To not forget: Pierre Hadot’s last book on Goethe. Pierre Hadot, N’oublie pas de vivre: pas de vivre: Goethe et la tradition des exercises spirituels (Albin Michel, 2008)

摘要

N’Oublie pas de vivre: Goethe et la tradition des exercises spirituels, which has remained untranslated, has hitherto attracted little scholarly recognition or critical notice, even in its native French. It is this situation that this review essay hopes to redress, in the small way permitted to any such piece of writing. In what follows, we examine in turn Hadot’s framing claims concerning the shaping ends and origins of Goethe’s species of neoclassicism (Part I), his claims concerning Goethe’s debt to the classical or Hellenistic tradition of spiritual exercises (Part II), before our closing remarks (Part III) challenge some of Hadot’s claims concerning the author of Faust, and then reflect on the significance of the fact that this last philosophical testament of Pierre Hadot’s was on a modern novelist, scientist, and poet, not an ancient philosopher.