Categories
- Art (356)
- Other (3,632)
- Philosophy (2,814)
- Psychology (4,018)
- Society (1,010)
Recent Questions
- Why did everyone start to hate the Russians if the U.S. did the same thing in Afghanistan, Iraq?
- What needs to be corrected in the management of Russia first?
- Why did Blaise Pascal become a religious man at the end of his life?
- How do I know if a guy likes you?
- When they say "one generation", how many do they mean?
This is not something specific to the writings of Aurelius. In Stoic philosophy, this is a well-known concept, “prohairesis” – literally translated roughly as” preference “or”ability to choose”.
This dominant principle is identified precisely with the mind and will of a person, a certain unity of them. This is, for example, a functional system of the psyche, which has the ability to control everything else in the personality (from Greek philosophy-the plant and animal principles of the soul).
With a large degree of coincidence, this concept can be correlated with what in modern psychology – at least in the psychoanalytic tradition – is called the Ego.
Unlike pop-psychological sources, where the Ego is always something inherently pathological (“false Self” or self-conceit), in the present psychological works, the Ego is defined as the center of rational management of the individual; a nuclear integrating system that provides (with sufficient development) constructive resolution of internal and external conflicts and overall balance and effectiveness in behavior.
Returning to Aurelius, when you see something about the dominant principle in him, you can confidently assume that it is a question of a person's ability to reason rationally, understand possible alternatives, make a personal volitional choice from these options, and also make efforts to implement a volitional intention.