Philosophy understood as a way of life

This is a brilliant video by Gregory Sadler. I’ve always liked the thought that philosophy began as a way of learning how to live well.

A few things that stood out to me in the video:

Hadot isn’t saying philosophy-as-life disappeared after antiquity and medieval times, leaving only professors in universities. He notes that the existentialists, for instance, carried this tradition forward.

Other scholars—like Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure—have shown that it runs through Socrates, the Stoics, medieval and early modern thinkers, Descartes, Bacon, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and even Foucault. My own dissertation focused on Maurice Blondel, whose 1893 Action is explicitly a “science of practice”—a philosophy of life.

This orientation appears across traditions: in Bergson, Gabriel Marcel, the existentialists, the pragmatists, Thoreau, Emerson, and many others. Even within universities, you can find professors and authors concerned with what philosophy does to transform life, if you know where to look.

This as well:

Philosophy as a way of life is deeply interconnected with the history of philosophy. In the present, at least in the United States, there’s a stark contrast between analytic and Continental philosophy. But anyone who has read widely enough knows that this supposed divide is just a tiny part of the vast world of philosophy. The history of philosophy offers a wealth of other approaches.

You can read a figure like Nietzsche and, instead of getting bogged down in trends, ask yourself, “What does this guy actually have to say, and is it applicable to my own life, my relationships, and my connection to the culture?” When you do that, you’re doing philosophy as a way of life. You’re interested in how this changes the way you live and what kind of life it turns into for you. This is a vital part of philosophy. If your professors tell you to ignore this, they’re full of crap. This is what makes philosophy so awesome and vital—the fact that we can communicate with these great thinkers and take what’s useful.

As I said at the start, I’ve always looked at philosophy this way, even before I knew it was a “thing.” I will say that not everyone has been receptive to this. Sometimes you’re accused of “popularizing” or “dumbing down” philosophy because you’re looking at it this way. People will say, “What you’re doing isn’t real philosophy.” But you can just ignore that, because no matter what you do, someone’s going to give you a hard time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdR7tuJ9b5o&t=1373s