Breaking Down with Marcus Aurelius

How to (not) enjoy music and how to stop worrying, according to the Stoic Emperor.

As a reminder, we’ll be wrapping up our reading of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations this month. In July, we’ll begin with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. As always, read-along posts are available for free — but if you want to support my work, consider subscribing.

Take a song and break it down into its parts. You’ll have the vocals, the drums, the guitar, and so on. Melody and rhythm get separated. You are no longer enjoying the song in the same way. At best you are enjoying the stems in themselves, but the total enjoyment will surely be diminished. You will no longer hear the precious interactions of the instruments, the interactions that make the song what it is.

Break the parts down into their parts. No we have isolated things even further. As we repeat this process, we are left with the fundamentals of music: tones. Heard on their own, there is no real enjoyment to be had. We have taken something which can cause an emotional response in us and reduced into something we few as utterly insignificant.

Marcus uses this example at the beginning of Notebook 11:

You’ll think little of the delights of song…if you divide the meoldy up into its individual notes and ask yourself, in the case of each one, whether you’re carried away by it — something you’d be reluctant to admit. The same goes for dancing too, if by an equivalent process you break it down into its separate movements or postures…In general, then, with the exception of virtue and virtuous action, remember to go straight to the component parts of everything; dividing things up like this will encourage you to think little of them. Then apply this procedure to your whole life as well.

This is an interesting bit of reasoning at the beginning of Notebook 11. Notice how Marcus begins with a comment about the detrimental effects of breaking something down into its constituent parts — if you are listening to a song, breaking it down to its parts will prevent you from enjoying the beauty of the composition. So you might think that Marcus is going to council us to avoid this kind of reason — but that’s not where he goes. Instead, Marcus thinks this models how we ought to think.

Just as breaking down a musical work robs it of its significance, breaking down some apparent hardship or disaster into its component parts should rob it of its ability to disturb us.

But this is one of the more puzzling lines of thought from Marcus, and this is a case where I am inclined to disagree.

From The Met

Before we talk about my disagreements here, let me note my general methodology when I read a text like the Meditations.

When I read a work of philosophy, in particular an older work that has survived the great filter of history, I do not go in looking for problems with the text. I default to assuming that what an author writes is correct and that I am to try and make sense of the text. A professor of mine once called this the ‘Talmudic approach,’ and he was on to something. You treat a great work in the same way religious adherents treat their holy text.

Eventually, you have to move beyond interpretation and into criticism. Criticism here is not entirely negative — synthesis with insights other works is a form of criticism too. Sometimes the criticism will be negative, as is the case when you really cannot make sense of a passage.

My general rule of thumb is this. If I have read a book all the way, then when I revisit the book (or just a section) I am allowed to start mounting challenges to the text. If I still feel uneasy with the text, then I just try to understand what is being said.

(That said, there is one complication. We often improve our understanding of an idea by challenging it. The trick here is to strenuously avoid overly reductive or simplistic interpretations just so you can feel like you’ve scored some points against a great mind. If you ever find yourself thinking ‘That’s obviously wrong’, then you’re probably on the wrong track.)

Let me try to outline what I think Marcus’ argument is here.

Our goal is to become unbothered by the whims of the world. Every event is either simple or complex. If it is simple, then it has no component parts. If it is complex, it has component parts. Simple events clearly do not and should not bother us — why would we be bothered by the clamoring of atoms or the vibrations of the air? So, when we are bothered by some complex event, we break it down into its component parts and see that there is nothing which should bother us.

This relies on a enthymeme, an unstated premise: If a complex event is made up component parts which should not bother us, then the complex event should not bother us. And read this way, this seems like the fallacy of composition.

The fallacy of composition is a bad form of reasoning wherein one concludes that because all of an object’s parts have some property, the object itself has that property. Since chairs are made of atoms and atoms are very small, this chair must be very small; since no single part of me is conscious, I am not conscious; since each person in a married couple is an individual, the couple is an individual. You can see that this kind of thinking misfires.

The inverse of the fallacy is the fallacy of division, wherein one concludes that since an object has a property, all of its parts have that property. This isn’t particularly relevant, but I mention it for the sake of being comprehensive.

This is where I think Marcus is going wrong. Since no simple events should bother us, complex events should not bother us either — except that complex events can have properties which are not possessed by any of the simple events, and those sorts of properties might make the event rather bothersome.

And yet, maybe there is something to this line of thinking.

From The Met

I am prone to anxiety. I know this about myself, and I’ve come to accept it. Something about me – my history, my innate dispositions, my intellectual processes – makes it easy for me to give into anxious ways of thinking. Small problems become big problems even before I’ve confirmed that there really is a small problem.

At one point, I went to therapy. I didn’t go for long, but I did go often enough to learn some techniques for dealing with my anxiety. And in fact, one of those techniques was essentially what Marcus recommends in this passage.

Take, for instance, calling someone on the phone. For some reason, this used to fill me with anxiety. I would begin to imagine all the ways it could go wrong. My therapist suggested that I enumerate all of these mishaps in my mind, and then ask myself a simple question: So what? Were any of these mishaps actually disastrous? Probably not. I would think through all of things that could go wrong, and then break those down more and more, and I would see that there was nothing for me to worry about.

Sometimes, strictly fallacious reasoning can still be a good shortcut to right action.

And I think this may be where Marcus’ pragmatism is coming into play. Marcus is not always a pure Stoic — he doesn’t seem so concerned with defending Stoic physics and logic, though he seems to be fully bought-in to traditional Stoic ethics. Thus, he may not be thinking in those strictly Stoic terms. Perhaps this sort of reasoning is the ‘noble lie’ we tell ourselves in order to live virtuous lives.