Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor. He commanded great armies, led his empire through a plague, and unalterably shaped human history. But you’d never know any of this if you just picked up a copy of his Meditations, a work of stoic philosophy and the only written work of his that’s survived to the present day.
The Meditations is a collection of hypomnemata, or “notes written on a daily basis for the author’s personal use.” It’s a diary, of sorts, that sometimes reads more like the marginalia on the planner of someone fixated on their own self improvement. Here’s one of Marcus’s notes:
That’s it. Literally the second century Roman equivalent of “Don’t keep hitting the snooze button, you lazy moron.”
A bit of background.
Stoics emphasize the supreme importance of the distinction between things you can control, and things you can’t. Much of their philosophy is based on making sure that your attitudes correspond with the way this carves up the world. The “Serenity Prayer” (made famous by, among others, Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five) -- “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference” -- was either written by a stoic, or by someone who was channeling one.
For stoics, the things that really matter in life -- the things you should value, and pin your hopes and dreams to -- are those things most immediately under your control; your virtue, expressed especially in virtuous responses to circumstances of fate, and the inner-peace that comes from being indifferent to those things you cannot (and should not try to) control.
How does a stoic like Marcus Aurelius achieve such inner-peace? By constantly reminding himself -- through meditations, aphorisms, notes-to-self -- not to get carried away by the rivers of time and experience.
In any case, the Meditations is extremely accessible for a work of ancient philosophy. It can feel like wisdom right off the shelf. You barely have to unpack it to feel motivated, inspired, like your soul is stirring just a little bit. It’s so accessible, in fact, that a couple prominent philosophers have recently taken to the New York Times to tell the culture (collectively) to hold our horses just a little bit.
In her piece, entitled “What ‘Pop Stoicism’ Misses About Ancient Philosophy,” Nancy Sherman targets incredibly successful...brands (what else to call them?) like Daily Stoic that have packaged and repackaged stoicism, into journals, daily inspiration desk-calendars, and twenty-six dollar pocket medallions. The brainchild of Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic boils the meditations down into quotes on Instragram that are...oddly exactly like other inspirational Instragram posts.
Sherman’s critique is that “pop stoicism” runs afoul of “real stoicism” in the way these things typically do: It hollows out a deep, philosophically rich tradition; it boils down complex teachings into inspirational quotes; it ignores crucial complexities. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, this same critique shows up (albeit implicitly) in a recent interview with Mary Beard, another very prominent ancient philosopher.
Full disclosure: I’ve got a bit of skin in this game. We teach Marcus Aurelius in God and the Good Life. Marcus shows up as the hero of one of the final chapters of mine and Meghan Sullivan’s forthcoming book (pre-orderable here!). My guiding assumption has always been that great stoics (and Marcus in particular) really are just about as accessible as they seem. Of course there’s always more (context, history, complexity) to explore, but the beauty of stoicism -- it seems to me -- is that it’s got a pretty low entry cost.
So I did a bunch of digging the past couple of weeks. I’ve been revisiting the Meditations, reading popular and scholarly treatments of the stoics, and talking to expert friends.
And what have I concluded?
Well, “pop” anything is liable to distort whatever it is a “pop” version of; fair enough. But there are actually special reasons to think that stoicism, as a philosophical tradition, is an especially good candidate for the kind of cultural appropriation it is now experiencing. Roman stoicism, it turns out, was actually appropriated from the greeks. And, when it was, the whole idea was to come up with a practical philosophy -- a philosophical way of life -- and one that was to be lived, embodied, and measured against its effectiveness as life-advice, rather than its theoretical completeness or comprehensiveness.
This is a story that my friend Caleb Cohoe told me in a recent interview (see below). It’s also one that Pierre Hadot (source of that definition of “hypomnemata” above) tells in scholarly work captured (by one of my students) in this lovely little graphic.
So, perhaps at the risk of justifying a little too much, I say: go ahead and appropriate when it comes to the Roman stoics. Do it carefully, and do it thoughtfully. Critically reflect on whether your brand-building is consistent with your deeply held beliefs and values (or whether any such brand-building could be). But let’s not fall prey to an error that we, academic philosophers, tend so easily to fall into that we often don’t even recognize it’s possibility: making ancient wisdom a an intellectual prize, something so abstract and remote and esoteric that only the finely educated and hyper-degreed should even attempt to operate in this space. Let Ryan Holiday post his inspirational Insta-quotes. And if we think he’s missing something, maybe we can make and post a few of our own…
-pb
Deep(ish) Thoughts
I’m not always able to put together inter-related content, but this week I was lucky. For the first installment in an ongoing series, I interviewed my friend and colleague Caleb Cohoe about stoicism and “good life” philosophy. He’s super smart, and the interview really opened my eyes (and forms the basis for much of what I say above. It’s a bit longer, and I recommend watching (or listening) when you’ve got a bit of time and brainspace to spare.
Feel free to subscribe to my channel for more like this here. In the next week or two I’m going to be posting another interview about stoicism, with another Caleb. This other Caleb is an expert of a different kind: he built and runs “Stoa,” an app to help people interested in further incorporating stoic mediation into their lives. That’ll be great — so subscribe to the channel if you want to be notified when that goes up!
Parting Recs
If you’re not sick of my TikToks yet, there’s a few new ones up here. I particularly recommend the ones on arguments for God’s existence (we recently tackled the Pascal’s wager and the ontological argument), or the one starring my infant daughter…
For something totally different, check out this gorgeous new book by Kazuo Ishiguro. He’s one of the few authors Shayla and I can read together (aloud), and, so far, we’ve really been enjoying this (which feels a lot like a return to the subject matter and style of “Never Let Me Go” — one of our favorites):
If you’re reading this, but haven’t yet, please…
…it’d mean a lot to me, and I promise I’ll only write when I’ve got something to say.
Especially if you’re a pop-stoicism lover, a pop-stoicism hater, a pop-stoicism scholar, or even pop-stoicism indifferent.
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Coverimage “Pop Marcus”: