Stockdale on Stoicism 52

Mid-career graduate education is not uncommon in military life, though it is somewhat rare to have it in a field entirely separate from one’s immediate concerns. 

For nearly twenty years I had been on the operational and technical side of things—an engineering degree from Annapolis, with shore duty as an engineering test pilot bracketed by flying tours in carrier-based squadrons. 

I was now to return to such an aeronautical life after this sabbatical devoted to the study of political science, economics, and international relations with as much of the humanities as I could pack in. I did this in hopes of eventually achieving a high command that needed this education for policymaking and diplomatic and strategic planning duties.

I and others have found that a midlife second education, particularly one heavily salted with introspective subjects like classical philosophy, can precipitate an unexpected postgraduate wrinkle. An aftershock can develop as one returns to life in the world of cutting-edge technology, expediency, and not infrequent bureaucratic infighting. 

Throughout the first six or eight months after returning to the operational scene, I underwent a kind of transitional decompression. I groped for a stable platform of philosophical reference from which I could confidently call my shots. It wasn’t because I was in a new environment that I had to screw my head on a new way; it was just that I now saw contradictions where before I had seen only order. I had to hook my life to a big idea if I was to stay the course.

It was now 1963. Throughout 1961 and 1962 at Stanford, my mind had been awhirl with a whole new shopping list of big ideas. Rhinelander’s two-term philosophy course in "The Problems of Good and Evil" had alone taken me from the Book of Job to Camus, with more than a smattering of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Kant, Pascal, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Descartes, and Hume along the way. 

But now, as I led my squadron on and off the carrier decks in Southeast Asian waters, halfway between war and peace, I gravitated toward a more self-supporting, independent ethical balance wheel as I suffocated in the moral dilemmas that I could feel closing in on us all. 

There, my last-found model, Epictetus and his Stoicism, who by then I had made myself better understand, struck the very chord of self-respect and personal autonomy that I so needed to keep my mind clear and to break through the clutter of false hope and wishful thinking and to cut myself free. 

—from James B. Stockdale, Epictetus' Enchiridion: Conflict and Character