5 ideas
For the Greek and Roman schools, philosophy meant choosing a way of life and training oneself to live it. Theory existed to serve that transformation of the self. Treating ancient philosophy mainly as a set of propositions to evaluate misreads what the ancients took themselves to be doing.
Spiritual exercises are voluntary, repeated practices meant to change how a person perceives and lives, not just what they believe. They include attention to the present moment (prosoche), meditation on death, premeditation of misfortunes, examination of conscience, and memorizing and rehearsing core maxims. They are called 'spiritual' because they engage the whole psyche: thought, imagination, emotion and will.
Ancient texts often seem repetitive, inconsistent or badly organized, and this usually reflects their purpose rather than weak thinking. They were written to form a particular listener at a particular stage of progress. The same dogmas are restated so they can be absorbed and kept ready for use. Asking what effect a passage was meant to produce on its reader explains features that look like flaws to anyone searching for a systematic argument.
Hadot argues that the Meditations are neither a diary nor a treatise. They are Marcus writing Epictetus's three disciplines (desire, action and judgment) to himself, over and over, in shifting phrasings, so as to revive them in his own mind. The repetition, the harsh reframings (fine wine as 'grape juice', the body's pleasures described in stark physical terms) and the lack of any system are the exercise itself, not the notes of a melancholy emperor. On this reading, writing served as a tool for reshaping perception, not for communicating conclusions.
The view from above is an imaginative exercise in which one pictures human affairs from a cosmic height. From there, wars, property and reputation shrink to their true scale against the vastness of space and time. Its purpose is to loosen attachment to the passions and to one's narrow individual standpoint, so that one identifies with universal reason or nature. The exercise changes the scale at which one values things instead of offering a new argument.