Last week I gave my thoughts on Senecas thoughts on the shortness of life. I may have been too quick with my (moderate) criticism, because this week I read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and I'm truly flabbergasted that it is so highly revered by many.
I know I titled this to be a book review, but it's really more of a collection of thoughts, not a structured review. Sorry in advance.
Marcus Aurelius was the Roman emperor from 161–180, and it would be reasonable to call him the most powerful man in the world at the time. So it’s certainly very interesting to have access to what is basically his private journal. The 12 chapters (or books) of the Meditations do not seem to have been intended for publication or to be read by anyone else at all. It’s not even really a cohesive text, but rather a collection of thoughts (or meditations, hence the title) that he came up with throughout his life, ranging in length from a single sentence to multiple paragraphs.
Having this text really does give us insight into how he thought about the world, which is obviously a valuable resource for understanding that time.
What is confusing to me is that I often see this book recommended by people who apparently found something close to enlightenment in it. People who describe it as “life changing,” “deeply impactful,” “one of the most important books I’ve ever read,” etc.
There are some interesting bits in it that can be reduced to the following:
- You can't control other peoples actions, but you can control your actions and reactions
- Don't be a dick
- In the end we all die, so make the best of life while it lasts
He repeats these things over and over throughout the book. I don’t really have an issue with this part. They are basic ideas of Stoic philosophy and if you’ve never encountered those ideas then I can see how they may be interesting. Same with the repetition: I practice meditation myself, and understanding that this is a practice (i.e. it needs to be practiced to be valuable) is not obvious for many beginners.
Still: 2000 years later, none of this is exactly a revelation.
I'd say another quarter or so are his thoughts on the nature of the universe / metaphysics. For the most part those ideas are just plain wrong. I'm not going to be too harsh here, he did have the disadvantage of living 2000 years ago. It's interesting to see how he makes extremely basic epistemic mistakes and is then still completely confident in his correctness.
Consider this passage for example:
All things that share the same element tend to seek their own kind. Things earthy gravitate towards earth, things aqueous flow towards one another, things aerial likewise – whence the need for the barriers which keep them forcibly apart. The tendency of flames is to mount skyward, because of the elemental fire; even here below, they are so eager for the company of their own kind that any sort of material, if it be reasonably dry, will ignite with ease, since there is only a minority of its ingredients which is resistant to fire. In the same way, therefore, all portions of the universal Mind are drawn towards one another.
Even if we are lenient about all the nonsense claims about physics (which we shouldn't be), this part is horrendous:
In the same way, therefore, all portions of the universal Mind are drawn towards one another.
What do you mean therefore? You can't just make some vague claims about physical processes and some similar claims about metaphysics and sell it as a deduction. Even if the physical claims were remotely true, that doesn't justify the metaphysics claims. It's still a category error. At best it's a very weak analogy, but really it's just a made up narrative that sounds good but doesn't hold up to scrutiny at all.
Before we figured out the scientific method people apparently had no issue just making shit up on the spot while still calling it reasoning.
The whole book is littered with these things. It is possible to separate those sections from his writings about stoicism and just ignore them, but many of the false claims he makes about physics could've easily been disproven even with the technology available at the time. If he wasn't willing to invest the time for that, why would we think he wasn't equally sloppy about his other claims?
Another point he keeps coming back to is his understanding of the order of things in the world. According to him there is a natural order to things and this order is just and we should accept it. I think a charitable reading of these passages is that nature is not a moral agent. What happens in nature happens for a reason, but it is not motivated in the same way that a human would be. Therefore, nature is neither good nor bad.
This would be acceptable for me (even insightful) if he didn’t so often slide from that into a kind of moral legitimation: treating existing social order and the current status-quo as a justification for what ought to be. It's hard not to think that this is a suspiciously convenient conclusion for an emperor to reach.
In fact many of the things he writes are awfully convenient for a man in his position. He argues again and again that we should strive for the good of the group. He says stuff like:
What is no good for the hive is no good for the bee.
or
All that befalls the individual is for the good of the whole. That by itself is warrant enough for us; but if you look closely you will also notice that, as a general rule, what is good for one man is good for his fellow-men as well.
I'm not even disagreeing with the idea that individual sacrifice for a greater good can be virtuous, but it does seem like a bit of motivated reasoning for a roman emperor to land on the conclusion that, in order to live a good life, people need to accept their individual duties and tirelessly work towards those duties, while overcoming any hardships along the way without complaining. If you have a whole empire of people who do this, you end up with a very stable empire and a very long reign.
There's more stuff like this, but I honestly don't care to write it all down.
Here's a claim that I take issue with:
To pursue the unattainable is insanity, yet the thoughtless can never refrain from doing so.
This is true in the strictest sense of the word unattainable but it obviously only matters if you can reliably tell apart the attainable from the unattainable. Thinking that you can is offensively arrogant and actively anti-science. I had a similar complaint about Seneca. For people that are so obsessed with knowledge, they are weirdly opposed to push the frontier of what's possible.
And lastly, take this passage:
When meat and other dainties are before you, you reflect: This is dead fish, or fowl, or pig; or: This Falernian is some of the juice from a bunch of grapes; my purple robe is sheep’s wool stained with a little gore from a shellfish; copulation is friction of the members and an ejaculatory discharge. Reflections of this kind go to the bottom of things, penetrating into them and exposing their real nature. The same process should be applied to the whole of life. When a thing’s credentials look most plausible, lay it bare, observe its triviality, and strip it of the cloak of verbiage that dignifies it. Pretentiousness is the arch deceiver, and never more delusive than when you imagine your work is most meritorious. Note what Crates has to say about Xenocrates himself.
A charitable interpretation of this passage is that we should be careful of the halo effect. That we shouldn't be deceived by fancy labels or shiny appearances.
But he gives the example of reducing fine dining to a list of ingredients or sex to friction + ejaculation and argues that this exposes the real nature of those things. But in both of those examples the real nature is in the complexity. Fine dining's real nature is not in the sustenance it provides. It is craftsmanship, tradition, social ritual, hospitality, scarcity, shared attention, even the story behind it. Reducing social eating to "dead fish" does not lay bare the nature of anything. In fact it does the opposite. It prevents you from understanding what is actually happening.
Similarly, Sex != friction. The real nature of it includes attachment, trust, vulnerability, status dynamics, consent, bonding, jealousy, intimacy, identity, etc. A purely mechanical description is not a reasonable simplification at all.
There are many, many passages like this where a charitable interpretation exists, but it comes with so much baggage that it loses its value. If your writing requires extensive interpretation effort, then it's really not that good of a text. If you're already able to get to the charitable interpretation, then you're unlikely to get a lot of insight out of the mediations. However if you aren't, there's a real chance you're reading into the text whatever confirms your pre-existing biases.
Anyway, it's safe to say that I didn't like it.