Marcus Aurelius · Philosophy
Marcus Aurelius’s practice of surveying human affairs from a cosmic height - shrinking our anxieties and ambitions to their true proportion against the vastness of time and space.
Again and again in his private journal, Marcus Aurelius performs a mental exercise: he rises, in imagination, above the Earth and looks down on the whole of human life from a great height. From up there, the things that loom so large at ground level - the quarrels, the ambitions, the slights, the anxieties, the empire itself - shrink to their true size. He pictures the teeming activity of all humanity, the marriages and wars and lawsuits and feasts, the crowds of the living and the vaster crowds of the dead, and sees it all as a small, swarming thing against the immensity of space and time. This is not contempt for human life but perspective: a deliberate correction of the distortion by which our own concerns, seen close up, fill the whole field of vision and seem all-important. Seen from above, they take their place as small events in a vast order.
Marcus applies the cosmic view with particular force to the thing that tempts the powerful most: the desire for fame and lasting reputation. From the view above, he sees how absurd this craving is. Consider, he tells himself, how soon you will be forgotten; how the people whose praise you crave will themselves soon die; how even the longest-remembered names - the great conquerors, the famous emperors - are now merely sounds, their owners utterly gone, their glory meaningless to the dust they have become. The whole Earth is a point in space; your own province a tiny corner of it; your lifetime a moment in the abyss of time. To sacrifice your peace and integrity for the applause of a few people in one small corner of one small planet for one brief moment is, seen rightly, a kind of madness. Posthumous fame is the emptiest of prizes, since you will not be there to enjoy it and those who might remember will soon be gone themselves.
Closely linked to the view from above is Marcus’s constant meditation on impermanence - the ceaseless flowing-away of all things in time. Everything, he observes, is in flux: bodies change and dissolve, reputations fade, what is famous becomes forgotten, what exists passes into not-existing. Time is like a river, a violent torrent, sweeping everything along: no sooner does a thing appear than it is carried off, and another takes its place, soon to be carried off in turn. Whole cities, empires, generations have vanished as if they never were. This vision of universal transience could be melancholy, but for Marcus it is liberating: if everything passes - including our troubles, our enemies, our pains, and ourselves - then nothing is worth clinging to or raging against, and the only sane response is to accept the flow, do well the brief part assigned to us, and let go. To grasp the impermanence of all things is to loosen our grip on the things whose loss we dread.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Marcus’s practice of viewing human affairs from a cosmic height to see them in true proportion. Fifteen centuries later, Pascal confronted the same infinite vastness but drew a very different feeling from it. State how Pascal’s response differed.
Leads to Blaise Pascal.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.