Plato: Meno. George Anastaplo and Laurence Berns translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004.

Jacob Klein: A Commentary on Plato’s Meno. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965.

 

Usually, inquiring Socrates asks the questions. Not so, on this occasion, initially. A wealthy young aristocrat from Thessaly, Meno, wants to know if aretē (excellence, virtue) can be taught. If not, does it come into being by practice? Or by nature, at birth? Or in some other way? An aristocrat might prefer to suppose that excellence comes by nature, as an inherent, inherited birthright to rule. But Meno isn’t an ordinary aristocrat.

These questions open Meno to a salvo of characteristic Socratic irony. “Meno, it used to be that Thessalians were well-reputed among the Greeks” (70a); in fact, Greeks generally regarded them as disorderly and licentious. They “were admired both for horsemanship and for wealth” (70a); that is, the substance of their good name consisting of a type of physical virtuosity and of money. “Now,” however, “it seems to me, they are to be admired for wisdom [sophia] also” because Thessaly is the home of the rhetoricians and sophists (‘wise’ men), Gorgias being the man “responsible for this happening” (70a-b). Gorgias was a Sicilian, student of his fellow countryman, Empedocles, the poet-philosopher, a materialist who nonetheless taught that human souls are reincarnated. Socrates recalls that “When [Empedocles] came to the city, he captivated the foremost men among the Aleuadai”—the Thessalian ruling class, including Meno’s lover, Aristippus—proof that Gorgias’ rhetorical art worked, at least insofar as it permitted rhetorician-sophists to get paid for changing the character of regimes (70b). Gorgias taught Thessalians the habit or custom Meno may expect Socrates to exhibit: “answering both fearlessly and magnificently whenever anyone asks you anything, as is fitting for those who know” (70b-c). (Then again, it may be that he expects to ‘show Socrates up,’ to establish the superiority of his own art of rhetoric over Socratic philosophizing.) Rhetorician Gorgias always has the answer, presenting himself as a man of ready knowledge (epistēmē). Any Greek, any Hellene, “who wants to question him about whatever one might wish to ask, and there is no one whom he does not answer” (70c-71a). Gorgias is a democrat, or at least one who aims at instructing, and perhaps influencing, anyone and everyone, democrats and oligarchs alike. This leaves open another question, however: Was Gorgias’ answer the right answer? Aside from the art of rhetoric, what does a rhetorician know? How wise is a sophist? 

And what of Meno’s name? Is it good? Klein observes, with his own touch of irony, that “Meno” resembles the Greek mnêmê, which means “mind,” and “we note that in the name ‘Meno’ the sequence of those two letters is somewhat deranged” (45). “Gorgias might well know what aretê is, while Meno might merely know what Gorgias said it is” (45)

Alas, here in Athens, Socrates explains, “the opposite condition prevails”; “it’s as if some sort of drought of wisdom has come about, and there seems to be a danger that wisdom has left these parts for yours” (71a). I, poor Socrates, don’t know if excellence can be taught and I don’t even know what it is. I blame myself for my ignorance. It will transpire that Athenians do assume that they know what excellence is, and how it can be taught, a circumstance that puts Socrates at odds with many citizens who assume that they are virtuous. For the moment, however, Socrates positions himself as just one of his fellow Athenians.

But Socrates, Meno asks, didn’t you meet Gorgias here in Athens? (That is, did you not learn how to have answers to such questions ready to hand?) Yes, but “I’m not a very good rememberer,” the philosopher who forgets nothing replies; “remind me,” and since, Meno, “you know what he used to say” and tell me what excellence is (71c). Gorgias’ student’s strength rejoices in the challenge. A man’s excellence, he replies, consists in “the ability to carry on the affair of the city and while carrying them on to do well by his friends and harm to his enemies and to take care that he not suffer any such thing himself” (71e). By contrast, a woman’s excellence consists in managing private business, managing the household, in keeping the things stored there safe, and in obeying her man. Boys, girls, freemen, slaves likewise have their excellences, as befits their condition. “According to each activity and each time of life to each task relative to each task for each of us there is an excellence, and in the same way I suppose, Socrates, there is also a vice” [kakia]” (72a). As it happened, young Meno would later become a leader of Greek mercenaries in an expedition launched by Cyrus the Younger against his brother, the King of Persia, Artaxerxes II. Xenophon, who went on that expedition, regarded him as treacherous and grasping—indeed “excellent” in managing public business after his own fashion, helping an ever-shifting constellation of friends and harming enemies who once were friends, all while keeping himself safe, at least for a while. Artaxerxes won the war, captured Meno, and eventually had him executed. In the event, the manly virtue of helping friends and harming enemies (both of them shifting categories) could not prevent Meno from being harmed in turn.

Rhetoricians would rule ‘the many’; rhetoricians thrive in democratic regimes like Athens, not only among Thessalian oligarchs. Socrates replies that he had sought one definition of excellence and instead received from Meno a “swarm” of excellences—a ‘many,’ a democratic mob of them (72a). But do bees differ from one another? No, they’re all bees, Meno admits. Then excellences must have something in common, too, something that makes them excellences, just a swarm of bees has something in common, namely, the species, ‘bee,’ the eidos, the idea, the definition. Moreover, health, size, and strength are the same in a man and a woman, are they not? True, men manage public business, women private, but it isn’t possible to rule anything well without phronēsis, practical wisdom, dikaisounē, justice. “Then all human beings are good in the same way,” Socrates urges (73c). Meno might have noticed, as Klein does, that Socrates has composed human goodness of two excellences, not one (Klein, 52), and that will require Socrates to refine his own definition, later. Meanwhile, Socrates asks (now appealing to Meno’s memory of his teacher’s teaching, not to Meno, who has proven himself unequal to the task), what does Gorgias say excellence is? It is “to be able to rule over human beings,” Meno replies (73c), exposing the nerve of Gorgias’ rhetoric, which deploys words at the service of decidedly material, Empedoclean, ambition; words are substitutes for force, the ultimate in ruling materially, but ruling in a cleverer way than force does. 

But if excellence is the ability to rule human beings, how could children and slaves rule, since they too have excellence, according to Meno? Alternatively, if excellence is not the ability to rule, should children and slaves not be able to rule? Socrates’ listeners (if not Meno himself) and Plato’s readers see that the attempt to rule with words, with logoi, opens the rhetorician to the authority of logic, of logos, to the principle of non-contradiction.  To rule with excellence, would one not then need to rule justly? And are there not excellences other than justice, such as courage, moderation, wisdom, and high-mindedness? Meno agrees, but Socrates then observes that we are back to many excellences, “but the one which exists throughout all of these we are not able to find out” (74a). What is excellence itself?

There is a still more preliminary question to consider. Reasoned or logical speech requires a definition of definition itself. Socrates therefore steers the dialogue into a consideration of “figures”—i.e., “shaped surfaces” such as round, straight, and the like (74b). He goes further, saying (as Meno sees) that “figure [schêma] always accompanies color” (75c). That is, a surface always has some color or colors on it; as Klein puts it, “we become aware of surfaces of whatever shape only by seeing color” (59). Meno calls this silly, since Socrates hasn’t defined color. Socrates has thus induced Meno to imitate Socrates, to demand a definition, to turn the tables; like a rhetorician-sophist, he picks up techniques in order to win. He wants to use words, not to define them.

Socrates begins his reply by distinguishing himself from sophists, those “wise men, with a bent for strife and contention” (75c-d), not a desire to arrive at the truth—exercising an art rhetoricians may well include in their repertoire of ruling abilities. Friends don’t do that, a point that recalls Meno’s claim that excellence entails helping one’s friends. Socrates knows how to win arguments by encirclement, rather as a general does, but it is encirclement by means of logic, the “more gentle and more dialectical way of answering” (75d), which wins arguments by disposing of falsehoods, exposing contradictions, illogic. Old Socrates may prove a better general, of this sort, than Meno will prove to be, of the more ordinary sort.

Every thing has a boundary, Socrates observes, “like those things in geometry”; “figure is the limit of a solid” (76a); it defines the solid. Yes, but I still want to know what color is, Meno insists, since you brought it up. Oh, Meno, you are hybristes—assertive, prideful. “You pose troublesome problems for an old man to answer, but you yourself are unwilling to recollect and say whatever Gorgias says virtue is” (76a-b)—this, on the ironic ‘assumption’ that Meno must have been kidding when he said the wise Gorgias called excellence the ability to rule men, when that definition is utterly inadequate and therefore could not possibly have been Gorgias’ opinion. In another attempt at tough-minded realism, Meno chooses to bargain: I’ll tell you the definition you want as soon as you tell me the definition I want. Socrates is up to the challenge. “Even someone who is blindfolded would know, Meno, from conversing with you that you are handsome and still have lovers” (76b). That is, Meno’s words alone reveal what he is, his ‘definition.’ It might be that Meno’s ‘looks,’ whether seen or inferred from his speech, are one source of his hybris. “Why, indeed?” befuddled Meno asks. “Because,” Socrates ripostes, springing the trap (he does have ready answers, at least to some questions), “you do nothing but impose commands in your arguments, the very thing that spoiled people do, so as to tyrannize as long as they are in their prime” (76b). The demand to be told, to be given the answer in the way a beauty expects gifts, suggests that Meno doesn’t want to work for what he wants. Like physically beautiful people, Gorgian rhetoricians get what they want without working. “It is likely that you’ve noticed about me,” Socrates flirts, as “that I have a weakness for beautiful people” (76c). In other dialogues, Socrates does indeed seek beauty, if not physical beauty, and his auditors learn from handsome Alcibiades that the old fellow is quite capable—excellent, even—of resisting physical beauty. Words, which rhetoricians and sophists take to be deceptive, agents of manipulation, can be made to reveal the inner man, his soul beneath the beautiful surface, if they are used ‘dialectically,’ in a procedure of question-and-answer in accordance with the principle of non-contradiction. But Meno’s boundaries amount to things he’s been told, a horizon consisting of mere memories, “the all-pervasive and habitually accepted opinions of mankind” (Klein, 72). Meno has a beautiful surface but an impoverished interior, which he seeks to fill with gifts, attractive opinions, to be acquired with little or no effort by him.

And then, with mockery cloaked lightly by courtly deference, “Do you want me to answer in the style of Gorgias, by which you might be as much as possible, able to follow?” (76c). Socrates then gives a none-too-definitive Empedoclean definition of color, decorating it with a Pindar quote and thereby winning Meno’s laughing affirmation of its excellence. Socrates suggests that Meno approves “perhaps because [the definition] was said in accordance with the way in which you have been habituated” (76d); that is, because it is familiar, a matter of memory, not the kind of knowledge achieved by thinking, by intellectual effort. “Because it is a tragic answer,” one consonant with impressive theatrics, rhetorical declamation, Socrates remarks, driving the nail into the coffin of Meno’s compliance, “it satisfies you more than the one about figure” I had given before, in prose. “But it is not better, son of Alexidemos”—fathers hand down ‘poeticized’ stories to sons— but I “am persuaded that the other [definition] is better”; I, Socrates, use words to inquire into custom, not to reaffirm it or to turn it for my own purposes with some form of rhetoric (76e). And you might agree with me, if you were not obliged to go off before the Mysteries, as you said yesterday; you have only to stay and be initiated in my philosophic ‘mysteries.’ Socrates invites Meno to abstain from traditional religious practices and instead become an initiate to Socrates’ reasoning prose, logos. Meno consents.

Very well then, how about that definition of excellence you owe me? Meno recurs to a poetic quotation, still preferring to remember what someone else said, rather than thinking for himself: excellence is “both to rejoice and to be capable in beautiful things,” to long for them and get hold of them (77b). Socrates immediately rephrases this: “Do you mean that he who desires beautiful things is someone who desires good things?” (77b). Of course, beautiful Meno readily says. This implies “that there are some people who desire bad things, and others who desire good things?” (77b-c). In distinguishing the “beautiful” from the “good,” Socrates suggests that one who is beautiful, accustomed to receiving gifts from lovers, might or might not be good. Some people desire what is bad, thinking it good; others know that something is bad but still desire it. For his part, Meno observes that some people “believe the bad things benefit,” while others “recognize that they injure” (77d), which Socrates explains as wanting the good but mistaking the bad for the good, a mistake that makes one “miserable” and thus “ill-fated” (78a). Eros or desire is universal, but “according to your argument,” as Socrates generously ascribes it, excellence is “a power of providing good things for oneself” (78c). 

What are the good things? Health, wealth (especially gold and silver), public honor and appointments, Meno says. Here we learn that Meno is the “ancestral guest-friend of the Great King” of Persia, whom he will seemingly betray by joining Cyrus’ expedition, before betraying the Greeks (78d). Health, wealth, public honor and appointments are the good things Meno wants and wants more of. But what if one acquires these things unjustly? Socrates asks. You need to “add to this getting” some “piece of excellence,” “or else it will not be excellence, even though it were a thoroughgoing provision of the good things” (78e). The mere “power of providing good things for oneself” does not define excellence. But if one needs to “add” such excellences as moderation and justice to the soul in order to make its strivings virtuous, you, Meno, are yet again breaking excellence into “pieces,” failing to tell me what it is. “Pieces” are the result of analysis, but before you analyze you must know what it is that you are analyzing, the outline or border of it. We have reached an aporia, an impasse in the argument, what English philosophers often call a “puzzle.” We need to start over.

Meno resists. He does not lack spiritedness, but he directs it toward resisting reason, not toward following it to a conclusion. “You seem to me to be bewitching me and drugging me and simply subduing me with incantations so that I come to be full of perplexity [aporia]“ (80a), he complains. Socrates, you remind me of a stingray, whose touch makes one numb, numb in soul and in mouth; I can neither think nor speak. I am usually quite eloquent, having “made a great many speeches about virtue, and before many people, and done very well, in my own opinion anyway”; yet now “I’m altogether unable to say what it is” (80b). Unlike Gorgias, the traveling rhetorician, you, Socrates, should never “sail away or emigrate from here,” because as a foreigner you’d be arrested as a wizard (80b). “You are prudent” not to do so (80b). Socrates refuses to be brought to an aporia by Meno’s rhetorical imagery. You are only comparing me to the ugly, soul-numbing, speech-numbing stingray because, like “all beautiful people,” you “delight in having images” made of you,” as it “pays them” to have that done for them (80c). You say you are perplexed, but (unlike the supposedly wise Gorgias, one may recall), I am the one “unprovided” with answers and “perplexed” (80c) “Nevertheless, I am willing to look with you and seek together for whatever [excellence] is” (80d). Meno finally sees an opening, one that Socrates himself has provided. If answers to the question, ‘What is excellence?’ are inadequate when they consist of multiple examples instead of one general definition, and if, moreover, you profess to know only what you do not know, how will you seek the knowledge you desire? And even if “you should happen upon it how will you know it is that which you did not know?” (80d). You are no better than a sophist, yourself.

Socrates might reply that his interlocutor was the one who asked about excellence in the first place, and justice requires that he give a coherent definition of his own term. But Socrates is more immediately concerned with Meno himself, not his dodgy speeches. Meno’s argument implies “that it is not possible for a human being to seek either what he knows or what he does not know,” since “he could not seek for what he knows because he knows it and there’s no need of any seeking for this sort of person; nor could he seek for what he does not know, because then he does not know what he is seeking” (80e).  Meno is intellectually lazy, preferring to memorize and speak without bothering to know what he is talking about. But he imposes his own sort of aporia upon the argument, leaving Socrates to figure a way out of it, this time.

Unsurprisingly, Socrates is up to the challenge. Since Meno cares most, or at least professes to care most, about what pious authorities—poets, priests, and priestesses—tell him, Socrates will reason with him within the limits of pious opinion. Very well, then, what do the religious authorities, with their mastery of pious convention, say? Socrates cites priests and priestesses, whose “concern” it is “to be able to give an account [logos] about those things they have taken in hand” (81a). Excellence, virtue, is ‘their’ primary topic, their field of expertise. Can they, or such “divine poets” as Pindar, give such a logos, even as Meno admittedly cannot? (81b). They do indeed offer an account, which is the doctrine of reincarnation. “They declare the human soul to be immortal, and that at one time it comes to an end, which they indeed call dying, and again, at another time, it comes into being, but is never destroyed” (81b).  For this reason, one should “live through one’s life as piously as possible” (81b). To this wholesome moral teaching they add an intellectual dimension. “Inasmuch as the soul is immortal and has been born many times and has seen all things both here and in the house of Hades, there is nothing which it has not learned, therefore “nothing wondrous about its also being able to recollect about excellence and about other things, which it already knew before” (81c).”Nothing wondrous”: Socrates gives Meno a sort of ‘revelation,’ a foundational religious belief, but in order to induce him to inquire further, to be “courageous” and untiring in learning (81d). There may be a problem with this priest-and-poet story: it gives an entirely ‘experiential’ account of virtue, an account or logos that leaves no place for logos as reason, no way to verify what the soul has seen on earth and in Hades by enabling it to find contradictions among the phenomena it has seen, if there are contradictions.

And how did souls begin to learn? There must have been a time when the soul had no store of memories, when it was young. The account may be an ‘infinite regress.’ Also, the account omits the heavens, as the soul never looks above the earth. That is not where Socrates takes the argument, however, because he is still interested in seeing what might be done with Meno’s soul, if only to exhibit its true nature to the onlookers.

Be this as it may, Socrates has channeled a religious “account” or myth into an invitation to philosophic inquiry. “All nature is akin,” on earth and in Hades, Socrates has said. (81c-d). Nature is a whole, a ‘one’ that consists of ‘many,’ many parts but all connected. This is an inquiry into nature by natural means, reducing the “memory” derived from reincarnation to one thing—to not accepting what you suppose you’ve learned from religious and poetic authorities and instead inquiring ‘on your own,’ or perhaps with the assistance of reasoning friends. If Meno were to accept the invitation, he would move away from rhetoric and sophistry.

To which Meno can only say, ‘What?’ How did remembering suddenly become learning? Ah, you “clever rogue,” Meno, you are trying to catch me in a contradiction (82a). But I can prove to you that learning is remembrance. Lend me one of your slaves, and “I’ll be able to exhibit things for you” (82b). After all, if nature is a whole, and all human nature is one, surely even a slave boy will be able to tell us something about that nature. Socrates then brings geometry back, recalling his definition of definition as a boundary line. He begins the conversation with a simple geometrical problem, drawing four squares within a square. If each square has a side of one foot, then two times two equals an ‘area’ of four square feet, as the boy readily answers when asked. See? I haven’t taught him anything. He got the answer out of himself and is therefore “remembering,” which indeed it is, if one accepts Socrates’ definition of remembering as seeking and learning. He then gives the boy a harder problem, showing that even a slave boy can learn that he knows that he does not know. This aporia, this numbness, about which Meno has complained, is an improvement in the soul of the boy. He now “does not think that he knows” (84b). In this bit of improvisational comedy, Socrates tacitly invites Meno to remember that the same has happened to him, but to see that it is good. Being stunned into a condition of aporia is not harmful, as Socrates-the-stingray is held to be, playfully by Meno and soon, with deadly seriousness by Socrates fellow citizens in Athens. Socrates, philosophic inquiry, is in danger not only if the philosopher travels abroad but just as much if he stays in his own polis. Philosophy is at risk in any polis. People don’t like to have their habits, their customary way of life, their regime questioned. But at least when it comes to the condition of an individual soul, not knowing it doesn’t know is the harmful thing.

By continued questioning, Socrates has brought the boy the answer to the more complex problem. The boy has gone from mistaken opinion to “true opinions,” showing Socrates, and all the gathered witnesses, that “there are true opinions about the things which he does not know” (85c). Since no one taught him—Socrates has “only been asking questions”—he got the “knowledge out of himself,” from Memory 2.0 (85d). You, Meno, know that your slave boy has never been taught any of this, so my claim must be true, perhaps a “true opinion.” “True opinion” is a formula that begs the question of how one arrives at the truth. One way not to arrive at it is to become indignant or embarrassed when your opinion is proven wrong, as Meno inclines to do. In Klein’s words, “to submit oneself to refutation without feeling angry and feeling disgraced is the first and indispensable step in the process of ‘giving birth’ to something true, that is to say, in the process of learning” (105). When Meno goes so far as to admit that he knows that he doesn’t know something (“You seem to speak well, Socrates, I don’t know how.”) (86b), Socrates immediately concurs, while avoiding hybris by confessing that “I would not assert myself altogether confidently on behalf of my argument” (86b) while averring that “I would surely battle, so far as I am able, both in word and in deed,” in “supposing one ought to see  what one does not know we would be able, more able to be brave and less lazy than if we supposed that which we do not know we are neither capable of discovering nor ought to seek” (86b-c)—a firm, implied rebuke of Meno, but one without the stingray’s sting, since Socrates has allowed Meno to see how beneficial aporia can be, without wounding the young man’s considerable pride, by making the slave-boy the example, not Meno himself. As Klein remarks, this “brings back the theme of excellence” (183). It is “the peculiar aretē of Socrates himself” to undertake this fight (183). [1]

Meno remains persistent in one way: he still wants to know if excellence can be taught, or if it comes to men by nature or in some other way. His memory for the things he wants is strong, even as it contradicts his assent to the learning-is-memory theory; he stubbornly wants to be told but is far from firm in his willingness to ‘remember’ in the sense of thinking. He has not really ‘remembered’ Socrates’ lesson. “His answers are not his answers, his judgments,” Klein observes, but merely reproduce opinions of others,” and “his questions are not really questions, since they do not stem from any desire to know” (188). Like some of the figures geometers draw, his soul has no depth, “no ‘inside'” (189). He is “a clever man totally incapable of learning,” perpetually stuck in amathia, ignorance because so weak in the distinctively human excellence (199). It has nothing of “the character of what is called in technical geometrical language a ‘solid” (190).  But the soul and the polis both must be studied in this third dimension, “in depth” (191). [2]

No less persistent, Socrates ‘re-minds’ him: “Yet, Meno, if I were ruling not only myself, but you too”—rather as you are the master of the slave boy, who, unlike you, is willing to make the effort to learn—we “would not first look at whether excellence is something teachable or not teachable before we first sought what it itself is” (86d). Socrates suggests that Meno makes no attempt to master himself because he wants to be “free” (86d). Freedom, for Meno, is giving speeches and taking actions that will boost him into positions of ruling authority and the honor most men give to it, whether by consent or not. Like ‘the many’ as later described by Aristotle, he defines freedom badly, as ‘doing as one likes,’ and what he likes is to rule others by speeches, not so much to rule himself by reason. Socrates pretends to yield, at last, even as he eventually pretended to yield to the Athenian democracy’s jury—that is, yielding with a qualification. “Relax your rule a little bit for me,” Meno, by granting me a working hypothesis, even as geometricians propose when they offer a proof (86e). Without waiting for Meno’s consent, Socrates presses on: We don’t know what excellence is or even what it resembles, so let us posit that virtue is “some sort of thing among those things that have regard to the soul” (87b). Are such things teachable or not teachable? Socrates has not defined excellence, but he has defined the problem, drawing a boundary around it, the soul (which he does not define). Is excellence like or unlike knowledge, which is teachable? If so, it can be taught. (It is also true that falsehoods could also be taught, inasmuch as what Klein calls Meno’s “innumerable accepted opinions” (211) are indeed taught in the polis.) 

“If there is something good, and it is something separated from knowledge, it may be that excellence would not be some sort of knowledge; but if there is nothing good which knowledge does not encompass, then we would be might in suspecting what we suspected, that it is some kind of knowledge” (87d). This recalls Socrates’ claim, and Meno’s concession, that eros ought to seek what is really good, that excellence is the ability to acquire what is genuinely good. If by virtue we are good, and all good things are beneficial, helpful, then virtue must be helpful. Conversely, bad things are harmful. By beneficial, Socrates means “whatever right usage directs,” by harmful, not so (88a). But who or what leads a soul to the good? Taking, then, the long list of virtues Meno has already identified, the thing they all have in common is phronêsis, practical wisdom or prudence. For example, courage is boldness, but with prudence. Without prudence, it will be not beneficial but harmful.” The same goes for the other things Meno admits to be good, such as health, strength, beauty, and wealth. All the things undertaken and endured by the soul when directed by prudence come to an end in happiness, but when controlled by thoughtlessness in the opposite?” (88c). If so, then excellence consists not, or not simply in knowledge, epistêmē, but phronêsis. Prudence is what guides the soul and its characteristics toward a good purpose, a right telos. The same goes for things external to the soul. Wealth and political office too are good if used prudently. As Klein writes, “all that the soul attempts or endures, when led by wise judgment (phronêsis) ends in happiness (eis eudamonian), when misled by lack of judgment (aphrosynē), in the opposite (eis toūnantion), in misery” (214). Excellence is the “exercise of wise judgment” (214). Plato’s reader recalls that near the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates lamented the lack of wisdom, of practical wisdom or wise judgment, in Athens, pretending it had all gone to Thessaly, thanks to Gorgias.

No one is born prudent. If men were good by nature—that is, at birth—then we could, and should guard them on the Acropolis, “setting our seal of them much more than we do with gold, so that no one could corrupt them, and that when they should come of age, they could become useful to their cities” (89b); readers will recall that Meno covets gold, but the lesser kind. Since men are not good by nature, then they must somehow gain their excellence by “learning.” Meno agrees, but mistakenly, saying that “if excellence is knowledge, it is teachable” (89c). He has mistaken knowledge for prudence; he has heard from Socrates what he wants to hear, revealing the answer he wanted to hear from Socrates when he first asked the question. We have learned something—about Meno. His wishes are the fathers of his thoughts; he does not master himself, if right mastery is rule of reason over the desires for external good misconceived as whatever one may want. Rhetoricians and sophists encourage such assumptions, finding them lucrative.

Which turns out to be Socrates’ next point. “If anything whatever is teachable, and not only excellence, are there not necessarily also teachers and learners of it?” (89d). Gorgias’ prize student replies, “Does it seem to you that there are no teachers of virtue?” (89e). I can find none, Socrates confesses, leaving Meno to ponder the implication, with regard to his own supposed knowledge. And indeed to the status of knowledge itself, which only finds right use when guided by wise judgment. Needless to say, Meno does not so ponder. And neither do the ‘guardians’ or rulers of Athens, who listen more attentively to the itinerant rhetorician Gorgias than to its philosophic native son, Socrates.

At this point, Anytos sits beside them. Meno is his guest-friend, a status that was itself a longstanding custom among the Greeks. It is “fitting” to give him a share in the inquiry, Socrates announces: he has a wealthy and prudent father, whose wealth came not by fortune but by that very prudence and effort; his father has a good name generally in the polis, is “an orderly and well-mannered man” who “brought up our man here well, and educating him well, as the majority of the Athenians judge; they elect him, at any rate, to the highest offices” (90b). We understand that the arts, from medicine to shoemaking, can be learned, but what about excellence? Anytos quickly establishes his adherence to the gods of the polis, swearing “by Zeus” (90e). He seems to be a man who orients himself to the gods of his political community.

Can one learn the excellences from the sophists? “By Heracles, watch what you’re saying, Socrates”: the sophists “are the debasement and corruption of those who associate with them,” Anytos bluntly asserts in front of his guest friend, who may have some sympathy for such teachers (91c). It transpires that Anytos has no actual experience of sophists; he ‘knows’ they are bad, has an opinion (whether right or wrong) that they are. Stay away from them, he recommends, and learn excellence simply by consulting “any Athenian gentleman,” who will know all you need to know about the beautiful and the good (92e).

Socrates is less than impressed. How did the well-bred gentlemen learn excellence? Was it fortune? No, they “learned from those who were gentlemen before them,” or, Socrates, “don’t you think there have been many good men in this city?” (93a). No mean rhetorician himself, Anytos wants to win the argument by maneuvering Socrates into a choice between insulting the Athenian aristoi or conceding the point. Socrates replies with ironic measure, that “there are good men in politics here” (leaving aside their gentlemanliness), “but have they also been good teachers of this excellence of theirs?” (93a). Have they known “how to hand over to another the virtue in which they were good, or whether this is not something able to be handed over or to be received by any human being from another” (93b).  The reader is left to recall that Anytos’ argument suffers from the same flaw as the reincarnation myth: infinite regress, but Socrates keeps things on a simpler level. Was the great Athenian statesman Themistocles a good man? “The best of all,” Anytos affirms (93c). Was he a good teacher of his own excellence? Anytos supposes so. Except that he wasn’t, Socrates is bold to say. His son, Cleophantos, was taught to be a good horseman—a skill, an art—but he did not learn excellence of character. Many of the most prominent gentlemen of Athens have similarly failed. Indeed, Anytos’ father was such a good man, who gave his son a good education, quite evidently to little effect. Anytos falls into an angry silence, after warning Socrates to watch his mouth. He will later become one of Socrates’ accusers at trial, rhetorically successful in winning a vote of ‘guilty’ from the jury. Klein comments, “Anytus’ anger is rooted in his firm reliance on the prevailing opinion (doxa) concerning the respectability or unworthiness of people, that is to say in his firm reliance on the good or ill repute of those people” (239). Like Meno, his soul is filled with the shadows on the wall of the cave, the Athenian polis, and so he too is a man of amathia, in this respect similar not only to Meno but to Athens itself, “where it is easy to do evil to people, or, for that matter, to do them good, as he himself says,” menacingly (239). The people of Athens have put their regime at risk precisely by assuming, with the foreign sophists and rhetoricians, that excellence is readily taught, passed down either from fathers to sons or from sophistical rhetoricians to rulers who are indeed ‘sophisticated.’ Anytos doesn’t like those foreigners, but in this respect, he thinks just like them.

Meno takes up the argument, observing that his teacher, Gorgias, does not claim to teach excellence of character, and so (he implies) is exempt from the criticism Socrates has leveled at the Athenian gentlemen-politicians. Gorgias the rhetorician claims to teach an art, the art of speaking well, but he laughs at Sophists, who claim to teach virtue, denying that virtue can be taught. Socrates cites another kind of artist, the poet Theognis, whose name sounds like ‘knower of God,’ who contradicts himself on the topic. But “could you declare that people who are so confused about any subject,” Socrates asks, “are, in any authoritative sense, teachers of it?” (96b). “No, by Zeus,” Meno swears, unwittingly raising the question of whether the gods themselves teach excellence. He has finally been brought to wonder, however: “I really wonder, Socrates, whether perhaps there are no good men, or what could be the way of generation for good men to come to be?” (96d). 

In his answer, Socrates initially directs Meno to look not ‘up’ to the gods but ‘in,’ to his own nature. “Above all, we should apply our minds to our very selves,” undertake self-knowledge. and thereby to see “that has escaped us that it is not only when knowledge is directing that human beings act rightly and well in their affair” (96e). Since “right opinion” is as good a guide as knowledge (the man who knew how to get to the city of Larissa would get you there no better than the one who had the right opinion of how to get there), a guide who has walked every step of the way will do no better than the man of right opinion derived by perusing an accurate map (97b). The problem is that “true opinions” tend not to last; “they are not willing to stay put, but run away out of the human soul,” unless someone should bind them with causes by reasoning” (97a).  “This is why knowledge is worth more than right opinion, and, by its binding, knowledge differs from and excels right opinion” (98a). If I know the reason for something, it becomes more than a mere impression on the mind, an impression that will fade. In this, Socrates is surprisingly certain; he knows that he knows this, he says. 

It is nonetheless the case that the rightness of an opinion “presupposes the existence of truth which only epistêmē—or phronêsis—can reach” (Klein 250). Those eminent “political men,” the ones Anytus esteems, use right opinion “to straighten out their poleis,” but “they do not know what they say,” having failed to reason their way to the content of their speeches, their rhetoric (99b-c). (Is Gorgias any different? one might ask.) Like the oracle chanters and prophets and poets and artists, politicians are not rational or knowledgeable. They are radically dependent upon the Other, or others. If Anytos will be unhappy with such dependency, as Meno cautions, Socrates avers, “That doesn’t matter to me” (99e). We’ll have a talk with him, later. Socrates concludes on this note of piety: “But now, if we in this whole account both searched rightly and were speaking rightly, excellence would be neither by nature, nor something teachable, but has come by divine dispensation without intelligence in those to whom it might come, unless there should be that sort of man among the political men who could also make someone else politic” (99e-100a). That is, he now turns Meno to right, allegedly divinely inspired, pious right opinion, having shown that he is unlikely to philosophize.

But (once again) we still need to know “what excellence, itself in itself, is” (100b). That is, we will need to know whether the gods are actually dispensing excellence in two ways: are they really the origin of it? and is what they give us real excellence? 

But “now it is time for me to go” (100b), Socrates announces, with abrupt prudence. In this, Socrates imitates the action of Anytos, but with the opposite effect. No reader is likely to regret Anytos’ departure from the conversation, but many readers may want to hear more from Socrates. As for Meno, Socrates tasks him with an action. Martial your rhetorical art and “persuade your guest-friend Anytos here too about those very same things that you yourself have been persuaded so that he may be more gentle; for if you do persuade him, you will also confer upon the Athenians a benefit” (100b-c). In the event, Meno was unable to persuade Anytos of any such thing. Either his persuasive skill, learned at the feet of Gorgias, lacked the power Meno supposed it had, or he didn’t make much of an effort. And so, Athens lost Socrates.

Plato’s readers have not necessarily lost him, however. Klein concludes, “we, the readers and witnesses of the dialogue, have to continue the search for human excellence on our own” (256). In doing so, one needs to be mindful of the inclination of most fellow-citizens, individually and collectively, to resist thinking.

 

Notes

1. At this point in the dialogue, Klein interrupts his commentary with an illuminating discussion of memory and cognition as presented in other Platonic dialogues in which they figure: the Republic, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Philebus, and the Theaetetus. The Republic features the image of the “divided line” which mark four “states of the soul” (112). The line divides the intelligible, which consists of two kinds of thought, opinions and the cognized, from the visible, which consists of two kinds of visible objects, the images or surfaces of things and the “originals” of those images. The images depend upon the originals, as opinions depend, or should be made to depend, upon the cognized. Typically, we can distinguish the images of things from the visible thing themselves; Plato calls “this faculty of ours, to see images as images” eikasia (114). “We see ‘through’ an image, as it were, its trustworthy original,” an act that bring pistis or trust to our soul (114). The prisoners in the Cave manifest eikasia when they turn their heads away from the shadows of the idols and look toward the cave’s opening, toward the sunlight. On the level of thought, doxa or opinion parallels the images, dianoia or thought parallels eikasia. Thinking or reasoning governed by the principle of non-contradiction enables human beings both to make discriminations and to draw connections among the objects of thought, as seen in arithmetic, inasmuch as “in the act of counting we both separate and combine the things we count” (117). “To begin thinking means—in any conceivable case and for any conceivable purpose—to begin searching for some clarity about the matter we are dealing with” (118). The kind of eikasia exhibited in thinking, leading to noesis or insight, understanding, “could be rightly called dianoetic eikasia” (119). “It is thus that our dianoia makes the visible things depend on their intelligible originals” and it is thus that our opinions can be improved in the ‘light’ of the things we tentatively cognize—tentatively, because “the power to clarify fully the suppositions of our dianoia may not be given to mortal men” (122). On the level of dianoetic eikasia, the human soul is ‘turned around’ or converted, “mark[ing] the beginning of a new life,” the philosophic life, “tolerable only to a few” (124). Meno is not among them; he prefers not to undertake the arduous “action of learning” (172). In the Phaedo, the dialogue presenting Socrates’ last hours before his execution, “recollection” means the rational ability to relate one thing to another, as when one relates images, “the apparently equal visible things,” to “an intelligible ‘original'” (129). Here, the claim of immortality for the human soul, the ‘reincarnation’ theme seen in the Meno, comes to be seen as a continuation of the distinctively human excellence, “the effort of dianoia” in following logos or reason through subsequent generations of thinkers (149). Those who continue Socrates’ quest ‘reincarnate,’ immortalize, Socrates. “The process of ‘recollecting’ would mean nothing but the very process of learning guided by Socrates’ prescriptions” (150). This process itself is ‘immortal’ in the sense that learning “is in no way concerned with any past moment of time but is uniquely interested in the content of the knowledge to be acquired” (150). Then, in the Phaedrus, Socrates shows that “human souls, unlike those of the gods, are not quite able to see all the truth”; their knowledge must “always be tainted with ignorance” and therefore “no man can be wise” but at best only a philosopher, a lover of wisdom (151). In this process of dianoetic eikasia memory has three aspects: it retains “our immediate experience, which is based on our outer and inner sensing”; it stores knowledge; and, in the incompleteness of that knowledge, it is “the source of our desires” for more knowledge and indeed for wisdom (156). Finally, the Theaetetus explores how human beings make mistakes, form mistaken opinions, by failing to “apply our thinking in earnest” and with sufficient logos (162). Still, a certain zetetic caution or skepticism is necessary, as insight into “the highest order of things” can never be fully conveyed by “the fragmenting medium of speech,” which “is not quite capable of coping with ‘wholeness'” (168). This is why efforts to tell people the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—which is what Meno wants Socrates to do and what rhetoricians like Gorgias claim to do—are vain. A philosopher can only go so far as to tell myths better than the ones on offer from rhetoricians, better because more nearly in line with the moments of noesis they have experienced. Those myths are intended less to convey the whole truth than to “initiate an effort in the soul of men and to beget action,” as it is “in action that human excellence and its opposite reveal themselves” (171). This is what Socrates’ “myth of recollection” is for, and it conveys what Socrates does in word and deed, what he avers that he “fights” for.
2. Thus, in the Meno, “the myth of recollection” has “fulfilled its function, not that it had any effect on Meno, but it has helped us to understand Meno’s soul” (209). This leads Klein to another valuable excursus, this time into the Republic and the Timaeus. In the Republic, the education of the guardians consists first of plane geometry, then the science of numbers followed by study of “solids,” of depth, and finally of heights and motion—astronomy. This education “binds the theme of the ‘solid to the theme of the polis” (192), one feature of Socrates’ ‘ideal’ polis or ‘city in speech,’ in logos. Genuine guardians guard the polis against one-dimensionality, against allowing the regime, the politeia of the polis, from “los[ing] its ‘depth,'” abandoning its telos or purpose, which is to seek justice. In the Timaeus, Plato addresses the question of three dimensionality more extensively. To understand the cosmos, one cannot look only to the “Father,” the model of all that is, “accessible only to intellect and thought” (193), or to the “Mother,” the receptacle or indeterminate space or “room” in which all change occurs (194), but also to their “offspring,” the “visible world around us, the domain of everything we sense” (194), including human beings, who however consist not only of visible bodies but of physically invisible souls, as does all of the cosmos. “The stretching of the Soul across the Whole, which stretching amounts to the very constitution of the Universe as a ‘whole,’ is achieved by means of numbers and rations of numbers,” which we study in arithmetic, logic, and harmonics (195-196). Here again one uncovers depth, ‘solidity’ of bodies and of souls, of the Whole and of Soul. The limitation of human knowledge may be seen in the fact that intellect perceives surfaces, geometric shapes, ‘definitions.’ Intellect can, however, perceive that bodies and souls have depth, are three dimensional; a soul has “capacity,” the ability to learn, “which is its capacity to grow on proper nourishment” (199). Intellect can ‘infer’ what the soul is, on the inside. Meno has cut himself off from that self-knowledge, preferring to fill himself with mere opinions. “Socrates and Meno counter-mage each other, Socrates putting the effort of learning above everything else, Meno never relenting in his unwillingness to make that effort, an unwillingness compensated by his readiness to rely on his memory” (201). While Meno’s outside, his body, is beautiful, his inside, his soul is “ugly”; while Socrates’ outside is ugly, his inside, his soul, is beautiful, as Alcibiades recognizes, in the Symposium.

Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.: Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

 

This review was originally published in Perspectives on Political Science. Volume 53, Number 2 (2024). Republished with permission.

 

In The Prince, Machiavelli adjures his reader not to attempt to understand things in terms of Platonic ideas or Aristotelian substances—in terms of what things are—but in the surer, more visible, terms of what their effects are. This evidently comports with his Heraclitan claim that nothing stable exists, that change is the only constant. To put it another way, “Machiavelli’s effectual truth is opposed to the truth according to nature” (3) This is a philosophic claim and Mansfield shows that Machiavelli is indeed a philosopher, unrecognized as such by most academic philosophers today—moreover, a philosopher whose influence has endured, not only among the philosophers who succeeded him but in the way our world now works. The effectual truth of Machiavelli is that he not only understood the modern world but created it. In keeping with such creativity, “Machiavelli appears to have invented the word effectual” (3). He was able to do so by giving his philosophic successors, preeminently Montesquieu (another philosopher unrecognized as such) the scope to exercise their own formidable capacities of invention or creation, while remaining within the line of thought Machiavelli forged. Mansfield opposes the assumption of most scholars, who take Machiavelli and his writings to have products of their time and place, the Italian Renaissance. Against these historicists, Mansfield assets that “modernity had a founding rather than an emergence, a founding by a philosopher, the philosopher being Machiavelli, who was a philosopher” (4).

These are large claims. Mansfield vindicates them in seven chapters, seven being the number of days in which, the Bible testifies, God created the world. The character of the world, and the character of creation, loom large in Mansfield’s interpretation of what Machiavelli calls his “enterprise.” Unlike God, Machiavelli could not effectively create a world in seven days, or even in his own lifetime. He needed the effectual truth to be instantiated by succeeding thinkers and doers, philosophers and political men.

They would do so by obeying what Machiavelli says is necessity. “Necessity pays no regard to the complete nature of a virtue that is distinct from accidental circumstances” (6). Necessity requires thinkers and doers alike to cultivate the classical or Christian moral virtues that complete or ‘save’ human beings according to their nature but to cultivate virtù, which empowers men to master the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune, using them as weapons against their rivals. [1] “Using” is exactly the right word, as Machiavellians do not have honesty or dishonesty, fidelity or infidelity, charity or miserliness; they use them in order to rule. Although Machiavelli does not hold up Bacon’s project, the modern scientific project of conquering nature for the relief of man’s estate, he “anticipates” it “more or less clearly” (6). Scientific “facts,” etymologically related to “effectual” things, by necessity tell you what to do, but also enable men of virtù to manipulate them. Human nature itself is malleable. “The ‘is’ of necessity leads to the ‘ought’ of necessity” (8). That is, the lure of the conquest of fortune and of nature will keep subsequent philosophers and doers more or less in line, not despite but because of their own grand ambitions, ambitions fired by the experience of reading Machiavelli, whose overarching ambition they perpetuate and perfect.

Although Machiavelli famously or notoriously deprecates imagined principalities, such as Plato’s ideal republic or Augustine’s City of God, imagination itself remains, albeit redirected from “imagined things ‘above’ this world” to future things within it (12). Imagination must be “disciplined by fear and advantage in this world, fear of failure and perception of the main chance afforded by the effectual truth” (12). (“Strange but true, the word ‘effectual’ made its way into the king James version of the Bible in 1611,” about a century after Machiavelli passed on to his reward.”) (12). Thus disciplined, imagination enables one to conceive of an impresa, that is, an enterprise or a campaign in a war which, like Christianity, is a spiritual war primarily, one that may entail physical wars. Imagination and deed can now be brought together. “Borrowing their unification from Christianity, and transforming the sovereignty of God into the government of necessity,” Machiavelli “had to show that what Christianity did through revelation as opposed to philosophy, he would do through philosophy alone” (15). That is, God’s providence, acknowledged in the formidable, prayerful, “Thy will be done,” gives way to the combination of natural necessity and human virtù; the effectual truth of necessity now dominated by the effective thought, speech, and actions of Machiavellians. This Machiavelli has done, as seen in the continued existence of the modernity he founded. “By substituting necessity for the good, and effectual truth for the imaginary truth, Machiavelli has made a fundamental change in the relation of philosophy to politics” (20). In this, he is, despite his many successors, uno solo, a man alone (29). Machiavelli’s perspective on political science is that politics as Aristotle understands it, as ruling and being ruled in turn, should not and cannot really exist, that the ultimate relation is that of one ruler over the ruled, of masterly or perhaps parental rule, rule for the good of the master or for the good of the master and his subjects or ‘children’—their good now defined in terms of virtù, not virtue. The Christian as child of God gives way to the prince as child of Machiavelli, ruling children of his own.

Machiavelli, then, is the prophet of the modern world because he is a king or prince of the modern world; he created it by discovering and asserting “the fundamental principle that builds and maintains the modern world” to this day (32). He has been ‘saved’ not by God but by himself, having achieved “a life beyond life” by his own efforts, with no divine assistance. As for the soul, Machiavelli hints that it does not exist, either. Instead of souls, human beings have “humors”; the few seek dominance, the many seek to resist domination. Whereas Aristotle sought to reconcile the few and the many via his “mixed regime,” consisting of a harmonious agreement between the two factions, Machiavelli lauds the two factions. Both seek to acquire, in defiance of classical moderation and the Biblical injunction against greed. They must acquire because they fear one another, and so need to provide for themselves against one another. To found and maintain a sound political regime, men must be brought back to that primal fear of one another, and of fortune. Their very disharmony brings life to republics, animated not by agreement but mutual hatred. Animosity inspires virtù. “The goal of virtù,” the goal of the prince, whether spiritual or political, is the power and the glory, world without end (47). “The prudence of a prince can put his form on the material of his principality” (55), and Machiavelli’s principality is the modern world he foresees/imagines, rules (‘in spirit’) and creates, by the grace of fear and acquisitiveness, well-used.

But are they well used? “To make a judgment on the success of Machiavelli’s enterprise one must be aware of the alternative to it in the classical tradition” (70). For an account of that tradition, Mansfield turns to the one who upheld it against Machiavelli, Leo Strauss. Yet Strauss used one aspect of Machiavellianism against Machiavelli even as Machiavelli used one aspect of Christianity against God. He effected a line of philosophic captains, called ‘Straussians,’ of whom Mansfield himself has been rumored to number. And indeed, Mansfield acknowledges that in his book, Thoughts on Machiavelli, Strauss identifies Machiavelli as a philosopher and as the founder of modernity, judgments Mansfield has affirmed. Strauss further identifies the Bible as book that “sets for the demands of morality and religion in their purest and most intransigent form,” a formula that “appears to leave open the possibility that philosophy, whether classical or Machiavellian, might find a reasonable substitute that does not attempt an impossible purity, that does not seek to remove the taint of unreason arising from every human being’s (including every philosopher’s) necessary concern with his own body” (78). Machiavellian philosophy, by contrast, opposes both the Bible, “which says that man needs God, and the classical tradition, which says that he needs nature” (78).

Machiavelli thus partakes of some of the nobility of philosophy, the province or principality of only a few persons in any generation. He “teaches evil,” as Strauss wrote, in the sense that he undermines all antecedent forms of morality; accordingly, he makes the young his principal audience, not the old men brought up under those forms. Machiavelli does not, however, undermine morality simply, for the many who do not philosophize cannot be ruled very long unless convinced that what they are commanded to do is right. Machiavelli’s new morality will consist of orderly pursuit of acquisition by the many and resistance to princes who interfere with that orderly acquisition. He arranges things so that the great ambitions of the few will seem less blameworthy to the many, now with their own more modest ambitions.

As for Strauss, by juxtaposing Machiavelli to the Bible and to classical philosophy, he shows that the Great Tradition, seen in the Great Books, deploys a sort of Machiavellian device against any unthinking appropriation of Machiavellianism. Rather like the conflict between the few and the many in a republic, in which their opposition gives each a degree of liberty even as each side acknowledges the necessity of guarding itself against the other, so do the Great Books sustain the liberty of thought necessary to philosophizing by its train of authors who contradict one another. Ancients and moderns, reason and revelation confront one another, forcing those who attend to them to think. “Strauss has no enterprise aiming at conquering the world” but he does intend “to contribute towards the recovery of the permanent problems” (85 n.26). 

During the course of this chapter, Mansfield notes that Machiavelli lacks any sense of the tragic. In tragedy, we are invited to admire the hero while weeping at the consequences, the effectual truth, of his flaw. Like morality itself, the tragic hero demands to be taken seriously. Comedy inclines to deflate such claims, to laugh at flaws, to ridicule failure. Mansfield’s following chapter, central to the book, concerns Machiavelli’s comedy, Mandragola. “The Mandragola makes for a good introduction to Machiavelli” (95). If so, why does Mansfield place it fourth in a sequence of seven chapters? The placement is a spur to wonder, the beginning point of philosophizing. The chapter itself partakes of comedy and one might be pardoned for thinking it even more entertaining than the play itself. Although rather smutty, “the play is about morality, not about eros” (96). Machiavelli portrays a childless couple, a wife who cannot conceive a child because her husband is impotent or sterile. She needs a stud, a lusty lover, to inseminate her. The wife’s name, Lucrezia, recalls ancient Rome’s Lucretia, whose rape “occasioned the founding of a republic” (97) when outrage over the crime inspired people to raise against the tyrant who committed the crime. In his Discourse on Livy, however, Machiavelli treats “these affairs” in a manner “altogether distant from the chaste spirit of republicanism” in ancient Rome (98), the chastity that makes erotic longing more intense both in the classical world and in the Christian world of knights in shining armor. In the Mandragola, the seduction, rather than the rape, of Lucrezia is treated with a spirit equally distant from ancient republicanism. It is a play about keeping up the appearance of morality, depicting an intricate conspiracy in which all the players—wife, husband, lover, priest, matchmaker/pander—effectively collaborate to get what they want, betraying “every ordinary human trust” while never letting on that trust has been betrayed (101). Everyone acts out of considered necessity, including the necessity to pretend that morality and the trust that morality generates, the trust that holds republics together, has remained as inviolate, as chaste, as Lucrezia is persuaded, and persuades herself, to be. The priest/fox/sophist persuades her, and in doing so demonstrates that Christianity, or at least Christian priests, might be adapted, used, for Machiavellian ends, as indeed they were in many of the modern states founded by Machiavellian princes, who subordinated the church to the state in still another example of acquisition. In all, “Men need to believe in order to trust one another, and to trust one another in order to work together, and to work together in order to survive” (113). Morality is necessary, even if it is necessary to invent a new morality. Lucrezia’s impregnation is a parody of Mary impregnation by the Holy Spirit, whom Machiavelli thereby suggest was neither holy nor a spirit. The new morality of virtuosity aims at the mastery of Fortuna, to which topic Mansfield turns in the final three chapters.

He begins by contrasting Machiavelli with his contemporary ‘civic humanists,’ with whom he is often lumped by careless scholars. The matter is philosophically important: to borrow Socrates’ image, does Machiavelli ascend from the cave that represents the conventional opinions of his time and place, including the conventional academic opinions, or does he not? Is such an ascent even possible? Mansfield maintains that it is and proves it by contrasting Machiavelli’s thought with that of “the hero of ‘civic humanism,'” Leonardo Bruni, a serious man of formidable learning (127). The great historian Jacob Burckhardt errs in as it were folding Machiavellian thought into the Renaissance, in effect making the Renaissance somewhat ‘Machiavellian’; other, lesser, scholars even more carelessly fold Machiavelli into Renaissance humanism, making him seem more or less the same as Bruni and Petrarch. Mansfield has a high old time needling the likes of Hans Baron, J.G.A. Pocock, and Quentin Skinner, who take this position; it would be a mistake to assume that his own comedy ends with the chapter on the Mandragola. One such person, he writes, “seized on civic humanism and used it for all it was worth, and more” (13)). Another invokes Aristotle’s thought, as “beamed through the ontology of Martin Heidegger” (131). Admirers of the civic humanists “in fact” (as Machiavelli might say) “would not want to live in the polis if it meant doing without clean underwear—which it does” (132) While having his fun, Mansfield also gets down to business, remarking that while Bruni’s Laudato Florentinae Urbis “remains very much within the Aristotelian tradition” of epideictic rhetoric, praising Florence as Rome’s worthy successor in order to inspire it to live up to the praise, Machiavelli intends to set Florence and the rest of Italy and indeed the world generally on a course that will depart both from ancient and Catholic-Christian Rome. Most pointedly in terms of political science, Bruni looks to the classical idea of the regime as the central concern of that science. But “whereas Bruni, following Plato, considers the site [of the city] as a place for a regime, Machiavelli considers it so as to bring out the necessities that override the choice of regimes” (139). Machiavelli’s ‘geopolitics’ puts emphasis on the ‘geo’ as a means of spurring princes to conquer it. The earth is not God-given, only a pile of clay susceptible to remodeling by hands wielded by men of virtù. The regime question, which depends upon the answer to the question, ‘What is justice?’ takes second fiddle, at most. “The political is essentially tyrannical; no one who rules acts for the common good”; “effectually politics is acquisitive tyranny” (141). This notwithstanding, and speaking for himself, Mansfield is far from dismissing men like Bruni: “It seems to me that on the whole the humanists understood politics better than we do”—for starters, they took Aristotle seriously—and “possibly even better than Machiavelli” (146). The same cannot be said for their enthusiastic admirers of the past half-century.

It might even be that one could fault Machiavelli’s approach to the conquest of fortune from within the framework of his effectual truth. For such a critique, Mansfield turns to Montesquieu and his magisterial The Spirit of the Laws, a work in which the philosopher (whose philosophic status, like Machiavelli’s, is equally denied by academic philosophers today) makes a show of rejecting “Machiavellianism” while tacitly showing how its effectual truth can be made more effective. Again following Strauss, who demonstrates the importance of the central passages of certain kind of books but also the importance of the longest chapter within them, Mansfield devotes by far his longest chapter to Montesquieu not only because Montesquieu wrote an unusually long book himself but because he wrote an unusually subtle and important one. In writing about this chapter, one can only skim the surface, although it may be that the surface of a thing tells one something about what lies beneath.

“Through Montesquieu’s relationship with Machiavelli, one may find the key to the argument of this marvelous work as a whole” (151). While “draw[ing] the foundation of his work from Machiavelli’s critique of the ancients and of Christianity, summed up in his notion of effectual truth,” Montesquieu “corrects the influence of Machiavelli, known as Machiavellianism, because it maintains rather than removes the error it was meant to criticize” (151). By emphasizing the rule of “one alone,” the rule of a prince of the (modern) state or the rule of a prince of thought, Machiavelli is despotic, all-too-despotic. He is, one might even venture to say, insufficiently comical; he does not apply his characteristic ‘reductionism’ to the pretensions of loners. Montesquieu’s “disapproval of despotism” is “the spring behind his most characteristic political teaching, the constitutionalism of separation of powers and of checks and balances that is to ensure the power of ‘one alone’ does not prevail” (151). “Montesquieu departs from the orders of Machiavelli in replacing the shock of encountering the world”—the use of a spectacular act of cruelty to leave the people satisfied and stupefied—with “the impression (producing the ‘opinion’) of comfort and trust we know as ‘security'” (155). For him, necessity remains both a sobering reality and a thing to be mastered, but it is not as harsh. To be sure, Plato’s Laws, in which the argument might be said to circle back around to the argument of his Republic is (in Montesquieu’s phrase) “not suitable today” (157), and perhaps never—partaking, as it does, too much of an illiberal despotism. But so does Machiavelli’s republicanism, on display in the Discourses. Similarly, the Biblical God, preeminently “One Alone,” rules with an iron fist. But there is a way of ruling, and of acquiring the things that men want, that isn’t despotic. Commerce is “a topic of extreme importance to Montesquieu” because “commerce softens the harsh mores of the ancient republic and enables regimes to devote themselves to peace rather than incessant war” (159). Commerce requires the rule of law bolstered by an independent judiciary, neither conducive to despotism. Commerce replaces the passion despotism instantiates with mild “interest,” guided by a “sense of dispassionate calculation” (160, 161)—the ‘modern’ substitute for classical phronēsis. More precisely, it emerges from the Machiavellian passion of acquisition, tempering it without transforming it into a classical, much less a Christian, virtue. “Machiavelli is correct that the passions govern mankind, but he did not understand how they can work to cure their own vicious effects” (162). He may not have tried very hard to inquire into the possibility.

But what, exactly, does Montesquieu mean by the spirit of the laws? Machiavelli relegates law to the status of a mere product of force smartly or stupidly used. Montesquieu takes law much more seriously, although he too attends to the “spirit” that animates a given set of laws. While laws are formed and executed by spirited men, they also form “the general spirit, the mores and the manners of a nation,” Montesquieu insists (164). The modern philosophers writing in the centuries between Machiavelli and Montesquieu imagined a ‘state of nature’ whose necessities drove men to form the civil societies that framed laws for themselves, but “Montesquieu does not adopt the liberal state of nature” (165). Like Hobbes and Locke, he does want to “enlighten men by drawing from them their prejudices,” which they used the state-of-nature doctrine to do so, but he will do so by “relying on [men’s] flexibility, not on a fixed nature found by consulting the state of nature,” rejecting “the simplification of politics in the liberal state of nature previously set forth because it substitutes a theory for careful reasoning and thus abstraction for awareness” (166).

Far from rejecting the materialism of the moderns, Montesquieu “compares the government as well as the soul to the mechanism of a watch that has a spring that makes it work, distinct from other parts” (166) A “spring” of the soul obviously is not “spirit” in the Christian sense, resembling rather Machiavelli’s term, animo, which contrasts with anima, the Latin word for the Greek psyche, seen, for example, in the title given to Aristotle’s book on the subject. For Montesquieu, the effectual truth of the spirit of the laws is equally “as human as the mechanism of a watch” (167)—man-made. But the effectual truth of Machiavelli and Hobbes denies scope for human liberty, having yielded absolute monarchy or princeliness in European political practice. A more subtle and measured account of human action is, to borrow their own term, necessary. In the numerology deployed by both Machiavelli and Montesquieu, the number seventeen denotes nature. Sure enough, seventeen relations form the components of “what is called THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS,” as Montesquieu fairly shouts to his readers. These include the main physical characteristics of the country, “to which the laws are related,” “the relations of the laws, both civil and political, to one another” (170) That is, for Montesquieu nature isn’t something to be understood as a whole, as a cosmos, let alone a cosmos created by God, but as a set of things, human nature being “the various encounters humans have with nature,” things “isolated in separate kinds, each responsible as the cause of human responses in their positive laws” (170). This could not be farther from a distinction without a difference with respect to its implications for political science. By ‘complexifying’ nature and the relationship of human beings to it, Montesquieu denies the possibility of effectively conquering it by the virtù of ‘one alone.’ Princeliness of philosophers and political men alike must stand aside, giving “room for choice” and balance among this “large number of specific necessities” (170). Not the “friendly companion,” the cosmos, the “home for man” posited by the classical philosophers nor the “enemy to be mastered” posted by the moderns, nature gives man space to be “neither passive nor aggressive but reactive in a spirit of self-defense against necessity, shown in human laws rather than in Machiavellian virtù, hence moderately” (170).Montesquieu downgrades necessity to “the ‘spirit’ that moves men to act, distinct from the reason or end toward which one moves,” as propounded by classical political science, while making the constitutional mechanisms of separation and balance of powers more consistent with if not identical to the Lucretian nature of things and the Machiavellian way of the world (171).

In Montesquieu, classification of forms of government follows neither Aristotle’s regime theory nor Machiavelli’s classification of states into principalities and republics, although he is closer to Machiavelli. He divides the rule of the one into monarchy, whose “spring” is honor—a false honor philosophically but “useful to the public” because it combines obedience to the will of the prince with obedience of both prince and people to the laws (173). It is therefore “moderate” in Montesquieu’s own, un-Aristotelian way, one “compatible with” the “materialism of effectual truth” (174). Despotism, whose “spring” is fear, is the rule of the one without the rule of law, much less useful to the people for that reason. When the people themselves ruled in the ancient republics, the “spring” of government was virtue, later “epitomized in the monks devoting themselves to the virtue of the Christian republic” (177). Such austerity amounts to still another form of despotism, a despotism of the many; “the virtue of the ancients runs into despotism and destroys itself,” as indeed it did in Rome, its republicanism giving way to Caesarism, its Caesarism to Christianity (178). Mansfield notes that all three of these political forms, including monotheistic Christianity, exemplify the rule of “one alone”; Christian and modern political thought and practice bear down hard on human liberty. “The practice of the ancient republics of relying on virtue leaves them in the situation of having to decide whether to excuse or punish its absence, which is either too weak or too strong” (180). This is precisely the situation of governments under the dominion of Christianity (itself “the effectual truth of Socratic philosophy” [188]): whether “to follow the New Testament and forgive or the Old Testament and punish severely” (186). Machiavelli’s critique is sound but his cure no better; modern states, Montesquieu famously writes, themselves need to be cured of their Machiavellianism.

The cure is a new republic, one constructed to avoid the despotism inherent in the old republics. Its “spirit” is “negativity, enshrined in the separation of powers, and its most characteristic end, the opinion of each person that his liberty is secure” (195). This republic derives not from the state of nature, which “the fearful one alone” escapes by contracting with similarly fearful ‘ones’ (196). It derives instead from the experience, the spirit, of England, in which Montesquieu discovers “the individual,” the one “we know today in a civil society of political liberty” (196). Montesquieu calls England “the only nation in the world whose constitution has political liberty for its direct purpose” (196). Borrowing the notion of “power” from Hobbes, Montesquieu shows that England separates and distributes it into the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branches of government. In the power of negation inherent in each, ‘between the slats,’ as the saying goes, the English citizen-individual enjoys the opinion of his own liberty. No philosopher designed this regime and no priest or set of priests rules it. Nor do the people, who register their opinions politically by the device of representation. The liberty of the people is best characterized not as full security but negatively, as a sense of inquietude; they rule themselves not by strict reason, as philosopher-kings might do, but by a sort of reasonableness. One thinks of Locke’s formula, the reasonableness of Christianity. They exercise reasonableness in civil society by practicing liberty of commerce; the few philosophers living in such regimes will practice commerce in what would later become known as the marketplace of ideas, practicing the study of what our contemporary academics now call the topic of ‘comparative regimes,’ a practice at which Montesquieu himself was no slouch. Incidentally, in his liberal—now in the sense of generous, hospitable—spirit does Montesquieu not seem reminiscent of a great man who lived between himself and Machiavelli, another man now seldom classified as a philosopher, Michel de Montaigne?

For both citizens and philosophers, “nature is not man’s enemy, as with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke; the human spirit of liberty thrives in the cold [climate] that forces reactive industriousness upon us” (202). Lazy priests come out of the hot climates of the East and the South; they have no just place in the bracing winds of the North, since such men preach that industry is punishment for sin. At the same time, the ambition to conquer nature stoked by the philosophers of modern science resembles “in its rigid universality” the “religions it replaced,” tending toward “a universal doctrine of rigid destiny”—a not-so-divine form of providence (205). Belief in that doctrine accounts for the principal weakness of the English, their tendency to commit suicide, despairing of the very liberty they should enjoy. Such Baconianism must be cured, being a form of Machiavellianism—itself the one wrongful piece of Machiavelli’s thought. “A free constitution needs a free self” (207). A free self secures its preservation but also maintains the liberty that secures its pleasure and happiness.

Similarly, in philosophizing one needs the liberty to think for oneself. Hence the exoteric character of philosophic writing, ancient and modern, and the esoteric character of philosophic thought. “It is never enough for readers to be told what is there in the text, for they will never be convinced by someone else’s discoveries. One must make them for oneself; that is why they are hidden.” (209). One cannot discover a secret concealed by a writer without exercising reason, thought governed by the principle of noncontradiction, first enunciated by Socrates. In this, Montesquieu, Machiavelli, Aristotle, and Plato concur, and their disagreements also invite their readers to and then require their readers to exercise reason. Mansfield demonstrates that such inquiry can find things, that “one should not lose heart” in observing the contradictions of great men or the varieties of “spirit” seen in the world (209).

Mansfield characterizes “the three central books of The Spirit of the Laws” (Books 15-17) as a consideration of civil and political liberty against slavery, which at core is a consideration of how to “save” liberalism “from the slavery to philosophy it has inherited from Machiavelli” (210). If the modern state Machiavelli invented is large and centralized, and therefore inclined to tyranny, its very size (deemed necessary for effective self-defense and acquisition) enables its civil society to be distinguished from its government in a way that the small, centralized ancient polis could never be. In commending this distinction, Montesquieu extends and complicates the liberalism of John Locke. Locke finds political liberty in the social contract which men have made to emerge from the state of nature, a condition of “perfect freedom” nonetheless “within the bound of the law of nature” (210). But this oversimplifies nature, as Mansfield has shown, making it too much a thing of necessity, too ‘Machiavellian,’ impinging upon the liberty Locke esteems. To save political liberty from philosophers’ overly necessitarian conception of the nature of things, Montesquieu introduces the topic of “women,” who symbolize philosophers, and their relation to “men,” who symbolize politics. Women-philosophers are fickle of spirit and indiscreet, gossipy, as may readily be seen in such examples as Machiavelli and Socrates. But this is admissible in a modern republic, preferable to the enslavement of women seen in in the ‘Oriental despotism’ of, for example, Persia (where, the eunuchs, by the way, in Montesquieu’s hands symbolize “the priests of in the Church”) (212). Women-philosophers should enjoy the liberty republicanism affords them, but legislators should reign them in a bit by “giv[ing] effect to their natural modesty or shame”—in the case of philosophers, “the shame of their original imperfection, their ignorance” (212). (For Montesquieu, one might suppose, not a certain kind of knowledge but ignorance is the original sin.) That is, Enlightenment philosophes should rethink their project—set a “damper on “their ambition and turn it to moderation,” become more ‘politic’ (213). Philosophy is the highest form of commerce; ergo, its practitioners should take care to become ‘economical’ in their bearing. It is true that modern commerce, now far more wide-ranging and precisely aimed than its counterpart in earlier epochs—thanks to the compass, an instrument of modern science—cannot “produce voyages that compare with ‘the charms of the Odyssey and the magnificence of the Aeneid‘” (221), and the money that serves as the instrument of commerce lends itself to the establishment of “the impersonal state rather than Machiavelli’s stato,” and even “excludes a personal God as well” (222). It may be, Mansfield suggests, that Montesquieu contemplates a time when the wisdom of the ancients might “come in handy” (223), unironically, not in the Baconian spirit. If modernity “is not permanent, it may be wise not to obliterate previous sects, as new sects like to do” (223).

Consequently, “Montesquieu is careful to set himself at some distance from Machiavelli’s,” and the Enlightenment philosophe Pierre Bayle’s, “hostility to Christianity” (224). Christianity’s gentleness sets it apart from despotism, even if its monotheism tracks too closely to ‘one alone.’ (One might even suggest that its trinitarianism resembles the wholesome separation of powers.) Machiavelli’s conspiracy against the soul, which the Christian God would save for Himself and for its own good, and his liberation of the desire to acquire in the name of harsh necessity, will not simply be abandoned but it will be tempered. Montesquieu “softens the harshness of modern subordination to necessity—no extreme measures!—and calls it moderation” (228). (One recalls Nietzsche’s indignant counter-thrust: this is mediocrity that is but called moderation—to which Montesquieu might reply, ‘Just so, and consider the effective truth of your stricture, in the centuries since you wrote it.’)

Montesquieu’s political philosophy retains natural right among the several sorts of law. It is no longer “the dominant principle of all principles as with Plato’s idea of the good or Aristotle’s archē,” but it survives as knowledge of “how the order of laws must relate to the things of nature being enacted upon and in not causing confusion among the plural principles that should govern men” (228), a prophylaxis the principle of non-contradiction has the power to effect. Nor does human reason need “to conquer nature,” with the earlier moderns; “instead, it can come to terms with nature as the ‘order of things.'” (228). As for natural law, as distinguished from natural right, “natural sentiments” replace them both, in anticipation of Adam Smith, that eminent philosopher of commerce (229). Human law now “takes a path that could be understood as natural and in this way to replace natural law” (236). In all of this, Montesquieu carefully distances politics from philosophy, married by the Church and not divorced by Machiavelli. Looking ahead to future excesses, Montesquieu would reject any religion of humanity as a return to simplisme. Political philosophy is good, so long as it restrains itself from becoming all too political; Christianity is also good, so long as it restrains itself from becoming all too political. This is to say that Montesquieu “legislates not as a founder, all at once, like his predecessors the ancients and the early moderns, but in his way, ‘little by little,’ through history” (237). “He will be a rare prince of moderation and discretion” (237). If the spirit of the laws “is its reason,” reason is seen in the variety of laws, adapting itself circumstances in the in the variety of places for the varieties of people, as the peoples move through time (238). Reasoning that ‘abstracts from’ the various natural and conventional, and natural-conventional, things has the effect of despotism in philosophy and in the state—that is, in theory and in practice. Within that modern state, Machiavelli’s inclination to erase the forms of aristocracy, of nobility (along with the sense of the good and of the noble), foments despotism, as Tocqueville would warn, a century later. The modern state needs a civil society with groups of men organized to resist the despotic inclinations of ambitious ‘executives.’ Among these, the philosophers should thrive, so long as they do no more than inherit the quest of wisdom from one another and do not seek to rule as if they have achieved comprehensive wisdom, even and especially about the effectual truth of things, which becomes visible in time but is hard to see ahead of time. In light of this teaching, Montesquieu may be said to have issued a firm warning to the Enlightenment philosophes he inspired.

Mansfield concludes his study with that very Tocqueville and his “startling Machiavellianism” (247). He, too, “feared that philosophy had become dogmatic and was giving bad advice to society as well as to other philosophers,” concluding “that the best way to oppose a bad philosophy was to show it bad effects rather than to argue openly against its mistaken premises” (249). But perhaps going beyond Montesquieu’s correction of Old Nick, Tocqueville opposes materialism with praise of spirituality as a way of moderating the effects of civil-social egalitarianism. In civil society itself, he moderates egalitarianism not by opposing democracy with by-now-weakened aristocrats (who might at best serve as benevolent ‘guides’ of democracy), but with civic associations consistent with democracy but resistant to its excesses. The risk Tocqueville sees is that with Machiavelli’s “destruction of gentlemanly honor the principle of egalitarian democracy is given entrance, later to develop into the spiritless sort of democratic republicanism Machiavelli did not want,” a form of government wherein “the princely element of mastery becomes the centralized administration” the Tocqueville calls “the science of despotism” (251). For “if risk can be contained by rational control, there is little or no need for virtue—or even of Machiavellian virtù—and rigorous necessity can be led by degrees to security and comfort, leaving honor and glory behind” (251). “Instead of giving aristocracy new life, Machiavelli had destroyed it with his formula of ferocity and cunning, lion and fox,” thereby inadvertently founding “modern democracy” (255). Now, it should be observed that Tocqueville doesn’t quite say that, saying rather that modern democracy evolved in rather the manner Montesquieu might expect, beginning not with Machiavelli but Christianity. Further, Christianity revealed what the ancient philosophers had reasoned out for and among themselves, that human beings are all equal in the sense of being all of the same natural species. It is this that enables Tocqueville to combine, as Mansfield so well puts it, “democracy, Christianity, and ancient nobility in a whole”—although “democratic overall,” to be sure (256). In this sense, “From Machiavelli…Tocqueville has learned how to reacquire the world” (258).

 

Note

1. Strictly speaking, of course, Christian virtues do not save Christians souls; God does. Christian virtues are perfections of the soul made possible by the indwelling of God in the soul of the Christian, whose soul has been converted, turned around toward God thanks to the unmerited grace of God.

Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Michael Chase translation. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

 

One who loves wisdom, pursues it steadily as lovers will do, may organize his life around that love. To organize one’s life is to subject it to a regime, complete not only with a purpose but means of achieving that purpose—a way of life. Political communities also have regimes, and the individual, family, and social regimes within those regimes may find themselves in conflict with that more extensive regime, a conflict Socrates saw and eventually came to symbolize. 

Socrates wrote nothing. The evidence presented against him at trial was ‘hearsay’ evidence, exclusively. We know of him primarily because contemporary writers wrote about him: Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon. Writers are equally subject to political regimes because what they write has a purpose and a way about it, a regime, either or both of which may or may not prove palatable to their fellow citizens. Writings, then, are also regimes within regimes. The form of any writing is its ‘genre.’ In considering philosophy as a way of life and philosophic writings as one aspect of that way, Hadot rightly observes that “a text should be interpreted in light of the literary genre to which it belongs.” For example, Augustine’s Confessions is “essentially a theological work,” not an autobiography as we moderns tend to think. Augustine’s long and even tortured story of stealing pears when a youth symbolizes “the forbidden fruit stolen from the Garden of Eden, and the episode gives him the opportunity to develop a theological reflection on the nature of sin.” (Similarly, André Malraux maintained that the Confessions isn’t really autobiographical at all, “and it ends with a treatise on metaphysics.”) In Augustine’s literary genre, “it is extremely difficult to distinguish between a symbolic enactment and an account of a historical event.” “Understanding a work of antiquity requires placing it in the group from which it emanates”—that is, its philosophic ‘school,’ itself a regime—in “the tradition of [the school’s] dogmas, its literary genre, and requires understanding its goals.” “One must attempt to distinguish what the author was required to say, what he could or could not say, and, above all, what he meant to say,” since “the ancient author’s art consists in his skillfully using, in order to arrive at his goals, all the constraints that weigh upon him as well as the models furnished by the tradition.”

Ancient philosophic writings, and indeed ancient writings generally, formed a link between speakers who wrote nothing and writers. Ancient writings were ‘oral’ in the sense of having been dictated to a scribe and having been intended to be read aloud. “Writing is only an aid to memory, a last resort that will never replace the living word.” If a writer intends to teach his readers, he must remember that “true education is always oral because only the spoken word makes dialogue possible, that is, it makes it possible for the disciple to discover the truth himself amid the interplay of questions and answers and also for the master to adapt his teaching to the needs of the disciple”; “what is inscribed in the soul by the spoken word is more real and lasting than letters drawn on papyrus or parchment.” That being so, there are still ways in which written words might be made to produce some of the effects of spoken words. “Although every written work is a monologue the philosophical work is always implicitly a dialogue,” “tak[ing] into account the level of the interlocutor, and the concrete tempo of the logos in which it is expressed.” Ancient philosophic writers are not ‘system builders’ in the manner of Kant or Hegel. “This is obviously true in the case of Plato’s dialogues, but it is equally true in the case of the lectures of Aristotle,” which are not “manuals or systematic treatises,” as “many Aristotelian scholars” now tend to assume. First and foremost, if not exclusively, Aristotle “intended to train his students in the technique of using correct methods in logic, the natural sciences, and ethics.” Ancient writings are “written not so much to inform the reader of a doctrinal content but to form him, to make him traverse a certain itinerary in the course of which he will make spiritual progress,” as seen in “all the detours, starts and stops, and digressions of the work”; “for the Platonists, for example, even mathematics is used to train the soul to raise itself from the sensible to the intelligible,” as seen in the Meno. We moderns “have forgotten how to pause, liberate ourselves from our worries, return into ourselves, and leave aside our search for subtlety and originality, in order to meditate calmly, ruminate, and let the texts speak to us”—submit to the regime of “a spiritual exercise, and one of the most difficult.” That is because “the works of antiquity are produced under entirely different conditions than those of their modern counterparts,” and with a somewhat different purpose. Hadot writes “to eliminate the preconception the word hilosophy may evoke in the modern mind.”

A spiritual exercise in the philosophic sense submits to the regime of reasoning, of thought ruled by the principle of non-contradiction. (Indeed, lawyers still employ the phrase, ‘the rule of reason.’)  If an ancient writer contradicts himself, this may be less a sign of incompetence as a strategy to provoke the reader into thinking for himself. More than that, a spiritual exercise is “existential,” “putting into action all kinds of means” with the intention of acting upon the reader’s whole soul, including the soul’s imagination and sentiments. “Philosophy thus took on the form of an exercise of the thought, will, and the totality of one’s being, the goal of which was to achieve a state practically inaccessible to mankind: wisdom.” In the spiritual exercise, “we must represent to ourselves in vivid colors the dangers of such-and-such a passion, and use striking formulations of ideas in order to exhort ourselves,” forming habits of life and “fortify[ing] ourselves by preparing ourselves against hardships in advance.” This is not the stuff of systematic treatises, which attempt to lay out the nature of things, including our own nature, by means of words, discourse. But the existence, the life, of a human soul is never quite reducible to such treatment. “That’s why it often happens that a poem or a biography are more philosophical than a philosophic treatise, simply because they allow us to glimpse this unsayable in an indirect way.” Spiritual exercises “correspond to a transformation of our vision of the world, and to a metamorphosis of our personality,” our psuchē. 

It does so by placing the soul “within the perspective of the Whole.” Reason abstracts, drawing out the universal from the particulars, as seen most simply in naming things by deploying common nouns. Since life as lived consists in large part of a passing parade of events, appetites, and passions, “he who remains faithful to the Logos risks losing his life,” as “was the case with Socrates,” but also in another sense intends to ‘lose’ his life, get beyond the demands of the body and of concrete particulars generally. Hadot calls this “the fundamental philosophical choice”: “the subjugation” of “the body’s will to live to the higher demands of thought,” a regime that “is the training and apprenticeship for death.” This life, ancient philosophers agree, makes life better than ordinary, more intensely lived because lived with attention to itself and the world around it. Hadot cites Socrates, who tells his interlocutor in the Phaedo, “those who go about philosophizing correctly are in training for death, and that to them of all men death is least alarming.” Philosophic spiritual exercise aims not at a trancelike state but at freeing reasoned thinking from the passions, at reorienting the soul, turning it around—in a word, conversion, “a transformation of one’s way of being and living, and a quest for wisdom.”. “The only ones even to attempt to do so are philosophers”; “beneath all their conceptions of death, one common virtue recurs again and again: lucidity.”

“From such a perspective, even physics becomes a spiritual exercise,” as (for instance) the contemplation of the heavens provides “joy and serenity to the soul,” “liberating it from day-to-day worries” by activating the disinterested intellect. [1] As Porphyry remarks, theoria brings happiness to the human soul not by storing it with knowledge, simply but by making what it learns “nature and life” within it. “The goal of physics as a spiritual exercise was to relocate human existence within the infinity of time and space, and the perspective of the great laws of nature.” Logic, another dimension of philosophy, also bids philosophers to the rule of reason. Hadot goes so far as to say that “philosophic theories are in the service of the philosophic life,” even for ever-elaborating Aristotle, who eventually earned the title, ‘master of those who know.’

Hadot says that all the ancient philosophical schools maintained that “people are unhappy because they are the slaves of their passions,” desiring “things they may not be able to obtain, since they are exterior, alien, and superfluous to them”; happiness “is the return to the essential,” to that “which depends on us,” on our inner nature. Philosophy aims not only at wisdom but at autarkeia,” literally self-rule, which Hadot translates as “inner freedom” and others as “self-sufficiency.” A soul can achieve this “with the help of a philosophical theory of nature, but above all through moral and existential exercises,” ethics. 

Self-rule, self-sufficiency, inner freedom: yes, but not isolation. Philosophy is the spoken word, and not only words spoken to oneself. “Ancient philosophy was always a philosophy practiced in a group,” very often in schools, such as Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. “Ancient philosophy required a common effort, community of research, mutual assistance, and spiritual support.” And, after Socrates, it became political, especially among the Stoics, who even fielded a Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius. For them, “an essential place is accorded to the duty always to act in the service of the human community; that is, to act in accordance with justice,” unblinded by “political passions, anger, resentments, or prejudices.” “Inner peace is indispensable for efficacious action.” On this, the schools varied: Stoics and Aristotelians evidently understood political philosophy as entailing advice to rulers, perhaps even ruling itself, whereas Platonists had more reservations (despite the famous commendation of ‘philosopher-kings’) [2], and Epicureans preferred to recline tranquilly on their couches.

How far could philosophizing extend? Here, Hadot follows the example of the ancients by introducing a contradiction. Philosophy, he writes, “is an attempt to transform mankind.” And “within each school, philosophy signified the attempt to raise up mankind from individuality and particularity to universality and objectivity.” This might or might not be the voice of a philosopher or a historian of philosophy, but it is surely the voice of a democrat, an egalitarian. Elsewhere, however, he affirms that “people such as these,” philosophers, who find their joy in virtue, celebrate a festival their whole life long,” but “to be sure, there is only a small number of such people,” their lives “like embers of wisdom kept smoldering in our cities, so that virtue may not be altogether snuffed out and disappear” from the human species. There is a “strangeness” to this “phenomenon,” even as it has endured “throughout the whole history of Western thought,” albeit with many permutations. [3] “Strange indeed all those philosophers whose behavior, without being inspired by religion, nonetheless [or perhaps consequently?] breaks with the customs and habits of most mortals.” This is why his contemporaries called Socrates atopos, unclassifiable, neither straightforwardly a citizen nor a sage. The philosopher’s love of wisdom, as distinguished from any claim to possess wisdom, makes him “foreign to the world,” a “stranger in it.”  Such a person “must live his life every day, in this world in which he feels himself a stranger and in which others perceive him to be one as well,” a condition of attempting “to see things as they are from the standpoint of universal nature and the conventional vision of things underlying human society,” a “conflict [that] can never be totally resolved.”

Hadot pays particular attention to the Platonic/Socratic philosophers and the Stoics. “In the ‘Socratic’ dialogue, the question truly at stake is not what is being talked about but who is doing the talking”; “the Socratic dialogue turns out to be a kind of communal spiritual exercise,” usually conducted not in private but in the marketplace or, if in a home, ‘with company.’ The “exercise” urges the participants “to comply with the famous dictum, ‘Know thyself,'” “invit[ing] us to establish a relationship of the self to the self, which constitutes the foundation of every spiritual exercise.” If I truly come to know myself, I know that I am no sage but at best “a philo-sophos, someone on the way toward wisdom.” Wisdom encompasses ethical self-knowledge, that is, knowledge of “one’s true moral state.” In dialoguing, in reading dialogues, I learn what Anisthenes called “the ability to converse with myself,” to philosophize without other persons as interlocutors, as Socrates may have been doing when he spent time standing still, thinking. “Only he who is capable of a genuine encounter with the other is capable of an authentic encounter with himself, and the converse is equally true.” Readers of these dialogues will see interlocutors who shut themselves down or storm out of the conversation: “We must let ourselves be changed.” The dialectic “demands the explicit consent of the interlocutor at every moment., and that isn’t easy to bring about, since by consenting to each logical step in the argument he “discover[s] the contradictions of his own position or admit[s] to an unforeseen conclusion”—usually in front of his fellow citizens. Platonic dialogues are spiritual exercises in two ways: “the dialogue guides the interlocutor—and the reader—towards conversion,” a ‘turning around’ of the soul toward the Good, as Socrates calls it in the Republic; the dialogue’s success depends on the eros inherent in reasoning, the desire “to submit to the rational demands of the Logos.” “In order to perceive the world, we must, as it were, perceive our unity with the world” because “we can know a thing only by becoming similar to our object.”

Who, what, is Socrates? Alcibiades compares him to “the little statues of Sileni”—trickster spirits—that “could be found in sculptors’ shops, which concealed little figurines of the gods inside themselves.” Outwardly, Socrates was “ugly, buffoon-like, impudent, almost monstrous,” but this costume conceals, if not divinity, the eros for the divine, the Good, within. Socrates’ outward mask consists of “that famous Socratic irony,” his pretension of ignorance and impudence. Irony is “a psychological attitude in which the individual uses self-deprecation in an attempt to appear inferior to what he really is,” thereby drawing out the thoughts of his overconfident interlocutor, thoughts which turn out to be self-contradictory. “At the end of the road, the general turns out to have no idea of what courage really is, and the soothsayer doesn’t know what piety is.” Meanwhile, by following Socrates’ line of questioning and reasoning, the reader learns that he, like Socrates, ‘knows that he does not know,’ thanks to this experience of “what true activity of the mind is”; “he has been Socrates himself.” Socrates approached Alcibiades as if he were in love with him; his verbal irony masks his dialectical strength, while his erotic irony, which “consisted in pretending to be in love” with the youths whom he converses, can bring themselves, and Plato’s readers, to fall in love with him, and more importantly, to fall in love with sophia. This could happen when the one who supposed Socrates loved him discovered his own inadequacy under the philosopher’s questioning, learning that while his body might be worthy of being loved, his soul was not. The loving soul sees itself no longer as beautiful, as ‘having it all,’ but as poor, needy, even “good-for-nothing.” As befits a lover, then, the barefoot, penniless Socrates “embodies desire.” “In Socratic Eros, we find the same basic structure as in Socratic irony: a divided consciousness, passionately aware that it is not what it ought to be. “What the young men “love in Socrates is his love for, and aspiration toward, beauty and the perfection of being.” “In Socrates they find the path toward their own perfection.” Hadot goes a step too far in his description of this Eros, calling it irrational and detouring into Nietzsche’s hope for “a musical Socrates,” the “genius of the heart” who will synthesize Apollonian rationality with Dionysian ardor. Not at all. Just as the soul’s spiritedness generates the love of honor and soul’s appetites generate the several loves of the body, so does the soul’s reason generates the desire for wisdom. The desire for wisdom is rational; reasoning is indispensable to it. For Plato’s Socrates, nature is not synthetic but a thing of articulation.

Indeed, “Socrates pulled off his enterprise of dissimulation so well that he succeeded in definitively masking himself from history,” leaving no writings behind. As a result, “Socrates has always been used as a mask by those who have spoken about him,” beginning with Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon. “Especially in the subtle, refined form given it by Plato, the Socratic dialogue was intended to provoke in its readers an effect analogous to that produced by the living discourse of Socrates himself,” a condition of “disquiet in the soul” that can lead to its ‘turning around,’ away from the conventions of the regimes in which the reader lives, toward (as it were) the regime of nature. Among the moderns, Kierkegaard is closest to Socrates, acknowledging that “to be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner.” And, since actions often speak louder than words, Socrates himself teaches not only by words but by his actions, indicating that “we can never understand justice if we do not live it,” order our souls rightly to as to put our minds in a condition in which they can understand. Alcibiades shows why this is dangerous for the philosopher, saying “Socrates makes me admit to myself that, even though I myself am deficient in so many regards, I continue to take no care for myself, but occupy myself with the business of the Athenians,” who are unphilosophic, upholders of their traditional customs and opinions. They are suspicious of philosophic inquiry. “Concern for one’s individual destiny cannot help but lead to conflict with the state. This is the deepest meaning of the trial and death of Socrates.” And this is why irony is a philosophic necessity, first, because “direct language is not adequate for communicating the experience of existing, the authentic consciousness of being, the seriousness of life as we live it, or the solitude of decision making,” but also because ironic speech, which requires thought to understand, “can make indirect communication possible,” communication of thoughts at variance with prevailing customs and opinions. This understanding of philosophy sees that a real philosopher puts himself on the line, body and soul; he is in that sense an “existentialist,” serious in his play, avoiding philosophic system-building because he knows he is no sage. His school is “the school of the consciousness of not-knowing,” but of wanting to know.

The Stoics are much more explicitly undertaking an exercise, an exercise that “did not consist in teaching an abstract theory…but rather in the art of living.” The Stoics maintained that the passions were the main cause of “suffering, disorder, and unconsciousness” in human beings, bringing on “unregulated desires and exaggerated fears” in their souls. Philosophy is “a therapeutic of the passions,” a therapeutic linked, as in Plato’s Socrates, to the soul’s conversion or turning around. To achieve this, Stoics commend prosoche, attention, “a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, self-consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit.” [4] What one should especially attend to is “the distinction between what depends on us and what does not.” One cannot change the past or control the future, but he can control our response to what is present by preparing his soul for whatever may befall. The Stoic does this by the exercise of meditation. “We are to represent to ourselves poverty, suffering, and death,” thinking of, then committing to memory, what we will do if, when, they befall us. “When the time comes,” the “maxims” we arrive at will enable us to “confront life’s difficulties face to face, remembering that they are not evils, since they do not depend on us,” but are “after all, part of the course of nature.” Nature is animated by reason; the things that happen to us happen ‘for a reason,’ and it our task to meet them with our own reason, not with wailing and gnashing of teeth. 

The title of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is better translated as Exhortations to Himself. They are a collection of hypomnemata, notes written each day by the author to himself. It is neither a systematic treatise, as readers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries supposed, nor is it a diary of Marcus’ inner workings, much less “a symptom of a psychological malaise”—attributable, according to certain twentieth psychologists, to a gastric ulcer or (in the doped-up mind of Thomas De Quincey), opium addiction. These exhortations are rather intended to prepare Marcus to place care of human things (he was, after all, an emperor) “within the perspective of universal nature,” a procedure Hadot calls “the very essence of philosophy.” Unlike so many political men, “Marcus has no patience for those who would try to console themselves for the brevity of existence by the hope that they will survive in the name they leave to posterity,” seeing that such a hope is almost always vain, and ‘in vain.’ “Marcus’ seemingly pessimistic declarations are not expression of his disgust or disillusion at the spectacle of life; rather, they are a means he employs in order to change his way of evaluating the events and objects which go to make up human existence.” He does this as the ancient philosophers so often do, by detaching those events and objects from “the conventional representations people habitually form of them.” By recognizing that a purple toga is by nature only a colored piece of cloth, he puts the passions we entertain when Romans see one—whether aspiration or envy, pride or resentment—very much in their place, their place in the rational order of the cosmos, which takes little note of such objects. It was Marcus, not one of Shakespeare’s characters, who first said, “What’s in a name?”

And so, “when Marcus speaks of the monotony of human existence, it is not in order to express his own boredom,” not to make much of a mood, “but in order to persuade himself that death will not deprive us of anything essential.” And as for “filth, dust, and other such apparently repulsive aspects of reality,” they are only “the necessary consequence of a natural process which, in the last analysis, goes back to universal reason,” the “accessory phenomena which accompany its transformations.” The “feelings of repulsion we eel in the presence of some phenomena which accompany natural processes are nothing but an anthropocentric prejudice.” Unlike the sentimental, ‘idealistic’ aesthetics of the modern Romantics, Marcus propounds “a realistic aesthetics which finds beauty in things just the way they are, in everything that lives and exists.” 

Marcus would discipline desire by strengthening the virtue of moderation, inclinations by the virtue of justice, assent by the virtue of truth, including the absence of hurried thought, which fails to find the truth. He “always sought to give to his thoughts the clarity, rigor, and striking formulations necessary to give them the sought-after therapeutical and psychagogic effect.” Far from evincing victimhood, taking himself to be the victim of fate or disease, Marcus “knew exactly what he was doing.” “It is extremely rare to have the chance to see someone in the process of training himself to be a human being.”

Epictetus propounded still another traditional Stoic idea: “the difference between discourse about philosophy and the practice of philosophy itself.” To discourse about philosophy was to separate its three parts: logic, physics, and ethics, each with its own set of topics for study. But “philosophy itself is the exercise of wisdom,” the exercise of logic, physics, and ethics. “On this level, we are no longer concerned with theoretical logical—that is, the theory of correct reasoning—rather, we are concerned not to let ourselves be deceived in our everyday lives by false representations. We are no longer concerned with theoretical physics—the theory of the origin and evolution of the cosmos—we are concerned with being aware at every instant that we are parts of the cosmos, and that we must make our desires conform to this situation. We no longer do ethical theory—the definition and classification of virtues and duties—we simply act in an ethical way.” To act ethically, Stoics weed out their desires, reducing them to those things obtainable by us because they “depend on us” and not on other persons and things. They then direct their remaining desires “first and foremost to human relationships within the city,” the duties of citizens, actions “bearing upon objects which do not depend on us—such as other people, politics, health, art.” “For him, the discipline of action consists precisely in acting in the service of the human community; in other words, in practicing justice oneself and in correcting injustices.” Finally, Stoics guard the realm of their freedom of soul by “assenting” only to the things that are really there, not to any phantasia, on the grounds that, in Epictetus’ words, “People are not troubled by things, but by their judgment about things.” In all of these exercises, the Stoics put theoretical reasoning at the service of practice, “so that, in concrete situations, we can act in conformity with mankind’s rational nature.”

The Epicureans practiced spiritual exercises, as well, but for different effects. For them, too, philosophy is “a therapeutics,” a way of “healing our own lives,” as Epicurus puts it. And, again like the Stoics, Epicureans held that unhappiness stems from fear of “things which are not to be feared” and desire “for things which it is not necessary to desire, and which are beyond” our control. They depart from the Stoics in identifying happiness not with duty but with pleasure, albeit refined pleasure. “The only genuine pleasure there is,” and one over which all human beings exercise control as long as they live, is “the pleasure of existing,” what a United States president once described as freedom from fear and from want. “This is why,” Hadot explains, “Epicurean physics”—a version of materialist atomism—can “liberate us from fear: it can show us that the gods have no effect on the progress of the world and that death, being complete dissolution, is not part of life.” There is a sort of “Epicurean piety,” expressed in Epicurus’ prayer, “Thanks be to blessed Nature, that she has made what is necessary easy to obtain, and what is not easy unnecessary.” Given materialist atomism, there isn’t really anyone to express thanks to; prayer itself becomes an element of the therapeutics. “For the Epicureans, in the last analysis, pleasure is a spiritual exercise.” Epicureans seek not pleasure in the form of mere sensual gratification, but the intellectual pleasure derived from contemplating nature, the thought of pleasures past and present, and lastly the pleasure of friendship,” which Epicureans hold to be “the spiritual exercise par excellence,” yielding “mutual affection and the confidence with which they relied upon each other.” This “invitation to relaxation and serenity” contrasts with Stoic tension and vigilance. It should be needless to say that Epicureans refused to trouble themselves with politics; political Epicureanism was invented in modernity, as seen in the writings of Thomas Hobbes and, among republicans, those of Thomas Jefferson.

What of the more familiar Christian spiritual exercises, most famously set forth by Ignatius of Loyola? “The conflict between pagans and Christians, from the second century AD on, is highly instructive,” in terms of the provenance of the texts in which philosophy and its spiritual exercises were expounded. “As both pagans and Christians recognized affinities between their respective doctrines, they accused each other of theft,” as Christians “claimed Plato plagiarized Moses,” while pagans “affirmed the contrary” regarding Christian humility as “nothing but a poor interpretation of a passage in Plato’s Laws.” The result was “a series of chronological arguments designed to prove which of the two was historically prior,” with Clement of Alexandria topping everyone by asserting that “the theft dated back even before the creation of humanity,” as “some wicked angel who, having discovered some traces of the divine truth, revealed philosophy to the wise of this world.”

For himself, Hadot regards Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises as “nothing but a Christian version of a Greco-Roman tradition,” as what is called asceticism is in fact a ‘baptized’ version of the pre-existing philosophic tradition. “Since its inception,” he claims, ignoring a well-known passage in a Pauline epistle to the contrary, “Christianity has presented itself as a philosophia,” although in fairness he means only that Christianity “assimilated into itself the traditional practices of spiritual exercises,” as seen in the writings of Clement, Origen, Augustine, and in the rules of several of the monastic regimes. [5] “Ancient spiritual exercises were preserved and transmitted by an entire current of ancient Christian thought,” a task made easier because God is Logos, as it is (although in another sense) for the Stoics. Clement links philosophy reconceived as Christianity with paideia, “by which he means the education of mankind” in accordance with “the complete revelation of the Logos” in the New Testament, “the true philosophy.” Wisdom no longer needs to be wondered about. As revealed, it can be taught as doctrine and requires no arduous effort to attain. This amounts to a substantial democratization of philosophy.

But “with the advent of medieval Scholasticism, we find a clear distinction being drawn between theologia and philosophia.” The logos about God became the “supreme science,” the love of wisdom its handmaiden. This “emptied” philosophy “of its spiritual exercises which, from now on, were relegated to Christian mysticism and ethics,” making philosophy theology’s “handmaid,” its role to “furnish theology with conceptual—and hence purely theoretical—material.” Christianity, not philosophy, was the right way of life; philosophy wasn’t a proper way of life at all. As with ancient philosophy, spiritual exercise was no mere “code of good moral conduct” but “a way of being,” the best and only true regime. “Under the influence of Greek tradition, the monastic life continued to be designated by the term philosophia throughout the Middle Ages,” as seen in Bernard of Clairvaux, who upheld “the disciplines of celestial philosophy,” and John of Salisbury, who assures his readers that monks are the ones who have “philosophized” rightly. Invoking a well-known Socratic thought, and the meditation practiced in the philosophic schools, Christians of this time regarded “remembrance” of God and of His commandments as “the most radical method for ensuing one’s presence to God and to oneself.” Philosophic self-knowledge became the examination of conscience, the attempt to ensure that it conformed to those commandments and to the Holy Spirit. Enkratia or good rule meant what Dorotheus of Gaz called the “cutting off of self-will,” the substitution of self-will with God’s will and thereby the attainment of “perfect apatheia,” the complete absence of passions. Scripture provided the spiritual character of such meditation, but “the texts from Scripture could never have supplied a method for practicing these exercises,” which “always presupposed the assistance of God’s grace” and “made of humility the most important of virtues,” but which borrowed their techniques from the philosophers, in another instance of the subordination of philosophy to theology and to the Christian way of life, the Christian regime. “In the final analysis, all these virtues were transfigured by the transcendent dimension of the love of God and of Christ.” Learning how to die now meant “to participate in the death of Christ.” 

Philosophy’s subordination had an unintended consequence: modernity. “From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries,” what Hadot calls “genuinely creative philosophical activity” would “develop outside the university,” under the rule of Catholic and Protestant churches, in the persons of Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz.” “Philosophy thus reconquered its autonomy vis-à-vis theology.” But in a strategy seen in the conduct of proponents of heterodox thoughts ever since, modern philosophers took care to win a place within the universities, and especially in the German universities, as seen in such luminaries as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, “with a few rare exceptions like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche.” But philosophy adapted itself to the university way of life, largely satisfied with its status as a theorizing activity even as it freed itself from ‘handmaidship’ to theology. “In the modern university, philosophy is obviously no longer a way of life or form of life—unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy.” Since so many universities, especially in Hadot’s Europe, are “state educational institution[s],” this may become a danger to philosophy’s independence. This had already happened in Eastern and Central Europe under the tyrannical and/or oligarchic regimes animated by Marxist ideology, the pseudo-philosophy of ‘scientific socialism.’ But in much of Western Europe and North America, “modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists,” i.e., as ‘analytic philosophy.’

Writing in the mid-1990s, Hadot does see resistance to the notion of exclusively theoretical philosophizing. With Nietzsche, but then with university-employed Henri Bergson and the many Existentialists, philosophy began to “return to being a concrete attitude, a way of life and of seeing the world.” He is not entirely satisfied with results, at least as seen in the writings of Michel Foucault, then enjoying a decided vogue in academic circles. Foucault lauded the “practices of the self” seen in the Stoics, with their “art of living.” But “It seems to me, however, that the description M. Foucault gives of what I had termed ‘spiritual exercises,’ and which he prefers to call ‘techniques of the self,’ is precisely focused far too much on the ‘self,’ or at least on a particular conception of the self,” one that is far more Epicurean than Stoic. The Stoics distinguished hedone (in Latin, voluptas), pleasure, from eupatheia (in Latin, gaudium), joy. “For them, happiness does not consist in pleasure, but in virtue itself, which is its own reward. And joy does not inhere in a modern ‘self,’ as it does in Foucault, but in the “perfect reason” (as Seneca puts it) of the soul, which ascends “beyond the self” to “think and act in unison with universal reason,” which Foucault, along with the rest of the moderns, regards as a myth; “according to a more or less universal tendency of modern thought, which is perhaps more instinctive than reflective, the ideas of ‘universal reason’ and ‘universal nature’ do not have much meaning any more.” “I can well understand Foucault’s motives for giving short shrift to these aspects” of ancient philosophy, “of which he was perfectly aware.” Foucault’s way of life was aesthetic, and aesthetics is an invention of the moderns. This may be why he says so little about the Epicureans, who seem to be more compatible with his stance; the Epicureans weren’t aesthetes but rationalists, convinced that they possessed a coherent understanding of the cosmos, an understanding they deployed to reinforce their way of life. Foucault shares little of the ancient philosophers’ esteem for reason, and particularly for the universality of reason. Whereas Foucault wants individuals to ‘invent themselves,’ to “forge a spiritual identity” by “writing down and re-reading disparate thoughts,” for the ancients thoughts should not be disparate “but chosen for their coherence,” the absence of contradiction among them. It is simply “not the case that writing constitutes the self”; it rather assists the philosopher in making his thoughts coherent. And the same was true of many early Christians: one monk thought of writing as a substitute for dialogue, as he who writes “is no longer alone, but is a part of the silently present human community.” How will I present myself to this community, the writer asks, preferring not to look the fool by contradicting himself, searching his writings for embarrassing contradictions. Foucault’s aestheticism “may be a new form of Dandyism.” It is the great-great grandson of Rousseauian revery. [6]

Among the moderns of his century, Hadot prefers the ‘phenomenologists’ Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who “want us to return to the world of lived perception or rather to perception-as-a-world, so that we may become aware of it.” This type of philosophy does not so much oppose science (“both, in their own way,” oppose “the world of habitual perception”) but philosophy as practiced by phenomenologists supplements science, which reduces the universe, “by both mathematical and technological means, to its quantitative aspects,” by “deepen[ing] and transform[ing] habitual perception, forcing us to become aware of the very fact that the we are perceiving the world, and that the world is that which we perceive.” For them, “disinterested, aesthetic perception of the world can allow us”—we moderns, saturated with modern science—to “imagine what cosmic consciousness might signify for modern man.” Painting, for example, “makes us feel the presence of things: the fact that” (in Merleau-Ponty’s words) “things are here,” not simply to be reduced to equations. “The experience of modern art,” which “makes things visible,” again, “allows us to glimpse the miracle of perception itself, which opens up the world to us.” Modern art is “the area of our experience in which there might be possible a relationship to the world bearing some resemblance to that which existed between the ancient sage and the cosmos: the world, that is, of perception.” Before Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, Bergson understood that modern man now “lives in the world without perceiving the world,” distinguishing “between habitual, utilitarian perception, necessary for life, and the detached, disinterested perception of the artist or philosopher.” And while “people in antiquity were unfamiliar with modern science, and did not live in an industrial, technological society,” most did not “look at the world any more than we usually do”; “such is the human condition.” The philosophers resisted the human condition, the conventions of the regimes they lived in, seeking to transcend them by the reasoning, philosophic ascent from ‘the Cave.’ 

Hadot most admires not the phenomenologists or the existentialists of his own century, however, but Goethe, the German philosopher-poet, friend of ancient thought and “a remarkable witness for the type of experience” he has been describing. Goethe’s Faust, “the personification of modern man,” searches for Helen, the symbol of the beauty of nature, “throughout all the mythical forms of ancient Greece.” Their meeting is “the meeting between two lovers” but also a “meeting between two epochs, and as full of meaning as the encounter of a human being with his destiny.” Modern man strives; ancient beauty soothes, consummates. In their dialogue, Helen begins to speak in rhyme, “the symbol of modern interiority”; like a Cartesian, she begins to have doubts; she “reflects upon her destiny,” that is, her past and her future. She begins to veer into ‘historicity’ or historicism in the modern philosophic sense. Goethe wants her to consider what she is doing to herself.  In a letter to a friend, he wrote that in antiquity the present moment was filled with meaning, to be “lived in all its reality and the fullness of its richness, sufficient unto itself”—an experience modern men no longer know how to grasp. For moderns, the present is banal; we place our hopes in the future. If Helen begins to feel ‘modern’ in her encounter with Faust, to Faust she reveals “what presence itself is: the presence of the world,” “that splendid feeling of the present. “It is ancient, noble Helen who reveals to him the splendor of being.” “This is what Goethe admired in ancient art, particularly in funerary art where the deceased was represented not with his eyes raised toward the heavens, but in the act of living his daily life,” in “knowing how to utilize the present,” “knowing how to recognize and seize the favorable and decisive instant (kairos).” This was the task of philosophy (both Epicurean and Stoic) and of poetry alike. Goethe strives to recover it, to “place the concentration of consciousness upon the present moment at the very center” of modern man’s way of life. True, “the Epicurean enjoys the present moment, whereas the Stoic wills it intensely; for the one, it is pleasure; for the other, a duty.” But in Faust, the two are combined in the phrases, “Only the present is our happiness” and “existence is a duty.” Not for the mature Goethe, the suicidal sorrows of young Werther. [7] For Goethe, “poetry in the truest sense is a kind of physics, in the sense we have define” as “a spiritual exercise, which consists in looking down at things from above, from the point of view of the nature or the all, and the great laws of nature.”

“Enjoying the present, without thinking about the past or the future, does not mean living in total instantaneousness.” It rather means not brooding upon past and future things, not “rehashing past defeats” or “cowering in fear of future difficulties,” distracting yourself from what is right in front of you, your life right now. “It is eternity—that is, the totality of being—which gives the present moment its value, meaning, and pregnancy,” the eternity as present in each moment of time. Goethe exhorts his readers to “Hold on to Being with delight!” As Hadot puts it, more prosaically, “for modern man in general, hypnotized as we are by language, images, information, and the myth of the future,” study of the philosophic life as lived by the ancients, yet still available to us, “provide[s] one of the best means of access to this wisdom, so misunderstood and yet so necessary. The call of Socrates speaks to us more now than ever before: ‘Take care of yourself.'” Order your soul rightly. What Goethe calls the “secular Gospel” of poetry, wherein Faust can meet Helen, each learning from the other, Christians can see, with Augustine, as the experience of turning the soul “inward upon itself” and finding “the fact that it is an image of the Trinity.” That is, “it is in the triple act of remembering God, knowing God, and loving God that the soul discovers itself to be the image of the Trinity.”

 

Notes

1. See H. G. Wells: The Island of Dr. Moreau in Seven Famous Novels by H. G. Wells (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934.
2. See Ariel Helfer, ed.: Plato’s Letters: The Political Challenges of the Philosophic Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023) and the two reviews on this website, “Plato’s Politic Practice: Plato’s Letters I-IV” and “What Is Politic About Platonic Political Philosophy?” under the category, “Philosophers.”
3. Hadot is especially fascinated by the Hellenistic period, wherein the Greek philosophic texts were translated into Latin and the Mediterranean, Europe, and Asia Minor became progressively Hellenized. “Hellenic thought had the strange capacity to absorb the most diverse mythical and conceptual schemes,” although it may be that the capacity was not so strange, since ‘Hellenization’ in terms of philosophy wasn’t simply Hellenic or ‘nationalist,’ making an appeal to reason, that is, to human nature, to ‘universality.’ The divisions that existed were rather within philosophy, in the form of philosophic doctrines. As the schools became better established, “the dogmas and methodological principles of each school [were] not open to discussion” by its members; “to philosophize [was] to choose a school, convert to its way of life, and accept its dogmas.” While this “does not mean that theoretical reflection and elaboration are absent from the philosophical life,” such reflection and elaboration “never extended to the dogmas themselves or the methodological principles” themselves. As a result, much philosophic activity consisted of the exegesis of texts, written by the founders of the school to which one belonged and “religiously preserved.” According to the schools, “truth was contained within these texts.” It is true that eventually Platonism “came to absorb both Stoicism and Aristotelianism in an original synthesis, while all the other traditions” became “marginal.” “Thanks to the writers of lesser antiquity but also the Arab translations and the Byzantine tradition, this Neoplatonist synthesis was to dominate all the thought of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and was to provide, in some fashion, the common denominator among Jewish, Christian, and Moslem theologies and mysticisms.” 
4. Hadot remarks that this attention to oneself, “the philosopher’s fundamental attitude, became the fundamental attitude of the monk,” as seen in Athanasius’ Life of Antony. Antony is “supposed to have said to his disciples on his deathbed: ‘Live as though you were dying every day, paying heed to yourselves and remembering what you heard from my preaching.” It is of course certain that what Antony’s disciples heard from his preaching concerned the Creator-God, not nature.
5. In the case of some writers of this period (Origen being an obvious example), Platonic philosophy dominates Christian revelation; Origen twists Christianity into Neo-Platonism. Hadot recognizes this, writing, “We may well ask ourselves if such an identification [of Christianity with philosophy] was legitimate, and wonder whether it did not contribute to a large extent to the notorious ‘Hellenization’ of Christianity, about which so much has been written,” “a tendency already at work in the Jewish tradition, particularly in Philo of Alexandria,” who “portrayed Judaism as a patrios philosophia: the traditional philosophy of the Jewish people,” a move also confirmed by the historian Flavius Josephus.
6. See “Rousseau’s Solitary Walker,” on this website under “Philosophers.” On the origin of modern “aesthetics,” Hadot refers to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s 1750 work, Aesthetica, which contrasted veritas logica with veritas aesthetica, the latter being sincere emotion; the astronomer looks at the stars as a scientist while the shepherd talks about them to his beloved in a rather different way, with different intent.
7. See “Young Werther’s Wrongly Ordered Soul,” on this website under “Manners and Morals.”