Meditations

Highlights

Of the doctrines central to the Stoic worldview, perhaps the most important is the unwavering conviction that the world is organized in a rational and coherent way.

All events are determined by the logos, and follow in an unbreakable chain of cause and effect.

Logos operates both in individuals and in the universe as a whole. In individuals it is the faculty of reason. On a cosmic level it is the rational principle that governs the organization of the universe.1 In

Stoicism is thus from the outset a deterministic system that appears to leave no room for human free will or moral responsibility.

According to this theory, man is like a dog tied to a moving wagon. If the dog refuses to run along with the wagon he will be dragged by it, yet the choice remains his: to run or be dragged.

In the same way, humans are responsible for their choices and actions, even though these have been anticipated by the logos and form part of its plan. Even actions which appear to be—and indeed are—immoral or unjust advance the overall design, which taken as a whole is harmonious and good. They, too, are governed by the logos.

the logos exists as pneuma, a substance imagined by the earliest Stoics as pure fire, and by Chrysippus as a mixture of fire and air.

and is present even in lifeless materials like stone or metal as the energy that holds the object together—the internal tension that makes a stone a stone.

Today philosophy is an academic discipline, one that few people other than professional philosophers would consider central to their everyday existence. While we may think of ourselves as having a “

“mortal questions”: the problems involved in making ethical choices, constructing a just society, responding to suffering and loss, and coming to terms with the prospect of death.

For Marcus and his contemporaries, the situation was very different. Ancient philosophy certainly had its academic side. Athens and other large cities had publicly financed chairs of philosophy, and professional philosophers taught, argued and wrote, as they do today. But philosophy also had a more practical dimension. It was not merely a subject to write or argue about, but one that was expected to provide a “design for living”—a set of rules to live one’s life by.

Philosophy As a design for living

The expansion of Stoic thought was not only intellectual but also geographical. The movement had been born in Athens.

Early and middle Stoicism was a holistic system. It aimed to embrace all knowledge, and its focus was speculative and theoretical. Roman Stoicism, by contrast, was a practical discipline—not an abstract system of thought, but an attitude to life.

Stoicism has even been described, not altogether unfairly, as the real religion of upper-class Romans.

Indeed, the application of the adjective “stoic” to a person who shows strength and courage in misfortune probably owes more to the aristocratic Roman value system than it does to Greek philosophers.

One of its most distinguished adherents was Marcus Cato (known as Cato the Younger to distinguish him from his great-grandfather, prominent a century earlier).

A more complex and much more interesting figure was the poet Lucan’s uncle, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 B.C.–A.D. 65), commonly known as Seneca the Younger to distinguish him from his equally distinguished father. Originally councillor to the young Nero, he was eventually forced to commit suicide after being implicated in an attempted coup against his erstwhile pupil.

But not all Stoics were wealthy senators.

He later produced an abridged version, the Encheiridion (“Manual” or “Handbook”).

Adventure Time

A still more dramatic example was Musonius’s student Epictetus (c. 55–c. 135), who had taken up the practice of philosophy as a slave and devoted the remainder of his life to it after being freed.

And Arrian’s abridged Encheiridion provides the closest literary parallel to the Meditations itself, not only in its content, but also in its form: a series of relatively short and unrelated entries.

The late Stoicism of Epictetus is a radically stripped-down version of its Hellenistic predecessor,

The late Stoicism of Epictetus is a radically stripped-down version of its Hellenistic predecessor, a philosophy which “had learnt much from its competitors and had almost forgotten parts of itself.”

Chrysippus and his followers had divided knowledge into three areas: logic, physics and ethics, concerned, respectively, with the nature of knowledge, the structure of the physical world and the proper role of

Marcus’s logic is weak—the logic of the rhetorician, not of the philosopher; it is rare to find a developed chain of reasoning like that in Meditations 4.4. His interest in the nature of the physical world is limited to its relevance to human problems.

The questions that the Meditations tries to answer are primarily metaphysical and ethical ones: Why are we here? How should we live our lives? How can we ensure that we do what is right? How can we protect ourselves against the stresses and pressures of daily life? How should we deal with pain and misfortune? How can we live with the knowledge that someday we will no longer exist?

Key questions

This is the doctrine of the three “disciplines”: the disciplines of perception, of action and of the will.

Chief among these are inappropriate value judgments: the designation as “good” or “evil” of things that in fact are neither good nor evil. For example, my impression that my house has just burned down is simply that—an impression or report conveyed to me by my senses about an event in the outside world. By contrast, my perception that my house has burned down and I have thereby suffered a terrible tragedy includes not only an impression, but also an interpretation imposed upon that initial impression by my powers of hypolepsis.

The discipline of perception requires that we maintain absolute objectivity of thought: that we see things dispassionately for what they are.

Human beings, for Marcus as for the Stoics generally, are social animals, a point he makes often (e.g., 5.16, 8.59, 9.1

As human beings we are part of nature, and our duty is to accommodate ourselves to its demands and requirements—“to live as nature requires,” as Marcus often puts it.

This requires not merely passive acquiescence in what happens, but active cooperation with the world, with fate and, above all, with other human beings.

We were made, Marcus tells us over and over, not for ourselves but for others, and our nature is fundamentally unselfish. In our relationships with others we must work for their collective good, while treating them justly and fairly as individuals.

Marcus, like most of his contemporaries, took it for granted that human society was hierarchical, and this is borne out by the images he uses to describe it. Human society is a single organism, like an individual human body or a tree. But the trunk of the tree is not to be confused with the leaves, or the hands and feet with the head. Our duty to act justly does not mean that we must treat others as our equals; it means that we must treat them as they deserve. And their deserts are determined in part by their position in the hierarchy. Stoicism’s emphasis on the orderliness of the universe implies a similar orderliness and harmony in its parts, and part of its appeal to upper-class Romans may have been that it did not force its adherents to ask difficult questions about the organization of the society they lived in.5 The third discipline, the discipline of

The latter governs our approach to the things in our control, those that we do; the discipline of will governs our attitude to things that are not within our control, those that we have done to us (by others or by nature).

If we act wrongly, then we have done serious harm to ourselves (though not, it should be emphasized, to others, or to the logos). By contrast, things outside our control have no ability to harm us. Acts of wrongdoing by a human agent (torture, theft, or other crimes) harm the agent, not the victim.

Acts of nature such as fire, illness, or death can harm us only if we choose to see them as harmful.

Interesting

For if we recognize that all events have been foreseen by the logos and form part of its plan, and that the plan in question is unfailingly good (as it must be), then it follows that we must accept whatever fate has in store for us, however unpleasant it may appear, trusting that, in Alexander Pope’s phrase, “whatever is, is right.” This

Socrates, the great Athenian thinker who had helped redirect philosophy from a preoccupation with the physical world to a focus on the role of man in society and the nature of human morality. Socrates himself wrote nothing. His teachings were transmitted (and greatly elaborated) in the philosophical dialogues of his student Plato.

Socratic paradox, the claim that no one does wrong willingly, and that if men were able to recognize what is right, they would inevitably do it.

“We cannot step twice into the same river,” Heraclitus had said,

Several entries explore the implications of phrases attributed to Democritus, one of the inventors of the theory of atoms, which would later inspire the Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus.

Wow, theory of atoms

Neither Heraclitus nor Socrates had founded a school. That was an achievement reserved for Plato, and then for Plato’s student Aristotle, who broke from his master to found the Peripatetic movement.

The Cynics, of whom the first and most notorious was the irascible Diogenes of Sinope, were united less by doctrine than by a common attitude, namely their contempt for societal institutions and a desire for a life more in accord with nature.

The Stoic world is ordered to the nth degree; the Epicurean universe is random, the product of the haphazard conjunctions of billions of atoms. To speak of Providence in such a world is transparently absurd, and while Epicurus acknowledged the existence of gods, he denied that they took any interest in human life. As for humans, our role is simply to live as best we can, making the most of what pleasures are available to us and insulating ourselves as far as possible from pain and anxiety.

Ha! Fuck stoicism

In particular, we are to feel no anxiety about death, which consists simply in the dissolution of our component atoms. This process is not only inevitable, but harmless, for the simple reason that after death there is no “us” to suffer harm.

“Eat, drink and be merry” was popularly supposed to be the Epicureans’ motto, though Epicurus himself had been quite explicit in identifying pleasure with intellectual contemplation rather than the vulgar enjoyment of food and sex.

In Meditations 6.10 he contrasts the Epicurean universe, founded on “mixture, interaction, dispersal” with the components of the Stoic system: “unity, order, design”—clearly to the advantage of the latter.

Some scholars have seen it as the basis for an unwritten larger treatise, like Pascal’s Pensées or the notebooks of Joseph Joubert. Yet the notes are too repetitive and, in a philosophical sense, too elementary for that. The entries perhaps bear a somewhat closer resemblance to the working notes of a practicing philosopher: Wittgenstein’s Zettel, say, or the Cahiers of Simone Weil.

Would be interesting to read some of those manuscripts

Perhaps the best description of the entries is that suggested by the French scholar Pierre Hadot. They are “spiritual exercises” composed to provide a momentary stay against the stress and confusion of everyday life: a self-help book in the most literal sense.

And it explains also the repetitiveness that strikes any reader of the work almost immediately—the continual circling back to the same few problems.

So, it’s not just me

“Phone Dr. re appt. Tues.?”

The shorter entries often display an interest in wordplay and a striving for epigrammatic brevity that recalls both the ingenuity of the rhetorical schools and the paradoxical compression of Heraclitus: Does the sun try to do the rain’s work?

One example that will strike almost any reader is the sense of mortality that pervades the work. Death is not to be feared, Marcus continually reminds himself. It is a natural process, part of the continual change that forms the world.

is the points to which Marcus returns most often that offer the best insight into his character and concerns. One example that will strike almost any reader is the sense of mortality that pervades the work. Death is not to be feared, Marcus continually reminds himself. It is a natural process, part of the continual change that forms the world.

It is the points to which Marcus returns most often that offer the best insight into his character and concerns. One example that will strike almost any reader is the sense of mortality that pervades the work. Death is not to be feared, Marcus continually reminds himself. It is a natural process, part of the continual change that forms the world.

persistent motif is the need to restrain anger and irritation with other people, to put up with their incompetence or malice, to show them the errors of their ways.

A persistent motif is the need to restrain anger and irritation with other people, to put up with their incompetence or malice, to show them the errors of their ways.

Affection for the natural world contrasts with a persistent sense of disgust and contempt for human life and other human beings—a sense that it is difficult to derive from (or even reconcile with) Stoicism.

One of the most frequently recurring points in the Meditations is the reminder that human beings are social animals, as if this was a point Marcus had a particularly hard time accepting. The gods care for mortals, he reminds himself, “and you—on the verge of death—you still refuse to care for them.”

And even those who love the book cannot deny that there is something impoverishing about the view of human life it presents. Matthew Arnold, whose essay on the work reveals a deep respect and affection for Marcus, identified the central shortcoming of his philosophy as its failure to make any allowance for joy, and I think this is a fair criticism. Marcus does not offer us a means of achieving happiness, but only a means of resisting pain.

For Marcus, life was a battle, and often it must have seemed—what in some sense it must always be—a losing battle.

Byzantine poet composed a brief appreciation that came to be copied along with the text: ON THE BOOK OF MARCUS If you desire to master pain Unroll this book and read with care, And in it find abundantly A knowledge of the things that are, Those that have been, and those to come. And know as well that joy and grief Are nothing more than empty smoke.

The only complete manuscript to survive is a fourteenth-century codex (now in the Vatican), which is riddled with errors. The first printed edition did not appear until 1559, when Wilhelm Holzmann (known as Xylander) produced a text from what seems to have been a more reliable manuscript.

The Meditations has never attracted great interest from professional students of the classics, and the reasons are perhaps understandable. It contains few direct references to historical events and provides relatively little material for social historians. As evidence for later Stoicism it pales beside the greater bulk of Epictetus’s Discourses.

Recent work on Hellenistic philosophy has done much to illuminate the philosophical background of the Meditations. A clear and helpful introduction to both Stoicism and Epicureanism can be found in A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1974);

For Stoicism under the empire, the most important sources are the works of Seneca the Younger and Epictetus. The best introduction to Seneca is probably the Letters to Lucilius, of which a selection is available in Letters from a Stoic, trans. R. Campbell (New York: Penguin, 1969). Epictetus’s Discourses and the Encheiridion are available in the Loeb series in a translation by W. A. Oldfather (2 volumes, 1925). The

And to behave in a conciliatory way when people who have angered or annoyed us want to make up.

And to have learned how to accept favors from friends without losing your self-respect or appearing ungrateful.

Not to be constantly telling people (or writing them) that I’m too busy, unless I really am.

That I didn’t lose my virginity too early, and didn’t enter adulthood until it was time—put it off, even.

That my children weren’t born stupid or physically deformed.

That when I became interested in philosophy I didn’t fall into the hands of charlatans, and didn’t get bogged down in writing treatises, or become absorbed by logic-chopping, or preoccupied with physics.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

Yes, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?

1. Even if you’re going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you’re living now, or live another one than the one you’re losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can’t lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don’t have? Remember two things: i. that everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period; ii. that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.

doing nothing randomly or dishonestly and with imposture, not dependent on anyone else’s doing something or not doing it.

Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.

1. If you do the job in a principled way, with diligence, energy and patience, if you keep yourself free of distractions, and keep the spirit inside you undamaged, as if you might have to give it back at any moment— If you can embrace this without fear or expectation—can find fulfillment in what you’re doing now, as Nature intended, and in superhuman truthfulness (every word, every utterance)—then your life will be happy. No one can prevent that.

1. Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.

1. Not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you. Death overshadows you. While you’re alive and able—be good.

1. The tranquillity that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do. (Is this fair? Is this the right thing to do?)

1. “If you seek tranquillity, do less.” Or (more accurately) do what’s essential—what the logos of a social being requires, and in the requisite way. Which brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better. Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?” But we need to eliminate unnecessary assumptions as well. To eliminate the unnecessary actions that follow.

1. And then you might see what the life of the good man is like—someone content with what nature assigns him, and satisfied with being just and kind himself.

1. The age of Vespasian, for example. People doing the exact same things: marrying, raising children, getting sick, dying, waging war, throwing parties, doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their own lives, falling in love, putting away money, seeking high office and power. And that life they led is nowhere to be found. Or the age of Trajan. The exact same things. And that life too—gone. Survey the records

But most of all, run through the list of those you knew yourself. Those who worked in vain, who failed to do what they should have—what they should have remained fixed on and found satisfaction in.

1. Words once in common use now sound archaic. And the names of the famous dead as well: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus … Scipio and Cato … Augustus … Hadrian and Antoninus, and … Everything fades so quickly, turns into legend, and soon oblivion covers it. And those are the ones who shone. The rest—“unknown, unasked-for” a minute after death. What is “eternal” fame? Emptiness. Then what should we work for? Only this: proper understanding; unselfish action; truthful speech. A resolve to accept whatever happens as necessary and familiar, flowing like water from that same source and spring.

1. Nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can harm you. Nor can the shifts and changes in the world around you. —Then where is harm to be found? In your capacity to see it.

1. There is nothing bad in undergoing change—or good in emerging from it.

1. Suppose that a god announced that you were going to die tomorrow “or the day after.” Unless you were a complete coward you wouldn’t kick up a fuss about which day it was—what difference could it make? Now recognize that the difference between years from now and tomorrow is just as small.

In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls.

49a. —It’s unfortunate that this has happened. No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it—not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it. Why treat the one as a misfortune rather than the other as fortunate? Can you really call something a misfortune that doesn’t violate human nature? Or do you think something that’s not against nature’s will can violate it? But you know what its will is. Does what’s happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness, and all the other qualities that allow a person’s nature to fulfill itself? So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.

1. Not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren’t packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully embrace the pursuit that you’ve embarked on.

Then look at the way the people around you behave. Even the best of them are hard to put up with—not to mention putting up with yourself. In such deep darkness, such a sewer—in the flux of material, of time, of motion and things moved—I don’t know what there is to value or to work for.

1. What am I doing with my soul? Interrogate yourself, to find out what inhabits your so-called mind and what kind of soul you have now. A child’s soul, an adolescent’s, a woman’s? A tyrant’s soul? The soul of a predator—