Bryn Mawr Classical Review 1998.11.

35

Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus

Aurelius. Translated by Michael Chase.   Cambridge, MA:  Harvard
University Press, 1998.  Pp. x, 351.  ISBN 0-674-46171-1.  $45.00.  

Reviewed by Rachana Kamtekar, Institute for Research in the Humanities,

University of Wisconsin-Madison ([email protected])
Word count: 4302 words

English-language readers of Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life (Blackwell,

1995) and students of Stoicism will welcome Michael Chase's translation of
Hadot's 1992 La Citadelle Intérieure. In The Inner Citadel, Hadot applies to
Marcus Aurelius' Meditations his characteristic interpretative approach: treating
ancient philosophy as a "way of life," in particular one which provides its
students with "spiritual exercises" to enable them to make progress towards
wisdom, and treating ancient philosophical texts with attention to the "forms of
discourse," or constraints of genre, tradition, and audience that affected their
production.1 Hadot's extended application of this approach to Marcus gives
readers an opportunity to evaluate its fruitfulness. Below, I give a brief chapter-
by-chapter summary of Hadot's interpretation of Marcus' Meditations,
commenting along the way on some general issues in The Inner Citadel: (1) the
treatment of Marcus' eclecticism vs. Stoic orthodoxy, (2) the value of
indifferents, (3) the Stoics' account of the relationship between the disciplines of
logic, physics, and ethics, especially in their theoretical and practical dimensions.

An initial chapter, "The Emperor-Philosopher," programmatically sets out

Hadot's view of what it meant to be a philosopher in antiquity--namely, to
transform one's life so as to live philosophically, rather than merely to study
philosophy--and discusses Marcus' relations to his contemporaries. Chapter 2,
"A First Glimpse of the Meditations," argues that the Meditations consists of
"hypomnemata" or "personal notes": Marcus wrote them in his own hand, day by
day, and did not intend them for publication, but rather for his own use--to help
him live his life according to certain essential rules. He sought to write these
reflections in a style that would be psychologically effective on, and persuasive
to, himself--hence the highly literary flavour of the Meditations. Thus, the
Meditations are spiritual exercises, exercises of self-transformation, par
excellence. In Chapter 3, "The Meditations as Spiritual Exercises" Hadot
suggests that in writing the Meditations, Marcus is following Epictetus' advice to
"write down every day" the fundamental dogmas and principles of Stoicism.
Hadot identifies three dogmas (rules for practical conduct expressing an inner
disposition): to be contented with whatever happens, to conduct oneself justly
towards others, and to apply rules of discernment to one's inner representations.
These dogmas correspond to the three disciplines, also found in Epictetus, of
desire (which ranges over universal nature), action (which ranges over human
nature), and judgment (which ranges over our faculty of judgment). When we
live by these dogmas and discipline desire, action and judgment, we develop the
inner attitudes of consent to destiny, justice and altruism, and objectivity.
Marcus engages in the spiritual exercise of writing the Meditations in order to
enliven these dogmas for himself so that he can internalize them2 -- by which
Hadot means that they "become achievements of awareness, intuitions,
emotions, and moral experiences which have the intensity of a mystical
experience or a vision" (51).

Here, Hadot leaves unremarked some tensions between Marcus and Stoic
orthodoxy. According to Stoic orthodoxy, the state of virtue is fully and purely
rational.3 However, Hadot's characterization of internalization suggests that
virtue is not only an intellectual state, but also an emotional one. Further, the
idea that one needs persuasive literary devices to work on the imagination in the
pursuit of virtue implies that there are non-rational parts of the soul, the
existence of which orthodox Stoics deny. Finally, this leads to a worry about
whether there are rational constraints on the process by which one internalizes
the dogmas: will any persuasive technique at all count as a Stoic spiritual
exercise as long as it leads one to acquire the appropriate dogmas?

But Hadot's neglect of questions of orthodoxy may be the result of two

methodological assumptions, one of which he makes explicit in the Conclusion
to his book. First, his conception of what makes a Stoic has less to do with
adherence to tradition or doctrinal detail than with adherence to certain
fundamentals: "What defined a Stoic above all else was the choice of a life in
which every thought, every desire, and every action would be guided by no other
law than that of universal Reason" (308), to be "conscious of the fact that no
being is alone, but that we are parts of a Whole, constituted by the totality of
human beings as well as by the totality of the cosmos.... The Stoic feels
absolutely serene, free, and invulnerable, insofar as he has become aware that
there is no other evil than moral evil, and that the only thing that counts is the
purity of moral conscience. Finally, the Stoic believes in the absolute value of
the human person" (311). A second assumption, not made explicit in The Inner
Citadel but suggested by his methodological writings, would be that ancient
philosophy developed through "creative misreading," "contamination," and other
such processes, so that even as a philosopher tried to be faithful to his tradition,
he strayed.4 We can see this methodological assumption at work in the opening
section of Chapter 4, which explains as an appropriation of non-Stoic
philosophers to Stoic thought statements by Marcus that might have been taken
as evidence of his eclecticism. For example, Hadot claims that when Marcus
says "All things are by law (nomisti)" (Meditations 7.31), he is quoting
Democritus but taking what Democritus meant to be "by convention" as "by
law"; again, when Marcus cites Monimus the Cynic's "Everything is judgment"
(2.15), he takes the Cynic's declaration that human opinion is vanity to be
making the Stoic point that it is only our judgments that can trouble us, but they
are vanity (56).

But this interpretative strategy will not explain all apparent heterodoxy. Hadot
mentions in Chapter 4 Marcus' approval of Theophrastus' view that there are
degrees of vice (57). This is not a Stoic reading of a non-Stoic philosopher, and
to stave off the charge of eclecticism or heterodoxy, Hadot cites Epictetus' view
that misdeeds done out of or for love are lesser faults than those done out of
ambition (58) -- thus using the reputedly orthodox Stoicism of Epictetus (82) to
reduce the importance for Stoicism of the doctrine that all faults are equal.5 But
Epictetus merely says that it is easier to pity the former than the latter -- a
psychological observation rather than an endorsement (Discourses 4.1.147) --
and from Marcus' text it looks as if Marcus is not only stepping out of line but
aware of it: he calls his appeal to Theophrastus a "koinoteron" way of speaking
(2.10).

Chapter 4 ("The Philosopher-Slave and the Emperor-Philosopher") gives some

of the philosophical, and particularly Stoic, background to Marcus' writings.
Hadot establishes that Marcus was greatly influenced by his reading of
Epictetus, argues that Arrian's Discourses of Epictetus are also "hypomnemata"
and suggests that the Encheiridion, like Marcus' Meditations, was a response to
the Stoic requirement that one always have Stoic dogmas at hand. Hadot's
account of the genre of the Meditations is attractive. But on points of doctrine,
Hadot's discussion of the Stoic background is somewhat unsatisfactory. For
example, his presentation of the Stoic doctrine of indifferents makes the Stoics
look more confused than they were. First, Hadot attributes to the Stoics the view
that, "the only value is moral good, which depends on our freedom, and ...
everything that does not depend on our freedom -- poverty, wealth, sickness, and
health -- is neither good nor bad, and is therefore indifferent ... we must not
make any distinction between indifferent things; in other words, we must love
them equally." But a few lines later, he distinguishes this view from Aristo's
view that "that which was indifferent was completely 'undifferentiated' and no
element of daily life had any importance in and of itself" on the grounds that,
"Orthodox Stoics, while they recognized that the things which do not depend on
us are indifferent, nevertheless admitted that we could attribute to them a moral
value, by conceding the existence of political, social, and family obligations,
linked to the needs of human nature in accordance with reasonable probability"
(71-72).

Now either moral good and evil are the only things that have value or they aren't
and indifferents have value too -- and in this case, one will have to explain the
difference between these two kinds of value (as Cicero attempts to do in De
Finibus 3). But saying that the kind of value indifferents have is "moral" only
makes them seem more likely to be good or bad. There is, however, a clear
solution to this problem: only moral good and evil have value, but the content of
moral good and evil, or virtue and vice, is given by what one does with (i.e. how
one selects among) indifferents. What one should do with indifferents is to select
those that are according to nature (e.g. usually health) and reject those that are
contrary to nature (e.g. usually sickness), and a Stoic therefore needs a thorough
understanding of nature in order to know what indifferents are and aren't
according to nature.

Chapters 5-8 are the heart of Hadot's book, attempting to make good on the
thesis that the Meditations are spiritual exercises written to internalize Epictetus'
three disciplines. In chapter 5, "The Stoicism of Epictetus," Hadot traces the
development of the Stoic conception of the parts of philosophy through
Epictetus. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics treat physics, ethics, and
dialectics as equally related to one logos, divine Reason, and although they see
these as pertaining to three different sectors of reality and pedagogically
separate, they consider them to be interentailing and unified in practice, like the
virtues -- indeed, the parts of philosophy are virtues. Somewhat confusingly,
Hadot says here that the three disciplines are not bodies of theoretical doctrine,
but rather are the inner dispositions and practical conduct of the sage (79),
without considering that they might be both. Hadot goes on to claim that the
Stoics see logic, ethics, and physics, not as parts of philosophy (for they see
philosophy as an organic whole) but rather as parts of the discourse concerning
philosophy, separated only for pedagogical purposes (81). But the textual
evidence for this claim is mixed: Diogenes Laertius notes some disagreement
among Stoics as to whether it is only philosophical discourse or also philosophy
itself that has parts (7.39-41); Cicero has philosophy partitioned (Academica
1.40); Hadot himself later cites the very same passage from Diogenes Laertius
(7.40) to talk about the parts of philosophy rather than of its discourse (90).
Finally, Hadot cites a passage in Epictetus (Discourses 4.4.11-18) that allegedly
contrasts logic as a part of theoretical discourse with lived logic, the discipline of
judgment. But Epictetus is drawing a much simpler distinction, between two
attitudes (presumably his students') towards one field: the bad attitude of
studying logic to show off, and the good attitude of studying logic to put it into
practice and apply it to one's judgments in life. On this picture, there is a
theoretical discipline, logic, which one can either apply or fail to apply to one's
life.

The distinction Hadot wants to insist on between 'theoretical' and 'lived'

philosophy is the distinction between the study of the rules of reasoning, the
laws of the cosmos and human behaviour, and the rules humans should obey on
the one hand, and reasoning well, living as a part of the whole cosmos, and
acting well on the other (82). Epictetus' three disciplines enable us to do the
latter, that is, to train the three functions of the guiding principle (hegemonikon)
-- desire, impulse and judgment -- which are up to us: training in desire enables
the philosopher to avoid frustration over the things that happen due to destiny,
training in impulse and action, to act in an orderly way towards other people,
guided by rational probability, and training in judgment, to withhold assent from
anything unless he has sufficient reason for it, especially from adding anything
subjective to his judgments (86).

Chapter 6, "The Discipline of Assent," identifies the "inner citadel": this is the
soul's guiding principle, which cannot be touched by destiny or the way things
are since it is free to assent or not to assent to the judgments thought forms about
presentations (phantasiai). The most fundamental spiritual exercise consists in
delimiting one's sense of oneself to one's guiding principle, and indeed, to one's
guiding principle in the present -- for in that alone is one free, and active. One's
guiding principle thus offers one the possibility of happiness, for only one's
judgments, not destiny or the way things are, can affect one's happiness. The
judgments one should strive for are simply those that do not go beyond
presentations but stick to an objective presentation of reality (phantasia
kataleptike). Marcus equates objective presentation with physical definition,
which demystifies and reduces objects and events to their material and physical
functions: thus gastronomic delicacies are reduced to "the corpse of a fish, the
corpse of a bird or a pig," purple clothing to "sheep's hair moistened in the blood
of shellfish," sexual intercourse to "the rubbing together of abdomens,
accompanied by the spasmodic ejaculation of a sticky liquid" (104-5, cf.
Meditations 6.13) The judgment (hypolepsis) one might add to a presentation to
make it false, and thus damaging, is, interestingly, a value judgment -- not a
judgment, e.g., that the sun really is a foot across. Thus what we have to assent
to or withhold assent from are "those inner discourses we pronounce not about
the reality of things but their value" (111, cf. 107, 110, 112, 122).

There is something unstoic about isolating value-judgments from all other

judgments -- as if value-judgments somehow float freely on top of factual
judgments so that one's value-judgments are a matter of one's will, as if will and
intellect can be separated. But given that our value-judgments are a function of
our knowledge or ignorance, they cannot be up to us in quite the way Hadot
suggests. Rather, it must be that it is up to us to understand nature so that all our
judgments can be true rather than false. This is one reason why the distinction is
false, between "theoretical or abstract knowledge and ignorance" and "a
knowledge and a non-knowing which engage the individual," where the latter
but not the former are supposed to be the kind of knowledge that is virtue (126),
and where the latter but not the former is "equally present in all human beings"
(121). The Stoics believe precisely that theoretical knowledge (knowledge of
how nature is) is practical.

Chapter 7 ("The Discipline of Desire") begins with the claim that Marcus gives a
"more precise grounding" to Epictetus' distinction between impulse and desire
through a systematic description of reality (128). Desire is passive, our attitude
towards the external events that comprise nature; impulse, on the other hand, is
active, the causality that comes from within us. So the discipline of desire is a
lived physics, through which one learns to desire only what is willed by
universal nature. Marcus certainly fills out the content of this lived physics much
more than Epictetus. As Hadot points out, it is the physics of Heraclitus, and it
teaches us to view time as a succession of instants; this has the effect of making
difficulties and hardships more bearable--because the present alone belongs to
us. (The present is, according to Hadot's dubiously reconstruction of Chrysippus
(135-37), that which is fixed by the subject's consciousness.6) Physical
definition has further beneficial results: redefine death as decomposition, and it
is no more or less emotionally charged than the account of the decomposition of
some stone. The study of the metamorphosis of things into one another as they
decompose and are regenerated gives one a view of the totality of substance and
time. Finally, this view of the totality reveals to one the homogeneity of things --
their interconnection as well as their repetitiveness -- all of which lead one to
have the right attitude towards the realm of indifferents. In general,
reductionistic physics enables us to view each moment with increased attention,
and, having learned how things are interconnected, to say yes to the whole
totality of instants when we consent to one. Chapter 8, "The Discipline of
Action," turns to impulse, for which the norm is conformity with human nature:
we are to act in the service of the whole (of society), respect the hierarchy of
values between types of action and love all human beings since we are all
members of one body. The concrete acts we are to undertake are given by our
instinct, the appropriate, and by our duties. When we act, we are to act
resolutely, but to want the outcome of our action with reservation, since that is
not in our control and we must desire only what is the will of nature (193-200,
204-5).

But Hadot starts off on the wrong foot because he does not attend to the rationale
for Epictetus' distinction between impulse and desire -- which Marcus follows.
As Brad Inwood showed in Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism,
Epictetus distinguishes between desire (orexis), which we have for the (apparent)
good, and impulse (horme), which is for the fitting or appropriate. Epictetus
urges us to suspend all desire so long as we are not wise (i.e. so long as we do
not know what the good is, or what it is that nature wills) and to act instead on
the basis of impulse with reservation.7 Thus we are not meant to desire anything
with reservation--that is too difficult psychologically, and in any case, we are to
desire not externals, but what is up to us, i.e., virtue (Encheiridion 2, Discourses
3.24.23-4, 85). It is just that we cannot give content to this desire until after we
have become wise, and in the meantime, we need guidance in action. So physics
is necessary not just for the training of desire, but also for the guidance of action
-- for without physics, how is one to know what is appropriate, how is one to
adopt the right impulses for action? Hadot's claims about the practical unity of
philosophy would have been better supported by this sort of account, which
would have required him to give up the neat one-to-one correspondence between
(a) physics, one's attitude towards the cosmos, and the discipline of desire; (b)
logic, one's refraining from making value-judgments but sticking with the
presentation as it is given, and the discipline of judgment; and (c) ethics, one's
attitude towards other human beings, and the discipline of action. Hadot does go
some distance in this direction: to establish that physics corresponds to (or is) the
discipline of desire, he argues in chapter 7 that even if the theory of desire
belongs to ethics, the lived practice of the discipline of desire implies an attitude
towards the cosmos that requires an understanding of nature, and that in addition
to giving one a rational foundation for disciplining desire, the study of physics
enables one to enjoy the spectacle of the universe with God's vision, and to
admire God's works in nature.

Two further topics of interest are discussed in these chapters. In chapter 7, Hadot
argues that Marcus' "Either Providence or atoms" expresses not eclecticism but
rather the view that whether the physics of the Stoics (providence) or Epicureans
(atoms) is true, one must live according to Stoic ethics (i.e. according to reason).
Further, the fact that we do live as Stoics shows that providence, rather than
atoms, must be the case--for atoms would not allow order to reign even within us
(149-51). According to Hadot, the idea of Providence also allows Marcus to
explain apparent evil both philosophically--as following indirectly rather than
directly from the will of Providence--and religiously, as willed by a personalized
daimon to teach one some lesson. Chapter 8 takes up the issue of motivation at
some length. On the one hand, the reason to do good for others seems to be that
we are parts of the same whole, and it brings us joy as well as straightforward
benefit, to be part of a whole that has been benefited (cf. Meditations 6.14:
practice virtue as a boon to yourself, thinking of yourself as the limb of a body.)
On the other hand, Hadot thinks Marcus demands more purity of motive than
this -- the virtuous person is not supposed to be conscious of his virtuous action,
he is supposed to act virtuously in the way a vine bears grapes (200-3). But, one
might object, this cannot mean that the virtuous person does not have access to
the reasons to be virtuous, or even to his reasons for being virtuous (cf. 5.2).
Hadot says finally that Stoicism is not a philosophy of self-love because its
fundamental tonality is of love of the All (212). But this does not distinguish
between the end (love of the All) one reaches when educated, and the initial and
assumed motivation (to Stoicism), which is eudaimonistic. Finally, Hadot
discusses the question, which he thinks is very much Marcus' question, of how
and why we should seek indifferents for others when they have no value in the
Stoic's own eyes. The answer comes from the idea of justice as merit: justice,
which it is his job as emperor and man to do, consists in giving to each the goods
that they merit -- to be just, he must dole out indifferents (217-22).

According to a short ninth chapter ("Virtue and Joy"), virtue is a state in which
we fulfill the function for which we were made, follow both our nature and
universal nature, and consent to the order -- social, natural, and discursive. Here,
Hadot discusses Marcus' attempt to fit the four virtues into Epictetus' three-fold
distinction between functions of the soul and disciplines. For a second time,
Hadot yields to the temptation to compare this three-fold distinction with Plato's
tripartition of the soul (233, cf. 88). But there is a deep confusion in Hadot's
reading of Plato: contrary to Hadot, Plato's Republic does not have it that
wisdom is the virtue of philosophers, courage the virtue of the military
auxiliaries and moderation that of the "artisans." For one thing, Socrates points
out the virtue of moderation is like a harmony, not in one class but distributed
across the three classes, and obtaining when the desires of the lower classes are
dominated by those of the higher (Republic 431b-432a), for another, he qualifies
the military's courage as 'political' (Republic 430c) In fact, the Republic has it
that genuine virtue (of whatever variety) is possessed only by philosophers, and
that the best the rest are capable of is a lesser, 'political' virtue based on true
belief rather than knowledge. In the context of this discussion, Hadot's
misreading makes Marcus and other Stoics seem to depart from Plato rather than
following him as they are when they claim that virtue is a single condition of the
whole soul, which requires knowledge. (The virtues are not, as Hadot claims,
simply enumerated without theorization elsewhere in Plato (233), for some
passages which were important for the Stoics see e.g. Euthydemus 278e-82a,
Meno 88b-d, Protagoras 329d)

Chapter 10, "Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations," begins with the laudable goal
of avoiding the pitfalls of psychobiography on the one hand and erasure of
author on the other. It is striking that Hadot never gives any arguments against
the latter -- especially given that a rigorous application of the methods to avoid
the former does lead one in the direction of effacing the author. Against the
former, Hadot repairs to the notion of "forms of discourse", that is, to the
distinction between what is required of the author by the genre, school, tradition,
within which he writes, and what the author wishes to do with these
prefabricated elements. Appeal to the prefabricated elements allows Hadot to
dismiss a certain amount of pointless psychobiography of Marcus -- according to
which Marcus was an opium addict, a depressive personality, a sufferer from
gastric ulcers -- but Hadot is not above psychologizing Marcus himself. So, for
example, Hadot determines that Marcus was candid, naive, simple; that he
sought tenderness, affection, warmth; that he had an acute capacity for objective
self-evaluation; that conflict between doing his appointed work at the Court and
living philosophically was the drama of his life. But why aren't these impressions
the results of prefabricated elements in the Meditations as well? What in the text
allows us to get at "the real Marcus"? It is reasonable to suppose that if we can
talk about Marcus' subjective states at all, we should use Stoic terms of
description and evaluation since this is what Marcus was doing with himself. But
apart from following this limited interpretative directive, it is difficult to see how
one can be any more specific in retrieving authorship. Further, one wonders
whether it is reasonable to take as psychological what remains once one has
completed the identification of the prefabricated. For example, Hadot describes
the organization of the Meditations as the result of "interwoven composition" in
which Marcus moves from one thought to another as it strikes him (264), but
perhaps what we are encountering here is just the explanatory limit of the
method of identifying prefabricated elements in the text. It might be not the flow
of Marcus' own thoughts that leads him to move from one theme to another but a
view about how thoughts do flow, or should flow.

The Inner Citadel is a rich and substantial book and will certainly affect future
scholarship on Marcus Aurelius. One wishes the author had engaged more with
the English-language scholarship on Stoicism (such as Inwood's work mentioned
above) and considered objections and alternatives to his interpretations -- but
perhaps that is just wishing that he wrote more in the style of analytically-trained
historians of philosophy.

Notes:

1.   See "Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy,"

Inaugural lecture to the Chair of the History of Hellenistic and Roman Thought,
reprinted in Philosophy as a Way of Life (tr. Michael Chase, Blackwell, 1995),
esp. pp. 57-60 and 62-65.
2.   Confusingly, Hadot characterizes Marcus' spiritual exercises as divided into
two therapies: of the word -- using striking formulas, rational or imagistic forms
of persuasion -- and of writing -- to internalize Stoic principles. But surely
writing is a technique that uses words and the use of words to persuade oneself is
aimed ultimately at internalizing Stoic principles. There don't seem to be two
therapies, but one, which can be specified in terms of its techniques as well as in
terms of its goal.
3.   See e.g. Plutarch, De virtue morali 441c (= Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic
Philosophers [LS] 61 B), Diogenes Laertius 7.89 (= LS 61A).
4.   "Philosophy, Exegesis and Creative Mistakes," essay 2 in Philosophy as a
Way of Life.
5.   Diogenes Laertius 7.127 (= LS 61I)
6.   Hadot here opposes the view of the present as an infinitesimal point with that
of the present as fixed by the subject's consciousness. He attributes to
Chrysippus the following odd argument. (i) Walking (e.g.) is present to, i.e.
belongs to, me when I am walking. (ii) The past and future do not currently
belong to me. (iii) Even if I think about them, they are independent of me. (iv)
Therefore, the present has reality only in relation to my consciousness, thought,
initiative, freedom. I do not see how (4) follows; in particular, how the 'only in
relation to my consciousness' follows. The Chrysippus passage distinguishes
between the present as infinitesimal ("in the proper sense of the term") and not
the present as fixed by a duration of consciousness, but rather the present as
fixed by the length of an activity ("in the extended sense").
7.   Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism (Oxford, 1985), pp.
117-126.

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