Why Marcus Aurelius?
And some stuff about Kristin Chenoweth
Dear M,
Vice Magazine says Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations has been selling like hot-cakes ever since the pandemic — a surprise to me considering what a mixed bag it is. Like the majority of books by Neitzsche, it’s a smorgasbord of ideas so formless and garbled that each eureka comes sparsely, between a whole series of throwaway thoughts, and you trudge from one to the next like you’re sticking your boots in mud and sucking them out. Thus it reads much less like a book than a bog; and the fact that anybody enjoys it too much or takes it religiously is a mystery — probably less a testament to their endurance than to their starvation for meaningful ideas. I rank it way better than Emerson’s essays, and about as good as Kristin Chenoweth’s I’m no Philosopher, But I Got Thoughts. Yes, Kristin Chenoweth the Broadway singer*.
Of course the resurgence of Meditations coincides with the popularity of the Roman Empire in general — a time and place few Americans would fit in and even fewer would survive. Marcus Aurelius is a perfect fit for us in other ways, though; mostly because you don’t have to think too hard if you read him, you can give him up after a few minutes, and he looks good stitched on a pillow. Thus he fits the TikTok attention span and the inability to process complex thoughts — two things that set him eye-to-eye with his audience, and keep him from getting buried like Samuel Johnson, or Edmund Burke.
Quotes are of course the main draw of the book; and the ability to put something deep into a short sentence is an art form that people need desperately, like poetry or music. And he has some real gems, such as,
It isn’t death a man should fear. He should fear never beginning to live.
and
Anywhere you live your life, you can lead a good one.
and
On every occasion a man should ask himself, “Is this necessary?”
and
To seek what's impossible is crazy; and it's impossible for the wicked not to do so.
This last one being a reminder that not knowing what’s impossible is the same thing as ruining what isn’t. And probably most famously, these days,
Whatever impedes an action invites an action. Whatever stands in the way becomes the way.
— a strong reminder that your life isn’t ruined by your obstacles: it’s defined by them, and even more by how you react to them.
Much of Marcus Aurelius’ philosophy boils down to the fact that he just got here, he can’t do too much, and he’s got to hold himself together — things that are all true, and can fit pretty much anybody. Thus we get passages like,
Remember the universe: how tiny your share of it. Of infinite time: how brief and fleeting your allotment of it. And fate: how small a role you play in it.
and
There's hardly anything that stays the same. Consider the infinity of past and future that stands before us — a chasm whose depths we can't see and which swallows everything. Wouldn’t it take a fool to get too upset and make himself miserable? Our troubles last only for a time — and a short one at that.
Petty words from most people, but especially wise coming from an emperor — who knew his real place in the universe, and how little power he actually had to change things.
Still, we’re absolutely inundated with great one-liners and Eat-Pray-Love ideas; and in the modern age he has difficulty keeping up with the wit, the charm, and sometimes even the clarity of Dolly Parton. In the realm of quote books I rank Meditations well below Franklin’s almanac, Solomon’s proverbs, and Rochefoucauld’s maxims — all of which were made for the public; unlike Meditations, which Marcus Aurelius never intended to have published. Due to his humility, probably, he figured they’d end up in the trash bin. He was wrong.
That’s probably why the Meditations are filled with half-thought “manly” B.S. He says,
Things have no control over the soul; they stand there outside it and unmoving. Disturbance comes only from the opinions inside us.
and
It was for the best — so Nature was compelled to do it**.
Two attempts to convince himself that his feelings are totally irrelevant. But in this he has it totally backwards. Reason isn’t to eliminate our feelings: our feelings give us a reason to think things out. If whatever happens is for the best, as he says, why do anything at all?
Many of his thoughts are straight-up unhelpful:
Everything that’s beautiful is beautiful in itself and sufficient to itself. Praise is thus superfluous. A thing is neither better nor worse for being praised. This applies, I think, even to “beautiful” things in every-day life — physical objects, works of art.
This leads us to wonder, can anything be beautiful if nobody wants to praise it?
Honest praise is, of course, the soul’s knee-jerk reaction to goodness; and those of us raised in a Judeo-Christian mindset see it as a good in itself — the soul’s almost melding with the divine, and the reason we were created in the first place. To gush in praise of beauty or goodness isn’t to throw something extraneous on it. It’s to join hands with it and spread it. Thus we have no choice but to interpret this passage as an attempt to rescue himself from flatterers and philistines: people who praised him for what he wasn’t, and people who didn’t praise him for what he was.
In one sentence he says beauty is good whether we say so or not; in another he says bad things don't mean anything at all:
If the body is cut or burned or filled with pus and infection, nevertheless let the part of you that weighs these things be quiet. That is, let it believe that nothing is either bad or good which can happen to either a bad man or a good man. Whatever happens equally to the wise man and the fool is neither according to nature or against it.
Thereby “proving” that pleasure and pain are neither good nor bad; but if that's the case, what’s the point of being a philosopher? Can you be good without having a good effect on other people? Can you be wise without avoiding unnecessary pain?
Thankfully he contradicts himself constantly on this issue, in passages such as,
In one sense people are my real occupation; my job is to do them good and put up with them.
And
One man, when he's done somebody a favor, is always looking for a chance to cash it in. Another isn't ready to cash in, but still he's aware of his good deed, and regards the other man as a debtor. A third is like a vine that produces grapes without being conscious of it, without looking for anything in return. […]. He just goes on to something else, as the vine looks forward to bearing fruit the next season. […] A man should be like a vine, then, doing good unconsciously.
— going back and forth between respect for good feelings and his total disdain for them. In some cases this magnanimity crosses the line into callousness:
If it does no harm to the state, it does no harm to the citizen. If you ever think you've been injured, apply this rule: if the state isn’t harmed by this, neither am I. And if it is, don’t be angry about it. Show the transgressor where his error is.
But if that’s true, what’s the value of anger? Isn’t anger given to us by nature to solve problems? And what if harm doesn't exist, like he said above? And isn't a community made up of individuals?
What this proves is that philosophy is a very personal thing; and that in some cases it’s so personal that it’s harmful to everybody else. A quick reading between the lines here leads me to believe that, like the passage against flattery above, he was trying desperately to keep his personal feelings from becoming national calamities — not a philosophy to give to a clerk or a waiter, but something showcasing the needs, the worries, and the extreme virtues of a man at the top. Thus every man needs a philosophy, but not every man needs Marcus Aurelius.
This leads us to ask, why is Marcus Aurelius’ brand of stoicism on the rise? Why do people feel the need to pretend that everything is meaningless except holding yourself together? And why now?
My theory is simple. For more than 200 years Americans have felt relatively free and upwardly mobile. The only people to compare ourselves to, except maybe England for a while, were much worse off in these aspects. We didn’t have any competition in the region so we stomped on everyone else. We had tons of land available so almost everybody could own his own home. The means of living were so easy that Mencken said, in the 1920’s, that to end up in poverty you’d have to be an idiot. Thus a man was master of his own fate (kinda), and the longer it went on the more it became a feature of the American psyche.
Then came globalization. Then the jobs shipped out and the housing market blew up and the colleges became a scam. Small business owners were swallowed up and became wage slaves. International corporations began calling the shots. States’ rights became subject to federal mandates. The city culture, which has generally been perceived as evil, now permeates the smallest towns via Trojan Horses such as Instagram and TikTok. The cities are being burned and the police are standing down. The border is held open by traitors. We're fighting wars we can’t afford and can’t win. And the price of food keeps going up.
To anybody in the “developing world” this might be normal — but to Americans it’s an aberration. We take one look at our country and at ourselves and we wonder where the men are — why they don’t stand tall with their chests out like they used to; why they have to keep their heads down and speak lies in the break room; and why "man culture” rises little above stuffing your face, watching sports on TV, and smashing beer cans on your head. Every step we’ve taken in the last twenty or thirty years has been away from personal dignity and responsibility and towards a feeling that things are out of control — including yourself.
The most natural question to ask here is, who do we look to? You can’t look next door, because nobody inspires you. Church caters to women, Hollywood is a cesspool, and most “intellectuals” are degenerates. So you look behind you. You look for anyone who stood tall in a mess, who held his ground against the world, and kept himself clean when he was up to his neck in filth. In short, you look to someone like Marcus Aurelius.
Marcus Aurelius’ book is a paean to the sit-still mindset in an age where the problems we face are beyond us. It’s the ability to wash your hands off, keep your head high, and make it through life intact. The philosophy of Marcus Aurelius is thus defensive in nature; an adaptation to circumstances not unlike the turtle’s shell. But Solomon would tell us life has many seasons and requires many stances — and that the key to being wise isn’t knowing which stance to take, but when.
Yours,
-J
*I said Kristin Chenoweth is just as inspiring to me as Marcus Aurelius and I was only half joking. One quick look at her half-silly half-serious book proves that she not only has fun with big ideas, but that she has some good ideas of her own.
She says, regarding quote books like the Meditations,
The legacy of great thinkers should be more than great thoughts; it should also be the inspiration to think great thoughts of our own.
— the sign of a true philosopher, I think: that wisdom isn’t passing off a quote, but our digesting it, weighing it, balancing it with the other ideas — to make it come alive right in front of us; to know its time and place; to fuse truths together and tear them apart and speak truths of our own.
And she picks her quotes tastefully (sometimes). A Kenyan prayer she mentions,
From the cowardice that dare not face new truth,
From the laziness that is contented with half truth,
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
Good God, deliver us!
And this odd gem from the Persian poet Rumi,
Somewhere beyond right and wrong,
there is a garden.
I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
The world is too full to talk about,
Even the words “each other” make no sense.
A strong reminder that morality and the war for ideas are tools for living well, and not life itself — which is attraction and sensation and magic. In her own words, regarding the “big questions,”
I actually find questions a lot more interesting than answers. Questions are usually honest while answers are frequently BS.
and on finding your place,
Belonging is not the same thing as acceptance. It doesn’t depend on someone else’s approval — like being allowed to sit at the lunch table with the mean girls. It’s a feeling you recognize within yourself, and it’s contagious.
and on a key difference between the bad and the good,
Humiliation is a byproduct of conflict with someone else. Humility is a byproduct of peace within yourself. The goal of humiliation is to make you hate yourself. Humility requires us to love our me of the moment selves with compassion and good humor, making way for better selves we know we can be.
and a prayer she wrote for her family,
I know you see us. Help us to see each other. When ill-chosen words get in the way, help us see the loving intent behind them. When old injuries get in the way, help us promote healing. When we can’t get out of our own heads, help us keep each other in our hearts.
— a total rejection of Marcus Aurelius’ sober and defensive solitude: a calling on God not even to shield us, but to help us take things in. And unlike Marcus, she doesn’t see life as an obstacle to be overcome and a bunch of emotions to be avoided, but an adventure to be taken on, head-first.
Honoring our anger is a necessary first step to forgiveness. […] There’s nothing virtuous about pretending you’re above getting mad. Rage doesn’t have to be a bully; rage can be a teacher and a tour guide […].
and
Anyone who cruises through life without getting their heart broken probably isn’t loving hard enough.
A beautiful, vulnerable, and feminine take on philosophy***.
**Marcus Aurelius’ “nature” is never actually defined in the book; but if you pay attention, it seems to suggest two things: everything as it ought to be, and everything he can’t control — two opposite ideas, in the end. Nietzsche picked up on this and destroyed Marcus Aurelius’ core philosophy in two paragraphs (Kaufmann translation):
“According to nature” you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power — how could you live according to this indifference? Living — is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living — estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative “live according to nature” meant at bottom as much as “live according to life”—how could you not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?
In truth, the matter is altogether different: while you pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law in nature, you want something opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to impose your morality, your ideal, on nature — even on nature — and incorporate them in her; you demand that she should be nature “according to the Stoa,” and you would like all existence to exist only after your own image — as an immense eternal glorification and generalization of Stoicism. For all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, so rigidly-hypnotically to see nature the wrong way, namely Stoically, that you are no longer able to see her differently. And some abysmal arrogance finally still inspires you with the insane hope that because you know how to tyrannize yourselves — Stoicism is self-tyranny — nature, too, lets herself be tyrannized: is not the Stoic—a piece of nature?
***It’s tempting at some points to think of I’m No Philosopher, But I Got Thoughts as a silly woman’s book — especially since that’s how it’s marketed. But the heart of true philosophy is all God’s: few thinkers can avoid treading on the others’ territories, and in some cases she comes across just as Stoical and manly as the Meditations. Consider,
I despise the phrase new normal. That’s no longer what I aspire to. I aspire to a new abnormal — a new understanding that normal is an illusion […].
— a real survivor’s mindset: not an ability to keep the world from changing, but the ability to see the change, understand it, and use it to your advantage. Thus she values suffering itself, on some level, and says,
the price of personal comfort is the sacrifice of personal growth.
Then there’s one of my favorite lines of hers,
That person you hope to be is already within you.
and echoing Marcus’ belief that what happens to you is less important than how you act,
The way you love people is not about who they are; it’s about who you are. And the way other people love or don’t love you, honey — do the math. That’s about them.
and another almost paraphrase of Marcus,
the real worst-case scenario is a life unlived.
All of these from a woman — and from a career that would have barred a man from Roman citizenship.