Objective representation, as Marcus practiced it

What the practice is

In practice you give yourself an accurate account of a thing before you decide what it is worth. You say what is there, what it is made of and how long it will last, and you leave out the words that praise or condemn it.

Usually the account and the verdict arrive together. A colleague’s message says “Can you redo the second half?” and what you take in is she thinks my work is sloppy. A neighbor’s new car registers as he is doing better than I am. The facts fit in one sentence. The verdict came with them, and it feels like part of what you saw.

Marcus Aurelius had his own terms for it. He described what he was doing as making “a definition or description” of whatever presents itself (Meditations 3.11), two terms from Stoic logic, horos and hupographē. The French historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot, in The Inner Citadel (1992; English 1998), called it “physical definition”: physical in the ancient sense, describing a thing the way a student of nature would, by its matter, its parts and its place in the whole.

What Marcus wrote

The Meditations are Marcus’s private notes to himself, and he comes back to this exercise many times. These entries show it best, in George Long’s 1862 translation.

Meditations 6.13: the dinner and the purple robe

The examples come from a Roman table and wardrobe. (Falernian was one of Italy’s most prized wines; the shellfish is the murex, whose dye was costly enough to mark rank.) Marcus reports what each is made of, then says what such reports achieve: they “reach the things themselves and penetrate them.” A flattering name stops at the surface. A plain one gets through to the thing.

He then extends the rule “all through life,” and he is blunt about what is left once the praise is gone: the “worthlessness” of what we prized. The closing warning explains why the habit is needed. Outward show misleads us most “when thou art most sure” that something deserves the effort (Meditations 6.13). The exercise is aimed at the moments when you feel least in need of it.

His word for these descriptions is “impressions.” The correction happens in the way the dinner shows up in his mind, not on the plate.

Meditations 3.11: define the thing

Here the method is set out as a list. Of whatever “now makes an impression on me,” Marcus asks its proper name, what it is made of, what it will break down into and how long it will last. Two of those questions look ahead: a plain account of something includes the fact that it won’t stay as it is. Then the list changes subject, from the thing to Marcus himself: “what virtue I have need of with respect to it” (Meditations 3.11).

Elsewhere he applies the same division to pleasures that work through the senses:

Heard whole, a song can carry you off. Heard one note at a time, it is a series of sounds, and you would be embarrassed to say that any single one had mastered you. (The pancratium was a Greek combat sport that mixed boxing and wrestling.) Look at the exception, though: “except virtue and the acts of virtue.” A kind act is not made smaller by taking it apart, because its worth was never in its parts. Shorter entries repeat the questions: what a thing is in itself, what it is made of, what it is for and how long it will last (Meditations 8.11, 12.10, 12.18).

Meditations 9.6: the present judgment

Three things, all in the present: a judgment, an action toward other people, and an acceptance of what happens. They line up with the three disciplines that Hadot, following Epictetus, traced through the Meditations: of assent, of action and of desire. The first is the one this page is about. Long’s “opinion founded on understanding” translates a Greek phrase whose adjective is katalēptikē (the Greek text on Perseus (opens in a new tab)), the same word the Stoics used for the cognitive impression described below. A plain description is that kind of judgment: one that holds no more than you have actually grasped.

If you know this entry as three short lines that begin with objective judgment and keep repeating the word now, you know Gregory Hays’s 2002 translation. It is still under copyright, so we show Long’s; our comparison of translations explains how they differ.

Not the same as phantasia kataleptike

Phantasia is the Stoic word for an impression: the way something shows up to the mind. Many impressions carry a claim, such as this is a fish, and the mind can agree with the claim or hold back. The Stoics called that agreement assent.

A phantasia katalēptikē, usually translated “cognitive impression” or “kataleptic impression,” is a special case. The adjective comes from katalēpsis, a grasp: this is an impression that grasps its object. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, defined it by three conditions. It comes from something real, it is stamped exactly in accordance with that thing, and it is of a kind that could not have come from something unreal. Assenting to such an impression gives cognition, and the Stoics treated these impressions as their criterion of truth. The skeptics of Plato’s Academy, Arcesilaus and Carneades among them, argued that no impression could meet all three conditions. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab) gives a careful account of the debate.

The two are easy to run together, and Hadot connected them. In The Inner Citadel he ties Marcus’s physical definition closely to the kataleptic impression, and in the English translations of his work phantasia katalēptikē appears as “objective representation.” That is probably where the modern name comes from, and why summaries often use the two phrases interchangeably.

The connection is real but limited. A plain description is the kind of statement that could be grasped as true: this is the dead body of a fish. The verdict that usually comes with it, this is a feast and I am lucky to be here, is not something the fish can stamp on your mind. Zeno’s theory says when you are entitled to be certain. Marcus’s exercise is the habit of keeping your account to what you could be certain of. Epictetus gives that habit its shortest form: say to a harsh impression that it is only an impression and not what it seems, and then test it (Enchiridion 1, in our words).

How Marcus used it

Read across the Meditations, the exercise points in two directions. Most of Marcus’s examples are things people admire: food, wine, purple cloth, music and dance (6.13, 11.2), even applause, which he reduces to the noise of many tongues (6.16). In 6.13 it is a brake on wanting. Modern accounts tend to use it the other way, on things that alarm or insult, and 3.11 supports that too, since it applies to whatever presents itself. Both uses rest on the same observation, that the strongest part of an impression is usually the part we added.

In ordinary life the second direction is the familiar one. A performance review says “meets expectations,” and you read mediocre. A friend hasn’t answered your message since this morning, and you read something’s wrong between us. Described plainly, the first is a phrase on a form and the second is a few hours without a reply. Neither description settles what to do next, but both leave you a smaller, truer problem than the one you started with. Epictetus’s version of the point, that people are disturbed by their opinions about things rather than by the things, is in Enchiridion 5. Our guide to anger applies it to insults, and its free exercise walks you through it.

The first direction is less familiar and just as useful. A job offer you were flattered to get is, described plainly, a different set of tasks, for more money, under a manager you have met once. It may still be worth taking. But now you are weighing the work, not the compliment.

Marcus did mean the method to lower the price of such things in his own eyes; 11.2 says the aim is to “come to value them little.” That is not a rule against having them. The note in 6.13 starts with dinner already on the table, and nothing in it tells him to leave. What changes is who decides what the dinner is worth: its reputation, or his judgment. He also knew where to stop. Virtue and virtuous acts are the one thing he exempts from being taken apart (11.2).

The exercise belongs with two others. The principle of objective judgment is the idea behind it: what disturbs you is the verdict you add to an event. The view from above, another exercise known by a name Hadot gave it, changes the scale of a thing instead of its vocabulary.