9781945186240

and exploratory, like the notes of Wittgenstein or Weil, and it contains little
or nothing that is original. It suggests not a mind recording new perceptions
or experimenting with new arguments, but one obsessively repeating and
reframing ideas long familiar but imperfectly absorbed.
Perhaps the best description of the entries is that suggested by the
French scholar Pierre Hadot. They are “spiritual exercises” composed to
provide a momentary stay against the stress and confusion of everyday life:
a self-help book in the most literal sense. A revealing comment in this
context is Meditations 5.9, where Marcus reminds himself “not to think of
philosophy as your instructor, but as the sponge and egg white that relieve
ophthalmia—as a soothing ointment.” On this reading, the individual
entries were composed not as a record of Marcus’s thoughts or to enlighten
others, but for his own use, as a means of practicing and reinforcing his
own philosophical convictions. Such an interpretation accounts for several
aspects of the entries that would otherwise be puzzling. It explains the
predominance of the imperative in the text; its purpose is not to describe or
reflect (let alone to “meditate”), but to urge, direct, and exhort. 7 And it
explains also the repetitiveness that strikes any reader of the work almost
immediately—the continual circling back to the same few problems. The
entries do not present new answers or novel solutions to these problems, but
only familiar answers reframed. It was precisely this process of reframing
and reexpressing that Marcus found helpful.
The recognition that the entries are as much process as product also
accounts for the shapelessness and apparent disorder of the work. We do not
know by whom or on what basis the individual books of the Meditations
were arranged; the order may be chronological, or partly chronological, or
wholly arbitrary. The arrangement of the individual entries may or may not
be Marcus’s own, though its very randomness suggests that it goes back to
the author (a later editor would have been tempted to group together
thematically similar entries, and perhaps to tie up some of the more obvious
loose ends). Nor can we always be sure where individual entries begin and
end; in some cases this is a question Marcus himself might not have been
able to answer. 8
A special position is occupied by Book 1, which is distinguished from
the rest of the work by its autobiographical nature and by the greater
impression of conscious design and ordering apparent in it. It consists of
seventeen entries in which Marcus reflects on what he learned from various