It is often stated that the less people know, the more they opine on the matters of which they know little. Consider that the Socratic thesis we have spoken so much about: that people are generally ignorant when they make assertions concerning matters of which they believe they are intellectually equipped to speak when in fact they are not. We all know people like this as surely as we know ourselves. Because whether you know it or not, you are likely guilty of this very offense.
To my everlasting shame, I am also guilty of indulging in the act. It is almost irresistible and to this I wonder why. What compels us to speak so freely about matters of which we know little? On the one hand, I believe it to be a matter of showmanship. Despite a century of degradation, intellectualism still instills envy and enmity in the hearts of those who lack it. On the other hand however, I find that we are most often compelled to argue against matters which threaten to encroach on cherished beliefs and values. When we find ourselves in the realm of belligerent ideologies and rival philosophies, we are entering the twilight zone, a free-for-all where anything and everything goes, where popular canards and simplified recapitulations of complex arguments become the means by which partisans wage war. Hence the state of political discourse at the present moment, where oftentimes incoherent screaming seems to serve its interlocutors just as well as reasoned discourse. Who wants to read a book in the age of digitized revolution?
Once again, I am guilty of just this very offense. Though I will stake out my nonexistent credibility to reassure the enterprising reader that I will, for the most part, concede my deficiency in matters of which I know little. My ire usually arises as a result of an acutely felt intuition that the characteristics of a particular philosophy's supporters reflect the substantive content (and therefore value) of that philosophy. This is somewhat off the mark, but I believe it approaches something closer to truth when we consider one particularly popular philosophy: stoicism.
If any philosophy has ever suffered immense bastardization, popularization, and intellectual pauperization, it is stoicism. Willingly or not, the content of stoicism has served, consciously and unconsciously, as the basis from which a whole new therapeutic vernacular has been cultivated by a cottage-industry of inward-directed self-help bestsellers. Most of them skyrocket to the top of the New York Times' bestseller list and stay there for weeks or months. What do all these buzzwords mean? It's not terribly difficult. I've said it before. We live in a strange time, where multiplying identities are fueling the balkanization of society into disparate groups, where everything from depression to autism to self-harm are held up like merit badges. It is a brand new culture of individuality. Or to echo the late Christopher Lasch: an ethos of narcissism. The pharmaceutical industry, ever ready to make profit, has few qualms in aiding children and adult-children (it is sometimes hard to tell the difference) alike in their quest to portray themselves as the world's greatest victim by pumping them full of Zoloft. An army of degree-wielding "professionals" on the other hand are plenty pleased to play at perennial extortion by treating symptoms and not causes by pushing treatments like cognitive-behavioral therapy. Instead of concerning themselves with nosology and ultimate causation, they are content to sit behind the desk and provide the validation their victims crave.
A new language has inevitably arisen to cope with the new demands of the day. "Wellness", "self-care", "mindfulness", "personal growth", "self-improvement", "self- actualization". The new mindset preaches (funnily enough) a disinterested attitude towards aspects of the world that seem to infringe of the wellness of the individual. It suggests that withdrawal, nonchalance, and imperturbability are the goals to strive for. People on both sides of the political aisle use this language to describe their real or ideal responses to everyday inconveniences. "I cut off toxic people". "I needed a mental health day". Some of these are old words in new guises. Some of these phrases clash with the demands of permanent victimhood. All use it to describe their ideal state of neo-apatheia, the stoic equivalent to the epicurean ataraxia (of which more is to follow).
The ideal of stoicism is attractive to psychological man because it seems to offer a vindication of everything they desire, perhaps summed up best by the enduring popularity of the crassly titled "book" The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck. The dilemma that arises from self-help of this kind isn't hard to see: never mind the fact that those who write these things disguise pandering trite and pithy statements as profound and life-altering ethical guidance, what people want is to simply not give a fuck about the things that harangue them on a daily basis, but they never seem to succeed in reaching that euphoric state of apathy. They want to craft an image of themselves as disinterested, unbothered and eminently rational. There is an obvious affinity here to a philosophy that preaches a certain kind of ethical and ontological individualism, where the only thing within our control is rational judgment, and everything outside of this judgment is relegated to matters outside of our control. It is quite like that other imported fashion: Buddhism.
Therein lies the issue. Stoicism is not dangerous because its followers are confused and uncouth philistines merely grafting onto its philosophy like a fad. It is dangerous because there is a genuine affinity between the individualism of the stoa and the individualism of therapeutic society. Furthermore, stoicism at its heart is not merely a peculiar application of virtue ethics whose primary difference from other ethical systems stems from mere matters of emphases, but because stoicism at heart is actually self-mastery supplemented by virtue ethics. Self-mastery is morally neutral and not of necessity virtuous. Consider this quote from Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the eponymous protagonist considers his relentless pursuit of sensual experience:
"What has the actual passage of time got to do with it? It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."
Quite apart from the stoic conception of self-mastery + virtue ethics, what we have here is self-mastery put in service of libertinism. It is the conquest of the self for its own gratification, through indulgence in externalities. So quite apart from the "moral freedom" preached by the likes of Epictetus, we find that self-mastery, the "rational check" on our impulses, can actually be used to cultivate and indulge said impulses. Stoicism contains the seeds of its own destruction.
All well and good, psychological man might say, but there is clearly a choice to be had here. The rational man who exercises mastery of his judgment can still choose virtue over vice. Just because there is no inseparable linkage between control and virtue does not mean that the two cannot be cobbled together into a useful fusion. That may be so, but with the umbilical cord between the two severed, the tensions that had been papered over burst out into full view, for the Stoics themselves conceived of the relationship between the two as inextricable and equivalent. Consider Epictetus's assertion: "Freedom is not obtained through the satisfaction of desires, but through the suppression of desires". Unfortunately for him, the only way forward appears to be through the conquest of the self. But the suppression by itself is not virtuous, as we have seen. Virtue must be tacked on after the fact. It is a junior partner in this relationship, for the suppression of desire, the moral purity of the stoic, can come only after we have purged ourselves of positive interest in things outside our control (judgment). But virtue demands positive interest in the world outside of ourselves, in our community, in our friends and neighbors and relatives. And to the credit of the stoics, they acknowledged these things and sincerely believed the two were compatible. Unfortunately, their mistake reveals discord at best and incompatibility at worst. For a separation of self from world, a retreat into the "inner citadel", cannot possibly accord with the demands and obligations that come from our virtuous investments in the world outside of ourselves. Seneca says we ought to kill ourselves in the face of unbearable indignity and shame. He similarly advises that one ought not to grieve the sudden death of loved ones, for we should have already reconciled ourselves to the expectation of death. One can only wonder what becomes of customs that dictated social relations in every society from Rome to the present day. One wonders what becomes of justice, injustice, honor, dishonor, love, grief, happiness, sadness and the physical expressions and ritual manifestations of them all. I loathe to find myself in concord with anything Nietzsche said, for I find his fanatical fanbase very similar to those of the stoics, but I can only concede the aptness of his statement that such a life is not very much in accord with the diktat of Nature. It is rather hostile to an aesthetics of living.
And so my taste for Hellenic ethics soured somewhat upon encountering this strange alliance between therapeutic man and ancient stoicism. Being the generalist that I am, this naturally made me skeptical of most post-peripatetic ethical systems. But my recent encounter with Lucretius has forced me to rethink what I impulsively assumed. What I found in his famous poem de rerum natura was an altogether more subtle appreciation for the art of living. It was, in fact, a definitive statement of the life that I believe most people would like to lead, if only they would mount an intifada against the shackles they have unthinkingly placed upon themselves.
Epicureanism is curious in that is one of the few philosophies whose entire rationale for existence is the fixation on and widespread fear of death. Epicurus inaugurated a line of thinking that still resonates today when he argued against the fear of death via this rather simple syllogism:
P1: When I am, death is not
P2: When I am not, death is
C: Fear of death is unwarranted
This is compelling enough by itself. I have encountered a surprising number of people who don't fear death and, when pressed to explain their views, echo some variation of this argument. I believe the opposite conclusion to be warranted by the premises, but that's neither here nor there. Wittgenstein would later pick up on this, but rather than use it in service of ethics, he was focused instead on making a transcendental argument concerning the nature of death. Fascinating stuff, but somewhat beyond the scope of this post. For our present purposes, what matters is that epicureanism is so concerned with death to the point where I do not think it hyperbole to assert that its life-ethos revolves around it. For Epicurus and Lucretius were primarily concerned with the abundance of religiosity in their day. They found organized belief ridiculous, they were atomists, materialists (in a rather loose sense), maybe not atheists but at the very least unconvinced that the Gods would concern themselves with human affairs. They saw the fear of death as the primary motivating factor in bringing people around to the idea that Zeus would smite you with a lightning bolt if he was displeased with your votive offerings.
Perhaps they were right about this. They were on the right track in their positing of atoms as ultimate causes, after all. Their refusal to embrace theology sent them towards natural philosophy and metaphysics instead, and opened the door to (as far as I can tell) the first formulation of underdetermination as a principle of physical theorizing, as Lucretius recounts:
To settle upon what's certain in this world,
That's hard. But what might possibly apply
In various worlds arranged in various ways,
That I can show, and set forth many causes
Of stellar motion through the universe.
One of those anyway must be what stirs
The stars to move; but to find which it is
Is not for our slow, step-by-step advance.
There is some humility in there. But the humility sometimes curdles into revelry:
One thing restores another; it must be.
And no one's flung to the pit or the pains of Hell.
We need those atoms for our progeny.
Who, though they live life full, shall follow us.
Before you came, men died - and they will die.
One thing gives rise to another, incessantly;
Life's given to no one outright; all must borrow.
Reflect how the span of the endless past
Before our births mean nothing at all to us.
Here Nature has provided us a mirror
Of the time to come when we at last have died.
Is there horror in the prospect? Any sorrow?
Isn't it freer from care than the sweetest sleep?
We frighten ourselves with stories of heaven and hell. What really ails us are our anxieties and fears about what-is-not, we cling (cravenly) to life when we should instead accept it as a natural progression in the endless All, the void in which atoms clash and clang and weave together to form the universe. Despite his hostility to Heraclitean ontology, the epicurean world is a world of ceaseless change, of reformation and destruction, life and death, it is a unity of opposites. Epicureanism tells us that we are born to die. We must embrace death to truly live.
Not content with his exhortations, Lucretius describes the fear of death as a consequence of man's ascent from a state of savagery to civilization, for death was of no moment to man before he discovered community:
Nor did those mortals much more often then
Lament their leaving the sweet light of life.
More often it happened then that someone snatched
By the fangs of a beast gave him living feed to gobble,
Filled hills and forests with his cry, alive
But watching his vitals interred in a living tomb.
And those who could flee to safety with half-gnawed bodies
Later would press their festering sores, their palms
In a palsy, and call for Death with dreadful cries,
Til the grip of lockjaw took their lives away,
Helpless, not knowing how to treat a wound.
From this it is not a long pathway to inventing the Gods, and from there we are not very far from ascribing to them vindictiveness and a willingness to "aim at us" the "limitless power" that "wheels the planets and stars".
And what does it mean to truly live? We find a description of tranquility in the latter half of the poem:
And echoing the liquid warble of birds
Came long before men gathered together to sing
Fine polished carols to delight the ear.
And the winds whistling in the hollow of reeds
Taught them to play the rustic hemlock pipe.
Then little by little they learned the sweet complaints
That the pipe pours forth at the fingering-pulse of the players,
Heard in the trackless forests, the shepherds' dells,
Places of sunlit solitude and peace.
After a hearty meal these songs caressed
And pleased them all - for then things touch the heart.
Often they lay at ease in the soft grass,
In the shade of a tall tree by the riverside,
Their bodies refreshed and gladdened, at no great cost,
Especially when the weather smiled, and the season
Stippled the meadow with fresh and lusty flowers.
Then they had games, and talking, and sweet laughter,
For then the rustic Muse was in her prime;
Then prompted by merry foolery they would garland
Their heads and shoulders with a crown of flowers,
And move their limbs in a rough rhythm and dance,
Pounding their mother Earth with their rough feet.
Then they would smile at themselves and merrily laugh -
It was all new to them then, and wonderful!
Whatever my deep disagreements with him about what our proper response to death ought to be, it is hard not to see in this the kind of peace and tranquility that we all aspire to achieve. Resting in the shade by the riverside, free of worry and care, playing music and dancing in languorous delight with friends. The question of how to get there aside, this is what it ought to be like, this is the end to strive for. That all being said, it seems clear to me that the epicurean has far less to concern himself with when it comes to reconciling community and the individual than the stoic does. The epicurean admits a certain amount of indulgence, a certain appreciation for both pleasures and pains. Keeping limits in mind (and even here we find a curious resemblance to the notion that death is a transcendental limit), the self is allowed to pursue the maximization of pleasant sensation however he may see fit, so long as he keeps the ends of ataraxia as described above in clear sight.
Later commentators have taken this to constitute a ringing endorsement of unrestrained hedonism, without taking care to consider that Epicurus and Lucretius both find a lack of equilibrium in the pursuit of sensation to be the primary cause of man's downfall, for the ever-increasing desire for more, the relentless drive for pleasure, profit and power, often leads men towards that same end from which they were striving to protect themselves against in the first place: death. As Epicurus intones: "When it comes to death, we are like a city without walls". But I would be remiss not to acknowledge that the epicurean leaves himself open to such charges so long as he stresses the primacy of pleasant sensation.
So we see in epicureanism what both the stoic and the libertine lack: an appreciation for limits, an acknowledgement that self-mastery might just require a leveling of all that really matters, both within and without, for it to truly succeed. And if it does leave open a crack in the door for a bit of excess, well, sometimes a little radicalism is needed in order to secure tranquility. The ends are quite alright. It is the means for which we still have occasion to debate.
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