“Remove the judgement, and you have removed the thought ‘I am hurt’, and the hurt itself is removed.”
A lot of external events were taking place during Marcus Aurelius’ time as Roman Emperor. Wars. Plagues. Conspiracies against Marcus. From the moment he took over as emperor, sharing the title with his stepbrother Lucius for the first eight years of his reign, he was constantly verbally attacked by Roman senators, regularly pushed to not implement changes in Roman law that gave civil liberties to slaves, and continuously pressed by the said senators to clean up, both literally and figuratively, the seedy parts of Rome. However, internally, Marcus was dealing with a slew of serious stomach issues and chronic pain that were with him throughout his life. These ailments that Marcus dealt with are the same as the ailments that everyday people have to do battle with today, but how he dealt with them is the topic of this post.
In the quoted passage above (Meditations, 4.7), Marcus is reminding himself that once you remove the judgement of pain, the pain is removed. The Stoics believed that one could separate the feelings, whether they be chronic pain, heartache, emotional issues, or any other ailment, from the person, thus giving a person at least some cognitive distance. The goal for Marcus, according to
, was to look at the chronic pain and associated health issues through the lens of harm, and therefore if the judgements did not equate to harm for Marcus, then the hurt would be null and void. The judgement that the pain was separate from the person was monumental for Marcus, and Marcus was better off because of it. Health problems, and especially chronic pain, were indifferent to Stoics. What the Stoics believed was that wisdom and virtue are a person’s ultimate goals, and a good life consists of those two virtues, but health, the offices you held, and the possessions you own are not under a person’s control and therefore are unrelated to that path of virtue.Epictetus, the person who Marcus modeled himself after on his Stoic journey, was reportedly a person with a damaged leg. According to lore, Epictetus was horribly injured by his slave master after a disagreement when Epictetus was a teenager. After Epictetus was set free and set up his school, he repeatedly stated that what focused his mind on Stoicism was the fact that he had been injured, and he dealt with chronic pain. What mattered to Epictetus was that he developed a stronger character after the terrible incident with his slave master and therefore was able to exercise virtue when dealing with the chronic pain. Marcus was deeply influenced by Epictetus’ viewpoint that it was not bodily injuries that mattered, but what those bodily injuries did to strengthen your own character.
If we learn to tell ourselves in this modern age that the judgement of our pain is not the same as the pain itself and therefore give ourselves grace and cognitive distance, the chronic pain will not be so horrific. If we learn to separate ourselves from the pain and not see the pain as harmful, then we will exercise virtue regarding the pain we face. When we exercise this virtue, we will fundamentally harden ourselves against the pain. Finally, when we harden ourselves against the pain preemptively, we have ultimately conquered the pain in our minds. That is what Marcus was trying to do with his serious stomach issues and chronic pain, and that is what we can do if we follow the Stoic principle of removing ourselves from the hurt by removing our judgement that it hurts.