Speaker 1Hello, everybody. How you doing? Hope all is well. This is Professor Rosopoulos, and today we're going to move into memento mori. So now that we've talked a little bit about what philosophy as the art of living is and why we should care about it, right? We talked about self-care. We talked about the importance of soul work. We defined some ideas. I hope you had time to listen and watch the videos I provided from Massimo Pagliucci and from Ryan Holiday and read the text from Pierre Hadeau. And Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus that I provided as well. Let's now move into the how, right? So how do we practice the art of living? As I said, of course, the main inspiration for our work together this summer is the painting Still Life with a Skull. As I also mentioned, this is a painting that I personally connect to. It's a painting that I have in my apartment that I look at every day by Felipe de Champagne. And it comes from vanitas, right? This genre of painting. That was primarily popular in the 16th, 17th century that included skulls, skeletons that introduced, I think, to the viewer this conception of memento mori, right? So, of course, memento mori is Latin and it means remember death. Remember that you will die. Remember that we are all immortal. So then even that small phrase when we talk about what is memento mori, of course, it's a phrase, as I said, it inspired artwork similar. To the one that we're looking at for our class together. And also, it's a practice. So what we're going to establish over the next couple lectures is not only like this philosophy of what it would mean to live with memento mori as a part of our daily lives, but we're also going to get into more specifics about how to actually do that, right? So the next few lectures will have what I hope to be engaging and helpful ideas from Massimo Pagliucci. One of his books I really enjoyed. Called A Handbook for New Stoics. He examines and offers a couple really interesting exercises that I think center not only on memento mori, but on another stoic exercise that we'll talk about, which is similar, called premeditatio malorum, right? And just to give you a general perspective on that, it's pretty much like we use visualization to see some of the possibly bad things in life. We see how things might go wrong and we do this. To kind of prepare ourselves in a couple different ways. So I'll get into that. I think the obvious point there is you might prepare yourself for a presentation by saying, you know what, I'm not going to go in thinking everything is going to go well. I might say, well, maybe I have a little bit of a technology issue. There might be traffic. So there's a practical sense. And the Stoics, of course, were very practical in which that's useful. But there's also, I think, some more profound philosophical points that we will get into when we discuss this from Pagliucci's perspective that are really interesting. For the premeditatio malorum. And, of course, in a sense, memento mori connects that because if you're able to practice memento mori, you're alive. Quite obviously, right? So if you're able to remember death, it's because you are still living. So it's the sense that we can use our minds, as Marcus Aurelius said in Meditations, I've already mentioned this, right? We can winnow our thoughts. We can organize our thoughts such that they serve us towards our pursuit of virtue, towards our pursuit of philosophy as the art of living. So we'll get a little bit from Pagliucci in terms of some specific exercises. We're going to read, of course, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. I have some lectures on selections from that as well, where he's, you know, practicing self-writing. And in so doing, he's reminding himself of his mortality. He's trying to cultivate a healthy relationship to death in the meditations or in his meditations. And when we read that, we always keep in mind he's using the word "you." He's writing to himself. He never had the intention of publishing this. So we're getting an inside look at the most powerful person on Earth, a trained Stoic philosopher, Roman emperor, father, husband, friend. Someone who, as I may have mentioned already, was a student of Epictetus' work, another famous Stoic teacher, philosopher we're going to study in this section and others. We're watching him practice memento mori in his self-writing. So we'll have some episodes or some lectures on that, where I lecture on a few selections from that. And of course, we're also going to refer to Epictetus for some general philosophical points that we get from the Art of Living, from the In Caridion, both of which were taken from notes that we've been able to hold onto from one of his students that are more kind of, you know, I would say, broad philosophical points about why memento mori and how memento mori. So we get that. We get Marcus engaging with it on a very personal level. And then, of course, we have Filiucci, which a handbook for new Stoics is a great book. It's like 52. Two different Stoic exercises. And he organizes the book in a very interesting way. We'll talk about the following more so in our discussion of the flower and the painting, the three disciplines from Stoicism. So we'll get into that in a different part of our work together. Either way, I think memento mori is one of my favorite aspects of not even just Stoicism, because as we'll see, the Epicureans and the Cynics, other schools of ancient philosophy that we're not necessarily going to focus on. In our class, although if you were more interested in those schools, if what I share sparks an interest in you, and I might even ask that we listen to a couple lectures that I have on Epicureanism that I think are helpful, the book, the PDF I put on canvas already for us by Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy, has chapters on various schools of Hellenistic philosophy. So, again, we focused on Stoicism. That'll be our primary school of philosophy for our work together this summer. But if something resonates. With you, read that book. It's a great book, and he's got stuff on the Cynics, stuff on the Epicureans, and others as well. So if that's of interest, keep that in mind. And before we get into our more specific kind of lectures, you know, there's a couple analogies I love to talk about when I teach this. They're not good. Admittedly, they're not very good, but I think they work at least a little bit. Right. So why memento mori? Right. Why bother reminding ourselves, remembering our mortality? Well, one. It's unavoidable, and for the Stoics, we need to confront the nature of things. And this is an unavoidable part of our nature. We shouldn't run from it. So we know we have an expiration date. And this is where my first analogy comes in. Right. If you have milk in the fridge and you notice it's about to expire in like a day, you drink that milk. You don't want to waste the milk. You don't pace yourself the same way as if you saw that. So the expiration date was a week from now. If you look at milk right now and you see you have a day to drink it, you're going to drink that milk faster. So that's one of, I think, my takeaways from a memento mori when I reflect on it myself. It reminds me to take action. Right. So take action in what sense of that word. Sigmund Freud got a lot wrong. I like this idea, though. He sort of divided life into two aspects, work and love. And I think for me, when I discuss this idea. With students of a memento mori, it's like, well, you don't want to have a job. You want to have a vocation. So a vocation roughly defined by Dr. David Hanson, and I say roughly because I'm not describing it fully, but I love this brief sort of summary of it, is that the crossroads between personal fulfillment. It makes you feel good and public service. The Stoics would love this idea. The Stoics needed us to be of service to the human community. And the Stoic philosophers also really cared about you. Personally, having a good way of being, having inner tranquility, having inner peace. Right. So for me, when I'm thinking about my work as a professor, which I'm very fortunate, I believe this is my vocation. Whenever I get lazy about it. Whenever I are, you know, whenever I kind of hesitate or I'm having negative thoughts about it, I kind of remind myself. I had a moment where I was walking to my car after one final day of a semester teaching. And I remember I thought to myself, I was like, you know, if that was the last time I ever taught a class, I would feel good. And that thought kind of resonated with me and stuck with me. And it's something I try to carry with me whenever I'm teaching. What I'm doing right now is not only making me feel good that I get to read these great books and reflect and grow as a person, but also I want to be helpful to my students. I want to be of service to my students. Right. So that feeling of memento mori, I think, motivates us. To see the value of things. So I have that thought now also when I'm doing this class, day one, right? It adds an element of urgency, which is one of the virtues I think we get from reflecting on our own mortality. If this class right now was the last class I ever did, I'd want to put my heart into it. I'd want to hopefully offer something once again that not only challenged me to learn more, to push myself more. I've never lectured on a handbook for new Stoics before. And I'm really excited to offer something about it. It was helpful for me to read Massimo Pagliucci and Gregory Lopez's opinions on these practices that I have learned about from Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. So that was fulfilling. And now I'm trying to make this lecture as engaging as it could be. Right. So I could hopefully offer something that's helpful for you all. And then when I read your discussions, when I read your essays, I'm looking for certain things. Like, does it resonate? Did I explain it well? So memento mori, I think, asks us to take action. © transcript Emily Beynon that encouragement is what we need sometimes to live life to the fullest. When we know our days are numbered, when we know that the milk is expiring, we make sure we get as much as we can out of things. So that's one way, I think, and one analogy that has worked for me to help myself, and I think students have also enjoyed that as well. To see that, you know, if we are acting like we're going to be here, as Marcus Aurelius tells himself, he's looking around at people, he's like, everyone here is walking around like they're going to be here for 10,000 years. Right, we're procrastinating, we put things off. Memento Mori is that reminder. It's almost like when you practice Memento Mori, maybe it's a mantra in your mind, right? You reflect on it, you even see the words in your head, right? Or you have images maybe that you associate with your own mortality or mortality in general that kind of wake you up, right? Maybe, again, it's in a self-writing practice. I write Memento Mori, I draw the hourglass consistently in my notebook because I practice what I call philosophical self-writing. Right, so maybe you have a writing practice, maybe it's something in your mind, maybe it's even a song you listen to, or in the case of our class together and my apartment, again, maybe it's a painting. But it's to wake us up and encourage that urgency, encourage us to take action, encourage us to see that this might be our last day, our last class. And we have an obligation, right, to serve our vocation and to find that. That'll make our lives fulfilling and, again, in a very stoic sense, it'll help us be helpful to others. That'll bring life. That'll bring life meaning as well. So in the face of death, right, and by that, literally, I mean when we face death, life becomes more meaningful because life only happens when it's lived. And Memento Mori encourages us to do that, I think. And also with love, right, as you said, with Freud, right, work and love. We might even ask ourselves, if you never think of death, if you think you're going to be here for 10,000 years, can you really love anybody? Fully, authentically? I would argue you can't. You would hold on to arguments for too long. You wouldn't make peace. You wouldn't express yourself when you were afraid to express yourself. Think about this for a second. If you confronted the idea that you and everyone around you, everyone you love, we're all expiring, right, we all have expiration dates. Would you love these people differently? What would you say? What might you be willing to let go of to have a healthier relationship? To these people? We might even argue that, you know, authentic love, healthy passion comes primarily from the idea that we know we're not here forever. In the movie Troy, which is very roughly based on the Iliad, right, this is some ancient Greek mythology, ancient Greek poetry, right, storytelling. Achilles tells Briseis, right, the gods who are eternal, who are immortal, they envy us humans because we are mortal and we know it. Everything is sweeter to us because we know this might be our last thing. Everything takes on, and I hope we highlight this with the reading that I've curated and compiled for us. There's some great poems and some great elements of philosophy that I think highlight this, right? It makes everything better. It makes, if we tune into it, right, if we ignore it, of course, we don't get this opportunity. But if we really, if we really practice mental Mori every day can become a little bit better because we understand what Achilles is trying to convey to Briseis, right? If we confront our finitude, I would argue that we love more authentically. And again, we connect the idea to we love more urgently. If we remind ourselves, one of the toughest things we're going to examine all summer is from Epictetus when he's telling you to, when you kiss your family members, when you kiss yourself, this might be the last time, it's very difficult to hear that. But what he's trying to do, I think one is a teacher, he's trying to wake his students up. Let's go think about this. That's good teaching to be engaging in that way. But also that's good philosophy because you won't ignore this person if you remind yourself of that. And love, as we said, is attention. So mental Mori calls us to attention. It calls us to be attentive, which is to say, maybe it calls us to love truly. And authentically. So think about that as well. And I've got one more analogy here, right? This is revolving more around what I think is another virtue that we cultivate, or something that really is helpful for us to lead a virtuous life when it comes to reminding ourselves of our mortality. And that's gratitude, right? If we know our days are finite, if we know our moments are limited, then we take better care of them. When we acknowledge, and I'm using words like finite, limited, right? When we take those ideas and we also acknowledge that because of this, life is fragile, right? Massimo Piuccio talks about this a lot when he was referring to and explaining Epictetus' reminder, right? And we're going to see this in the handbook for new Stoics, his reminder to his students to when they kiss their family members, this thing that's seemingly cold, right, is actually the warmest thing I think we could say. Of course you're going to be warm with these people. Of course you're going to not hold on to the unnecessary negative stuff. He says, not only is it philosophical, but as I was kind of remarking on a moment ago, it's historical, right? Not right after, right? Not like the next day, but soon after Epictetus taught that, a plague hit Rome, hit the Roman Empire, right? A plague swept across the land. I mean, people were dying in droves. Marcus Aurelius lost a number of children before they reached adolescence, right? So these ideas were kind of around as they still are today, unfortunately, of course, that mishaps happen, horrible things happen. These things are out of our control. These things end upon people unexpectedly. Horrible accidents happen, plagues happen, natural disasters happen. So again, for the Stoics, if we know these things might happen, we should at least prepare for them a little bit. So life is fragile. We have to confront that with memento mori. And this is where I think the gratitude comes in, right? And how do we express gratitude? I think ultimately we express gratitude by... Aside from in a literal sense saying I'm grateful for these things, and that's a powerful practice in and of itself, right? And saying thank you to others, and even saying thank you to ourselves at times, right? But also we take care of things when they're fragile. And you want to take care of your life. So once again, if you don't think your life is fragile at all, and you never confront these possibilities, you never confront your own mortality, right? It would be like going on... And here's the analogy. It'd be like going on vacation, getting somebody a gift. If you go on vacation, you get somebody a gift. You really take very good care of that gift. You wrap it differently than you wrap your own t-shirt, right? You think of it differently than you think of an old t-shirt that you don't care about. Even if, for example, you borrow something from somebody that you know might break, you take different kind of care of it, right? So we understand life is fragile. We take better care of it as a result. And we should try to do that. We should try to care for ourselves. Again, the whole thing of philosophy is the art of living, is self-care. And we could also say, as we're saying, you know, I hope already too, service, right? My analogy of the gift too, it's like when you're living a life characterized by vocation and by love, you're not just living for yourself, you're also living for other people. And that's a beautiful thing, right? So we remark on memento mori, we visit this idea to cultivate gratitude, to cultivate the sense that because life is fragile, we have to take care of it. We have to appreciate it. We have to live with a sense of urgency. We have to love and work with a sense of care and urgency and attentiveness. And we might, as you know, we'll have, again, with Pagliucci, among a couple other remarks, we might have to establish a practice that helps us connect to this idea of memento mori. If you want to lead a life, right, full of meaning, I think the Stoics would say you need to confront your mortality. And when you look at the painting, right, it's right in the middle. The skull is right in the middle. Even the title of the painting, the title doesn't mention the flower or the hourglass, it mentions the skull. The centrality of the skull visually, the centrality of the skull and the title, I think is an artistic and philosophical remark on the importance and the centrality of memento mori. And again, this was a whole genre of paintings, these were common images that people would confront to inspire. This was a whole genre leading a meaningful life, to inspire memento mori. And I would like to close this kind of like introduction into memento mori, a little bit more about the painting, a general outline of some of the thinkers we're going to discuss, with a quote from Epictetus that was my first encounter with this idea years ago in college. It's always stuck with me. And I think it actually really nicely summarizes this practice and this idea. So it's coming from me in Caridian. and a text that we're gonna spend a lot of time with. is available for free online. I'll put it on Canvas. And we're looking at number 21. He told his students, let death and exile and all other things which appear terrible be daily before your eyes, but mainly death. And you will never entertain any abject thought nor too eagerly covet anything. The Stoics were really well known for this. And what do I mean by this? To say present to yourself, right? I don't think he necessarily means literally when he says before your eyes. I think he also means in your mind, right? The Stoics would do things to deliberately challenge themselves. They would on their own volition choose to kind of impose upon themselves, we could say like philosophical exercises, that they would confront harshness, right? So they would go out into the cold wearing like a light jacket and deliberately be cold, right? They confront the cold. They, as we had in other episodes, right? They maybe do some fasting. They'd go maybe, you know, let's say a certain amount of time with no food and deliberately feel the hunger, right? We can think of a lot of different examples of this. I even think hard physical exercise would be something the Stoics would encourage us to do, right? Training ourselves for the potential harshness of life. We're greeting that harshness on our own terms. There's power there. We're sharpening ourselves, right? Steel sharpens steel. So maybe what Epictetus is saying here, right? And again, focusing on death because it's something that we have to relate to. And these other exercises too, things are difficult in life, period. Life will throw difficulties at you. Epictetus, the first thing he talks about in Caridian is the idea that we can control certain things and we also cannot control certain things. There's a great quote. I'm not sure if anyone here likes Dermot Kennedy. He's an Irish like singer songwriter. I love a lot of his lyrics. And one of the great ones I think is in love and death, we don't decide. I think there's a lot of, you know, a lot of truth to that. We don't know a lot about, the things that will occur to us in life. We're incapable of seeing the future clearly. And sometimes the present can be very surprising. So when he's saying, let these things be before your eyes every day, he's asking you to meditate on them. He's asking you to take time and make space for these potentially terrible things. And again, death is not a potential thing. It is an unavoidable, inevitable thing. That's why he's saying mainly death should be what we think about here. And let me be clear about how I would suggest implementing this. I don't think he would agree with this. And the Stoics too would, I think, generally agree with this. This doesn't mean obsess about death constantly. Please do not do that. Do not let that be the takeaway from this part of the class or the class in general, right? The idea is that you visit the idea of death, right? Let it appear doesn't mean let it appear and stay there all day. It means maybe it's a brief meditation in the morning or in the afternoon or at night, or maybe a couple of times throughout the day. But of course, the Stoics were not at all, I would say, obsessed with death. They were obsessed with us leading a good, virtuous life. They were obsessed once again with the art of living. Memento mori is a part of that. Because again, it's the unavoidable, inevitable thing. So please do not misinterpret this because anything can be misinterpreted and then, you know, cause problems, right? We talk about Aristotle a little bit in an earlier episode, right? He's obsessed with balance. So keep this in your head. But I do suggest, and I hope that I make an argument over the next few minutes that this actually might work for you. And maybe it doesn't. That's cool, right? And I'm going to try to present a couple other options on this in regards to how to cultivate a relationship to our own mortality. But I hope that you approach this with an open mind. And I know, again, this is not for everybody. Even the Stoics, right? Cicero, a Stoic himself, said you can't always be a Stoic. Marcus Aurelius famously said, look, I have to be open to being corrected. So maybe this isn't for you. And I understand that we have a lot of other things we'll talk about in the class that you approach this idea and this practice with an open mind. Because what Epictetus offers his students here, too, is like some of the benefits. When we talk about abject thoughts, we talk about like negative, severe thoughts, like very bad thoughts. But we might be able to avoid some of those. I myself, again, as I said, this is personal for me. I practice this. I think philosophy as art of living is always personal. So I will talk a little bit about myself and my own relationship to these ideas, especially because, again, I own the painting and I love it, right? That does that for me. Memento Mori lifts me out of a place, or even I think it lifts me out of a negative place, but also it prevents me from getting to a negative place. As I think I might have mentioned, it kind of snaps me out of a mode of thinking and a mode of being. I remind myself, like, I don't want to spend my time like this. My time is limited. I remind myself, as I said, when I was walking to my car, I'm like, I have to offer something. I have to feel good today, right? And have to doesn't become this pressure thing. It becomes this, like, I think, let's even say it's a positive type of pressure. I'm like, come on, man. The same way Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself, you need to do something. You, right? I tell myself, you are not here forever. You can have a good day today. You can feel joy today. You can have a good day today. You can have a good day today. You can have a good joy today. That starts with the reminder. So I'm not going to entertain, right? I love that verb, right? To entertain any abject thought. We all have negative thoughts, right? I thought of this, I'm not sure if I thought of it, but I like the idea of a flaut. It's a flying thought. Sometimes shit just flies into your head and you don't even know where it came from, right? To use kind of a modern psychology term in a very sort of overview way, right? It's like an intrusive thought. That's a very common experience. But to entertain a thought, that's different. Then you're grappling with it, right? And when you grapple with a thought, the same way if you were to wrestle with another person, right? Even if you're holding it down and you're, quote, winning, you're still down with that thought, right? So even if you're winning the thought, this is like not even going to entertain it. Memento mori, let it go. Don't even entertain this severe negative thought, right? And to not too eagerly desire anything. The Stoics would say, I think that it's okay to have some desires. The Stoics would say, yes, go into society. Again, serve, have a career, have a family. There are specific spots in Stoicism where they really suggest these things. Be a part of the human community. That comes with some desires, right? But again, back to balance. Don't be too desirous. Memento mori, again, can snap us out of that type of thinking and ground us in the moment. This painting, too, you know, when we talk about the hourglass, we're going to talk about living in the moment. Memento mori serves that purpose, I think, really nicely as well. Where does desire live? Desire only lives in the future. We have to be careful about desire. If it's in the future, it's not real. If it's not real, it's false. And a great quote from Seneca is that the false is limitless. You'll always just keep wanting and wanting and wanting. Now, memento mori says, hey, focus now. Take advantage of this day. Well, read Marcus Aurelius telling himself, live today like it's your last. There's power there. There's a positive type of pressure that if this was my last day, I don't want to be mad at my sister. I don't want to be mad at my significant other. I want to work on this. I want to sit with them and figure this out. I want to make sure I put my heart into my work today. So this one brief line from Epictetus, as many brief lines from Epictetus, among many other Stoics and ancient philosophers do, it gives us a lot. It gives us a practice and a reason for why we should try it and the possible results. Do you entertain negative thoughts? Think about memento mori as almost like a jab to get you going in a different direction. Do you feel like you're anxious about the future? You have all these desires. You want these to go a certain way and that creates stress and anxiety. Maybe memento mori could be helpful too. So now in our next episode, we're going to get to some specific things. We're going to go more deeply into Epictetus. I'll share some quotes from our book that I will put on canvas for us and some of my interpretations. We'll do the same thing with the handbook for new Stoics, as I said, and also with Marcus Aurelius' meditations, likely among a couple other sources as well. So I hope this brief intro into memento mori was helpful. And again, I hope it encourages you to at least have an open mind to see if it might work for you.
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