Stoicism as a personal choice to handle fear and pain :geordi-yes:
Pop stoicism as a le trendy :reddit-logo: way to dismiss le emotions as bad and wrong :geordi-no:
Even if she’s shit, Hannah Arendt had a pithy remark along the lines of “Just as epicureanism rests on the illusion that one is happy while roasted alive in the Phaleric Bull, so Stoicism rests on the illusion that one is free when enslaved. Both attest to the power of the imagination” it’s in the human condition, can’t grab the book rn to get the exact version.
Not to say a personal stoicism, endurance, or Patience isn’t valuable, but the stoic position can quickly enable evil as a political project
Crass misunderstanding of it can, sure, but Stoicism isn’t quietism or whatever else people on the internet characterize it as.
In every affair consider what precedes and follows, and then undertake it. Otherwise you will begin with spirit; but not having thought of the consequences, when some of them appear you will shamefully desist. “I would conquer at the Olympic games.” But consider what precedes and follows, and then, if it is for your advantage, engage in the affair. You must conform to rules, submit to a diet, refrain from dainties; exercise your body, whether you choose it or not, at a stated hour, in heat and cold; you must drink no cold water, nor sometimes even wine. In a word, you must give yourself up to your master, as to a physician. Then, in the combat, you may be thrown into a ditch, dislocate your arm, turn your ankle, swallow dust, be whipped, and, after all, lose the victory. When you have evaluated all this, if your inclination still holds, then go to war. Otherwise, take notice, you will behave like children who sometimes play like wrestlers, sometimes gladiators, sometimes blow a trumpet, and sometimes act a tragedy when they have seen and admired these shows. Thus you too will be at one time a wrestler, at another a gladiator, now a philosopher, then an orator; but with your whole soul, nothing at all. Like an ape, you mimic all you see, and one thing after another is sure to please you, but is out of favor as soon as it becomes familiar. For you have never entered upon anything considerately, nor after having viewed the whole matter on all sides, or made any scrutiny into it, but rashly, and with a cold inclination. Thus some, when they have seen a philosopher and heard a man speaking like Euphrates (though, indeed, who can speak like him?), have a mind to be philosophers too. Consider first, man, what the matter is, and what your own nature is able to bear. If you would be a wrestler, consider your shoulders, your back, your thighs; for different persons are made for different things. Do you think that you can act as you do, and be a philosopher? That you can eat and drink, and be angry and discontented as you are now? You must watch, you must labor, you must get the better of certain appetites, must quit your acquaintance, be despised by your servant, be laughed at by those you meet; come off worse than others in everything, in magistracies, in honors, in courts of judicature. When you have considered all these things round, approach, if you please; if, by parting with them, you have a mind to purchase equanimity, freedom, and tranquillity. If not, don’t come here; don’t, like children, be one while a philosopher, then a publican, then an orator, and then one of Caesar’s officers. These things are not consistent. You must be one man, either good or bad. You must cultivate either your own ruling faculty or externals, and apply yourself either to things within or without you; that is, be either a philosopher, or one of the vulgar.
– Epictetus, Enchiridion
Yeah, there’s ultimately some asceticism, but primarily what he’s advocating for is forbearance and decisiveness. You want to take on something you are unlikely to succeed at? Go ahead, but do so after considering what makes it unlikely, so that you will either be prepared ahead of time or else avoid getting into something you now know you wouldn’t want or be able to finish.
People look at stoics saying “Don’t pick stupid fights” and assume they mean “all fighting is stupid”, just as they see them say “Failure in matters of externality is always possible, and you should approach your attempts understanding the significance of that possibility” and conclude “I guess they don’t want us to interact with the world at all”.
I’m just reminded of Augustine’s critique in city of god. This might be a case of “actually existing stoicism” versus the theory though, since his prime example is cato.
But such is the stupid pride of these men who fancy that the supreme good can be found in this life, and that they can become happy by their own resources, that their wise man, or at least the man whom they fancifully depict as such, is always happy, even though he become blind, deaf, dumb, mutilated, racked with pains, or suffer any conceivable calamity such as may compel him to make away with himself; and they are not ashamed to call the life that is beset with these evils happy. O happy life, which seeks the aid of death to end it! If it is happy, let the wise man remain in it; but if these ills drive him out of it, in what sense is it happy? Or how can they say that these are not evils which conquer the virtue of fortitude, and force it not only to yield, but so to rave that it in one breath calls life happy and recommends it to be given up? For who is so blind as not to see that if it were happy it would not be fled from? And if they say we should flee from it on account of the infirmities that beset it, why then do they not lower their pride and acknowledge that it is miserable? Was it, I would ask, fortitude or weakness which prompted Cato to kill himself? for he would not have done so had he not been too weak to endure Cæsar’s victory. Where, then, is his fortitude? It has yielded, it has succumbed, it has been so thoroughly overcome as to abandon, forsake, flee this happy life. Or was it no longer happy? Then it was miserable. How, then, were these not evils which made life miserable, and a thing to be escaped from?
I mean say what you will the boy is right. We should never accept political suicide, but instead rage and fight to our last to change the world. I think the fact that there is this history of the noble stoic suicide is the big question mark. Shouldn’t you want to resist evil and change the world?
Granted Christianity had the long Pauline tradition of submitting to authority, so they don’t get off Scott free, but real politics hours, if the regime kills you and you become a martyr that’s probably more politically powerful than suicide.
Btw this isn’t to say existential suicide isn’t justified. But as political… it always feels performative and ineffectual.
Stoicism is only relevant if you allow yourself to be moved by it. To discipline your own curiosity is superior and to therefore eschew old Roman philosophers results in a virtuous life.
OGs - original greeks
this one got a smile out of me
wait does she actually have a brother who was supposed to show up in one of the U.N.C.L.E. KJB eps or is it solely a bit?