Happy New Year and don't forget to "balance the books of life everyday"
New Year’s marxist-stoic micro-dissertation on the contemplation of transience and death as the source of meaning in life. (Please forgive the somewhat personal tone.)
I wanted to be a philosopher in my late adolescence (before that, I wanted to be a soldier and a pilot), but I had no idea what that meant. It appeared to me that this person would teach others how the world works and how to live properly, and that such knowledge could only be obtained after decades of complex study: of one's own life as well as philosophical treatises, analyses, and manifests.
Of course, this is partially correct, but as the fathers of dialectical philosophy taught us, every half-truth is also (or even more so) a half-lie.
Philosophy is (please, excuse my banal statement here) the art, unique to the human race, of contemplating the relationship between being and thinking, which cannot be reliably certified but can be initiated by any mentally and emotionally capable individual at any stage of his life. This is why we can become philosophers by organizing our desires, needs, and aspirations in a way that transcends the superficiality of everyday life and allows us to see the architecture, where our existence is (only and as much as) a part of the all-encompassing vastness. Only from this vantage point can we understand what we truly can and cannot control; only then can we see what we are capable of managing and become largely immune to phenomena and processes beyond our control.
As we approach the end of the year, it is appropriate to wish loved ones and friends a prosperous future, but it is also appropriate — for our own sake — to recall the famous ancient phrase “remember you shall die.” Today's society is unable to appreciate the subtle and liberating appeal hidden in “memento mori” due to civilizational degeneration and living in the realm of immediate impulses, obsessions, egotism, consumption, profit, and cheap pleasures, as well as “emotioholism,” as the great contemporary Polish Neo-stoic Tomasz Mazur put it.
After all, Seneca, Epictetus, and Socrates were not concerned with people wallowing in despair and emotionally agonizing over the prospect of death; on the contrary! They demanded an understanding of finitude, the most important aspect of our personal realities. Only in this way can we make even a small step toward being better — whatever that means for each of us.
Seneca urged us thousands of years ago to imagine that every day when we wake up at dawn, we are looking at the last day of our lives, and to let this guide all of our decisions and choices and plans. Personally, I believe he was exaggerating a little, but only a little.
We are in dire need of this reminder of our finite nature in our lives. Every single day. Perhaps not in such a sharp and rigid formula as it appears in Seneca's various works, but it is absolutely necessary. We require constant confrontation with concepts that our egos would rather ignore in favor of narratives and illusions that suit it. The practice of pragmatic reflection begins by tearing down synthetic comfort and accepting that we will all die, and that everyone around us will also die.
The famous Renaissance essayist Michel Montaigne also took up the contemplation of death and gave it a new, optimistic, more rationalistic, pre-Enlightenment touch. “To contemplate death is to practice freedom. The man who learns to die ceases to be a slave,” he wrote in one of his works.
Of course, this should not be interpreted crudely or superficially.
The point is not to torment ourselves with terminal fantasies, but to live better guided by an awareness of the passing of time and the interplay of contradictions. We begin to die at birth; that is what life is all about, biologically speaking. The end may come in a century, a decade, or a few years, but it could also come tomorrow, next week, next month, or in an hour. No one is ever insured for anything in this matter.
Conceiving, understanding, and taming mortality and finitude is the start of a one-of-a-kind adventure full of freedom, happiness, and agency in the face of an uncontrollable universe of phenomena and processes. The next step will be a journey into contradictions that give unity existence, along with opposites that foster cohesion, as well as the progress that moves humanity away from suffering and challenges it in new ways.
My personal journey through everyday life with philosophy is now in its 26th year; it started when I was 17 years old, when I read a short article by Leon Trotsky (I’m not a trotskyist, I just happened to stumble upon this piece of writing at the beginning of my conscious political life) titled On Optimism, Pessimism, the Twentieth Century, and Many Other Issues. This brief reading convinced me of the peculiar ease of philosophical pragmatism, that philosophy is a great thing that can be broken down through the prism of everyday life and life practice in every way. Of course, I did not grasp everything right away, but it was a start. Which I also wish for you! Get to the source of your inspiration and perseverance. Begin looking for it! And don't wait until tomorrow, next weekend, February, or the first day of spring to do it. Make it more than a cheap bead of “New Year's resolutions.” Look back every day and “balance the book of life,” as he suggested... I'm not sure whether it was Seneca or Marcus Aurelius.
Memento mori! Happy new year! Another world is possible!