Unlike their modem counterparts, none of these philosophical productions, even the systematic works, is addressed to everyone, to a general audience, but they are intended first of all for the group formed by the members of the school; often they echo problems raised by the oral teaching. Only works of propaganda are addressed to a wider audience.
Moreover, while he writes the philosopher often extends his activity as spiritual director that he exercises in his school. In such cases the work may be addressed to a particular disciple who needs encouragement or who finds himself in a special difficulty. Or else the work may be adapted to the spiritual level of the addressees. Not all the details of the system can be explained to beginners; many details can be revealed only to those further along the path.
Above all, the work, even if it is apparently theoretical and systematic, is 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. This procedure is clear in the works of Plotinus and Augustine, in which all the detours, starts and stops, and digressions of the work are formative elements. One must always approach a philosophical work of antiquity with this idea of spiritual progress in mind. For the Platonists, for example, even mathematics is used to train the soul to raise itself from the sensible to the intelligible. The overall organization of a work and its mode of exposition may always answer to such preoccupations.
Such then are the many constraints that are exercised on the ancient author and that often perplex the modem reader with respect to both what is said and the way in which it is said. Understanding a work of antiquity requires placing it in the group from which it emanates, in the tradition of its 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. For the ancient author's art consists in his skillfully using, in order to arrive at his goals, all of the constraints that weigh upon him as well as the models furnished by the i-rnllition. MoHt of the time, furthermore, he uses not only ideas, images, nml p111 1�rn• of nrl(mncnt in 1hi11 way hm also tcx1·11 or at lca111 inc-existing form11l111• l•'rnm 11l11icii1riNm
Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse 65
pure and simple to quotation or paraphrase, this practice includes - and this is the most characteristic example - the literal use of foi;mulae or words employed by the earlier tradition to which the author often gives a new meaning adapted to what he wants to say. This is the way that Philo, a Jew, uses Platonic formulae to comment on the Bible, or Ambrose, a Christian, translates Philo's text to present Christian doctrines, the way that Plotinus uses words and whole sentences from Plato to convey his experience. What matters first of all is the prestige of the ancient and traditional formula, and not the exact meaning it originally had. The idea itself holds less interest than the prefabricated elements in which the writer believes he recognizes his own thought, elements that take on an unexpected meaning and purpose when they are integrated into a literary whole. This sometimes brilliant reuse of prefabricated elements gives an impression of "bricolage," to take up a word currently in fashion, not only among anthropologists hut among biologists.
Thought evolves by incorporating prefabricated and pre-existing elements, which are given new meaning as they become integrated into a rational system. It is difficult to say what is most extraordinary about this process of integration: contingency, chance, irrationality, the very absurdity resulting from the elements used, or, on the contrary, the strange power of reason to integrate and systematize these disparate elements and to give them a new meaning.
An extremely significant example of this conferring of a new meaning can be seen in the final lines of Edmund Husserl's Cartesian Meditations.
Summing up his own theory, Husserl writes, "The Delphic oracle yv ro6t OEavi-ov [know thyself] has acquired a new meaning . . . . One must first lose the world by the etrov] [for Husserl, the 'phenomenological bracketing' of the world], in order to regain it in a universal self-consciousness. Noli joras ire, says St Augustine, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas." This sentence of Augustine's, "Do not lose your way from without, return to yourself, it is in the inner man that truth dwells," offers Husserl a convenient formula for expressing and summarizing his own conception of consciousness.
It is true that Husserl gives this sentence a new meaning. Augustine's "inner man" becomes the "transcendental ego" for Husserl, a knowing subject who regains the world in "a universal self-consciousness." Augustine never could have conceived of his "inner man" in these terms. And nonetheless one understands why Husserl was tempted to use this formula. For Augustine's sentence admirably summarizes the whole spirit of Greco-Roman philosophy that prepares the way for both Descartes' Meditations and Husserl's Cartesian Meditations. And by the same procedure of taking up such a formula again, we ourselves can apply to ancient philosophy what Husserl says of his own 1>hilmmphy: t.he Delphic oracle "Know thyself" has acquired a new meaning.
For 1111 the 11hiloso1>hy of which we have spoken also gives a new meaning to l hl' I >clphic form11 l11 . Thi11 new mc11ninir already appeared among the Stoics,
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Method
for whom the philosopher recognizes the presence of divine reason in the human self and who opposes his moral consciousness, which depends on him alone, to the rest of the universe. This new meaning appeared even more clearly among the Neoplatonists, who identify what they call the true self with the founding intellect of the world and even with the transcendent unity that founds all thought and all reality. In Hellenistic and Roman thought this movement, of which Husserl speaks, is thus already outlined, according to which one loses the world in order to find it again in universal self-consciousness. Thus Husserl consciously and explicitly presents himself as the heir to the tradition of "Know thyself " that runs from Socrates to Augustine to Descartes. But that is not all. This example, borrowed from Husserl, better enables us to understand concretely how these conferrals of new meaning can be realized in antiquity as well. Indeed, the expression in interiore homine habitat veritas, as my friend and colleague Goulven Madec has pointed out to me, is an allusion to a group of words borrowed from chapter 3, verses 1 6
and 1 7, o f Paul's letter to the Ephesians, from a n ancient Latin version, to be exact, in which the text appears as in interiore homi11e Christum habitare. But these words are merely a purely material conjunction that exists only in this Latin version and do not correspond to the contents of Paul's thought, for they belong to two different clauses of the sentence. On the one hand, Paul wishes for Christ to dn1el/ in the heart of his disciples through faith, and, on the other hand, in the preceding clause, he wishes for God to allow his disciples to be strengthened by the divine Spirit in the inner man, in interiorem hominem, as the Vulgate has it. So the earlier Latin version, by combining in interiure homine and Christum habitare, was either a mistranslation or was miscopied. The Augustinian formula, in interiore homine habitat veritas, is thus created from a group of words that do not represent a unified meaning in St Paul's text; but taken in itself, this group of words has a meaning for Augustine, and he explains it in the context of De vera religione where he uses it: the inner man, that is, the human spirit, discovers that what permits him to think and reason is the truth, that is, divine reason - that is, for Augustine, Christ, who dwells in, who is present within, the human spirit. In this way the formula takes on a Platonic meaning. We see how, from St Paul to Husserl, by way of Augustine, a group of words whose unity was originally only purely material, or which was a misunderstanding of the Latin translator, was given a new meaning by Augustine, and then by Husserl, thus taking its place in the vast tradition of the deepening of the idea of self-consciousness.