Individual Philosophical Counselling in the Hellenistic & Roman Eras
The Epicureans, Galen & Plutarch
In this series, we have been seeing that Chapter 4 of Ilsetraut Hadot’s book Sénèque shows how seriously she takes her own advice, that to write well on Seneca, it is necessary to know your Cicero, but also as much of wider ancient philosophical culture as we can.
Following her account of Epictetus’ extant writings (in fact, recorded by a student), and their basis in his ways of teaching, Hadot transitions to an account of what her husband Pierre would later call “spiritual exercises”. She first makes a contrast between the Stoic premeditation of adversities, as a way to secure tranquility, and the Epicurean exercise, aimed at the same end, of:
turning thought away from misfortune, the avocatio a cogitanda molestia, and that which consists in returning to the contemplation of pleasures, the revocatio ad contemplandas voluptates …
As these exercises are (I think) pretty widely known and written about, I am going to pick up the story when Hadot transitions, via the Epicureans’ stress on friendship, to looking at a second form of spiritual exercise: that of philosophical dialogue with a teacher of “spiritual director”, with a view to ethical transformation, and the place within it of “frank speech” (parrhesia).
