mk kleinbl00 OftenBen It's a very important book and I found it astonishing in its sheer incisive truth -- but his sentences are so convoluted as to be essentially unreadable. Caesar, he was not. It took me a surprisingly long time to finish. And as bfv says, it doesn't have a whole lot of depth; it's mostly aphorisms and references to Aurelius' father. EDIT: this link is a very good read. EDIT2: though I found this sickening. I can't stand the (very common) general mindset of the author.
I don't know about lacking depth, if you know a bit about the Stoics you can see how he made use of philosophy, and it's very different than the way you learned to do philosophy if you took some philosophy classes. You just have to go in knowing a little about the Stoics or it all sounds like something your grandmother might embroider and hang on the bathroom wall. It doesn't stand on its own.
Well, yes, he's turning the things he got from his teachers into aphorisms and rephrasing them to keep them fresh in his head without turning them into words to be repeated out of habit. It was his journal and not meant to be read by other people; he didn't need to explain things to himself at length, just to remind himself. If you want a lengthier explanation, Epictetus is one of his student's notes from his lectures, and is meant to be instructive, and Seneca is as verbose as anyone could ask for. None of them are up to modern standards, because even philosophy has made some progress over the past 2000 years, but there are books that are meant to do what you wanted Meditations to do. Meditations just one of them. But do read Pierre Hadot's The Inner Citadel for why Meditations isn't as shallow as it looks.
It has certainly changed considerably, at least. For the Greeks and Romans, philosophy was expected to guide one in how to live one's daily life. That role is mostly expected to be filled by religion nowadays, not by philosophy.it's actually possible philosophy has gone backward in the last 2000 years
Hadot agrees with you. I don't think I do. We've gained precision, and the cost of that is that we know when we're waving our hands. It turns out when you're talking about big things like how people in general ought to live, you invariably wave your hands a lot. It makes attempts to talk about them look ridiculous, and trying to talk about them feel ridiculous. But the ancients were waving their hands too, they just didn't know it.
The greatest hand-waver of them all was dear Bertrand, though. I always secretly pretended he was Bertie Wooster's namesake. In all seriousness, I tried to articulate what I disagree with here and I can't, really. Just that I've read a lot of post-Renaissance philosophy and a lot of classical philosophy and a bare handful in between and I know which era I'd pick if I was on a desert island. If that's the best rationalization I can mount, though, I clearly don't belong with Descartes anyway.
I got the free version and read the first chapter, then decided to get the Hays translation. Only 8 bucks and well worth it, IMO.
By coincidence, just yesterday I started reading "Meditations". I got the Hays translation, and his introduction is excellent. Only on chapter 2 so far but the readability is very good, a big improvement over the Gutenberg e-book version.
A brother came to see Abba Macarius the Egyptian, and said to him, “Abba, give me a word, that I may be saved.” So the old man said, “Go to the cemetery and abuse the dead.” The brother went there, abused them and threw stones at them; then he returned and told the old man about it. The latter said to him, “Didn’t they say anything to you?” He replied, “No.” The old man said, “Go back tomorrow and praise them.” So the brother went away and praised them, calling them, “Apostles, saints, and righteous men.” He returned to the old man who said to him, “Did they not answer you?” The brother said, “No.” The old man said to him, “You know how you insulted them and they did not reply, and how you praised them and they did not speak; so you too, if you wish to be saved, must do the same and become a dead man. Like the dead, take no account of either the scorn of men or their praises, and you can be saved.”