A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living (Learning to Live)

by Luc Ferry

Or, according to Marcus Aurelius: ‘You came into this world as a part: you will vanish into the whole which gave you birth, or rather you will be gathered up into its generative principle by the process of change.’ (Meditations, IV,14) What do such texts mean? They mean simply this: that having reached a certain level of wisdom, theoretical and practical, the human individual understands that death does not really exist, that it is but a passage from one state to the next; not an annihilation but a different state of being. As members of a divine and stable cosmos, we too can participate in this stability and this divinity. As soon as we understand this, we will become aware simultaneously how unjustified is our fear of death, not merely subjectively but also – in a pantheistic sense – objectively. Because the universe is eternal, we will remain for ever a fragment – we too will never cease to exist!