Marcus Aurelius on the importance of seeing things as they really are

Marcus Aurelius (121 – 180 CE) was the ruler of the Roman Empire from 161 to 180 CE, and he was also an important Stoic philosopher. The Meditations, his book, contains important reflections on the world and human life from within the Stoic perspective.

Certainly, though, he wasn’t a doctrinaire Stoic thinker. So far from being a card-carrying Stoic, he hardly talks explicitly about the Stoics in The Meditations, and he at one point shows disdain for those he thinks of as logic-chopping hair-splitters. The Meditations wasn’t intended as a philosophical treatise at all, but instead as a series of personal reflections. But his thoughts are filtered through a Stoic lens, and many of the key ideas he presents are recognizable Stoic ones.

One of his key insights comes from Epictetus (50-135 CE), a slightly earlier Stoic thinker, who prioritized the idea of critically examining the way that the world strikes us. You might immediately be hit with the impression that, say, the loss of a loved one isn’t something you could ever recover from, but that impression is not one you have to accept. You can interpret the world in any number of ways, and it is our interpretation of events and things that makes the difference. We don’t have to be beholden to a particular impression or judgment.

Marcus Aurelius developed practices for this kind of mindfulness: the ability to take a step back and gain awareness of what is going on in the mind and how we might change or re-evaluate our judgments of things.

Here’s a key passage from the Meditations:

“Define whatever it is we perceive — trace its outline — so we can see what it really is: its substance. Stripped bare. As a whole. Unmodified. And to call it by its name — the thing itself and its components, to which it will eventually return. Nothing is so conducive to spiritual growth as this capacity for logical and accurate analysis of everything that happens to us” (Meditations 3.11).

This is the kind of mindfulness that I was describing. We strip away the mythology that our mind covers things with, and this is the key to our growth.

For instance, he wants us to realize that even the tastiest food is just dead animals. The most sought-after kind of wine is mere grape juice. The purple robes of his office as emperor of Rome are just the wool of sheep dyed with the blood of shellfish.

When he turns to the weighty matter of what we should value in life, he dismisses the idea that we should value praise. An audience clapping for us is “no more than the clacking of their tongues” (Meditations 6.16). Thanks to this sort of analysis, we “see how pointless they are” and we “strip away the legend that encrusts them” (6.13).

The idea is that we see an audience clapping and interpret it as the praise and esteem that make a human life good. Consider how many people chase after public praise and esteem like that. But that isn’t the clapping of the audience itself that we are responding to. We are responding to an act of our mind. This act is the mythologizing of the audience clapping, by means of which our mind transforms this event or thing into something new.

Accordingly, we ought to respond by using our minds to strip away the mythology or legend that encrusts a thing. Once we see it as it really is, we’ll see how utterly pointless it is. It was nothing to get so worked up about.

His example about seeing the purple robes as nothing but dyed wool is particularly striking. He is saying that the foremost symbol of the imperial office is nothing to get worked up about! That’s an interesting glimpse into the mind of a 2nd-century Roman emperor.

But this is easier said than done. After all, if we lose our job, or if someone we love dies, and we are inconsolable as a result, we might resist the claim that we are responding to mythology. We take our strong emotions to be the appropriate response to a terrible situation.

And yet Marcus Aurelius really did think the following:

It’s not what they do that bothers us: that’s a problem for their minds, not ours. It’s our own misperceptions. Discard them. Be willing to give up thinking of this as a catastrophe… and your anger is gone. How do you do that? By recognizing that you’ve suffered no disgrace” (Meditations 11.18; emphasis in original).

This is the key: thinking that this isn’t a catastrophe. No matter what goes on, it just isn’t a catastrophe.

Stop thinking of it as such, and your emotional response will change. It isn’t what happens to us that bothers us; it’s our own judgments. But first, we need to be willing to give up our current way of seeing things.

For this reason, he says, provocatively, that “everything a person needs to avoid real harm” exists within each of us already (2.11). We avoid real harm by changing our mindsets accordingly. Strip away the legends and mythologies that encrust things. If we can do that, we can avoid being harmed.

Here’s an even more provocative claim:

“Choose not to be harmed — you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been” (Meditations 4.7).

This flies in the face of the way we normally think of being harmed. We often think of harm as the result of something being done to us, and it’s as simple as that. But Marcus Aurelius wants to complicate that picture: when we see things as they are, we realize that we haven’t been harmed unless or until our mind makes that judgment.

Since it is our mind’s judgment that is so crucial here, we have the power to avoid being harmed altogether.

How? By choosing to not be harmed. And once we choose not to be harmed, we won’t feel harmed, and we will not actually have been harmed.

This is why seeing things as they are is such an important practice for Marcus Aurelius. It’s the heart of living well, he thinks. As difficult as this might seem, the first step lies in giving up thinking of what happens to us as a catastrophe, as he puts it. The hardest part is being willing to do this and willing to re-adjust our mindset.

Douglas R. Campbell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Alma College. He is the author of An Introduction to the Ethics of Social Media. He is also the host of The Ancient Philosophy Podcast.

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