Even Stoics Get the Blues
Returning to the Meditations.
Today, we are returning to our reading of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.1 This will be our first discussion of Notebook 8, which means that we are roughly about three quarters of the way through this text.
Before we turn to the text, I want to make an announcement. The next book that we read together will be Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which is my favorite work of philosophy. I’m excited for us to read it together. I highly recommend the Bartlett & Collins translation.
And now, let’s turn to Notebook 8.
Notebook 8 begins with an admonishment — not an uncommon thing in Marcus’ journals. I once heard a scholar of Ancient Greece say that the Greeks as a people were particularly prone to self-criticism, and it seems that Marcus inherited this tendency from his philosophical forebears. The Meditations is full of it.
From the very first paragraph, we see that Marcus is thinking about who he is and his station in life. Marcus is arguably the most powerful man in the world at this point, but he is not happy. The battlefield, where he spends a good deal of time, is an unforgiving place. The Roman court is a treacherous environment. And Marcus feels as if he is being taken away from what he truly loves: philosophy.
Another thing that will help you curb your tendency toward self-importance is the fact that you no longer have the opportunity to live your whole life, or at least your adult life, as a philosopher…You’re a long way off being a philosopher. You’re neither one thing nor the other.
Because of Marcus’ responsibilities, particularly because of his role as the emperor of Rome, he is unable to ‘win the glory of being a philosopher.’ That phrase indicates something interesting: Marcus is also interested in what others think of him. Thus he speaks not just of being a philosopher, but of winning glory.
Given some of what he has said in these notebooks, a modern reader might want to argue that Marcus was prone to something like depression, or maybe what we previously would have called melancholy. He has some of the standard characteristics: an introspective disposition, a strong tendency toward self-criticism, a recurrence of negative thoughts. I do not know if this is the case — but clearly we see a man in these journals who is teaching himself how to be happy.
The first stage of being happy is learning to accept your present circumstances. Acceptance of circumstances — rather than denial — is the necessary prerequisite for living well. And here I think we can learn something by looking at the process of grieving.
In 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic, my stepfather died. Jim was a hardworking man and a devoted husband. For several years, he had been putting tremendous effort into improving his health: losing weight, getting proper exercise, changing his diet, managing his blood sugar. Despite this effort, he died of a heart attack in his sleep.
Ever since then, my mother has been grieving. While I was deeply saddened by his passing, the truth is that I have never lived with Jim, as he married my mother when I was in college. Pretty soon after that I was on the East Coast, and then I was in Austin. Jim was not a part of my day-to-day life. So the grieving process for Jim, from my perspective, has primarily been one of observation and assistance. Still, I have learned something about the grieving process over the past few years as I’ve tried to be a source of comfort.
According to the popular Kübler-Ross model of grief, the bereaved follow a progression: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The logic of this model is intuitive enough. When confronted with something deeply traumatizing, we do anything we can to avoid accepting the problem.
Despite its intuitiveness, the Kübler-Ross model has been highly criticized, and alternative models have been suggested. There are worries that there is no natural progression, that researchers are blurring the boundaries between the description and prescription, that supporting research is lacking, that cultural context has an important impact on grieving, and that grieving is not a clear-cut and linear process. The worries are sufficiently strong and varied that I would say we are best off viewing the Kübler-Ross model as a kind of heuristic at best, and that we should avoid strong generalizations or applications of the model to particular experiences.
One alternative model of grief is given to us by J. William Worden, who proposes a set of tasks rather than a set of stages. Here, the tasks are clearly prescriptive. Worden writes about them in the context of a handbook for grief counseling, after all. According to Worden, the tasks are:
Accept the reality of the loss
Process the pain of grief
Adjust to a world without the deceased
Redirect emotional energy
It is particularly interesting to me that both Worden and Kübler-Ross have to make acceptance an important part of their models of grieving. While Kübler-Ross treats acceptance as the end of grieving, for Worden the grieving process begins with accepting the world as it is. Worden’s model is more consistent with Stoic teaching.
It is not just the grieving who want to live in denial. It is not just the bereaved who want to bargain with the universe (sometimes offered as a prayer, sometimes as a cry out to the void). It is not just those who have lost a beloved companion who feel a sense of anger at the world. These are natural states for all of us.
In particular, we are all prone to living in denial. We lie to ourselves about what we can afford, or about our preparedness for the future, or about the problems that we are exacerbating. We tell ourselves that we can always deal with things later, or that really there is nothing to deal with, or that it is someone else who is causing our problems. More seriously, we often deny that there is any problem at all.
Marcus, as he begins Notebook 8, is learning how not to live in denial. He wants to be a philosopher, but he has to accept that he will never be able to devote himself fully to philosophy. He wants to win glory as a philosopher, but he has to accept that this is impossible, and later he will argue that he should not worry about anyone’s opinions of him in the first place.
We might rework the Worden tasks to make sense of what Marcus is doing:
Accept the reality of the loss of dedicating oneself solely to philosophy.
Process the pain of grief, by arguing that this pain is dependent on one’s attitudes towards circumstance and then adjusting one’s beliefs.
Adjust to the world where your goals are frustrated.
Redirect one’s efforts to what truly matters.
§1 is Marcus accepting reality. He focuses on making a ‘true assessment of the situation’ and discards ‘worrying about what people will think of you.’ He has elided step 2 in the Worden model, but given what we know about Stoicism we can see how this task is undertaken. He is correcting his judgment about the world, and as he corrects it he believes his emotions should correct themselves. He adjusts to the world in which his goals are frustrated by considering ‘how your nature wants you to live’ and reminding himself not to be sidetracked. He begins to redirect his efforts to what truly matters, reminding himself not to be sidetracked by wealth, sensual pleasure, prestige, and so on.
But what truly matters? Where should Marcus redirect his efforts? For Marcus, that is a matter of making good progress in accord with one’s rational nature, as we see in §7 of this notebook. And that is what we will discuss next week.
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