Philosophy as a way of life

It is true that Husserl gives this sentence a new meaning. Augustine's "inner man" becomes the "transcendental ego" for Husserl, a knowing subject who regains the world in "a universal self-consciousness." Augustine never could have conceived of his "inner man" in these terms. And nonetheless one understands why Husserl was tempted to use this formula. For Augustine's sentence admirably summarizes the whole spirit of Greco-Roman philosophy that prepares the way for both Descartes' Meditations and Husserl's Cartesian Meditations. And by the same procedure of taking up such a formula again, we ourselves can apply to ancient philosophy what Husserl says of his own 1>hilmmphy: t.he Delphic oracle "Know thyself" has acquired a new meaning.

For 1111 the 11hiloso1>hy of which we have spoken also gives a new meaning to l hl' I >clphic form11 l11 . Thi11 new mc11ninir already appeared among the Stoics,

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for whom the philosopher recognizes the presence of divine reason in the human self and who opposes his moral consciousness, which depends on him alone, to the rest of the universe. This new meaning appeared even more clearly among the Neoplatonists, who identify what they call the true self with the founding intellect of the world and even with the transcendent unity that founds all thought and all reality. In Hellenistic and Roman thought this movement, of which Husserl speaks, is thus already outlined, according to which one loses the world in order to find it again in universal self-consciousness. Thus Husserl consciously and explicitly presents himself as the heir to the tradition of "Know thyself " that runs from Socrates to Augustine to Descartes. But that is not all. This example, borrowed from Husserl, better enables us to understand concretely how these conferrals of new meaning can be realized in antiquity as well. Indeed, the expression in interiore homine habitat veritas, as my friend and colleague Goulven Madec has pointed out to me, is an allusion to a group of words borrowed from chapter 3, verses 1 6

and 1 7, o f Paul's letter to the Ephesians, from a n ancient Latin version, to be exact, in which the text appears as in interiore homi11e Christum habitare. But these words are merely a purely material conjunction that exists only in this Latin version and do not correspond to the contents of Paul's thought, for they belong to two different clauses of the sentence. On the one hand, Paul wishes for Christ to dn1el/ in the heart of his disciples through faith, and, on the other hand, in the preceding clause, he wishes for God to allow his disciples to be strengthened by the divine Spirit in the inner man, in interiorem hominem, as the Vulgate has it. So the earlier Latin version, by combining in interiure homine and Christum habitare, was either a mistranslation or was miscopied. The Augustinian formula, in interiore homine habitat veritas, is thus created from a group of words that do not represent a unified meaning in St Paul's text; but taken in itself, this group of words has a meaning for Augustine, and he explains it in the context of De vera religione where he uses it: the inner man, that is, the human spirit, discovers that what permits him to think and reason is the truth, that is, divine reason - that is, for Augustine, Christ, who dwells in, who is present within, the human spirit. In this way the formula takes on a Platonic meaning. We see how, from St Paul to Husserl, by way of Augustine, a group of words whose unity was originally only purely material, or which was a misunderstanding of the Latin translator, was given a new meaning by Augustine, and then by Husserl, thus taking its place in the vast tradition of the deepening of the idea of self-consciousness.

This example borrowed from Husserl allows us to touch on the importance of what in Western thought is called the topos. Literary theories use the term to refer to the formulae, images, and metaphors that forcibly impose themselves on the writer and the thinker in such a w11y 1 h11t t he LINC of these prefabricated models seems indispensable tu them in 1mlc�1· tn he 11hlc to express their own thoughts.

Fonns of Life and Fonns of Discourse

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