Marcus Aurelius

What is Stoicism?

Stoicism is an ancient philosophy that treats thinking as training, not as talk. It covers three areas: how the world works, how to live well, and how to tell true from false. Marcus Aurelius practiced it as three daily disciplines, desire, action and assent. Only your character counts as good. Wisdom, justice, courage and self-control are the whole list. Everything else, health, money, reputation, is worth having and worth working for, but it does not decide whether you act well. That is why a Stoic can lose almost everything and still hold the one thing that mattered.

• Stoic practice joins three domains: understanding reality (physics), living virtuously (ethics), and discerning truth (logic).
• The three disciplines, desire, action, and assent, turn philosophical understanding into daily practice.
• Aurelius, despite imperial power, treated philosophy as training for life, not speculation.

Listen to the story “The Stoic Path”

What is in the Meditations?

The Meditations were never written for readers. They are private notes in Greek, twelve books of them, set down roughly between 170 and 180 AD, partly on campaign at the Danube frontier. Book 1 is a list of debts: what he learned from his teachers and his family, one person at a time. Nothing like it survives from the ancient world. In Books 2 and 3 the tone gets harder. Death stands close, the pressure of the war shows, and he practices exactly what he teaches: examine an impression before you give it your assent. You can start at any page.

Read the Meditations, in George Long's translation →

How do you practice Stoicism every day?

Marcus Aurelius starts before the day does. In the morning he tells himself who he is likely to meet. People who push in, people who take and never thank, people who lie. Not to sour the day. To take the surprise out of it, so his answer is a choice instead of a reflex. He adds that people behave badly because they cannot tell good from bad, not because they picked you. Then there is the view from above. You lift the picture up, from the room to the city to the world, until the thing eating you is back at its real size.

• Morning preparation involves realistic anticipation of challenges, not idealized positive thinking.
• We rehearse encountering difficult people and our virtuous responses to them.
• Others' faults come from ignorance of good and evil, not from personal malice toward us.

Listen to the story “Morning Preparation”

What does Stoicism say about anger?

Stoicism does not ask you to feel less. It splits feelings in two. Some grow out of a false judgment, and those are the ones that wreck a day. Others line up with what is actually true, and those are fine to keep. Anger almost always sits in the first group. Something happened, you decided in half a second what it meant, and the heat came from the decision, not the event. Marcus Aurelius works on the decision. Look at the judgment, ask whether it holds, and the feeling loses its grip. Not suppressed. Taken apart.

• Stoicism distinguishes pathē (harmful emotions from false judgments) from eupatheiai (healthy emotions from true judgments).
• Emotions arise from our judgments about events, not from the events themselves.
• Examining the cognitive roots of emotions allows us to transform harmful patterns.

Listen to the story “Emotional Clarity”

What did Marcus Aurelius teach?

Marcus Aurelius taught Stoic philosophy, and three ideas carry most of it. The first is the examination of impressions. You put a pause between what happens and how you answer it, then you check the judgment you attached. The second is living according to nature. That works on three levels: your own reason, the people you owe something to, and the wider order of things. The third is preferred indifferents. Health, family and success are worth wanting. They still do not decide whether you act well. He wrote all of it down for himself, not for us, in the Meditations.

What is the examination of impressions?

It is the Stoic pause. Something happens, and before you answer it you look at the impression it left. Then you ask one question. Is the judgment I just attached actually true? Marcus Aurelius called this the discipline of assent. Take being criticized. The burn you feel usually does not come from the words. It comes from the story your mind wrapped around them in the same second. The event is one thing. The verdict you added is another, and that one is yours.