An exercise of the discipline of desire in which consciousness contemplates any natural process — decay, withering, and the outwardly repellent included — and recognises in it the place, the necessity, and the beauty of the whole. If in a providentially ordered cosmos nothing is "ugly by nature," then the task of the practitioner is to replace the spontaneous value-judgment ("ugly," "repulsive") with a perception for which even the by-products (τὰ ἐπιγινόμενα) of natural processes "co-adorn" the whole and charm the soul. This is "physics as therapy": an attentive look at the workings of φύσις calms and reconciles, and the acceptance of all that nature brings is amor fati extended to aesthetics. Hadot counts φυσιολογία (the contemplation of nature) among Marcus's central Stoic exercises, alongside the view from above.

(1) Take any natural object or event, including the humble, the perishing, or the repellent (the cracked crust, the over-ripe olive "at the very edge of rot," the foam from the boar's mouth, old age, death). (2) Refer it to the Whole — see it as an ἐπακολούθημα, a consequence of the providential process, not as a chance defect (the Stoic natura artifex: nature is the supreme artist, whose products need no improvement). (3) Strip away the spontaneous verdict "ugly/repulsive" and hold instead the judgment "a natural flowering, fitting within the whole." (4) Let this pass over into χαρά — the good joy of contemplation — not the vicious ἡδονή of possession. (5) Ascend from the easy cases (bread, fruit) to the hardest (decay, ageing, one's own death): the same operation that grounds amor fati. The organ that makes it possible is oikeiōsis toward nature herself: only the one "genuinely made akin" to φύσις (γνησίως ᾠκειωμένος) sees the beauty in all her works.