The Vulcan way

Lots of interesting group discussions in Intro yesterday, pertaining to Aristotle and Stoics and Skeptics and African and indigenous American philosophies.

Some wondered how Aristotle could speak so earnestly of living a life of virtue and at the same time, without irony, defend the Athenian institution of slavery. Same question arises much closer to home with Mr. Jefferson. ("All men are created equal," right? And women.) Can we let either of them off the moral hook, on the grounds that they were simply products of their time and place? Can we excuse ourselves, when a later age calls us to account for who knows what?

Then there are the extreme skeptics Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus and their followers. (Can a skeptic really be a "follower," btw? Nowadays you can join the Skeptics Society. Should you?) How can the refusal to believe anything at all be therapeutic? Well, JMH says theirs was the philosophy of "no"... so maybe Sally Brown could explain it to us? She's not the most serene Stoic, but she does seem to enjoy not committing to any particular philosophical conclusion.

Interesting discussions surrounding indigenous American and African philosophy, too. Are we all related ("mitakuye oyasin"), and all a part of nature? Are we humans entitled to assert "dominion" over the rest of creation?  Is personhood an "achievement"? How can a living soul split and reincarnate?

Most saliently, people in both classes were scratching their heads trying to understand why the old Greek & Roman Stoics insisted that "emotions are irrational judgments that make us frustrated and unhappy," and why both they and the Buddha counselled: "Minimize your desires and you will minimize your suffering."

I understand their consternation. The Vulcan way seems awfully cold. Can you really "live long and prosper" if you "form only limited attachments"? As Jonathan Haidt has written,

When life is unpredictable and dangerous (as it was for Stoic philosophers, living under capricious Roman emperors), it might be foolish to seek happiness by controlling one’s external world. But now it is not… to cut off all attachments, "to shun the pleasures of sensuality and triumph in an effort to escape the pains of  loss and defeat” is an overreaction.

Not many of us are likely ever to have to deal with a crazed homicidal Emperor, as Seneca did. But what if you found yourself at "Windows on the World" in the North Tower of the World Trade Center  on the glorious morning of 9/11/01? Might Stoicism help you decide how to dispose of your last free moment on Earth? 

Or what if you got a bad medical prognosis? This is something to premeditate, as did the Stoics.

In any case, detachment from conditions beyond one's control is only half the story for Stoical Vulcans. Their philosophy of IDIC urges "infinite diversity from infinite combinations."

Isn't that illogical, Captain? Maybe. But it's the way of our world at its best, so far as I can tell.

a stoic in full

Tom Wolfe discovered Stoicism a while back, in Atlanta no less. In A Man in Full, a character

receives a copy of Epictetus’ Discourses, reads it, and becomes a Stoic convert.  Hensley dedicates himself to the Stoic life of total moral integrity, self-sufficiency and sturdy acceptance of those things in life he cannot change.  In prison, Hensley refuses to fake insanity to avoid a confrontation with a jailhouse bully because doing so would compromise his character.  The Stoic lesson: Always conduct yourself respectably regardless of your circumstances.  Your moral integrity never eludes scrutiny. "Rebirth of Stoicism"

disarming

Nancy Sherman is the featured "opinionator" in the latest installment of the new Times philosophy blog "The Stone," with a timely Memorial Day message on stoicism: 

After the loss of his daughter Tullia in childbirth, [Cicero] turned to Stoicism to assuage his grief. But ultimately he could not accept its terms: “It is not within our power to forget or gloss over circumstances which we believe to be evil…They tear at us, buffet us, goad us, scorch us, stifle us — and you tell us to forget about them?”

Put in the context of today’s wars, this could just as easily be a soldier’s narrative about the need to put on Stoic armor and the need to take it off.

That's a message for us all.

George

Maira Kalman's latest (and last in her wonderful "Pursuit of Happiness" series)... soon to appear between hard covers. Read it and tell me: is she an Epicurean, or a Stoic, or a Jeffersonian? I think so.

Where George-- whose hero was the old Roman Cincinnatus, and who also wanted no part of permanent fame or glory or power-- found his ataraxia:

James bio - 2

Time for our next installment from Richardson's James biography.

This week's reading includes young William's attempts to buck up his younger brother's spirits in a letter that evokes images he'd imbibed while traveling with scientist Louis Agassiz's South America expedition, in the 1860s (more on that, and more). I wrote about this once, while drawing a connection between John Dewey's naturalistic version of spirituality and James's.

In an uncharacteristic moment of self-revelation the stolid Yankee once apparently confided in his old student Max Eastman about a youthful "mystical experience" from his [John Dewey's] early stint in Oil City, Pennsylvania:

The essence of the experience was a feeling of oneness with the universe, a conviction that worries about existence and one's place in it are foolish and futile. "It was not a very dramatic mystic experience," Eastman continued. There was no vision, not even a definable emotion—just a supremely blissful feeling that his worries were over. Eastman quoted Dewey, ". . . to me faith means not worrying. . . . I claim I've got religion and that I got it that night in Oil City."

This melds very well with a homiletic, therapeutic, stoic, yet somehow joyous and de novo expression of James's unique view, dating from his prephilosophic youth but anticipating his most mature thought:

"Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the cosmos."

I find it compelling, and not at all coincidental or incongruous, that the two great pragmatic meliorists of classical American Philosophy each achieved in their twenties the same quasi-stoic insight that, as we have noted, carried the world's oldest person happily through her many days. [The world's oldest person had just died when I wrote that; her position was quickly filled, of course. But it's not a job with a lot of long-term security.] The power of imaginative self-transcendence to conquer egoistic distemper, especially when coupled with the wide-open perspective of life as a self-replicating, self-correcting chain, is unrivaled. It has been conclusively "verified." The spirit of acceptance and the spirit of reform belong together. The mature James, for one, is full of admiration for the spirit of acceptance in whatever blissful forms it may assume in the actual lives of men and women. And he is full of expectancy and hope.

He wasn't so sunny while aboard ship during the Brazilian expedition: he became very depressed and homesick, and probably would at that time have been incapable of cheering himself with the letter he sent to Bob.

But the 23-year old James was already a kind of incipient Stoic, in 1865. He was much more of one when he got his land legs back under him. One of the more engaging graduate seminars I've participated in was "Pragmatism and Stoicism," jointly offered by John Lachs and John Stuhr at Vanderbilt.

It's hard for some people to get that link (Pragmatists and Stoics, not Lachs and Stuhr). Some think that Pragmatists are all about "go-go-go"-ing, trying to change the world and ameliorate its wounds, never noticing cliffs and sharp edges. Not so. A wise Pragmatist knows there's a time to put on the Stoic's hat and accept external conditions as they stand, while turning inward and conjuring some skimming gulls.

And a wise Jamesian is prepared to act on the belief that such an inward turn is freely available to us all.

But at 25, we learn in this week's reading of Robert Richardson, James has now added another vocation to his "reject" list-- "Medicine is busted," he told a friend-- and is one step closer to a breakdown and posssible suicide that would have been anything but stoically reasonable.

Here, in case you ever need cheering-up. A little YouTube might have done young WJ some good.