Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize 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 that oversimplifies what it is to be a person on a level that's almost insulting when you read it. I 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 going to 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. It should also be said that next episode is going to 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 going to 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 15 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 on to it. And then there's this book, Meditations, that was written by a guy named Marcus Aurelius when he was Emperor of Rome between 170 and 180 AD. Understanding how very different these three things are. We'll 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 also heard someone say at some point that Marcus Aurelius was not

a philosopher. Now, I'm all for inclusive definitions

to a certain extent, and I can respect the argument that this was a man who should be considered

a philosopher because he lives so strictly by a philosophical code. But I also think it doesn't

help anyone in this world to just lump everybody out there together under a single banner because

they loosely resemble each other. And the fact is, there are differences between what Marcus Aurelius did with his life and what

Seneca or Epictetus did with theirs. Or for that matter, Kant or Hume or any philosopher

that produces work that contributes something new to the area of philosophy they were interested in.

Look, none of this is to hate on Marcus Aurelius.

Again, most of this episode is to show what's cool about him. But if you're a fan of Stoicism, it's important to understand what Meditations is not. And when you look at the way he wrote this book, for someone to say he's not a philosopher, that he's probably better described as something else, starts to sound pretty reasonable. I mean, first of all, he never intended for this book to be published as a work of philosophy.

He never wrote a single... described as something else, starts to sound pretty reasonable. I mean, first of all, he never

intended for this book to be published as a work of philosophy. He never wrote a single page of any

of this stuff, thinking people would one day be reading it and learning about stoicism from it.

Meditations was something compiled after his death from personal journals. He kept only for

...