From Marcus Aurelius (3): To Live Toward Dying

I concluded the last essay by suggesting that everyone should take time out to ask themselves why they get up in the morning. Clearly this question only had tangential relevance to my main thesis in that essay, which had to do with Marcus Aurelius’s exemplary clarity in setting up an objective or ideal pattern for his own moral behavior. But at the same time, this question is entirely relevant to my over-all argument through the last two essays.

I have been using the Meditations as an example of moral reasoning (in structure more than content). So far we have considered two pre-requisites for such reasoning: first, the self-analysis which admits the historical and communal nature of one’s own moral vision; second, the consolidation of that moral vision into a definite ideal pattern of moral behavior.

But we haven’t fully set up the appropriate context for moral reasoning yet. One thing is lacking. Motivation.

Consider the following metaphor: Imagine the moral agent to be an atom in a totally material universe. (This metaphor would have offended Marcus, who like a good Stoic opposed the materialist view of philosophers like the Epicureans by positing a totally deterministic divine providence.) So far we have considered the location of the atom (which can only be determined in relation to whatever this universe contains) and the orientation of the atom (the direction it will travel in when it moves). Our goal is to get the atom moving. What we lack is a motivation for our atom, a push or pull that will set it moving.

For Marcus, that motivation is death.

The following two passages occur in books 2 and 4, respectively, of the Meditations:

(1. Now is it high time to perceive the kind of Universe whereof you are a part and the nature of the governor of the Universe from whom you subsist as an effluence, and that the term of your time is circumscribed, and that unless you use it to attain calm of mind, time will be gone and you will be gone and the opportunity to use it will not be yours again.

(2. Don’t live as though you were going to live a myriad years. Fate is hanging over your head; while you have life, while you may, become good.

These passages are representative of numerous instances in which Marcus urges himself to actually move along the path he has charted out for himself. In a deathless world, Marcus might say, knowing the genealogy of your moral vision and passionately upholding a moral pattern won’t necessarily ever result in moral behavior.

For Marcus, because now is all there is, and because the hereafter offers no definite possibility for the process of becoming good, goodness is to be sought in the present.

While I would disagree with Marcus regarding the nature of the present, the promise of the hereafter, and what it means to become good, I find his motivation to live toward dying wholesome for the activity of moral reasoning.

As an aside directed specifically at certain religious perversions, note that the motivation to live toward dying is not the following: motivation to live a certain way out of fear for judgment hereafter; motivation to live a certain way in order to cause the present to become the hereafter.

Instead, to live toward dying is to live a certain way because the time in which that way of life is possible is circumscribed—to embody the principle in two cliches, the window of opportunity demands that we seize the day. To live toward dying is to live, one might say, with the grain of the universe.

Clearly I summon a whole constellation of ethical concepts with that last paragraph, but I urge my readers not to be distracted from my main point. I will re-summarize: from Marcus Aurelius we can learn to locate ourselves within an historical and communal moral context, to orient ourselves toward a definite moral pattern, and to galvanize ourselves by conceiving of goodness as a process tied to mortality.