Marcus Aurelius

Comparing Marcus Aurelius and His Stoicism with Rousseau s Libertinism
Marcus Aurelius: What Has Been Lost
Natural law ethics were articulated by Aristotle in classical Greek philosophy and have been a mainstay of Western philosophy ever since, being discussed by Roman philosophers, early Church Fathers and Scholastics in the Middle Ages. It was not until the Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment when modern society began to reject the Old World values where natural law conformed with moral law. Enlightenment philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau abandoned the notion of Original Sin and of fallen human nature and viewed natural law from a liberal perspective in which every human impulse was deemed good regardless of whether form followed function (Laux). For Rousseau liberty was what mattered most, and that meant rejection of the order of the medieval Church and of the doctrines of sin and redemption. It also meant rejecting the natural law and classical notion of virtue, self-restraint, and stoicism propagated by one of the greatest classical stoics to influence subsequent generations—Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius wrote the book Meditations, which is both a chronicle of different points in the Roman Emperor’s life. Divided into 12 books, Meditations is as much a reflection on the Emperor’s own life as it is a meditation on stoic philosophy—the Hellenistic school of thought founded by Zeno in Athens some four hundred years prior. Stoicism, which Marcus Aurelius promotes in Meditations, was based on both a logical system of personal ethics and observations of the law of the natural world. Marcus Aurelius and his book Meditations can be considered as important to the laying of the foundation of virtue ethics and the notion of personal responsibility in the West for centuries as Aristotle or the later Scholastics (Strange). It was only with the arrival of the materialistic, liberal and revolutionary Age of Enlightenment that a new kind of philosophy rooted in libertinism began to take hold of modern society. This paper will show what has been lost in today’s world by examining the vigor found in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
The very first point that Marcus Aurelius makes in Book One of the Meditations is the importance of passing on knowledge and discipline from one generation to the other. In other words, it is directly the opposite of the argument that Rousseau makes in Emile, where the modern philosopher argues that parents should not try to pass on their ways, their knowledge or their view to their children because doing so corrupts the natural essence of the child and serves as an obstacle to liberty. Aurelius implies quite simply that to leave younger generations twisting in the wind without guidance is akin to abandoning them, and he implies this with his first line: “From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper” (Aurelius, Book One). That is such an important line for today’s world because it shows the absolute importance of receiving guidance from the older generations, the absolute vital importance of submitting to their wisdom and restraining one’s own passions. Rousseau who is basically one of the founding philosophers of modern thought argued in The Social Contract that people are born free and yet everywhere they are in chains—and the chains he identified as thought control, i.e., principles of previous generations placed oppressively onto the upcoming generation who never agreed to accept those principles. In other words, Rousseau argued that if young people want to accept what the older people have to say then they can, but it is up to them to make that decision on their own and they should not be influenced in any way by others who might try to sway their minds or their impulses or thoughts or feelings one way or another. In short, Rousseau laid the foundation for today’s world where it is acceptable to choose your own gender not based on sex but rather on how you feel inside, where parents like NBA star Dwayne Wade are lauded for letting his child choose his own gender and not getting in the way of that choice by offering any guidance one way or another. Wade would be the antithesis of Marcus Aurelius’s grandfather Verus I but he would be the poster-father of Rousseau’s philosophy in Emile.
Why is it important to have the kind of guidance that Marcus Aurelius received from his grandfather? For one thing, it allowed him to grow up to be a great Emperor and philosopher. On the other hand, by way of contrast, more than half of those young and impressionable people of today who, without any firm guidance, undergo gender reassignment therapy end up suicidal by the time they reach adulthood (Anderson). But there is more to it than that. Marcus Aurelius goes on to explain what he received from his father and mother as well: “From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character. From my mother, piety and beneficence, and abstinence, not only from evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich” (Aurelius Book One). In other words, Marcus Aurelius relied upon his parents and grandparents to teach him right from wrong, to help him to develop his character, to give him the standards that they expected him to strive to reach and maintain. Today, standards in terms of character development are almost considered taboo because it goes against Rousseau’s philosophy of non-interventionism. However, there are standards in education that teachers expect their students to reach. There are standards in work that employers expect their employees to reach. Yet standards in terms of moral development is nowhere emphasized in the modern popular culture of today’s society. It is just the opposite: those who impose no set of standards other than the principle of absolute liberty are lauded and celebrated as the best and most ideal of all parents and elders.
Aurelius points out the values he received from others as well—not just his elders in his own family: “From my governor, to be neither of the green nor of the blue party at the games in the Circus, nor a partizan either of the Parmularius or the Scutarius at the gladiators' fights; from him too I learned endurance of labour, and to want little, and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with other people's affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander” (Aurelius Book One). He shows how he learned good governance from his caretaker. He shows how various others, from Diognetus to Apollonius to Sextus to Alexander the grammarian, all played a part in his education and character formation. The way Marcus Aurelius opens his book on Meditations with this utterly honest and generous indebtedness that he displays towards those who formed him into the man he was when he wrote the book is astonishing considering how different modern society is today. Today, people are too busy staring at their own social media profiles, pictures and number of followers to even give a thought to how they have been shaped or who might have shaped them. However, because they are moderns it is unlikely that they would have received the same sort of lessons that Marcus Aurelius received growing up. Today’s world is obsessed with liberty, which is ironic considering how quickly everyone is eager to give up their liberty to the State in exchange for a sense of safety, security and protection.
Marcus Aurelius on the other hand viewed this type of thinking as erroneous. His philosophy was that one should look to control oneself for that is all anyone can ever really do. Others are beyond one’s own control. One should not expect the State to take care of you, but rather one should learn how to take care of himself and one should start by learning how to conduct oneself and control one’s temper. Marcus Aurelius points to his father for learning how to cultivate a mild temper—but he also shows the value of having a religious perspective and Marcus Aurelius expresses gratitude to the gods for giving him such good examples of character in his parents, grandparents and friends and tutors. This alone is a nearly shocking display of humility that so flies in the face of today’s generations of atheistic, ungrateful people who show no thanks to any power or God whatsoever above them.
In the stoicism and Meditations of Marcus Aurelius one thus can find a depth of humility and self-possession that is all but missing in many of today. Yet even in his own time of Roman antiquity, people were also falling under the sway of libertinism. That is why Aurelius prepared himself each day by mentally telling himself: Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly… I can neither be injured by any of them” (Aurelius, Book Two). With this incredible sense of right from the wrong, the glory of beauty and the horribleness of that which is ugly, Aurelius was able to rise above it all and transcend the wicked environment of a decadent Rome. Today’s people of the modern world could learn a great lesson from reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and thinking about how they themselves have been formed, unformed or malformed by their own environment and families.
Works Cited
Anderson, Ryan. “Sex Reassignment Doesn’t Work. Here Is the Evidence.” Heritage, 2018. https://www.heritage.org/gender/commentary/sex-reassignment-doesnt-work-here-the-evidence
Aurelius, Marcus. Book One. Meditations. http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.1.one.html
Aurelius, Marcus. Book Two. Meditations. http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.2.two.html
Laux, J. Church History. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1933.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/rousseau-emile-or-education
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/rousseau-the-social-contract-and-discourses
Strange, Steven (ed). Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004.