Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not a truth.
Marcus Aurelius
We haven't covered him just yet, but at some point we'll see a little bit of Marcus Aurelius. He's most known, philosophically, for his support of Stoicism -- a philosophy of life which espouses a genuine concern only for those things in our immediate control. And, if you really think about it, that is a pretty short list. The school of philosophy itself (Stoicism) was originally founded by Zeno, who lived himself from about 334 to 262 BC, and was then joined by thinkers like Cicero, Epictetus, Seneca, and of course Marcus Aurelius. The basis of the thought lies in happiness as a product of wisdom and control; its metaphysics lies in the idea that matter (going back to Aristotle's dichotomy of matter and form) is fundamental reality and is dynamic, changing, structured, and rationally ordered. The core value is of reason, through which all knowledge can be derived and at which all truths can be arrived -- this is because "God" (not the Biblical version, but you get the point) rationally structures the world so as to be accessible by reason (created in 'logos' -- Greek for 'the word') and thus all nature is reflective of this principle. However, as humans, despite the fact that we possess a formal element (or "spark of the divine" as the Stoics call it) that allows us to know those rational principles inherent to all things in the world, our freedom is also limited. Because things are rationally ordered by God to fit rational principles, the Stoics fundamentally believed that things and events in life were determined, and thus humans could only respond (take an attitude or emotion toward) those things -- not impress upon, manipulate, change, or effect them. As a result, proper living and 'wisdom' lies in controlling only that which can be controlled -- the self and one's responses/reactions to those determined events of life -- and living according to those natural laws and rational principles placed in the world by "God" through logos.
As an Ethic, a lot of times Stoicism is incredibly appealing -- it calls for persons to separate themselves from those things which are destined to be transient and inclined toward change. If you think about it, there is so much we can't control about what goes on around us; we can't control the weather any given day (unfortunately... I'd probably make it snow at this point if I could, getting tired of this heat!), we can't control the way things decay and die, we can't control our own inevitable aging, we can't control how other people treat us, or perceive us (in many cases). The only thing we can really control is to a limited degree our own health and bodily well-being (can't stop some disease and illness, can't stop the naturally trend toward death), and to a greater degree our mental processes, our thirst for knowledge, our reactions to those things beyond us, and our responses to our environment. So what better way to live than to mentally choose to place care in those things which we can control? In fact, there's something very Eastern about the Stoic view (I always love it when we find overlaps in East and West philosophies and cultures, as they develop so completely in isolation in both instances -- really proves something about either the idea of their truth, or about humanity in general).
What I find really interesting about the above quote by Marcus Aurelius is the fact of his own existence. He makes an interesting advocate for Stoicism, particularly in the fact that -- in comparison to most -- there was quite a bit more that Aurelius could control. Born in the year 121, Aurelius was the son of a wealthy family with a paternal history of political figures of influence. He was educated at home through tutorages, as he was afforded advantages for his aristocratic station, and was well-versed in early philosophy. Long story short, he became connected to another political family, was adopted and added to a line of succession, made a consul, a co-ruler, and then finally (in 161) became the sole Emperor of the Roman Empire. As someone with the entire empire at his disposal, masses of wealth and fame and fortune, and power of course, it's interesting to me that he could retain a philosophy like Stoicism that places so little value on all of those things. And perhaps, this is what made him effective -- because those things didn't matter so much to him, he could effectively do his job worrying about things that did matter, and got less caught up in the materialism of it all, in the fear of death and destruction, and so on.
While his quote here isn't specifically concerning the dominant ideas of Stoicism as obviously, it's still clear that some elements of it are inherent to Aurelius' thought. To say that all things heard (presumably as spoken by others) are opinions, and all things seen (by the individual in question) are perspective, is to suggest a type of subjectivism not really on the surface Stoic -- as said previously, Stoicism advocates for a natural order and deterministic vision for all things. However, what his statement draws on is the inherent human element to both of those admissions -- opinion and perspective -- which necessarily stem from the individual and are things which only the individual can control. So in this instance, those opinions I hear from others, are contingencies to their existence which I cannot control (as they are not a product of mine) in the same why that my own perceptions of the world are a contingency of my own existence which may not be trusted as they are limited purely to my one body, one mind, one experience. Later philosophers will do something very much like this, and they're always super compelling to me -- at some point in the future we will venture in Heidegger (by extension, Hermeneutic philosophers like Gadamer), who basically argue that everything in our experience is filtered through a personal, individual, subjective perspective:
We are always already interpreting the world around us -- nothing we see/hear/etc. comes to us directly and raw. It must filter through some kind of brain/thought system which puts it into some coherence. This is why it is impossible for me to really know if you experience the same thing -- I cannot experience your brain, your thoughts, your experiences, and know for a fact they match mine. I can only trust that the language we've socially/culturally agreed upon does it enough justice to give us some type of shared experience. This is why I always say, language is at once the most freeing thing (as it allows us a chance to have any sharing at all, since I can't do this by standing there and hoping you'll absorb it from me), and yet the most limiting thing (as I said, if we're already interpreting and that thought I have in the moment of experience is already an abstraction, then me talking about it through language is even further removed, not even second hand but third hand etc). It's a very strange paradox.
I'll leave you with that. I'll talk more about the language thing later, since it's my favorite philosophical concept :) Happy thinking!
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