Three questions and three tests. The passage consists entirely of questions and falls into two halves. First three questions about the state: what my TERMἡγεμονικόν is to me, DOGMAwhat sort of thing I am now DOGMAmakingDOGMA it, and what I am now DOGMAusingDOGMA it for. The key words are ποιῶ and χρῶμαι: the ruling part is not given ready-made, it is manufactured by the use one puts it to. Hence the insistent νῦν, twice over: the question is not about character in general but about the present minute.
Then three diagnoses. Three μήτι ("surely not…?") — a short checklist of corruption, each item striking at a different bond:
- κενὸν TERMνοῦ — "empty of intellect": the bond with one's own reason is broken.
- ἀπόλυτον καὶ ἀπεσπασμένον κοινωνίας — "unbound and torn away from fellowship": the bond with people is broken. The participle ἀπεσπασμένον is the one used of a severed limb.
- προστετηκὸς καὶ ἀνακεκραμένον τῷ TERMσαρκιδίῳ — "stuck fast and blended into the poor flesh": here the bond is not broken but on the contrary has fused where it should have stayed distinct.
The symmetry of corruption. The first two questions concern detachment, the third fusion; the ruin runs in both directions. And the closing verb is exact: συντρέπεσθαι, "to turn together with" — the ruling part does not merely suffer from the flesh, it swings in time with it, losing its own axis. Cf. 5.11 ("what am I now using my soul for? whose soul do I have?"), 8.48 (the ἡγεμονικόν withdrawn into itself as an unassailable ἀκρόπολις), 10.13 (the same "most honoured part"). The governing discipline is assent, the sustaining one action.
A note on the tagging. The passage is a model of EXERCISEself-monitoring, and so the exercise stands in the frontmatter; but it is not tagged in the text, since the word παρακολούθησις does not occur here. For the same reason κοινωνικόν is untagged — the text has κοινωνία, a word of the same root but a different one.