Marcus Aurelius (0121–0180)

Overview:
Conflict and disagreement do occur, but people need to readily seek reconciliation. To reaccept those who had previously offended. Hostilities endure when people resist regaining friendly relations. Reason facilitates cooperation between people. Society depends on the cooperation of people. Therefore, other people either need to be taught how to improve their behavior, or be tolerated. Behavior and thinking skills are not innate, and need to be taught. To utilize reason and judgment to make the most appropriate decisions as possible. Discovering the most appropriate decisions, would require questioning superficial knowledge. To not easily assent to popular claims.

People need to find contentment in their lives. Which comes from proper work and appropriate behavior. People will only do that which is possible. Individuals are more interested in activities which they have taken internal responsibility for, rather than pressured externally to do. Individuals need to live in the present. The future is uncertain, while the past has already happened. No matter what people strive for and have achieved in their life, death takes them all the same. Praise for contemporary achievements occurs because of political considerations.

Caveats?
This is a very difficult book to read. Difficult formatting with antediluvian references. Many similar topics and ideas are sporadically placed. The claims themselves are rarely given an explanation. They appear to portray common observations that do not need an explanation.… (mehr)

Marcus Aurelius had me on his team from the outset until he wrote in Book 2, “But cast away the thirst after books, that thou mayest not die murmuring.” My first reaction: the nerve of creating a book, then. Then I recalled that this book is a collection of notes to himself. Rather than asserting that any well-read person dies murmuring, he’s steeling himself against regret that he could not lead the retired life of a philosopher but that it was his lot to be emperor. That being so, he resolved to carry it out for the general good and in line with the Stoic principles he imbibed from his youth.

Moreover, even an emperor can philosophize: “Where a man can live, there he can also live well. But he must live in a palace; — well then, he can also live well in a palace.”

And what a time to be emperor. These notes were written in stolen moments while campaigning on the fringes of the Roman Empire as the Pax Romana began to crumble. The circumstances of their composition help explain the loose organization and repetition; he did not prepare these for publication. We are listening over his shoulder as he admonishes and exhorts himself. His words attest to his moral seriousness and awareness of falling short of his rigorous standards.

In Book 8, Marcus draws an analogy between an arrow and the mind, asserting that both move straight, although in a different manner. These jottings are evidence that this is not really so with the mind.

Despite the seemingly random nature of the collection, it does have overwhelming recurrent themes. Paramount: the need to cultivate equanimity in the face of mortality. Marcus believes in God/the gods (he seems to use the terms interchangeably), yet not in any afterlife. Other emphases are the need to follow the “ruling part,” as Long translates the Greek term used by Stoics to denote reason, and to remember that the opinion of others is only that, opinion.

When Marcus returns to the consideration that even an emperor can be a philosopher, he writes, “How plain does it appear that there is not another condition of life so well suited for philosophizing as this in which thou now happenest to be.” If it’s true of him, it can also be true for us since, as he writes, “How close is the kinship between a man and the whole human race, for it is a community, not of a little blood or seed, but of intelligence.”

This universal applicability helps explain why these deeply personal musings have been widely read through the centuries.… (mehr)