Philosophy and Life

Those familiar with ancient and late-antique Mediterranean philosophical schools will probably also be familiar with the work of Pierre Hadot, an historian of philosophy who ended his career at the College de France. Hadot is famous (as much as any academic is ever famous) for treating ancient philosophical schools as coherent ways of life. Platonism was a way of life. Aristotelianism was a way of life. Stoicism was a way of life. Back then a student of philosophy did not simply ask questions about the fields we delineate under the categories of physics, metaphysics, and ethics for the sake of asking questions. These investigations, and the answers characteristic to the various schools, were not only guides to correct living, but exercises in themselves; they molded the psyche of their practitioner so that it conceived of the world in a way distinct from other schools. The leaders of these schools were far more like priests of the Most High Good than they were like modern university professors. In some cases, especially in the Platonic tradition, they approached the status of holy men.

In a very short radio broadcast, transcribed in Philosophical Chronicles, Jean-Luc Nancy explores the act of philosophizing, contrasting it against the image of the philosopher presented above. Asking whether or not philosophy gives form to life, he determines that the question itself is about energy, about the difference between Descartes and Heidegger. “In one case, one supposes that the order of reasons generates energy, and in the other, one affirms that the effectivity of this energy is of an order different from the order of reasons. One thus poses the problem of the passage from one order to the other.”  Reasoning through concepts and ideas somehow mobilizes life into a particular configuration or it does not. In the latter case, we are speaking of two distinct forms of energy.

Nancy goes on to assert that this tension between ‘form’ and ‘life’ is necessarily internal to philosophy. Why? Because “a philosopher immediately disqualifies the notions of both ‘form’ and ‘life’ understood as frame and content or even as signification and experience…Neither form, nor life, nor concept, nor intuition, but from one to the other, or rather, from one within the other, through the other, but also one against the other, a tension without resolution.” Here Nancy efficiently twins a series of words which roughly sum up human being: frame-form, content-life, signification-concept, experience-intuition. Frame-form rests opposite content-life; signification-concept opposite experience-intuition. The philosopher, in thinking, thinks within and through and against and between the four polarized ends of this axis, mixing and matching, transposing and contrasting. According to Nancy, this tangle is the truth of life, which is “never simply available but is always caught up in its own practice.”

“Thus philosophy is less a ‘form of life’ than life forming itself, that is to say, thinking itself, in accordance with its excess over every given form or signification. Which also means, of course, this life thinking itself even in its death.”

We are reminded of Phaedo now. Philosophy is practicing to die. We are also reminded of the later Platonists who sought, through the practice of death, an ineffable and illuminating experience of Mind or the One. But those goals are not what Nancy is attempting to describe, are they? For Nancy, philosophy is a process that both produces itself and overcomes itself. It is a fundamental quality of life-as-thinking, which is the necessary life of humanity. Its purpose is to create and explore space in being. "Between religion and lived experience--in a space, let us note, where one also finds politics, science, and art--philosophy has the task, if I may say so, of spacing as such." According to Nancy, philosophy performs its work on the organization of society, on the investigation and cataloging of natural phenomena, and on the expression of lived experience. Like the ancients, Nancy's philosophy is an art of all arts.

  

Here we might infer Nancy’s evaluation of the philosophical schools described by Hadot and other historians of ancient and late-antique philosophy. They were bad at making space between religion and lived experience. Why? Perhaps because their philosophy, their life-thinking, was focused overly on the future of life-ending or life-over. The foundations and ends of their frame-form and signification-concept were gods or God. In which case, Nancy's philosopher would be a modern invention, or--if we are being charitable--a full flowering of philosophy's potential. I would say that Nancy's philosopher is one who faces death much less often than the ancients and early moderns would have faced it. It is the philosophy of a life possessing social services.

Whatever the case, it is interesting to note that much of Nancy's most recent thought has concerned religion. Having written this out, I now see that, through thinking, he is attempting to create space not only between religion and life, but within religion itself, transforming that age-old thought barrier into philosophy as such.

I wish him luck and success.