Meditations

Generally speaking, Stoicism does not embrace the idea of “free will” in the modern sense, meaning that humans are free to determine their own outcomes by the choices they make. The Stoic view is essentially deterministic, in that everything that happens was meant to happen. The creation of the Cosmos and everything within it is conceptualized as a woven cloth whose design is constructed and governed by Fortune, Nature, and Providence. When Stoics speak of “freedom,” it is the freedom to choose how to react in given situations instead of the power of controlling one’s external circumstances. The situations themselves are woven into a larger plan over which humans have no control.

This Stoic conception is the concept of freedom that Marcus Aurelius develops in Meditations. “Whatever happens to you,” he writes, “was being prepared for you from everlasting and the mesh of causes was ever spinning from eternity both your own existence and the incidence of this particular happening” (95). Accepting the predestination of events becomes the mechanism that then frees humans to focus on what is within their control: their responses and actions. Freedom is the freedom to do and be good in whatever circumstances humans find themselves.