The Ancient Art of Living II

THE STOIC LIFE (5)

I can’t think of Stoicism apart from my experience in the military police and the “gravitas” it lent my whole way of being and understanding in the world. I learned to live under another’s, and to give commands: obedience, focus, self-discipline, responsibility to station. I learned men suffered and were cruel. I learned men had to be tamed with force as well as words. If Epicureanism worked off the recognition of personal death and repudiation of religious hopes and fears in the interest of enjoying the moment, Stoicism seemed all about higher values--ideals of perseverance and courage, duty and honor, citizenship and service to country, the realization that life itself was a “just war” with internal and external enemies and action in uncertain conditions. If Epicureanism evoked images of gardens, dance, philosophy, happiness, Stoicism evoked images of armor, wrestling, logic, justice. These were, of course, first impressions. I seldom attributed “humanitas” or joy to the Stoics, and this was a mistake.

The Stoic “turn to the self” still seems to me to have a Roman military coloration, as the Epicurean a Hellenistic, pacific one. The Epicurean enjoys the world and values every pleasure. But the Stoic recognizes what Martha Nussbaum calls the “fragility of goodness.” The Stoic embraces the B+, the second best, as about the best we can ask for in reality, if not in thought. Give him law, and he will accept it as justice; give him science, he will make technology; give him family, he will make of it love. He knows how fast and far things can go south.

The Stoic is tough, and doesn’t want your sympathy. I once played golf with such a man, who’d lost in foot in battle. He had devised a steel shoe to let him pivot in his swing, but it kept giving way as he played, adjusting and struggling, all 18 holes without complaint. My German uncles, Karl and Erwin, survivors on the Russian front, surrenders in the west, were Stoics, too, as was my aunt Emily, whose husband died and left her with a small business and two young boys in a devastated country. They endured and in their own way prevailed.

It is a kind of aristocratic philosophy, of and for the responsible few, not the complaining many. I think that is part of why it is theistic, if not monotheistic, e.g. the "Hymn to Zeus," whereas the Epicurean philosophy, more democratic, has no room for the transcendent (some will dispute this, and point to purely loving or contemplating gods). But Stoicism is not ‘humble’ in the Christian way, all equal as fallen souls before the Almighty Father, or in the manner of Montaigne. The Stoic belongs to that ancient world in which the “great-souled man” is proud of his station and cares about his honor, a hierarchic world in which self-reliant lords are most fit to know and serve the King Divine. The Stoic Sage who leaves his own familial, human city to become a citizen in the Cosmic City of free and equal rational persons and friends—that Stoic lives in S1, the Stoicism of the mind, which is quite different from S2, Stoicism in actual life.

The Stoic life in the strict sense, as Hadot describes it, is hard work: (i) the constant massaging of emotions and desires, not least by meditation on nature and its lessons on the accidental smallness of our lives, (ii) of actions and relations to others by the sovereign measures of virtue and duty, (iii) of judgments and reasons by logic and ethics, to get the gold and sift out the “indifferent.” The rule of reason in the soul, the aspiration to be a sage. Might it finally be too great for us? And if so, are we strained toward cruelty toward ourselves or others, dividing all by good and evil, waging the war righteous by choice, rather than necessity? I began to wonder if the inner citadel could remain self-contained, or had to unleash its admonitions against a world that seemed too weak or else too cunning, that needed a good lesson. (Though some of the ancient Stoics, e.g. Aurelius, seem to have managed this temptation well.)

I now play the game more freely, less intent upon the form. I am unwilling to sacrifice myself for duty or God or country, or even, as I infer Nietzsche did, for truth. I seek my own human way, between the Stoic ideal and the Epicurean garden, a path that does not leave the world below, or behind. I don't want to be a mere tourist, but I also no longer want to play the cop. How then to shape my own, less strident rule of reason in my soul? What practices shall I retain, and which discard? What will be my integrity, if I would choose both virtue and happiness, and not deny that they are not the same?