People have often asked me why I quit Academia. Below is an excerpt from my first lecture of the Philosophy as the Art of Living course that explains some of it:

In 2021 I quit my academic position at a university in London. I had had enough of seeing young students come in with great aspirations, with deep existential questions about life and the metaphysics of the universe only to see them either quit studying philosophy altogether or be turned into academic automata. Ironically, one course I had to teach was called «Philosophy as the Art of Living». The curriculum was set by the department. I remember a student in that particular course once asked me why this course bore that particular title as it had little to nothing to do with the ars vivendi, the art of living. The course was indeed just another broad introductory lecture series beginning with the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, then moving on to Descartes, the British Empiricists and a few other ‘relevant’ figures of the history of philosophy that a new student of philosophy should be acquainted with. The course lacked entirely in the spirit of imparting on the young minds what they were truly looking for: ways to live and live well, how to lead an intellectually and spiritually fulfilling life. A course on the art of living should teach the rich insights on the good life from two-thousand five-hundred years of European philosophy which students will be able to draw from for the rest of their lives.

But it was not just the standard curriculum which made imparting on them the good life, and hence the meaning of life, difficult. It is rather the entire machinery of the University experience that can be an impediment. Students often are busy with collecting credit points, getting good grades, and getting ahead because their degree is ultimately a credential for the job market.

The reason I founded my school of philosophy Halkyon, of which you are now partaking, is because I want to impart on people from all walks of life and at any age the rich tapestry of human memory and their responses to the challenges of a finite, mortal existence. It is never too late to start living well. Because as human beings to live is not mere biological fact. It is a daily practice, a living tradition. And to live well has to be learnt.

Outside Academia most of what I found was life-hack gurus, self-styled Stoics who reduced the Stoic tradition to meditation exercises, and other contemporary sophistry that sells recipes for personal gain and worldly success. The ancient discipline of appropriate conduct has been almost systematically reduced to mere social utility and commercial expedience. The classical ideal of formation is fractured. Based on the logic of the content mill and the attention economy many in this space have to churn out content almost by the hour to keep their massive audiences entertained and distracted. At the same time this leads to high levels of confusion amongst the audience. It seems there are new exercises and meditation practices every single day that one should follow. Thus, the ancient pursuit of virtue (ἀρετή) and harmony has been replaced with transactional technique to make an individual perform better at work. Superficial etiquette takes the place of inner transformation. Shallow self-regard and self-optimisation turns the self into an evaluated object following market logic and replaces genuine self-examination. The very logic of self-optimisation brings with it avoidance of discomfort by not confronting, even denying, genuine human suffering and death.

Sancta Simplicitas!, exclaimed Nietzsche. Sacred Simplicity! This is the approach we shall take here. Simplify your life and enrich it at once. It would be a contradiction in terms to demand to to accumulate abstract propositions in order to live well. Instead, we should learn again to see our lives again through living concepts that our rich heritage already has in store. The Greeks had a word for this kind of disinterested seeing: theoria. Which can also mean festive procession. What follows we can think of as a festive procession of life and the art of living. So that we may cultivate our inner lives again. Such formation, which nurtures the soul and loves the true, the good, the beautiful as much as its pursuit, the Greeks called paideia.

In order to pursue paideia we need to get into the habit of inquiry. Such inquiry that leads to true understanding rather than just looking up information online. In this way we may arrive again at newfound clarity.

Thanks for reading. I've distilled my own philosophy of life in my new course. You can learn more about it here:https://halkyonacademy.com/p/philosophy-as-the-art-of-living

Kind regards,
Johannes A. Niederhauser
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