Stoic Wisdom for the Day Collection 6

STOIC WISDOM FOR THE DAY: 31 March, 2016
"Suppose. . . that each one of our bodily members should conceive this idea and imagine that it could be strong and well if it should draw off to itself the health and strength of its neighboring member, the whole body would necessarily be enfeebled and die; so, if each one of us should seize upon the property of his neighbors and take from each whatever he could appropriate to his own use, the bonds of human society must inevitably be annihilated."

--Cicero ("On Duty")

The bonds of justice and charity between the members of humanity are as natural and essential as the harmony between the members of the physical body. Remove either, and only disease and death will follow. Greed, malice, or conflict are blights on human nature. And I find that very comforting, because it helps me to try to find peace in all things.
 
Image: Goya "Duel with Clubs" (c. 1823)




















STOIC WISDOM FOR THE DAY: 1 April, 2016
When confronted with someone who had given up on life: "Why do you stand there? What are you looking for? Do you expect the God himself to come and speak to you? Cut out the dead part of your soul, and you will recognize the God."

--Musonius Rufus (as quoted by Aelius Aristides)

Or as my great-grandmother always said to me: "God helps those who help themselves." It annoyed me then, but I get it now.

Image: 天道酬勤 "Heaven rewards the diligent"

STOIC WISDOM FOR THE DAY: 2 April, 2016
"Now what is this famous power of yours, which you so much seek after? Will you not consider, earthbound animals that you are, whom you think you actually command? If you saw one mouse among many, claiming to have rightful power over the rest, how you would laugh!"

--Boethius (The Consolation of Philosophy)

I find it helpful to just have a good chuckle when I see people puffing themselves up with their own self-importance. It humbles us to laugh at ourselves! 

STOIC WISDOM FOR THE DAY: 3 April, 2016
"Wellbeing is attained by little and little, and nevertheless is no little thing itself."
--Zeno of Citium

Often falsely attributed to Tolkien, the folk saying "little by little one travels far" also comes to mind. I will be grateful for a small victory today.

Image: Miranda Mott, "Die Winterreise"

STOIC WISDOM FOR THE DAY: 4 April, 2016
"He has his wish, whose wish can be to have what is enough."

--Cleanthes of Assos

Sometimes less is more.

 

STOIC WISDOM FOR THE DAY: 5 April, 2016
"Can we then hold the poverty-in-wealth of the money-grubbing usurers to be of any account? They may seem to be kings with purses full of gold, but they never even in their dreams have had a glimpse of the wealth that has eyes to see."

--Philo of Alexandria ("On the Virtues")

Philo (25 BC-50 AD) was a Hellenistic-Jewish thinker who made heavy use of Stoic ethics.
To say that greed and wealth are 'not what matters' has sadly become a platitude and truism. So we stroke our egos when we repeat something like the above, and then go right back to our hoarding. And Philo sees that this is because we are so blind to the true wealth of virtue and love that we can't even imagine what it could be like. Time to open our eyes?

 

STOIC WISDOM FOR THE DAY: 6 April, 2016
"What do you do when you disembark from a ship? You do not pick up the rudder, do you, or the oars? What do you pick up, then? Your own luggage, your oil-flask, your wallet. So now, if you are mindful of what is your own property, you will never lay claim to that which belongs to another."

--Epictetus (Discourses 24)

It's when I think I have much, or am owed much, that I pave the way for my failure.

I love history not because of the dusty books, but because it's about the lives of real people. I wonder how the Acadian settlers in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia must once have felt. On the losing end of the French and Indian War, their homes and fields were destroyed, their property confiscated, and thousands were rounded up to be shipped to the British Colonies. When this group disembarked at Boston Harbor, they must have thought that everything was lost.

But Epictetus reminds us that we should rely on the only things that are fully ours, our minds and wills. They hadn't lost everything at all, because they still had the most precious of possessions, their dignity as persons. They can take everything else, but they can't take that away.

Image: Robert Dafford, "Acadians in the Harbor," 1755

STOIC WISDOM FOR THE DAY: 7 April, 2016
"You have been wishing to know my views with regard to liberal studies. My answer is this: I respect no study, and deem no study good, which results in money-making. Such studies are profit-bringing occupations, useful only in so far as they give the mind a preparation and do not engage it permanently. One should linger upon them only so long as the mind can occupy itself with nothing greater; they are our apprenticeship, not our real work.

"Hence you see why 'liberal studies' are so called; it is because they are studies worthy of a free man. But there is only one really liberal study, - that which gives a man his liberty. It is the study of wisdom, and that is lofty, brave, and great-souled. All other studies are puny and puerile. You surely do not believe that there is good in any of the subjects whose teachers are, as you see, men of the most ignoble and base stamp? We ought not to be learning such things; we should be done with learning them."

--Seneca the Younger (Letter 88)

This may seem brutally offensive to our modern sensibilities, but perhaps that says more about us than it does about the nature of the true and the good?

Simply put, if learning is to make us better, then it must be directed at our highest end, that of wisdom and moral character, the only qualities that can make us truly free. Anything else is a means, secondary to that end, and hence perhaps even "puny".

If the accumulation of wealth, power, or reputation is our goal, that isn't liberal education at all. It's an enslavement to all those lower things.

Image: Cecco del Caravaggio, "Christ Driving the Moneylenders Out of the Temple"

STOIC WISDOM FOR THE DAY: 8 April, 2016
"The healthy eye ought to see all visible things and not to say, I wish for green things; for this is the condition of a diseased eye. And the healthy hearing and smelling ought to be ready to perceive all that can be heard and smelled. And the healthy stomach ought to be with respect to all food just as the mill with respect to all things which it is formed to grind. And accordingly the healthy understanding ought to be prepared for everything which happens; but that which says, 'Let my dear children live,' and 'let all men praise whatever I may do,' is an eye which seeks for green things, or teeth which seek for soft things."

--Marcus Aurelius (Meditation 10)

Just as I shouldn't just see or hear what I prefer, selectively ignoring the rest, my thinking should be open to things as they are. I shouldn't try to force things to fit my thinking. A mind willing to be open to anything and everything the world presents to it is the only kind of mind that can ever be sane.

Image: Rembrandt, "Philosopher in Meditation" (1632)

 

STOIC WISDOM FOR THE DAY: 15 April, 2016
"The wise man knows that all who strut about in togas and in purple, as if they were well and strong, are, for all their bright color, quite unsound, and in his eyes they differ in no way from the sick who are bereft of self-control. And so he is not even irritated if in their sick condition they venture to be somewhat impertinent to their physician, and in the same spirit in which he sets no value on the honors they have, he sets no value on the lack of honor they show. Just as he will not be flattered if a beggar shows him respect, nor count it an insult if a man from the dregs of the people, on being greeted, fails to return his greeting, so, too, he will not even look up if many rich men look up at him. For he knows that they differ not a whit from beggars."

--Seneca the Younger ("On Firmness")

Being a person with a very sensitive disposition, I am both blessed and cursed. I feel joy with great depth and strength, but it also means I feel pain and loss with a proportional intensity. And that's probably the most important reason why I try to practice Stoicism. My habits of thinking help me to order my habits of feeling, and I learn, slowly but surely, not to allow myself to be battered by anger, irritation, sadness, or loneliness, whenever I am insulted, rejected or ignored by others. Seneca is a great help in practicing this type of firmness and self-control.

Image: Harmen Steenwijck, "Vanitas" (c 1640)

(I'm fascinated lately by the Dutch tradition of 'Vanitas' still-life painting, where symbols of pleasant and attractive things are contrasted with reminders of our mortality. They serve to dampen our vanity, and encourage our humility. )

 

STOIC WISDOM FOR THE DAY: 16 April, 2016
"Who of us does not marvel at the action of Lycurgus the Spartan? For when he had been blinded in one eye by one of his fellow-citizens and had received the young man at the hands of the people to punish as he saw fit, he did not choose to do this, but trained him instead and made a good man of him, and afterward escorted him to the public theater. And when the Spartans regarded him with amazement, he said: 'This man I received from you an insolent and violent creature; I return him to you a reasonable man and a good citizen.' "

--Musonius Rufus (Fragment 39)

The Spartans were a fascinating bunch. I still recall one of my favorite teachers, Leland Giovanelli, telling us about the phrase Spartan mothers said to their sons before sending them into battle: "Come home with your shield, or on it." Fight with courage, or return dead. This may make them sound heartless.

But Lycurgus, the legendary founder of Spartan law, wasn't just about toughness. He was about the building of virtue and character, and Musonius' passage remind us just how deeply a man like Lycurgus cared about others. He didn't seek vengeance. He tried to help others become better. Love is the law.

Image: Statue of Lycurgus, Palais de Justice, Brussels.

 

STOIC WISDOM FOR THE DAY: 17 April, 2016
". . .You cannot hold him to be a man who has been, so to say, transformed by his vices. If a violent man and a robber burns with greed of other men's possessions, you say he is like a wolf. Another fierce man is always working his restless tongue at lawsuits, and you will compare him to a hound. Does another delight to spring upon men from ambushes with hidden guile? He is as a fox. Does one man roar and not restrain his rage? He would be reckoned as having the heart of a lion. Does another flee and tremble in terror where there is no cause of fear? He would be held to be as deer. If another is dull and lazy, does he not live the life of an ass? One whose aims are inconstant and ever changed at his whims, is in no wise different from the birds. If another is in a slough of foul and filthy lusts, he is kept down by the lusts of an unclean swine. Thus then a man who loses his goodness, ceases to be a man, and since he cannot change his condition to that of a god, he turns into a beast."

--Boethius ("Consolation of Philosophy", Book 4)

The nutritionist may say we are what we eat, the Christian may say the wages of sin are death, and the Stoic may say that we abandon our human nature when we act in ignorance and vice. It's all of a kind.

Whenever I have taught this text, I am sure to add that the animals shouldn't feel offended. They are rightly what they are. But men should feel ashamed of themselves, because they are not themselves. As Boethius also says, “In other living creatures ignorance of self is nature; in man it is vice.”

Image: Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, "Circe Transforms Odysseus’ Companions into Animals" (c. 1650)





















STOIC WISDOM FOR THE DAY: 21 April, 2016
"Aiming then at these high matters, you must remember that to attain them requires more than ordinary effort; you will have to give up some things entirely, and put off others for the moment. And if you would have these also --- office and wealth --- it may be that you will fail to get them, just because your desire is set on the former, and you will certainly fail to attain those things which alone bring freedom and happiness."

--Epictetus (Enchirdion 1)

A man cannot serve two masters. Many people say they will be Christians, or Socialists, and then the promptly seek the things they say they despise. You cannot love God, and then put money or power in His place. You cannot love economic equality, while you drive in your BMW and talk on your latest iPhone.

If I want to be good, I need to make irrevocable decisions. I need to commit.
I am reminded of Robert Frost:

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

Your choice will make all the difference. You can't have it both ways. I have always chosen the road less traveled.