The ultimate form of this premeditation of evils is the meditation on death. The meditation on death is found in Plato, in the Pythagoreans. Death is not just a possible event; it is a necessary event. It is not just an event of some gravity: for man it has absolute gravity. And death may occur at any time, at any moment. So it is for this event, as the supreme misfortune if you like, that we must prepare ourselves, through which this premeditation of evils will be brought to its highest point.
In Stoics, the exercise consists in thinking death as present and one is living one's last day.
Seneca, Letter 12: the whole of life is only one long day with morning, which is childhood, midday, which is maturity, and evening, which is old age; that a year is also like a day, with the morning of spring and the night of winter; that each month is also like a sort of day; and that all in all a day, the passing of a single day, is the model for the organization of the time of a life, or of different organized times and durations in a human life. Living one's life as if not just a month or a year, but the whole of his life passes by in that day. We should think of each hour of the day we are living as a sort of age of life, so that when we arrive at the evening of the day we will also arrive at the evening of life as it were, that is to say at the moment of death itself. This is the exercise of the last day. It involves organizing and experiencing our day as if each moment of the day was the moment of the great day of life, and the last moment of the day was the last moment of our existence.
Marcus Aurelius: Moral perfection involves living each day as if it were the last.
Epictetus: Don't you know that illness and death must take us in the middle of some activity? They take the laborer at his work, the sailor navigating. And what activity would you like to be engaged in when you are taken? For you will be doing something when death takes. If you can be taken, while engaged in something better than our present activity, practice that.
Seneca: On the moral progress I have been able to make in the course of my life, I trust only in death. I await the day when I will pass judgment on myself and know whether virtue was only in my words or really in my heart. Whether or not you have wasted your time will be revealed when you lose your life.
The exercise, thinking about death, is only a means for taking this cross-section view of life which enables one to grasp the value of the present, or again to carry out the great loop of memorization, by which one totalizes one's life and reveals it as it is.
Pythagoras's examination of conscience at the end of each day to purify the thought before sleep. The dream is the test of the soul's purity.
Murcus Aurelius's morning examination: remembering the general aim you set yourself by these actions and the general aims you should always have in mind throughout life, and so the precautions to be taken so as to act according to these precise objectives and general aims in the situations that arise.
Epictetus: We should always have ready at hand the judgment of which we feel the need; at table, we should have ready at hand the judgment concerning everything to do with eating; at the bath, we should have ready at hand all the judgments concerning how to behave at the bath. When we are in bed, we should always have ready at hand all the judgments concerning how to behave in bed. To practice philosophy is to make preparation. To practice philosophy is to put oneself in a frame of mind such that one will regard the whole of life as a test. And the meaning of ascetics, the set of exercises available to us, is that of enabling us to be permanently prepared for this life which will only ever be, until its end, a life test in the sense that it will be a life that is a test.
For the Greek, caring about the self means equipping ourselves for a series of unforeseen events by practicing a number of exercises which actualized these events with an unavoidable necessity and in which we strip them of any imaginary reality they may have, in order to reduce their existence to the strict minimum. It is in these exercises, in the interplay of these exercises, that we will be able to live existence as a test throughout our life.
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