Philosophy was practiced by the ancients as a form of áskēsis—a practice of continual self-overcoming and self-transformation. With the rise of Christianity in the West, philosophy became an orthodoxy, a quest for correct doctrine. Philosophy was no longer practiced as a way of life because the Christian way of life was already established as the only true one. Philosophy became a theoretical practice aimed at the justification of the revealed truths of Christianity. In the Chinese tradition, the reverse occurred: Truth-seeking philosophies (such as the Mohists for example) were relegated to the countercultural margins of the tradition.
Hadot writes about áskēsis as a means to “let ourselves be changed, in our point of view, attitudes and convictions. This means that we must dialogue with ourselves, and hence we must do battle with ourselves.“ Áskēsis makes use of techniques of the self that are as much bodily as intellectual. These exercises were designed to bring about “a conversion which turns our active life upside down, changing the life of the person who goes through it.” It should not be confused with asceticism. Michel Foucault comments on the difference between asceticism and áskēsis: “Asceticism as the renunciation of pleasure has bad connotations. But the áskēsis is something else: it’s the work that one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself or make the self appear that happily one never attains.”