I've nearly finished The Meditations now. Has anyone here who fetishes stoicism and Roman emperors actually read it? It just made me depressed. Long story short, full of blackpilled quotes like "a person who dies after three days and a person who dies after a long life are all the same, they both go back to nothingness." Or "What does a great name matter? Who cares? You're going to be dead and can't enjoy it, and anyone who remembers you will be dead soon enough too and no one will care about any of you." He said something else along the lines of wondering why people idolize great men of the past, if they don't like anyone who is alive today. They only idolize them because they're dead but if they were around now they would shit talk them as much as they shit talk everyoen else. But also, pleasure is bad. Don't enjoy things.
It just seems really blackpilled and miserable. The only things I liked were saying basically, man was made to be part of society, so go work hard and be part of it, like bees do what comes naturally to them, and also, try to be kind to people who aren't as advanced as you are and gently correct them, but if they're too stupid, just leave them be because you won't fix them anyway, and be indulgent of them.
Any Forums is the opposite of Marcus Aurelius. Aside from being angry and unpleasant all the time, is always going on about muh people, muh nation, muh genetics, etc.
I don't think any of the people who jerk off to Rome have read him at all.
What is the point of Stoicism?
Always seemed kinda pointless desu.
I care more about the attitude of the Indo-European ancestors than anything Roman stoics believed, and to them, the ancestors were paramount
It's a way to deal with existential trauma. A crutch rather than a solution.
It's true though. No amount of coping can prevent death, slander or hate targeted towards you. You can't control the outcome, only the process. Great men are not great as a person, but by the good they have created in this world that outlives them. As humans, we're worthless, it's what we create that is appreciated and lives on.
You have to remember that he was emperor of practically the whole world as far as he knew, the utter peak of power, and this book was just his personal diary, it was never meant to be published or seen by others.
He was a man that could literally have anything and do anything but showed incredible restraint and moral virtue with really flies in the face of ideas that humans are innately corrupt or that power always corrupts.
Ironically the only corruption he had was his love for his son which ironically plunged the empire into years of conflict and struggle.
Stoicism is not “blackpilled” but its purely realistic
If something is outside your influence, then there is no reason to complain about it, and if it IS within your power to change, you should change it or else don’t complain either.
Any Forums is an agiprop psy-op so its full of complainers and twisted fantasy versions of real life.
Based
Interesting. My thought is stoicism was a cope for Rome after the Roman empire became a gay commercialist mess. There were no "Romans" left and most of the emperors weren't even ethnic Latins, and nihilistic Epicureanism was the mainstream. I'm not a Christian but I think Christianity became popular because of this crushing nihilism.
Well, that's the thing. Aurelius said that that doesn't matter. No one is going to appreciate it so don't even think about it.
Humility and doing what needs to be done to improve the condition of your family, society, nation and yourself, without being overly attached to anything and losing your mind over things you don't have control over. Essentially what even the Bhagwad Gita and Buddhism say.
>He was a man that could literally have anything and do anything but showed incredible restraint and moral virtue with really flies in the face of ideas that humans are innately corrupt or that power always corrupts.
That is an interesting point. That he didn't intend to publish it and it was just his own thoughts. And yes it is interesting to think that he felt this way although he could have lived as decadently as Nero.
>My thought is stoicism was a cope for Rome after the Roman empire became a gay commercialist mess.
Yeah I'd say that's accurate. The west is at a similar stage as Rome of Aurelius' time.
Marcus Aurelius teaches us that even in a palace it is possible to live a good life.
You could always follow Epicurus OP. Live a reasonable hedonistic life and you could probably get through it just as well.
I don’t think stoicism is nhilistic, and it had a big influence on Christian thought as well
However you are correct about nihilism and paranoid superstition running rampant in the later empire.
The skeptics and the epicureans were both true nihilists while the stoics were just realistic/rationalists, even Marcus himself admits his belief in God/Gods in Meditations.
Platonism, through stoicism played an important role in developing christian thought
Buddhism is better because at least there's Enlightenment in the end, whereas Stoicism is just a platform for you to understand the body dies and dont things too seriously
Could you tell me how so? About the stoic influence on Christianity. I know Christianity is basically Platonism mixed with the Bible, but what in it comes from Stoicism, which is more fatalistic I would say and really has little to do with it.
I don’t think its fair to compare the current “west” to Rome at all when Rome was basically unmatched and for all intents and purposes universal.
The only close parallel is China before European expansion, the ideologies and struggles faced by both nations are very similar, and even today the Chinese maintain a lot of qualities which would seem familiar to the Romans (ancestor worship, paternal social hierarchy, omnipresent mysticism in place of large organized religions, persistent issues with unassimilated minorities and cults)
Its funny to think that in Chinese historiography, they paint European history as a long “warlord era” from the collapse of Rome to the current American hegemony.
let a gladiator fuck your wife
>literal cuck philosophy
Platonism was basically dead during the Roman empire, the three successors were Skepticism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism
Skepticism and Epicureanism basically died leaving little relevant influence except maybe in the most basic sense, but Stoic schools were very popular with serious intellectual types who also gravitated towards Christianity as a result of their decaying society.
>love me petroglyphs
user I have bad news about snowniggers....
>Just stop having feelings bro
Yeah it's retarded.
stoicism has always been a slave philosophy, that is why it is pushed so much. "how to be ok when you are really not" is the whole essence of their philosophy.
seneca is a pretentious recipe collecting faggot (spergs about how to use time wisely, then i read what a good investment of his time was, it was collecting recipes, seneca would have been a facebookmum) and whose pupil commanded him to kill himself (nero), epictetus was a cripple and a slave, aurelius was surrounded by enemy troops.
it is literally the philosophy of "make the best out of a shitty scenario"
read nietzsche on the stoics, i am not a big fan but nietzsche was a S-grade philologist.
Heraclitus best waifu.
stoicism can not be nihilistic, it has virtue as highest good.
>spergs about how to use time wisely, then i read what a good investment of his time was, it was collecting recipes, seneca would have been a facebookmum)
This made me kek, thank you user
1. Marcus Aurelius was an opium fiend. Atharaxia is easy when you're on downers 24/7.
2. Stoicism and similar cults like buddhism are simply a symptom of dying societies. Stoicism became big in Rome when the Roman way of life changed to the point that men could not achieve virtue with mighty deeds anymore, so they elevated the female trait of "being able to tolerate hardships" to a virtue and became stoics who could achieve virtue by doing nothing and suffering.
Of course this plays into incels'/autists' phlegmatic nature, so stoicism became a pol meme.
Stoic influence on Christianity is a meme created by people who don't know shit about stoicism and/or Christianity.
Oh and can you please tell me what you like about Heraclitus?
OTOH you could say protestantism with it's dour fatalism is pretty stoic, but of course protestantism came a lot later, again in a time of a dying society (Shortly before the Renaissance),
To learn to accept reality as is rather than how you wish it were.