Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.12

If you had a stepmother and a mother at the same time, you would be dutiful to your stepmother, but still you would constantly return to your mother.

Let the court and philosophy now be to you stepmother and mother. Return to philosophy frequently and repose in her, through whom what you meet with in the court appears to you tolerable, and you appear tolerable in the court.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6 (tr Long)

We may think that the court is a thing of the past, where kings and queens paraded about, their retinue jostled for favors, and shifty ministers of state arranged their intrigues. Add some saucy dalliances on the side, and we have all the makings of a gripping historical novel.

The names and faces may be different, but all of this is still thriving. We have just described the workings of most any modern professional institution. I have seen court being held anywhere, from corporate boardrooms and government offices to universities and monasteries. Even the old local pub I once frequented worked precisely along these lines.

We may also think that philosophy is a thing of the past, suitable perhaps for men in togas or poufy wigs who had the leisure to ponder the meaning of life, all the time gazing dramatically into the distance, nodding their heads, and stroking their chins. Our modern world, it would seem, is too busy getting important things done to be so useless.

Remove the silly trappings, however, and man is still as philosophical a creature as he ever was. Few of us may still attempt to write ponderous books of wisdom with impressive titles, but all of us, on each and every day, will go about making judgments of what is true and false, good and bad. That is still an essentially philosophical exercise, however well or poorly we may go about doing it.

In other words, every man attends court, because every man lives in the world, engages in business, and participates in society. Ever man is also a philosopher, in the most immediate and practical sense, because he thinks about the meaning, value, and purpose of how he will go about living in the world.

Now which of these two things needs to come first, just keeping ourselves busy, or understanding what it is worth being busy with? The work of the day, my obligation to the court, is the stepmother. I must be committed to her, and attend to her with care and concern. But my sense of the true and the good, my obligation to philosophy, is the mother. She is the very measure that informs what is worthy within the work of the day.

Respect your stepmother, but respect your mother all the more. Only philosophy can teach me to endure the workings of the court, and only philosophy can teach me to act with justice and decency when I must engage in the business of the court.

Written in 1/2007