The Cosmic Context

Again and again, I find the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius useful, and in this case, it is good to compare notes. I would say, throughout the meditations, Marcus has this underlying uncertainty about the Gods. He talks about them as a sort of embodiment of all that is good about us, and he sometimes writes about how, if the gods weren't real, it wouldn't matter anyway. Their realness changes nothing about his practice. The Gods, then, are for Marcus a kind of model and a placeholder, a way of thinking about things.

Think about the scientific understanding about the world during Marcus' liftime. One gets hints of that from the Meditations, and it always strikes me that it isn't all that far off from my understanding today. I think the biggest difference between Marcus' worldview and my worldview is how much larger the universe is now. The universe is so large, it is just insane. I don't know how else to put it. In Marcus' time, it would have seemed a bit smaller. The Gods had things to do.

Another big difference would have to be that I exist in an era during which the theory of evolution is well-developed and forms the basis for understanding life as a process. Here, I sometimes think about Schopenhauer's Will to Life, how he came up with this idea of a blind and irrational force, and he was a contemporary of Darwin. These are the same thing, the Will to Life and evolution.