“Persuade me or prove to me that I am mistaken in thought or deed, and I will gladly change—for it is the truth I seek, and the truth never harmed anyone. Harm comes from persisting in error and clinging to ignorance.”[Hat tip Objective Standard Institute]
~ Marcus Aurelius
2 comments:
I've been reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and there's a lot of pearls of wisdom in there. His metaphysics and epistemology doesn't match Objectivism in it's consistency and correctness (being what Peikoff would categorise as M1), but there's a lot of pearls in there around human relationships and effective mindsets for every day life, that you won't get from Objectivism.
If he's typical of the Stoics, I think the Objectivist critique of them is overblown too, based on too literal an interpretation of certain Stoic tenets. He doesn't regard sacrifice and pain as an end in itself (as some critiques would have you believe), more that you often have to submit to short term pain or unpleasantness to achieve long term success and happiness.
Here's an example:
“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these thing happen to them by virtue of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly.....I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him...”
Marcus Aurelius, 175 CE
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