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Memento Mori (Episode 67)
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“You are mortal.” So whispered the slaves of triumphant Roman generals as they celebrated their return in a glorious parade.
In this episode we discuss memento mori: Remembering the fact that you will die in order to live well.
We discuss the Stoic view of death and why they argued that one should always keep death in mind. We end by summarizing the benefits and risks of memento mori exercises so that you can translate Stoic philosophy into real practice.
(02:16) Introduction
(08:37) Memento Mori
(17:49) Face Death to Pursue Knowledge
(22:07) Overcoming Death
(27:08) You Are Free
(32:30) How to Practice
(39:04) Summarizing the Benefits
(42:55) Risks
***
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Transcript
Impact of Mortality on Life Choices
00:00:00
Speaker
But the mental more is this kind of thing you want to remember all the time and the benefits of remembering that you die, I think, or something that you take into how you choose to construct your life long-term. So it's not just this way to navigate stress in the moment or, you know, trivialize stress in the moment. It is this way to really set up what kind of life do I want to live?
Podcast Introduction
00:00:22
Speaker
How do I want to structure things?
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
Philosophical Significance of Memento Mori
00:00:41
Speaker
In this episode, Michael and I discuss Memento Mori, remembering the fact that you will die in order to live.
00:00:49
Speaker
We talk about the stoic view of death, why the stoics argue that one should keep death in mind, why doing so is a way to pursue knowledge, overcome adversity, and exemplify human freedom. We then move to discussing what this looks like practically, the number of different ways one can meditate or reflect on human mortality.
00:01:17
Speaker
Finally, we end by summarizing the key practical benefits and risks of memento mori. Here is our conversation. Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Antaveras. And I'm Michael Trombley.
00:01:33
Speaker
And today we're going to be talking about the stoic practice of memento mori. We're going to be talking about how the stoics approach death, what the stoic view of death is, and then especially focus on why the stoics are always talking about death, why they have so many practices that orient around the fact that we are mortal beings.
00:02:01
Speaker
Yeah, so nice light conversation for those listening. Yeah, that's right. Good light conversation.
Stoic Acceptance of Death
00:02:09
Speaker
Normal fare you can turn on for any activity. You're cleaning the house. This is a good one for you.
00:02:16
Speaker
That's right. Yeah, on the note of cleaning, there's a famous line from Genesis, of course, for you are dust and to dust you shall return. But we should cite some of the Stoics too. The Stoics are always talking about
00:02:32
Speaker
death, if you were to rank Stoic topics, it's very likely in the top 10, at least for the Roman Stoics. When we have for the Roman Stoics, it's one of the key features of philosophizing is learning how to die. That's something that Stoics adopt from Plato.
00:02:54
Speaker
And I have a handful of passages from Seneca and Musonius Rufus and Marcus Aurelius here that I want to read.
00:03:07
Speaker
sentence from Seneca's letter, 26 from moral letters, you do not know where death awaits you, so be ready for it everywhere. And then we also have from letter 4, most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life.
00:03:27
Speaker
They are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die. So we have this idea of preparation, this idea of philosophy as learning how to die. And then from Mosonius Rufus, one of his lectures,
00:03:43
Speaker
Surely the life of a good man is the best life, and death is also its end. Therefore, as I have said, if one should learn in one's old age to accept death fearlessly and boldly, one would have taken an important step towards living without regret and according to virtue.
Death as Life Preparation
00:04:04
Speaker
And then finally, one of my favorite lines from Marcus Aurelius, meditation's 417, don't act as though you're going to live for 10,000 years. Fate is hanging over your head while you live, while you can be a good man.
00:04:21
Speaker
So those are a few passages from the Stoic writings and they bring to light some of the key features that the Stoics highlight about death. These ideas of preparation, learning to die, accepting the fact that we are mortal beings and using that as a reminder to live better while we can.
00:04:51
Speaker
So that's where I wanted to begin this conversation was with those passages, those examples of how the Stoics do in fact talk about death.
00:05:03
Speaker
Yeah, and there's a couple of things I want to pull out here about the way the Stoics think about death because there's ways that you can relate to
Facing Mortality in Various Contexts
00:05:10
Speaker
death. I think at its simplest, they're obsessed with it because stoicism is about living in accordance with nature. It's one of the main tenets of stoicism. Death is a part of your nature, but often a part of our nature as mortal beings that most people are very uncomfortable with or oblivious to.
00:05:31
Speaker
So it's something that every human shares, one of the few things that, you know, every human has in common, but of, of, of anything in life, one of the things we're most uncomfortable with. So that's why that emphasis, but then I also want to, I guess, pull apart these different flavors just for those listening to keep in mind. There's a lot of different ways we can talk about death. So we can talk about, you know, handling the death of somebody else. Well.
00:05:55
Speaker
which is, you know, are you, are you grieving appropriately or inappropriately? Were you prepared for that instance or not? Are you acting inappropriately because you're not prepared when it comes up and you're afraid and you're fearful in that moment instead of, you know,
00:06:11
Speaker
brave and conscientious in your relationships. There's the death of somebody else. There's your own death, the eventuality of your own death, the shortness of your life, the fact that your life is set to end as comes out in Marcus Aurelius' quote, you know, while you can be good.
00:06:27
Speaker
And then there's also the actual moment of death, and I guess I want to pull that apart because I think in these conversations we can get focused on the anxiety around death, but the Stoics were also focused on death itself as a discrete moment, as a discrete event.
00:06:44
Speaker
And kind of an ultimate challenge or, you know, a kind of a cherry on top of a good life. If you're able to confront that event appropriately the same way, maybe Socrates would have, you know, with bravery or the way Seneca tried to by committing suicide and showing bravery in that moment.
00:07:03
Speaker
So there's the death of others, there's your own inevitable death and what that means for what you should do in the day to day. And then there's the actual moment and how do we do that well? So they thought about it along all of these lines. Yeah, that's some great divisions we have. The fact that we die, the fact that others around us die, and then how do you die well? How does that moment of death, how does that fit into the story of a life?
00:07:32
Speaker
So in this conversation, we'll chat about memento mori, that's our starting point, the practice of memento mori and how that shapes how you relate to your own death, how you think about dying well.
Practicing Memento Mori
00:07:49
Speaker
Of course, we'll touch on others as the fact that others die as well, but that would be the primary focus.
00:07:55
Speaker
But to do that well, I think we need some background in how the Stoics thought about death to begin with. And then once we have that, we'll cover why the Stoics think it's important to have a Memento Mori practice, and then cover some ways you can practice Memento Mori in detail, and then finally end with
00:08:19
Speaker
Some final notes on benefits or risks with particular momentum worry practices. Anything else you want to say by way of structuring the conversation? No, exciting. Let's jump into it. I think it's a fun, I think it's a fun practice that really jumps out, but has some depth to it.
00:08:38
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So, Memento Mori fundamentally is just about simply bringing to mind the fact that you are mortal. Memento Mori is Latin for remember that you die or remember that you must die. And now the question is, you know, what's the stoic view of death?
00:09:00
Speaker
The Stoics, they're not thinking about an afterlife. They're generally thinking about death as the point at which, you know, life ceases to exist and there's nothing next. And crucially for the Stoics, death is an indifference.
00:09:18
Speaker
It's not something that is intrinsically bad. It's not something that is intrinsically good. Instead, it's something that in some situations is going to be a good and in others it will be a bad. And what do I mean by that?
00:09:38
Speaker
By bad and good, I especially mean it's something that would be chosen. I'm not talking about sort of evaluating states of affairs, but sometimes, you know, most of the time we ought to make decisions that preserve our life.
00:09:53
Speaker
But as we talk about in the euthanasia conversation a while back, sometimes it's appropriate to make decisions to end your own life.
Cultural Perspectives on Death
00:10:04
Speaker
And in that sense, death is an indifference. It's not...
00:10:09
Speaker
intrinsically something to be avoided, but is something that the virtuous person has to contend with and select or avoid at the right moments.
00:10:25
Speaker
And that's something that I think the common view of death doesn't acknowledge. I think if we were to sum up the, at least in the West, we have the idea of death. We all know it happens, for there's a sense that it's not going to happen today. It's going to happen sometime in the future. And the death is usually separated, I think, from our
00:10:50
Speaker
normal life. It's not something we think about unless we are forced to, unless it's forced upon us by circumstance. Instead, it's separated into particular ceremonies or treated as a heavy topic one doesn't broach upon likely. And of course, there are some good reasons for this.
00:11:13
Speaker
But an upshot is that Memento Mori is not something that many people practice, and you can sort of understand the Stoics as pushing against this. And I think especially today, there's this reminder, this urge to keep in mind that we are mortal and that that does have serious import for how we ought to live now. Yeah, and to build on that, I think those were all great points, Caleb.
00:11:43
Speaker
We talked about this in the euthanasia episode. I do think the Stoics are a bit more, I wouldn't say they're pro-death, but they certainly remind us that death is on the table and remind death as an option. For most people, death would be something that you would attempt to avoid in all situations except the very, very most extreme.
00:12:05
Speaker
And maybe it was just the case that Stoics and ancient Roman Greece encountered more extreme situations than we did, encountered situations of slavery, of war, of, you know, people attacking your family or attacking you in a way that we don't have to. But Epictetus is pretty explicit. He says the door is always open. And what he means by that is that there's never
00:12:30
Speaker
We are never as humans forced to do something we don't want to do because we can always choose to die.
00:12:39
Speaker
So nobody could ever force us to do something terrible. So these kinds of arguments of, oh, he or she forced me to do this. Yeah, I didn't have a choice in the matter. There's no kind of choice that you can be forced to do because you can always just choose to stop living. You can choose to kill yourself. And maybe that's just because it was a lot more intense back then. Much more different situation. But Epictetus is actively reminding people that this option's on the table. Actively putting death there is an option.
00:13:07
Speaker
not as a figure of speech, but as a legitimate option to avoid it. If you feel you're stuck between death and doing something terrible, you know, choose death. Another thing I just want to say is, is Memento Mori is this kind of exercise, but it was something that I think was a lot more natural part of society back then.
00:13:29
Speaker
Even if it wasn't, it's certainly not a natural part of society today. I think about how we consume animals, for example. We don't even kill the animals we eat for 99% of cases. We don't see things die, let alone humans. Family members often, we only experience death in these kinds of cases of immediate family members, and they're either we're around it or we're not. But it's not something that we encounter in a normal society.
00:13:58
Speaker
I guess in Western culture today, it's possible to, you know, a memento mori, it's possible to not remember that death even exists for prolonged periods of time. So that's really what the exercise, I think, is trying to counteract. It's trying to push back against this tendency
00:14:17
Speaker
both in ourselves to block out the existence of death because it's scary, stressful, anxiety inducing, but then also a cultural situation where we've confronted, we've constructed a culture, at least many people live in a culture where we don't have to confront that notion. So we have to kind of do it ourselves to make sure we stay healthy about it.
00:14:37
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah, so we'll jump into how in fact you practice this, what the details of that looks like. But before doing that, I think we should be clear about, you know, why do the Stoics do this?
Philosophical Arguments on Mortality
00:14:50
Speaker
And the first is just the obvious point that the Stoics
00:14:56
Speaker
think we ought to pursue knowledge and we are mortal creatures and there's no sense in denying that. And as you said, Michael, there are these sort of natural psychological forces, natural cultural forces, and then of course also biological forces that push us often against considering the fact of our death and certainly against the idea that sometimes it's appropriate to die.
00:15:23
Speaker
and would push us instead towards this idea that death is always an evil and that life is something we always ought to preserve whenever we can. But for the Stoics, you know, they are often, you know, nearly always going to be in favor of preserving life, but that
00:15:45
Speaker
We need to admit, face the fact that we are mortal creatures and life, you know, we will not be forever. Hence, you know, part of embracing reality just is coming to terms with that fact. And I think that's why, you know, you have the phrase from Montagna to philosophize is to
00:16:09
Speaker
And I also want to read a quote from Plato that Marcus Aurelius cites in Meditations 735.
00:16:21
Speaker
When a person is high-minded and contemplates all time and existence, do you think he can place much importance on human life? Impossible, he said. So he won't find death terrifying either, will he? Not at all. This is from Plato's Republic.
00:16:42
Speaker
So the thought is that, you know, death is something that cannot be avoided. It's something that is out of our control. And as such, there is no reason, no justified reason to fear the fact that we die, but rather there's a benefit to facing
00:17:08
Speaker
that fact. The sage is going to look down on all things, see how nature is connected, how the parts compose the whole, and see the role that death plays in that larger system. It also reminds me of the passage from Marcus Aurelius where he's talking about, you know, the cracks of the loaf.
00:17:28
Speaker
the flickers of foam on a boar's mouth where if you look at them in isolation they may not be beautiful but if you zoom out you can see how everything fits together and even these small things will apparently be and appear excellent.
00:17:50
Speaker
Yeah, so what you've called the knowledge argument here is this idea that the goal of philosophy is to understand the world as it is and someone who understands the world as it is will not be afraid of death because that person, you know, as Plato says, will understand all substance or all of reality, the universe will understand
00:18:13
Speaker
you know, a human's mortal place within that. And the way you love, you know, the cracks on the loaf and accept the, the, you know, the nature of things you, you apply that same consideration and acceptance to yourself. So to, to, to have knowledge of those things is to also understand death and accept death. Something like that. Does that sound right?
00:18:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. The starting point is just that we are mortal creatures and that's something we should embrace, something that's not up to us. It's a part of our nature. And then there's this additional point about how that fits into the whole. And I think both of these features taking the fact that
00:19:04
Speaker
We are mortal creatures, how that determines our life in isolation, but also our lives in the larger context of things may help things fit together.
00:19:18
Speaker
When you take the view from above, what's trivial falls away and what's important remains. And the trying to get that extra minute or extra hour, extra month of life, whatever it is, I think when viewed from the right perspective becomes one of those trivial things often.
00:19:41
Speaker
what remains are important things, you know, being a virtuous person and typically being in order to be a virtuous person, you're going to be acting in the world.
Balancing Life Preservation and Virtue
00:19:50
Speaker
But the fact that you die, that there are serious risks in many worthwhile activities is not something to be feared, not something to flinch away from.
00:20:06
Speaker
Yeah, I like that idea of, you know, maybe don't go skydiving that a parachute as a teenager, but this idea of fighting for every extra minute, month, year, as if that's the ultimate goal of the life, of a life is to like prolong that as much as possible. You know, you're at the risk of being, I don't know, cowardly, for example, in these kinds of political situations the Stokes found themselves in.
00:20:34
Speaker
You're, you're missing what's important in that moment. If you're putting prolonging your existence about everything else. And we can think of this too, in context of like, I think of this in the political example of just, you know, tyrants, regimes, things like this, where you think, well, what's important here? Is it, is it really just squeaking out of this situation to make sure I can live as long as possible? Or is there something else more important here? I find that quite inspiring.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. I think there's this idea that if you're the sage, sometimes that means you are going to seek to preserve your life at all costs because that's what's required to protect your family or be a good citizen. But in other situations,
00:21:25
Speaker
you will risk your life to stand up against absurd injustice. And I suppose it's an exceptionally complex question, especially in many circumstances and which situation you are in, but the target, the thing you're shooting for is the kind of person who can think about that
00:21:52
Speaker
coolly without having this instant reaction against anything that would cause that would be too risky. Cool. So what's the, what is the next argument for why we should remember?
00:22:08
Speaker
Yeah, so some of these arguments might blur together, but the next argument I think of as the overcoming argument, and just to get this started, here's a quote from Musonius Rufus. Being fearless, undaunted, and bold, these are the products of courage. And how else could these become someone's qualities more effectively than if he would become firmly convinced that death and pain are not evils? So I think here we have this
00:22:36
Speaker
idea that what's holding us back from being virtuous so often is fear, fear that particular bad things will happen and especially fear that death or pain will occur. And the thought is
00:22:59
Speaker
from Musonius Rufus that if you attack that belief that death and pain are evils you're attacking this obstacle to being virtuous at its root and once you drop that belief you're getting rid of one of the fundamental
00:23:17
Speaker
obstacles to being virtuous. And I think that's probably easier to see in the pain case where, you know, why don't you stand up for that person and some meeting or whatever, because you are afraid of being shamed by the group. You're afraid of experiencing that emotional pain.
00:23:36
Speaker
But if you think about that emotional pain and compare it with many other bad things that could happen, it would be surprising to think of someone who thinks, oh, emotional pain, that is exceptionally terrible. But death, that is nothing to me. What would come to mind would be a person who
00:24:00
Speaker
held the prospect of death, how that stoic view of death is not something that is ultimately evil, is better able to face down things like emotional pain, physical pain, because in a real sense, death is one of the worst things that could happen to a person.
Indifference and Fear in Stoicism
00:24:23
Speaker
You're deprived of anything else good, anything else preferable that could happen.
00:24:28
Speaker
in a life. And if you're able to face that possibility, well, that gives you the ammo, the confidence to overcome one of the most common obstacles to being virtuous.
00:24:46
Speaker
Yeah, the Stoics had what they called, so you already mentioned before that death is an indifferent, but the Stoics had preferred indifference and dispreferred indifference, which means that indifference are things that are not good or bad. You choose them based on the situation. But if something is preferred and different, like health or money,
00:25:06
Speaker
All things being equal, you're going to tend to choose it. You're going to want to, you're going to kind of need stronger arguments to not choose good health and friends than something that's a dispreferred indifferent. That's something like physical pain, something like death. And then you could place these along the spectrum, right? And I would say probably death is, is the most extreme dispreferred indifferent. It's the thing that is going to require the most arguments to select.
00:25:34
Speaker
But there's still times when you'll choose it, but it's the one that's going to need the most compelling arguments to choose. But there will be times when it's the right thing to do. Now, the idea is that if you can accept that, and you can see death as a dispreferred indifferent, this is what I always understand your point, Caleb. Then you move up that chain, you go to pain, you go to kind of a rude coworker, you go to mild inconvenience.
00:25:58
Speaker
You go, you know, something that smells bad, you know, you, you being embarrassed in public, you, you, once you can accept death and everything up that spectrum of just prefer to difference just seems less bad. Right. And you, if you can, if you can get over that hump, you can get over the rest of those. No problem.
00:26:15
Speaker
Yep, yep. I think it brings to mind a quote from Steve Jobs, I think, where he said something to the effect of remembering that you're going to die is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. You are already mortal. And I love that phrasing. It's also, I think, a reminder that
00:26:44
Speaker
knowledge that you're going to die is not sufficient. You still need that positive vision of what a virtuous life looks like. But it's the fear that stops you from pursuing that positive vision. Yep, absolutely. Cool. Anything else on that argument? No, that makes sense to me.
00:27:08
Speaker
Awesome. All right. The last argument I want to mention here is what I call the freedom argument. You already touched on it. Sorry, I spoiled it. Yeah, you spoiled it. You had a spoiler, but the Epictetus is the person who states this most clearly. Seneca also has a number of lines about it.
00:27:26
Speaker
But here, let me read from the discourses. Don't believe your situation is generally bad. No one can make you do that. Is there smoke in the house? If it's not suffocating, I will stay indoors. If it proves too much, I'll leave. Always remember the door is open. And this is Epictetus's open door policy. As you mentioned, this thought that
00:27:55
Speaker
Death is always an option.
00:28:00
Speaker
And the fact that you don't choose death, I think often means you are freely agreeing to whatever happens that's outside of your control. Perhaps this is better explained as another anecdote from Epictetus where one we've mentioned before, the anecdote of the chamber pot, where he discusses someone who
00:28:27
Speaker
is asked to hold the chamber pot for their master and it's a very demeaning task. And they ask, you know, what should they do? And Epictetus's principle lines of advice here is to choose a path. You can be the person who
00:28:50
Speaker
holds the chamber pot to you know goes through with the demeaning exercise of it and perhaps you have good reasons to do so. You don't want to bring any beatings on yourself or beatings on those you love by rejecting the
00:29:06
Speaker
demands of your master. Alternatively, you could be the person who rejects the task because it is demeaning because you don't have those other obligations, but rather that obligation to yourself to avoid particular demeaning.
00:29:22
Speaker
activities. But what you do not want to do is be the person who holds the chamber pot and grouses. Instead, you've freely chosen to do, take an action, hold a chamber pot. And by doing so, you've accepted the consequences of that action, everything else that is outside of your control. And so the porting this over into the context of death,
00:29:49
Speaker
The idea is whenever we choose to continue living, to continue existing, we are agreeing to all of those aspects of reality that are outside of our control and in a sense, willing those things. You have related ideas and acceptance, commitment, therapy.
00:30:12
Speaker
And I think there's a real solace in that. And of course, there's the reminder that you have the freedom to avoid those situations. The door is always open. And this is a more advanced, stoic thought, certainly, but a very powerful one. Yeah, that's got to be one of my favorite
00:30:42
Speaker
passages and all of stoicism. I love that passage. The door being open is an extreme example, but it follows from the chamber pot. Nobody can make you do anything. You're always choosing a path and accepting the consequences of that path, but that's coming from your choice because you always have this other door, this other opportunity.
00:31:06
Speaker
As you said, advanced practice, I don't think that's going to help me at work tomorrow. The knowledge that I have this other door is not really going to help me in my day-to-day, but the thing that you see demonstrated by advanced practitioner. We just filmed an episode on the lives of the Stoics. We talked about Seneca suicide.
00:31:27
Speaker
I don't know enough of Roman politics to know if Seneca could have survived by groveling, you know, back to Nero or appeasing him or doing something, but Seneca didn't, right? He took the door. Same thing with Socrates when he was in prison and, you know, he was offered the opportunity to escape.
00:31:45
Speaker
And he took the door instead. And these stories demonstrate examples of those things occurring, right? It's not just something abstract. It's something that the Stoics and those that inspire the Stoics were doing. Yeah, that's a great point, Michael.
00:32:04
Speaker
It's not just an abstract reminder. Sometimes the Stoics did choose to act on it either by committing suicide or more often embracing wherever they were at to the best of their ability because they knew they did not take the door. Yeah, I love that passage as well. It's a very powerful thought.
Methods of Practicing Memento Mori
00:32:30
Speaker
So the question then is, okay, so how do I practice this more often? What does a Mentomori actually look like as a practice? And I think it's a sort of thing. It can be done in a number of different ways. Many people keep simple reminders of their mortality around.
00:32:54
Speaker
whether it's in a physical symbol or quotes from the Stoics. And then, of course, you can remind yourself of this fact by revisiting the writings from the ancient Stoics as we just did.
00:33:12
Speaker
There are also some explicit meditations one can perform that fit well into stoic practice. There's this idea of visualizing your funeral, the people who are there, the people who you admire.
00:33:33
Speaker
bringing to mind what you would like them to say about you. And I think that has the dual purpose of reminding you of your mortality. You will have a funeral and then also bringing to mind some people who are important to you, some people who you admire and what you wish they would say about you. And that I think should provide some amount of fuel for, you know, jumping back to that Marcus Aurelius quote, while you can be good.
00:34:04
Speaker
And I think that can be a very powerful meditation, the sort of thing that's worth doing not every day, but throughout the year.
00:34:15
Speaker
Likewise, you can meditate on the span of your life, think about what has happened so far, think about the ways your life can unfold, and really bring to mind the fact that the timeline of your life is limited and you only have so many more years. That's the kind of thing we don't
00:34:36
Speaker
talk about until people become older until it becomes clear that, yes, my timeline is coming to an end. And explicitly doing, thinking through your life, I think in that way, can be useful.
00:34:54
Speaker
Yeah, well, I was trying to look up now where the phrase itself comes from because, you know, we're referring to this practice, but I was trying to see if Memento Mori itself was actually said by any of the Stoics or something that was used in the future to describe, you know, these lessons that they were giving. But I was also struck by how Memento Mori, it's like, you know, it's intentionally an alliteration, right? Like it's meant to be a little,
00:35:21
Speaker
a little token of a phrase. It's not this long description. It's this really quick thing that's meant to be repeated to yourself. I made a division at the start of the conversation between
00:35:33
Speaker
you know, the fact of the death of others, the fact of your death, and then preparing for the moment of death. And I think some of these exercises, the three that you talked about Graf on, some of those, you know, there's like, there's the, there's the fact that death exists. That's that kind of just remembering this, the funeral meditation you described, you're contemplating your, your death in particular.
00:35:57
Speaker
I think can help you think about how you want to die. And then the lifespan meditation maybe is helpful for maybe motivating you in the moment, bringing in the temporariness of your life into your full picture so that it can motivate you to act differently.
00:36:15
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah. And also bringing into mind the fact that the people who surround you, their stories are also temporary affairs and thinking about how they fit, how those fit into your life. So I think each of these, it's not, so I suppose Memento Mori, it's not a specific
00:36:39
Speaker
exercise, but rather a goal of these meditative exercise, these contemplative exercises to remember the fact that you are mortal. And these are just three ways to do it. It's not the only way to do it. You have reminding yourself via maxims, quotes, physical reminders, the funeral meditation, and then lifespan meditations.
00:37:02
Speaker
There's also, I think, one of the most famous Roman cases of memento mori is the Roman general who returns after a victorious campaign to a triumph, a huge parade celebrating his accomplishments. Traditionally, this person would have a slave behind them whispering into their ear, remember, you will die. This is not going to last forever, even at that peak moment.
00:37:29
Speaker
So, you know, I think unlike Western culture, perhaps, certainly in Roman culture, this idea of death was much more central to two people in stoicism and outside. Yeah, I like that story because we think of stoicism of the important part of stoicism is this idea of the passions.
00:37:52
Speaker
which are not normal emotions, but these kind of extreme emotions that deviate from false judgments. So you can have this situation. So it's like, what is that slave doing that's whispering to you? Well, you might have a general, the general might have a kind of pride for what they've done.
00:38:10
Speaker
Well, I did a good job. Well, I've helped some people. There's these kind of true judgments. And then there's these more exaggerated judgments while I'm the best there ever was. I'm unstoppable. I'm immortal. I could defeat anybody. And so I see that slave as the person whispering to them as this kind of aid who's helping them not slip into those passionate judgments or those extreme judgments. You're still in the parade.
00:38:39
Speaker
You're still indulging in what went well, but you're not allowing that to go too far.
00:38:45
Speaker
Yep, yep, absolutely. Yeah, you're not letting that passion, that feeling, overleap reason. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, absolutely. So those are the practices, that's the reason, or some of the reasons why the Stoics thought Memento Mori was so important. I think now we should summarize some of the benefits of the practice that maybe we haven't touched on before, and then also discuss possible risks.
00:39:15
Speaker
In terms of the benefits, each of these arguments seem to me like good ones, what I call the knowledge arguments, the overcoming argument, and then the freedom arguments. All of those seem like good reasons to keep one's death in mind because doing so enables us to overcome obstacles to being virtuous. It reminds us of our
00:39:42
Speaker
free nature and then is, of course, a piece of knowledge, a knowledge that shouldn't merely be verbal. You know, of course, at some level we all know we will die, but is that knowledge really embodied rather than a verbal thing we say when we're asked the question? Yeah, if you had to take a true or false test, most people would say, true, I will die. That's different than embodying that in your actions. Right, right.
00:40:13
Speaker
Yep. Yep. Definitely. So each of those arguments strikes me as good ones and good enough, certainly good enough to think about how to practice Mentomori in your life, whether you're stoic or not. I think, you know, we've had this stoic framing around the conversation, but that's really not necessary for, for most of this. Yeah. Cool. That makes sense to me.
00:40:41
Speaker
Cool. Do you want to add anything else by way of pros? Otherwise we can discuss, jump into the risks. I mean, I think those are good arguments. I agree that we don't emphasize death enough. We don't confront it enough in Western culture. I think that this is also something that becomes more important as
00:41:05
Speaker
As you get older, I guess as you live more. So I think that a lot of stoic exercises are easy to construe as things that we use in moments of crisis. So, okay, I'm very stressed today. Well, I should remember that I will remember that I'll die. So it doesn't matter anyway, or remember that that's not an evil or it's it's.
00:41:24
Speaker
outside of my control, so I shouldn't worry. But Memento Mori is this kind of thing you want to remember all the time and the benefits of remembering that you die, I think, are something that you take into how you choose to construct your life long-term. So it's not just this way to navigate stress in the moment or trivialize stress in the moment, it is this way to
00:41:46
Speaker
really set up what kind of life do I want to live? How do I want to structure things? So you think of a midlife crisis, that's when somebody hits 30, 40, 50, and they've kind of lost to a memento mori, or they haven't done memento mori, and now they have to restructure because they've kind of spent their life building
00:42:06
Speaker
building towards something without a recognition that this is the one shot you get, this is temporary, or this is all there is, and then those thoughts come to them all at once, and it requires this extreme restructuring.
Risks in Advanced Stoic Practices
00:42:20
Speaker
It's something that I think is helpful to keep that hygiene up, keep that muscle up, to keep that momentum all the time, and it will pay dividends, not just in the moment, but over decades.
00:42:33
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think especially thinking about this lifespan type meditation, funeral meditation, what do you want people to say about you at your funeral? Who do you want to be? And then what does that actually look like in a life? That's the sort of thing that one cannot start working on too early.
00:42:55
Speaker
That, you know, all this said, I think with many of these practices, there are risks, there are ways they can go awry. And I think it's important to, it's important to touch on this. One of the things I wanted to say here is that I think in some is an advanced practice, especially this freedom argument from Epitetus, the open door policy. I think one needs to be really clear about what the stoic
00:43:25
Speaker
views on death is, what the stoic view about suicide is, and role ethics before one takes that on too seriously as a frame. Otherwise, there's the
00:43:42
Speaker
risk that one makes the wrong choice. Yes, the door is always open. That does not mean it should be taken in the majority of moments. It's an entirely different question whether it should be taken or not.
00:44:00
Speaker
So, for that reason, I would label practices around thinking about that as an advanced matter. You know, we have this other discussion on euthanasia where we go into detail on the questions of euthanasia and suicide. So, I think that if you hadn't listened to that episode and want to know more about the stoic theory there, that's somewhere I would go to next.
00:44:29
Speaker
Another possible risk with these practices is they can become too negative or
00:44:38
Speaker
You might have the thought, why not fail? I'll die anyway. One way to think about death is it gives us urgency. It gives us gratitude for the good that we do have. But another approach is to respond to the fact of our mortality with a thought that nothing really matters because we're going to die anyway. And you can have that be a nihilistic attitude or a negative one.
00:45:06
Speaker
And that's not what the Stoics are about. The Stoics are always about finding this perspective where you use things like Memento Mori, the view from above, to make salient what does matter, not to erode the possibility of value or the possibility of a good life, of course.
00:45:29
Speaker
Yeah, and it can also, just to build on this, it can also, memento mori can be discouraging to non-stoics or people being confronted with stoicism who think, wow, this sucks. You know, like this is just, I can't have, I can't feel anything and I have to think about how I'm going to die all the time. Like this, this, this is, I mean, I think the negative and nihilistic comes from something that practitioners can do to misinterpret it, but I think it can also, outside people can misinterpret memento mori.
00:45:57
Speaker
not view it the way you just said about focusing on the good parts, focusing on what matters and having that be more salient, but they see it as kind of this hyper obsession with the negative, with the nihilism or negativity and then bounce off stoicism because of that. They say, that's not the philosophy for me if I'm just going to, I'm not allowed to cry and I have to think about how I'm going to die, you know? Another possible, another risk I think is this risk of
00:46:28
Speaker
rumination where a one negative thought pattern is you have the same negative possibility, you know, spinning in your mind and you just return to it again and again. You can't get that thought out of your head. I think that's pretty common for people suffering from some form of anxiety.
00:46:48
Speaker
you know, what if things go this way, you just keep on thinking, thinking, thinking about it, or alternatively, forms of depression are like this, you just keep on ruminating on negative aspects of the world. And with some stoic practices, you need to always be careful that you're not falling into that trap. And if you think
00:47:13
Speaker
you are, then any of these memento mori practices might not be the best fit at the moment. Now, I think this may be especially clear when you think about the possibility, not just of your own death, but the death of others, where the fact that the ones we love will die is, in a deep sense, very tragic. And focusing on that can
00:47:42
Speaker
lead to a kind of rumination that is unhealthy. And so perhaps another principle to keep in mind is this idea of
00:47:53
Speaker
exposure therapy when people practice defusing some harmful phobia, often they'll expose themselves to small versions of that phobia and deal with what is manageable first before scaling up.
Confronting Mortality Gradually
00:48:11
Speaker
And hence, you know, if you think about facing the prospect of your death or the death of your loved ones, already you're jumping to a pretty high
00:48:23
Speaker
level. So if you notice that maybe you're ruminating, the exercise is not helpful. Start by approaching some of the other static practices that are more manageable or thinking about something like pre-meditatio malorum with bads that are not as severe. And I think that's often a useful step one can take and something to keep in mind.
00:48:53
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's also a risk if you move to a state that is too advanced, there's the risk of being nihilistic or negative, there's the risk of ruminating, but then there's also the risk of trivializing and not actually confronting the idea of death. There's a way where you can desensitize yourself to the exercise. You're thinking, yeah, the mental more, yeah, we're all going to die, but you're not really allowing that to
00:49:23
Speaker
you're not really, I guess, understanding the implications of that claim, reflecting upon those deeply, accepting how they might be emotionally unsettling, you know, because we're not sages or, you know, it's totally fine if it's like really scary or really sad as you're progressing, as you confront these ideas. And if you jump, if you kind of jump a stage ahead, yeah, I'm a stoic, yeah, I'm a mental mori. It's like, well, you're not actually really doing the exercise because you've,
00:49:53
Speaker
gone at such a high level that you can't actually do it properly. You have to expose yourself slowly, but expose yourself genuinely. I think you provided a good example of how to do that, maybe premeditatio malorum, but make sure you're actually feeling the kind of emotional implications of these exercises or behavioral changes from these exercises. Otherwise, you're just kind of like Epictetus's students. We run the risk of showing off without internalizing.
00:50:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great point. You can't merely be after the verbal knowledge. Verbalizing is easy. Thinking about this thing from an abstract level is relatively manageable, perhaps a good place to start, but you have to flesh out.
00:50:37
Speaker
and think about these concrete situations that can arise. Think about what does the fact that your life is in fact limited mean for you specifically and your circumstances.
00:50:50
Speaker
Otherwise, you know, you certainly can find yourself in this situation where you're like, Oh, I've practiced memento mori for years. And then you get a terminal diagnosis and you think, Oh shit, I am going to die. And to some extent, those sorts of situations are, you know, that's unavoidable. It's a hard thing to hear, I think for, for most people.
00:51:13
Speaker
But the fact that people do get into that kind of situation is evidence that it often desensitizes a good way to put it. We desensitize our self to the fact that we're going to die instead of knowing that it's something that's going to occur. Yeah, totally. Awesome. All right. Well, that's our conversation on Memento Mori.
00:51:37
Speaker
Yeah, you got, you got, for those listening, a good hour to reflect on the head and hopefully, hopefully, yeah, some insight into where this fits into your practice, the stoic justifications behind it. Maybe you've been confronting it differently. Maybe it's changed your view, but hopefully that was, that was helpful and a little bit of a deep dive into, into that single exercise in practice. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thanks for that conversation until next time. Awesome.
00:52:04
Speaker
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00:52:34
Speaker
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00:53:01
Speaker
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