a stoic attitude
As many of you know, the Stoics were a group of Greek and Roman philosophers during the Hellenistic Roman period, emerging towards the end of the third century BCE. Famous members included Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Zeno of Citrium (its founder) or Seneca. They were rationalists who believed in reason or logos, hence the mental discipline of logic. The Stoics encouraged focusing on what’s within our control (our judgments and actions) while cultivating “the middle road”, advocating virtues like wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance, as well as promoting the inner resilience allowing us to find peace amidst life’s challenges.
Some of these ideas have been emphasized here before without tracing them back to their historic origin. To accept what one cannot change but rather focus one’s energy on making those things better that we have some control over is a lesson in endurance and grit. Most of us are at least occasionally tempted to “rage against the machine.” Just that it doesn’t change much, as became patently clear during the pandemic, when all kinds of people found reasons to go against the grain, often creating more of the isolation they lamented. Splitting the world into “us” and “them” remains a facile exercise in avoiding responsibility for the collective as a whole, of which we are all a part, like it or not.
We need to stand together and remember our core values. They haven’t changed. We’re still concerned with peace, with supporting our beautiful blue planet and its ecology, as with finding love in our hearts when dealing with others. We don’t need to be “healed” to make things better in our own little corner of the world. Like Mr. Natural, the R. Crumb character, famously said, “Life is hell, but we live well.”
I don’t mean that as a glib encouragement to turn one’s back on what’s collectively ailing us but rather as a reminder of all that we have to be grateful for. When it comes to our interests, we are all Stoics at least some of the time. They believed that the world makes sense. Their logic invites us to examine our reason(s) at all time. Are we acting rationally or on impulse? Are our motives purely personal or aimed towards a more universal good? What do we want to achieve? How much time do we have to do so?
The logic of the Stoics helps us get a clear view of reality, reason effectively about practical affairs, stand our ground amid confusion, differentiate the certain from the probable, or get an overview of what befalls us.
I wish you a happy and healthy new year!
Yours,
Susanne Seiler
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