Meditations

"There are plenty of translations, many of which are good, but I think the Waterfield translation is by far the best. Not only is the translation itself is very good—the language is accessible, it really makes Marcus come alive in English—but the notes are priceless. The full title is Meditations: The Annotated Edition and you could spend more time looking through the notes than in the actual text. They’re very helpful, especially if one doesn’t have too much of a background either in the history of the Roman world or in Stoic philosophy. There are lots of things in the Meditations that make a lot more sense once you read the notes. Otherwise, there are some passages, some references Marcus makes to pre-Socratic philosophers , or he’ll throw in a quote by Plato without telling you that it was by Plato, where you don’t know where it comes from but once you read the note by Robin, it enlightens the whole thing. So it’s a really good translation. Yes, there’s been a discussion about that by scholars since forever. I tend to lean more toward the notion that this was in fact his personal diary. It surely would have been edited, especially later on, because of course we don’t have the original of the text. The first title, by which it was known in the early Middle Ages, was To Himself which goes with the idea that yes, this was a personal philosophical diary. The Romans did have this tradition of writing to themselves, these notes about things that were interesting, or things that could help them in terms of their path to self-improvement. It wasn’t that unusual at the time. The reason I picked this book is because, as you say, it is an explicit effort to improve yourself, to become a better person. Marcus does it from the Stoic perspective, although not exclusively, he does bring in material from Plato, the pre-Socratics and some of the Greek tragedians. So he expands all over the place, although the core of it is certainly Stoic in nature. You’re right that the book has no structure, except for the first chapter. The first chapter is essentially a long exercise in gratitude. It’s a list of people that Marcus is grateful to, and why. ‘I’m grateful to my father, because… I’m grateful to my teacher, because… etc. etc.’ So exercises in being grateful, in gratitude, are part and parcel of the kind of exercises that you do if you want to engage in self-improvement. You want to recognize what is good in your life, you want to recognize the people that have been influential. It’s an example of a good exercise. But from this we also get an idea of what Marcus’s criteria for ‘good’ were. What is he thanking these people for? And, it turns out, he’s thanking them for being just and honest and straightforward and not deceitful to other people. So you get a long list of points of reference in a moral compass that Marcus builds for himself. “Moral philosophy made a couple of wrong turns with Kant and Mill” The rest of the book, the other 11 chapters, are without any structure. People have tried to find a hidden structure, but there isn’t one. It is what it is. It’s a diary. If you were writing your diary, even a philosophical diary, there wouldn’t be any structure. In fact, the book is redundant, repetitive and a bit preachy, but that is to be expected for a personal diary. Why is it redundant and repetitive? Because Marcus runs into the same problems over and over. For instance, he was known to be prone to anger. Therefore, sure enough, you see that he chides himself, ‘You got angry again. You shouldn’t do this because…’ He’s preachy because he’s talking to himself. Interestingly, he’s talking in the second person, not in the first person. He says, ‘You should be doing this or that.’ In that he actually anticipates a standard technique in modern cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapists will tell you that keeping a personal journal of self-improvement is a good idea, but that you should try to do it in the second or even the third person. The reason for that is because it helps you distance yourself emotionally from what’s going on. You should try to use analytical language, which Marcus very much does, not emotional language. And you should try to write as if you were writing to a friend. Both of those things—the language and the writing in the second person—put a bit of distance between the otherwise emotional issues and your analysis and therefore you can be a bit more objective and learn more from your own experiences. It is, you’re right. Marcus goes into these day-to-day situations that presumably recurred in his life and tries to address them. At one point he says something along the lines of ‘Don’t wait for Plato’s Republic . Do whatever little you can do because it makes a difference, because it’s important.’ Of course, waiting for Plato’s Republic is his way of saying ‘don’t wait for utopia,’ for a perfect situation. He has all these little ways of reframing a particular problem. One of my favorites is when he says, ‘You don’t like bitter cucumbers? Fine. Don’t eat them. But why do you have to go on and complain about the fact that there are bitter cucumbers in the world?’ Since I have my own number of bitter cucumbers in my life, I find that particularly useful. Every time that I find myself going cosmic and saying, ‘Why are these people in the world?’ I say to myself, ‘They’re bitter cucumbers, just avoid them.’"

"This is probably the most famous book written by a Stoic. It has been in print ever since there have been printing presses. The same can be said about Epictetus’ Enchiridion incidentally, though Epictetus is far less well known than Marcus. This is a recent thing, a 20th-century phenomenon. Up until the 19th century, Epictetus was one of the most prominent philosophers studied. You’d find references to him everywhere: Descartes, Spinoza, many of the major philosophers you can think of were influenced by the Stoics and particularly by Epictetus and by Seneca, and the Enchiridion was used as a training manual in Christian monasteries throughout the Middle Ages. Going back to Marcus’ Meditations , that book was never meant for publication. The Meditations initially did not have a title at all and it was known during the Middle Ages by the title To Myself because this was the Roman emperor’s personal diary. Yes, it is a better title, I agree. It later became known as the Meditations , but it really was his personal philosophical diary. Marcus Aurelius had studied philosophy when he was young and in particular Stoicism. He had a major Stoic for a teacher who gave him a copy of Epictetus’ Discourses . You can see Epictetus’s influence in the Meditations . The Meditations consists of twelve short books. If you read them through you will see that there’s a lot of redundancy there. He comes back over and over to the same themes, and he repeats the same sorts of concept again and again. It is not so great to read through from beginning to end for this reason. Marcus wrote this over the course of a few years when he was on the German frontier fighting the Marcomanni revolt against Rome. “Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world at the time, yet his wife was cheating on him, and his advisers were treacherous” The reason the Meditations have endured is because you really get a very clear sense of an interesting man who is struggling with his own limitations, as well as with the environment that surrounds him. Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world at the time, and yet he was dealing not only with major events like revolts throughout the Roman Empire, but also with his wife who was cheating on him, and with some of his advisers who were treacherous. Yet the first book of the Meditations opens with a long list of people whom he thanks. It’s an exercise in gratitude, which is a basic Stoic practice: you have to remind yourself of the people you are grateful to because they are important in your life. The very first person he thanks is his grandfather: “From my grandfather Verus I learnt good morals and the government of my emperor,” and then he goes on to thank his mother, his teachers, his brother, and so on. If you read this for the first time, you don’t really expect it. If you bear in mind that it is the most powerful person in the world writing this, and in his own personal diary—not done for show to other people—he starts out by thanking people who had made a good impact on his own life: it’s a very humbling exercise. Often people say that the Meditations come across as preachy, and that’s true to some extent. But they forget that he is preaching to himself. He is not telling other people here’s what you should do and should not do; he’s telling himself, he’s reproaching himself. For instance, he says—this is one of my favourite quotations from the Meditations , from book two, chapter one: Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil… I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him This struck me as really profound. A lot of people who surrounded the emperor would have wanted favours, and many were treacherous; but he says: ‘Remember, they do this because they don’t know better. They don’t have the advantage of your education, they don’t have the advantage of your self-reflection so they’re just doing this out of ignorance, ignorance of what is good for them or what is good to do: ignorance of virtue.’ And then he goes on, ‘but I cannot be injured by them, and nor can I actually hate them because they’re my fellow human beings, I am just as imperfect as they are: I also lose my temper, I also do things that I may regret or I’m not proud of, and we are all in the same boat together.’ I find these very down to earth observations of human nature and Marcus’ way of dealing with it both very refreshing, and at the same time actually very insightful. That’s an interesting point about Stoicism: is it an impossible ideal? There, I think, a good comparison can be made between Stoicism and Christianity. Despite the fact that Christianity, early Christianity, adopted quite a bit of Stoicism, the early Christians rejected Epicurus because of his emphasis on pleasure—that’s why still today the word ‘epicurean’ is almost an insult: simply because the Christians completely rejected this worldview, and we have inherited the Christian disdain for Epicurus. But Christians did learn from Stoicism—not only from Epictetus’ Enchiridion but also Saint Paul knew Seneca’s brother, Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus, and so was aware of Stoic writing. There was even a medieval forgery of an alleged correspondence between Seneca and Paul. You can find reactions to Stoicism in all the major Christian Church fathers beginning with Augustine, too, and then all the way to Thomas Aquinas. Now, the reason I’m bringing this up, in answer to your question, is because there is a good, interesting distinction between Christianity and the Stoic approach. For Christians, if you think about it, they have their role model—Jesus—who is, by definition, an impossible role model to emulate: he’s a god. I can aspire to behave as much as possible like him, but I’m never going to achieve that fully because he’s an immortal and I am not the son of God. I simply cannot be perfect, and that of course is part of the Christian doctrine of repentance for your sins. For the Stoics, in contrast, they have a similar figure, a role model to whom they aspire and they call him the ‘sage’. The sage represents an ideal to aspire to, but is an achievable role model. The sage is a human being. It’s difficult, but not impossible to emulate the sage. Stoics are clear that there haven’t been many sages throughout history, but there have been some, and they point to some examples, the obvious one being Socrates, who was not a Stoic because he pre-dated the school. Many of the Stoics referred to Socrates as a sage. There were other examples too: Cato the Younger, for example, who was a famous political opponent of Julius Caesar during the Roman Republic; Seneca refers to him as a sage and as a role model. The Stoics also had fictional role models, ancient heroes and demigods like Hercules. That’s debatable, though a good point. It’s hard to imagine that Seneca actually took stories about the Olympian gods seriously. True, but the basic point is that even when the Stoics refer to demigods, if you look at the story of Hercules, for instance, the actual ancient myth, it doesn’t end well: for one thing, Hercules ends up dying of a horrible death. He makes mistakes, he’s a human figure, he’s somebody you can relate to but who constantly strives to do better: he constantly strives to do the right thing. This is the Stoic idea of a sage, which has some affinities with Buddhism. Buddha allegedly achieved enlightenment in his lifetime. In the Buddhist tradition that’s not easy. It’s not something that everybody can do—the fact that he as a man achieved enlightenment, however, shows that it is achievable. In Stoicism you have an ideal model, and, yes, most of us will fall short of that, but it is an achievable model. Seneca explicitly addresses this in his letter to a friend ‘On the Firmness of the Sage’ where he writes: ‘Don’t think that we mean by this just an unachievable ideal, just a theoretical thing. We think there are people who actually are sages, and those are our role models, and we try to do as they did’."