Pierre Hadot and Marcus Aurelius from reading to actualization

Abstract

The text that follows is an exploration of Pierre Hadot's writings on Marcus Aurelius, especially the Diaries, in order to delineate the prevailing themes about experiences that appear as complex for human beings, showing how the two authors relate them. The paper pursues the methodology of the documentary essay. Sharing with the authors the experience of the field diary, we note as a proposal to present the perception of everyday life and its small challenges as the cradle of true philosophical questions. In the making of the text, Marcus Aurelius appears as a character who intersects pessimism and optimism with the hymns to the beauty of nature, mediating his reflections with Stoic intuitions and principles. We thus present reflection as a modality of the freedom of that (ideal) individual who is already indifferent, no longer affected by the situational mutations that he did not expect to live. In fact, the autonomous philosopher lives the mutations and is realized without letting himself be kidnapped by the flux of disordered will. Instead, he experiences and communicates a kind of symmetry between the experiences that offer themselves and pass by, qualifying human life from beginning to end. This proposal poses the possibility of embracing transience, cultivating good living, and caring for oneself, in a world that seems to be on the way to forget the value of the human person.