I was talking to a friend recently about life and its aims and meaning. Offhand I mentioned I was reading Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius, arguably the most powerful man in the world when he was composing it. There is debate about whether he wrote Meditations for public consumption, but that is somewhat irrelevant to why we moderns read it.
I could attempt to derive the fundamental theorem of calculus and reconstruct vast swathes of modern mathematics from first principles. But I don’t. Part of it is that I don’t have the skill or time. But another aspect is that I can stand on the shoulders of those who have come before, and lean upon the hard work that has come before. And so with natural science, which has a institutional backdrop I can’t recapitulate. There’s no point in reinventing the wheel.
There are those, like Steven Pinker, who suggest that the nature of modern philosophy is that it has been relegated to answering questions which seem well night insoluble. And I am in broad sympathy with this perspective. But the reason I look to the ancients is that often I find their musings more human and real than those of the philosophers of today, who in the analytic tradition put passion in thrall to reason, and on the Continent place a premium on stylistic verve at the cost of coherency. I don’t think that Marcus Aurelius, or Seneca or Christ for that matter, had any specific deep insight into the general human condition. But they probably addressed most of the same questions that the average person today has. There may be benefit then in seeing what their answers to the deep questions were, because presumably the generations that have intervened have selected at least some for memetic clarity, if it not depth.
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