Ilsetraut Hadot’s Seneca: spiritual direction and the transformation of the other

This chapter will track the structure of Hadot’s Sénèque. In the next section, I will examine her foundational reading of Seneca’s Epistles 94 and 95 in the Letters to Lucilius. For Hadot, these epistles are vital for understanding Seneca’s larger philosophical self-conception as a ‘spiritual director’: a self-conception which licenses not simply argument, but also philosophically considered and rhetorically crafted counsel, rebuke, and exhortation. In Section 3 I will reconstruct Hadot’s ensuing claims concerning the origins of philosophical spiritual direction in classical antiquity. Section 4 examines Hadot’s detailed portrait of Seneca as a philosophical spiritual director. Here I pay especial attention to the details Sénèque adds to other accountsof ancient philosophical cultivation: in particular, a sophisticated diagnostic machinery concerning the kinds of ethical and psychological maladies different people can suffer, which is matched to a set of subtle pedagogical and therapeutic strategies, illustrated most fully in the Letters to Lucilius. In the final section, I draw in the threads, offering some brief remarks underscoring the significance of this remarkable book.