“Spiritual exercises”. But not the pious and rigid meditations of Loyola, which are only a distant echo, full of distortions, of the ancient tradition, but the work of the self on the self, sketched from early times by the first Greek philosophers and finding its full extent with the Socratic and Platonic dialogues, with the “Epistles” of Epicurus or Seneca, with the “Manual” of Epictetus, with the “Thoughts…” of Marcus Aurelius, with the treatises of Plotinus – work that some moderns, like Montaigne, Descartes, Kant, Michelet, Bergson, Friedmann and Foucault, have continued to practice. Isn’t the essence of philosophy just this continual questioning of our relationship with ourselves, or with our neighbors and the world?