The philosopher lives in an intermediate state. He is not a sage, but he is not a non-sage, either.160 He is therefore constantly torn between the non-philosophical and the philosophical life, between the domain of the habitual and the everyday, on the one hand, and, on the other, the domain of consciousness and lucidity. 161 To the same extent that the philosophical life is equivalent to the practice of spiritual exercises, it is also a tearing away from eyeryday life. It is a conversion,162 a total transformation of one's vision, life-style, and behavior.
Among the Cynics, champions of askesis, this engagement amounted to a total break with the profane world, analogous to the monastic calling in Christianity. The rupture took the form of a way of living, and even of dress, cnm11lctcly fnreil{n to that of the rest of mankind . This is why it was 1111mc1 imcN Naid thin C :yniciNrn w11N not· n philosophy in the proper sense of the
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Spiritual Exercises
term, but a state of life (enslasis). 163 In fact, however, all philosophical schools engaged their disciples upon a new way of life, albeit in a more moderate way.
The practice of spiritual exercises implied a complete reversal of received ideas: one was to renounce the false values of wealth, honors, and pleasures, and turn towards the true values of virtue, contemplation, a simple life-style, and the simple happiness of existing. This radical opposition explains the reaction of non-philosophers, which ranged from the mockery we find expressed in the comic poets, to the outright hostility which went so far as to cause the death of Socrates.
The individual was to be torn away from his habits and social prejudices, his way of life totally changed, and his way of looking at the world radically metamorphosed into a cosmic-"physical" perspective. We ought not to underestimate the depth and amplitude of the shock that these changes could cause, changes which might seem fantastic and senseless to healthy, everyday common sense. It was impossible to maintain oneself at such heights continuously; this was a conversion that needed always to be reconquered. It was probably because of such difficulties that, as we learn in Damascius' Life of lsidorus, the philosopher Sallustius used to declare that philosophy was impossible for man.1"' He probably meant by this that philosophers were not capable of remaining philosophers at every instant of their lives. Rather, even though they kept the title of "philosophers," they would be sure to fall back into the habits of everyday life. The Skeptics, for instance, refused outright to live philosophically, deliberately choosing to "live like everybody else," 165
although not until after having made a philosophical detour so intense that it is hard to believe that their "everyday life" was quite so "everyday" as the) seem to have pretended.
Our claim has been, then, that philosophy in antiquity was a spiritual exercise. As for philosophical theories: they were either placed explicitly in the service of spiritual practice, as was the case in Stoicism and Epicureanism, or else they were taken as the objects of intellectual exercises, that is, of a practice of the contemplative life which, in the last analysis, was itself nothing other than a spiritual exercise. It is impossible to understand the philosophical theories of antiquity without taking into account this concrete perspective, since this is what gives them their true meaning.
When we read the works of ancient philosophers, the perspective we have described should cause us to give increased attention to the existential attitudes underlying the dogmatic edifices we encounter. Whether we have to do with dialogues as in the case of Plato, class notes as in the case of Aristotle, treatises like those of Plotinus, or commentaries like those of Proclus, a philosopher's works cannot be interpreted without taking into consideration the concrete situation which gave birth to them They arc the product11 of n
.
philosophical school, in the most concrete sense of the term, in which n nu1s1c:r forms his disciples, trying to guide t hem to sc:lf:.tr1111sfimm11 ion 1uul
Spiritual Exercises
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-realization. Thus, the written work is a reflection of pedagogical, psychagogic, and methodological preoccupations.
Although every written work is a monologue, the philosophical work is always implicitly a dialogue. The dimension of the possible interlocutor is always present within it. This explains the incoherencies and contradictions which modern historians discover with astonishment in the works of ancient philosophers.166 In philosophical works such as these, thought cannot be expressed according to the pure, absolute necessity of a systematic order.
Rather, it must take into account the level of the interlocutor, and the concrete tempo of the logos in which it is expressed. It is the economy proper to a given written logos which conditions its thought content, and it is the logos that constitutes a living system which, in the words of Plato, "ought to have its own body . . . it must not lack either head or feet: it must have a middle and extremities so composed as to suit each other and the whole work." 167
Each logos is a "system," but the totality of logfli written by an author does nol constitute a system. This is obviously true in the case of Plato's dialogues, but it is equally true in the case of the lectures of Aristotle. For Aristotle's writings are indeed neither more nor less than lecture-notes; and the error of many Aristotelian scholars has been that they have forgotten this fact, and imagined instead that they were manuals or systematic treatises, intended to propose a complete exposition of a systematic doctrine. Consequently, they have been astonished at the inconsistencies, and even contradictions, they discovered between one writing and another. As Diiring168 has convincingly shown, Aristotle's various logoi correspond to the concrete situations created by specific academic debates. Each lesson corresponds to different conditions and a specific problematic. It has inner unity, but its notional content docs not overlap precisely with that of any other lesson. Moreover, Aristotle had no intention of setting forth a complete system of reality .169 Rather, he wished to train his students in the technique of using correct methods in logic, the natural sciences, and ethics. During gives an excellent description of the Aristotelian method:
the most characteristic feature in Aristotle is his incessant discussion of problems. Almost every important assertion is an answer to a question put in a certain way, and is valid only as an answer to this particular
, question. That which is really interesting in Aristotle is his framing of the problems, not his answers. It is part of his method of inquiry to approach a problem or a group of problems again and again from dillcrcnt anglc..'S. His own words are a.U.17vapzq JI Tr0l1]C1aµEIJOl ["now, taking 11 different starting-point .