This is a copy of a Feb. 28, 2022 message from Grant Sterling to the International Stoic Forum.
All:
This List has seen discussions of "harshness" in Epictetus, and has seen discussions of the virtues of rejecting (yes, Nigel) Epictetus' ideas regarding emotions in favor of a neo-Aristotelian model whereby emotions have their origins outside of assent to impressions that externals are good or bad, and we should aim to keep them in bounds rather than exterminate them (harshness, again). It has also seen Nigel wonder why so many on the List are obsessed with discussing Epictetus, rather than other Stoics.
This is my answer. From my conversations with other people, I know that I am by no means alone. I suspect, but do not know, that the majority of people who are now attracted to Stoicism have a similar story. But I don't speak for them, only myself.
My first contact with the Stoics came through Marcus Aurelius, but that didn't spark my real attraction. My love for Stoicism came from reading the Handbook.
Life is filled with ups and downs. Victory, success, friendship...and defeat, failure, unrequited love, death, etc. And our actions--sometimes we get things right, do what we ought to do, even enjoy doing the right thing...and sometimes we know what we ought to do and we spit on that knowledge. I remember one time in grade school when I cheated on an exam. Not because I desperately needed a passing grade--I already had an A on the exam, I cheated to get an A+. Not because I didn't know that it was wrong to cheat. No, I was just greedy--I wanted the feeling of pride from telling other people that I had scored a perfect 100%.
And this is the ordinary picture of life. Happiness is a matter of good luck. I loved the Minnesota Vikings as a kid. A friend loved the Dallas Cowboys. The Vikings have never won a championship--every single season of my life my favorite team has ended the year in failure. My friend has celebrated not one but _five_ championships. But I've been healthy--another friend has suffered from severe mental illness, and another was murdered (by mistake) at a young age. So happiness comes and goes, depending on matters largely out of one's control.
Of course, I was told right from the start that I should control my responses to these things. It was correct to feel grief at funerals, but after all one should never be _too_ consumed in grief. Being upset that one's football team has lost should be brief and mild. One should be angry when one has been insulted, but not punch the guy in the face. One should be afraid of nuclear war, and Especially at the actions of the other political party, but not afraid enough to stop enjoying a good cheeseburger. (I have always loved cheeseburgers.) (I was rarely cautioned about being too happy at good fortune, but it was understood that that was possible, too.) Of course, the techniques for doing this were never fully effective. Taking a few deep breaths did take some of the edge off anger, and reminding oneself that the events one feared may never come to pass sometimes reduced the anxiety, but I never found anything that worked very well for frustration or for sadness.
Right from the first sentence, Epictetus was the first person I had ever encountered who challenged this entire structure. The distinction is sharp, "harsh"--things not in our control are enslaved, things in our control are free. And almost everything is not in our control, including our own bodies--but that's ok, because those things are not who we really are. We are enslaved to those externals things only because we _enslave ourselves_. It is never the events that happen that upset us--the Vikings losing, a friend dying--it is our own judgements about those events, and those judgements are in our control. Change our judgements and we will be free of all grief, all sadness, all fear, all psychological pain. _Free_. Not "you'll still feel grief, but not as much". Not "you'll be sad, but you won't let your pain get too strong". Not "you'll be tempted to steal, lie, commit adultery, etc., but you won't act on those temptations as often as you do now." No, Epictetus says "you'll be free". The harshness is part of the beauty--we will never achieve eudaimonia by holding on to the old view and making some little modifications--that will only make the chains more comfortable, and tempt you even more strongly to stay enslaved.
All of this happens within the first 5 sections. No mention of being forced to accept pantheism (or any kind of theism at all), or fiery pneuma, or Chrysippus' determinism (which most certainly was hard core determinism) or any other metaphysical notions beyond the dichotomy of internals and externals, and real good and bad all on one side of the chasm. Of course, the theory does need _some_ more stuff. Although E. doesn't use the language of "preferred indifferents", the theory needs something like that, because otherwise how could any choices at all ever be coherent? Later on we get role-duties, and we get E's (apparent) monotheism. But, really, we get that beautiful worldview in the first 5 sections, and after that just elaboration.
Once I saw this, I saw that I could never be satisfied with any lesser worldview. I loved Aristotle, but his moderate virtues paled by comparison. And then...the more I thought about things, the more I explored my life and my choices and my emotions, the more it because clear to me that this was _right_. Other people weren't in the least distressed when the Vikings lost. Billions of people didn't notice my grandfather's death at all, much less feel grief about it. And I...well, I won't risk offending anyone who happens to read my posts, but I admit that there were relatives of mine who died for whom I felt absolutely zero grief, because I had no thought that their death affected me. And in all my wrongdoings I saw that I knew, deep down, that I should not have done those things but I had allowed myself to become attached to some outcome that I hoped for from the action, and chose to follow the attachment rather than my knowledge of right and wrong. So it was possible, indeed it was _within my grasp_ to lead a life with _no_ psychological pain and _no_ wrongdoing. What a glorious vision!
So I read more Stoicism, and I built more into my own Stoic worldview, but all of it has always revolved around the promises of those first 5 sections of the Handbook. And none of my experiences since then has convinced me that this view was false. Epictetus changed my life, and changed it for the better.
Now since then many people have told me that Epictetus' Stoicism stands alongside another, older Stoicism, that taught different things. (Pantheism and what-not.) True enough--and my attitude towards that other Stoicism is the same as my attitude towards Aristotle's doctrine of the heavenly spheres-- historically interesting, but neither a view that attracts me nor one that I find even remotely plausible, and certainly not one that I would need to accept as true in order to accept the view in the Handbook. Some have told me that E. secretly taught these other things, and that Arrian just didn't mention them, or that what E. taught was a simplified distortion of his real view that he didn't reveal. I've even seen people claim that perhaps these views aren't E's at all, but Arrian himself made them up. I see no reason to think any of those things were true. But suppose they were--well, too bad for E., then. I should have to go forward thinking that E. accidentally expressed the true and beautiful view, or that A. was inspired by E's false view into discovering the true one and bringing it forth in E's name.
In other words, it is the view in the Enchiridion (esp. sections 1-5) that I follow. I don't care, deep down, whether you call that view "Stoicism" or not. (I think it's silly not to, since that's the way the word has been used for centuries. But it's just a word--I'm not loyal to the word "Stoicism", I'm loyal to that view.) I think Epictetus believed it, but it's not really crucial to me whether or not he did. If we discover his secret diaries and he repudiates the view, then I will follow the view and discard Epictetus. I certainly don't care how well the view squares with the ideas of Zeno or Chrysippus, or especially how well is squares with the latest interpretation of the tiny fragments we have from Z or C. I care about that view.
I have also been told that this view, whether or not it was E's, is false. That science proves it false, or that some philosophical argument demolishes it. Yet...no philosophical argument is ever actually brought forward to prove it false. And people who claim that science has proven it false either can't actually cite which studies "prove" this, or they cite studies that most patently fail to prove anything of the sort. (For example, there are studies that show that sociopaths don't feel emotions when they do some despicable things (or, at any rate, don't feel anything like the normal emotions). Ergo, the psychologists conclude, if you don't feel normal emotions then you'll do despicable things. But that's silly--just as well argue that a broken engine doesn't run and doesn't emit a loud howling sound, so emitting a loud howling sound is necessary in order for an engine to run. No study has ever investigated people who don't have normal emotions _because they have trained themselves to recognize that externals are neither good nor evil, but are still preferred or dispreferred_. No studies have ever shown that recognition of moral values cannot produce action.)
But suppose that somehow, someday, someone does prove that the theory is false...that grief and fear and sadness and so on come to us independently of our beliefs or perceptions of value. That our lives will therefore contain such pains, and they are unavoidable, and the level of pain is therefore a matter of luck. That we will always spend some portion of our time doing immoral things, because those belief-independent feelings will be constantly tempting us to go astray. That a life of freedom and joy and virtue is impossible, except only in a relative sense. (I have freedom because someone else is more enslaved than I am.) Then I will not say "well, the Stoics followed truth, so this must be Stoicism". No, I will say "sadly, Stoicism is dead. We are doomed. Burn your Ethics books, because the truth about ethics turns out to be something that the average idiot on the street knew all along when they told you that grief was unavoidable, and don't worry about stealing a little bit because everyone does it, etc."
"Though I never thought that we could lose,
There's no regret."
-ABBA, "Fernando"
Regards,
GCS
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