Hadot on Seneca Letters 94–95: Seneca’s “Discourse on Method”?

If philosophy is a way of life, or spiritual direction of students, so they can live as well as think more philosophically, doesn’t that mean talk of “method” is up in the air?

We associate method, after Descartes, with a kind of impersonal procedure which anyone can follow, and whose goal is finding out impartial things about the world, not the transformation of the inquirer. But this doesn’t mean that any philosophy or psychology which aims at effecting such transformation needs to be a kind of anarchic practice without distinct aims, procedures, or at least guidelines for practitioners.

For Ilsetraut Hadot, as she examines in chapter two of her wonderful book Sénèque, if we are to look anywhere in the Roman Stoic Seneca for reflections on how philosophy works, as spiritual direction, we should look to Letters 94 and 95 to Lucilius.

Paranetic versus dogmatic philosophy

These letters distinguish two parts of philosophy. One is dogmatic, that is, to do with developing theoretical teachings. The second is “paranetic”, from the Greek word for “exhortation”. It is this second part that has generally dropped out of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s extraordinary revival of it in the 19th century partly explains why he attracts such devoted adoration amongst youths, still today.

“The paranetic part, Seneca explains to Lucilius, aims to give prescriptions, “praecepta”, appropriate to the…