Is there anyone alive practicing “Roman Stoicism”? People today take valuable and useful ideas from the philosophy of Stoicism such as those that underpin CBT. Why disregard these because some people did or wrote things you disagree with hundreds of years ago? The author doesn’t say anything meaningful here.
Don't Be Stoic: Roman Stoicism’s origins show its perniciousness
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Re: Don't Be Stoic: Roman Stoicism’s origins show its perniciousness
#12Meh, seems like it attacks the usual stoic strawman of it boiling down to simply being unemotional. That's not my own takeaway of stoicism. At the core of stoicism is the dichotomy of control: something is either in my control or it is not, or it is some combination of the two which must be unraveled. Applied to emotion: I can't control when I weep. I can't control when I feel sorrow. I can control how I react to tho…
I've got mixed thoughts/feelings (theelings? foughts??) about stoicism but my brother gave me a pretty damn cool coin that he got from the creator of a stoicism podcast or something like that. The heads side (there's a profile of a guy with the classic bearded ancient guy look) says Carpe Diem and the tails side says "Some things are in our power / other are not" along the rim with "Persist and Resist" in the center between two columns. It's a bit bigger than a US half dollar and I always keep it in my wallet.
Re: Don't Be Stoic: Roman Stoicism’s origins show its perniciousness
#13This is a weird article since it doesn't actually describe stoicism accurately.
"Don't be sad"? Huh?
Re: Don't Be Stoic: Roman Stoicism’s origins show its perniciousness
#14It seems as though the author has completely missed a core tenet of the philosophy, and one which is reiterated by many stoic philosophers.
You accept what you can’t control, and that which you can, you enact your virtues to ensure the best outcomes possible.
You don’t simply let things be and accept it. You need to be constantly engaged in observation and reflection to ensure who you are and what you do is virtuous, and regularly assess if you are succeeding or not.
If anything stoicism strikes me as a philosophy which encourages practitioners not to accept the world as it is, but to live in harmony with it. Harmony doesn’t mean complacency, but living according to the environment you are a part of. You can live as you please (set goals, challenge yourself, explore, etc) non complacently, but it will necessarily need to coincide and function with the reality you exist in as well.
Re: Don't Be Stoic: Roman Stoicism’s origins show its perniciousness
#15This headline is a comic example of the genetic fallacy.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/genetic
The article continues in this vein, and then presents a straw man version of stoicism in which rape, murder and so forth is greeted with indifference. I am not an unqualified fan of stoicism, but this is a ridiculous caricature of the philosophy, and the alternative presented by the article appears to be an appeal to allow emotion to drive our behavior.
I do not notice a dearth of emotional reasoning or a surfeit of stoic reasoning in today's world.
Re: Don't Be Stoic: Roman Stoicism’s origins show its perniciousness
#16https://www.holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/Nietzsche-The-B...
Fagamid suid mar a te se
Re: Don't Be Stoic: Roman Stoicism’s origins show its perniciousness
#17This is like a 17 year olds idea of what stoicism is.
Re: Don't Be Stoic: Roman Stoicism’s origins show its perniciousness
#18This article ends with its thesis: > Because if you accept your fate joyfully, as a Stoic sage should, you’ll never try to change it. This is a common criticism. To pick one of many convenient rebuttals, here's William Irvine's book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, chapter 5: > To the contrary, they were fully engaged in daily life. From this, one of two conclusions follows: Either the Stoics w…
The article author substantiated their argument with actual historical examples. Your rebuttal supported their argument with, basically, platitudes.
Re: Don't Be Stoic: Roman Stoicism’s origins show its perniciousness
#19IMO, this entire essay is misguided. There isn't anyone going around practicing Stoicism as it was practiced in Ancient Rome. Instead they take their psychological techniques (some of which are shared by Buddhism, Christianity, and cognitive behavioral therapy) such as the dichotomy of control and negative visualization and reject some of the other parts of the overall philosophy (mostly the metaphysics and similar).
Either those techniques works or they don't. If they don't work, then they should be abandoned for that reason. If they do work, the fact that Seneca had a disciple that turned bad as an adult or that Aurelius wasn't an abolitionist doesn't do anything to change that.
This is just the genetic fallacy in essay form.
Re: Don't Be Stoic: Roman Stoicism’s origins show its perniciousness
#20It's wild to me that to this day we still perpetuate the philosophical biases that originated with the early church, and as such everyone is familiar with Stoic and (Neo)Platonic philosophy, and yet very few people are familiar with the Epicureans.
A book like De Rerum Natura was talking about the quantization of light, survival of the fittest and the progression of now extinct 'freaks' of nature in the development of life, a universe that originated by atoms clashing randomly in the void. That rainbows were from light interacting with water vapor and that lightning and thunder might happen at the same time and just take different lengths of time to reach us.
And their philosophy for living a good life boiled down to self-knowledge, socialization with friends, and avoiding suffering.
They deserve far more credit than they got, and were effectively ignored throughout most of modern history because they saw a world that operated by its own laws and thus didn't see appeasement of gods as something to be concerned with.
The Stoics and Platonists with their perfect origin from which existence emerged by design was much more palatable to the church, and the group with the best understanding of the physical world in hindsight remains mostly a footnote, despite in antiquity (before the rise of the church) having been one of the major philosophical schools.