Dear Readers,
Here is the latest Monday Muse with a meditation from the Dying Every Day series, a perennial reminder, insight, and a question to consider.
Be wise and be well this week!
💀 Dying Every Day
The Dying Every Day series delivers meditations on the art of living (and dying). Each meditation provides a quote, a selected passage (from an original Stoic text), and a daily exercise to contemplate.
“Both death and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty – all these things happen equally to good men and bad, being neither noble nor shameful. Therefore they are neither good nor evil.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Selected Passage
In this week’s meditation, we explore the art of living through a selected reading from Seneca.
If every good is in the soul, then whatever strengthens, uplifts, and enlarges the soul, is a good; virtue, however, does make the soul stronger, loftier, and larger. All other things that arouse our desires depress the soul and weaken it, and when we think that they are uplifting the soul, they are merely puffing it up and cheating it with much emptiness. Therefore, that alone is good, which will make the soul better. …
Therefore, if one is determined invariably to follow that which is honorable, invariably to avoid baseness, and in every act of his life to have regard for these two things, deeming nothing else good except that which is honorable and nothing else bad except that which is base; if virtue alone is unperverted in him and by itself keeps its even course, then virtue is that man’s only good, and nothing can thenceforth happen to it which may make it anything else than good. It has escaped all risk of change; folly may creep upwards towards wisdom, but wisdom never slips back into folly. …
It follows that the things which are often scorned by the men who are moved with a sudden passion and are always scorned by the wise are neither goods nor evils. Virtue itself is, therefore, the only good; she marches proudly between the two extremes of fortune, with great scorn for both. […]
+Adapted from On Learning Wisdom in Old Age
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Daily Exercise
Consider reflecting on how you define (or think about) the highest good. What does it mean that much of our experiences are actually "neither good nor evil"?
📌 Perennial Reminder
The twentieth-century philosopher William Barrett on the ethical life:
One’s values may thus be all down on paper, but one’s actual life goes on as if the ethical did not exist. A formal theory of ethics would be perfectly empty if it were not for the fundamental act of ethical existence by which we let values come into our lives. The fundamental choice, says Kierkegaard, is not the choice between rival values of good and bad but the choice by which we summon good and bad into existence for ourselves. Without such a choice, an abstract system of ethics is just so much paper currency with nothing to back it up. […]
Source: Irrational Man (via Reading & the Good Life)
💡 Perennial Insight
The professor and author Karen Swallow Prior on the virtue of prudence:
Virtue requires judgment, and judgment requires prudence. Prudence is wisdom in practice. It is the habit of discerning the ‘true good in every circumstance’ and ‘the right means of achieving it.’ In other words, it is ‘applied morality.’ A person possesses the virtue of prudence when ‘the disposition to reason well about what courses of action and emotion will best bring about our own and others’ well-being’ becomes an acquired habit. Perhaps Cicero puts it most clearly and succinctly in saying, ‘Prudence is the knowledge of things to be sought and those to be shunned.’ […]
Source: On Reading Well (via In Search of Wisdom)
🛋️ Perennial Question
The American philosopher and educator Mortimer Adler asked, “What is the one right ultimate end that all of us should seek?”
Good habits, or moral virtues, are habits of making the right choices among goods, real and apparent. Bad habits, which Aristotle calls ‘vices,’ are habits of making the wrong choices. Every time you make a right choice and act on it, you are doing something that moves you toward your ultimate goal of living a good life. Every time you make a wrong choice and act on it, you are moving in the opposite direction. The virtuous person is one who makes the right choices regularly, time and time again, although not necessarily every single time.
That is why Aristotle thinks that virtue plays such a special role in the pursuit of happiness. That is why he regards moral virtue as the principal means to happiness and as the most important of all the things that are really good for us to have. […]
Source: Aristotle for Everybody
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W.
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