Below is an extract from Emily Colette Wilkinson’s review of Marcus Aurelius: A Life, by Frank McLynn. The parallels with the Buddhist approach are striking, and I can’t help feeling again that it’s a tragedy that Stoic philosophy — the original Western Buddhism? — was stamped out by that Middle-Eastern upstart religion, the early Christian church.
Marcus’ creed held that virtue was its own reward and the only life goal worth pursuing. On the Stoic view, we have no power to determine whether we’ll be rich or poor, famous or infamous, sick or healthy, but we can control whether or not we are good. Thus, life’s pleasures and pains–poverty, disease, fame, death-become “indifferents” to the Stoics–i.e. matters that have no direct bearing on our moral wellbeing and so are irrelevant. As a Stoic, I might be poor and sick and my family might die, but none of this hurts me because it does not impair my ability to be good, which consists in working for the good of my fellow human beings.
“Remember that everything is but what we think it,” Marcus writes, and what he urges himself to think is that we are all ears of corn for the reaping, “leaves that the wind scatters earthward”:
But a little while and thou shalt be burnt ashes or a few dried bones, and possibly a name, possibly not a name even….And all that we prize so highly in our lives is empty and corrupt and paltry, and we but as puppies snapping at each other, as quarrelsome children now laughing and anon in tears.
…
Stoic holism offers a refuge from individualism, the intrinsic faith of our age, and its petty, exhausting calculations. Through Marcus’ writings, individual self-interest and concern for others become mutually supporting ends: The well-being of others and my own well-being are one and the same. And so my happiness consists in orienting my actions toward others and the good of the whole, rather than in pursuing the endless vagaries of earthly desire-sex, fame, fine things, the love and approval of peers-the Goblin Market cravings (to borrow a term from the poet Christina Rossetti) that contemporary society usually encourages us to indulge as the means to self-fulfillment. Have more orgasms, we’re told, wear spiffier outfits, watch another movie, speak more assertively, and the longings, the sense of something missing, will abate.
Stoicism says just the opposite: Stop indulging illusory physical and emotional longings and see your real happiness outside of yourself, your body, your emotions.
The book being reviewed, incidentally, takes a very dim view of Stoicism, finding it “inhuman.” That in itself is interesting. As the reviewer points out, Stoicism led its practioners to be “different from the man guided by physical desires and emotions, better than that man and less human, partaking more of something metaphysical, something divine” — that is, “inhuman” in a positive sense. The Buddha too, when challenged to acknowledge his ontological status (God? Man? Something else?) denied that he was a human being. The Buddha too, in a sense, was “positively inhuman.”
