A way of life

Among the Quadi

At the end of the first book of a small Greek notebook, a note in the margin says where it was written: among the Quadi, on the river Gran. The Quadi were a Germanic people north of the Danube, and the Gran is the river now called the Hron, in Slovakia. The notebook belonged to the most powerful man in the world. Marcus Aurelius (121–180) was emperor of Rome from 161 until he died, and for years he lived on the northern frontier, commanding a long war against tribes that were pressing on the empire. The note at the end of Book 2 reads “at Carnuntum,” the great Roman camp on the Danube. We cannot say where, or how, he wrote the rest. The best guess is that he wrote in the 170s, and he never meant anyone to read it. Its Greek title, Ta eis heauton, means “things to himself.”

Open it and you do not find a theory. You find a man talking to himself, again and again, in the same few moves. “Begin the morning by saying to thyself,” reads the opening of Book 2 in George Long’s old translation, “I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.” They behave that way, he goes on, because they do not know what is good and what is bad. In Book 5 he rehearses getting out of bed: “I am rising to the work of a human being.” In Book 9 he tells himself to look down from above on the countless herds of men, with their countless ceremonies, and the voyages of every sort in storm and calm. What are these? Not arguments for the reader. They are what the French historian Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) taught us to call spiritual exercises.

A gym for the soul

Hadot began as a Catholic priest, left the priesthood in the early 1950s, and became a scholar of ancient thought; from 1983 until his retirement in 1991 he held the chair of the history of Hellenistic and Roman thought at the Collège de France. His book Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (1981; the English version is Philosophy as a Way of Life, 1995) made a claim that startled his colleagues. Ancient philosophy, he said, was not mainly a body of doctrine to be learned. It was a training. By “spiritual exercises” he meant practices that could be physical (a diet, say), discursive (dialogue, meditation), or intuitive (contemplation), all intended to bring about, in his words, “a modification and transformation in the subject.” (What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 1995; English 2002, Introduction.) The phrase itself is old. Ignatius of Loyola gave it to the Catholic world when he began composing his Spiritual Exercises in the 1520s, and Hadot argued that the Christian practice inherited its name and method from the Greek and Roman schools. “Gym for the soul” is a loose rendering of the Chinese phrase 精神体操, “spiritual gymnastics,” and it fits: exercise is repeated, uncomfortable, and aimed at a change you cannot get from reading about it.

Here is a short tour of five exercises that Hadot and the ancient sources document.

• Attention (Greek prosochē): staying alert to your own thoughts and to the present moment, so that you notice a judgment while you are making it.
• Imagining the worst in advance (the Latin phrase is praemeditatio malorum): Marcus’s morning rehearsal of the people he will meet is one; Seneca recommends it too, so that trouble finds you ready and not shocked.
• The evening review: Seneca (On Anger 3.36) describes the Roman philosopher Sextius, who at the end of each day asked himself what fault he had cured, what he had resisted, and in what way he was better.
• The view from above: imagining yourself high up, so that your quarrel, your city, and your lifetime shrink to their real size (Marcus, Meditations 9.30).
• Practice for death: in the Phaedo (64a) Plato has Socrates say that those who pursue philosophy rightly “study nothing but dying and being dead.” Hadot reads this not as morbid, but as training in detaching thought from the body’s fears and the passions.

The choice comes first

The second and more radical part of Hadot’s argument concerns the order of events. We tend to picture philosophy this way: you study a doctrine, you become convinced, and then you decide how to live. Hadot says that for the ancients it ran the other way. In the introduction to What Is Ancient Philosophy? he writes that philosophical discourse “originates in a choice of life and an existential option.” First you decide to live a certain sort of life, a Stoic life or an Epicurean one. The arguments follow, to explain and defend it. The scholar Arnold Davidson, who edited the English collection of Hadot’s essays, drew the consequence: in antiquity you counted as a philosopher by how you lived, not by what you could argue.

The schools were therefore not departments. The Academy, which Plato founded outside Athens about 387 BC; the Lyceum, where Aristotle taught from 335 BC; the Garden, which Epicurus opened in Athens about 306 BC; and the Painted Porch, the Stoa Poikile on the edge of the Athenian marketplace, where Zeno of Citium began teaching about 300 BC and so gave the Stoics their name: each was a community with its own daily practices as well as its own opinions. Stories about Diogenes the Cynic show the idea at its most theatrical. The ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius, writing centuries later, reports that he lived in a large jar and, in broad daylight, walked about with a lamp looking for “a human being.” These are anecdotes, not records, but they were told because everyone understood the point: you could see a philosopher’s philosophy in how he lived.

Epictetus, a former slave who taught in Nicopolis (about AD 50–135), said it plainly to students who came to hear clever talk. His lecture room, he told them, was a hospital for the sick (the Greek word means a doctor’s surgery), and a person should not leave it pleased, but pained. Discourses 3.23.30 is the line, and the translators’ wording varies. Thoreau, nearly 1,800 years later, made the same complaint of his own century in Walden (1854): “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live.” And he gave a definition: to be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but “so to love wisdom as to live” by its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. In this reading, that is why the first two steps are incomplete without the third: a philosophy you cannot live is, as this course puts it, a false one.

The third step: the good as order

What did the ancients think the exercises were for? This course gives the answer in its third step: to bring a person into line with the good, and the good, for many Greek thinkers, was order. The Pythagoreans are the emblem. They were credited with the discovery that the main musical intervals correspond to simple ratios of string lengths: an octave is 2 to 1, a fifth 3 to 2, a fourth 4 to 3. (The charming story that Pythagoras found the ratios by listening to blacksmiths’ hammers is a later legend, and it fails as physics; the string-length ratios are real.) If beauty in sound is number, perhaps the beauty of the whole world is too. The Greek word kosmos means order and ornament at once, and in Plato’s Gorgias (507e–508a) Socrates says that wise men teach that heaven and earth, gods and men, are held together by community, friendship, orderliness, temperance, and justice, and that this is why they call the whole a kosmos. So to see the world as an ordered whole, and to arrange your life in tune with it, were one project. That is also how the Stoics ranked their own study: Diogenes Laertius records their comparison of philosophy to a field, with logic as the fence, physics as the soil and trees, and ethics as the fruit.

The ideal came with a humbling fact. The Stoics said the wise person, the sage, was perfectly free of the passions and made no mistakes in judgment, and they admitted that such a person almost never exists. Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius (Letter 42.1) that one of the first rank springs into being, like the phoenix, only about once in five hundred years. Everyone else is on the road. The Stoic word for the traveler is prokoptōn, “one making progress.” That is what Plato had already said, in the Symposium, of the philosopher: not wise, but a lover of wisdom, in the in-between.

What the gaze gives

Put the three steps together and ask what the gaze gives a person. This course’s answer has four parts.

First, a changed way of seeing. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in the preface to his Phenomenology of Perception (1945) that true philosophy means “relearning to look at the world.” What fades with habit comes back when you look as if for the first time. Second, distance. Husserl’s “bracketing,” Marcus’s view from above, and Laozi’s “watch them return” are all methods for standing a little way off from your own life, so that the pressure of the immediate loosens. Third, a measure of fairness. The Zhuangzi’s second chapter, Qíwùlùn (齐物论), usually rendered “Discussion on Making Things Equal,” says “天地与我并生，而万物与我为一”: heaven and earth were born with me, and the ten thousand things and I are one. A look from far enough away will not rank things by how much they matter to you. Fourth, a quest that does not finish. Philosophy as the Greeks first named it was a lack and a love, the Stoics’ sage is a phoenix, and in the Symposium the philosopher is in between. In this reading, that is the greatest gift of the gaze: it keeps you asking, which is a good way to keep curious.