Commonplaces from Meditations: with selected correspondence (Oxford World's Classics) by Robin Hard
Posted on March 10th, 2017
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Last annotated on March 9, 2017
In short, intense, and often powerful reflections, Marcus tries to articulate his core beliefs and values. Drawing mainly on Stoic philosophy, but formulated in his own way,Read more at location 73 • Delete this highlight
after an early introduction to Stoicism, Junius Rusticus guided him to Epictetus’ Discourses, which formed an important influence on the MeditationsRead more at location 82 • Delete this highlight
The title, Meditations, was given to the work in the seventeenth century; an alternative title ‘To Himself’, though it goes back to the ninth century, is not thought to be Marcus’ own.3 Probably the work had no title and was not intended for publication but served as a purely private notebookRead more at location 99 • Delete this highlight
He cites brief phrases or longer extracts, especially from the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus (late sixth and early fifth century BC) and Plato’s dialogues, as well as Epictetus’ Discourses.Read more at location 169 • Delete this highlight
Marcus never announces his allegiance to Stoicism, does not refer to Zeno (334–262 BC), the founder of Stoicism, and only twice mentions Chrysippus (c. 280–c. 206 BC), the most important Stoic theorist.Read more at location 180 • Delete this highlight
He also shows a rather surprising readiness to accept the ideas of Epicureanism (usually seen as the chief opponents of Stoicism in this period), particularly on the question of whether nature embodies an inbuilt purpose or not.Read more at location 186 • Delete this highlight
Galen (AD 129–c.216), a philosophically minded medical thinker and one of Marcus’ medical advisers,Read more at location 192 • Delete this highlight
Cynicism, which Marcus also evokes, had also been an influence on Stoicism and was viewed favourably by some Stoics under the Roman empire.Read more at location 196 • Delete this highlight
Seneca, who is more of a specialist Stoic philosopher than Marcus, is also ready to see common ground between Epicurean and Stoic ideas, though Marcus goes further in this direction than Seneca does.19Read more at location 198 • Delete this highlight
(1) One is the idea that the virtuous life is identical with the happy life (that virtue is all that is needed to ensure happiness).Read more at location 204 • Delete this highlight
(2) A second theme is that emotions and desires depend directly on beliefs about what is valuable or desirable; they do not form a separate (non-rational) dimension of psychological life.Read more at location 206 • Delete this highlight
(3) A third theme is that human beings have an inbuilt natural inclination to benefit others.Read more at location 209 • Delete this highlight
These three ideas add up to a highly idealized view of human ethics and psychology, one that ancient critics thought was over-idealistic and unrealistic.Read more at location 211 • Delete this highlight
The Stoic belief in inbuilt purpose was connected with their view that all events are determined, and that the whole sequence of events embodies divine purpose or providentiality.Read more at location 220 • Delete this highlight
(5) As this point indicates, the Stoics saw philosophy as forming a highly unified and systematic body of knowledge.Read more at location 224 • Delete this highlight
what the method brings out is what virtues we should aim to express in that contextRead more at location 247 • Delete this highlight
the ‘stripping’ method illuminates the underlying connection between the ethical order (how we should behave) and the natural or cosmic order.Read more at location 255 • Delete this highlight
the really important aspect of human nature is the capacity to use the mind, or ‘governing part’, to try to live virtuously, rather than attaching supreme value to ‘matters of indifference’ such as material goods or sensual pleasures.Read more at location 269 • Delete this highlight
Taken in isolation, such language seems to indicate Platonic-style rejection of the body or a Cynic desire to shock by rejecting conventional norms.27 But these features, taken in the larger context of his writing, serve to express the low value he places on the material goods that would be described in more technical Stoic writings as merely ‘preferable indifferents’.Read more at location 274 • Delete this highlight
for Stoicism, true ‘freedom’ was a matter of liberation from error and passion rather than gaining specific political or legal rights.Read more at location 305 • Delete this highlight
he often raises the question, ‘providence or atoms?’ In using this phrase, he means to ask which world-view is true: the Stoic one that assumes inbuilt natural purpose or the Epicurean view that the universe is the random outcome of atomic movements.Read more at location 317 • Delete this highlight
It is rather puzzling why he raises the question at all, and even more surprising that he leaves the question open, even though only in a few cases; and scholars have debated this point at length.Read more at location 323 • Delete this highlight
There is a strong contrast with the works of Epictetus, Marcus’ great exemplar, which were well known in later antiquity, closely studied by Neoplatonists, especially Simplicius, and influential on Christian scholars in antiquity and the Middle Ages.Read more at location 339 • Delete this highlight
An important modern edition is Farquharson’s two-volume text with English translation and notes (1944), which provided the previous Oxford World’s Classics translation (1989). The first English translation was by Casaubon (1634), with the title Meditations Concerning Himself, reprinted by the Everyman Library in 1906;Read more at location 347 • Delete this highlight
The modern revival of writing on practical ethics has given Marcus, like Epictetus, fresh relevance.Read more at location 352 • Delete this highlight
C. R. Haines, The Correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto (Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1919–20).Read more at location 368 • Delete this highlight