Everything is Familiar and Temporary

Meditations Notebook 7 and the Prevalence of Vice

We have now started Notebook 7 of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations — which, according to the notes in the Waterfield translation¹, is the least unified of the notebooks. Because of that, I am planning on only writing two or three posts on this notebook, and instead of drawing out a major theme (such as the idea that our thoughts determine our lives, as we see in Notebook 6), I’ll focus on a single paragraph per post. And so I’ll turn to §1 of Notebook 7 for this week.

What is vice? Nothing you haven’t seen before. In fact, whatever happens in life you should keep readily available the thought that what you’re seeing is nothing you haven’t seen before. As a general rule, look where you will, sameness is all you’ll find: history books on ancient times, recent times, and the period in between are filled with the same things, and they are the same things with which states and households are fully occupied now. Nothing is new; everything is both familiar and temporary.

This is a truly curious paragraph. For one, Marcus seems to asking a definitional question, but he does not offer a definition. A definition is available to him, as we have seen in other parts of the Meditations, but in this paragraph he does not seem to be concerned with the essential nature of virtue and vice. Instead, Marcus is asking how he ought to respond to the fact that vice is everywhere.

This is, I think, a particular feature of Marcus’ thought. Epictetus, perhaps, would go on to offer a definition of vice, and from that definition he might draw out several conclusions. Aristotle certainly would have done so — though he was less interested in the immanently practical. But Marcus is an emperor first and a philosopher second, and so he needs to figure out what he is going to do even when he has not come to the most philosophically satisfying conclusions. And as we learned all the way back in Notebook 2, we are going to encounter vicious people every single day.

Recall how Marcus begins that notebook:

At the start of the day, tell yourself: I shall meet people who are officious, ungrateful, abusive, treacherous, malicious, and selfish. In every case, they’ve got like this because of their ignorance of good and bad.

Every day, we will encounter vice. In Notebook 2, Marcus is concerned with how he will respond to particular people who have these vicious traits. But in Notebook 7, Marcus’ focus appears to be much broader. He recognizes that vice and disorder is, in some sense, the ordinary state of the world.

‘Ordinary’ is a strange world — sometimes it is a normative notion, where we privilege the ordinary and the normal. But here I mean it in the strictest statistical sense: vice and disorder are not unusual, and so encountering them should not be a surprise to us. As students of the Stoics, we want to pursue virtue and order (especially, or even perhaps exclusively, on the personal level). So we need to learn how to pursue these in spite of the banality and prevalence of vice. One way that Marcus does that is by reminding himself that all vice, and really everything, is ‘familiar and temporary’ — we have seen its like before, and we have seen that it will all pass.

I go back and forth on this point — sometimes, I think that is one of Marcus’ weakest points in the Meditations, and sometimes I think there must be some genuine insight. When I write these posts, and when I read any philosophical text, I do my best to place myself at the feet of the masters — I am here to learn from them, and focusing too much on criticism can get in the way of this. But learning is an active process with a dialectical structure, and so to learn one must actually question and engage.

As I question Marcus on this point, I do not find easy answers. Is Marcus merely noting that, in the end, things tend to work out for the best? Is it Marcus’ belief in the Logos and a sense of Providence that allows him to believe that vice and disorder will remain temporary? What should we do when these things seem to be permanent, or at least seem like they may persist for a very long time? Perhaps you, dear reader, can help me see the wisdom in this paragraph.

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