Holy Philosophy

David Glidden

Unlike the saints, sages and their followers are co-dependent on each other. The wisdoms of philosophy are temporally bound to their interpreters, unlike miracles eternally evident for anyone to witness. Notwithstanding ambitions for resplendently transcendent Truths, attraction to a particular philosophy abides in the eye of the beholder, and perspectives differ. In taking the measure of the philosophically profound, reader-response and focused discussion groups make all the difference in the world. So, the power of perspective leverages the history of philosophy, including ancient sages still revered today as holy fathers.

Recently, two eminent scholars, each with a connection to Foucault, have written reflections on ancient sages. One hagiographer, Pierre Hadot, bears witness to the life and thoughts of Marcus, suggesting how Marcus' Meditations made manifest a life of spiritual exercises, anticipating the contemplative devotions of later Christianity. By contrast, the hagiographer of Socrates, Alexander Nehamas, is more post-modernist, suggesting how Socrates' holy example to the history of philosophy is a craftily manufactured one, designed to serve as a magic looking glass for those who would in turn display themselves in the act of contemplating le dieu caché of Socrates, the Silenus of philosophy. Hadot taught Foucault the

Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Transl. by Michael Chase. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1998, x + 351 pp., $ 45.00 ISBN 0 674 46171 1. Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. Sather Lectures, volume 61. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998, xi + 283 pp., $29.95 ISBN 0 520 21173 1.

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ancient history of philosophy, while Nehamas studies philosophy's history as an admirer of Foucault.

Whereas Hadot portrays Marcus the Emperor as a model for a life well lived from day to day, Nehamas invokes Socrates the ironist as a poseur of a different sort, inviting the artful re-visioning of Plato, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Foucault. According to Nehamas, the philosophic art of living is better seen to be a form of writing --yielding a virtual life of autofiction, instead of a life that is out there to be lived and shared with you and me. So, 'the monument one leaves behind is in the end the permanent work, not the transient life' (p. 8). In this way, Nehamas defers the search for a personally lived salvation, in favor of production values, preferring an Oscar for Socrates, instead of a life lived in imitation of the goodness personally displayed, say, by Marcus, Jesus or the historical Buddha, Gautama.

Both Hadot and Nehamas are mesmeric authors, whose portraits of philosophers are elegantly compelling, deeply motivated. Yet, the chiaroscuro each employs contrasts sharply, in the way a Turner landscape differs from an expressionist etching by Käthe Kollwitz. Hadot would have us walk straight into the light, while Nehamas invites his readers into the shadows of twilight. At the same time, both Nehamas and Hadot focus on an undisputed facet of western civilization: its nostalgia for the past, yearning for that philosophic Eden when philosophers once walked the earth as exemplars for humanity to emulate.

Yet, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in The True and Only Heaven (New York, W. W. Norton, 1991), nostalgia can express itself in different ways. One can, for instance, attempt to retrieve the past by taking up the ancient calling of philosophy again, trying to live a particular philosophy of life. Hadot tempts his readers to respond this way today to Marcus' ancient Stoic Meditations. Or else one might engage, instead, in role-playing, by acting out a retro life-style as if one's very life were itself a form of fiction. Nehamas adopts the latter posture, pondering the legacy of Socrates as if it were an invitation by the Academy to tour the Star's home in anticipation of constructing a parallel role of one's own creation.

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Before we turn to the story Nehamas proposes for Socrates and then consider the contrasting portrait Hadot paints of Marcus, I would call to mind a rather different image of the founding of philosophy, fashioned in 1894 by Anton Chekhov in 'The Black Monk'. (I am using the Garnett translation.) My purpose in doing so is to bring to the fore the background of melancholic misanthropy that Nehamas finds appealing about an artifactual philosophy of life and Hadot so appalling.

The Black MonkAndrey Vassilitch Kovrin, we are informed, enjoyed a philosophic

temperament but suffered a nervous disposition. A physician friend suggested he spend spring and summer in the country. So, Kovrin retreated to Borissovka, where his guardian, Pesotsky, had raised him in a veritable Eden. Pesotsky welcomed Kovrin's visit, in the hope he might abandon his philosophy sufficiently to manage the estate upon Pesotsky's death, by marrying Pesotsky's only daughter, Tanya. Otherwise, Pesotsky worried, his vast horticultural experiments would come to naught and Eden perish.

As weeks passed into months, Kovrin became betrothed to Tanya. But he did not abandon his philosophical ambitions. Instead he proposed taking Tanya with him to the city. Walking in the country only fueled his philosophic fervor, once the apparition of the Black Monk appeared to him, a legendary figure who is said to return to earth every thousand years, like one of Plato's sages who otherwise abide in the Isles of the Blest. As the wedding day approached, Kovrin visited his apparition often.

Though he kept the monk's appearance to himself, their conversations energized Kovrin, giving a flush to his face and to his mind ecstatic dedication. Kovrin worried, to be sure, about these hallucinations but at the same time felt reassured in his philosophic mission. Even the Black Monk confessed he was a fiction of Kovrin's fantasy, but he too said Kovrin's madness spoke well of him, in his service to eternal truth, his willingness to sacrifice his health to the idea. The monk merely voiced what Kovrin often thought: 'If you want to be healthy and normal, join the common herd'. Not

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surprisingly, Kovrin's mania made him at first appear attractively self-confident to Tanya.

With the clinical precision of a physician, the narrator of the story reports on Kovrin's mood swings between mania and melancholy, noting with increasing irony the growing distance between Kovrin and ordinarily conceived normality. Kovrin comes to despise those he once regarded friends. His hallucinations worsen in the city, manifesting a love/hate relationship with the fame he sorely senses he deserves. Kovrin recognizes his insanity but revels in the crystalline wisdom madness brings.

The Black Monk is intimately reassuring: 'The more highly a man is developed on the intellectual and moral side, the more independent he is, the more pleasure life gives him. Socrates, Diogenes, and Marcus Aurelius were joyful, not sorrowful'. Kovrin embraces such philosophic joy, falling deeper into depression and detachment, as he attempts to emulate the ancient sages. His life of intellectual independence takes on an anorexic, compulsive aspect that horrifies and defies efforts of his wife and various physicians to heal him.

His depression deepens; his delusions worsen. Kovrin receives his professorship at the university. Yet, he proves unable to deliver his inaugural lecture, once he comes face to face with the cancer of his mediocrity, made worse by intense ambition. Kovrin becomes hostile to those who love him. Sadistic to others, masochistic to himself, by now he has abandoned Tanya for a woman who treats him as a baby. Believing simultaneously both in his genius and his mediocrity, Kovrin faces the Black Monk one final time before he dies of neurasthenia, having lost his life, his love, his sanity in thralldom to the ancient sages of philosophy. Kovrin's fervor for philosophy induced the hallucination of wisdom as a privately privileging possession, disdainful of commonplace, ordinary humanity. This hallucination killed him.

Chekhov's short story revisits familiar ground addressing the madness of philosophical ambition, a theme first introduced by Plato. And like Plato, Chekhov artfully employs irony to distance the reader from the text. In this way the reader can recognize Kovrin's self-deception, as well as the deception practiced by so many others, from

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Pesotsky and Tanya to the Black Monk himself, all of whom are taken-in by what they think they know about others and themselves. The reader is kept well informed about the mental and moral aberrations of the interlocutors, just as the reader learns to see past the narrator's clinical detachment, to recognize an all too human tragedy unfolding, one that any reader might address, even if the narrator remains oblique about it.

In this way Chekhov exhibits the power displayed by several contemporary ironists who trust readers will recognize moral failings and human tragedies which nonetheless escape the conscience of their characters or even their own narrators. Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Richard Ford's Independence Day are recent American masterpieces in this genre, as is The Remains of the Day by the English author Kazuo Ishiguro. Understatement and deeply revelatory irony allow the reader to illuminate the darkness of others' lives in the light of what the reader recognizes as moral truths.

This use of what I shall call 'ironic realism' displays considerable faith in the latent wisdom of the reader, provoking insights the author expects the reader to fathom, even if the author will not or cannot articulate the precise truths his veiled portrait paints. Readers might disagree with any particular articulation of the 'moral problem' depicted in the story. The author might not do justice either, in attempting to name what it is both author and reader find morally compelling. But it turns out anyone can recognize moral success or failure without having to describe it clinically. Such was Chekhov's genius with this story.

This technique of 'ironic realism' is not just a modern strategy. Aesopian fabulists of ancient Greece together with Cynic beggars in the streets who acted out Socratic poses practiced a similar tactic as catalysts for moral illumination, through the controlled use of wit and veiled irony, just at a time when would-be sages were beginning to elevate themselves above the hoi polloi as the world's first professors. The reader of an Aesopian fable fathomed more than its narrator's obliquity would display about the moral to the tale, just as those who might overhear a Cynic caustically put down a passing aristocrat fully apprehended what the Cynic merely satirized. The Cynic speaker and

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the fabulist's narrator served as ironic vehicles, wise fools if you will, provoking the wisdom of the knowing reader or the experienced listener to recognize human truths which the fabulist or Cynic only half-alluded to. In this way Aesop or a Cynic might conceal private (possibly inchoate) moral theories sufficiently, to bring the listener or reader to recognize a commonplace moral reality.

Academic Irony This is where Nehamas parts company, for he sees Platonic irony

as serving a crueler, anti-democratic purpose, quite unlike that employed by Chekhov in 'The Black Monk'. It is important for Nehamas's Plato that the reader be put down as well. So, Nehamas begins his account of Socrates with a discussion of Socratic and Platonic irony, and Nehamas prefaces that discussion with an exploration of a different work of literature, where Nehamas detects ironic cruelty deployed against the reader's ignorance. Nehamas finds Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. suggestive of Plato's darker purposes: 'It makes a mystery of its author as well as of his characters, and it often turns its readers into fools. It originates in Plato, who remains perhaps its most disturbing practitioner' (p. 20).

When Hans Castorp arrives at the Berghof ostensibly to visit his tubercular cousin, it is important for Nehamas that the reader share Castorp's self-deception that Castorp himself is healthy, notwithstanding a steady stream of hints from the narrator that Castorp too is ill. In this way, Mann supposedly induces self-deception in his readers, who are caught up, like Plato's audience, in the verisimilitude of the story. At the same time Castorp's self-deception poses a mystery to the reader, who may well be struggling with similarly hidden physical and spiritual frailties such as those Castorp suffers from. Consequently, Thomas Mann the author, like a typical professor, approaches his characters and readers from a position of moral superiority. So, Nehamas sets the stage for appreciating the purposes of Platonic irony, in particular Plato's invention of the fictional Socrates.

To project such a dark portrait of The Magic Mountain requires Nehamas make a few adjustments to the story. For one thing, in 1924 when Der Zauberberg was first published in Berlin, generations of

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Europeans were all too intimately familiar with tuberculosis, enough to know its early warning symptoms and the foolhardiness of prolonged visits with friends in sanatoria. Castorp may be fooling himself, but I doubt the real reader is tricked by Mann's narrator.

Instead, Mann creates at worst the illusion of an implied-reader who is, it seems, supposed to be deceived. With this approach, the thoughtful reader can share with the author sufficient moral high ground to see Castorp's physical and spiritual troubles, even if others may be fooled. Authorial irony is deployed only against a fictional reader, rather than against oneself, on this revision of Nehamas's dark interpretation. In either case, however, the author is expressing hostility against the reader, whether implied or actual. Someone is being tricked. And the trick is achieved by making use of a cruel kind of irony in which the author knows what he will not tell: 'academic irony', let's call it.

Thomas Mann, as Nehamas reads him, wants readers to be fooled. By reading Mann this way, Nehamas is free to view The Magic Mountain as an allegory of disdain for the common man. Its alleged use of academic irony represents an act of disengagement from humanity. So, Nehamas purposefully deconstructs the optimistic essence Mann himself found within his novel, in the chapters 'Operationes spirituales' and 'Schnee', where Castorp apparently finds spiritual redemption as he faces an impending death. Nehamas similarly passes over the novel's final words: 'einmal die Liebe steigen'. Redemptive love and the kind of spiritual growth that comes from a commitment to community figure prominently throughout the text of the novel. Nehamas focuses on Castorp's sexual discomfort as symptomatic of his spiritual self-deception.

Similarly, Nehamas passes over the renunciation of individualism advanced in an extended discussion (cf. 'Vom Gottesstaat') with the philosophic stranger Naptha, whose ugliness is suggestive of Socrates. Nehamas claims this discussion is 'a lot of philosophical gibberish' (p. 32). As the novel ends, Castorp has left the Berghof to fight in the trenches, not only to face death as Nehamas says, but also to take up the commonplace again, in rejection of that neurasthenic style tuberculosis was admired for among chain-smoking intellectual

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poseurs of the '20s. Castorp takes up ordinary life once more, just in time to die, having been healed by love. But this is a reading Nehamas rejects.

As Nehamas readily admits, there is an abundance of material in The Magic Mountain opening up to a range of interpretations. But once any serious reader takes up a perspective of her own, it indelibly colors the material she reads. So, one can read The Magic Mountain as an expression of anomie or, instead, as an invocation of spiritual salvation; as an instrument of academic irony or as a display of moral realism. But one reader cannot see it simultaneously both ways.

How is one to go about fathoming Platonic irony and its presence in his Socratic dialogues? For that matter, how is one to go about reading Marcus' Meditations? As cautiously constructed as any reading may be (and Nehamas is a cautious scholar), readers (including scholars) will read Plato and Marcus differently. The moral coloring which they in turn project upon the text may make all the difference in what they see. At the same time, our spiritual health really does depend on how we read reality, in what we are responsive to. How we even read fiction is a reflection of our character development (cf. p. 6). This poses a dilemma for the scholar: what we read is up to us; yet our moral outlook hangs in the balance. How then is Plato to be read? We'll attend to Marcus later.

The Master's VoicePlato never speaks in his own voice in the dialogues he wrote.

Consequently, we never know what Plato really thinks, but only what his characters say, including Plato's Socrates. In the course of writing dialogues, Plato sometimes gives Socrates weighty philosophic views to express. In the Republic, Phaedo or Timaeus, for instance, Socrates is fully fleshed out as a philosophy professor. In other dialogues, such as the Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist and Philebus, Socrates is tentative or at least obscurantist about his final views. Nehamas turns away from those two groups of Platonic writings to concentrate, instead, on texts in which Socrates is most a mystery to us: the Apology, Euthyphro, Charmides, Laches and other similar dialogues where Socrates expressly disclaims views of his own. In this way, Nehamas constructs a tension between what he

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takes to be Plato's authorial academic irony and the mystery that results in Plato's characterization of Socrates' alleged ignorance in those same dialogues.

Now it is often thought, but less often argued, that Plato's dialogues are dialogues of Platonism. Given Plato's anonymity, this requires his works be seen as encoded, designed only to be fathomed by some special reader (cf. p. 36). Consequently, those who only give a surface reading to Plato's texts will miss their philosophic message. If Plato turns out to be this sort of academic author, he generates texts out of hostility to his general readers (cf. pp. 62-63), forcing them to come face-to-face with their own self-deceptive ignorance, like all the other victims of Socratic conversations (cf. pp. 44, 46, 48).

Nehamas would have us read Plato academically, so as to free the philosophical content of his dialogues (coded as they may be) from the context of their literary creation. So understood, Plato's dialogues can serve as a source for Platonic philosophy. But this interpretation only works once we assume arrogance on Plato's part, as already knowing what he is not about to share with readers generally. Part of Nehamas's interest in reading Plato this way is that it can illuminate the mystery of Socrates, who then becomes a talisman for all that might be known by us. The elusiveness of what Socrates really knew is born from an academic posture which would willfully conceal him, even if that Socratic wisdom is in the last analysis concealed from the author too (p. 85).

Another interpretive possibility presents itself. Perhaps the author of those dialogues is at a loss himself as well, exploring characters who have taken on lives of their own invention, in a situation not entirely under authorial, or at least articulately philosophical, control. In this way, Plato's use of irony may exhibit moral ignorance on the part of depicted characters and possibly even implied- readers, but it reveals authorial ignorance as well. Illumination escapes author, character, and reader alike. In this way, Plato's use of irony, like Chekhov's, frees the author from attempting to control how his story will be interpreted, while at the same time relying on the reader's common wisdom to fathom sufficiently what the author says. Painters exhibit their creations to viewers this same way.

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Nehamas touches on this possible interpretation with a passing reference to Leo Strauss (cf. pp. 35-36), who often called his students' attentions to the fascinating tensions present in Platonic writings, where Plato's apparent messages are so often immediately undermined by the literary contexts of his dialogues. Strauss & Co. went on, however, to decode those texts so as to uncover Plato's cryptic messages, in this way sharing with Nehamas a sense of Plato's academic superiority. Yet, an alternative remains. Possibly, Plato had no secret or concealed doctrines he wished to articulate in coded dialogues, but consciously used dramaturgy to restrain the reader from taking what he had written as conveying philosophical authority. Plato the implied-author could well have been as ignorant as his interlocutors. And in those other Platonic dialogues where Socrates expressed views of his own, those views too were readily as questionable as anyone's, from Plato's authorial point of view or even from the viewpoint of Plato's implied-reader. For what it is worth, it is likely Aristotle read Plato's Socrates this way, and I suggest he was wise to do so.

In other words, Plato may have been a different sort of ironist than Nehamas would regard him: not an academic ironist looking down upon his readers but an ironic realist hoping to provoke the commonplace illumination of his audience without expressly laying a claim to it himself, at least in what he himself had written. On this approach, Plato's dialogues would have more in common with Chekhov's short stories than with what has come to be regarded as doctrinal philosophy.

By reading Platonic irony either academically or realistically, the legacy of Plato's Socrates changes, like the face of Janus. Instead of becoming a figure of concealment, Socrates the Seeker becomes much less mysterious a literary fiction than Socrates the secretive Possessor of Privileged Wisdom. There is, of course, no authoritative way of forcing Plato to be read either as an academic ironist or as an ironic realist. But the more a reader of Plato wishes to see Socrates as a mysterious shaman, the more likely it is such a figure provokes the reader into regarding knowledge as a privately privileging possession, one that distinguishes a sage from serfs. On this dark

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reading, Plato opened the way to a kind of melancholic misanthropy, where wisdom is gained only as an elite possession by the philosophic stranger at the expense of the ignorance of fools. On another reading, Plato's depictions of Socrates can open themselves up to insights pondered by thoughtful readers facing-up to similar problems Socrates also failed to resolve and Plato failed fully to articulate. This latter way of reading Platonic irony mirrors the skeptical history of Plato's historical Academy, while the former reading anticipates the secret doctrines of Porphyry, Plotinus, Nietzsche and Foucault.

An Oscar for SocratesPlato's Socrates is both a moral hero and a mystery figure. He is a

mystery because Plato will not, or cannot, reveal what he knows. He is a moral hero because Plato says he is. At the same time it is central to the hagiography of Socrates that we endorse Plato's portrait of Socrates as a moral hero in order to embrace his mystery. Indeed, it is this conviction in Socrates' personal virtue (cf. pp. 82, 86, 89, 92) that explains the allure Socrates personified through the ages, a conviction shared and propagated by both Xenophon and Plato, notwithstanding their differing depictions of him.

For Nehamas, this duality reveals 'the real Socratic problem' (p. 96). On the one hand, Socrates' 'major accomplishment is that he established a new way of life, a new art of living'. On the other hand, 'holding philosophical views is of course essential for living a philosophical life'. Yet, 'Socrates' views are simply not sufficient for explaining his mode of life'. For Nehamas, following Kierkegaard, this allows Plato's implied-reader, the devotee of Socrates, sufficient freedom to 'give voice to Socrates' silence' (cf. pp. 97-98) by fleshing out a philosophical viewpoint which might then account for Socrates' personal nobility, at least as seen by that particular reader. Nehamas then proceeds to take up three such portraits of Plato's Socrates: Montaigne's, Nietzsche's and Foucault's, each of which in turn influenced its subsequent version, like re-makes of Plato's black & white original.

What made St. Socrates so holy? It turns out we know nothing of his life but only of his hagiography. Was Socrates a good husband or a responsible father to his children? It's unlikely that he was or even

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could be, given his erotic interest in young boys. Was Socrates a local civic hero or at least a citizen of the world? He apparently disdained civic responsibilities, unless foisted on him. Nor did he challenge the social status quo. Did Socrates convert his interlocutors to lives of moral virtue? Even Plato must admit he was a failure as a teacher, except of course for Plato (cf. p. 89). The fact is that Socrates was more like a classic academic than a saint, provoking his students to frustration without himself particularly demonstrating the personal virtues he advocated should be practiced in daily life. We know Socrates was made martyr to his life-style. But that is almost all we know about him. We do not know whether his life was morally exemplary. Instead, Socrates is depicted, at least by Nehamas' Plato, as a virtual moral hero, who is presented on the stage of public life as practically perfect in every way, regardless of the private life he really lived.

As a consequence of this false-front staging, Socrates' example, as Nehamas reconstructs it, need not require imitation of particular acts of piety or exemplary courage in daily life. Instead, according to Nehamas, 'the novelty of Socrates' art of living' inspires 'an effort to develop a mode of life that is unique to a particular individual' (p. 97), to fill the vacuum of detail as it were. By not illuminating the day-to-day virtues of what Aristotle called the requirements of practical wisdom, Plato's Socrates is then open to become a figure of inspiration to any fan without demanding a corresponding moral imitation. Socrates' example can then provoke a form of individualism that can prove perfectly indifferent to the requirements of an ordinarily conceived morality. Indeed, the Socratic pose encourages indifference and resistance. Yet, it would appear such inspiration is achieved precisely because Socrates' art of living is only a pose. Nehamas's Plato in this way converts Socrates' life into an aesthetic fiction, dramatized as virtuous, without actually requiring such a life be lived in any particular way at all. So, one might impersonate Socratic conversations in the classroom or a coffeehouse, while living the life of an immoralist or of madness.

Ancient Cynics found themselves in a similar posture. Much like Socrates, they would rise up every morning to rail at the sins of

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citizens. Such was the sum and substance of the lives they lived as public philosophers. At the same time it proved difficult to imagine Cynics actually living lives as real persons, with wives and children to attend to, passing up preaching at a street corner to take a child to the doctor. Epictetus found himself amused at the very thought of such a spectacle of domesticated Cynics. So, instead of living lives of quietly practical wisdom, Cynics like Diogenes lived public lives as actors for the edification of others. But their private lives were fictions, their virtues promises, much like the lives of movie stars or television personalities. Cynics were consummate actors who gave up their private lives entirely for role-playing, like Marilyn Monroe or Ronald Reagan.

The mystery Nehamas finds in Plato's Socrates is less than meets the eye. There is no such person there who actually had a life to live, to be tested on a daily basis with its sundry temptations and moral duties. What we read, instead, is a series of stories to be studied about a never-ending conversation in which wisdom inevitably awaits another day, depending on the kind of dialogue it is. On an interpretation I would prefer of Plato, this Socratic mystery figure holds out real promise to the reader and his author, awaiting not only the perfectly illuminating conversation but also looking for a life lived to perfection. Yet, the reader --and Plato for that matter-- would first have to step out of the picture and actually attempt to live a life of real virtue off the stage, unlike the Cynics' posturing or the staged depiction of Socrates the fiction.

On the reading Nehamas would advance, Plato's Socrates is disturbingly akin to Chekhov's Black Monk. Such an hallucinatory figure tempts devotees away from the moral responsibilities of daily life, once transfixed by the delusion that wisdom is a privately privileging possession. Such a philosophical apparition excuses duties to our neighbors in favor of narcissistic gazing at the self, affording no space for love, except for the love of self. According to Nehamas, there are those who found that ghost especially appealing, Montaigne (sic), Nietzsche and Foucault.

Chekhov suggests we pity persons taken down by melancholic misanthropy and philosophic vanity, instead of praising them. There

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are better, socially constructive lives to live of a great range and variety, once persons free themselves from narcissistic madness and delusions of philosophic grandeur. So, before we turn to the specific black monks haunting Socratic wannabes through history, let us first consider the case of Marcus, Emperor of Rome, whose Meditations were reflections on the life he lived, guiding day-to-day decisions affecting the lives of millions.

Philosophy as a Way of LifeLate into antiquity, after a few too many centuries of theorizing,

several Stoics and some Platonists reoriented their philosophical outlook toward combating the psychopathologies of everyday life. Cicero's On Duties, Plutarch's Moralia, Seneca's essays and epistles all contributed to this renaissance of interest in practical morality, following the lead of Panaetius, Posidonius, the practices of Epicurean communities, the legacy of Aristotle. In time practical and practicing philosophers were ubiquitous throughout the Empire, recognized by their beards and the clothes they wore, similar to the garments of St. Francis. Their names are not well-known today: Musonius Rufus, Dio Chrysostom, Favorinus, Macedo, Junius Rusticus, for instance.

Yet, their speeches, writings, the lives they lived exerted considerable influence on Roman society, fleshing out the Socratic promise that philosophy mandated a way of life affecting every aspect of humanity, from the way we raise our children and our choice of friends to civic duties, how we live from day to day, how we face shame or fame or death. It is a measure of their success that these philosophers were banned from imperial Rome on several occasions. Such sages proved dangerous. And those who sought to live lives as practicing philosophers fully expected their personal philosophical commitments might lead to execution (Cicero), forced suicide (Seneca) or impoverished exile (Dio). Centuries earlier, it would have been unthinkable that Epictetus, a former slave, could have so centrally stimulated the practice of philosophy from his humble exile in Nicopolis, where he had been banished in 89 by the Emperor Domitian. Even Plato would have been incredulous at the emergence of an actual philosopher-king of the entire Mediterranean basin, not to mention Europe. What had been

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philosophic fiction became historical reality, but it was a Stoic reality, not a Platonic fantasy.

In The Inner Citadel, Pierre Hadot presents the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome. This portrait is sympathetically drawn, beautifully translated. Indeed, it reads like the Meditations themselves, sharing with Marcus that rare kind of inspirational writing that commands a presence on the bedside table next to, say, the Bible. Philosophy had never been composed so intimately before Marcus wrote his Meditations. Rarely have scholars written in recent years with the moral fervor of Hadot.

Unlike Plato, Marcus did not write with ironic anonymity, but neither are his Meditations artless. As Hadot fully appreciates (cf. pp. 25-34, 243, 257-60) and R. B. Rutherford has amply demonstrated, Marcus elaborately edited and re-worked his manuscript. So attentive an author might well have had in mind a wider audience. Yet, it is evident Marcus wrote the Meditations for himself (p. 244). He distilled Stoic aphorisms and converted them into moral annotations, describing and prescribing the life he sought to live. In this way the art of composition Marcus first mastered from the rhetor Fronto helped him compose a life of Stoicism. Like Plato, writing was central to his enterprise (cf. pp. 48-51). But, unlike Plato and his fictional Socrates, Marcus wrote out his meditations to serve as an instrument for acquiring the personal discipline he needed to implement the art of living (cf. p. 72). What only mattered to Marcus was how he lived, not what he wrote or how his story might be read historically.

'The goal is to reactualize, rekindle, and ceaselessly reawaken an inner state which is in constant danger of being numbed or extinguished' (p. 51). To achieve this goal Marcus turned primarily to the Stoicism of Epictetus, though several ancient authors (including Heraclitus, Plato and Theophrastus) wove their way into his spiritual exercises. It is a virtue of Hadot that he is able to organize Marcus' diffuse moral notebook into a trinity of themes which comport nicely with Epictetus and classical Stoicism, recreating a portrait of that inner citadel (cf. pp. 107, 122) Marcus sought to construct for himself, to enable him to live a truly virtuous life. By organizing

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Marcus' Meditations in this way, Hadot affords his reader the opportunity to construct a similar life-style, rather than merely imagine what it might be like to do so.

In his Discourses, Epictetus noted, 'there are three domains in which he who would become perfect must train himself' (III 2.1-2; Hadot, pp. 86-87). The first domain requires disciplining primary desires and aversions, as we envision our place in the greater scheme of things, by accepting the particular calling the cosmos ordained for each of us. The second domain trains particular impulses and aversions, so that we situate our various plans and ambitions within a governing recognition of the reality we belong to, as members of the community of fellow human-beings. The third domain disciplines our rush to judgment by delimiting what we sense within our frame of experience to what is truly there.

By comparison, Freud for instance termed the first domain primary process; the second, the reality principle; and the third domain the education of the ego. Hadot characterizes these three dimensions in terms of the discipline of desire, the discipline of action, and the discipline of assent. Yet, it all amounts to the same thing, constructing a moral identity out of three fundamental aspects of human personality, as the Stoics conceived it, along with Freud and Plato: rational judgment, the impulse to act and basic desire.

Epictetus presented this training regimen by working from the outside in (cf. Hadot, p. 93). Here the Stoics markedly parted company with Plato (and Freud for that matter). Following Epictetus, Marcus fully appreciated that one's search for self follows naturally from first orienting oneself within the cosmic scheme of things and the social community fate has placed one in. Individual identity emerges out of social and cosmic placement, as we mold our particular personal identity to roles first fated by the cosmos and society. At the same time, our spiritual challenge comes with adapting the roles we are assigned by fate and circumstance, so as to fit the moral requirements of character.

Marcus' reflections constitute a manual describing how to go about this adaptive process, provided that we understand success in terms of how we suit God's cosmic plans and how we suit humanity rather

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than how we suit ourselves. Hadot suggests that Marcus' historical reflections might guide contemporary readers too, even though the particular roles life today presents us with vary immeasurably from that peculiar fate facing Marcus as Emperor of Rome. The moral focal point remains the same, both for Marcus and ourselves: focusing on a personal calling, which varies widely with time and circumstance from person to person. This personal calling allows for situational pluralism while resisting moral relativism.

There is, to be sure, a wide diversity of roles to be played, given the varieties of human experience, shifting cultural contexts and the forever flowing future of the divinely cosmic plan. Even so, the requirements of virtue remain uniformly eternal. Moral guidelines may require interpretation, framing life's choices within an evolving social and cosmic context. But the particular virtues expected of humanity do not change. Instead, these commonplace virtues can be employed to construct an inner citadel which will fortify us against the various assaults of fate or fortune, whether we are commoners or kings, thereby establishing 'an impregnable islet of autonomy, in the midst of the vast river of events and Destiny' (p. 83). There are many paths to that same salvation.

Scholars today typically approach Stoicism by working from the inside out, proceeding from Stoic empiricism, or the rationalized interpretation of sense impressions, moving outward toward the wider context of social propriety, and finally addressing the moral demands of the divine cosmos. In an era of individualism this interpretive approach makes sense to modern readers, who follow Freud in proceeding from the psyche outward. Yet, it can lead to the false impression that Stoicism is a psychologically centered moral system. Hadot's Inner Citadel demonstrates how such an approach fails to fathom the moral force of Stoicism: 'It invites humankind to a complete reversal of its vision of the world and its usual way of living' (p. 100).

As Marcus takes up these Epictetan themes he personalizes them, in terms of how he expects himself to live from day to day. First and foremost Marcus defers the nagging demands of the self by disciplining primal desire, so as to allow himself to be guided by the

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cosmos, adopting what Hadot terms the view from above (cf. p. 173). In this way, 'the self...discovers both its limitation and its transcendence' (p. 181). It discovers its limitation by deferring to its placement in the greater scheme of things. It discovers its transcendence by fathoming, with Pascal and Royce, that inner God within who also is the world's (cf. p. 123). The soul comes to discover this inner God only by first coming to love the soul's placement in the cosmic plan -- what Nietzsche termed amor fati (cf. Hadot, p. 144). As the soul accepts its placement, 'it becomes transfigured: for what the free self wills is all of Destiny, the entire history of the world and the entire world, as if the self were that universal Reason, which is the origin of the world, or universal Nature' (p. 180).

Nietzsche notwithstanding, such a sentiment finds little resonance in a contemporary world where atoms ignorantly bump up against the void. Marcus anticipates this complaint with his famous disjunction: 'either providence or atoms' (Meditations IV 3.5, cf. Hadot, pp. 147-163). Following Seneca, Marcus argues that even if the Epicurean worldview should prove physically correct, our humanity inevitably extends to the universe that portion of the universe we find miraculously at work within ourselves --namely, the power of what Heraclitus called logos. We inexorably find our own rational identities poised within that wider cosmos, even if such a cosmos were chaotically composed of atoms in the void. We act as if that cosmos were divine, and by doing so we discover a taste of our own divinity. So, we become Stoics in spite of such a possible reality (cf. p. 150). Yet, Marcus remains convinced the cosmos actually 'possesses its own internal law' (p. 156), one he finds he must acknowledge in order to find his place within it, allowing him to seize upon the corresponding freedom such concession to the Other brings (cf. pp. 151-152). Thus, even an impersonal cosmos becomes in Hadot's words (following Bergson) 'a machine for making sages' (p. 161).

As we grow our souls from the outside in, slowly working toward the center of our being, next in importance comes Marcus' second set of exercises for spiritual training: 'the discipline of action in the service of mankind' (p. 183). And it is this complete commitment to civic altruism that conspicuously sets Stoicism apart from the entire

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Socratic and Platonic tradition. For Plato's Socrates, the human being does not love in our sense of the term; he merely desires what his psyche needs, whether wine or sex or wisdom. Consequently, the perfect person stands complete and completely alone, once he no longer is in need of anything, once his soul becomes as sated and self-satisfied as Kovrin's Black Monk appeared to be. By contrast, on Marcus' understanding of Stoicism, the more we humans approach divine perfection the more we love, the more we sacrifice our selves to the love of other human beings: 'the goal of our actions must be the good of the human community' (p. 185). The true philosopher can consequently never stand apart from the community. Indeed, he needs to love humanity constantly.

The natural focus of Marcus' moral concentration on other persons energizes his own impulses to action. Community service and personal sacrifice are paramount: 'Since such actions are directed exclusively toward other people, and have their foundation in that community of reasonable nature which unites humankind, they must be guided by our intention to place ourselves in the service of the human community, and bring about the reign of justice' (p. 87). Marcus placed so much emphasis on altruistic love that, according to Hadot, he shared with Christianity the fundamental orientation of agape, exhibiting and mirroring the love of God (cf. pp. 229-231).

The 'fine serenity' (p. 183) that comes with loving thy neighbor as thyself enables us to liberate ourselves from frivolously careerist role-playing (cf. Meditations III 15.6, IV 24, VII 69; Hadot, pp. 185-188, 229-231) by allowing us to concentrate, instead, upon our calling as divinely inspired human beings: 'limiting one's actions to that which serves the common good' (p. 187). Freed from uncertainty and worries wrought by more localized ambitions, Marcus and every one of us can then compose a life of joyful virtue, welcoming whatever fate and circumstance may hold in store (cf. p. 212).

So joyful a therapy committed to the good of the cosmos and humanity has not been without detractors. Considering that neither Marcus nor the Stoics envisioned a second life in Paradise, there can be something somewhat puzzling, even existentialist, about Marcus' commitment toward converting egoism into altruism. Naysayers, not

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to mention scholars, have detected a certain melancholic resignation in such a blind embrace of virtue, totally indifferent to fate and the futility of good intentions. Indeed, Marcus appears peculiarly fond of pointing out the vicious capriciousness of circumstance, too much so to exhibit such beatific serenity. And so, it is alleged, Marcus' commitment to the common good is undermined by inner pessimism.

For Hadot (cf. pp. 163-179), what refutes this charge lies in the construction of what Marcus called the inner citadel and what Epictetus termed the third and final course of spiritual training: the discipline of judgment and assent. Here the Stoic-in-training struggles to adopt a unified way of looking at the self and at the world, one which integrates the self with others. We might term such a viewpoint 'objective' or 'the view from above'. Hadot describes it this way: 'This delimitation of the self is, in the last analysis, the fundamental exercise of Stoicism. It implies a complete transformation of our self-consciousness, of our relation toward our body and toward external goods, and of our attitude toward the past and the present' (p. 120). The final task facing one who would be Stoic requires letting the voice of the inner God within take over the perspective of the self entirely (cf. p. 123).

One can indeed ponder Marcus' indifference to woeful fate, the death of seven of his children and all his sons save one, the betrayals by his wife and friends, the corruption of his courtiers, the continual wars along the outer reaches of the Danube which demanded his weary attentions. One might well conclude Marcus suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, a severe affect disorder never yielding to grief, anger, terror --symptomatic of inconsolable depression. Yet, 'depending on which perspective one adopts, the practice of the discipline of desire can take on different tonalities' (p. 163). From the cosmic point of view, the self must be resisted, not to relieve one's personal suffering but to allow for the possibility of joy, regardless of that suffering.

This leaves us, finally, with Marcus' personal relations. Puzzled about the composition of his Meditations, scholars have noticed how the first book appears to have been written last. Unlike the other books, it consists entirely of personal acknowledgments to Marcus'

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contemporaries, apparently by then deceased, each of whom had influenced Marcus' life and upbringing. What has not been recognized by scholars, including even Hadot, is the selective nature of Marcus' descriptions of this circle of acquaintance. Marcus praises them for the good they did him, while completely omitting their human failings, of which history has so much to say --regarding Marcus' wife Faustina, for example.

Marcus sees Alexander the Grammarian's fault-finding as a virtue, not a vice. He praises fate for not allowing him to become a poet or professor, which might well have distracted him from his humanitarian calling. He acknowledges his wife's simplicity, physical affection, her concern for the education of their children. He expresses gratitude his surviving children were not deformed. And he leaves the rest unsaid. This window into Marcus' inner citadel reveals something of his discipline: to hearken to the God within, by becoming deaf to the insatiable lamentations of the self. The suggestion Marcus leaves with readers is that we could do this too, and liberate ourselves from the evils of experience. Paradoxically, by placing God and the community before our selves and our immediate self-interest, we can construct within ourselves an inner citadel, enjoying joyous freedom. Thomas Merton could have composed these same sentiments in his Seven Storey Mountain, as Augustine did in his Confessions.

The Sacred and ProfaneHadot's portrait of Marcus and Nehamas' account of the fictional

Socrates stand at crossroads to each other. One path leads toward civic action, altruism, sublimation of the self in the interest of the common good and the love of God. Marcus calls only upon himself to take this pathway. But his Meditations call upon readers like Hadot to follow him, in whatever separate callings fate and circumstance has arranged for them. Amidst the myriad possibilities offered by a life of Stoicism, in none of them does self-love take precedence over the love of other human beings. For every pilgrim on this journey the self finally finds itself effaced at the vanishing point where its divine autonomy is perfected.

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Nehamas' version of the freedom highway offers an all too human, familiar form of freedom. To a critic like Chekhov or a scholar like Hadot, the magical mystery of Plato's fictional Socrates (as Nehamas portrays it) is merely the star turn of autofiction, affording an Oscar for anyone with sufficient hubris to carry off a life-style of her own invention. It reads more like a tour of Universal Studios than the journey of a life well-lived from day to day. On such a set with such a script, the self is everything, just as it was with Kovrin. What is lived is the image of a life, like Chekhov's apparitional Black Monk.

Yet, the choice between these two different forms of freedom is far from obvious. Even Kovrin must have his due. Just as Marcus saw in Socrates a fellow traveler, so too Kovrin regarded Marcus as a role-model of autonomy, defiant of convention, joyful in his loneliness. After all, it was the discipline of Stoicism that isolated Marcus from the popular culture of a people he sought to serve so devotedly (cf. Hadot, p. 292). The discipline of philosophy similarly isolated Kovrin.

Just as Kovrin can be criticized for his compulsions, so too can devotees of Marcus be dismissed as slavish followers who cast away their freedom in the cause of seeking it. To draw a contemporary analogy, there are Christians today who wear bracelets initialed W.W.J.D. (What would Jesus do?). These religious icons serve as disciplinary reminders, evocative of a similar spiritual purpose at work within Marcus' Meditations or the Handbook of Epictetus. Especially to a Southern Californian (where Thomas Mann once walked the streets and Monica Lewinsky lives), such spiritual discipline might seem offensively dictatorial, legislating moral uniformity. From a SoCal point of view, every choice is freely ours to take. Whether to be ascetic or materialistic, virtuous or vicious is a question of life-style and autonomy. Unlike the movie 'Pleasantville', for the Stoics --and notably Aristotle as well-- there was no human life-style available to stylize outside the realm of virtue. From the SoCal point of view and that of many contemporaries, morality is clothing optional.

It is not a simple decision, standing at the crossroads, choosing between the pathways of Hadot's Marcus and Nehamas's fictional Socrates. It is, at the heart of the matter, a question of directing

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one's own identity, either as part of the greater whole or as apart from the whole. It is a matter of guiding character. The hagiographers of Marcus and Socrates each will find their followers. Some will value living out their lives, as Marcus did, by identifying themselves as world citizens, focusing on civic duties. Others will value themselves more for the monuments they are constructing of their life-styles and life's stories. How is one to choose? That depends on how one sees one's own persona, as seen from an eternal viewpoint or from the inside looking out.

Nehamas takes the latter perspective; Hadot adopts the former. Each views the same sages differently. Hadot cites Nietzsche in defense of Marcus' cosmic humility and sees Socrates as Marcus' spiritual ally. When Nehamas turns to latter day Socratics who gave voice to Socrates' silence, he writes so magically of Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault, that his reader would be hard pressed to remember Nietzsche's madness, Foucault's personal disgrace and, worse yet, the reader might forget how Montaigne was actually a civic hero, not a recluse.

Montaigne studied Socrates' visage in his essay 'Physiognomy', and Nehamas proves persuasive, when singling out the intensely individualist strain in Montaigne's art of living (pp. 105, 127). But Montaigne was far too humble to seek to build a personal monument from the composition of his Essais (cf. Nehamas, p. 120). Such was not the man who quietly risked life and limb to negotiate a peace to cease the murderous religious wars of France. Faith in a God he knew-not-what had driven him and a weary love of humanity, not glory. His borrowings from a vast array of classical and contemporary authors may be eclectic, his perspectives prismatic, his final thoughts evasive. Montaigne may be a subtle author, but as I would read him, he did not write in code (cf. pp. 125-126). He was too much a moral realist to write with academic irony. Yes, one can highlight Montaigne's melancholy and paint a different portrait of a darker private purpose. But to those who revere Montaigne as they do Pascal, such a portrait, even a poetic one, seems sacrilege.

Nietzsche's conflicted attitude toward Socrates serves Nehamas' purpose better, giving voice to the silence of Socrates' fictional self-

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fashioning. Nehamas writes wondrously of Nietzsche, highlighting Nietzsche's initial fascination for what he took to be Socrates' self-mastery fatally flawed with an imbedded self-hatred (cf. pp. 138-141). Later in his life, Nietzsche's attitude toward Socrates became even more conflicted: 'he could never be sure that his own project was not also the project of the character who animated the tradition against which he defined himself' (p. 155). In this way, Plato's fictional Socrates became Nietzsche's personal Darth Vader. Nietzsche's autofiction may well prove exciting to Star Wars fans, but to Stoic sympathizers and Aristotelians like myself, I wouldn't wish the life that Nietzsche lived on anyone, not even Rousseau.

Foucault's final thoughts were dedicated to Socrates and the Cynics. So, Nehamas explores Foucault's last lectures, where Foucault focused on Socrates as a therapist caring for the soul. This might appear to bring Foucault's Socrates closer to the discipline of Marcus, not to mention Foucault's early mentor, Hadot. It is indeed revelatory to fathom Foucault's final image of himself as a modern day Socratic/Cynic, addressing individuals individually (cf. p. 164), trying to empower their autonomy with unbridled speech. In this way, like Diogenes of Sinope and Socrates, Foucault could see his life's work as working for humanity. In his final years this purpose took on greater focus, as his writings on sexuality sought to free homosexuals particularly, by encouraging resistance against what one would not be. But it is dubious whether Foucault's 'deep love' (cf. pp. 175, 180) for marginalized humanity healed the life he lived personally from day to day, as James Miller's Passion of Michel Foucault (New York, Doubleday-Anchor, 1994) disturbingly reveals. Like his Cynic forebears, Foucault proved more useful as a voice than as a role model.

Nehamas admires 'the cases of great individuals' where 'the private and the public, the aesthetic and the political, are as entangled with one another as the "life" and the work" ' (p. 180). Such fusions open out to pluralism, the possibility of autofiction for anyone with sufficient talent to wish upon a star. Pluralism is consequently paramount for Nehamas's depiction of the art of living; so is individualism.

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Stoics and Hadot might embrace these catchwords, too. The difference comes with establishing limits beyond which no human being should ever trespass. Nehamas apparently would welcome, with Nietzsche and Foucault, going to personal extremes that Stoic virtue would necessarily forbid. Yet, what is even more important for Nehamas is not the daily lives these figures lived, but how they saw the lives they lived and the glorious monuments they erected in what they wrote about themselves, emulating Plato's fictional Socrates. What is all important for Hadot is Marcus' disciplined art of daily living. For Kovrin, the Black Monk was his salvation. For the physicians who failed to heal him it was his disease. DAVID GLIDDEN is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His scholarly papers have focused on Hellenistic philosophy and late antiquity, including ‘Augustine’s Hermeneutics and the Principle of Charity’ (Ancient Philosophy 1997). He is the author of numerous essays on contemporary moral issues, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and an alumnus of the California Council for the Humanities.

University of California, Riverside CA 92521 U.S.A.

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