter 32 (Ep. 32.1).21

The philosophical, spiritual director also forms an indispensable interlocutor in the

pupils practices of examination of conscience, and assessment of his own ethical progress.
The director is the authority to whom one reports back on ones progress, and who can offer
criticism and exhortation, faced with tests or difficulties (2945). This is one reason why Letter
38 (cited above) sees Seneca expressing to Lucilius his preference that they should converse
face-to-face, like the Epicureans in the kepos (garden) about whose practices of parrsia (frank
speech) and the intersubjective confession of difficulties we know from the Roman
Epicurean Philodemus (Philodemus 1998: P. Hadot 2002: 21418).

Evidently, this entire paradigm of spiritual direction would make no sense, if

philosophy were restricted for the ancients to the discovery and transmission of doctrines
concerning ethics, logic, physics or theology. In the same vein as her husbands monograph
on Marcus Aurelius (Hadot 1998), at stake in Ilsetraut Hadots work on Seneca is a conception
of knowledge that transcends the capacity to conceptualise, recall to mind, or teach any body
of theoretical teachings. To live according to ethical dogmata involves more than professed
wisdom. The aim is that students should make of their philosophical knowledge, or at least
the ethically salient aspects of that knowledge, a living habitus (20116). For both the Stoics

19
Hadot reminds us in this connection of Senecas famous bon mot to his friends on his death bed, when
deprived by Nero of even the physical means to transcribe his last will and testament: the image of his life
was his true testament to his friends, per Tacitus account (Annals XV 62).
20
Cf. 32122 where Hadot makes the comparison explicit; cf. 6570 on ancient and modern forms of
psychotherapy.
21
Compare Philodemus advice on spiritual direction in Peri Parrsias, examined by Hadot at 295-6.
Epicurean guides in the philosophical direction of students should: 1. make a point of knowing the students
background, parents, friends, education; 2. never despair of their charge, even when they lose hope or sight of
the goals; 3. censor the faults, not the person; 4. rhetorically accuse themselves of the fault that the student needs
to overcome; 5. neither belittle nor flatter the student, but speak frankly; and 6. aspire to be a living model for
the student of their ethical-philosophical ideal.
and the Epicureans, theoretical knowledge of how one should live, assented to in abstraction,
is simply not realistically compelling. Such savoir-vivre must stand against the counter-forces
of social values that have been inculcated into us since earliest life (Cicero, Tusculan
Disputations III 1-2), as well as our passions and the deep-set evaluative convictions which
they embody and express (20104; 27981).

In several, highly elucidating pages in Snque, Hadot delineates three stages which are
needed to make philosophical knowledge practically effective:

i. learning ethical goals at the theoretical level (in the classroom, by reading, etc.), which
is inefficacious if unaided by direction and practice;
ii. the work of assimilation and memorisation of precepts, coupled with exhortation
aiming to fortify the students character (cf. 228);
iii. the actualisation of assimilated knowledge under fire, tested by experience, as a new
diathsis or habitus (201).

At stake in this deeply assimilated kind of knowledge are ethical truths which might be
relatively easily taught and comprehended at the first, solely theoretical level. Nevertheless,
as Seneca chides himself: The mind often tries not to notice even that which lies before our
eyes; we must therefore force upon it the knowledge of things that are perfectly well known
(Ep. 94.25). Perhaps in part rhetorically, to encourage Lucilius, Seneca confides to his
pupil that:

... I still exhort myself to do that which I recommend; but my exhortations are not yet followed.
And even if this were the case, I should not have these principles so ready for practice, or so well
trained, that they would rush to my assistance in every crisis. (Ep. 71.30)

Knowledge of this second kind must penetrate to the most intimate parts of the psyche (Ep.
20.4; 40.1). At stake is nothing short of an existential transfigurari (Ep. 6.1; 94.48; 117.16;
75.7; 71.30; De Ben. VII, 1, 3 ff.):

Just as wool takes up certain colours at once, while there are others which it will not absorb
unless it is soaked and steeped in them many times; so other systems of doctrine can be
immediately applied by men's minds after once being accepted, but this system of which I
speak, unless it has gone deep and has sunk in for a long time, and has not merely coloured but
thoroughly permeated the soul, does not fulfil any of its promises (Ep. 71.31)

This transfigurari animi will require the arduous implementation of regimes of what
Pierre Hadot famously calls spiritual exercises or Foucault technologies of the self.22
Seneca emphasises a need for constant practice of certain exercises and mnemonic practices

22
See P. Hadot (1996); Foucault (2005).
(Ep. 28.10) to make ones philosophical knowledge into a habitus (Ep. 30.46; 31.8).23 Yet
Hadots stress in Snque on the philosopher as spiritual director, guiding others, pushes her
into examining components of Senecas therapeutic practice left unexamined by Pierre Hadot,
Foucault, and cognate thinkers. In particular, Snques long last chapter (273356) is devoted
to examining in fine-grained details the therapeutic prospects of this philosophical, spiritual
direction: including the eminently practical questions of under what conditions philosophical
spiritual direction works, on or with whom, and how?

As Hadot comments, modern, post-Freudian forms of psychotherapy call upon

analysands to challenge the deeply habituated self-understandings which they bring into
therapy. Yet they do so by seeking out deeper understandings of the analysands qua
individuals: as the subjects and objects of particular biographies. By contrast, ancient spiritual
directors asked their charges to overcome habitual modes of self-perception. But not in the
name of a search for what is singular and idiosyncratic in individuals lives. The aim of ancient
spiritual direction was instead to redirect their charges towards larger, self-transcending norms:
and ultimately, towards the normative horizon of a life according to nature, embodied in the
serene tranquillity and inner freedom of the sage.

This does not, for Hadot, mean that we can say that there was no operative conception
of the individual in ancient thought, as has sometimes been claimed (28589). A recurrent
topos in ancient literature stresses the importance for the young to carefully select particular
friends and advisors, Hadot rightly stresses. Mutatis mutandis, ancient philosophical texts
register the need for advisors to just as carefully select their charges: both of which concerns
show highly developed discourses on individual characters and differences (31920). The
Stoics, like the ancient medical tradition, theoretically acknowledged the realities of different
individual predispositions and capabilities24at the same time as they posited that the goal of a
philosophical way of life was to transcend ones idiosyncratic being by cultivating ones
rational self (68-70).25

For Seneca as for the other Stoics, it is our social milieu, from our earliest experiences,
that is responsible for promoting peoples false conceptions concerning the good and the goal

23
Such exercises (Hadot devotes pages to premeditation of evils, including death; daily examination of
conscience; the marking and celebrating of progress; and contemplation of ethical exemplars) are conceived by
Seneca as necessary if a philosophical constancy of mind (Ep. 71,32; 20, 5; 31.8) is to be strengthened and
implanted more deeply by daily reflection (Ep. 34.1; cf. 58-60).
24
See eg Seneca, Tranquillity of Mind on choice of vocations to suit particular natures; compare Cicero, De Off,
I,110; Sen, De Ben, IV,26, 2-3; 27, 1; Letters 52, 3ff.; 94,50)
25
Hadot points also, to show the attention to individuality in ancient thought, to the extended ancient literature
which addresses the different educational capabilities of children of different ages (ages 1-7, where education
should remain physical and musical; ages 7-14, the age for teaching the liberal arts, enkyklia mathmata, and
presenting strong ethical exemplars; 14-21; 21 and older); and then old age (the subject of works like Senecas
De brevitate vitae or Ciceros De senectute) (291-2). See also I. Hadot (2006).
of life, and which shapes peoples individual idiosyncrasies (279-281; cf. Seneca Ep. 50.7;
75.16; De Clem. 1.6.3; De Ira II 10.3). Yet there is nothing, again, in such a perspective which
excluded the Stoics from an ordinary awareness that some childhood milieus will be more
psychologically pathogenetic than others, and that this will have a powerful say in shaping
individuals different dispositions. On the contrary, in important pages, Hadot delineates a
kind of Stoic diagnostic chart presenting the levels of maladies within the soul in different
kinds of cases (274-277):

i. The first, almost universal level (only sages are excluded) is that of or
perturbatio: passing, passionate responses to the prospect or presence of indifferents
like pleasure, money, and fame, which may not be deeply implanted within the
psyche;26
ii. At a second level come or aegratatia: again, these involve passion-inducing
opinions about indifferent things (that they are necessary to have or avoid), but now in
a more deeply-set habitual manner. Such opinions, which almost everyone has, are still
subject to change;
iii. The third level are more deeply ingrained passions and opinions: and in
Seneca, morbi. Such can be changed, but only with great difficulty;
iv. Finally, there is vice itself as a condition of the psyche: or inveterata vitiositas.
It involves false opinions and passions that have been so often and so deeply imprinted
upon an individuals soul as to have become an unchangeable habitus or
(Stobaeus I, 113, 18; cf. 201-215; 282-283).

Hadots Seneca and her Stoics then also recognise, very clearly, that however much there
is an absolute difference between sages and non-sages, there are at least three levels of progress
in different people towards virtue and wisdom (285-287; cf. 137-140):

i. A first, almost unattainable level is that of the person who experiences only first
impulses in response to fearful or captivating externals. This is the godlike sage,
serene and content, whether he faces external adversity or prosperity;
ii. Second comes the prokoptn who has escaped many, but not all, of the worse passions
and ethical vices that beset most people, and has set themselves the goal of attaining to
wisdom;

26
Viz. which we know Stoicism argues are neither good nor evil in themselves, but the subjects of fortune and
the will of Zeus, beyond our control.
 iii. Third come most people, who in the Stoic perspective have not yet overcome many of
the worst passions and vices, who as such remain prey to them and largely dependent
on chance or fortune for their happiness or misery (274-276).27

Only the goal of virtue and tranquillity of mind remains the same for each of these groups.
The practical, therapeutic approach to directing each must differ, and the sage will need no
others guidance. Spiritual direction should be tailored to the case, if it is to be effective. The
beginning of ethical progress then lies in pupils acknowledgment of their flaws (Ep. 28.9; cf.
292). This is an idea which Hadot documents as a recognised principle across the ancient
philosophical schools (127-131). But self-knowledge without the will to affect deep ethical
change (menta tota) is also insufficient (cf. Ep. 92.3). The absence of this self-knowledge or
any desire to change explains why people with inveterate vitiositas are incurable, and attempts
to guide them through philosophical direction must prove futile (277).28 Indeed, in some of
Senecas Letters to Lucilius, he presents the desire to change as by itself the largest part of the
cure, whose exhortation accordingly takes on great importance for the spiritual director:

What else do you want of me, then?, you ask; the will is still mine. Well, the will in this
case is almost everything, and not merely the half, for the matter of which we speak is
determined by the soul. Hence it is that the larger part of goodness is the will to become good
(Ep. 34.3).29

So what then will the course of such a philosophical therapy look like, carried out over time
between a willing pupil and a spiritual director? Hadot argues that such a course is what we
have laid down for us in the 124 Letters to Lucilius, perhaps Senecas most well-known
philosophical work. As Hadot reads the text, it works on two, decretal and paraenetic
dimensions. These are interposed one upon another, sometimes in the same letters. At one
level, that of the communication of Stoic theory to a student who is at the beginning largely
ignorant of the schools doctrines, Senecas letters progressively communicate the Stoics
theoretical edifice in ethics, logic and physics. Hadot sees three stages in what she calls this
expansive or centrifugal pedagogy, gradually widening Lucilius theoretical purview:

27
Epicurus, she notes comparably (111-119; 286-287), explicitly distinguishes in his discourse between people
who can make progress towards ataraxia without aid (like the teacher himself); those who can make progress
only with a guide (like one Metrodorus); and those who need both guide and direct help (like one Hermacus).
(111)
28
As Hadot observes, Seneca in Letter 29 thus paints a portrait of one Marcellinus, a kind of Stoic Alcibiades.
Marcellinus consults Seneca and learns Stoic theory. He is convinced of its worth when Seneca converses with
him. But as soon as Seneca is not there, Marcellinus reverts to pattern (282). He does not want to change.
Compare Aristotle on responsibility for acquiring habits, which then rob us of ability to break them, Nic. Eth. III
5 (1113b30; 1114b30ff).
29
Or again: Therefore let us press on and persevere. There remains much more of the road than we have put
behind us; but the greater part of progress is the desire to progress (Ep. 71.36).
 i. Letters 1-30, which Hadot notes, are by far the briefest. Seneca presents the Stoic
ethical teachings or decreta here in striking, memorable sentences, alongside many
from Epicurus, adapting himself to Lucilius known pre-existing sympathies for the
Epicurean school (116). To the extent that Seneca develops his sentences into more
elaborated theoretical positions, he proceeds cautiously: without yet confronting his
new charge with what Seneca warns are the Porchs hard ethical teachings (Ep.
13.4);30
ii. Letters 31-80 represent a second pedagogical stage, characterised by a predominance
of the epitome. Seneca now explicitly cautions Lucilius concerning rote learning
striking maxims from others, without making them truly ones own (116).31 Recourse
to Epicurus decreases; Seneca exhorts Lucilius to a more detailed study of the Stoics
writings on his own. At this stage, Seneca also reports sending Lucilius notes, breviaria
or summaries (Ep. 39.1) of philosophical texts; as against, in the first stage, copies of
philosophical texts with specific passages marked out for his reading (116);
iii. In the culminating pedagogical stage, Letters 80-124 (Hadot names it that of the
commentaria), Seneca sends Lucilius full theoretical treatises (the Naturales
Questiones and also De Providentia) in response to Lucilius requests. The teacher
even promises his student an ethical treatise, and we can well suppose that Seneca had
equally integrated his other treatises into Lucilius program of formation (116-117).
As against the first two stages, Seneca also now engages in lengthy criticisms of
Epicurean philosophy as well as of the claims of other philosophical schools (117).
Lucilius pedagogical ladder has, as it were, now been cast aside.

Nevertheless, this expansive pedagogical program is punctuated at every stage by a second,

paraenetic dimension which gives its life to the Letters. At issue here is a movement of
concentration, of reduction to the essential, of unification of all [Lucilius] knowledges around
the key principles of the Stoic regula vitae (117). A passage in De Beneficiis (VII 1, 1; cf. n.
99, 16061) commenting on Senecas own teacher in Rome, Demetrius, enunciates clearly the
directive thought here:

30
At this stage, he sends Lucilius annotated copies of specific philosophical works (Ep. 6.4), in contrast to later
stages (see below).
31
See Ep. 33.9: Thus said Zeno, thus said Cleanthes, indeed! Let there be a difference between yourself and
your book! How long shall you be a learner? From now on be a teacher as well! But why, one asks, should I
have to continue hearing lectures on what I can read? The living voice, one replies, is a great help. Perhaps,
but not the voice which merely makes itself the mouthpiece of another's words, and only performs the duty of a
reporter.
 The cynic Demetrius, who in my opinion was a great man even if compared with the greatest
philosophers, had an admirable saying about this, that one gained more by having a few wise
precepts ready and in common use than by learning many without having them at hand 32

Again and again, then, Seneca in the course of all the most subtle letters as in the treatises
beckons his addressee back to the essential Stoic principles (117), rather than undertaking an
exclusively expansive presentation of new teachings:

But, you reply, I wish to dip first into one book and then into another. I tell you that it is the
sign of an overnice appetite to toy with many dishes; for when they are manifold and varied,
they cloy but do not nourish. So you should always read standard authors; and when you crave
a change, fall back upon those whom you read before. Each day acquire something that will
fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after
you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day (Ep 2.4)

It is Senecas method of interposed expansion and concentration, pedagogy and

psychagogy, dogmatics and paraenesis, which has led modern commentators to believe that
the developments of Seneca lack any coherence, Hadot surmises (117). Whether it is a matter
of Seneca or the Stoics in general, she writes:

we must distinguish between the therapeutic and doctrinal points of view [informing their
writings], and the misrecognition of this distinction is one of the principal sources of all our
interpretive errors (tous les contrasens hermeneutiques) (237)

By recovering an awareness of the Senecan method, as Snque prompts us, any impression of
Senecas philosophical incompetence or incoherence falls away. It is replaced, instead, by a
renewed sense of the many-dimensional subtlety of Senecas paraenetic art of philosophical
writing.

5. Concluding thoughts

32
Demetrius core principles, which Seneca praises, are these: Nor can we complain that nature deals hardly with
us, for there is nothing which is hard to discover except those things by which we gain nothing beyond the credit
of having discovered them; whatever things tend to make us better or happier are either obvious or easily
discovered. Your mind can rise superior to the accidents of life, if [1] it can not greedily covet boundless
wealth, but has learned to seek for riches within itself; if [2] it has learned that it has not much to fear from
man, and nothing to fear from God; if [3] by scorning all those things which make life miserable while they adorn
it, the mind can soar to such a height as to see clearly that death cannot be the beginning of any trouble, though it
is the end of many; if [4] it can dedicate itself to justice and think any path easy which leads to it; if [5], being a
gregarious creature, and born for the common good, it regards the world as the universal home, if [6] it keeps its
conscience clear towards God and lives always as though in public, fearing itself more than other men, then it
avoids all storms, it stands on firm ground in fair daylight, and has brought to perfection its knowledge of all that
is useful and essential
As we have tried to show, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of the contribution
that Ilsetraut Hadots Snque: direction spirituelle et pratique de la philosophie makes to
todays debates surrounding virtue ethics, and the recovery of the ancient sense of philosophy
as a way of life or cultura animi (cultivation of the soul). Hadots examination of Senecas
philosophical oeuvre in this light, and in the light of her formidable knowledge of classical
Greek and Roman culture, casts much new light on the intersubjective dimensions of ancient
philosophical practices. Hadot carefully situates ancient philosophy as spiritual direction in a
lineage which encompasses classical conceptions of friendship and medicine, and looks back
to preclassical representations of gods as counsellors: at once taking up and philosophically
transforming the ancients sense of the transformative powers of spoken and rhetorically
crafted language. Hadots Snque also provides highly detailed examination of the day-to-
day, diagnostic and prescriptive dimensions of Stoic spiritual directionand demonstrates its
enduring sophistication. One emerges from reading Ilsetraut Hadots book with a far more
robust sense of how ancient philosophical self-cultivation was actually undertaken: as a
centrifugal-centripetal movement of theoretical progress and deepening internalisation of the
schools key ethical tenets: carried out under the watchful eye of the spiritual director: and
shaped and enjoined by the latters paraenetic, as well as theoretical discourses.

Considerations of space and focus here have dictated that we have said somewhat less
concerning our opening subject: the relative absence in recent anglophone virtue ethics of
detailed engagements with Stoic ethics, let alone a figure like Seneca. This feature of
neoAristotelian virtue ethics surely reflects, although it is not identical with, the larger absence
of concern in this literature for what Snque calls the paraenetic dimension of classical virtue
ethics: that side of classical philosophical writing and pedagogy which sought to actively
inculcate or cultivate, as well as theoretically comprehend, the good life. It is this sense of
philosophys larger ethical calling which led ancient philosophers like Senecabut one also
thinks of Plato, Xenophon, Epictetus or Lucretius, amongst othersto cultivate a variety of
literary genres to exhort, rebuke, provoke, challenge and inspire their addressees. The notion
that such an expanded, paraenetic as well as theoretical conception of philosophy must detract
from philosophys more purely rational dimension is mistaken, when it is not myopic.
Snques extensive attention to Senecas dogmatic continuity with the Hellenistic Stoics, as
well as Ilsetraut Hadots exacting examination of Senecas and the Stoics subtle contributions
to philosophical psychology, shows that there is no zero-sum game at play here. Philosophical
spiritual direction or cultura animi remains philosophical. It is just that, to echo a modern,
philosophers have often only interpreted the world. The greater thing is also to change it, if
onlyas in Seneca and the other ancient philosophersone student or one reader at a time.
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