溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
What Is the True Fruit a Life Bears?
Is the fruit a life bears at its end what it piled up, or the person it became?
The rational soul surveys its own life and knows what kind of life it has been.
Aurelius's placing of a life's fruit in character and good deeds carried Aristotle's question of the good life on in a Stoic way. Where Aristotle set life's end in activity in accordance with virtue, the Stoics pressed that virtue into an inner completion unshaken by any outward condition. Epicurus, by contrast, found a life's fruit not in virtue but in calm and joy, and the Eastern Confucians saw it not as virtue achieved alone but as the humane relationship (ren) borne among people. Is a life's true fruit inner virtue, the peace of mind, or the humaneness of relationship? Painting different reckonings of a life, the question lives on.
In an age that easily reckons a life by how much it piled up, Aurelius's question — that a life's true fruit is who one became — turns the measure of reckoning inward.
Aurelius speaks of the power of the rational soul: it surveys its own life and knows, of itself, what kind of life it has been.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Aurelius speaks of the power of the rational soul: it surveys its own life and knows, of itself, what kind of life it has been. As a field is judged by its fruit, a life is judged by the character it bore. He found that fruit in good acts for oneself and for the common good. I feel this question touches the inner side of what we leave. The fruit remaining at life's end is not a bank balance but who I became and what good I did. Toward what fruit am I now growing? I weigh the fruit my own life will bear.
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