Episode #236 ... Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

Today we talk about the collection of journals known as Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. We mark the differences between Stoicism, modern Stoic ethics, and the journals of Marcus Aurelius. We talk about the divine logos, indifferents, and how metaphysical assumptions ladder up into the virtue ethics of the ancient Stoics. We talk about some of the context that Marcus was writing each of these journals in. All of this while trying to relay some of the biggest ideas that he wrote about. Hope you love it. :) Sponsors: Nord VPN: https://nordvpn.com/philothis Quince: https://www. QUINCE.com/pt ZocDoc: https://www. ZocDoc.com/PHILO Thank you so much for listening! Could never do this without your help. Website: https://www.philosophizethis.org/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/philosophizethis Social: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/philosophizethispodcast X: https://twitter.com/iamstephenwest Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/philosophizethisshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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  Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West, this is Philosophize This, Patreon.com/PhilosophizeThis, philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there. I hope you love the show today. So depending on what your tastes are, you could think that Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is the best philosophy book you've ever had the privilege of reading, or you could think it's a book that oversimplifies what it is to be a person on a level that's almost insulting when you read it. Heard both of these takes plenty of times, getting emails over the years. But as I always do on this podcast, whenever we're covering anything, today my job is to make a case for what's amazing about this book, Meditations. I'm going to talk about some of the big ideas from it, and hopefully give someone who's reading through it some important context for where Marcus Aurelius was personally at his life

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  when he wrote each of these 12 entries that make up the "books" of this book. They're called "books," not "chapters" in this case. Should also be said that next episode is going to be on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer's brutal critique of Stoicism, and how limited they thought the whole thing was. That's another thing we like to do on this podcast, consider the other side of things. Anyway, that's for next time. Today, as I said, I'm going to be making a real case for Stoicism, and a case for why, even if there are some built-in limitations to it, why those limitations may in fact be a big part of the selling point of Stoicism, how it's become so popular in the last 15 years or so? What is it about the world we're currently living in that makes the message of Stoicism in particular so attractive to people? Let's get right into it. The most important thing I think anybody reading Meditations needs to understand before they pick the book up

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  are the differences between three things that may sound like they're all the same thing on the surface, but they're actually very different. There's Stoicism as a whole system of thinking about everything in the universe, metaphysics, knowledge, and all the rest of it. Then there's Stoic Ethics as a subcomponent of Stoicism, with a lot of modern interpretation that's been added on to it. And then there's this book, Meditations, that was written by a guy named Marcus Aurelius when he was emperor of Rome between 170 and 180 AD. Understanding how very different these three things are will bring you a lot of clarity about Meditations as a book, and it'll also show someone how much they'd be missing out on about Stoicism if all they did was just read Meditations and then call it a life. By the end of the episode, we'll understand all three. Now, the first thing to say is probably to address what you could call the elephant

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  in the room regarding Marcus Aurelius as a man. Anybody who's read the book Meditations and has heard other people talk about it has probably also heard someone say at some point that Marcus Aurelius was not a philosopher. Now, I'm all for inclusive definitions to a certain extent, and I can respect the argument that this was a man who should be considered a philosopher because he lived so strictly by a philosophical code. But I also think it doesn't help anyone in this world to just lump everybody out there together under a single banner because they loosely resemble each other. And the fact is, there are differences between what Marcus Aurelius did with his life and what Seneca or Epictetus did with theirs, or for that matter Kant or Hume or any philosopher that produces work that contributes something new to the area of philosophy they were interested in. Look, none of this is to hate on Marcus Aurelius.

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  Again, most of this episode is to show what's cool about him. But if you're a fan of Stoicism, it's important to understand what Meditations is not. And when you look at the way he wrote this book, for someone to say he's not a philosopher, that he's probably better described as something else, starts to sound pretty reasonable. I mean, first of all, he never intended for this book to be published as a work of philosophy. He never wrote a single page of any of this stuff thinking people would one day be reading it and learning about Stoicism from it. Meditations was something compiled after his death from personal journals he kept only for himself about his everyday moral struggle. In fact, some modern commentators will say that Meditations is best described as just a collection of spiritual exercises that the guy did late in his life. That's it. They'll say that everything that he writes in this book has been said better by other

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  Stoic thinkers that came before him. And if that sounds kind of harsh for whatever it's worth, some important context to have here is that Marcus Aurelius himself would probably be the first one to agree with that statement about him. You know, in a very humble moment, we can read in Book Eight of Meditations, he says more or less the same thing as what we're saying right now. He's talking to himself in this particular section of the book. And he says, "Listen, dude, be real here with yourself. You know you haven't spent your whole life studying and living as a philosopher." He says, "You know, deep down, how far you really are from philosophy. And look, there's no shame in it. You should be grateful," he says, "if you can just find a way to live out the rest of the time you have here, truly living as a virtuous person." That in itself would be something beautiful to be able to carry out.

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  Who cares about whether you were able to become a philosopher during the time you had? Fate apparently had other plans for your life. And it's real moments like this in the book that really start to win you over as you're reading it. Because even if we can't say that Marcus Aurelius was a stoic philosopher pushing the conversation forward, he definitely has been an inspiration to countless people in a way that transcends Stoicism altogether. Because no matter what moral approach you're trying to commit yourself to, consider the fact that Marcus Aurelius was a man that was in his mid-50s, as he's writing these journals, which by ancient standards makes him practically ancient. Like, if you're in your 60s back then, you're basically shaking hands with the Grim Reaper every day in terms of life expectancy. And yet, this is still someone who shows up every day as the emperor of Rome, you know,

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  through plague, through long-protracted wars, through the loss of most of his children throughout his life. And this is someone who still dedicates himself to moral excellence as one of his biggest priorities. That's something anybody can take inspiration from, stoic or not. So again, there's 12 books that make up Meditations. And it's important to understand that each of these were written at different periods in his life, some of them years apart from each other, where the feel of each one of these books is going to mirror whatever he was dealing with at the time that he was writing it. Book One, it turns out, may be the only exception to that, because scholars aren't sure about exactly when he wrote Book One. Essentially, the whole chapter is him expressing gratitude for all the teachers and mentors that he's had over the years. It's a great way to start the book, I guess, if you're putting this all together after he's dead.

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  He thanks his mother and grandfather who raised him after his father died when he was three. He thanks his philosophical heroes. He thanks the man who eventually adopted him, Antoninus Pius, who was the emperor of Rome at the time and adopted Marcus expecting that he would become emperor after he died. For whatever it's worth, Marcus spends the rest of his life admiring the way his adoptive father ruled Rome before him. And as you're reading Meditations, you'll see him saying positive stuff about him in these journals all the way up until the very end of his life. But anyway, after showing the level of gratitude he has in Book One, Book Two is going to take on an entirely different feel, because it's a journal he wrote when he was on a military campaign on the front lines fighting against the Quadi. The Quadi were a Germanic group of people that were resisting Roman domination at the time. So what this means for the reader is that being

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  so close to all that death every day during the war forces Marcus Aurelius to face the reality of how easy it is for him to die, in a way that scholars often say is probably the reason this particular chapter has as its focus, fate and dealing with things that are completely outside of his control. He's going to talk about these two things a lot in Book Two. He starts it with a really useful exercise that he likes to remind himself at the start of each day. It's an exercise that the Stoic philosopher Seneca, before Marcus, called the premeditation of evils. It's an exercise designed to get someone to not have a ton of expectations about how people are going to be treating them that day, or how the world should be for them that day. Marcus says he tells himself every morning when he wakes up, that today I am going to meet, quote, meddling, ungrateful,

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  aggressive, treacherous, envious, unsociable people, end quote. I will meet these sorts of people, but he says that none of them can actually harm me, as long as I stick to living in accordance with nature. Now, useful exercise aside here, this statement that he just made is a great opportunity to start talking about Stoicism as a whole system of thought, as something that's very different from just Stoic ethics, that often becomes compartmentalized and used entirely on its own. Let me explain. See, Stoicism for Marcus Aurelius was much more than just the ethical claim. You'll often hear about Stoicism when people talk about it on the internet. This idea that, you know, you can't control what happens to you in the external world, all you can do is control the way you respond to it. People will try to summarize Stoicism into a single sentence like

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  And while this is completely true, this is a piece of Stoicism, it comes originally from the Incheridion by Epictetus, but the Stoicism that Marcus Aurelius followed and is writing about in these journals goes far beyond just ethical advice about how we should be acting. The philosopher Pierre Hadow puts it like this, he says Stoicism ultimately is a philosophy of life that's rooted in certain metaphysical claims about reality, meaning assumptions the ancient Stoics made at a metaphysical level ladder up into conclusions they make about how we should behave at an ethical level. And whenever Marcus Aurelius says anything in Meditations along the lines that he needs to live in accordance with nature, anything like that, it's these metaphysical assumptions about reality that he's going to be referencing. The ancient Stoics believed that the universe was organized by what they

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  called a divine logos that governs all things. Now, not only does this logos guarantee the rationality of each moment and ensure that the universe proceeds causally into the future based on a rational order to things, but they also believe that there's a spark of this rational logos that exists inside each and every one of us. The Stoics then thought it was our moral responsibility as people to cultivate this rationality. And whenever tough events show up in our lives that may cause us to get overly emotional or irrational, it's our job to stick to four key virtues that lie at the heart of Stoicism: justice, courage, wisdom, and temperance. What this means is that Stoicism is a type of virtue ethics, especially for someone like Marcus Aurelius who would have read and followed

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  the ancient Stoics. Meaning it's important to understand that as he's writing Meditations, he's not saying we should act rationally out of some kind of cosmic duty, this isn't deontology. He's not saying we should act rationally because it produces good outcomes for us in the world, this isn't consequentialism. Moral excellence for the Stoics is measured by how well someone sticks to certain virtues, in this case, justice, courage, wisdom, and temperance. Now, each of these virtues to the Stoics, their point is, if we really look at them closely, these are not really four different things that are totally separate from each other. Each of these virtues are just different expressions of rationality that show up in different parts of human behavior. So you can see here, for whatever it's worth, how irrational order to the universe at a metaphysical level

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  has now laddered up into something ethical that we need to follow as people. See, to expand on the way Marcus Aurelius would have saw this, if this divine logos is a force of the universe that ensures everything is rationally ordered, then everything that happens that's not part of human behavior is necessary. And what follows from that is that because this is something that is part of the rational order of things, this is also something that is in accordance with nature. Whether you're sick or healthy, rich or poor, whether a hurricane rolls through town and lifts your house and carries it away like you're in the Wizard of Oz or something. None of these things are good or bad to the Stoics. Events like this belong in a category that they called indifference. Now, we may prefer certain indifference over others. That doesn't make them good or bad.

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  The only thing that's good or bad that we can responsibly talk about is human behavior. The only way we can talk about it is to judge whether or not that behavior conforms to this moral standard of rationality. And the ancient Stoics were very serious about this point. To act irrationally is to act immorally, whatever it is. And if justice, courage, wisdom, and temperance are expressions of rationality, well, then what that means is that to act in an uncourageous way, for example, to let your actions be guided by fear in any circumstance is a moral failure on your part. All throughout, the Incheridian of Epictetus, through Seneca's letters, we get claims about how anger or intense desire, irrationality is a moral failing, and that things like justice and moderation, rational control over things, is a reflection of virtue.

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  So it's no surprise you can find passage after passage in Meditations by Marcus Aurelius taking his philosophical mentors seriously. He says in Book Nine, "Wipe out imagination, check desire, extinguish appetite, keep the ruling faculty in its own power." In Book Eight, he says, "The mind that is free from passions is a citadel." Later again in Book Nine, he says, "He who does wrong does wrong against himself. He who acts unjustly acts unjustly to himself because he makes himself bad." The point is, it's important to know that the Stoicism Marcus Aurelius is following when he's writing this book is one that is rooted in metaphysics. And when he says something like he's going to commit himself to live in accordance with nature,

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  look, the guy's not saying he's got a low-carbon footprint when he says that. He's not an ecologist. He's saying to act irrationally is to go against the rational divine logos that governs nature. Now, here's the good news, if you believe that acting rationally all the time is living in accordance with nature. For the Stoics, this way of thinking leads to two major insights that people often love when they're reading through meditations in today's world. These are insights that years later would be turned into two famous Latin phrases about life that have inspired countless thinkers since the Stoics. I'm talking about the ideas of amor fati, or to love your own fate, and memento mori, or to remember the reality of the situation you're always in as a person, that you are absolutely going to die one day. Again, both these ideas blossom out of the metaphysics that Marcus Aurelius builds

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  his whole worldview around. Let's start with memento mori. If everything that's not human behavior is just indifferent, it's the divine logos unfolding, then that includes the inevitability of your own death. And when you rationally reflect on that fact, like a Stoic would, one of the first things you realize is that you just have limited time on this planet that you're working with. It is one of the things that hits you hard when you truly internalize this fact. Marcus Aurelius says, "All the greatest emperors and heroes that you can read about are all dust and ashes at this point. Any fame or legacy that anyone has ever built is at best something that's constantly fading away and then eventually disappearing." So with this in mind, one of the things you'll see him remind himself of all throughout these journals is to live intentionally with every moment you have

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  before time runs out. We are always, in a sense, to Marcus Aurelius, running out of time to finally make the choice to live as a virtuous person. I mean, how easy is it to always put this off until tomorrow, when you don't even know if you're going to have a tomorrow? He says, "Don't live your life like you're going to be living for 10,000 years. That's never going to happen." When we do live like this, he says, "Think of all the time we typically waste as people on trivial things that don't really matter." The argument with somebody on social media, the shame over some dumb thing that you said in the past, frustration over somebody who was inconsiderate to you. How about just the time we waste, he says, on procrastination? How about the fear, sitting there worrying that, you know, you're going to be on a plane, it's going to be taken off, and a goose is

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  going to fly into one of the engines, and you're going to die? Marcus Aurelius would say that all of this thinking, and much more, by the way, is getting overly caught Up with the past and the future. And the reason that's important to recognize, he says, is that it's getting away from the one and only place that we can rationally control, the present moment. Because again, if the only thing we can control is how much our behavior corresponds to those four virtues, then that is always going to be something going on right now in the present. That's where we should be staying in our thoughts as much as we possibly can to Marcus Aurelius. Now, look, people will hear the whole, don't regret the past, don't worry about the future, stay in the present. And they'll understandably say, well, that sounds a lot like Buddhism, doesn't it? Are Stoicism and Buddhism just essentially the same thing?

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  They just come from different time periods and parts of the world? But by this point in the episode, you can probably already answer that question for yourself. No, similar language used here about the present moment for sure. But these are coming from completely different places and making completely different claims. Marcus Aurelius is saying that the present moment will allow you to live more intentionally, conforming to an abstract code of ethics that he believes in. It's not something the Buddhists are interested in. And his foundation for believing this is based in a metaphysics that Buddhists generally wouldn't be caught dead believing in. So understanding the differences between these two is going to be important because the Stoic version of this present moment and how we should use it leads to a totally different way of seeing yourself in the world than Buddhism does. There's a great passage from Book Two of Meditations that illustrates this point.

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  Remember, he's on the front lines of the war when he writes this, conscious of dying every day. And this paragraph depicts the Stoic attitude we're talking about here and adds some good context into how he was thinking at the time. He says, quote, "You may leave this life at any moment. Have this possibility in your mind in all that you do or say or think. Now, departure from the world of men is nothing to fear if gods exist because they would not involve you any harm. If they do not exist, or if they have no care for humankind, then what is life to me in a world devoid of gods or devoid of providence? But they do exist and they do care for humankind. And they have put it absolutely in man's power to avoid falling into the true kinds of harm." End quote. This is a legendary quote from this book for a reason.

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  You know, this ties together a few different things from Stoicism that we've talked about so far on this episode. That when bad things seemingly happen to you in the world, none of that stuff is actually harming you. It's your judgment about it and your reaction to it that causes you harm. Also, this quote is saying that everybody has within their power the ability to react rationally to these things and to be able to prevent that harm. Finally, what he's saying here is that when you consider how things in the universe rationally unfold, who are you really to question the rational order to things? Some more context here about Marcus when he's writing Meditations. He obviously talks about gods in that passage we just read. He'll reference gods and nature a lot all throughout these journals. But it's important to know, he doesn't actually believe in a literal pantheon of

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  human-like gods that are keeping everything organized for us. No, this is just a common way that Romans at the time, like Marcus, talked about things at the level of the universe. His actual views on this would fall more along the lines of pantheism, like many other Stoic thinkers, where God just is everything, pantheistic. In this case, God to Marcus was the divine logos that permeates everything. His point in that passage being then, that if there isn't a rational order to the universe, like the Epicureans say, rival school, then if that's true, what is life for something like me anyway? But if there is a rational order, which he thinks there is, then it becomes obvious how we can live more in accordance with it. It's Stoic virtue. Now that said, the other Latin phrase that emerges out of living in accordance with nature like this is amor fati.

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  We've talked about this concept quite a bit on this podcast, so I'll keep it kind of brief. But I'm sure you can see the logic of how this applies here. If we accept the metaphysical premise that we have no business questioning the rational order of how things play out, well, another way of saying that would be that we have no business questioning our own fate. And if you're in that spot, then to Marcus Aurelius, simply accepting your fate is, I guess, one way to go about it. But the more rational thing to do, he thinks, is to go one step further and to learn to actually love your fate as it plays out in front of you. He has a great line about this a bit later on in Meditations in Book Six. It's written a few years later in his life than Book Two, so he's writing this from a place after the wars have died down a bit. In fact, scholars sometimes say, when analyzing this particular journal, that he seems to be in a place of calm as he's writing it.

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  He says, quote, "Accept the things to which fate binds you and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart," end quote. See, the difference for Marcus between simply accepting your fate as it comes and loving your fate is that when you love your fate, you find a way to also live with virtue as you're in it, no matter what happens to you. Think of how the opposites of justice, courage, wisdom, and temperance are always living in a way that is not loving your fate. To let fear, for example, dictate your decision-making is to constantly live in opposition to what is necessarily going to happen to you from Marcus's perspective. Living in fear is not loving your fate then. Excess indulgence, for example, the opposite of temperance, is excessive and irrational.

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  It's to live like a beast, Marcus says at multiple points. But see, it's only through rationally controlling your behavior for him, you can ever truly love living in accordance with nature. He says there's no greater harmony than to love what happens and to love what was destined. There's also the famous metaphor by Zeno, one of the philosophers from the early Stoic, that no doubt Marcus would have been familiar with here as well. He says that just like a dog that's tied to the back of a cart that's moving down the road, that dog is much better off running along with the cart than being dragged along with the cart. Well, in the same way, he says, so too we, as people, should try living virtuously, embracing our place in the rational plan that's unfolding, rather than being dragged along, judging everything around us in an irrational way.

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  Once again to Marcus, to act on irrationality is to morally fail. Now, an important thing to say at this point is that all of this we've been talking about so far is not the way most modern Stoic voices will talk about Stoicism. Modern Stoics will usually soften some of these points made by the ancient Stoics, and they'll usually do so in a very self-aware way. I mean, there's nothing bad going on here. Massimo Pigliucci, for example, one of the best Stoic voices out there today, in my opinion, he'd be the first to say, "Look, there are just things that the ancient Stoics believed in back then that are untenable in the world we live in today. We've learned a lot since they were saying all these things all those years ago." And if you read the text closely, the thing we need to take from the Stoics is not that

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  you should never be acting irrationally, but more like, "Look, there are these extreme destructive emotional spirals that people can find themselves in sometimes, and people can use this philosophy the Stoics developed to help prevent those moments." That how silly would it be to throw out all the insight here, simply because the Stoics were imperfect in some of the details from a couple thousand years ago? And this is a common theme you'll see all throughout modern Stoicism. Most people are fine with bracketing off the metaphysics and saying, eh, it doesn't really matter too much in the grand scheme of things. They'll bracket off some of the more judgmental aspects from the ethics, and they'll turn it into a modernized version of Stoic ethics that's much more appealing to people living today. See, Stoicism has helped people a lot in this kind of world we're in. But why?

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  Why has it been so helpful in this kind of world in particular? Some historical context here. Stoicism originally rose to popularity during what's called the Hellenistic period. Alexander the Great dies, and this giant empire that went all the way from Greece to India is split up into four different huge sections that go under the control of his top generals. In fact, there were even more small kingdoms that emerged from within that division of things. And the point is, when power over a region is so split up like this, what happens if you're a person living in the Mediterranean Sea region during that time is that it's very possible for your life to become incredibly unpredictable, let's just say. You might not have any idea what your life is going to be like a year from now or two weeks from now.

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  The territory changes so much, you're not even sure who you're supposed to be having an allegiance to. At any second, somebody can ride into town on horseback, tell you a new set of rules to live by, and you have no choice but to just follow them and hope it's the right decision in the future. It's not a surprise that a school of thought like Stoicism would rise to popularity. I mean, when you can't control much of anything about what's happening to you in the world, why not focus on the narrow set of things you can control, like how you act in response to it? And consider how much that same message resonates with people living in the world we do. How many people out there live their lives every day, not knowing whether World War III is going to break out today or two weeks from now? You're just supposed to trust the people in charge. They seem pretty smart. I feel great about this, really.

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  How many people live in a climate of technology right now where things change so quickly? You have no idea what things are going to look like a couple of years from now, whether you're falling behind as we speak, whether your job is even going to be relevant in the near future. People live in a world right now where they have to constantly reinvent themselves or else potentially lose everything they've ever built. More than that, in the age of information, it is entirely possible for someone to just sit at home with any free time they have, and to read and educate themselves on every institution of the modern world: economics, law, politics, science. You can become an expert in any of these things in theory. But the world is changing so fast in the time we're living, that even if you spent all your time doing that, you would have no way of knowing whether any of that information is going to even be relevant

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  in 10 years when some new technology or a cultural shift makes the world into a completely different place. What I'm saying is that somebody can criticize Stoicism and say that it simplifies human experience to just rationality, and that it ignores all the parts of the world and people that are irrational, which is a lot about our lives, as it turns out. But even if those people are right, which I'm not saying they are, but even if they are, what if limiting our scope to just the fraction of reality that we can control, fully admitting that this is not everything, but look, I'm going to focus on what I know I can control? What if that's part of the magic of Stoicism that makes it so effective? I mean, is it so crazy that people would want to spend their time on an area of their thinking where they know it's not going to be a waste of time?

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  So now that we've laid out the differences between ancient Stoicism, modern Stoic ethics, and Marcus Aurelius's goals when he's writing Meditations, I think it's really exciting to talk about some of the common ground between these three. Because a lot of these insights that Marcus writes about in Meditations are still embraced by modern Stoics. Sometimes it'll be when the metaphysics softened a bit, but sometimes it can be almost word for word. Point is, these are moments where the ancient and modern projects overlap, even if they're arriving at the same place from slightly different assumptions. For example, in Book 11 of Meditations, Books 9 through 12, by the way, are generally regarded as being written pretty late in his life. Lot of humility in these books, lot of reflection in them. And this is supposedly when he's trying to encapsulate the Stoic attitude as best he can as someone that's been practicing it for so many years. And in one of these moments, in Book 11,

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  he gives a great piece of advice about how to respond with kindness or patience to the obvious faults of somebody that's treating you bad in a moment. He says, quote, "When someone does you wrong, you should immediately consider what judgment led them to do wrong. Once you see this, you will pity them and not be surprised or angered." Now, once again, this is a piece of advice about how to treat people that is very stoic, but it doesn't require any kind of cosmology to get there. See, Marcus Aurelius and the ancient Stoics didn't believe in the idea that we do immoral things because we're weak. They didn't think we just don't have the willpower to do the right thing in a moment. That's more along the lines of Aristotle, if anyone. No, the Stoics believed that anytime anyone does anything irrational, it's out of ignorance that they do that thing.

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  Reason and passion to the Stoics are not two different forces competing with each other, constantly battling. When someone does something immoral, that is not passion overtaking reason. To them, that is just reason that has gone astray. If someone steals from you, for example, it's not that this person really, deep down, believes that stealing is wrong, and then in a moment betrayed what they truly believed when their will just became overwhelmed by the passion of having what you do. No, in that moment, for the Stoics, that person made a judgment that satisfying their desire for what they stole was more important than justice. Again, this is a mistaken judgment to the Stoics, not weakness of the will. So the takeaway from this for Marcus Aurelius is going to be that if someone does something

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  to you that you don't like, don't focus on the fact that this person just did something that wronged you and the whole injustice of it all, and instead try to turn your focus to the mistaken judgment they made that led to whatever problem they caused you. Because when something is seen as a mistake like this, instead of a direct attack that was just launched on me by this bad person, he thinks focusing on the judgment like this just sets you up a lot better to handle, once again, the only thing you can control, reacting in a way that is rational and virtuous, or to respond with kindness and patience when someone around you happens to be imperfect. Another great insight that Marcus repeatedly puts down in his journals is the importance of seeing the problems that show up in your life as opportunities that actually guide

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  your path through life, as opposed to seeing them as just obstructions that are blocking you from doing something. He has a couple of great lines here. For example, there's a great one in Book Five. Book Five, by the way, is a special book in Meditations with tons of great insights in it, because it's one of the only books he writes where it seems like he's trying to articulate things in it in a way that would be useful to a younger person that's trying to center their lives more around Stoicism. Some scholars have even said that this might have been written around the time when he was trying to rub a little bit of the Stoicism off on his son Commodus, who would later become emperor after Marcus dies. Which, bad ending there, for whatever it's worth. But anyway, in Book Five, trying to put it in the plainest terms he possibly can, Marcus says, quote, "The impediment to

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  action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way," end quote. Certainly something that might have been useful for the Emperor of Rome to keep in mind. Now, later on in Book Seven, he gives us another memorable line along this same subject. He says, quote, "What stands in the way is the raw material for working with, and whatever may obstruct us can be turned into the furtherance of our design," end quote. Now, consider for a second just how many obstacles this guy faced all throughout his life, and yet still worked every day to try to not grow resentful of any of them. Again, he lost his wife Faustina, along with most of his children throughout his life. Plague broke out on his watch when he's the emperor. A lot of people died as a result of that. There was almost always, during his time in charge, some war that was going

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  on, trying to maintain stability to the empire, and these wars didn't always go his way, for whatever it's worth. And to see all these things that otherwise complicate your life, not as a tragedy, or as an injustice that you're going to make yourself miserable about, but instead to see them as a kind of raw material, that you're going to mold into the future you. Once again, this puts you in a place where when you're reacting to these obstacles that will come up, Marcus thinks framing it in this way just makes it much more likely you're going to have that reaction in a virtuous way. Another really great insight Marcus talks about is from Book Four. You know, scholars say he seems to have written Book Four right after the death of his wife Faustina, and right when he's dealing with a major revolt that goes on in some distant territory of Rome. Point is, there's a lot of grief and frustration you can read between the lines

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  of Book Four, but despite this, he still gives us a great Stoic insight about how to see ourselves when we show up every day fulfilling our particular role in the world. He says, quote, "Love the humble art you have learned and take rest in it. Pass through the remainder of your days as one who wholeheartedly entrusts all possessions to the gods," end quote. Once again, God's there is him referring to the rational logos or the ordered way that things play out in the universe. And entrusting in it is him telling us not to worry about any of the outcomes you get. "No, just love the humble art you have learned," he says, meaning your craft, your purpose, "and keep working at that craft every day of your life, trusting that whatever possessions you have or don't have in this world, it's the way

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  that nature has ordered it." And that there's a lot of Stoic peace to be found in living in a more process-oriented way like that. And the mistake would be to get caught under the spell of a society that's constantly obsessed with outcomes instead of how moral people are being. And look, there's so many of these insights you could pull from this book, it would be impossible to cover all of them. But I'll give one more that often gets overlooked in these conversations. That's truly something Marcus Aurelius built his view of other people around. He says in Book Six, talking about things he just can't bring himself to do in this life, quote, "Neither can I be angry with my brother, for he and I were born to work together, like a man's two hands or eyelids. To obstruct each other is against nature's law," end quote. His point is that when you truly understand the divine logos and the laws of nature, you start to understand that the people around

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  you are not competition for you. These are not people to fight against or to have hate for. Your relationship to other people, from Marx's view, is a lot like the relationship between a left hand and a right hand, or two eyelids. He thinks we're put here to be natural collaborators with each other. This is an echo of the larger Stoic idea that we're all part of one cosmic community under the very same divine logos, that every one of us has that same rational spark within us that we need to cultivate. And when you see things the way that he does here, this just breeds a sense of fellowship with the people around you that, again, usually isn't talked about in these kinds of conversations about Stoicism. Now, again, next episode's going to be on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer's critiques of Stoicism. And the question for us to consider between now and next week, when that episode comes out, is

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  Could it be that Stoicism was such an effective way of living for someone like Marcus Aurelius in particular because of the position he occupied in the world as the Emperor of Rome? In other words, if a big part of your purpose in life is to instill rational order onto a sprawling empire, if a big part of what's expected of you is you maintain a calm, rational, public appearance to present yourself as a good example, if that's your life, do you just not have the luxury of considering a full range of human experience in terms of its irrationality? I mean, it's very clear from his journals that sticking to this moral standard of always doing the rational thing is something that he struggled with a lot during his life. Is this part of the selling point of Stoicism, where it's an ideal to strive for that you're

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  never going to reach, and so it's guaranteed to keep you working towards something moral for the rest of your life with no ceiling? Or is this a kind of self-inflicted torture, where you're trying to reduce human experience to something far more narrow than what it actually is, ultimately never understanding it beyond a certain level of depth? We'll see what Nietzsche and Schopenhauer had to say about this and more next time. If you value the show as an educational resource and want these kinds of conversations to be available to everybody, thank you for subscribing on Patreon, patreon.com/philosophize this. And by the way, I'm glad I mentioned last time that there are good discussions going on on Patreon in the comments section. After I said that, more people than usual showed up last time, and it became even better. It's exciting to see that growing as a place where people in good faith can come together

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  and actually talk about this stuff or discussing on the podcast. Anyway, I'll shut up, just wanted to give a thanks to everybody that's giving their expertise in that comments section. Hope you have a good rest of your week, but most of all, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.