Whether reading Plotinus, Marcus Aurelius, or Augustine, Hadot has made detailed use of his methodological prescriptions, not allowing the surface pronouncements of the texts to obscure the underlying structure, the literary genre and modes of thought that confer a determinate meaning on these pronouncements. Employing all of their resources, Hadot has used these practices of interpretation to try to reconstruct the fundamental meaning (sens de base), the meaning "intended" by the author (le sens "t,tm/11 " p11r l't111/e11r), of these ancient tcxts.'18 More often than not , as is c\•idcnt from the cxnmplci;
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I have given, this meaning will not be apparent. And if Hadot's practices of interpretation are most often employed with respect to ancient p�ilosophical and theological writing, his discussion of Wittgenstein makes clear the need, throughout the history of philosophy, for such practices. To restrict the importance of Hadot's lessons to one period in the history of thought would be radically to misunderstand the techniques and procedures of human thought.
2 Spiritual Exercises
Hadot has written that he was led to become aware of the importance of what he has called "spiritual exercises" by his work of interpretation of ancient philosophical texts.99 On the one hand, like his predecessors and contemporaries, Hadot encountered the well-known phenomenon of the incoherences, even contradictions, in the works of ancient philosophical authors. On the other hand, many modern historians of ancient philosophy have begun from the assumption that ancient philosophers were attempting, in the same way as modern philosophers, to construct systems, that ancient philosophy was essentially a philosophical discourse consisting of a "certain type of organization of language, comprised of propositions having as their object the universe, human society, and language itself." 100 Thus the essential task of the historian of philosophy was thought to consist in "the analysis of the genesis and the structures of the literary works that were written by the philosophers, especially in the study of the rational connection and the internal coherence of these systematic expositions." 101 Under these interpretive constraints, modern historians of ancient philosophy could not but deplore the awkward expositions, defects of composition, and outright incoherences in the ancient authors they studied. 1112
Hadot, however, rather than deploring these ancient authors' failures to measure up to the modern standard of the systematic philosophical treatise, realized that in order to understand and explain these apparent defects, one must not only analyze the structure of these ancient philosophical texts, but one must also situate them in the "living praxis from which they emanated." 103
An essential aspect of this living praxis was the oral dimension of ancient philosophy, and the written philosophical works of Greco-Roman antiquity were "never completely free of the constraints imposed by oral transmission." uu Hadot has described this written work as only a material support for a spoken word intended to become spoken word again, "like a modern record or cassette which are only an intermediary between two events: the recording and the rehearing. " 105 All of ancient philosophy believed in what 1-ladot once called, thinking of Plato's Phaedrus, the "ontological value of the spoken word"; 1 his living and animated discourse was not principally intended to 1 r1111Nmi1 inform11 1 ion, hu1 "10 tlrod ucc a certain psychic effect in the reader
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or listener." 106 Thus the "propositional element" was not the most important element of ancient philosophical teaching, and Hadot has frequently cited Victor Goldschmitt's formula, originally applied to the Platonic dialogues but used by Hadot to characterize ancient philosophy more generally, that ancient philosophical discourse intended "to form more than to inform." 107
Hadot claims that it is probably a mistake about the nature of ancient philosophy to consider abstraction, made possible by writing, its most important characteristic:
For ancient philosophy, at least beginning from the sophists and Socrates, intended, in the first instance, to form people and to transform souls. That is why, in Antiquity, philosophical teaching is given above all in oral form, because only the living word, in dialogues, in conversations pursued for a long time, can accomplish such an action.
The written work, considerable as it is, is therefore most of the time only an echo or a complement of this oral teaching. 108
This is one reason why, for Hadot, to philosophize is to learn how to dialogue.109 A Socratic dialogue is a spiritual exercise practiced in common, and it incites one to give attention to oneself, to take care of oneself, to know oneself. The Socratic maxim "know thyself" requires a relation of the self to itself that "constitutes the basis of all spiritual exercises. " i m Every spiritual exercise is dialogical insofar as it is an "exercise of authentic presence" of the self to itself, and of the self to others. 1 1 1 The Socratic and Platonic dialogues exhibit this authentic presence in the way that they show that what is most important is not the solution to a particular problem, but the path traversed together in arriving at this solution. Hence, we can understand the critical significance of the dimension of the interlocutor, with all of its starts and stops, hesitations, detours, and digressions. This essential dimension prevents the dialogue from being a theoretical and dogmatic account and forces it to be a concrete and practical exercise, because, to be precise, it is not concerned with the exposition of a doctrine, but with guiding an interlocutor to a certain settled mental attitude: it is a combat, amicable but real. We should note that this is what takes place in every spiritual exercise; it is necessary to make oneself change one's point of view, attitude, set of convictions, therefore to dialogue with oneself, therefore to struggle with oneself.1 IZ
Although Hadot recognizes that some ancient philosophical works are so to speak "more written" than others, he insists that even these works "are closely linked to the activity of teaching" and must "be understood from the perspective of dialectical and exegetical scholarly exercises." 1 1 ·1 The tnsk of I he
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philosopher was not primarily one of communicating "an encyclopedic knowledge in the form of a system of propositions and of concepts that would reflect, more or less well, the system of the world." 1 14 Therefore, even definitions were nothing by themselves, independently of the road traveled to reach them. The philosophers of antiquity were concerned not with readymade knowledge, but with imparting that training and education that would allow their disciples to "orient themselves in thought, in the life of the city, or in the world." 1 15 If this is most obviously true of the Platonic dialogues, Hadot has reminded us that it is also true of the methods of Aristotle and the treatises of Plotinus: "the written philosophical work, precisely because it is a direct or indirect echo of oral teaching, now appears to us as a set of exercises, intended to make one practice a method, rather than as a doctrinal exposition." 1 16