Duties, Friendship and Philosophy as a Way of Life

Practical judgment as something practised: Cicero's On Duties on weighing the right against the useful, his On Friendship on frank counsel, and Pierre Hadot's account of ancient philosophy as daily exercise.

Knowing what is right in general and doing right in a particular case are different skills. Cicero's On Duties (De officiis) and On Friendship (Laelius de amicitia) treat the second as something trained, case by case, among people who tell each other the truth. Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995) argues that ancient philosophy was itself such a training. This page reads them together. Cicero is quoted in the Loeb translations on LacusCurtius.

A handbook for action

On Duties is written to Cicero's son Marcus, who had been "studying a full year under Cratippus, and that too in Athens" (I.1). Cicero says he will "follow chiefly the Stoics, not as a translator", but choosing for himself what to take (I.6). Its method is a set of questions to put to any act.

On Duties asks five questions before an act:

Is it morally right or morally wrong?
Is it expedient, "conducive to comfort and happiness in life"?
What should be done "when expediency seems to be pulling one way" and right the other?
Of two morally right courses, which is morally better?
Of two expedient courses, which is more expedient?

The first three come from the Stoic Panaetius; Cicero added the last two (I.9-10). Rightness itself, he holds, springs from four sources: "the full perception and intelligent development of the true", the conservation of society and "rendering to every man his due", "the greatness and strength of a noble and invincible spirit", and "the orderliness and moderation of everything that is said and done" (I.15).

Four roles

A right act must also fit the person doing it. Nature, Cicero says, invests us with "two characters, as it were": one universal, shared by all, and one "assigned to individuals in particular" (I.107). To these he adds "a third, which some chance or some circumstance imposes, and a fourth also, which we assume by our own deliberate choice" (I.115). Each person "must resolutely hold fast to his own peculiar gifts, in so far as they are peculiar only and not vicious" (I.110).

The roles move judgment from the rule to the case. Two people can face the same choice and owe different acts, because their gifts, circumstances and commitments differ. The rule still binds both. The role decides how it applies.

The grain merchant

Book III works through hard cases. In a famine at Rhodes a merchant arrives with grain and knows that other ships are coming. Cicero frames the question this way: "is he to report the fact to the Rhodians or is he to keep his own counsel" (III.50).

Diogenes of Babylon says the seller must declare defects "in so far as such a course is prescribed by the common law of the land" (III.51). Antipater says "all the facts should be disclosed, that the buyer may not be uninformed of any detail that the seller knows" (III.51). Diogenes answers with a distinction: "It is one thing to conceal", and "not to reveal is quite a different thing" (III.52). Cicero sides with Antipater: "it was the duty of that grain-dealer not to keep back the facts from the Rhodians" (III.57). He runs the same test on a house sold as healthy when the seller knows it is not (III.54-55).

What the case trains is the act of judgment itself. State each side at full strength, separate what seems useful from what is right, and give a verdict with a reason. Judgment Under Uncertainty: Probability, Causation and Forecasting covers decisions where the facts are uncertain. Here the facts are known and the duties clash.

Friendship as a school of judgment

On Friendship defines friendship as "nothing else than an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection" (20). It holds that "friendship cannot exist except among good men" (18). Its first law: "Ask of friends only what is honourable; do for friends only what is honourable" (44).

Friends also correct each other. "Let the influence of friends who are wise counsellors be paramount" (44), and "it is characteristic of true friendship both to give and to receive advice" (91). The enemy is flattery: nothing is "a greater bane of friendship than fawning, cajolery, or flattery" (91). For judgment the point is practical. A friend who will tell you that you are wrong is a check you cannot run on yourself. The Defend step of The Weekly Loop builds the same check into study.

Philosophy as a way of life

Hadot's book, subtitled Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, argues that ancient philosophy was a way of living, not only a body of doctrine. The summary used here is Matthew Sharpe's article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; this page has not opened Hadot's book itself. On that account, in What is Ancient Philosophy? (English translation 2002), Hadot places philosophical discourse inside philosophy as "a kind of existential choice" (section 4a). Those who talked philosophy without living by it were traditionally called sophists (4a).

Hadot's name for the practices is "spiritual exercises", aimed "at generating and reactivating a constant way of living and perceiving" (5a). Sharpe lists "practices of attention (prosoche), meditations (meletai), memorizations of dogmata, self-mastery (enkrateia)", along with reading, listening, dialogue and the examination of conscience (5a). Renewed attention to the present moment is, Hadot says, "in a sense, the key to spiritual exercises" (5c).

Read in that light, On Duties is a manual of exercises: questions to ask before acting, roles to check, cases to argue. That reading is this page's, not a claim about what Hadot says of Cicero. Reasoning for What Ends? Wisdom, Character and the Examined Life sets out the Stoic discipline of attention; Deliberate Practice for Learning and Mastery shows why repetition needs feedback to count as practice.

Duties and the five acts

The Levels path asks for five acts, the site's own synthesis rather than Cicero's. The fifth, act and review, is what this page trains. Cicero's questions and roles prepare the decision; a frank friend and a daily review examine it afterwards. The Orator's Education: Cicero and Quintilian on Forming a Speaker shows the same Cicero training speech.

Where this could be wrong

The strongest objection. Case-by-case judgment can turn into clever excuse-making. Diogenes' line between concealing and not revealing shows how a fine distinction can serve the seller. Hadot's term has critics too: the encyclopedia article records a worry that "spiritual exercises" ties philosophy more closely to religious devotion than usual, citing Nussbaum (1996) and Cooper (2010) (5a).

The best reply. Cicero's checks sit outside the self: a verdict stated with reasons, a first law that forbids asking a friend for anything dishonourable, and friends expected to advise frankly. Excuse-making survives in private. It struggles in front of a frank friend.

What would settle it. Records. Write down a decision and its reasons before the outcome is known, as the decision records in Technical Writing as Reasoning do, then compare them with what happened and with what a frank adviser said. Without such records, the claim that practice improves judgment stays Provisional. Whether ancient philosophy was chiefly a way of life is disputed: Aporetic.

Try this

Write the Rhodes case as a short dialogue: Diogenes' best argument, Antipater's best argument, then your verdict and its principle in one sentence.
Take a decision you face this month. Put Cicero's five questions to it, then write one line for each of your four roles and note which role the decision touches most.
For one week, end each day with three lines: a decision you made, the duty it served, and what a frank friend would say about it. Then ask that friend.