The Essential Marcus Aurelius (Tarcher Cornerstone Editions)

by Marcus Aurelius

understand—and here is the great power of these writings—is that this is the source of true self-respect in human life. Marcus is telling us, and in a certain definite sense he is showing us (think again of the conditions under which he is writing!) that no matter what befalls us, no matter what life deals us, no matter what temptations or suffering we encounter, no matter how shaken we are or bored or torn by impossible demands and choices, no matter what is happening to us in the life we happen to be living, it is always possible for us to step back within ourselves and rediscover an intentional relationship to our own mind (which includes our thoughts, emotions, and sensations). No one and nothing can take that possibility from us. I am a human being. I am not, first and foremost, a man or a woman, not an animal, not a computer, not a car, not a bank account, not a professor, senator, soldier, not even a mother or father. I am first and foremost a human being, and it is of the essence of a human being that he has the possibility (and, as Marcus will tell us, the high duty) to cultivate the capacity to step back from himself and become conscious of himself—the capacity and the responsibility to remember what he is as both an individual personality living just here and now, in this or that circumstance, and as a human being who has within himself (who is within oneself) a conscious particle of divinity.

eventually reach the throne, though not until after the long reign of his adoptive father, Antoninus

At root, Marcus sees mind as the source of human freedom, for it is only with the help of the mind that we can begin to step back from our often thoughtless reactions to our surroundings and view them from a different perspective, and only then perhaps begin to change our lives. He repeatedly writes that every human being has within himself an ability to be free from the suffering that results from the tyranny of our emotional responses. This is,

all, to free his mind from the bonds of all categories, be they political, religious, or even philosophical. In spite of his obviously Stoic influences, Marcus refers not to Epictetus the Stoic but to Epictetus the man, the teacher. And he does not hesitate to cite others, regardless of their philosophical school, if they have something important to contribute. Having said this, let us now look at what is called Stoicism.