Seven Key Points From Marcus Aurelius’ First Morning Meditation

here’s how you can avoid getting angry with jerks you're likely to meet up with

Perhaps one of the best known passages from Marcus Aurelius’ book, the Meditations is the daily reminder he sets himself. It is the very first chapter of book 2, and reads like this:

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

This is from Gregory Hayes’ 2003 translation, which is pretty decent as far as translations go. You can find plenty of other English translations of this passage. I can’t say that I’ve run across one that sticks as closely as one might like to the Greek original of Marcus’ text.

It might be useful to give this passage a close reading, providing breakdowns of the key ideas, heads-ups about the original language and potentially misleading translations, and highlights of several important implications that tend to get overlooked by readers.

Marcus’ Reminders For Himself

There are a number of interconnected main points Marcus is reminding himself about in this passage. As this is, quite literally, “to himself” (the original title of what we call “Meditations,” ta eis heauton), these are matters that Marcus has already learned. He knows them, at least in the sense of he has that knowledge within his mind somewhere, but he thinks that he needs to stress them, to recall them, to repeat them each morning, or “at dawn” (heōthen).

What are these key points? By my analysis, there are seven of them, and they are.

• different types of bad people he will likely have to deal with

• the general reason why each of those kinds of people behave as they do

• what Marcus knows about good and evil that these people don’t

• his own relationship to them as fellow human beings

• the fact that none of them can hurt him where it really counts

• working together as right for human beings, and obstruction as wrong for them

• anger, hatred, and distancing as wrong responses to bad people.

So, let’s work through each of these in turn, looking closely at what Marcus is saying and what the implications are for us.

Tell Yourself: I’m Going To Have To Deal With Jerks

The start of all of this is Marcus giving himself some advice as a writer which presumably he will come back to as a reader. “Tell yourself” translates prolegein heatō, that is, say to yourself before things happen. Get yourself ready. Each day, there is a kind of verbal formula to go through or repeat to oneself.

And what is it? A listing of types of jerks, that is, of people who have, exhibit, and act upon negative characteristics. We could use all sorts of other terms to describe them, but “jerk” works well enough. What are the specific classes of people Marcus himself most anticipates he will run into (sunteuxomai), and therefore have to “deal with”?

• Meddling (periergos) — this is a great translation. The term quite literally means being around or on the periphery of the task (ergon) at hand. These are the people who instead of focusing on their own business, get into everyone elses

• Ungrateful (akharistos) — these are people who fail to show kharis, translated sometimes as joy, which does somewhat fit, but more aptly here as people who fail to show gratitude, who don’t reciprocate

• Arrogant (hubristēs) — “arrogant” certainly works, but this term has a wider extent, so that it doesn’t just refer to people with a certain attitude. It can also mean people who insult, who humiliate, who harm others.

• Dishonest (doleros) — this does refer to people who lie, but also those who cheat and steal. Dolos means trickery or fraud, so these are people who deceive, who conceal, who play fast and loose with the truth.

• Jealous (baskanos) — the choice here is a little less clear. The term can be translated as “envious” and we do often associate jealousy with envy. It does also have a sense of being slanderous or more broadly malicious.

• Surly (akoinōntētos) — with this translation, we have a sort of metonomy (substitution of a part for the whole) at work. Koinōnia means sharing, community, fellowship, and so a broad sense of this term would involve being the kind of person who doesn’t share, who is unsocial. Being “surly” would certainly be one way people manifest that broader disposition.

So Marcus tells himself (to tell himself) that he will meet up with representatives of each of these types of people. Odds are, most days, he probably did! Is this a comprehensive list? Probably not. There are all sorts of other problematic people types mentioned elsewhere in the Meditations.

Notice something very important here. Marcus doesn’t say that these are all at bottom nice people who just happen to act in bad ways. He also doesn’t say that these people being bad is just a reflection of how we interpret them. They’re actually bad people — not the absolute worst, perhaps, but certainly bad in determinate ways. And he’s not afraid to call them such.

Why Do Jerks Behave Like Jerks?

The next point that Marcus makes to himself is, however, one that comes up in different formulations many times throughout the Meditations. People who behave like jerks — and who often actually are jerks — do so for a reason (or reasons). One of these is that they are mixed up or mistaken about some really fundamental matters.

One term that he deliberately chooses is very interesting, very revealing. “Sumbebēken ekeinois” — “this happens to them,” we might say, and notice that this isn’t there in the translation. Sumbainein has a technical use in philosophy that goes way back to Aristotle, denoting something being accidental rather than being essential. These people aren’t essentially messed up and mistaken. It so happens in these cases that this is the way they turned out.

And how did they happen to turn out? They suffer from ignorance (agnoia). They behave the way they do — they make the choices they make — motivated by this ignorance (para agnoian). What are they ignorant about? Good and evil, or more literally, “good things and bad things” (tōn agathōn kai kakōn), in the plural. It isn’t just the nature of good and evil as such that they don’t understand. It is also general matters bearing upon what things are good and what are bad, that is, what those concepts of good and bad apply to. We could go further and view these people as mixed up about more particular and specific matters of goods and evils.

One common response to the standard Stoic take on people doing wrong, that people do wrong out of ignorance, not knowing that what they choose and do is bad or evil, is to point out instances where people who do wrong do seem to recognize that what they’re doing is bad. If someone chooses to be a jerk in some determinate way, because they prefer being, and behaving like, a jerk, it seems then they are not acting out of “ignorance about good and evil”.

There is an easy Stoic response to this, of course. It is to point out that those people are mistaken, or ignorant, about what’s good or bad on yet a higher level, but that might not be all that satisfying an answer.

One Thing Marcus Knows

Aurelius reminds himself he does not labor under that same ignorance about good and bad things as many other people do. What does Marcus know that they don’t? Again, the Hayes translation leaves a little bit out, something quite important.

Marcus’ Greek reads: “egō de tetheōrēkōs tēn phusin.” “I have seen the nature. . .” It isn’t just good and evil that Marcus understands, because he has seen or contemplated. It is the nature of good and evil. He understands what these are in their essences, what makes them what they are.

Obviously here Marcus isn’t detailing everything he knows about good and evil. But he is telling us — or rather himself — something very important about both of them. The nature of the good is that it is “beautiful” (kalon), a complex, rich term that encompasses a wide range of meaning, including “honorable”, “fine”, or “noble” in addition to “beautiful”. And by opposition, the nature of the evil or bad is that it is “ugly,” “dishonorable,” “foul,” or “base” (aiskhron).

By itself these two bits of knowledge, these identifications, bearing upon the good and the evil might not seem that great an advantage. But they are part of a much larger systematic picture of things. Understanding that the good is indeed the noble, what is intrinsically valuable, rather than just the useful, expedient, or pleasant, is indeed knowing something quite important. And the same goes for the bad or evil.

A Second Thing Marcus Knows

In the view of the Stoics, all of us share one common human nature. We are also differentiated from each other in myriad different ways, of course, since we are individuals with our own characteristics and choices, and we participate in a number of different groups. But we all belong to one single race, one “city” that spans the entire world. We are all related to one another.

This includes everyone from the legendary and all-too-rare sage or wise person at one extreme, to the most depraved of wrong-doers, and everyone else in between. It is all too easy to fall into the trap of dividing up the human race along lines that separate people out into groups presumed to be entirely different from each other. Knowing the nature of good and evil, recognizing that some human beings are good and others bad, Marcus refuses the temptation of setting good human beings completely apart from bad ones. One way in which he expresses his own goodness is by affirming the unity of the human race.

The nature (phusis) of the wrongdoer as themself (autou tou harmartantos) is something that Marcus reminds himself that he knows. And what is that? Someone who is related to him (moi sungenes). Someone who is family of sorts. But not through blood or sperm, as he says quite literally — the manners that we typically think of affiliation. It is rather what the wrongdoer and we share in (metokhos), the higher aspects of human being.

One of these is the possession of, or participation in, mind or intellect (nous). We may not all develop or use our minds to the same degree, but as humans, this is a capacity we do share in common. Not a big surprise, of course, to find any ancient philosopher holding that position, given that nearly all of them distinguish us humans from the other animals as being rational.

The other, however, might be a bit more striking or even controversial. All of us participate in something yet higher. We all — good people and bad alike — possess “a portion of divinity” (theias apomoiras). The Stoics (among others) viewed this higher part of ourselves as a way in which we are distant relatives of the gods, participating not only in a kosmopolis of human beings, but also in a community that includes all rational beings, us and the divinities.

A Third Thing Marcus Knows

Another important piece of knowledge Marcus reminds himself of is his relative invulnerability to the wrongdoers, the mistake-makers, the jerks he is going to encounter. “None of them can hurt me,” or more literally, “I am not capable of being harmed by one of them” (oute blabēnai upo tonis autōn dunamai). And “no one can implicate me in ugliness”, or again more literally “nobody can encompass me with the ugly” or “with the shameful” (aiskhrōi gar me oudeis peribalei).

The two sentiments are intrinsically connected, and here is where we see one payoff of the earlier-mentioned knowledge about the nature of the good and the evil. Realizing that there are a number of modalities to what we call “good’ and “bad”, or if you like that there are not just good and bad things plural, but also different determinate ways of being good or bad — this is a very powerful thing to understand. When Marcus insists just earlier that the real nature of the good is the kalon, and that the real nature of the bad is the aiskhron, this bears important implications about how or even whether he can be harmed by another person.

If the good and the bad are understood to intrinsically involve different, arguably lesser modalities, then it would be possible for Marcus to be harmed by the jerks he will encounter throughout his day. This involves reference to what the Stoics would call by various technical terms, like “externals,” “indifferents”, or “what is not up to us”.

Bad people can “harm” us in some senses, by damaging things that we mistakenly identify ourselves or our good with. They can deprive us of positions and opportunities, injure or impede our bodies, ruin or erode our reputations, take away our money or possessions. That is, they can indeed do us harm, when this is understood as applying to what most other virtue ethicists would call lesser kinds or modes of goodness. The useful or expedient, for example. Or the pleasurable. These are modalities of goodness in which we are vulnerable to fortune in general and to other people more specifically.

If what really matters to us is the (morally) beautiful or noble, then that is something we have control over. We can choose to throw that away, to sacrifice it to something else, but nobody — strictly speaking — can make us do so. One could point out one other important modality of goodness and badness often discussed in ancient philosophy — the just and the unjust — and note that others can indeed do injustice to us. But they can’t thereby make us less just. Only we can do that to ourselves.

All The Parts Working Together

This chapter introduces a theme that will be absolutely central throughout the Meditations, and which by the time Marcus is writing them has long been a commonplace of Stoic thought. We human beings are supposed to work together, rather than get in each other’s way, let alone center everything upon our own self and enter into conflict with others.

The Stoics framed this ideal in terms of the distinctive function of human beings. Our rational nature isn’t just a matter of intellectual faculties that can examine and inquire about matters, work though lines of thinking and argument, or facilitate an entire range of activities from crafts to philosophy. A rational human being is a social creature, an animal that exists within a fabric of relationships, and a part of a greater whole.

There are a variety of analogies used by Stoics to drive this home, often by focusing first on a whole whose parts might not be working well together. One of the favorite analogies is to compare human beings to parts of a human body. That’s precisely what Marcus does here, first with the long-familiar example of the foot, the hand, and the eye. Each of them has their particular job to do, and to do well, as an organ of the more comprehensive body.

“We are born to work together.” The Greek term there is gegonamen, which is a bit broader in sense, meaning “we came into being”, but that’s typically through birth for us human beings, so it’s a fine translation. And what did we come into being to do? Pros sunergian is what Marcus says. For engaging in our tasks or functions, our erga, which we are to do in some sense together, sun. This might be working together side by side on a common project. It might involve being at different steps or places in more complex matters.

The opposite of this is “impeding” each other. This could just be a matter of getting in the other person’s way, keeping them from doing what they ought to by what it is that we do. But the term Marcus uses, antiprassein allēlois, also includes the stronger sense of working at cross-purposes, doing things that actively conflict or interfere with what it is the other person is doing. Marcus tells himself that doing this is not just a matter of human nature. In fact, it is against nature (para phusin), and we can read this in both senses of conflicting with the rest of the cosmos and of contravening our own distinct human nature.

Comparing us to upper and lower sets of teeth is an interesting shift. Unlike the lowly foot, the useful hand, and the lofty eye, there really isn’t any hierarchy in this whole and its parts. You need both sets of teeth, and each set contains the same basic set of toothy tools for cutting, tearing, chewing, and grinding. Neither set can really work without the other cooperating.

Before we go on, notice that Marcus doesn’t say anything about the wrongdoers’ side here. Can he expect that all of these potentially troublesome people are going to be cooperators rather than hinderers? Probably not. Elsewhere he remarks that you really ought to expect bad people to behave in their characteristic ways. Then again, he also holds out the possibility that providing a good example, by following his own principles, his understanding of good and evil, of nature and human nature, creates virtual space the wrongdoer might enter and change within. What Marcus can do is to be a good, cooperating, part.

Avoiding Anger, Hatred, And Turning Away

After preparing himself to encounter the daily rogues gallery of jerks, reminding himself about why they behave as they do, and reminding himself of those three important things that he knows, Marcus writes something rather startling to himself. “Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him.”

The Greek there is in fact a “neither . . . nor” construction (oute. . . oute). Neither getting angry, nor hating is right. He does use that same term here for being related as he used earlier, being of the same (single human) race (sungenēs). And here is where it gets particularly interesting. That “I can” translates dunamai.

How should we read this term? Quite literally, it would mean a lack of capacity, so that Marcus would be unable to get angry or hate. That reading would be at odds with what he knows about himself and his own life-history. And it would also make much of what he tells himself in the Meditations rather pointless. If he can’t get angry at all, why all the cautions about anger? Why all the suggestions for how to avoid it and reframe his mindset?

Perhaps it should be read in a moral sense. Often when we say “I can’t do that,” what we really mean is, yes I could do that, but it would be wrong of me to do that. So as a decent human being, I can’t do that sort of thing. You can rely upon my formation, my principles, my conscience, my good will to keep me from doing that. You wonder then why Marcus wouldn’t just have used any of the rich moral vocabulary Greek has for expressing that sentiment to himself.

My own view on this is that “I can’t” is being used here in a weaker sense. Some assumptions are built in but left implicit. Obviously Marcus does think he can fall into anger. He is capable of it, or he can. And he does know that he shouldn’t let himself get angry, that it’s the wrong thing to do. But just reminding himself of that isn’t always enough to ward off anger. However, if he deliberately deploys the insights and practices philosophy offers him, he builds a concrete capacity to not slide into anger, or to at least reduce it, a more attenuated but effective “can” and “can’t”.

At the very end of this passage, he specifies two modes in which we “impede” each other (and arguably ourselves). These aren’t the only ones of course, but these are two that Marcus seems to think matter most in his own case, dealing with the daily panoply of jerks. He tells us that the sorts of responses on our part that are “impeding” (antipraktikon) include “to feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him”.

The translation somewhat conceals the scope of Marcus’ own word-choice here. Being, getting, or feeling angry in these passages renders two different though connected (and sometimes synonymous) terms, both of which are verbs in this chapter. The earlier one is orgizesthai, which comes from one of the common nouns for anger, orgē. The later one is aganaktein, which also denotes getting angry, losing one’s temper, becoming irritated or “vexed” (in Greek-English lexicon entries). These are both members of the wide and complex anger-vocabulary Greek places at one’s disposal.

I think it is safe in this passage to interpret them as synonymous. So getting angry is both something one cannot do, at least in relation to a relative, and it is something that, if one does, is a prime instance of “impeding”, which is against nature and wrong for one to do. There are two other terms that come up in these passages as well.

One cannot “hate” (apekhthesthai) one’s own relative. That’s certainly one way of translating it, but this verb goes beyond merely feeling the passion of hatred or enmity against another person. It has the sense as well of being hateful towards someone, and arousing or producing hatred on the other person’s part. It derives ultimately from the term for enemy, and carries with it the connotation of mutual hatred, enmity felt on both sides. “Making an enemy of my relative” by how I behave towards them could very well be what Marcus has in mind.

The other term, translated as “to turn your back on”, is apostrephesthai. More literally, it has a wider range of meaning, to turn oneself away from. It certainly does include the more specific comportment of turning oneself 180 degrees in place in relation to another person, that is, turning one’s back. But it could also include all manner of other turning aside, turning away, from the other person. This might be physical, for instance, not looking at another person, or it might also metaphorically describe a range of comportments we might exhibit towards another. Deliberately ignoring another person could be one example.

All three of these — getting angry, hating (and being hateful), and turning aside — are interconnected and perhaps even overlapping emotional, volitional, and attitudinal responses. We see them all too often when people have to deal with other people behaving like jerks towards them (or even just more generally). We get angry with them. And our angry response — especially if we have history with that person, or we recognize them as a “type” — leads easily into “hating” them, casting ourselves and them as enemies. Alternately, our anger can lead us to write them off, to give them the silent treatment, to ice them out, to insulate ourselves from interaction with them.

This complex of negative responses to others is ultimately, I think, what this entire passage of reminders is about. Knowing from experience the kinds of people he is going to have to deal with, being concerned with his own emotional responses to them, and understanding the structure of productive and unproductive thought-processes, he suggests to himself that he begin the day with this very specific meditation.

All so that he can do what is good and right, and avoid what is bad and wrong. The latter includes these three connected responses of anger, hatred, and turning-away, which he desires to avoid falling into.

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This essay was previously published in Practical Rationality