I’ve been reading a bit about Stoicism, which is enjoying a mild contemporary revival among non-academics. New books are coming out, one of them being “How To Be A Stoic” by Philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci.
Relax, I am not going anywhere, but I did find his account of why he chose Stoicism for his personal life compelling. I can relate to his account and I think others here can too.
When you order a hardback off of Amazon these days, they give you a sample of the eBook in the Cloud Reader. You can’t cut and paste out of it, so any typos you find in this quote are mine :).
Something else was going on at a time that made me pause and reflect. I
have not been a religious person since my teenage years ( I was prompted
to leave Catholicism, in part, by reading Bertrand Russell’s famous
“Why I Am Not a Christian” in high school), and as such I have been on my
own in dealing with question of where my morals and the meaning in my life
come from. I take it that an increasing number of people in the United
States and across the world find themselves facing a similar conundrum.
While sympathetic to the idea that lack of religious affiliation should be
just as acceptable a choice in life as any religious one, and strongly
supportive of the constitutional separation of church and tate in the
United Sates and elsewhere, I have also grown increasingly dissatisfied
with ( make that downright irritated by) the intolerant anger of the
so-called New Atheists, represented by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris,
among others. Although public criticism of religion ( or of any idea)
is the staple of a healthy democratic society, people don’t respond very
well to being belittled and insulted.…
There are, of course, alternatives to the New Atheism if you want to
pursue a nonreligious approach to life, including secular Buddhism and
secular humanism. Yet these two paths – the two major ones on offer for
those seeking a meaningful secular existence – are somehow unsatisfactory
to me, though for opposite reasons. I find Buddhism’s currently dominant
modes a bit too mystical, and its texts opaque and hard to interpret,
especial in light of what we know bout the world and the human condition
from modern science( and despite a number of neurobiological studies that
persuasively show the mental benefits of meditation). Secular humanism,
which I have embraced for years, suffers from the opposite problem: it is
too dependent on science and a modern conception of rationality, with the
result that – despite the best efforts of its supporters – it comes
across as cold and not the sort of thing you want to bring your kids to
on a Sunday morning. Hence, I think, the spectacular lack of success (
numerically speaking) of secular humanist organizations.By contrast, in Stoicism I have found a rational, science-friendly
philosophy that includes a metaphysics with a spiritual dimension, is
explicitly open to revision, and, most importantly is eminently practical.
The Stoics accepted the scientific principle of universal causality:
everything has a cause, and everything in the universe unfolds according to
natural processes.…
Finally, one of the most attractive features of Stoicism is that the
Stoics were open to considering challenges to their doctrines and altering
them accordingly. In other words, it is an open-ended philosophy, ready
to incorporate criticism from other schools (for instance, the so-called
Skeptics of ancient times) as well as new discoveries. As Seneca
famously put it:“Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our
guides. Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And
there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover”.
You all have heard me quibble about translations, so you all probably know I related to the author about the cryptic nature of the suttas.
Last evening I was finishing reading one of the letters from Seneca to one of his students. It was difficult to understand. Many of the passages were what would have been semi-related sentences forcibly conjoined into giant run-on sentences via multiple semicolons ( I felt that the translator could have cleared that up ). It was like reading a transcript of a Donald Trump interview with multiple subjects per sentence, switching back and forth. Coincidently, this morning another person new to Stoicism complained about that translation in a forum I read. My only thought was “Dude, try reading the Pali Canon! This is a cake walk. Just slow down and read it twice!”
