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The Inner Citadel: the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Pierre Hadot

Article  in  Mind · July 2001

DOI: 10.1093/mind/110.439.764

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 Book Reviews 1

The Inner Citadel: the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, by Pierre

Hadot, translated by Michael Chase. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 339. Hb £27.95.
Suppose you were told by some unimpeachable source that Stoic moral phi-
losophy was correct in every detail. In some sense of the word ‘reason’, you
would have a reason to believe that Stoic moral philosophy was true. If your
source was genuinely unimpeachable—perhaps it was God—it would be
rational for you to believe that nothing that fails to be under your control was
relevant to your happiness or well-being. Even if your spouse is brutally mur-
dered before your eyes, your children turn out to be utterly rotten and you
are reduced to poverty or servitude, this has nothing whatsoever to do with
whether you are doing well (eu prattein) or are happy (eudaimonos). You
would also be correct in believing that emotions like anger or sorrow were
mistaken judgements. But could you bring yourself to actually believe this
and live in accordance with these beliefs? Suppose that you yourself read
some now lost work of Chrysippus that summed up in his tidy syllogisms the
reasons why Stoic moral philosophy is true. You would then be in possession
of reasons of a rather different sort for believing these things. Even if you
understood the reason why it is true that you suffer no real misfortune when
are unjustly imprisoned or stricken with a terminal illness, could you bring
yourself to believe it?
Hadot’s book on the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is about how one
might effect the transition from believing that Stoicism is true to being a
Stoic. This is a familiar theme for recent work on Hellenistic philosophy.
Books like Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire or the Apeiron supplementary vol-
ume entitled The Poetics of Therapy forcefully remind contemporary philoso-
phers that, at one time at least, it was taken for granted that it was the
purpose of philosophy to make life better for those who undertook the ardu-
ous study. It is also a familiar theme for Hadot whose earlier book, Exercises
spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris, 1981), discussed the relationship
between theory and practice in ancient philosophy generally. Part of his argu-
ment there was that in antiquity it was not necessary that a philosopher
should write philosophical works or contrive theoretical innovations to an
accepted body of doctrine in order to count as a philosopher. Philosophical
credentials were earned by enacting one’s philosophical beliefs in one’s own
life. For this reason, Hadot is naturally drawn to the task of rehabilitating the
Roman Stoics, Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius for they have all been
criticized for being derivative, longwinded, boring moralists from whose
writings we learn nothing new about Stoicism. Recent scholarship has done
much to acquit them of many of these charges—particularly that of being
utterly derivative. But Hadot is less interested in their theoretical contribu-
tions (or lack thereof) to Stoic philosophy than in their contribution to the
really central task of integrating Stoicism into one’s practice of living. Here he
finds in Marcus three tropes or patterns of disciplining oneself which Hadot
2 Book Reviews

claims he absorbed from his reading of Epictetus. In the very first paragraph
of the Enchiridion Epictetus asserts that there are three things that are under
our control: judgement (hupol_psis), impulse (horm_) and desire and aver-
sion (orexis kai ekklisis). According to Hadot, Marcus develops these three
activities into three disciplines with different spheres of operation. With
respect to each activity we attempt to transform ourselves so as to cultivate a
different inner attitude. This ternary model of self-discipline is summarized
by Hadot with the following table:

activity domain of reality inner attitude

judgement faculty of judgement objectivity

desire universal Nature consent to Destiny

impulse toward human Nature justice and altruism

action

The bulk of the book consists in three central chapters in which each of these
disciplines is discussed.
Before he can turn to that task, however, Hadot tells us about Marcus
Aurelius and the curious work we have from his pen. He then provides a
chapter in which he argues for the claim that Marcus’s Stoicism was pro-
foundly influenced by the writings of Epictetus. Finally, he dedicates a chap-
ter to the Stoicism of Epictetus. In each of these chapters, Hadot argues that
Marcus and Epictetus ought to be accorded more respect as philosophers,
even according to the more traditional norms for identifying great philoso-
phers. For instance, Hadot argues that Arrian—the compiler of the work we
call the Discourses of Epictetus—records or paraphrases only a certain por-
tion of Epictetus’s lectures. Hadot supposes that, like Aulus Gellius’s Platonic
teacher, Epictetus had a portion of his course in which he invited questions
and tried to bring the point of the preceding lectio home to his auditors. Thus
it should come as no surprise that the Discourses are long on exhortation and
short on detailed discussion of Stoic arguments. Hadot believes that refer-
ences within the work imply that Epictetus both knew and taught the nitty
gritty bits of Stoicism. A similar explanation is offered for the rather repeti-
tive character of much of the Meditations: they are spiritual exercises whose
point is to imprint the foundational principles of Stoic moral philosophy on
the imagination in order not only that Marcus can believe them, but in order
that he may live them. Much of this seems plausible and there have been oth-
ers who have defended the philosophical acumen of Marcus and Epictetus by
appealing to the purpose of the works we possess from them.
 Book Reviews 3

The core of Hadot’s book, however, is the three-fold division of disciplines

of the soul and here I have some concerns about the clarity and accuracy of
Hadot’s account of Stoic moral psychology. Let me skip over the discipline of
assent, which is not so problematic. It has long been recognized that Epictetus
and Marcus both use ‘impulse’ and ‘desire’ in somewhat unorthodox ways.
What is needed is a clear explanation of role of these concepts in orthodox
Stoicism and then an account of how the later Stoics’ use of them differs. In
orthodox Stoicism, desire or orexis is a species of impulse which is distin-
guished by having as its object that which the agent deems to be good. The
genus, impulse or horm, is directed at something that the agent takes to have
some property that motivates. Thus a hormetic impression presents an object
as pleasant or conducive to survival. To assent to such an impression is to
accept a content like ‘the bread ought to be eaten’. Impulse is rather like an
imperative in the soul’s inner dialogue with itself in which it says ‘You, take
the bread’. Now most of us non-Stoics suppose that eating the bread is a good
thing, since we mistakenly believe pleasure or survival are themselves goods.
So we are likely to have orexis and not merely impulse in such a case. But
according to the Stoics, these things are not goods—only virtue is. But in
many cases one will perform an appropriate action (kath konta) in taking
something that will preserve one’s nature. An appropriate action is roughly
one for which there is a justification in terms of things according to nature.
Kath konta performed from a virtuous disposition are morally correct actions
(katorth ma). The Stoic sage may desire that he performs a morally correct
action by acting from his impulse, but he will not have desire for the bread.
A quote from Hadot will show how far his account places the later Stoics
from this orthodox picture. According to him, ‘Desire and impulse represent
a reduplication of the will. Desire is, as it were, an ineffective will, whereas
active impulse or tendency is will which produces an action’ (p. 128). They
are further related to the distinctions between passivity and activity, external-
ity and internality, common nature and our nature. The discipline of desire
has as its object that I desire only what universal nature or fate brings about.
The discipline of impulse ‘consists in wanting to do that which my own
nature wants me to do’ (p. 129). It is true that Epictetus at least treats impulse
and desire as coordinate rather than as genus and species. It is also true that
he exhorts his students to abandon desire, but perhaps this is only because
his auditors do not yet know what the sole object of desire—the one genuine
good— ought to be. And in any event there is a difference between saying
that one ought not to desire and that desire is an ineffective act of will.
It seems to me that what is needed here is a great deal more clarity about
these fundamental concepts in Stoic moral psychology— an account that
states more clearly how Hadot supposes Epictetus and Marcus differ from the
orthodox picture and a more detailed argument that they in fact do so. The
issue is examined with great rigour and clarity by Brad Inwood in his book,
Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism and he concludes that they do not
 4 Book Reviews

depart substantially from orthodoxy. The differences are differences that

flow from the nature and purpose of the documents that we have from them.
But Inwood’s excellent book—a standard in the anglo-analytic tradition—
receives not a mention in Hadot. All this leaves this reader in two minds
about this book. On the one hand, Hadot’s treatment of the various tropes
by means of which Marcus works on his own soul is often insightful. His
attention to the way that Marcus pursues the ‘live in the present’ theme is a
good example. On the other hand, I am largely unconvinced by the elabora-
tion of the theoretical framework within which this detailed examination
takes place.

Department of Philosophy  

Monash University
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Clayton, Victoria 3800
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