Because of its fragmentary nature, much of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations will be lost on a first, second, or even third reading — the ideas are too scattered to be easily digested. One passage from Notebook 5, however, has stuck with me since I first read it:
Your mind will come to resemble your frequently repeated thoughts, because it takes on the hue of its thoughts. Dye your mind, then, with a succession of ideas such as the following: Wherever it’s possible to live, it’s possible to live well; it’s possible to live in a palace; therefore, it’s possible to live well in a palace.1
Marcus then goes on to repeat some other maxims.
This may be the interpretive key for all of the Meditations. It is not a systematic work; as a work of pure philosophy, it is lacking in rigorous argumentation. But the Meditations as a whole do have a purpose. Marcus is using these notebooks as an opportunity to dye his mind.
This is not quite what Michel de Montaigne is doing in his Essays, but it is similar. The Essays are intimate, self-exploratory, perhaps even an attempt for Montaigne to construct a new version of himself. Each Essay is a tentative exploration of some domain. And frequently, with very little ornamentation, Montaigne would insert excerpts from classical philosophy or letters into his writing. In his writing on solitude, he quotes Horace, for instance:
Reason and sense remove anxiety,
Not villas that look out upon the sea.
He writes another line of his own, then he returns to Horace, and then Virgil, and then Horace again. A single page of this essay contains 6 maxims or quotations.
If you purchase a worthwhile edition of Montaigne’s Essays, you’ll find the annotations useful. Since the Essays were revised several times, a good edition will mark material that was inserted later. Many, though not all, of these maxims were inserted into the essays at later dates. Perhaps Montaigne wrote his essay and then, as he read more, found another writer who had expressed his thoughts better than he had originally.
In his book The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries, Andrew Hui dedicates a chapter to Montaigne’s library and study (located in a separate tower on his property, complete with a chapel). Hui highlights the way that Montaigne had constructed a space for thinking and reflection — and this construction has a curious intersection with Montaigne’s love of maxims.
In or around 1575, Montaigne read Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Skepticism. Sextus Empiricus was a 2nd-century Greek philosopher within the Pyrrhonist tradition, a form of philosophical skepticism. The Pyrrhonists are careful to avoid the contradiction that threatens a philosophical skeptic. If you say that you do not know anything, an interlocutor can rightly ask if you know that. If not, then your skeptical position is undermined. If so, your skeptical position has a glaring exception. The Pyrrhonists instead refrain from assertion. They withhold judgment.
This philosophical skepticism underpins much of Montaigne’s writing. The tentativeness, the way that he refrains from stating a thesis, might be a product of Sextus Empiricus’ influence. These thoughts were clearly important to Montaigne. ‘Montaigne had forty-seven maxims painted on the ceiling beams of the library on the third floor of his tower, twelve of which are from Sextus Empiricus,’ Hui writes.2 Some examples:
Undecided
I am without inclination
It is possible and it is not possible.
I determine nothing.3
I do not know if Montaigne read Marcus. But he seems to be echoing Marcus’ thinking here; he knows that his mind will take on the hue of his oft-repeated thoughts. He takes this to a new extreme by designing his library with this in mind, adorning his ceiling with maxims. In other words, he was using his environment to dye his mind.
The irony of Montaigne’s maxims is that he apparently felt so strongly about sayings like I am without inclination that he painted them on the ceiling. Did this ever strike him as ironic, or at least as slightly in tension with the ideas expressed? I have to assume it did.
The walls in my studio – a converted shed that I use to write and to make YouTube videos – have no maxims. When I read about Montaigne’s ceiling beams, I thought perhaps I should write some maxims of my own on my walls. But none came to mind. I couldn’t think of anything I believed strongly enough that I would want to be reminded of it every time I looked at my wall. (Looking at walls is an important part of my writing process.) I am too non-committal.
I have no maxims worth painting on my walls. I do not want to go looking for them, either, because that would be too artificial — and you might end up with the wrong maxims. If your mind does take on the hue of your thoughts, the maxims you repeat are too important to take lightly.
Of course, you do not have to do any painting. You might simply repeat certain maxims many times. Meditative, ritualized prayer is essentially a form of maxim-repeating. The daily affirmations some people repeat to themselves is another example. You can influence your thoughts through the careful repetition of certain phrases, so long as you do it often enough.
But sometimes, you don’t have to be the one to repeat the maxims.
By now, it is common internet lore that ‘meme’ was coined by Richard Dawkins. The intention was to give a name to ideas that spread like genes. Genes are replicators; that is what Dawkins thinks makes them what they are. Ideas are replicators, too. While clearly non-genetic, ideas, customs, songs, etc. can spread, adapt to circumstances, and thrive (or, in the negative case, die off).
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catchs on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter:'... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking—the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.4
A good idea will spread much like an advantageous gene. Of course, like the problem of fitness in the philosophy of biology, ‘good idea’ here might be hopelessly circular.5 But we don’t have to worry to much about the ‘why’ of this right now — all that matters is the basic insight that ideas spread in some gene-like way. They are passed along, they mutate, they adapt. They can only do this, it seems, because of the human proclivity to imitate and mirror.
If we are prone to imitate and mirror, we are prone to taking on ideas that we encounter out in the wild. As we hear these ideas repeated more and more, the chance of these ‘sticking’ would naturally increase. You become your thoughts, Marcus says. But you also run the risk of becoming someone else’s thoughts.
The solution, of course, isn’t to wall yourself off so that you never encounter anyone else’s thoughts — ideas aren’t necessarily pollutants. But I do wonder how a highly repetitive, memeified informational ecosystem will change the way we think over time. As memes spread online, we begin to think in terms of those memes. They provide us with convenient shorthands; sometimes they are useful heuristics. But most of the time, they offer us low-resolution ways of looking at the world. They may obscure just as much as they illuminate.
And it is certainly true that we do live in that highly repetitive, memeified informational ecosystem. Sometimes these memes are the classic internet iteration: text and image in a convenient and memorable format. Some of these memes are more like Dawkins’ original description: intangible ideas that we encounter in various ways. Slogans, comebacks, trending audios on platforms like TikTok… maybe all of these are maxims, like those Montaigne painted on his ceiling beams. They are not maxims we choose to repeat — though we choose to be in contexts where they’ll be repeated to us.
Dyeing the mind, indeed.
Meditations 5.16
The Study, 136
Ibid, 136-7. The maxims are rendered in the original Greek; the translation here follows Hui.
The Selfish Gene, 192
In short, the problem of fitness is this. If we define fitness as ‘able to pass on its genes,’ then we can’t use fitness as part of the explanation for why an organism is able to pass on its genes. We risk saying ‘An organism is able to pass on its genes because it is [fit/able to pass on its genes].’ That’s vacuous as an explanation. Many biologists and philosophers have worked to refine the definition, of course.
Within minutes of posting, I received an email (from one of my dissertation advisors, no less!) pointing out that Montaigne did not paint these maxims. He carved them! That's considerably more work and commitment.
At one point, I considered getting a maxim tattooed on my body. But fortunately I was able to talk myself out of it.