Donald Robertson
The Globe and Mail
Originally published April 19, 2019
Recently, a bartender in Nova Scotia showed me a quote from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius tattooed on his forearm. “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be,” it said, “just be one.”
We live in an age when social media bombards everyone, especially the young, with advice about every aspect of their lives. Stoic philosophy, of which Marcus Aurelius was history’s most famous proponent, taught its followers not to waste time on diversions that don’t actually improve their character.
In recent decades, Stoicism has been experiencing a resurgence in popularity, especially among millennials. There has been a spate of popular self-help books that helped to spread the word. One of the best known is Ryan Holiday and Steven Hanselman’s The Daily Stoic, which introduced a whole new generation to the concept of philosophy, based on the classics, as a way of life. It has fuelled interest among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. So has endorsement from self-improvement guru Tim Ferriss who describes Stoicism as the “ideal operating system for thriving in high-stress environments.”
Why should the thoughts of a Roman emperor who died nearly 2,000 years ago seem particularly relevant today, though? What’s driving this rebirth of Stoicism?
The info is here.
Showing posts with label Stoicism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stoicism. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Thursday, May 24, 2018
Is there a universal morality?
Massimo Pigliucci
The Evolution Institute
Originally posted March 2018
Here is the conclusion:
The first bit means that we are all deeply inter-dependent on other people. Despite the fashionable nonsense, especially in the United States, about “self-made men” (they are usually men), there actually is no such thing. Without social bonds and support our lives would be, as Thomas Hobbes famously put it, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The second bit, the one about intelligence, does not mean that we always, or even often, act rationally. Only that we have the capability to do so. Ethics, then, especially (but not only) for the Stoics becomes a matter of “living according to nature,” meaning not to endorse whatever is natural (that’s an elementary logical fallacy), but rather to take seriously the two pillars of human nature: sociality and reason. As Marcus Aurelius put it, “Do what is necessary, and whatever the reason of a social animal naturally requires, and as it requires.” (Meditations, IV.24)
There is something, of course, the ancients did get wrong: they, especially Aristotle, thought that human nature was the result of a teleological process, that everything has a proper function, determined by the very nature of the cosmos. We don’t believe that anymore, not after Copernicus and especially Darwin. But we do know that human beings are indeed a particular product of complex and ongoing evolutionary processes. These processes do not determine a human essence, but they do shape a statistical cluster of characters that define what it means to be human. That cluster, in turn, constrains — without determining — what sort of behaviors are pro-social and lead to human flourishing, and what sort of behaviors don’t. And ethics is the empirically informed philosophical enterprise that attempts to understand and articulate that distinction.
The information is here.
The Evolution Institute
Originally posted March 2018
Here is the conclusion:
The first bit means that we are all deeply inter-dependent on other people. Despite the fashionable nonsense, especially in the United States, about “self-made men” (they are usually men), there actually is no such thing. Without social bonds and support our lives would be, as Thomas Hobbes famously put it, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The second bit, the one about intelligence, does not mean that we always, or even often, act rationally. Only that we have the capability to do so. Ethics, then, especially (but not only) for the Stoics becomes a matter of “living according to nature,” meaning not to endorse whatever is natural (that’s an elementary logical fallacy), but rather to take seriously the two pillars of human nature: sociality and reason. As Marcus Aurelius put it, “Do what is necessary, and whatever the reason of a social animal naturally requires, and as it requires.” (Meditations, IV.24)
There is something, of course, the ancients did get wrong: they, especially Aristotle, thought that human nature was the result of a teleological process, that everything has a proper function, determined by the very nature of the cosmos. We don’t believe that anymore, not after Copernicus and especially Darwin. But we do know that human beings are indeed a particular product of complex and ongoing evolutionary processes. These processes do not determine a human essence, but they do shape a statistical cluster of characters that define what it means to be human. That cluster, in turn, constrains — without determining — what sort of behaviors are pro-social and lead to human flourishing, and what sort of behaviors don’t. And ethics is the empirically informed philosophical enterprise that attempts to understand and articulate that distinction.
The information is here.
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