Writing as a spiritual exercise

 

As we have seen throughout these analyses, the Meditations appear to be variations on a small number of themes. The result of this is the large number of repetitions they contain, which are sometimes almost verbatim. We have already encountered several examples of this, and the following ones can be added:

How could that which does not make a man worse, make life worse? (II, 11, 4)

That which does not make a man worse than he is, does not make his life worse, either…. (IV, 8).

All is ephemeral: that which remembers, and that which it remembers (IV, 35).

Ephemeral… is he who remembers and that which he remembers (VIII, 21, 2).

Nothing is so capable of producing greatness of soul (III, 11, 2).

Nothing is so capable of producing greatness of soul (X, 11, 1).

Many more examples could be cited, including long developments such as VIII, 34 and XI, 8, both of which are structurally parallel, and are devoted to the power which man has received from God to reunite himself with the All from which he has separated himself.

The advice on distinguishing within each thing “that which is causal” from “that which is material” is repeated almost ten times, with only very slight variations. Here we can recognize one of the fundamental structures of Stoic physics,8 and therefore—once again—the technical nature of the formulas Marcus uses. But Marcus does not merely repeat this distinction as if he were reproducing something he had learned in a Stoic school; for him, it has an existential meaning. To distinguish the causal element is to recognize the presence within oneself of the hēgemonikon, that is, the principle which directs all being. This is that principle of thought and judgment which makes us independent of the body, and the principle of liberty which delimits the sphere of “that which depends on us,” as opposed to “that which does not depend on us.”

Marcus does not say this; however, we can deduce it from the overall structure of his system. He is content merely to recommend to himself to apply this distinction, without ever giving an example which might help us to understand what this exercise might mean. The reason is that Marcus has no need of examples; he knows perfectly well what he’s talking about. These formulas, which are repeated throughout the Meditations, never set forth a doctrine. Rather, they serve only as a catalyst which, by means of the association of ideas, reactivates a series of representations and practices, about which Marcus—since he is writing only for himself—has no need to go into detail.

Marcus writes only in order to have the dogmas and rules of life always present to his mind. He is thus following the advice of Epictetus, who, after having set forth the distinction between what does and does not depend on us—the fundamental dogma of Stoicism—adds:

It is about this that philosophers ought to meditate; this is what they should write down every day, and it should be the subject of their exercises (I, 1, 25).

You must have these principles at hand (procheira) both night and day; you must write them down; you must read them (III, 24, 103).

The Stoic philosophical life consists essentially in mastering one’s inner discourse. Everything in an individual’s life depends on how he represents things to himself—in other words, how he tells them to himself in inner dialogue. “It is not things that trouble us,” as Epictetus said (Manual, §5), “but our judgments about things,” in other words, our inner discourse about things. I will have a great deal to say later on about the Discourses of Epictetus, which were collected by his disciple Arrian. They depict Epictetus speaking with his students during his philosophy classes, and, as Arrian says in his brief preface, “When he spoke, he certainly had no other desire than to set the thoughts of his listeners in motion toward what is best… when Epictetus spoke these words, his audience could not help feeling just what this man wanted them to feel.”

Epictetus’ speech, then, was intended to modify his audience’s inner discourse. We are thus in the presence of two therapies: one was that of the word, practiced in a variety of forms, by means of striking or moving formulas and with the help of logical and technical rational processes, but also with the help of seductive and persuasive imagery. Another was the therapy of writing for oneself, which, for Marcus, consisted in taking up the dogmas and rules of action as they were stated by Epictetus—all the while addressing himself—and assimilating them, so that they might become the principles of his inner discourse. Therefore, one must constantly rekindle the “representations” (phantasiai) within oneself, in other words, those discourses which formulate dogmas (VII, 2).

Such writing exercises thus lead necessarily to incessant repetitions, and this is what radically differentiates the Meditations from every other work. Dogmas are not mathematical rules, learned once and for all and then mechanically applied. Rather, they must somehow become achievements of awareness, intuitions, emotions, and moral experiences which have the intensity of a mystical experience or a vision. This spiritual and affective spirituality is, however, quick to dissipate. In order to reawaken it, it is not enough to reread what has already been written. Written pages are already dead, and the Meditations were not made to be reread. What counts is the reformulation: the act of writing or talking to oneself, right now, in the very moment when one needs to write. It is also the act of composing with the greatest care possible: to search for that version which, at a given moment, will produce the greatest effect, in the moment before it fades away, almost instantaneously, almost as soon as it is written. Characters traced onto some medium do not fix anything everything is in the act of writing. Thus, we witness a succession of new attempts at composition, repetitions of the same formulas, and endless variations on the same themes: the themes of Epictetus.

The goal is to reactualize, rekindle, and ceaselessly reawaken an inner state which is in constant danger of being numbed or extinguished. The task—ever-renewed—is to bring back to order an inner discourse which becomes dispersed and diluted in the futility of routine.

As he wrote the Meditations, Marcus was thus practicing Stoic spiritual exercises. He was using writing as a technique or procedure in order to influence himself, and to transform his inner discourse by meditating on the Stoic dogmas and rules of life. This was an exercise of writing day by day, ever-renewed, always taken up again and always needing to be taken up again, since the true philosopher is he who is conscious of not yet having attained wisdom.

From:

The inner citadel: the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius / Pierre Hadot; translated by Michael Chase.