Discourse or a way of life
On the axis: The point of philosophy · philosophy itself
Is philosophy a body of doctrines, or first of all a way of life made of exercises that transform the one who practices them, since reduced to mere theory?
Justification
Nietzsche mocks the pleasure-happiness of the utilitarians as much as the morality of duty: the good is neither enjoyment nor disinterested virtue. It is the enhancement of life, the flourishing of power and self-overcoming, the great health of one who dares to create himself and to say yes to existence. A transvalued eudaimonism, where success is measured by strength and greatness, not by comfort.
Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows, 12
Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows · The Gay Science, IV-V · Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Justification
Stoic philosophy is an exercise (askêsis) more than a body of knowledge: a daily discipline of judgment, desire, and action, whose raw material is the very life of the one who practices it. Physics and logic keep their place, but in the service of the art of living: to know the order of the world is to learn to consent to it.
The subject-matter of the art of living is each person's own life.Discourses, I.15.2
Epictetus, Discourses, I.15 · Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 16
Justification
The good, the Stoics argue, must be what always benefits and never harms; yet health, wealth or pleasure can be misused: they are not goods but , at most « preferred ». Only virtue, the right use of reason, meets the criterion, hence the school's most disputed thesis, against : it , and the sage stays happy even amid torments.
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius · Cicero, On Moral Ends, book III
Anchors: Hadot · Nietzsche · the Stoics
leads to: The highest good