Kendime Düşünceler (Meditations)

Marcus Aurelius did not give this book a title. In Greek it is known as Ta eis heauton, roughly "things addressed to himself". In English it is Meditations, in Turkish most commonly Kendime Düşünceler.

Marcus was born in Rome in 121 and was emperor from 161 until his death in 180. In those same years he led long campaigns against the Germanic tribes. Some of the notes were written on campaign: at the end of the first book Granua, in the land of the Quadi, and at the end of the second Carnuntum stand as place notes. The text consists of twelve books, and it is not certain that the sections are arranged in the order they were written.

Since the book is in the public domain, this piece rests on the text itself: on George Long's English translation of 1862 and on the sales pages of the Turkish editions. I do not claim to have compared the Turkish translations line by line.

A book written for no one

This text was not written to be published. These are notes Marcus kept for himself, written without any thought that someone might read them one day. It was first printed in 1558-59 in Zurich, with the Greek text and a Latin translation; that is, roughly fourteen centuries after Marcus.

I think this matters, because the voice of the book comes from here. It is not trying to persuade anyone, and it is not trying to look good to anyone. It repeats the same idea three times, because it is repeating it to itself. This is not a teacher giving a lesson, it is a man pulling himself together in the morning.

The French philosopher Pierre Hadot systematized this reading. In La citadelle intérieure (1992; in English The Inner Citadel, 1998) he reads the notes less as a diary and more as Stoic "spiritual exercises": mental exercises repeated in order to change the person doing them. I think this is the most useful reading. When you read Marcus not as someone explaining a doctrine but as someone testing a doctrine on himself, the text opens up.

The first and second books: a list of debts and the morning

The first book opens not with a list of principles but with a list of gratitude. Marcus lists what he learned from whom. From his grandfather Verus, a gentle temper and mastery over his anger; from his teacher Rusticus, that he needed to train himself, and access to the discourses of Epictetus; from Fronto, how envy and duplicity work in people who hold power; from Maximus, self-command and cheerfulness; from Antoninus, the father who adopted him, calm resolve and modesty in the face of honors.

This section is easily skipped, but I think you should not skip it. Beneath the harsh voice of the rest of the book there is a gratitude, and that gratitude is visible here.

The second book begins with the best-known morning sentence. "Begin the morning by saying to thyself", says Long's translation. What follows is a reminder to himself: today you will meet people who are meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious and unsociable. They all behave this way because they do not know good and bad. On top of that, they share the same reason as you. None of them can do you real harm, and being angry with them is contrary to nature.

The same book also holds the limit of time: you keep postponing the chance to gather your mind, and the time will not come back. The second book ends with a Carnuntum note.

Third to sixth: nature, retreat, work

In the third book, the image that held me most is the beauty of things that look flawed: bread that has split open, a shriveled fig, a ripe olive, the wrinkles on a lion's brow. A mind that knows nature sees a charm in these too, he says. In the same book life is described as a sea voyage and death as stepping ashore, and he advises against wasting time thinking about what other people are doing.

In the fourth book comes the best-known idea of the book: people want to retreat to the countryside, to the seashore, but at any moment you choose you can retreat into yourself. Peace is the good order of the mind. The fire image is here too: a strong fire swallows whatever is put in front of it and turns it into its own material, and reason treats the obstacle in its way in the same manner. The sentence "Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break", the image of the rocky headland standing in place while the waves crash, is also in this book.

The fifth book opens with being unable to get out of bed. Marcus asks himself: I am getting up to do the work of a human being; was I born to stay in a warm bed? Ants, spiders, bees do their own work. Rest too has a limit set by nature. The idea that "the obstacle advances the action" also appears here: what stops an action can become the material of that action.

In the sixth book, the place I marked is this: the best revenge against someone who does wrong is not to become like them. The same book contains the exercise of looking at food and wine in their naked state; wine is a little grape juice, fish is the corpse of a living creature. The idea that what is not good for the hive is not good for the bee is also here.

Seventh to ninth: the inner citadel and other people

In the seventh book there is the sentence about looking inward: "Look within. Within is the fountain of good." The spring is inside, and if you dig it will gush up. The eighth book ties the same idea to the image of a citadel: a mind freed from passions is a citadel, and the person who does not retreat there is unhappy. The title of Hadot's book comes from this image too.

The eighth book has another powerful image: a severed hand or foot. A person who cuts himself off from others and from the whole resembles such a severed limb. For him, the fact that a person can rejoin the whole is a gift of nature. The ninth book says that the one who does wrong actually wrongs himself. If you can, correct them by teaching; if not, bear it and keep your expectations realistic, because shameless people will go on existing.

The common movement in these books is to separate what depends on your mind from what depends on others. It looks like an ancient older brother of the distinction I described in the piece on acceptance and commitment therapy.

Tenth to twelfth: stop talking and be

In the tenth book there is, I think, one of the best sentences in the book: stop talking about what a good person should be like, and be one. A sentence that lands on top of a shelf full of self-improvement books.

The eleventh book has two faces. On one side there are reflections on the theater: tragedy reminds people that suffering is part of nature, and old comedy carries a frankness that reins in insolence. On the other side, the power of goodwill: a disposition that is truly good is invincible, he says. In the same book, while describing readiness for death, he also mentions the Christians: he says the readiness should come from reason, not from obstinacy.

The book ends, in the twelfth book, with the image of a city and an actor: you have been a citizen of this great city for a certain time, the nature that brought you in now sends you out, go content and satisfied. In Long's translation the final words run in this direction.

Its strongest points

The book's greatest strength is that the one writing it was in power. When Marcus belittles fame, praise and wealth, he is someone who actually holds them. That adds weight to what he says. He sees himself not as someone giving lessons but as someone still learning.

The second strength is the balance between harshness and compassion. In sentences like "teach in order to correct" and "do not be angry with him, he does not know" there is a softness. In the same text he is merciless with himself: wake up, do your work, stop making excuses.

The third is its fragmentary structure. You do not need to read this book from start to finish in one go. One morning, one page.

Weak points and criticisms

Repetition. The same idea comes twenty times and often adds nothing new. It is good to go into the book knowing this; otherwise the book turns into a tedious echo. D. A. Rees wrote in 1992 that he found the text deeply moving but did not see it as original philosophy. If you ask me, he is right: Marcus is not building a new system, he is applying the existing Stoa to his own life.

There is also the matter of emotional coldness. The sentence "no one can harm you" can read like an instruction to suppress for someone going through real pain. The Stoa's aim is not to be without emotion, but when the text is read quickly it comes across that way. The passage on the Christians is also the coldest place in the book: even readiness for death he describes by belittling a group.

And the text itself is problematic. The Greek text we have rests on two main sources. One is a manuscript on which the 1558-59 edition was based, later lost; the other is a fourteenth-century copy that is corrupt, with some lines dropped. So every translation contains, to some degree, editorial decisions.

From an ADHD point of view I need to be honest: the book says nothing about ADHD and offers no method designed for ADHD. It is known that the roots of cognitive behavioral therapy reach back to the Stoics; Aaron Beck's manual on depression says this openly. But that does not mean reading Marcus reduces ADHD symptoms. What has been tested for effect is a structured program carried out with a therapist. I explained this distinction in more detail in the piece on cognitive behavioral therapy.

Which edition to get

When I searched on Kitapyurdu, many editions are listed from Kapra, Say, Can, Oda, İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları and other publishers. As far as I could see on the pages, the hardcover edition from İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları is translated by Yunus Emre Ceren, 2018, 156 pages. The Say Yayınları edition is translated by Furkan Akderin, 2022, 136 pages. The Can Yayınları edition is translated by C. Cengiz Çevik, 184 pages. I could not verify from the pages which of them was translated directly from the Greek; only Say's page says that the twelve books were written in Greek.

Even the difference in page counts shows how much the editions differ from one another in prefaces, footnotes and typesetting. When choosing, an edition with footnotes that keeps the book numbers looks safer to me. If you read English, you can access Long's translation for free.

Who it is for, and who it is not for

For the reader who wants to enter philosophy through the text itself rather than a textbook, who can read in short pieces, and who is looking for an inner voice that is harsh but not crude. Every page holds a small test.

For someone with ADHD, the practical use could be this: one page, in the morning, at a fixed time. As I described in the piece on the morning routine, what keeps a routine going is not its content but its consistency. Adding that morning's sentence to your evening end-of-day shutdown does the same job.

For someone who has just been diagnosed and is still in anger or grief, it is too early. The sentence "being angry is contrary to nature" can feel unfair to someone trying to carry their anger. For that period the piece on anger outbursts is a better fit.

Its place on the shelf

On the philosophy shelf, Marcus's closest neighbor is Sisifos Söyleni (The Myth of Sisyphus). Both ask what to do in a world that offers no meaning. Camus accepts and rebels, Marcus accepts and takes his place. It also sits well next to Frankl's İnsanın Anlam Arayışı (Man's Search for Meaning): all three argue that where you cannot change the conditions, your attitude is still in your hands.

In the diary I have written about a few concepts that neighbor the Stoa. Ataraxia is about tranquility, hypomone about endurance, amor fati about Nietzsche's idea of loving one's fate and Epictetus's plainer approach to it, and oikeiosis about the Stoa's idea of the innermost circle. Read together with this book, they complete one another.

My stance

Finishing this book once and putting it on the shelf feels wrong to me, and so does opening it every morning to try to draw a lesson. I think the right way to use it is to see it as a mirror you open now and then: what am I angry about this morning, which task am I putting off, whom am I making excuses for. Marcus asked himself these questions and does not seem satisfied with the answers. That is why I trust him: these are the notes of a man who does not fool himself.