Living Virtue

Derren Brown starts with an admission: Book One of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is a slightly odd way in, and you probably skimmed it. He reads it against the Roman habit of eulogy, Julius Caesar writing up his own achievements, and notices what Marcus does instead: he lists small personal qualities he admired in the people around him. Brown tried the exercise on his own friends and family, and found the things he admired weren't the things he wanted for himself.

Then comes Book Two, written among the Quadi on the northern frontier, where Marcus talks about kinship with all people while leading a war. Brown lays out the recurring themes as they first appear: divinity as the rational mind, indifferents with a T-S, judgments, the shortness of life. The line that stays with him is 'live each day as if it's your last', read without fear of death: less bucket list, more kindness.

Transcript

Right. How was Book One? It's a slightly odd one, isn't it? And if you go into Marcus expecting it to be the greatest book ever written, which a lot of people tell you it is, it can be a slightly disappointing entry into it. It's interesting, and I bet you glossed over it. You started to skip through it. It's interesting though, for a couple of reasons. First of all, what it isn't. There was a real tradition of eulogies at the time, this big sort of eulogizing of famous people and powerful people and emperors. And often they'd write it about themselves. Julius Caesar famously was doing that. And it's interesting that it isn't any of that. He's not talking about people's achievements or their courage or their strength. He's talking about these lovely personal qualities. That's an interesting thing in terms of what it isn't.

And another thing that I don't think it is, but it's not immediately obvious from reading it: I don't think he's talking about things that he himself has acquired. These are not things that, oh, this guy gave me this quality. I think these are just things he admires in other people, things he considers important. I don't think for a second he's saying that this is where I got this amazing quality from, because as you continue with Marcus, and as we go through this, you'll see his attitude towards his own achievements and qualities are ambiguous at best. It's actually kind of interesting as an exercise. And of course, when I read it, I started doing it myself with my friends and family and things that I admired in them. You realize that the things you admire in other people aren't necessarily the things that you desire for yourself. It's an interesting exercise, and so do it. If you take a moment, I do recommend that you try it yourself, and you realize that the things you admire in other people are not necessarily what you seek out for yourself. And why not? Why is that? It would be a good Stoic move to try and bring those two things together.

So after that, we turn to Book Two, and the real stuff of the Meditations begins. We also get the sense in Book One that it's like when we all start off writing a journal. We've got a certain sort of form in mind and we put our best into it, and after a while it kind of breaks down. I think that's what's happened here. So we start to get to Book Two, and now we're beginning to get into this world of miscellany, of just thoughts and bits and pieces that won't really group together in any particularly clear way. But what we do get in Book Two is our first taste of the various themes that are coming in. So it's actually a good place to look at those, look at the themes that we're gonna go back to throughout the whole book.

Right at the very start, he tells us he's amongst the Quadi. So he's at war. He is on the northern frontier, sort of around what would be modern day Slovakia, I guess. He's just been sent out. He's in the last 20 years of his life, writing this book under conflict. And yet one of the things he's gonna be writing about is kinship amongst all men. It's all a bit gendered, but kinship amongst all people, while he's in the middle of the war. He's not talking about kinship with fellow Romans. There's no sense of any kind of jingoistic pride. He is in the middle of all of this, leading a war and talking about kinship with all people. So that is a thing to be reminded of.

One of the things he talks about at the very beginning is that he's writing this in the morning, and there was a Stoic tradition of meditation, which is different from what we think of as meditation nowadays, but it's a really good idea. And if you can bring yourself to do it, it's a great way of making sure that the Stoic principles, or whatever you wanna achieve really in life, actually sort of hits. So in the morning, you spend a few minutes thinking about what is coming during the day and the sort of challenges that you might face, and how you might face them as a better Stoic or a better person with the ideas that we'll come across together throughout the book. And then during the day, you try and remain present, and you try and live out those better reactions as best as you can. And then in the evening, you review. You have this meditation again at night when you're thinking back and go, well, how did that go? And did I do the best job? Could I have done that better? And then the next day you go through it again. It's such a simple idea. You can imagine how effective that would be if you could actually bother to find that minute or two, which is easier said than done. But he's doing this, he's doing his morning meditation, and there's this very famous passage saying, I'm gonna meet people that are rude and are nasty and useless and shameless, and blah, blah, blah. And why wouldn't I? This is kind of what the world is.

And as the book continues, there are some things I want to pick out, and then we'll look at the main themes. But one passage or idea that really struck me was this first taste of: you could leave life at any point, so how does that make you live now? Your life could come to an end, so how does that affect the life you lead now? And it feels like this thing, live each day as if it's your last. And that's such a common thought nowadays, isn't it? Live each day as if your last. But what it means is a sort of tick everything off your bucket list, go out, enjoy yourself. And really all of that is about a fear of death and trying to avoid death and frantically trying to fit these things in and sort of stab away the inevitable. And as I've read this little idea a few times, he's talking about it with no fear of death. And it's an interesting thought to begin to have. If you don't see death as something frightening, and he'll give us lots of ways as to why he feels we shouldn't, and even if that's a big ask, if we could at least entertain that idea just as a thought exercise, what sort of things does it then nudge us to? And I feel, which is what he is talking about, it nudges us towards a very different sort of connection with people in terms of how we want to be with them. The kindness and connection and compassion that we might find with people around us if we don't see death as something frightening, but if we just see it as a sort of inevitable and potentially perfectly peaceful thing. With that in mind, how does it affect our relationships with people? That really struck me, that passage, and stayed with me.

So here are some big principles we're gonna come across in Book Two, and they'll better repeat. And the reason why they're gonna repeat, it's a very repetitive book, the reason why it's repetitive is he's needing to remind himself of these things. So he'll find five or six different ways of telling himself the same thing. It's a Stoic technique in itself. It's a rhetorical technique. He had a whole background in rhetoric. It's a way of making an idea stick.

So first ideas. Kinship. We've spoken about kinship with all people, that we form part of a body. We're a limb that's attached to other limbs, and we all form part of this sort of body of humanity. That's easy enough. The divinity within us, he talks a lot about that. And when he's talking about divinity, what he's saying, and the reason why it's a theological word, in the old mode, their way of seeing things, the gods were rational creatures and they made us rational creatures. That's what sets us apart from everybody else. So that's our spark of divinity, is our rational mind. So when you see him talking about the divine within us, think about that as the rational mode. Our executive mind that can guide us through life and is sort of pitched against the more impulsive, emotional side.

He talks about the shortness of life, how fleeting everything is. It's a recurring thing. There's a lot about death. He talks about the sameness of things, how things in life just repeat and repeat and repeat. The same old dramas get played out. He argues against certain things. He'll argue against anger and finding other ways of dealing with things rather than getting angry. Anger's quite a negative emotion to Stoics. And that's an interesting question, you know, is it wrong to be angry? Or is it good to be angry? Should we be angry? Our sense of justice has been upset. Whatever. The Stoics think we shouldn't. But it is an interesting question.

Against fame. He's a very famous man, and a lot of what he writes about is how silly and fleeting fame is. So you're famous, so what? Soon you are gonna die. The people that like you now and flatter you now, and do they behind your back even? But they're gonna die. The people that remember them are gonna die. Like, everything's so fleeting. We have a lot of arguments against hanging onto fame as something that's important. Again, against the fear of death. That's another thing that comes up a lot, reasons why we shouldn't fear it. I don't know if they're successful arguments against the fear of death, because that's such a big thing in life, isn't it? But they are very helpful ideas to take on board nonetheless, even if they don't quite do the job. They are nonetheless, I think, part of the psychological picture of Stoicism. I think there's still things that are useful to take on board.

He talks about good and evil in a way that is a little different from how we might think of it nowadays. And really it ties in with ignorance and knowledge. So we'll get to that. Indifference. So we'll use the word indifferents, and not C-E but T-S on the end, as in things that are called indifferents, with T-S on the end. And what he means by that are things in life that are, like money and fame and health, are things that the Stoics say we shouldn't get too attached to, which is why we have this sort of Buddhist flavor running through a lot of Stoics. So there are things that are good for us, but that's really only to do with the stuff that sort of feeds our soul, and they talk about it as virtue. And everything else that's out of our control, right, the things we shouldn't bother too much about, they refer to as indifferents. And then within the world of those things that are indifferent, the Stoics would say, well, you can certainly prefer to be healthy, prefer to have a bit of money and to be comfortable. And you can prefer that your children, the world as well, and so on. But we shouldn't get too attached to them. So that's what this word indifferents means.

And finally he talks about judgments. And remember this idea that it's not things in the world that cause our problems, it's our judgments about those things. So when he is talking about the judgments, it's the decisions we are making about things that are happening in the world that will flavor our entire reactions to them. And finally he talks about the universe, the whole, nature, the cosmos, and so on. Again, all of that pretty much comes down to the same idea, a kind of a rational force that we're all part of, us as human beings. We don't need to theologize it. Sometimes it's helpful. I find it quite helpful to think in terms of a soul sometimes, even though I'm an atheist. I don't believe in any of that, but I like the way he talks about it. And I find it a helpful sort of geography that it will create. Like, well, here's my soul and it's somehow untouchable. And then outside of that is all the stuff that happens, but somehow my soul is protected from that. These are helpful ideas, even if we don't have to take them literally. So we're gonna see these ideas for the first time, and then we're gonna return to them in a million different ways as the book goes on. So good luck, and welcome to some of Marcus's ideas.