A review by jackwwang
Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
3.0
The issue with reading philosophical musings from antiquity is that the ideas are from antiquity, and more than the usual works of philosophical musing, this book has ideas that are that much more culturally obscured by the mists of time to made passages hard to digest.
Fortunately Marcus Aurelius is a terse kind of guy, and in under 100 pages this Roman Emperor manages to distill what appears to be the key takeaways from the stoic school of thought. The book is a collection of his musings on how to live a virtuous life, and they read like they've been lifted out of a journal (which I think may have been the case), that is - not particularly linear, jumping here and there, and often repetitive.
In a nutshell the author argues that a virtuous life consists of doing one's duty, and maintaining serenity through anything life has to throw at you, good or bad. In it as well are strains of thoughts about a communitarian idea that virtue and good are inherently social, the irrelevance of the past and future and the sole relevance of the present, and the intrinsic separation between the bodily and earthly nature of man that coexists with his divine and rational "faculties" (an idea that I feel like dates the work, something that directly butts up against our understanding of how the physical and biological informs the mental capacities of human cognition).
Throughout it all, the author exhorts us to act with steely tranquility to anything that may happen, accept all, including death, with calm and dignity. I can't help but feel that stoicism, especially Marcus Aurelius' brand of it, is an inevitable product of privileged men. No surprise that literally the most powerful person in the world of his time sees the universe as inherently the way it should be, the best of all possible worlds, and does not find fault in the determinism of events. There are useful ideas here, and indubitably I will try to use them to inject a measure more of serenity in my life, but its hard to adopt a stoic's view of the universe if one does not blind himself to the stark injustices that have been, and continue to be in our world.
Fortunately Marcus Aurelius is a terse kind of guy, and in under 100 pages this Roman Emperor manages to distill what appears to be the key takeaways from the stoic school of thought. The book is a collection of his musings on how to live a virtuous life, and they read like they've been lifted out of a journal (which I think may have been the case), that is - not particularly linear, jumping here and there, and often repetitive.
In a nutshell the author argues that a virtuous life consists of doing one's duty, and maintaining serenity through anything life has to throw at you, good or bad. In it as well are strains of thoughts about a communitarian idea that virtue and good are inherently social, the irrelevance of the past and future and the sole relevance of the present, and the intrinsic separation between the bodily and earthly nature of man that coexists with his divine and rational "faculties" (an idea that I feel like dates the work, something that directly butts up against our understanding of how the physical and biological informs the mental capacities of human cognition).
Throughout it all, the author exhorts us to act with steely tranquility to anything that may happen, accept all, including death, with calm and dignity. I can't help but feel that stoicism, especially Marcus Aurelius' brand of it, is an inevitable product of privileged men. No surprise that literally the most powerful person in the world of his time sees the universe as inherently the way it should be, the best of all possible worlds, and does not find fault in the determinism of events. There are useful ideas here, and indubitably I will try to use them to inject a measure more of serenity in my life, but its hard to adopt a stoic's view of the universe if one does not blind himself to the stark injustices that have been, and continue to be in our world.