Rhetorical training that makes a comprehensive use of philosophical tools has a long and extremely rich tradition. Young Greek and Roman children learned the logic of effective argumentation incidentally by way of listening for and imitating useful strategies of persuasion in public performances which culminated in the rhetorical exercises of declamation. Prior to formal classroom declamation, children worked at the embellishment or abbreviation of simple narratives like fable and proverb which familiarized them with stock characters, historical and mythical situations, and the precepts of style, while also training memory and improvisational skills. Then they graduated to declamation and continued to develop their talents in both the suasoria—a deliberative speech offering advice to a historical or mythical figure, e.g. whether Agamemnon should sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia—and the controverisa—a speech in character on a side of a fictional law case which consisted simply of (1) a general law, (2) a specific violation, and (3) the speaker’s interpretation of the law for the defense or prosecution. Thus this highly performative learning environment produced articulate and persuasive students through an examination and appreciation of human history and psychology. With the tools acquired through exercises of analytical thinking and competitive learning, students were prepared for a life in a competitive world.

But such training was not limited to the classroom. The ancient art of living involved every aspect of daily life, every effort to translate ideas into action, beliefs into habits, philosophy into life. It is, in fact, a practice to be found anywhere and at anytime that people have taken the time to recognize, read, and rewrite the habits and commitments of their daily constitutions in deliberate and striking ways. Socrates practiced this art, notably in public with great earnestness and daring, finding dignity and freedom even as a condemned man. Both Stoics and Epicureans performed a daily search for freedom from everything external to the self. The disciplined performances of religious ascetics, from Saint Antony to Siddhartha, are so striking, they are legendary. Social crusaders also perform their beliefs in deliberate and striking, even legendary, ways. Martin Luther King, Jr. exclaimed at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, “We’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.” Hundreds of thousands of people organized themselves to propose and perform a dream, “a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’” The public performance of this dream was as dramatic as the revolutionary performance that penned this creed. These giants successfully transformed ideas and dreams into outward action with every word and gesture.

To be sure, there are also very private practices of the philosophical art of living even for these masters of public performance, but these private exercises are no less disciplined or theatrical. Whether in the solitude of a jail cell, under a bodhi tree, in a desert hut, or at home in bed just before sleep, philosophy is still a disciplined performance. This performance is for the attentive gaze of that audience from which one never escapes; it is for oneself. The ancients found that we are always watching and evaluating ourselves. The Roman philosopher and dramatist Seneca the Younger writes that even when you try to lose yourself in distraction, “your faults will follow you wherever you go… and all your bustle is useless” (epistle XXVIII). Instead of trying to forget ourselves, instead of trying to find some activity easier to bear, Seneca proposes that we withdraw our thoughts from our busy affairs, withdraw our gaze from our daily distractions, and focus our attention inward fully and constantly on the one thing over which we have control and about which we at any rate are naturally concerned: the state of our character. Seneca finds that daily and privately looking inside oneself, performing philosophy for oneself, yields therapeutic counsel for one’s own ills and the ills of generations to come. Since we are always on stage performing for ourselves and others, we had better learn and practice the best possible way to perform. Because we cannot help but ask those questions that haunt us, we ought to learn how to ask those questions, how to work at our craft of living.

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