by Pierre Hadot

366 Pages·2015·4.99 MB·English

THE INNER
CITADEL
TheM editatoifo ns
MarcuAsu relius
Pierre Hadot
Translated by Michael Chase
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
1998

Copyright© 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved
Publication of this book has been aided by
a grant from the French Ministry of Culture.
Originally published as La Citadelle Interieure: Introduction aux "Pensees" de Marc Aure/e by
Pierre Hadot, copyright© l 992 Librairie Artheme Fayard.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hadot, Pierre.
[Citadelle intfaieure. English]
The inner citadel : the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius I Pierre
Hadot ; translated by Michael Chase.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-674-46171-1 (alk. paper)
r. Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, 121-180. Meditations.
2. Ethics. 3. Stoics. 4. Life. I. Title.
B583.H3313 1998
l88-dc21
97-46971

CONTENTS
Preface Vil
Note on Transliteration and Quotation XI
Translator's Note XII
1 The Emperor-Philosopher
2 A First Glimpse of the Meditations 21
3 The Meditations as Spiritual Exercises 35
4 The Philosopher-Slave and the Emperor-Philosopher 54
5 The Stoicism of Epictetus 73
6 The Inner Citadel, or the Discipline of Assent 101
7 The Discipline ofDesire, or Amor Fati 128
8 The Discipline of Action, or Action in the
Service of Mankind 183
9 Virtue and Joy 232
10 Marcus Aurelius in His Meditations 243
Conclusion 307
Abbreviations 315
Notes 317
Index 339

PREFACE
Soon, you will have forgotten everything.
Soon, everybody will have forgotten you!
Meditations, VII, 2r
Marcus Aurelius was wrong. Eighteen centuries-almost two millen­
nia-have passed, and the Meditations are still alive. Nor have their pages
been reserved to a few aristocrats of the intellect, like Shaftesbury,
Frederick II, or Goethe: on the contrary, for centuries they have brought
reasons to live to innumerable unknown people, who have been able to
read them in the multiple translations of the Meditations which have been
made in every corner of the earth; and they still do so today.
The Meditations are an inexhaustible source of wisdom; an "eternal
Gospel," in Renan's words. Apparently, the Meditations do not hold any
particular difficulties in store for their readers. Aphorisms and brief dis­
sertations follow one another without any apparent order, and as the
reader leafs through the book, he or she winds up finding a striking or
moving formula which seems to speak by itself, and to need no exegesis.
It is not a book to be read in one sitting. One must return to it often, in
order to discover in it, day by day, some nourishment which suits the
momentary states of our soul. The modern reader can perfectly well
understand a given aphorism by Marcus Aurelius, like the one I have
quoted as an epigraph. This is what is always attractive about the Medita­
tions: their sayings, whose limpidity can never grow old.
And yet, what a deceptive limpidity! For besides these formulas, there
are others which are much more obscure, and which have been under­
stood by historians in widely varying ways. The overall meaning of the
book, its purpose, and some of its affirmations are very hard for us to
grasp. Nor is this the case only with Marcus Aurelius. For all kinds of
reasons, of which chronological distance is not the most important, our
understanding of ancient works has grown more and more dim. To gain
access to them once more, we will have to practice a kind of spiritual
Vlll Preface
exercise or intellectual ascetics, in order to free ourselves from certain
prejudices and rediscover what is, for us, almost another way of thinking.
This is what we shall attempt to do throughout the present work. Before
we set out upon this itinerary, however, it may be helpful to become
aware of these prejudices and illusions, which threatep to cause the
modern reader to go astray when reading a work from antiquity.
In the first place, the reader will perhaps imagine that the text has
remained constant since the distant era in which it appeared, as do our
contemporary printed texts. But we must not forget that ancient texts
were, precisely, not printed: for centuries they were copied by hand, and
copying errors were thereby constantly introduced. We can hardly blame
the ancient scribes for this, if we think of our modern books, which,
although they are printed, are often filled with printer's errors, which
sometimes deform the author's thought to the point of rendering it
unintelligible. That, however, is another question. It cannot be overem­
phasized that it is thanks to the efforts of the scholars who investigate and
classify the manuscripts in which ancient works have been preserved, and
who attempt, using the critical method of the classification of errors, to
reconstitute the original state of the text, that we can now read the works
of antiquity in a state which is more or less satisfactory, but can never be
perfect. I feel I must insist upon this point, which is sometimes com­
pletely ignored by some scientific authorities or historians of philosophy,
who imagine that one can hold forth about the theories of a particular
ancient author without knowing what he really wrote. In the case of
Marcus Aurelius, the greatest uncertainty often reigns with regard to
certain words of his text. This does not affect the totality of the work, but
it nevertheless remains true that some passages present almost insur­
mountable difficulties, and we should not be surprised if these difficulties
are reflected in the translations which have been made of this author.
The modern reader tends too often to imagine that there is only one
possible translation of a Greek text, and he or she may be surprised to
find considerable differences. This fact should, however, make the reader
aware of the distance that separates us from the ancients. Translation
presupposes, first of all, a choice with regard to the Greek text, in those
cases in which this text is sometimes uncertain. But the translators' hesi­
tations often also correspond to the difficulties they have in under­
standing the text, and to the sometimes radically different interpretations
of it which they propose. In the case of Marcus Aurelius, for example,
many have not been able to render in an exact manner the technical
terms, peculiar to the Stoic system, which are found on every page of the
Preface lX
Meditations. Moreover, in the case of Marcus, the division of the text into
chapters is very uncertain, and often the limits of each "meditation" are
not absolutely clear. Thus, the very appearance of the text can vary
widely.
Finally, the modem reader might imagine-and no one is safe from
this error-that the ancient author lives in the same intellectual world as
he does. The reader will treat the author's affirmations exactly as if they
came from a contemporary author, and will therefore think he has im­
mediately understood what the author meant. In fact, however, this
understanding will be anachronistic, and the reader will often run the risk
of committing serious mistranslations. To be sure, it is fashionable now­
adays to affirm that, in any case, we cannot know exactly what an author
meant, and that, moreover, this does not matter at all, for we can give the
works any meaning we please. For my part, and without entering into
this debate, I would say that before we discover "unintentional" mean­
ings, it seems to me both possible and necessary to discover the meaning
which the author intended. It is absolutely indispensable to go in the
direction of a basic meaning, to which we can then refer in order to
uncover, if we should so wish, those meanings of which the author was
perhaps not conscious. It is true, however, that this reconstitution is
extremely difficult for us, because we project attitudes and intentions
proper to our era into the past. I� order to understand ancient works, we
must relocate them within their context, in the widest sense of the term,
which can signify the material, social, and political situation as well as the
political and rhetorical universe of thought. In particular, we must recall
that the mechanisms of literary composition were very different then
from what they are now. In antiquity, the rules of discourse were rigor­
ously codified. In order to say what he wanted to say, an author had to
say it in a specific way, in accordance with traditional models, and ac­
cording to rules prescribed by rhetoric or philosophy. Marcus Aurelius'
Meditations, for instance, are not the spontaneous outpourings of a soul
that wants to express its thoughts immediately, but rather an exercise,
accomplished in accordance with definite rules. As we shall see, they
presuppose a pre-existing canvas, upon which the philosopher-emperor
could only embroider. Often, Marcus says certain things only because he
has to say them, by virtue of the models and precepts imposed upon him.
The meaning of the Meditations can, therefore, only be understood once
we have discovered, among other things, the prefabricated schemes
which have been imposed upon it.
My intention, which is to offer the modem reader an introduction to