> Because if you accept your fate joyfully, as a Stoic sage should, you’ll never try to change it.
This is a common criticism. To pick one of many convenient rebuttals, here's William Irvine's book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, chapter 5:
> To the contrary, they were fully engaged in daily life. From this, one of two conclusions follows: Either the Stoics were hypocrites who did not act in accordance with their principles, or we have, in the above argument, somehow misinterpreted Stoic principles. I shall now argue for this second alternative.
> Remember that among the things over which we have complete control are the goals we set for ourselves. I think that when a Stoic concerns himself with things over which he has some but not complete control, such as winning a tennis match, he will be very careful about the goals he sets for himself. In particular, he will be careful to set internal rather than external goals. Thus, his goal in playing tennis will not be to win a match (something external, over which he has only partial control) but to play to the best of his ability in the match (something internal, over which he has complete control). By choosing this goal, he will spare himself frustration or disappointment should he lose the match: Since it was not his goal to win the match, he will not have failed to attain his goal, as long as he played his best. His tranquility will not be disrupted.
Verse [2.47] says:
1) Only rightful action is in your control.
2) Fruits of your action is never in your control.
3) Give up the pride of doership .
4) Last but not the least do not get into inaction.
Verse 3.5 says:
No body can remain inactive even for a second. All living being have to act even to sustain their bodies.
Anyone interested in stoicism should also read it from a good translation.
The Tao Te Ching also talks about not striving for things.
It is interesting that these three philosophies from three different civilizations at different times overlap in their outlook to life, which hints at something permanent. It would be great to map the migration of these ideas between them and how we arrived at the diverged modern day outlook.
There isn't a lot offered to support the conclusion that stoicism somehow caused Aurelius to turn away from love and accept power. I would be hesitant of drawing such a conclusion based on the paucity of evidence; but the author just asserts it. The trope of the philosopher more interested in contemplation than earthly affairs is just that: a trope. There isn't really an argument here, just indignation at this ancedote.
That's not my own takeaway of stoicism. At the core of stoicism is the dichotomy of control: something is either in my control or it is not, or it is some combination of the two which must be unraveled. Applied to emotion: I can't control when I weep. I can't control when I feel sorrow. I can control how I react to those experiences. Attempting to simply suppress such emotions is not being a stoic, at least as I have learned it, since doing so violates the dichotomy of control -- attempting to control that which is beyond our control.
You accept what you can’t control, and that which you can, you enact your virtues to ensure the best outcomes possible.
You don’t simply let things be and accept it. You need to be constantly engaged in observation and reflection to ensure who you are and what you do is virtuous, and regularly assess if you are succeeding or not.
If anything stoicism strikes me as a philosophy which encourages practitioners not to accept the world as it is, but to live in harmony with it. Harmony doesn’t mean complacency, but living according to the environment you are a part of. You can live as you please (set goals, challenge yourself, explore, etc) non complacently, but it will necessarily need to coincide and function with the reality you exist in as well.
Stoicism, Buddhism, Christianity, etc., are moral frameworks, and they all have an element of explaining the pain in the world in a way that absolves the individual from responsibility of others, while at the same time emphasizing personal responsibility, which is what the article is arguing against.
Which sounds like the author is probably an atheist since the premise is about taking responsibility for the pain in the whole world. Regardless, I always wonder when people take this tone of moral clarity, on what moral framework are they drawing their conclusions from.
Either those techniques works or they don't. If they don't work, then they should be abandoned for that reason. If they do work, the fact that Seneca had a disciple that turned bad as an adult or that Aurelius wasn't an abolitionist doesn't do anything to change that.
This is just the genetic fallacy in essay form.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/genetic
The article continues in this vein, and then presents a straw man version of stoicism in which rape, murder and so forth is greeted with indifference. I am not an unqualified fan of stoicism, but this is a ridiculous caricature of the philosophy, and the alternative presented by the article appears to be an appeal to allow emotion to drive our behavior.
I do not notice a dearth of emotional reasoning or a surfeit of stoic reasoning in today's world.
Christian tradition can serve even, but it requires quite a bit of study I think to approach seeming coherence, simply passively "being raised in it" isn't enough. Meanwhile things like stoicism, or one of my favorites taoism (see the short Tao Te Ching), can be grasped in a very short period of time, which is all the more attractive. Even if one ultimately doesn't get anything from them or explicitly rejects them, it doesn't take too long to evaluate them and figure that out, and then you'll at least have been exposed to something coherent and helpfully be armed against loving future systems you encounter too much on account of their seeming coherence no longer being novel. That happens I think to a lot of Objectivists for whom Atlas Shrugged (specifically its long philosophical monologues) was their first exposure. But it could also happen to someone reading Walden or the related essays of the time that form an interconnected worldview -- less likely on that one though since amusingly the modern education system's common practice of making snippets of those a bit of "required reading" and then analyzed as just literature or poetry is an amazing defense mechanism against anyone casually coming across them, reading them all, and extracting and applying some of their philosophical points.
Its essays are hit and miss for me (and there's a fair bit of miss from this one, even though I think the discussion here is interesting...), but there's more than enough interesting ones to keep me coming back. It's one of the few sites around that has convinced me to join its newsletter. And if you're in a cosmopolitan city (Melbourne, London, New York, etc) they host semi-regular philosophy night events too. Worth a look.
A book like De Rerum Natura was talking about the quantization of light, survival of the fittest and the progression of now extinct 'freaks' of nature in the development of life, a universe that originated by atoms clashing randomly in the void. That rainbows were from light interacting with water vapor and that lightning and thunder might happen at the same time and just take different lengths of time to reach us.
And their philosophy for living a good life boiled down to self-knowledge, socialization with friends, and avoiding suffering.
They deserve far more credit than they got, and were effectively ignored throughout most of modern history because they saw a world that operated by its own laws and thus didn't see appeasement of gods as something to be concerned with.
The Stoics and Platonists with their perfect origin from which existence emerged by design was much more palatable to the church, and the group with the best understanding of the physical world in hindsight remains mostly a footnote, despite in antiquity (before the rise of the church) having been one of the major philosophical schools.
Stockdale was tortured in the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War and his writings are studied (or at least were 30 years ago) at USNA.
I find stoicism an intellectually useful set of concepts, in a tactical sense. IMO, it seems morally limited, strategically.
For example, taking care of the environment is sensible, but why do I care? If I'm just so many atoms, then the eventual effects of my folly are SEP[2]. The drive to be mature and responsible will _always_ succumb to rationalization.
Case in point: the national debt. Who in their right mond lives beyond their means? Only pretty much _every_ government.
The human flesh is always corrupt; the mind is prone to rationalizations; the only "hope", if one cares to go there, is through the soul. Finding a community of faith to offer moral feedback to the Stoic mind and the fallen flesh is left as an exercise for the reader.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stockdale
[2] Someone Else's Problem
Nor does the article show how now people today are driven by virtue more than things like . . . say, influence. Or who those virtuous but doomed/destructive Stoics are who seek to follow truth.
This is an invective against not just stoicism but truth itself. What do I expect from Psyche? How do they vet these things?
To Henry Gruber at Harvard, you seem to have an early draft of something here. It has . . . problems. But maybe potential. You've read and thought a little. With a little more, what can you make it into?
There is a political case to be made against virtue (this was not it). There is an economic case (this not it). There is even something to be said for un-virtuous romance or how sex workers are virtuous but not really romance (not this thing, Gruber). So what is this?
"Don't be sad"? Huh?
I believe the author is right — stoicism ends in detached, aloof, disconnected aloneness and probably wouldn’t create a society we want to live in.
Regardless of whether you think Jesus is God…the end of his teaching is the opposite of disconnected aloneness.
The question I would have for the author is, with what framework do you determine what is worth attaching to, worth grieving over?
I like stoicism as it made my life a little more bearable. I can take the good, and ditch the useless, though.
Fagamid suid mar a te se
