This seems to suggest that in the absence of knowledge that one is fated to be ill, one should select health, but either this selection is not guaranteed to be in accordance with nature or to result in an appropriate action, or a selection e. We might wonder why anything should be called according to nature, or preferred, if there are circumstances in which it is not.
The heterodox Stoic Aristo of Chios denied that any indifferents were to be preferred by nature, pointing out that the same thing could be preferred in one circumstance and dispreferred in another Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors So it is not true of all, but only some, appropriate actions that their appropriateness is circumstantial. Perhaps the idea is that while it is only true for the most part that health or strength or well functioning sense organs is in accordance with nature, this does not mean that the naturalness of health strength, well functioning sense organs depends on the circumstances.
The fact that our sources understand what is according to nature both in terms of cosmic nature or what is fated and in terms of the individual natures out of which the nature of the cosmos is built up raises the question of conflict, for instance when my health, which is in accordance with my nature, is not fated, or in accordance with cosmic nature. Such conflict can be avoided for human beings by appeal to our rational nature, on the one hand, and providential cosmic nature, on the other: our rationality enables us to appreciate and will what is according to cosmic nature because the latter is best for the whole.
The role of citizen brings with it certain conventional expectations of conduct which Marcus transfers to citizenship of the cosmopolis. Marcus says that one should be concerned with two things only: acting justly and loving what is allotted one x. Appeal to the idea that the cosmos is a city allows him to say that we should do well for all humanity viii. Strikingly, Marcus seems to specify this communal goal in terms of indifferents rather than virtue, with the result that one should aim to bring about preferred indifferents for the whole of which one is a part.
Even though food is not a good and hunger not an evil, a Stoic will respond to a hungry person with food, rather than only a lecture that food is not a good and hunger not an evil. Marcus says that the rational nature does well when it directs impulses hormai to communal action viii. After the communal faculty comes the rational faculty vii. Sometimes Marcus goes so far as to identify the good agathon of a rational creature with community v.
Finally, Marcus simply denies that there is ever any conflict between the good of the individual and the good of the whole community of which that individual is a part. He says, on the one side, that the perfection, well-being, and stability of the whole depends on what happens to each part v. And on the other side, he says that what the nature of the whole brings about is good agathon for each part ii.
He compares the relationship between separate rational individuals and the community to limbs and body, which are so constituted as to work together vii. While Plato uses the limb-body analogy to emphasize the unity of feeling the ideal city achieves, Marcus uses it to emphasize that the citizen is a functional part of the whole city: just as this material making up a limb would not be a limb at all without the body of which it is a part, so too, this human individual would not be what they are without a city of which they are a part Marcus must mean the cosmic city.
One might object that there is more to being a human being than being a citizen Striker , , but perhaps Marcus is not merely saying that the cosmos is like a city and we are like its citizens; perhaps he is saying that the cosmos actually is a city and human beings actually are its citizens, so that what it is to be human is exhausted by citizenship of the cosmos. Every nature is satisfied with itself when it goes along its way well, and the rational nature goes along its way well when it assents to nothing false or unclear among its impressions, when it directs impulses to communal actions, when it generates desires and inclinations for only those things that are in our power, and when it welcomes everything apportioned to it by common nature.
The last of these four behaviors is productive of piety. The key idea in piety is that the cosmos as a whole is providentially designed, and so is as good as it can be, and so its parts are as good as they can be, and so our attitude towards every part ought to be acceptance—or as he sometimes puts it more strongly, love.
Desire, parallel to impulse, is restricted to the sphere of our passivity; thus, we should desire whatever befalls us. Hadot is mistaken here, for according to the Stoics, our reactions to what befalls us are also impulses, and desire is a species of impulse.
Marcus says either to restrict desire to what is up to us ix. Epictetus tells us to refrain from desire for the time being iii.
The reason to quench desire is the danger of desiring the wrong thing: to desire something is to believe it to be good, and to have a runaway impulse towards it. This also gives us an argument against desiring the things that befall one. Perhaps we should associate desire orexis with pursuing, and welcoming with contentment upon receiving.
Nine times in the Meditations , Marcus lays out the alternatives: providence, nature, reason, on the one hand, or atoms, on the other iv. On these passages, see Cooper What is not obvious is why Marcus is laying out these alternatives. Is it because his grasp of Stoic physics is so tenuous that he must be open to the possibility that Epicurean physics is true Rist , 43, Annas , ?
Marcus does at one point express despair about his own grasp of physics vii. Here Marcus also quotes Epicurus on pain with approval: pain is either bearable if long-lasting or short if intense. Still, Marcus is not really open to the possibility of Epicurean physics. Elsewhere he insists that he has a sufficient conception ennoia of a life according to nature so as to live it i.
Since wealth, reputation, and health are distributed among the virtuous and the vicious indiscriminately, he reasons, they cannot be good, for that would be contrary to providence ii. This does not mean Marcus is generally grounding ethics in physics, however. Are you discontented with the part you have been assigned in the whole?
Recall the alternatives: providence or atoms, and how many are the demonstrations, that the cosmos is a city. The reasoning works to raise the stakes for someone who is grumbling at the way things are. It brings out that there is a contradiction between believing, as a Stoic must, that the world is providentially run, and being discontented with anything that happens.
Once the contradiction is brought out, it becomes clear which of the two alternatives a Stoic must plump for, and what follows about the attitudes he must consequently adopt towards the world and every part of it. For example, at iv. Often, however, Marcus does not have to spell this out.
So Marcus is telling his grumbling self: your grumbling is evidence of impiety, evidence of your being like an Epicurean—except that actual Epicureans are more philosophical and do not grumble about an irrational cosmos bringing them bad luck, but rather, try themselves to live rationally. Perhaps bringing about the desired attitude calls for making hyperbolic statements in order to correct for some natural tendency he thinks he has.
If we do not keep this in mind as we read Marcus, we will only find contradictions, tensions, and ambivalences and we will conclude that Marcus is an eclectic and imprecise thinker. According to Stoic epistemology, things in the world impress images of themselves on human and animal souls, as shapes can impress themselves on a wax tablet.
Human beings may also assent to or withhold assent from these impressions; judgments are the result of our assenting to impressions, or more precisely to the propositional articulations of our impressions. While assent is voluntary, impressions are not cf.
Epictetus fr. What Marcus is telling himself to erase, Hadot says, is value-judgments about everything external to his character. Hadot thinks Marcus is simply confused in using the term phantasia for these judgments the correct term, which he sometimes uses [cf. Yet the distinction between objective physical facts and subjective value judgments seems more existentialist than Stoic—for the Stoics value is objective, and indeed Marcus repeatedly exults in the beauty and goodness of the cosmos as a whole.
We should not assume that the evaluations are all added by us, the subjects, to the impression, for the Stoics think that there are evaluative impressions, cf. And it is also right that Marcus often deals with things that are conventionally accorded high value in reductive material terms.
So, for example, he writes,. Marcus lost his father at a young age, after which he was adopted by his grandfather, also Marcus Annius Verus. Marcus Aurelius writes about the influence of his relatives in the first book of his Meditations. In AD , Annius Verus had been appointed consul for the third time, making him the first man to be awarded this honour by Hadrian. When Marcus was six, Hadrian nominated him to be enrolled into the equestrian order, and at seven years old Marcus was enrolled into the priestly college of the Salii by the emperor.
At the same time, he required Antoninus to adopt Marcus and the young aristocrat Lucius Verus as his own heirs. The sources suggest that Marcus Aurelius might have been happier presiding over a similar period of imperial peace, but he was not to be so lucky. In response to this act of aggression, the co-emperors reasoned that one of them needed to go to the eastern border in person.
They decided upon Lucius Verus, but our two main literary sources diverge on the reasons why. The combination of Marcus Aurelius handling matters of politics, law and administration at home and Lucius Verus overseeing military activity on the frontier seems to have worked well against the Parthians.
But the jubilation did not last for long. Sometime in the late AD s, plague now known as the Antonine plague had been introduced to Rome, possibly by troops returning from Mesopotamia. Both emperors remained in the imperial capital for as long as they could to manage the tragedy. Nevertheless, in the spring of AD , they set off towards the north, and for a time used Aquileia at the northern tip of the Adriatic as a base from which to go back and forth to the frontier. Then, in early AD , calamity struck: Lucius was taken sick in his carriage and died three days later possibly a victim of plague.
In late summer , he headed back to the front as the sole emperor. Campaigning began again after the winter of —70 had passed. The remaining evidence makes it hard to put together a clear narrative of events, but a fourth-century historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, suggests that two more enemy groups, the aforementioned Quadi and the Marcomanni, invaded Italy and laid siege to Aquileia. Not since the days of Hannibal during the wars between Rome and Carthage in the third century BC had Italy experienced a foreign military so close to home.
But Marcus Aurelius was up to the challenge. By late , the Romans, now led by Marcus in person, appear to have pushed the invaders far enough back to celebrate a military triumph. Marcus Aurelius remained in Pannonia to receive embassies from the different groups.
The repetition of themes and the occasional groups of quotations from other authors see e. Book One, however, is somewhat different from the rest of the text and may well have been written separately a plan for it may be discerned in Med. The first recorded mention of the Meditations is by Themistius in AD AD by Arethas.
The modern text derives primarily from two sources: a manuscript now in the Vatican and a lost manuscript mentioned above , upon which the first printed edition was based. AD , discovered as a palimpsest in However, although this interesting discovery sheds some light on Marcus as an individual, it adds little to our understanding of his philosophy.
According to tradition, Marcus was a Stoic. His ancient biographer, Julius Capitolinus, describes him as such. Marcus also makes reference to a number of Stoics by whom he was taught and, in particular, mentions Rusticus from whom he borrowed a copy of the works of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus Med. However, nowhere in the Meditations does Marcus explicitly call himself a Stoic.
This may simply reflect the likelihood that Marcus was writing only for himself rather than attempting to define himself to an audience. Yet it is probably fair to admit that Marcus was at least open to ideas from other philosophical traditions, being impressed by Stoic philosophy , but not merely an unthinking disciple of Stoicism.
As has been noted, Marcus was clearly familiar with the Discourses of Epictetus, quoting them a number of times see Med. If Marcus felt drawn towards Stoicism, then Epictetus would surely have stood out as the most important Stoic of the time.
It is perhaps reasonable, then, to turn to Epictetus in order to explore the philosophical background to the Meditations. He suggests that the apprentice philosopher should be trained in three distinct areas or topoi see Epictetus Discourses 3. These three areas of training correspond to the three types of philosophical discourse referred to by earlier Stoics; the physical, the ethical, and the logical see Diogenes Laertius 7.
For Epictetus, it is not enough merely to discourse about philosophy. The student of philosophy should also engage in practical training designed to digest philosophical principals, transforming them into actions. Only this will enable the apprentice philosopher to transform himself into the Stoic ideal of a wise person or sage sophos. It is to this end that the three topoi are directed.
The first topos , concerning desire orexis , is devoted to physics. It is not enough for the philosopher to know how Nature works; he must train his desires in the light of that knowledge so that he only desires what is in harmony with Nature. For the Stoic, Nature is a complex inter-connected physical system, identified with God, of which the individual is but one part.
What might be called the practical implication of this conception of Nature is that an individual will inevitably become frustrated and unhappy if they desire things without taking into account the operations of this larger physical system. The study of ethical theory is of course valuable in its own right but, for the Stoic training to be a sage, these theories must be translated into ethical actions.
By so doing the apprentice philosopher will be able not merely to say how a sage should act but also to act as a sage should act. The third topos , concerning assent sunkatathesis , is devoted to logic. When an individual accepts or gives assent sunkatathesis to an impression, assent is often given to the value-judgement as well.
For instance, when one sees someone drink a lot of wine, one often judges that they are drinking too much wine see e. Epictetus Handbook Epictetus suggests that, in the light of Stoic epistemological theory, the apprentice philosopher should train himself to analyze his impressions carefully and be on guard not to give assent to unwarranted value-judgements.
For Epictetus, then, the student of philosophy must not only study the three types of philosophical discourse but also engage in these three types of philosophical training or exercise in order to translate that theory into actions.
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