Marcus Aurelius' Stoic Paradoxes

Contradictions that Rewire Us

Dear Classical Wisdom Reader,

It’s something we’re always saying: ancient philosophy is very practical.

The paradoxes of Marcus Aurelius, the famed Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, are a prime example. Taken from his much celebrated Meditations, they show how the wisdom of the past speaks to us anew, across generations, centuries, and continents.

Moreover, they’re extremely applicable to our lives today.

Read on below to discover how the wisdom of an emperor can help you meet life’s various obstacles… and even improve your love life!

All the best,

Sean Kelly

Managing Editor

Classical Wisdom

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Marcus Aurelius’ Four Stoic Paradoxes

by Andrew Perlot of Socratic State of Mind

Most notebooks don’t survive 1,800 years.

Yet the medieval scribes copying the journal of Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius — as well the Renaissance thinkers printing it, and the modern readers who’ve periodically returned it to bestseller lists — all thought it contained something priceless. It changed them.

This isn’t accidental. Marcus’s journal, Meditations, is the foremost survivor of an ancient philosophical journaling practice in which record-keeping wasn't the point. Marcus’s objective was to change himself in the moment pen touched paper.

As scholar and philosopher Pierre Hadot noted in The Inner Citadel:

“The goal is to reactualize, rekindle, and ceaselessly reawaken an inner state which is in constant danger of being numbed or extinguished. The task—ever-renewed—is to bring back to order an inner discourse which becomes dispersed and diluted in the futility of routine.”

The Same Old Startling Wisdom

Across the Meditations, Marcus continuously repeats himself with slightly different wording. He hunts for the right turn of phrase like the trained orator he was, trying to craft an incantation to move an audience of one. If his ideas lack originality, it was because he pulled them from a storehouse of well-tested wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of learning. He’d gone over these ideas a thousand times and knew their power to alter him. He simply redeploys them in new and startling ways, and they still hit home today for his unintended audience.

You’ll find several types of striking phrases in Meditations — epigrams, maxims, and idea mashups all appear. But some of his best are paradoxes.

The Other Stoic Paradoxes

Philosophers have long known they can set minds on fire by asserting seemingly contradictory truths. This is the art of paradox. They become earworms that never leave us, often mentally surfacing when life is most hectic.

Marcus, however, doesn’t focus on the six Stoic paradoxes at the heart of the philosophy. Perhaps these seemed such a given that they weren’t worth repeating.

He focused on what I consider “deployable,” paradoxes, or ones we might bring to bear in real-world situations. Here are some of my favorites:

Splendor’s Downside

“It is possible to be happy, even in a palace.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.3

This paradox works on two levels.

First, many balk at the implication that palaces aren’t obvious places for happiness. If you’re ensconced in a palace, you probably have money, power, and influence. People respect you, and perhaps fear you. Isn’t this — or some modern equivalent — as good as it gets?

Those with more perspective realize something Marcus — a Roman emperor who knew a lot about palatial living and power — felt deep in his bones. Wealth, influence, and power often lead us down dark roads. Sycophants tell the powerful what they want to hear instead of what’s true, a recipe for detachment from reality and self-centeredness. This rarely ends well for rich and powerful people.

It’s against this truism that Marcus makes his paradoxical assertion — actually, you can live well in a palace.

Here Stoicism parts ways with Buddhism. Where “high level” Buddhist practitioners flee the palace for an ascetic life of renunciation, Stoics stay put. They insist anyone dedicated to philosophy can be wealthy, powerful, and live in luxury without being corrupted. You can live with virtue in a palace, and therefore you can be happy in a palace. Philosophical palatial living is harder, but it’s doable. Marcus wrote to remind himself to use his practice to push back against his worst inclinations and the bad influences at court.

For those of us lower on the socio-economic totem poll, the paradox is more about correcting goals and desires — collecting wealth, power, and influence for their own sake won’t make us happy in the long run. It just might ruin our lives. The further you climb, the further there is to fall. So we might as well get off the hedonic treadmill now.

Passionless Love

“To be free of passion and yet full of love.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 1.9

A thousand odes have been written to love, but how many poets mention the downside?

Anyone who’s fallen in love knows there’s an element of delusional obsession to it. You can’t stop thinking about the other person; your mind whirrs and fantasies flit through your mind’s eye. You feel great, but in a slightly unhinged way — you’re not thinking straight.

Stoics insist this isn’t love, but pathos, a word they applied to emotions like anger, fear, unmoored desire, and excessive joy. Passions are disturbing and misleading forces of the mind stemming from faulty reasoning and lack of self-examination, but they’re often pleasurable until they lead us into mistakes.

The Stoics weren’t anti-love or anti-feeling — their philosophy demanded both.

Even Epictetus, the most cantankerous Stoic philosopher of antiquity whose work survives, admitted that feelings were fine. “I must not be without feeling like a statue,” he said.

This paradox comes from Marcus’s praise of a beloved teacher famous for his sober, grounded love and kindness toward all. This isn’t just about romantic love, but about cultivating love toward all of mankind.

How can we achieve this passionless love?

As dry as it sounds, forcing yourself to soberly assess and reason with your delusional passions is the best way to keep yourself from going off the rails.

You’re not going to totally escape the “madness” of falling in love any more than you’ll always be perfectly calm and rational.

Passionate love fades, and we’ll doom ourselves to horrible lives if we have nothing to fill the gap. Someone would need to keep changing romantic partners and continuously seek out new rollercoasters.

It’s critical that we have another sort of love at the ready — one based on virtue. Stoics thought expressing that might look like being loving, trustworthy, kind, etc.

This devotional love doesn’t preclude romance and sex, but puts the wellbeing of your partner first. You commit to treating them justly and trying to better them. That goes whether the love is romantic or platonic.

Obstacle or Whetstone?

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.20^.

Every misfortune that befalls us and every roadblock we encounter is an opportunity. We’ve just been issued an invitation from the universe to become a better person.

The only real question: will we accept it and rise to the occasion, or reject it and sink into the mire? Will we wallow or will we grow?

How might we grow? Most problems have solutions. Goals might be reached from multiple avenues. So, a setback is an opportunity to learn new skills or think outside the box.

But Stoics would say this is beside the point. Even if no solutions exist, we can still grow by becoming more virtuous, and so become better equipped to endure — and thrive in — our future life, whatever happens.

We might use a setback to become wise, just, courageous, and moderate.

When Kindness Subverts

“Kindness is invincible”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.18

“Kindness is invincible,” seems like a nonsensical oxymoron.

How well did kindness work against viking raiders slaughtering the unarmed monks of England so they could steal their golden relics? In a hardened world, kindness seems an inexcusable luxury opening us up to abuse by the wicked.

Yet kindness was demanded by the virtue of justice Marcus continuously references in Meditations, and on at least one occasion he almost seemed to use it offensively in a manner that protected him.

When the war hero Avidius Cassius — Marcus’s trusted general — proclaimed himself emperor in 175 A.D., it threatened to tear the empire apart. The senate responded by declaring him and his supporters public enemies and confiscating all their property, stripping them and their heirs of their wealth and land.

But Marcus countermanded the order, saying that anyone who laid down their arms — including Cassius — would be fully pardoned. It was a shrewd move.

Cassius’ supporters, who may have followed him into rebellion because they’d been ordered to rather than because they wanted to see him on the throne — now no longer had their backs to a wall.

Before it had been win or lose everything, but Marcus had changed the game.

Now it was a matter of win, or end the senseless war before it cost tens of thousands of lives.

A cabal of officers killed Cassius and the war ended on the spot.

Whether you think Marcus was exercising clemency and kindness or merely making a shrewd power move, you have to admit that it worked. He protected himself better with an act of forgiveness than a sword or suit of armor ever could.

Implement Like An Emperor:

Of course, it’s one thing to admire these paradoxes and another thing to live them.

Marcus and Epictetus knew all about philosophical dilettantes who talked a good talk but never lived up to their principles. With all the power and adoration surrounding him — all those distractions — It would have been easy for Marcus to fall into that trap. Meditations is a record of his daily attempts to stay free and close the gap between his principles and his actions.

If you want to do the same, it’s not enough to read. It’s not enough to admire. You also need to close the gap, which means an active practice and journaling like a philosopher. You must, as Marcus Aurelius instructed himself, “fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you.”