Episode #236 ... Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophies This. I hope you love the show today. So depending on what your tastes are, you could think that Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is the best philosophy book you've ever had the privilege of reading. Or you could think it's a book that oversimplifies what it is to be a person on a level that's almost insulting when you read it. Heard both of these takes plenty of times getting emails over the years. But as I always do on this podcast, whenever we're covering anything, today, my job is to make a case for what's amazing about this book, Meditations. I'm gonna talk about some of the big ideas from it, and hopefully give someone who's reading through it some important context for where Marcus Aurelius was personally at his life when he wrote each of these 12 entries that make up the books of this book. They're called books, not chapters in this case. Should also be said that next episode is gonna be on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer's brutal critique of stoicism, how limited they thought the whole thing was. That's another thing we like to do on this podcast, consider the other side of things. Anyway, that's for next time. Today, as I said, I'm gonna be making a real case for stoicism and a case for why even if there are some built in limitations to it, why those limitations may in fact be a big part of the selling point of stoicism, how it's become so popular in the last fifteen years or so. What is it about the world we're currently living in that makes the message of stoicism in particular so attractive to people? Let's get right into it. The most important thing I think anybody reading meditations needs to understand before they pick the book up are the differences between three things that may sound like they're all the same thing on the surface, but they're actually very different. There's stoicism as a whole system of thinking about everything in the universe, metaphysics, knowledge, and all the rest of it. Then there's stoic ethics as a subcomponent of stoicism with a lot of modern interpretation that's been added onto it. And then there's this book, Meditations. It was written by a guy named Marcus Aurelius when he was emperor of Rome between January and January. Understanding how very different these three things are will bring you a lot of clarity about meditations as a book, and it'll also show someone how much they'd be missing out on about stoicism if all they did was just read meditations and then call it a life. By the end of the episode, we'll understand all three. Now the first thing to say is probably to address what you could call the elephant in the room regarding Marcus Aurelius as a man. Anybody who's read the book Meditations and has heard other people talk about it has probably …