MARCUS AURELIUS : WARRIOR, PHILOSOPHER, EMPEROR

by Frank McLynn
684pp, Bodley Head, £20

Frank McLynn is currently Visiting Professor in the Department of Literature at Strathclyde University. A full-time writer, his most recent books include Napoleon, 1066, Villa and Zapata, Wagons West, Stanley and 1759, all published by Pimlico.

One of the points I am trying to make clear in this review of Frank McLynn’s Marcus Aurelius: Warrior, Philosopher, Emperor is that philosophy strictly, in itself, has nothing to do with how to live or 'normal life' whereas the biographer of Marcus Aurelius, Frank McLynn, hard headed Scot like Hume and Oxford professor, is that the Stoic way of life is nonsense from the point of view of being a normal human being.

    And it is. After all Socrates refuses to lie and yet accepts the judgment of the State even though he thinks it is wrong because, simply, for philosophical principles purely, one of which being life is not really worth the bother, which is why he tells Phaedo to dedicate a cock to Aesclepsius as he is being cured of an illness. Pragmatism is useful - that is its declared purpose - but it does not reflect stark reality - which is my point. Even a pragmatist has to amend his thinking to rock hard reality. It's not the other way around.

     A reflection that historically and philosophically clarifies this is Heidegger’s notion of OUSIA from two points of view, his own and Pierre Bourdieu’s. Heidegger himself finds the basis for the Greek notion of ‘being’ in everyday objects, practical objects one uses every day, literally located in one’s home, not ‘a house’. It is the familiar, the everyday, what surrounds you all the time and is ready-to-hand. Being is very cozy. Pierre Bourdieu specifically ties this notion to the political chaos in Germany after World War I, something already well known in its particulars in Heidegger’s biography, but never before clearly tied specifically to his basic concepts. Being is stable because it is what always surrounds you. It literally has the aspect of being at home. But the political and social chaos of Germany literally threatens every concept of ‘being at home’. So, to restore ‘homeliness’, one must impose strict discipline from above. Heidegger’s philosophy, then, is very ‘human’ whereas the ‘inhuman’ philosophy of the Stoics destroyed any fundamental notion of ‘being at home’ ontologically.

     And strangely enough Sartre who started from basically the same premises as Heidegger, even the same enthusiasm for Husserl and Hegel, but biographically always being literally homeless throughout his life but especially in his childhood, and identifying himself with homeless figures like Jean Genet and Gustav Flaubert, basically conceived ‘being’ as a distinct pain in the ass and life itself as a big joke with nothing serious possible from it despite his own intense political involvement, like Heidegger’s, except he disagreed with everybody and everything and quite literally put his own life on the line several times, whereas the actual threat of which at a post-war French tribunal made Heidegger have a nervous breakdown. He did not feel at home. So, if one considers Sartre a Stoic – and I do, is Stoicism really, fundamentally ‘inhuman’? Sartre would have said, ‘Yes! Quite so!’ – and then laughed.


THE STOIC THEORY OF OIKIOSIS: [pg. 42] ‘(ii) An argument in practical thought – builds directly on the Aristotelian model for talking about the TELOS – that when the Stoics turn to nature [small ‘n’] as Aristotle did in the middle of EN I vii, unlike Aristotle, they do not just speak about man’s nature as a static entity which is the same all through. Rather they go back to man’s natural behavior from birth and consider his nature as it develops from a period in which he, like any other animal, behaves on the basis of HORME and perception alone to one in which his behavior is based on reason – The real point lies – in sketching a certain understanding of human practical thought as seen from within, i. e., in terms of its form and content as it is actually found and engaged in by individual, human deliberators right from the start: what they take to be valuable. Thus the point is not just that nature has set up from the outside self-preservation as the goal of animal behavior.

     Rather, the emphasis lies in Stoic theory about what goes on inside the animal: the more or less rudimentary form of practical thought or individual seeing, through which any supposed goal of nature is reached. - The aim is to focus on man’s nature and more specifically on his seeing as this changes through the development of his cognitive and practical relationship with the world once reason is ‘superadded’ to the cognitive and practical faculty which initially man shares with animals. – The stoic view of the human TELOS is embedded in the idea of a development in seeing and coming to see. – The Stoics base their conception of the human TELOS – constructing wholly within actual practical thought itself an argument proper for their view of the human TELOS that nowhere relies on any premise outside human seeing. [pg. 43]- The stoics would be able to defend the claim that their own ethical theory was relevant to anybody. [pg 44] For if they could find in the development, from childhood to adult hood, in the impulses that account for human behavior what [much like Aristotle] they were looking for, then they might also be able first to explain, in a theory of error based on the idea of an erratic development of something initially correct, the existence of many contrasting views of the good.[pg. 44] – The stoic conception of the good was developed from an indistinct understanding of it shared, from the very beginning, by any individual. – With the capacity for purposive action , and not one necessarily set up by Nature [like self-preservation], the TELOS of human beings – should be seen to be employing that very capacity to the full which will make them live “in homology with nature” in that they will now be able to grasp nature, or the world, as it in fact is. For what they will now have is knowledge.’ [pg. 46] Troels Engberg-Pedersen.

     And here the biography of Epictetus, the ex-slave, despite his thought being ‘very confused’ [McLynn, page 210], shows him easily changing from situation to situation, as far as we know, to the point we do not know how he died whereas Seneca was hunted down by Nero and Aurelius refused medical treatment though he had the most successful physician in the Empire available to him. When you read the DISCOURSES, you do not readily find confusion, though it can be hunted down, but rather sense someone that can always land on his feet in any situation, something neither Seneca nor Aurelius could do. ‘Epictetus always had the confidence of the professional lecturer, whereas Marcus was always more tentative and self-questioning,’ McLynn page 212.


     Another point relevant to Epictetus versus Aurelius relates to immediacy, specifically, ‘the impact of the thing . . . while also insisting that whether something is persuasive or not is a matter of the state of mind of the person who is, or is not, persuaded? – The answer to this question goes back to the fundamental distinction between the child’s view and the adult view which lies at the heart of OIKIOSIS as the Stoics describe this. The child is immediately related to a given object in two ways in which a sane adult is not. First, the child is directly concerned with the object itself . . . whereas the sane adult is rather related to a certain understanding of the object, which is wider, not so immediately directed towards the object itself, because it reflects attention being given to a large number of other experiences [in memory [language]] and to general considerations of various kinds. Secondly, the child is more immediately concerned with the object since he sees it from a single point of view, viz. his own subjective one. As against this, the adult will see the object both from his own subjective point of view and from an objective view which relativizes the former one.
Both differences have the effect that when a sane adult whose mind is not totally consistent is reacting to some particular object, the fact that he is reacting to a particular object, which is manifestly there . . . will make his “childish” reaction appear more congeal. It is just more difficult to maintain to some general set of interconnecting beliefs than to the object which is directly present [or vividly approaching.]

     What explains a person’s falling back from his considered point of view to some passionate belief about some particular object is a general fact about human attention. In spite of the fact that human beings may rise to a considered view of particular objects . . . it apparently remains the case that human attention is most easily given to particulars.’   THE THEORY OF OIKIOSIS pp. 196-197.  

I relate this overall to what McLynn says about Marcus Aurelius’ numerous inconsistencies versus Epictetus’ smooth professorial seeming [rhetorical] consistency. Aurelius is writing to himself. He is not trying to be persuasive but to simply clarify what are immediate observations. Epictetus is trying to persuade an audience. Aurelius writes what he perceives as true right at the moment. Epictetus is choosing the right words so his audience agrees with what he says. If this is true, what Troels Engberg-Pedersen says immediately above, applies quite specifically to Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is not seeking persuasive consistency but the truth of immediate impressions as immediately judged only in the purely subjective context of a sane adult. Epictetus is guiding sane adult minds in a full social context. The situations are drastically different. Marcus Aurelius’ cultural prejudices are rampant especially because he is trying to be honest to himself. Epictetus, on the other hand, is the ex-slave persuading aristocrats.


     One piece of honesty on Aurelius’ part whom point is usually lost because it is simply taken as a philosophical concept, that is, a general context of connections, rather than a drastically related philosophical AND pragmatic paradigm, an axiom of stark, bare reality. This relates to McLynn’s statement, ‘The implicit attack on linear time made by Marcus’ which he relates to the Eternal Recurrence of the Same McLynn says is ‘itself a Stoic standard’ [also related to Lucretius] and notoriously attached to Nietzsche. However, this philosophical illusory façade – merely in bits and pieces even in Stoicism – is also highly obscure, even contradictory in Nietzsche, as personal in his thinking as Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, and can, with difficulty, be related, also with its contradictions, in purely personal issues. If one has had a lovely childhood and adolescence ruined by a hideous present as with Nietzsche, or desperately tried to plan a good and ethical future for one’s family and see it all descend into the worst kind of sordid ugliness as Aurelius did, one might very well impractically foreswear the past and future for the sole reality of the present moment, or hope for a recurrence of better times that led to the present moment, both presupposing that the realistic future is going to be very, very bad.

     McLynn quotes, ‘Remember that everything has always been the same and keeps recurring, and it makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a hundred years or two hundred or an infinite period’ [also, ‘Remember that no one loses any life other than the one he lives, or lives any life other than the one he loses. It follows the longest and the shortest lives are brought to the same state. The present moment is equal for all; so what is passing is equal also; the loss thereof turns out to be the merest fragment of time. No one can lose either the past or the future – how could anyone be derived of what he does not possess.’] MED II, 14, 1 and 2. ‘I am made up of substance and what animates it, and neither one can ever stop existing, any more than it began to. Every portion of me will be reassigned as another portion of the world, and that in turn transformed into another’ [also, ‘Nothing forbids this assertion, even if the universe is subject to the completion of cycles.’]. MED V,13. In both of these quotes the personal intrudes in the fact that what is asserted is beyond any possible human keen. They are neither scientific statements nor logical deductions at all, but are statements about a sense of human existence.

     ‘Even more bizarre is Marcus’ oft-repeated idea that we must live in the present and concentrate only on the present moment’, pg. 217. McLynn connects this to his conclusion, ‘His emphasis on the present engenders some of the very worst confusions and self-contradictions in the MEDITATIONS. It is important to be clear that Marcus is not just advocating Horace’s ‘carpe diem’ or enjoining us to live every day as if it were our last – though he does also do that [MED II, 5, 2, XI, 34, VII, 69]. He very plainly preaches that the present is all there is. One can see why the Stoics taught this: not to worry about the future allegedly chokes off our worst fear of pain as well as worldly ambition, while it is also definitional of neurotics that they are locked in the past. . . But taken seriously, this prescription to treat as real only the present instant which would make life pointless, for not only would all striving, ambition and aspiration vanish, but so too would memory, nostalgia, sentimentality and all sense of what makes life valuable . . . Taken seriously, ‘presentism’ would prevent all contingency planning – not a good recipe for a Roman emperor. A politician or a soldier needs to be a chess-player, but this would be impossible if one was so ineluctably wedded to a doctrine of the present. Marcus himself is very confused on this issue, for at one time he tells us that the present instant is unreal and at another that it is.


         One of the problems with McLynn is that he does not consider whether human life is fundamentally valuable in any sense whatsoever. He just appeals to ‘normal’ common notions, obviously in a purely ‘practical’ way not to be looked into too deeply. And he is right – to be able to act at all presupposes these logically ludicrous premises. His statements clarify what the real issue is, that is, does reality in any real way really
provide premises to a guide for how to live, and, purely in itself, it obviously does not and cannot. You must have unquestioned, not at all though unquestionable, premises on how and why to live at all. The philosophical paradigm of Stoicism does not provide answers. Answers are purely the product of wishful thinking. And part of that is being born as an animal with the desire to survive pure and simple except what one learns in context through education.


      McLynn quotes Aurelius to the effect – 1] ‘Limit yourself to the present’ VII, 29. 2] ‘The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone’ II, 14. 3] ‘Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it. Each of us lives only now, this brief instant’ II, 10. 4] ‘If you’ve seen the present, then you’ve seen everything – as it’s ever been since the beginning, as it will be forever’ VI, 37. 5] ‘Forget the future’ VII, 8. 6] ‘For me the present is constantly the matter on which rational and social virtue exercises itself’ VII, 68. 7] ‘Past and future have no power over you. Only the present – and that can be minimized’ VIII, 36. As McLynn would probably agree, statement six reduces itself to nonsense in this context. But, none the less, what Aurelius holds is true if the present really is more real than linear time. The future cannot exist, the past cannot exist except as concepts in the present and subordinated to it and its purposes, thereby automatically putting both in question as to their reliability and rationality, a conundrum Aurelius possibly inherited from Plato., that is, if sense knowledge is primary, presence, then how can the past, memory, be in any sense ‘real’ not having present existence, only having the ‘power’ of logical, historical explanation based on nothing present to explain why the present is as it is. Even stated so, it falls afoul of Aurelius’ paradoxes, in many ways much like Zeno’s, because if sense knowledge/presence is the primary standard of knowledge, anything else is purely speculative and imaginative. Reality as it is in itself, is impractical, as Hegel or Sartre might say it is ‘of and for itself’, and as such cannot rationally fit into a pragmatic paradigm. But one still must act, essentially because of the impulse to survive. As Sartre says, ‘Man is a futile passion.’  Man is only secondarily rational, a product of education and history, whereas primarily he is an irrational animal.


       McLynn proceeds, ‘Ye the problems of Marcus’ “presentism” do not end here. His ideas on the present collide with other aspects of his overall doctrine, most notably that of holism [1 : the philosophic theory first formulated by Jan C. Smuts that the determining factors in nature are wholes (as organisms) which are irreducible to the sum of their parts and that the evolution of the universe is the record of the activity and making of these wholes 2 : a theory or doctrine according to which a whole cannot be analyzed without residue into the sum of its parts or reduced to discrete elements — compare GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY, ORGANICISM- Meriam-Webster Unabridged], to say nothing of pantheism.

Multiple philosophical puzzles are created by such a stance. If the present is all there is, what meaning can we attach to the idea of eternal recurrence, for by definition everything that has ever happened must be identical to what is happening now? If one insists that only the present instant is real, one falls into the fallacy of which Hume’s skepticism was a deliberate REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM: far from not stepping into the same river twice a la Heraclitus, one would not be able to step into it once..


Hume demonstrated that Descartes’ famous COGITO ERGO SUM makes no sense if there is no “I” to do the thinking, and how could there be on a strict interpretation of the present instant? The most there could be would be a kind of solipsism of the moment. To live in the present moment commits one to the unreality of time, and in logic to the famous paradoxes of Zeno – To escape from this quagmire when talking about the present, the philosopher and psychologist William James famously popularized the idea of the “specious present”, defined by him as anything from a few seconds to a minute. [PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY (1902) i, p. 609] The “specious present” was conceived as an interval, not a durationless instant, and thus allowed to escape from the “real present”, which was durationless. In the “specious present” there could be earlier and later parts, and thus no paradoxes about time. But the very notion of “earlier” implies memory, and once you have admitted memory, there seems to be no good reason to entertain the fatuous prejudice about the past to which Marcus commits himself . . . A judicious conclusion would be that the Stoic notion of “presentism” is a mess.’ [pp. 218-219]

      All this makes good practical sense but doubly reinforces what I have said about philosophical paradigms versus pragmatic paradigms. Here, fiction is presented as more pragmatically ‘true’, that is, useful, than actual fact. In a pragmatic ‘world’, everything is either useful or useless to the presupposition of living well. And being a ‘world’ or a ‘whole’ or ‘life as such’, it mistakes systematic logical completeness with the philosophical paradigm strictly trying to comprehend reality ‘as found’, literally and wordlessly experienced, beyond presuppositions, not as conceived for a purpose. Trying to deal with concepts attempting to describe the wordless is always already a paradox. However, it does point to the real non-human reality in all its bits and pieces that factually surrounds us and condemns us to death. To have a ‘pragmatic’ philosophy, then, is to secretly sneak numerous theological concepts in under the bed sheets. There is no purpose to reality. And we are composed of reality. And in this regard the Stoics have an edge on the matter because A] they admit the pointlessness of matter, and B] they say the only thing a person can do is try to impose his will on matter, and yet that is something that comes after the fact as the rational adult comes after the irrational child. You are not discovering a super human father out there. You are the only father.


      McLynn goes on, ‘Another cosmological issue that exercised Marcus was whether the cosmos was to be considered a product of God’s providence or a mere collection of atoms, as the Epicureans alleged,’ pg. 219. ‘Marcus has several arguments for preferring the idea of Providence to that of atoms, principally the atom theory makes men mere beasts,’ pg. 220. But this argument merely amounts to, ‘It just does not suit my purposes’, i. e., to support moral behavior, that is, it is a practical argument for what is ‘normal’ as Mclynn often does so in fact, to a degree here, Marcus and McLynn are in the same boat. Again McLynn, ‘Another argument is that Epicureanism and atoms implies disjuncture and divergence, whereas Stoicism correctly stresses unity and holism.’ This is another ‘It just does not suit my purposes argument.’ It is simply more useful, practical to sort things into groups with common characteristics whereas, in actual fact,
nothing is ontologically different between either position and the factual value of the sorting is essentially verbal and only to a small degree experiential, empirical. It is merely a matter of practical convenience. And McLynn supports this with Marcus Aurelius himself when he says,’ Yet in the end, Marcus admitted that the atoms-versus-Providence conundrum was insoluble by empirical evidence and argued that it made actually no difference to ethical theory which view of the universe was entertained; we can still use reason to impose order on chaos’ [something which I have already said above. McLynn’s contention is supported by MEDITATIONS VI,4; VI,24; IX,39. With such a ‘It does not matter which either/or’, by the pragmatic logical principle of Ockham’s razor the simpler concept is more likely right, that is, since we actually perceive the so called ‘world’ really in just bits and pieces, ‘reality’ really is just bits and pieces.


     All representations are ‘indifferents’. That is why your child’s illness is not a bad thing. ‘Things have no moral value’, McLynn, pg. 221. All things are per se non-moral. ‘Representations are the cause of everyone’s unhappiness.’ That illness of your child is in the external world. In fact, your child is in the external world. Its sickness or death, therefore, comes from ‘not applying the proper preconceptions,’ DICOURSES IV, 1, 42-6. The only world you can control is the internal one.

However, Stoicism believes in strict fate. So-called ‘free will’ and ‘responsibility’ simply come from your historically determined ‘character’ and even much more from your almost complete ignorance of all effecting causes whether fully determining synthetic causes or causes subsidiary to synthetic causes. And after seeing personally how people totally change their personalities with brain damage and chemical imbalances, that is,  obviously, nonsense also.

The full and thorough working out of cause and effect is not just difficult but absolutely impossible. That is why the Stoics say full determination resides in the complete knowledge of God whereas human ‘moral’ acts are literally perceived as ‘free’ only as fundamentally incomplete in their knowledge. That is why only the mythical perfect wise man knows truly what is good and bad. On the one hand, imperfect human beings can supposedly commit what they assume is a good act that, however, has evil consequences. On the other hand, someone can commit an evil act that turns out to have good consequences. For unknown reasons, what applies in one person’s case does not apply in another person’s case. So, the complexity and detail of causality does imply an illusory flexibility that, though not real free will, acknowledges our permanent ignorance of hard core reality.

    We need to break down our wishful thinking about free  will and responsibility and think more like the Classical Greeks did who regarded the bad behavior of the bad person as a curse of fate upon them that, none the less, did not absolve them of punishment for that behavior.[I did not say ‘correction’ for how can one correct Fate?. Things are seen to change, but are only ‘seen’ thus incompletely, so that the whole story is never completely told. And it is only with knowing the whole story, as I am finding out with Feinstein’s BECOMING WILLIAM JAMES, do you KNOW any of the story – which actually is an impossible task.

This in turn goes back to ‘All rational minds think alike’ as they all start from the same point, working for the same purpose, and only seem to change by pure accident in experience and education. Therefore all that individuality amounts to in ontological fact is a pile of accidents set on a basis of rationality that all human beings, since no one is perfectly rational, disparage and largely disregard.

Gary. C. Moore