The Inner Citadel

The trouble it addresses

For centuries readers puzzled over the Meditations. Why did the most powerful man in the world write the same few thoughts over and over? Why are the notes so bleak, full of decay, death and the worthlessness of fame? Some scholars concluded that Marcus was a melancholy, disillusioned man, or that he was ill. The historian Thomas Africa argued in 1961 that the visions of time and transience in the notes reflected the effects of opium in a medicine Marcus’s physician Galen prescribed for him.

Pierre Hadot, a French historian of ancient philosophy who spent much of his career at the Collège de France, argued that all these readings misunderstand the kind of text the Meditations is. The Inner Citadel, published in French in 1992 and translated into English by Michael Chase in 1998, is the full statement of his argument. It changed how the Meditations are read, and, beyond them, how many people understand what ancient philosophy was.

The trouble Hadot addresses is a modern blind spot. We tend to think of philosophy as theory: arguments and systems to be studied. Hadot showed that for the ancient schools, philosophy was primarily a practice, a way of living that had to be trained through daily exercises, and that much ancient writing makes sense only if read that way.

The exercises

Rewrite the principles. The first of Hadot’s insights is that Marcus was not trying to say anything new. He was repeating Stoic doctrines he had learned from Epictetus, in ever new forms, because the aim was to keep them alive in his mind. A principle that has become a dead formula no longer works on the soul. Writing it again, vividly, revives it. Repetition is the method, not a sign of a tired mind.

Discipline assent. Hadot found the notes organised, beneath their surface disorder, by three disciplines that Epictetus had taught. The first concerns judgement. Each impression the mind receives must be examined before one assents to it. The exercise is to describe events objectively, stripped of value judgements, so that what happened can be distinguished from what one adds to it. Hadot showed that Marcus’s harshest passages, which describe fine food as dead animals or fame as noise, are exercises of this kind: deliberate attempts to see things as they are, without the glamour imposed on them.

Discipline desire. The second discipline concerns what one wants and fears. The Stoic exercise is to accept what happens as part of the order of the whole, and to want what nature brings. Marcus’s views of cosmic vastness and endless change belong here. They are not expressions of despair but ways of seeing one’s own life within the whole, so that desire can align with reality.

Discipline action. The third concerns impulse, what one sets out to do. Action should be directed to the good of others, done justly and with a “reserve clause”, the recognition that the outcome is not in one’s power. Marcus’s many reminders to serve the common good, and to accept when plans are blocked, are exercises in this discipline.

Hadot connected the three disciplines to the three parts of Stoic philosophy: logic, physics and ethics. For the Stoics these were not separate subjects to be studied but aspects of a single practice of living.

The picture of a life behind them

Hadot’s larger argument, developed in Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995) and What Is Ancient Philosophy? (1995 in French, 2002 in English), is that ancient schools, Platonist, Aristotelian, Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic alike, offered not doctrines but ways of life. To become a Stoic was to undergo a conversion, a turning of one’s whole existence, and to maintain it by daily exercises: attention to the present, meditation on death, examination of conscience and the view from above. These exercises aimed to transform the self, to free it from the passions and to make it part of a larger whole.

On this view, Marcus’s notebook is an inner citadel. The phrase echoes one of his own images of the mind that, freed from passions, becomes a fortress no one can capture. It is built and maintained by daily work.

Hadot’s interpretation was influential far beyond classics. The philosopher Michel Foucault drew on his work in his late writings on “care of the self”, though Hadot thought Foucault placed too much emphasis on the self and too little on the universal reason the Stoics sought to join. Hadot’s work also underlies much of the modern revival of Stoicism as a practical philosophy.

Carrying it into ordinary work

Hadot’s insight about repetition is practical. Principles that matter to a person, such as a commitment to treat people fairly or to tell the truth, fade unless they are restated regularly in one’s own words. Writing them down, freshly, is a way of keeping them working.

The discipline of assent suits any role with pressure and noise. Before reacting to a report, a remark or a setback, describe what happened in neutral terms. The gap between the neutral description and one’s first reaction is where most poor decisions begin.

And Hadot’s broader point applies to how organisations think about learning. Knowledge that is studied and not practised rarely changes behaviour. Like the ancient schools, the teams that get better build their principles into daily habits, not into documents.