Reading Plotinus with Hadot: Chapter 7 - Solitude

About this event

Plotinus is one of the strangest and most rewarding thinkers in the Western tradition — a philosopher whose work reads less like a system and more like a series of maps for looking inward. Pierre Hadot's Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision is the best short introduction there is: lucid, personal, and written by a scholar who saw ancient philosophy as a way of life rather than a set of doctrines. Every two weeks we'll take a single chapter, listen to it together, and then open it up for discussion. No prior background in philosophy is required — just curiosity and a willingness to sit with ideas that don't always yield on the first pass. Newcomers are welcome to drop in at any point; each chapter stands well enough on its own. Chapter 7 — Solitude Chapter 7 is the last, and Hadot ends the book by asking what Plotinus can still mean for us, seventeen centuries later, in a world that has grown suspicious of everything he stood for. We moderns have learned to distrust "pure spirituality." Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and their heirs have taught us that the person who claims to detach from the human condition is usually being moved, without knowing it, by inferior forces: class, biology, unresolved wounds. There is something healthy in this suspicion, Hadot admits; too many disguised interests have been dressed up as spiritual values. And yet, he argues, there is another kind of mystification, subtler and just as tragic: imagining that human life can be reduced to what is measurable, expressible, and analyzable. The inexpressible keeps breaking through, in perception, in language, in the ordinary texture of a life, and to close ourselves off from it is to shrink human reality to something less than what it is. Hadot brings this thought back to the figure of Plotinus dying alone on a friend's country estate, his disciples scattered, his skin covered in sores, his friends fleeing his kiss. Even here, in solitude and suffering, Plotinus keeps writing, treatises on wisdom, providence, evil, and death, trying to steady himself against what is coming. His last words are almost banal in their simplicity: "I am trying to make what is divine within me rise back up to what is divine in the universe." Hadot does not ask us to imitate him. He asks only that we listen, that we take seriously the possibility that a life lived seventeen centuries ago, in a language and a world we no longer share, might still have something to say to us about how to be here now. Format • We listen to the chapter together (roughly 35 minutes) • Open discussion follows — questions, reactions, tangents, disagreements all welcome • Expect to be here about 2 hours total Before you come If you'd like to read or listen ahead, here's the links: Audio (https://drive.google.com/file/d/15Jyl_5ygoLA3IvSFDfLkGE7uUvqfsXUO/view?usp=sharing)/Text (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r6vu6_qBIHNAceLn8kf4xObn8jPkgYe0/view?usp=sharing)