Of first importance is "meditation," which is the "exercise" of reason; moreover, the two words are synonymous from an etymological point of view.
Unlike the Buddhist meditation practices of the Far East, Greco-Roman philosophical meditation is not linked to a corporeal attitude but is a purely rational, imaginative, or intuitive exercise that can take extremely varied forms. First of all it is the memorization and assimilation of the fundamental dogmas and rules of life of the school. Thanks to this exercise, the vision of the world of the person who strives for spiritual progress will be completely transformed. In particular, philosophical meditation on the essential dogmas of physics, for example the Epicurean contemplation of the genesis of worlds in the infinite void or the Stoic contemplation of the rational and necessary unfolding of cosmic events, can lead to an exercise of the imagination in which human things appear of little importance in the immensity of space and time. It is necessary to try to have these dogmas and rules for living "ready to hand" if one is to be able to conduct oneself like a philosopher under all of life's circumstances. Moreover, one has to be able to imagine these circumstances in advance in order to be ready for the shock of events. In all t he schools, for various reasons, philosophy will be especially a meditation u1mn death and an attentive concentration on the present moment in order to t•njoy it or live it in full consciousncs11. In all these exercises, all the means oh1 11hu1hle hv dialect ic 1111J rhet oric will he util i:1.cd to obtain the maximum
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Method
effect. In particular, this consciously willed application of rhetoric explains the impression of pessimism that some readers believe they discern in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. All images are suitable for him if they strike the imagination and make the reader conscious of the illusions and conventions of mankind.
The relationship between theory and practice in the philosophy of this period must be understood from the perspective of these exercises of meditation. Theory is never considered an end in itself; it is clearly and decidedly put in the service of practice. Epicurus is explicit on this point: the goal of the science of nature is to obtain the soul's serenity. Or else, as among the Aristotelians, one is more attached to theoretical activity considered as a way of life that brings an almost divine pleasure and happiness than to the theories themselves. Or, as in the Academicians' school or for the skeptics, theoretical activity is a critical activity. Or, as among the Platonists, abstract theory is not considered to be true knowledge: as Porphyry says, "Beatific contemplation does not consist of the accumulation of arguments or a storehouse of learned knowledge, but in us theory must become nature and life itself." And, according to Plotinus, one cannot know the soul if one does not purify oneself of one's passions in order to experience in oneself the transcendence of the soul with respect to the body, and one cannot know the principle of all things if one has not had the experience of union with it.
To make possible these exercises in meditation, beginners are exposed to maxims or summaries of the principal dogmas of the school. Epicurus' Letters, which Diogenes Laertius preserved for us, are intended to play this role. To ensure that these dogmas have a great spiritual effectiveness, they must be presented in the form of short, striking formulae, as in Epicurus' Principal Doctrines, or in a rigorously systematic form, such as the Letter to Herodotus by the same author, which permitted the disciple to grasp in a kind of single intuition the essentials of the doctrine in order to have it more easily at hand.
In this case the concern for systematic coherence was subordinated to spiritual effectiveness.
The dogmas and methodological principles of each school are not open to discussion. In this period, to philosophize is to choose a school, convert to its way of life, and accept its dogmas. This is why the core of the fundamental dogmas and rules of life for Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism remained unchanged throughout antiquity. Even the scientists of antiquity always were affiliated with a philosophical schooclass="underline" the development of their mathematical and astronomical theorems changed nothing of the fundamental principles of the school to which they claimed allegiance.
This does not mean that theoretical reflection and elaboration arc absent from the philosophical life. However, this activity ncVl'r l'ncndcd to the dogmas themselves or the methodological principlcN but r111 hvr In t he wayH of demonstrating nnd 11yHtcm1nizing thcHc JugmnN iUUI 111 1111rnml11r v , duct rinnl
Forms of Life and Fom1s of Discourse
6 1
points issuing from them on which there was not unanimity i n the school.
This type of investigation is always reserved for the more advanced students, for whom it is an exercise of reason that strengthens them in their philosophical life. Chrysippus, for example, felt himself capable of finding the arguments justifying the Stoic dogmas established by Zeno and Cleanthes, which led him, moreover, to disagree with them not concerning these dogmas but on the way of establishing them. Epicurus, too, leaves the discussion and study of points of detail to the more advanced students, and much later the same attitude will be found in Origen, who assigns the "spiritual ones" the task of seeking, as he himself says, by way of exercise, the "hows" and "whys"
and of discussing these obscure and secondary q uestions. This effort of theoretical reflection can result in the composition of enormous works.
Obviously, these systematic treaties and scholarly commentaries, such as Origen's treatise on Principles or Proclus' Elements of Theology, very legitimately attract the attention of the historian of philosophy. The study of the progress of thought in these great texts must be one of the principal tasks in a reflection on the phenomenon of philosophy. However, it must be recognized that generally speaking the philosophical works of Greco-Roman antiquity almost always perplex the contemporary reader. I do not refer only to the general public, but even to specialists in the field. One could compile a whole anthology of complaints made against ancient authors by modern commentators, who reproach them for their bad writing, contradictions, and lack of rigor and coherence. Indeed, it is my astonishment both at these critics and at the universality and persistence of the phenomenon they condemn that inspires the reflections I have just presented, as well as those I wish to turn to now.
It seems to me, indeed, that in order to understand the works of the philosophers of antiquity we must take account of all the concrete conditions in which they wrote, all the constraints that weighed upon them : the framework of the school, the very nature of philosopl1ia, literary genres, rhetorical rules, dogmatic imperatives, and traditional modes of reasoning.