September 26, 2026

Feet, Hands, Eyelids

But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.

Marcus Aurelius wrote these words to himself, not for publication, while commanding Roman legions on the harsh Danube frontier late in his life. Meditations opens its second book with this passage, a kind of rehearsal for the day ahead, where he braces himself to meet difficult and irritating people before he has even left his tent. His point is not to tolerate them grudgingly but to recognize that all people share reason and a portion of the divine, making them as much a part of him as his own limbs. Stoic tradition calls this Sympatheia: the idea that humanity forms one interconnected body and one city, so that hostility between people is as unnatural as a hand striking a foot. Practicing it means catching the impulse to divide the world into us and them, and remembering instead that cooperation is what we were built for.

A principle of Stoicism: Sympatheia →