Stoicism – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

Avoidance Always Possible

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VI, 20, Loeb Classical Library no. 58, p. 141, tr. Haines:

Suppose that a competitor in the ring has gashed us with his nails and butted us violently with his head, we do not protest or take it amiss or suspect our opponent in future of foul play. Still we do keep an eye on him, not indeed as an enemy, or from suspicion of him, but with good-humoured avoidance. Act much the same way in all the other parts of life. Let us make many allowances for our fellow-athletes as it were. Avoidance is always possible, as I have said, without suspicion or hatred.

This is indeed Sage Advice. Avoidance is always possible and sometimes necessary if one would live well. Marcus bids us avoid, if not our "fellow-athletes," then their rude antics. But I would add to the list certain thoughts, words, and deeds.

Seneca: Omnis Vita Servitium Est

Assume the worst. Assume that Seneca was a hypocrite: he didn't believe what he wrote or try to live in accordance with it. What would it matter? How is it relevant to the fact that countless thousands, over the centuries, have derived inspiration, consolation, and strength from passages such as the following? If a message is sound, it is sound regardless of the moral condition of the messenger.

Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi, X, 4 (tr. Basore):

All life is a servitude. And so a man must become reconciled to his lot, must complain of it as little as possible, and must lay hold of whatever good it may have; no state is so bitter that a calm mind cannot find in its some consolation. . . . Apply reason to difficulties; it is possible to soften what is hard, to widen what is narrow, and burdens will press less heavily upon those who bear them skillfully.

Seneca on Leisure and Philosophy

Some say Seneca was a hypocrite. But even if it is true, even if he did not believe or practice what he preached in his voluminous writings, what would it matter when he has bequeathed to us such gems as the following?

Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live; for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex every age to their own; all the years that have gone before them are an addition to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life. By other men’s labours we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light; from no age are we shut out, we have access to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of mind, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. Since nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters? (De Brevitate Vitae, XIV, 1-2. Trans. J. W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 254, pp. 333-335, emphasis added.)

Comment: Leisure (otium) is a concept almost universally misunderstood nowadays. It has nothing to do with hitting little white balls into holes at Leisure World, and everything to do with the disciplined use of free time in pursuit of the worthiest objects for nonutilitarian ends. Leisure in this classical sense is the basis of culture (Josef Pieper). To be able to enjoy it with a good conscience is a mark of nobility of soul. (Nietzsche).

We Annoy Ourselves

There are not a few situations in life in which we are tempted to say or think, 'Your behavior is annoying!' Thinking this, we only make ourselves more annoyed. Saying it is even worse. For then two are annoyed. Instead of saying or thinking of something external to oneself that he, she, or it is annoying, think to oneself: I am annoying myself, or I am allowing myself to become annnoyed.

Just as one enjoys oneself, one annoys oneself. Enjoyment of a thing external to oneself is enjoyment of oneself in relation to the thing. The same goes for annoyance. There is of course an objective stimulus, not in one's power. One's tablemate, for example, is slurping his soup. His slurping is not in one's power, or else not conveniently in one's power. (Shooting him only makes matters worse.) But how one responds to the slurping is within one's power.

Stoicism may not take us very far along the road to happiness, but where it takes us is worth visiting.

It goes without saying that adjusting one's attitude is the appropriate response only in some of life's difficult situations. One does not adjust one's attitude to the 'annoying' behavior of a terrorist: one literally shoots him, thereby inducing a radical attitude adjustment in him. If the shooting adversely affects one's ataraxia, too bad. Better a little less tranquillitas animi than death or submission to the religion of 'peace.' Better his being red than your being dead.

Seneca on Drinking

In this festive season it is perhaps appropriate that we should relax a little the bonds that tether us to the straight and narrow. A fitting apologia for a bit of indulgence and even overindulgence is found in Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind, XVII, 8-9, tr. Basore:

At times we ought to reach even the point of intoxication, not drowning ourselves in drink, yet succumbing to it; for it washes away troubles, and stirs the mind from its very depths and heals its sorrow just as it does certain ills of the body; and the inventor of wine is not called the Releaser [Liber, Bacchus] on account of the license it gives to the tongue, but because it frees the mind from bondage to cares and emancipates it and gives it new life and makes it bolder in all that it attempts. But, as in freedom, so in wine there is a wholesome moderation.

Sed ut libertatis ita vini salubris moderatio est.

. . .

Yet we ought not to do this often, for fear that the mind may contract an evil habit; nevertheless there are times when it must be drawn into rejoicing and freedom, and gloomy sobriety must be banished for a while.

Heights and Precipices: Quae Excelsa Videbantur, Praerupta Sunt

Seneca, Tranquillitate Animi, X, 5 (tr. Basore) counsels the chastening but not the extirpation of desire:

. . . we must not send our desires upon a distant quest, but we should permit them to have access to what is near, since they do not endure to be shut up altogether. Leaving those things that either cannot be done, or can be done only with difficulty, let us pursue what lies near at hand and allures our hope, but let us be aware that they are all equally trivial, diverse outwardly in appearance, within alike vain. And let us not envy those who stand in higher places; where there are heights to be seen, there are precipices. (Emphasis added.)

I modified the last sentence of Basore's translation, substituting 'where there are heights to be seen' for 'where there appeared heights' which is bad English and appears to be a mistranslation from the Latin.

Admiration and Contempt

Often it is like this. He is not admirable; it is your unadmirable propensity to admire that confers upon him a quality he does not possess. She is not contemptible; it is your contemptible tendency to contemn that makes of her what she is not.

One ideal is to so apportion admiration and contempt that it is only the intrinsically admirable and contemptible that become the objects of these attitudes. An ideal Stoic and stricter is to regard nothing as admirable or the opposite, not even the propensities to admire and contemn. Is this what Horace meant by nil admirari?

How far should we take the mortification of desire and aversion? You could take it all the way into a world-denying asceticism. But I suspect the Sage is a man of balance. Able to control desire and aversion, he has no need to extirpate them. Why uproot a tree that you can trim and manage? You say it is messy when its blossoms fall. But before they fell were they not beautiful and fragrant? The leaves are a bother to rake, but is not the shade they afford agreeable?

The Sage can enjoy the transient in its transiency without clinging and without hankering after the absent transient. He can oppose the bad and the disagreeable without losing his equanimity or exaggerating their negativity. He neither idolizes nor demonizes.

We Annoy Ourselves

There are not a few situations in life in which we are tempted to say or think of another, 'Your behavior is annoying!' Thinking this, we only make ourselves more annoyed. Saying it is even worse. For then two are annoyed. Instead of saying or thinking of something external to oneself that he, she, or it is annoying, think to oneself: I am annoying myself, or I am allowing myself to become annnoyed.

Stoicism may not take us very far along the road to happiness, but where it takes us is worth visiting.

Alain on Keeping to the Present

Emile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier’s sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym ‘Alain,’ Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. Were he alive and active today he would most likely be a philosoblogger.

Speaking of the Stoics, Alain writes,

One of their arguments which I have always found good, and which has been useful to me more than once, is their concept of the past and the future. “We have only the present to bear,” they said. “Neither the past not the future can harm us, since the one no longer exists and the other does not yet exist.”

[. . .]

. . . keep your mind on the present; keep your mind on your life, which moves onward from minute to minute; one minute follows another; it is therefore possible to live as you are living, since you are alive. But the future terrifies me, you say. That is something you know nothing about. What happens is never what we expected; and as for your present suffering, you may be sure that it will diminish precisely because it is so intense. Everything changes, everything passes away. This maxim has often saddened us; the very least it can do is console us once in a while. (Alain on Happiness, Frederick Ungar 1973, trs. R. D. and J. E. Cottrell, pp. 144-145)

The literary merit of Alain’s writing is in evidence in the concluding sentence. My only quibble is with the typically Gallic exaggeration: what happens is never what we expected? Ah, the French love of the the universal quantifier!

Companion post: Can You Get Through the Next Hour?

Can You Get Through the Next Hour?

The present can always be borne – if sliced thinly enough – and it is only the present that must be borne.

This aphorism of mine is in the Stoic spirit. It illustrates the Stoic method of division. Any process or procedure or undertaking which seems overwhelming or unbearable when surveyed as a whole can be managed if one breaks it down into its parts. Since it is not all at once, it needn’t be managed and borne all at once. One does not run the marathon all at once, but stride by stride. The wise marathoner at the starting line does not remind himself that he must run the daunting distance of 26.2 miles, he just starts running. Near the end, when he is spent, he thinks only of the next step. One can always take another step, and only one step needs to be taken at each time.

Here is Pierre Hadot (The Inner Citadel, p. 133) quoting from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (XI, 3):

A seductive melody . . . you can despise it if you divide it into each of its sounds, and if you ask yourself if you are lesser than each one of them taken separately; if you are you would be filled with shame. The same thing will happen if you repeat this procedure in each figure . . . In general, then, and with the exception of virtue and its effects, remember to head as quickly as you can for the parts of a process, in order, by dividing them, to get to the point where you have contempt for them. Transpose this method, moreover, to life in its entirety.

Analysis destroys the seductiveness but also the fearfulness of processual wholes by decomposing them into temporal parts that can be easily negotiated. How will I get through this life of trial and tribulation? How will I bear up under sickness, old age, and dying? I will do it day by day, hour by hour. One can always get throught the next hour, minute, second. As Hadot puts it, “No object can make us lose our mastery over ourselves if we submit it to this method of division.” (133)

There is a comparison worth exploring between the soteriological use to which Stoics put analysis and the use to which Buddhists put it, as in Milinda’s Chariot. But that is a large topic for later.

Louis Lavelle on the Stoic Wisdom

I am a lover of the Stoics. Why waste time on New Age hucksters when one can read Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius? But while the Stoics can take us a good stretch down the road to wisdom, they cannot bring us to the end — a fact long appreciated by first-rate minds. In late antiquity, Aurelius Augustinus offered a critique of the Stoics in Book XIX, Chapter 4 of The City of God, a critique worthy of being called classical. We will have to examine that critique one of these days. But today I want to draw your attention to some passages from Chapter 10, Section 4 of Louis Lavelle’s The Dilemma of Narcissus (Allen & Unwin, 1973, tr. Gairdner):

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