Meditations of Marcus Aurelius | Video Lecture Series

In this installment of our video lecture series on stoicism, we adapt the brilliant lecture by Michael Sugrue on Marcus Aurelius. This video hopes to serve as an audiovisual supplement of the original.

An excerpt from the video:

"Marcus wrote this manuscript without intending to have it published after his death. He wanted to have it burned. Some philosophically inclined I guess bookkeeper librarian said the camp whoever it is to pick this up said no we just can't throw this out. We cannot lose the memory of such a great man, and we can't lose the sort of meditations that he created. He wrote a book called meditations and it's a book to himself that's not intended to be published. What sort of a man writes a book to himself. What sense does that make? Think about it. The nature of a book is communicating something and we were thinking we would communicate it to some reader. But this is not going to be published. It's written to himself. What makes a man write a book to himself? And there's a very deep answer I think here. Marcus Aurelius writes a book to himself because he's the loneliest man in the world. He has no friends because he has no equals. Think about a man breaking himself on the rock of an impossible virtue. He has no equals. Everyone he talks to wants something from him. He is the Emperor of everything in the world. He owns it all. Everything he says immediately gets done. He has absolute life-and-death power over everyone so anytime he's in the throne room he's having an audience. Someone comes in from some part of the Empire and they're always here because they want something from him. And all Marcus wants to do is live a philosophical life, but he happens to have had the misfortune to be born the emperor of Rome.

What a pity so he has to deal with these self-centered swine, people all the time and his responsibility to do good for them to give him justice to give them both examples of virtue and virtuous laws and virtuous decisions. And the weariness of it gets to him after a while the book that he's written the meditations is shot through with a kind of philosophical melancholy. That is extremely moving despite the stoic content of what he's saying. In other words oddly enough there are very few books in the world which generate more pathos which create more of a sense of pity for a person reading this then this book. He's writing a book to himself because he has no one else to talk to and what kind of things does he write in the book? Moral maxims and he has two or three ideas not a hundred odd pages but he says essentially the same thing again and again and again. Why? He has nobody to talk to so that limits the scope of his conversations and he's constantly trying to remind himself that although the people you're dealing with are corrupt, evil and depraved, it's your job not to get angry with them but to try and teach them and morally improve them. If you can't morally improve them, at least put up with them because the gods have created us social animals and it is part of the mark or it is the mark of a philosophical man that he should return benefits for harm. Because those that would harm other people do not live the philosophical life. Those that don't want the ultimate good for themselves and for society do so because they don't know any better.

He did the best he could and you can't help but feel it at the end of his life. He must have felt relieved that the terrible crushing burden of this loneliness, a man that has no equals and has no friends, a man that has nothing but philosophy to guide him. Death must have been a great release. It's like getting the evening off after you put in your turn guarding the camp and instead of becoming an obscure unimportant figure he's become a symbol in the history of Western philosophy of the practical concrete immediate virtues. the sort of virtues which are accessible to us not because we have profound intellectual ability, not because we're Newton or a Conte but simply because we have problems and are everyday rational human beings. The stoic man says that a virtue that is possible from one man is accessible to all of us. there is no excuse for us not being that good. If we provide such excuses for ourselves we harm ourselves and we harm others by preventing us from recognizing our true moral obligations. Marcus Aurelius lets us know that all people suffer but that not all people pity themselves. Marcus Aurelius lets us know that all men die but that not all men die whining. "


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