Meditations: Stoicism and a Roman Emperor's Defense against Human Shortcomings
Diary of a Roman Emperor
The Meditations is a diary written by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius to himself. Actually, the long-established title Meditations is kind of misleading and not original.
The book doesn’t have an emphasized and coherent argument but instead some recurring themes. A few topics are mentioned and discussed multiple times throughout the book. For example, the sense of mortality pervades the work. Marcus contemplates the topic of death and continually reminds himself that death is a natural process that is not to be feared, part of the continual change that forms the world. Not surprisingly, reading the Meditations for long periods can be conducive to melancholy.
Other recurring themes include how to get out of bed in the mornings, how to restrain anger, how to deal with pain, how to live a proper life, how to cope with evil people…etc,.
The Meditations, and the philosophy it represents, fundamentally is a philosophy of resisting pain, a remedy to human shortcomings and a defense against negative things such as pain, irritation, and suffering. Marcus does not offer us any means of achieving happiness in the book.
Stoicism
Marcus Aurelius is a stoic philosopher and a Roman Emperor. The Meditations, therefore, has its philosophical foundation in Stoicism.
The core doctrine of Stoicism is the conviction that the world is organized rationally and coherently, by an all-pervading force called logos. 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. In this sense, it is synonymous with nature, Providence, or God.
All events are determined by the Logos. Stoicism is thus a deterministic system that appears to leave no room for human free will or moral responsibility. According to the Stoicism definition, free will is a voluntary accommodation to what is in any case inevitable. Man is like a dog tied to a moving wagon. The dog appears capable of making choices, but ultimately it will move along with the wagon.
Three core disciplines are presented again and again in the book.
- The discipline of Perception: to perceive objectively without personal value judgment;
- The discipline of Act: to act justly to things in our control
- The discipline of Will: to accept indifferently to things outside our control
Marcus never defines what he means by justice, but it approximates to live as nature requires.