a running summary of meditations

Without consulting my shorter note on ugliness I started writing on some dead trees about the first paragraph in book 2 of Meditations. I wanted to scribble down my understanding of the passage as I read it so that I could go back and look at my note and see how it had changed over time. When I reached page three I didn’t like the ordering of the paragraphs and wanted to go back and fill in stuff that I left out or would be more appropriate just grouping it differently, but that doesn’t work so well when writing on paper. So I’m going to explore that explanation here.

ugliness

Meditations

The Gregory Hay’s Translation of Meditations

Book one is full of the persons, some family and some not, to whom Marcus was thankful and why. Book two is the beginning of the content that I find to be the most interesting.

Paragraph one begins with:

When you wake up…

This is possibly just some practical advice that can be taken literally (as advice to himself to engage in the practice upon waking in preparation for the day.) But perhaps it also carries a hint of From the moment you wake, you can expect…

But the purpose is to remind himself what people can be like, why they will be that way, and to remind himself that they are worthy of his compassion and not his ire.

It also defines good and evil. He ascribes beauty to what is good and ugliness to what is evil. He is not saying that way is ugly is evil nor what is beautiful is good. He’s saying that what is good is beautiful and what is evil is ugly. This is likely intended to encourage (in himself) behavior that is good and discourage behavior that is bad. He reminds himself that wrongdoers - those who perpetuate evil - are capable of good. And the very act of getting angry at them is itself an evil thing to do.

In the middle of this paragraph is one of my favorite quotes:

No one can implicate me in ugliness.

But the quote needs context later in the paragraph where Marcus describes what he means by nature. When he says:

I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related my own - not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine… Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

Seeing the beauty is just an acknowledgement of accepting that the natural world is beautiful, mostly due to a belief in it being created by and planned by some divine presence. But what he is illustrating with the rest of it is how everything works with everything else. This is the natural order: to help each other, not hate each other, to work together and not against each other.

Here, ugliness is committing some evil act by going against nature. The only real form of harm is to one’s character. No other harm is truly harm because it is beyond one’s control. Many of the things viewed as harmful by non-stoics are what some stoics would call negative indifferents. They are things that cannot be controlled, therefore indifferent, but things might be easier without them having happened, and therefore negative.

Getting back to the quote, one cannot be harmed by the actions of others and made to do evil. One cannot be tricked, coerced, or otherwise implicated in behaving evilly. One must take an active role in doing something ugly or evil, it does not just happen and there is truly no excuse.

Also, the use of evil isn’t the anthropomorphic Christian capitalized E sort of Evil, it’s just colorful language describing bad behavior. Other translations simply use good and bad where this one uses evil. There are other translations that also use good and evil, but my sentiment remains.

Looking back

My notes ended here, and while I may circle back I’ll probably put the additional content in a new note. At the moment, as I tag this one to be public, I don’t remember if this is part of the notes I was gearing up to make comparisons between the Hays translation with the Needleman & Piazza selected translations from Meditations. I’ll definitely circle back and repeat the experiment to see how I’ve internalized the material versus what I had previously written with the following books.

There’s a sort of retroactive continuity that I’m hoping not to fall prey to, where as my alignment in thinking changes over time, I don’t want to fall into the illusion that my thinking was always that way. Making these notes helps me to spot where I started to change direction in my thoughts. Those are (some of) my intentions anyway.

Tags: summary, stoic, meditations

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