The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
classics.mit.edu
classics.mit.edu
"In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present- I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?- But this is more pleasant.- Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature?- But it is necessary to take rest also.- It is necessary: however nature has fixed bounds to this too: she has fixed bounds both to eating and drinking, and yet thou goest beyond these bounds, beyond what is sufficient; yet in thy acts it is not so, but thou stoppest short of what thou canst do. So thou lovest not thyself, for if thou didst, thou wouldst love thy nature and her will."
Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues
Don't get the impression you are providing a wonderful service here; it's very annoying to see Christianity dragged into otherwise pleasant subjects.
I can hardly imagine a better "place" than HN to share, even in some small way, the light of the Crucified and Risen. Also, I'm passionate about software development and information technology, so the HN scene is a natural place for me to hang out and share my ideas and concerns, on a variety of topics.
I do my best to make sure that all my comments, whatever their nature, follow that pattern. So, no, I'm not trolling, or "thread shitting", or anything along those lines. If I didn't think my comments were relevant in some way, I wouldn't make them -- that's just basic HN etiquette. If you don't like what I have to say or think I am in fact trolling, by all means downvote my comments. Also, if my comments really bother you, feel free to implement a little script that filters them from view. You could even make it general purpose, put it up on GitHub and submit it to HN.
However, one of the things most people here don't do is use HN as a convenient platform to push their beliefs at every possible occasion.
> feel free to implement a little script that filters them from view.
No. You are the one with the annoying, spamming behaviour. Don't tell me to put up a spam filter. Stop spamming instead.
I find that claim implausible... I see a lot of beliefs being pushed, like "Startup culture is great" or "Startup culture is awful" or "Those people should have a better security response story" or "Don't use tables for layout" or "MAC-then-encrypt is a mistake". I would expect that most people have pushed a belief one time or another.
What I don't see a lot of is arguments about what is or isn't on-topic. That's what the downvote button is for, and it has a built-in mechanism to see if anyone else agrees with you.
Proselytism on HN should not be okay. This is not something you'd want to leave to up and down votes, in my opinion.
Just like the previous poster, you water down what I meant by 'pushing' and 'belief' so it becomes downright reasonable to do it.
This is a systematic approach by him to advocate his religion every opportunity he gets.
Perhaps instead of giving up to the mind virus so readily, you should try and read up on why Christianity is false and try to learn something we do know about the universe we live in.
And one of the things about how the world really is, is that you can't change people's minds about the universe by calling them "sheep" or "sharing the Light of the Redeemer" or any such methods. None of this engages anyone in the intellectual and emotional calm needed to actually change their views based on reasoned discussion, nor does any of it provide evidence for, well, anything in particular.
So please, just head off to /r/DebateReligion or something.
But these people get to vote too you know. What person believes influences strongly what they do and what they want. There is no such thing as a private belief. What you believe about the physical world and what you base your beliefs on determines how you behave, what policies you support, if you will deny scientific facts, what you want your kids taught in schools, etc.
If that weren't enough some of these people find it irresistible temptation to "share" their delusions to the point they want their brand of belief instituted in laws and constitution of the country, and things like commandments displayed in schools and courtrooms almost like graven images.
This is why they must be engaged in debate, discussion and idiocy of their beliefs pointed out. There is no polite way to tell someone that what they hold as most precious and dearest thing is false, and debunked. But it has to be done, esp. now that we live in times when we do know, are free to say so.
And the only reason we are having this discussion is precisely because these people feel the need to discuss and share their beliefs, because they can't be happy until you believe it too, and until every knee bows. The stipulation to proselytize is in the holy books.
The rest of your comments may or may not be true, but they feel off-topic.
You do not have to answer that question to me, but until you have produced a satisfactory answer, you will be like the drunkard who lost his keys in a dark alley, but keeps looking for them on main street because "there's light there".
You basically accuse people of dogmatism but in my experience, the dogmatics are those that get pissed off upon hearing some taboo word mentioned, ignore what other people are actually saying, and instead of respond resort to cheap rhetoric tricks such as name calling and repetition of litanies.
Christians are at least (painfully) aware that theirs is one amongst many competing faiths. Scienticists on the other hand just believe that the World is exactly like they think it is, and that everyone that thinks different is plainly wrong. This makes them dangerous because there is always a subset in every group that would burn every "other" man, woman and child at the stake if they thought they could get away with it. The more you affirm the "otherness" in people you dislike, the closer you make this scenario to play out in your reality.
There are two kinds of beliefs. One is based on evidence, logic, reason, testable repeatable experiments. Rational mind has no option but to accept their truthfulness (sometimes after laborious examination of evidence or step by step verification of logical deduction). You could go on and deny obvious truth, but that leads to cognitive dissonance and is rather mentally taxing. The other belief is opposite, it is not based on any evidence at all and it is called faith. You are believing things without having sufficient or any evidence for it. Note also that all religions are faith based. If they were based on evidence, religion would be a branch of science, it would be a scientific theory (which is the highest pedestal a scientific hypothesis can be placed upon, only mathematics has theorems).
There is now strong evidence that theistic gods i.e. gods that care about human beings, that interfere in their lives, that tell you what you should do, what you should eat, on what days, who you may sleep with and in what position, gods who break the known laws of nature for their people, god who stops the motion of the sun around earth so certain people in the Bible can finish their work, god who takes "our" side in a war, a god that gives itself body so it can kill it to save the humanity are man made invention.
Religion comes to us from other human mammals who not only know there is a god, but they also know his mind what he wants us to do. And how do they know? Revelation of course, god told them something often times contradictory what he told others. And the religious never even seek evidence for their extraordinary claims. But revelation is useless and unreliable as a way to discover truth
Revelation can only ever be relevant to the person to whom something is revealed. As soon as that person shares and relates the revelation to someone else, it becomes a testimony at that point. And then it becomes a matter of trusting that person for the claim they are making. Also, the person to whom something is revealed should be apprehensive and wonder which is more likely that laws of nature have been bent in their favor no less, or if perhaps they are under apprehension.
Revelations are dime a dozen. Numerous people have claimed that something has been revealed to them. Even worse different people have claimed same god has revealed things that are contradictory to the things god has revealed to other people. In Christianity god reveals himself as a human, he dies on the cross, and resurrects. In Islam, Jesus is not only not the son of god, he never died on the cross and never resurrected. Believing otherwise will have you condemned to hell. In Christianity god says love your enemies, in Islam he says kill your enemies and apostates. Yet it's the same god, and both sides claim divine revelation for the "wisdom" they preach.
Content of revelation paints a picture of a god who is quite frankly incompetent, stupid and has morals lesser than average decent human being today. And most importantly he leaves it to chance what you will believe about him and if you will be damned to eternity.
What religion you get indoctrinated into has very little to do with its truthfulness, but everything to do with where you were born. If you were born in Saudi Arabia for example you would be a Muslim defending Islam right now. Yet both Islam and Christianity and Judaism (the three desert dogmas) all claim to posses the true and perfect words of the creator of the universe.
And isn't it incredibly stupid of a supreme, intelligent, omnipotent, omnipresent being to demand belief in him without evidence? God would presumably know that people would invent scientific method as the only sure way to discover truth. Yet he leaves such important things as if you will be damned for eternity to belief without evidence leading to three desert dogmas that teach completely opposite things about him. Yahweh himself besides being stupid is rather evil god. Look how he behaves exactly as you would expect the people of that age that invented him to behave (he orders genocide of neighboring tribes that worship other gods, enslavement of women and children etc, just read random book of old testament). By the way he was never meant to be god of all, he was meant to be a god of a single tribe (otherwise a lot of stuff god says and orders makes no sense). Evolution of competing religions and the fact we have multiple religions like this is exactly what you would expect to see if religion were man made.
All metaphysical claims and especially all physical claims made by religion were proved to be wrong. And would you expect it any other way really? Religion was our first approximation of cosmology, medicine etc. But like all first approximations it proved to be completely wrong. Jesus casts out demons to heal people, he heals lepers instead of healing leprosy, no germs ever mentioned in the Bible (naturally no germ theory of disease either).
But now we know better. We know how solar systems are formed, we know how planets are formed, we know how life evolves, we even know how a universe can plausibly come from nothing. We really don't need god to kick off any of these things any more. Besides positing an intelligent god capable of creating universes, god that always existed, or that spontaneously came into being is assuming a lot more than assuming the same about the universe itself i.e. dumb matter. Occam's razor cuts him out of existence as superfluous assumption that does not explain anything.
I will rather be polite and say that I am not interested in keep going further with this discussion. But if you ever find yourself in need to examine your world view please consider the following:
> And isn't it incredibly stupid of a supreme, intelligent, omnipotent, omnipresent being to demand belief in him without evidence?
Ok, granted... you have a point here. What of the many assertions you make can be logically derived from this one hypothesis? What other hypotheses could explain the same facts?
"Evidence-based reasoning", as goes the misnomer, is not actually based on some ontologically basic thing called evidence; it's based on causal interaction. If I can't use evidence-based reasoning on some phenomenon X, it's because X and I don't have any interactions via causality.
Now, this could mean that X is, for instance, an ultra-distance galactic supercluster completely outside our light-cone, so far away that the last time it interacted with us was when we were all inside the singularity pre-Big-Bang.
But it effectively means, "X doesn't exist [in the same universe as us]".
But people who brandish the "evidence based" argument do not mean that. What they mean is that if X does not behave in a particular way for which it is feasible to design an experiment, then X ought not to exist.
In practice, what happens is that if I claim to have had direct experience of X, they will dismiss it out of hand and go trying to shoehorn some explanation which does not offends their world view. And if I go further and point out that there are millions of people who have had similar experiences during history, they will blast that we are all a bunch of brain-washed idiot sheep.
Personally speaking, and to make it clear, I have had a couple of experiences that make much more sense if you consider that there's more to reality than what scientific materialism would be willing to accept. Maybe there's is perfectly materialistic explanation that is yet unknown to us, but maybe there's not. I simply point out that accepting the limits of our own ignorance is a more philosophically sound position than to dismiss evidence before considering it.
No. It means that if X does not behave in such a way that it is physically possible to design an experiment, X most probably is not a sensible concept for anything other than "the idea of X".
The problem here is that subjective experiences are highly malleable and have never particularly corresponded directly to objective reality without further interpretation. So your subjective experiences are explainable in three possible ways:
* You subjectively experienced something we don't have a theory for yet, but which is part of physical reality. We will eventually figure out how to test it and construct a theory of it. This is very unlikely.
* You subjectively experienced something whose underlying causal basis is so highly complex that the interaction may not be repeatable (ie: whatever you interacted with could be capable of choosing with whom to interact or not, and when). This is extremely unlikely.
* You had a subjective experience that does not correspond to any external reality. This is quite common, actually, and the most probable option.
"At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work–as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for–the things which I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?
- But it’s nicer here…
So you were born to feel “nice?” Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?
- But we have to sleep sometime…
Agreed. But nature set a limit on that–as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota.
You don't love yourself enough. Or you'd love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they're really possessed by what they do, they'd rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts."
Related pseudo-Einstein quote: "“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life. All that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”"
"Dionysius of Heracleia was notorious for his appetite, and eventually grew so weighty that he could scarcely budge: he suffered from apnea or narcolepsy besides, prompting his doctors to prick his flesh with needles whenever he fell asleep on his throne. A contemporary poet has him declare that he aspired to end his days 'on my back, lying on my many rolls of fat, scarcely uttering a word, taking labored breaths, and eating my fill,' for of all the ways a man might die, an excess of luxury was the only truly happy death. Nevertheless, he lived to what was then the ripe old age of 55, earning a reputation for fairness and generosity that competed with his size as an object of astonishment."
Rejection of duty is rejection of responsibility. I have no complaints about people who do so -- and would enjoy more vacations of that sort myself -- so long as they've set up their lives to not be responsible for others during their rejection period. It may be better to find ways of enjoying life's comforts while staying on top of your business, though.
The original wasn't meant to be a dry treatise; it was a journal. I think a rendering that uses personal and simple language is more faithful than one that goes for the inscrutable ancient wisdom angle.
Is vs ought is a serious problem, unsolved and (as far as I can see) unsolvable. We end up doing things for no reason other than that we feel like it. But, if your philosophy suggests that you should do things in spite of how you feel, that's going to be a problem.
It doesn't? If my neighbor rises early, works hard and seems happier than me, whereas I spend all day in bed and feel depressed, doing what he's doing isn't a bad place to start.
Advocates of the importance of the is-ought problem want us to be deeply concerned about it, but they never explain why we ought to be. And in fact, we ought not be worried about it whether it is solved, unsolved or unsolvable:
Once we identify what it is in our nature that makes solving the is-ought problem a problem we ought to be worried about, we will have solved the is-ought problem and it will no longer be a problem we ought to be worried about.
Until we have identified what it is in our nature that makes the is-ought problem a problem we ought to be worried about, we have no reason to consider it a problem we ought to be worried about.
QED
For myself, I think the is-ought problem is ill-posed in its traditional "ultimate moral justification" form and trivially easy in any sensible form that acknowledges the vast amount of stuff Hume didn't know, like evolutionary biology. The sensible form doesn't solve the ultimate-moral-justification question Hume was concerned with for the same reason chemists never solved the creation of the Philosopher's Stone alchemists were concerned with: because such problems are the result of bizarre fantasies that have nothing to do with actual human existence. Science will never tell us how to forge the One Ring, either, but that isn't because of the limitations of science, it's because the One Ring is fantasy, just like ultimate moral justifications and the Philosopher's Stone.
If it turns out that there is an ultimate ought, then finding that out seems very likely to contribute to doing what I ought to do. If there isn't, then by thinking about it I am wasting no resources that I ought to be spending elsewhere. :)
We don't necessarily disagree on whether ultimate moral justifications exist, I think.
I have the hardcover, but it's not great quality. The paper is thin and yellowing, the printing is crooked, and the binding is simply a paperback glued into a hardcover, with a ribbon in between to give the impression of a real binding.
The content is great though, and despite my complaining I am mostly stoic about it :)
This made me question the "wisdom" of his Meditations (which, as a kid, I loved reading and whose advice I used to love): knowing this is how he lived and ruled and raised children, and those were the consequences... are we sure it's good advice? I'm not anymore.
Text here: http://sacred-texts.com/cla/gibbon/01/daf01013.htm
As an aside: I listened to Irvine on audiobook immediately after listening to Sherry Turkle's Alone Together. It was like reading about a disease and then the treatment. Recommend, would do again.
Maybe my impression is biased by the uninspiring quality of his prose on a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph level though: I’m pretty sensitive to bland fuzzy writing.
I settled on Maxwell Staniforth's translation. The only hardcover of it I could find was from the Folio Society[1]. There may be paperbacks available from other publishers, I don't know.
Folios are somewhat cheaper on the used market, and used copies of Folio Society books tend to be exceptionally well-kept, probably because they're so pricey new.
As usual, most older (public domain) translations don't have much going for them for a modern reader. Several of the newer ones were OK, but Staniforth's manages to hold very close to the original while remaining easy to read, besting most other translations on both fronts, IMO.
The Hays translation linked by the parent strays, to my eye, exceptionally far from the form of the Greek text, so if fidelity to the original is important to you I'd avoid it.
Hopefully that helps save someone the three or four hours I lost to this :-)
> D.A. Rees calls the Meditations "unendingly moving and inspiring", but does not offer them up as works of original philosophy. Bertrand Russell found them contradictory and inconsistent, evidence of a "tired age" where "even real goods lose their savour". Using Marcus as an example of greater Stoic philosophy, he found their ethical philosophy to contain an element of "sour grapes". "We can't be happy, but we can be good; let us therefore pretend that, so long as we are good, it doesn't matter being unhappy".
Can anybody agree/disagree/comment?
[0] - http://www.amazon.com/New-Stoicism-Lawrence-C-Becker/dp/0691...
http://www.amazon.com/Obstacle-Way-Timeless-Turning-Triumph/...
That said, it wasn't written for this kind of consumption and the book was repetitive. It took me longer to read than I 'd hoped.
Marcus Aurelius spent several decades before becoming emperor as a general out on Rome's borders which for the most part must have been a miserable existence and the reason, even need, for his Stoicism seems clear.
I consider it an irony of his 'wisdom' that he was the last in a line of 'good' Roman emperors who'd all been appointed by their predecessors on the basis of ability, as opposed to passed from father to son.
It was probably going to be hard to continue the tradition anyway but Aurelius passed the emperor's crown to his son and the tradition was broken. His son Commodus' reign was noticeably less successful than any of the previous five appointed emperors and Commodus was assassinated after 12 years in power.
Marcus was obviously heavily influenced by Epictetus, and at times manages to state some of his ideas more poetically (esp in the Hays translation). Overall though, The Enchiridion is a much better base for Stoic philosophy. It's short, acerbic and almost every section can send you off into deep thought.
Meditations is mostly interesting as an example of someone trying to life a Stoic life - it shows Marcus' failures, his attempts to conquer his fears. It's well worth reading, but you'll learn more from Epictetus.
Edit: for Epictetus, I prefer the George Long over the Elizabeth Carter: http://www.ptypes.com/enchiridion.html
I read Discourses, and frankly I was not aware of Enchiridion until today. I can that every sentence or paragraph of Discourses got me to pause, and think hard.
It was easier for me to just load up in my mp3 player and digest.
Here are some discussions on the different translations:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Stoicism/comments/137knd/survey_best...
http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/jaqm1/whats_the_best_...
Edit: Incidentally, a simple Google would've shown it was written in Greek: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations
Never trust people on the internet, even yourself.
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio. - Ep. II.i.156
"Greece, once conquered, herself conquered the artless victor, and planted the banner of civilization in the farmlands of Rome."
I have translated freely and taken considerable license.
By Aurelius' time, familiarity with Greek for the ruling classes was a given; as a matter of preference, it is a more supple language and probably more comfortable to use for putting abstract reasoning to words.
Then you'd only be getting one translation - yours. With the amount of context that goes into a good translation, I'm not actually certain it's better for something like this that's more philosophical than artistic.
Meditations in Wall Street
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3570107;view=1up;...
There are great recommendations in there if anybody wants to dive deeper into Stoicism or understand Meditations better.
There were many quotes in this book that have had a deep impact on me. One I thought was interesting is this:
> Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.
It struck me that even if Marcus Aurelius had actually lived a thousand years, he would have died a thousand years ago.
Another insight if you want to call it so is that the texts are 2000 years old and they still apply to daily life now.
I would also assume that by "slaves" he means, legal status aside, what would be called "the help" in a different era, i.e., the most visible members of a wealthy person's household and retinue. I'm sure that nobody was socially shunned because their salt-miners and ice-cutters were hideous to behold.
You don't need to be Einstein to see that this has a huge crossover into the startup world where the stress is huge.
Your ignorance and inability to make this connection is endearing if not a little worrying for your future sanity.
Should I post a fucking copy of Walden next week?
Sure, why not, Walden is also a great book and foundational text and raises questions about the relationship of the state to its citizens which are increasingly appropriate for people working in the global online community to consider. It's also a great read.
Compared to the content of most of the links on HN, both Walden and the Meditations have more insightful commentary, and more generally applicable lessons, than most of the websites posted on here will produce over their entire lifetime.