Your Part in the Whole
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Τούτων ἀεὶ δεῖ μεμνῆσθαι, τίς ἡ τῶν ὅλων φύσις καὶ τίς ἡ ἐμὴ καὶ πῶς αὕτη πρὸς ἐκείνην ἔχουσα καὶ ὁποῖόν τι μέρος ὁποίου τοῦ ὅλου οὖσα καὶ ὅτι οὐδεὶς ὁ κωλύων τὰ ἀκόλουθα τῇ φύσει, ἧς μέρος εἶ, πράσσειν τε ἀεὶ καὶ λέγειν.
Always keep this in mind: what the nature of the universe is, and what my own nature is, how mine stands toward that, and what sort of part, of what sort of whole, it is; and that no one can prevent you from always acting and speaking in accord with the nature of which you are a part.
A private method-note: before acting, recall four things together — the nature of the universe, your own nature, how the two relate, and your place as a part of that whole — since nothing external can then stop you from living and speaking in accordance with it.
The passage compresses an entire method into a single sentence-shape: four things to hold ready before anything else — what the nature of the whole is, what my own nature is, how the second stands toward the first, and what sort of part of what sort of whole I am. Marcus does not answer them here; he prescribes only that they be kept in mind, and the verb he chooses says as much. μεμνῆσθαι is a perfect infinitive, not "to recall" as a single act but "to already hold in a settled state of readiness." The four questions move outward and then back in — cosmos to self to relation to position — so that self-knowledge is defined structurally, as a location inside a larger body, rather than psychologically, as an inventory of one's own traits or history.
The real turn comes in the clause readers remember less often than the argument that produces it: because you are a part of that nature, no one can stop you from acting and speaking in accordance with it. A metaphysical premise — part of a whole — yields a practical guarantee of unhindered agency, and the inference anticipates the Epictetan claim that runs through this whole book, from the meddlers and haters of 2.1 to the recurring insistence that obstruction only ever reaches the body or circumstance, never the rational choice itself. Whether that inference actually holds is exactly the question Marcus keeps re-arguing across the Meditations rather than settling here once and for all.
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Meditations 2.9 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/meditations-greek/2.9/