Meditations 4.38 · 4.38

Marcus advises a particular kind of attention to other people: not to their appearance, rank, or reputation, but διάβλεπε — "see right through" — to their ἡγεμονικόν, the governing mind that does the actual choosing. A person is what his ruling faculty is; everything else is costume. To read others rightly, and to know whom to take as a model, one must get past the outer man to the inner judge.

And he specifies where to look hardest: at οἱ φρόνιμοι, the prudent or wise, watching precisely οἷα φεύγουσιν καὶ οἷα διώκουσιν — what they flee from and what they go after. In Stoic terms, "avoidance" (ἔκκλισις) and "pursuit" (ὄρεξις) are the fundamental motions of the will, and a person’s whole character is revealed in the objects toward which these motions run. The wise man’s pursuits and aversions are a curriculum: watch what he refuses to chase (wealth, honour, safety at any cost) and what he will not avoid (hardship in a good cause), and you see the shape of a rightly ordered mind. The undercurrent, familiar from 4.18, is that the study of others should serve self-correction — you look into their ruling faculties in order to calibrate your own.

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