Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.35

From Plato:

The man who has an elevated mind and takes a view of all time and of all substance, do you suppose it possible for him to think that human life is anything great?

It is not possible, he said.

Such a man then will think that death also is no evil.

Certainly not.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 7 (tr Long)

It’s quite hard trying to help someone understand that the self is not the beginning and end of all things, almost as hard as trying to help someone understand that death is not in itself a bad thing at all. People may look at you funny, worry about your sanity, and whisper around that you may be quite disturbed.

I’m sure they thought and said that about Plato as well, or his teacher Socrates, or any of the Cynics and Stoics. Yet Plato understood something that most of us will so easily overlook. It isn’t all about me, but about me in the context of all other things. And if I’m not the center of the world, then my end won’t mean the end of the world. These two insights go together. The former helps me to make sense of the latter.

We are accustomed to thinking of life as an extended conflict, a state of war, where what is good for me is often in opposition to what is good for anyone or anything else. For me to be rich, you may well have to be poor. For me to feel secure, you may well have to feel threatened. For me to be happy, you may well have to be miserable. And, if necessary, for me to live, you may well have to die. The vice of pride, of course, centers on the importance of the self, at the expense of others.

Yet wisdom, seeing things from a perspective that is both broader and deeper, teaches me that all things are part of a whole, and that all things are made to work together, each playing its own distinct part. There is no me without the order of the whole world, and there can be no me at the expense of the whole world. It is all a totality.

Accordingly, I do not need to think of my own good separately from the good of anything else, and I must respect that my good is in service to the good of everything else. We think that vanity frees us, but it actually imprisons us. A wise man can be serene, precisely because he can joyfully look beyond himself. He is no better, or more special, or more necessary than any other creature.

This is also why he does not fear death, or does not consider it an evil, because he knows it is natural and right for all creatures to come to be, and to cease to be. Only the self-serving man cares for his reputation, or his wealth, or the accumulation of his pleasures, just as only the self-serving man cares about when he will die. 

Written in 11/2007