Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.43

It is not fit that I should give myself pain, for I have never intentionally given pain even to another.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 8 (tr Long)

This passage gave me some trouble when I first read it, because I was assuming it was obvious that I shouldn’t give myself pain, and I was also assuming it seemed rather silly to claim that one has never chosen to give pain to others. I was misunderstanding what it means to cause pain, and the reasons why I might end up causing it.

After all, I always seemed to be making the mistake of taking too much care of myself, and not caring enough for others, and I could think of all sorts of instances where I was trying to maximize my own pleasure as well as seeking to hurt my fellows. But then I realized that I quite often end up hurting myself even as I intend to help myself, and whenever I am doing something bad to another, my thinking is still somehow, in however perverse a way, aimed at doing some sort of good.

I end up doing harm to myself and to others, even as I am intending to be of benefit. I do bad because I am ignorant of the good. My ignorance, whether willful or not, is the root cause of my vice, by twisting and distorting my sense of what is right. As odd as it seems, my clouded thinking will perceive pain as pleasure, or insist that hurting is helping.

The remedy is in choosing to see my thoughts and deeds for what they really are, and recognizing how misguided I can truly be when I confuse a vice for a virtue.

And even though I might not completely understand what I’m doing, I manage to hurt myself all the time. In fact, when I do wrong I’m actually hurting myself the most, because while I might injure the goods of the body of another, I am a doing even worse by injuring the goods of my own soul.

I notice how delusional I become, telling myself over and over that something is making me better, when it is only making me worse. If it’s really so great, why am I just as miserable as I was before? Lust, and laziness, and deception, and anger may appear quite satisfying, but they are simply self-destructive. I may be calling it love and pride, but I am only filled with hatred and shame.

“Don’t hurt yourself” sounds like silly advice, but it is one of the most necessary pieces of wisdom I need to hear, because I don’t really even know how much I’m hurting myself at all. I need to take of that blindfold of ignorance. I can only take care of myself when I understand what it really means to care.

Written in 4/2008