Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions

The Recovery of Philosophy as Spiritual Exercise Exposes the Same Fracture That Depth Psychology Was Born to Address

Sharpe and Ure’s Philosophy as a Way of Life enters a field that Pierre Hadot opened but never fully cultivated. Hadot’s original claim—that Hellenistic and Roman philosophy constituted not doctrine but transformative practice, a set of exercices spirituels aimed at converting the practitioner’s mode of being—has become a fixture of contemporary philosophical self-congratulation. Everyone invokes Hadot; almost no one reckons with the structural problem his thesis exposes. Sharpe and Ure do. Their contribution is to historicize, dimensionalize, and critically evaluate the entire landscape of thinkers who have attempted to revive philosophy as lived practice, from Hadot and Foucault through Martha Nussbaum, Alexander Nehamas, and the recent Stoic revival. In doing so, they reveal that the ancient integration of theory and practice—of logos and askēsis—was not a charming feature of Greco-Roman culture but an achievement that modernity systematically dismantled, and whose absence underwrites the therapeutic crisis of the present. This is precisely the fracture that Edward Edinger identified when he described depth psychotherapy as the heir of three traditions: “the medical tradition of the care of patients, the religious tradition of concern for the soul, and the philosophical tradition of dialogue in the search for truth.” Edinger located depth psychology at the convergence point of these three streams; Sharpe and Ure show that the philosophical stream dried up long before psychology arrived to claim the riverbed.

Philosophy Abandoned the Soul Before Psychotherapy Claimed It

The book’s most important structural argument is its periodization of how philosophy lost its therapeutic function. The story runs from the late antique schools—where Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics, and Neoplatonists all understood philosophy as medicine for the soul—through the Christian appropriation of spiritual exercises (monasticism absorbed the very practices philosophy had developed), to the modern university’s reduction of philosophy to professional argumentation. Sharpe and Ure trace how Descartes, Kant, and the German Idealists progressively severed the link between philosophical thought and the transformation of the thinker. Richard Tarnas’s analysis in Cosmos and Psyche provides the macro-historical frame that makes this story intelligible: the Copernican displacement that created the “disenchanted cosmic vision” forced the cultural psyche inward, and when it arrived there, philosophy had already vacated the premises. The territory of interiority was claimed first by theology, then by Romantic poetry, and finally by depth psychology. Freud and Jung did not invent the care of the soul; they inherited a vacancy. What Sharpe and Ure add to this familiar narrative is the recognition that philosophy’s abdication was not inevitable but contingent—and potentially reversible. Their survey of contemporary movements (Stoic CBT, philosophical counseling, Hadotian spiritual exercises, Foucaultian techniques de soi) constitutes an inventory of attempts at reversal, each evaluated with precision.

The Hadot-Foucault Divergence Mirrors the Jung-Hillman Tension Over What “Care of Soul” Means

One of the book’s sharpest analytical moments is its dissection of the deep disagreement between Hadot and Foucault. Both argued that ancient philosophy was about self-transformation; they diverged radically on what the self is and what transformation means. Hadot envisioned the philosophical exercise as dissolving the ego into cosmic perspective—a “view from above” that reconnects the practitioner with universal nature. Foucault saw it as an aesthetics of existence, a creative self-fashioning that resists normalization. This divergence maps with remarkable precision onto the split between Jung’s understanding of individuation as alignment with the Self (a transpersonal center) and Hillman’s archetypal psychology, which resists any single integrative center and instead distributes psyche across multiple imaginal figures. Hillman explicitly defined soul-making as “the individuation of imaginal reality”—not the ego’s project but the images’ own unfolding—and described depth as “not literally hidden, deep down, inside” but as “a primary metaphor necessary for psychological thinking.” Hadot’s cosmic dissolution has a Jungian resonance: the ego relativized before the transpersonal. Foucault’s aesthetic self-creation has a Hillmanian resonance: no final integration, only the ongoing poetics of existence. Sharpe and Ure do not resolve this tension—they anatomize it, and in doing so reveal that the deepest question in “philosophy as a way of life” scholarship is identical to the deepest question in depth psychology: Is the goal a unified Self, or a polyvalent soul?

What This Book Illuminates That No Other Does

The unique value of Sharpe and Ure’s work for readers formed in the depth psychological tradition is that it provides the philosophical genealogy that depth psychology has always needed but rarely sought. When Hillman traced his lineage “back through Freud, Dilthey, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus, and Plato to Heraclitus,” he was performing exactly the kind of ancestry-work that Sharpe and Ure perform for the philosophical side of the equation. When Edinger argued that “it promotes our psychological health as well to be in touch with the early Greeks, our cultural ancestors,” he was pointing toward the same psychic root system. But neither Hillman nor Edinger explained why philosophy abandoned this work, or catalogued the contemporary attempts to reclaim it. Sharpe and Ure fill this gap. Their book demonstrates that the “philosophy as a way of life” movement and depth psychology are not parallel enterprises but two halves of a single interrupted tradition—the ancient project of caring for the soul through disciplined attention to experience. The Stoic prosoche, the Epicurean therapeia, the Neoplatonic epistrophe: these are not historical curiosities but the very practices that psychotherapy reinvented under clinical guise. Anyone who has wondered why therapy sessions so often resemble philosophical dialogues, or why reading Marcus Aurelius can feel more therapeutic than most self-help, will find in this book not comfort but a rigorous explanation of the structural convergence—and the institutional forces that keep the two disciplines from recognizing their shared origin.