Marcus Aurelius: An Introduction to Stoicism

In this installment of our video lecture series on stoicism, we adapt the brilliant lecture by Michael Sugrue on Marcus Aurelius. This video hopes to serve as an audiovisual supplement of the original.

An excerpt from the video:

"After the death of Socrates and the breakup of Greek culture that resulted from the Peloponnesian War, Socratic philosophy went into a decline and fragmented into several pieces. And the fragments of Socratic philosophy make up the body of Hellenistic philosophy.

The three main fragments that Socratic philosophy breaks into are called stoicism, epicureanism, and skepticism. The first of these developments is hedonism or Epicureanism. Named after a guy named Epicurus, and what epicureanism says is that pleasure is the only good and that the happy man is the one that has a great many pleasures but no corresponding pains.

A second alternative again a minor alternative fragment of Socratic philosophy is called scepticism. Socrates teaches by question and answer. Socrates helps people to articulate and to realize what's already buried within their soul. When Socrates does that when he's in that skeptical mode he says I myself know nothing all I do is inquire into things.

The third and most important development in Hellenistic philosophy is called stoicism. Stoicism is probably the greatest and most interesting achievement of the Hellenistic philosophers, and while it never achieved the poetic and intellectual grandeur of the Socratic synthesis, or the Platonic overarching system which makes statements about the entire human condition, stoicism is in fact a noble philosophy.

Stoicism takes the position that the wise man, the good man, the philosopher, is a man who lives in accordance with nature. He fears only abdicating his moral responsibility. He is not afraid of pain. He is not afraid of death. He is not afraid of poverty. He is not afraid of any of the vicissitudes of the human condition. He fears only that he should let himself down and then he should be less than a complete human being according to the Stoics.

The stoic philosopher is the man who has liberated himself from fear. He's not afraid of death. He's not afraid of pain. He's not afraid of other people's dismissal as a fool. The only thing he cares about is that he should meet his moral obligations.

Now among the Roman Stoics, two are especially noteworthy. One is Epictetus and one is Marcus Aurelius. One of the wonderful irony about the history of philosophy is that Epictetus was a slave and Marcus Aurelius was an Emperor. And philosophy is the great equalizer, both the slave and the Emperor can equally well participate in a philosophy that is accessible to all human beings. As human beings there is nothing less conscious of social status than philosophy.

The most interesting of the Stoics is Marcus Aurelius. Lord Acton the great English philosopher and historian once said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And that's generally speaking true. The difficulty with that generalization is Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius was an absolute ruler. He was a ruler of the Roman Empire. He was an Emperor.

Maybe he did it through philosophy but well it remains to be seen. Marcus is the last of the good emperors. He's the last of the Antonine emperors and the emperors that come before him are generally speaking ok. They're not as bad as the ones that come after. But Marcus is perhaps the greatest of the Romans, the noblest of the Romans. When old-fashioned writers talk about Roman virtue, what they have in mind is Marcus Aurelius, a man who does what he ought to do regardless of circumstance through Roman virtue. He's not afraid of being dead. He's not afraid of being in pain. He's not afraid to have people laugh at him. He's only afraid of doing what's wrong. He's only afraid of making chaos of his soul. Why? Because his soul is the only thing he's completely in control of. It's the only thing he's responsible for and the rest of it as a matter of indifference to him.

He is in some respects an enormously lonely man and in some respects an enormously sad man. There’s a melancholy in this that’s terrifically moving. And yet we ought not to pity Marcus Aurelius because if he looked at our lives, he would pity us. Pathetic creatures that we are. We don't even meet his standard of virtue and were pitying him. Think about the irony of that he said. Well I’d pity you back if I didn't think that was disrespectful. Think about. What it takes to be something like Marcus Aurelius. We shall not see his like again."


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