Salvete eis qui legant - 

Stoicism is coherent, I would say.  It accords with how life is.  It is a project, not a belief system.  Its doctrines have survived in a paucity of reporting and original texts, and stand or fail in our application of them and in our consciences.  To live according to Nature is a project, a quest, a  continuous goal.  In that regard, it parallels religious orientations, but it is not a religion; rather, an attitude and an empiricism.  

Valete. 

Jordan Peterson of Toronto

Salvete, qui legantes sint - 

My sons have been talking of this "new feller", Professor Jordan Peterson, and the HUGE splash he has been making in the cyber-world.  From what I have gaathered so far, he's made of equal parts Joseph Campbell, Karl Jung, and Dr. Laura Schlesinger.  I have yet to read his materials.

But the online response to his teaching and exhortations has been, as I said, HUGE.  He's become an overnight Absurdity cure, apparently.  So tonight I will begin his book, "12 Rules: an Antidote to Chaos".  If indeed it's aimed at the problem of life in the modern world, it is ipso facto of interest.

Controversy surrounds him - so I make no pronouncements yet.  Would it matter if I did so, prematurely?  Not to the world, but to me - yes!  Defective as I am, I still need to try to be fair and accurate.

I have read a critique of him published recently by another author I need to read - one Pankaj Mishra, author of "Age of Anger", his book about the general return to authoritarianism and violent nationalism and so on world-wide.  Mishra's topic seems critical to me, watching from the sidelines as the world's bedbugs - Neo-Nazis, Tea Party-ists, and others of dubious intent - have come to the fore over the last decade or so.

More to come.  Valete.

Avete -

Et nunc brevissime -

Among my blog-subscriptions is one that often shows old photos of Betty Page, in various states of attire.  A signal female model in a signal position in our recent cultural twists and turns, and yet another "pretty face".  In the un-simple confusion of biological life, being male involves being moved by "pretty faces" of various sorts. There is so much connected with that: how to sort it out? 

One way is this, to remember that "a pretty face" is a-dime-a-dozen in itself; that there is no "pretty" without some desire, some weakness on the part of the viewer; that more real than the impression that an image makes is the person (unknown for the most part) embodied within the source of the impression; that underneath said vision is a being, whether your superior or inferior or your more-or-less-peer, but certainly a creature with its own agenda; that we are morally bound to treat people well (if at all possible), and so to defer to her (or him or whatever); and, after all, that said creature is in the end just a messy-mixed-up-wonder of mucus, stomach acid, bacteria, noxious filth, and God knows what else! 

Such thoughts can push the superfluity of sexual excitement back a bit towards the proper indifference that we, as rational folks, should show towards strangers. 

Valete.

A Referral regarding a Name in the News

Salvete, quicumque legant -

One of my favorite Bloggers, Ciceronianus,  posted something good recently that I thought I'd feature here.  

I, like probably a lot of people, am still trying to wrap my head around the spate of cop-on-black-civilian and other killings going on domestically.  One of the forces in this whole controversy is the "Black Lives Matter Movement" and Ciceronianus's article deals with recent abuse of that name.  

ciceronianus.blogspot.com/2016/07/how-not-to-do-things-with-words

You'll notice he reserves judgment and analysis on the whole controversy for later.  So do I.  

Valete, et audete sapere. 

Some More about God and Men

From an earlier note, a week or so ago, that I made to myself.  Why I need to try to figure out all these metaphysical maybe's is attributable to Human Nature, and to the subject matter of my studies this term. 

Epicurus* asked:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not all-powerful.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?　 Then why call him God?　

 

God exists as something real – the micro-, macro- and astro-scopic Universe itself – huge, infinitely complex, beyond men’s ability to control or comprehend. This is "the Creation", whether it was something created or remains perpetual or whatever its ultimate nature may prove to be. This God can be seen, analyzed, and learned from. Whether it is, as the Stoics claimed, a"providential" one depends on your definition of 'providential', and then upon your experience and your bent in life.

God also exists – subsists, perhaps? – as a feeling, as the experiences of thinking and of conscience – whether these come from the otherwise fanciful pneuma deduced by the Stoics, or from some sort of organic neural feedback, or from whatever.  We (at least most of us) carry these and participate in them, and we get the feeling that – well – there's something going on that’s not just material.　 We can call it soul, pneuma, Daimon, Guardian Angel, Christ-in-us, Reason, moral sense, or even numina that lace the land about us.　 This God cannot be seen, cannot be proven to be material, remains both hard to pin down but also remains self-evident to us.

Whether you claim a Single God (combining all divine attributes), or Two Gods (as I have crudely laid out above), or Three Gods (as in the Christian Trinity, united as One), or a full Pantheon (as in the many and endlessly various Pagan traditions), what we do know is that we are, for the most part, dealing with an Idea whose manifestation is both our whole physical world – the "works" of God – and also our own inner selves.　 But there’s no other hard evidence, just "hearsay", as Thomas Paine put it.　 And this evidence that we do have available – that we and the world ARE -- does not have a simple, intelligible signature that quiets all controversy.　 It is much more complex than that.

The only honest notion about God or the Gods, I am convinced, is the Agnostic One – as in, "I don’t know, but I think … !"　 The actions of worship (on one hand) and reasoning (on the other) are both indications of God, in us, at work.　

===========================
*   The only authority for this being Epicurus's argument is Lactantius, the only ancient source to quote it.  He may have been wrong about having Epicure as the author; in fact, Epicurus's notions of the Gods seem to run counter to the notions inherent in the quote. 
　

Writer Os Guinness

Salvete, qui legentes - 

(My Latin is so much bullshit!  I'm enamoured of it but am so ill-studied.  But that is quite beside the point today....) 

I want to mention a very good author, one whom I hold in respect -- while also, at times, arguing with in my lonesome journal:  Os Guinness, a man of reason and responsibility, a Christian writer who can bridge the gap (at least for me) between what is decent in the moral (and so, intellectual and political) stances of the American Left and Right.  It probably helps that he's not from around these parts to begin with. 

Amazon's bio of him lists this:

OS GUINNESS (DPhil, Oxford University) is an author and social critic. Born in China, he was educated in England at the Universities of London and Oxford. He moved to the United States in 1984....

Whether he likes it or not, I count him a proper Humanist, concerned for both real people as well as traditions of wisdom, and keen to penetrate partisan dishonesty.  I've read only two of his many books and recommend them both. 

First,  

• The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends on It

but especially this one,

• Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror .

Need more folk like him. 

Valete.

Metaphysics from Iohannes

Salve, si aliquis has legit !

I am, as affiliations go, a Stoic -- at least, these days.  Have been since 2006, a decade or so.  I'm currently taking a course from the College of Stoic Philosophers (not accredited, I don't believe) whose classes are done over the Internet, are affordable, and are not bound up in the toils of professional academia.  Professional philosophers may sniff at this College (collection of colleagues) but it fulfills a purpose that the unaffordable and scholarly-professional schools do not address -- common people living their lives. 

Enough about the College. I'm grateful they've been around.  But I'm currently finishing up a quarter in which we've read on Stoic Physics, which -- for the Stoics -- was also Stoic Theology.  We're at the last section, and the subject is Piety. 

Looking over Erik the Scholarch's summation for this quarter, I find myself agreeing with most everything.  The one area where I can't agree with Erik and my mentor, Chris, is that of the Stoic God's Providence.  The Stoics had an interesting idea of God and of Providence:  They argued that while most of the universe is a system of causes (not a chain, not a domino effect), men are set apart, a section in them reserved for a minor sort of divine intelligence (all the universe being infused to greater or lesser degrees with a Cosmic Intelligence that orders things and creates movement and animation and consciousness).  What this does is set men (ie, people, humans, of both genders) apart as having a say-so in their own fates.  Fate rules all, and yet not finally, because men generally have the power to think and choose.  (Rather like Christianity, isn't it?  I'm sure there are endless parallels in other religions, too.) 

Where I part with Erik's and Chris's theistic notions is largely in this notion of Providence.  What does it mean?  I agree that God (as Universal Nature and as the divine Pneuma that pervades it) has provided for men and their survival as a species.  But I argue that that is about as far as it goes.  Erik and Chris might agree, but we part on the definition of Providence.  If the Stoic God (the divine Intelligence innate in the cosmos) were fully provident, we humans would have had a better nature to begin with; we would not be such a miserable, splintered, hostile, dissatisfied and ape-like species.  Erik's Providence goes only so far -- which is fine, actually, for Stoicism quite properly looks askance at most notions of Absolute Purity and Infinite this-and-that.  We have no Types, no Perfect God, no Perfect Other World; there is only what was, what is, and what comes to be. 

But then Erik quotes this, from our old drill instructor, Epictetus:

"For if we had any understanding, ought we not, both in public and in private, incessantly to sing and praise the Deity, and rehearse his benefits?" 

Well, yes and no.  We might, because we are small and insignificant, and incapable of the kind and degree of creation that Epictetus would have us thank God for.  But a question arises:  What's the purpose of this incessant praise?  Wasn't God doing what he is supposed to, that is, providing?  Moreover, isn't that Providence limited?  Yes, he's given us a bit for each, in terms of Intelligence, with which to affect Fate on our own; he's sort of 'deputized' us as Junior Gods, you might say.  But again, isn't that now our job, to be intelligent, to be good, to be so at the same time that we're being the particular kind of beasts that we (quite demonstrably) are?  God does his bit, and we do ours -- and that's the ticket.  God deserves praise only insofar as the entire World deserves praise, and most of the world is, to the Stoic, necessarily a thing Indifferent -- a world "not up to us" to control.  Moreover, indifference is the Stoic God's personal relation with us -- he's absent, except (again) as Universal Nature and as Our Individual Natures. 

Is this a big deal?  No, except that I can't join the Chorus of Theistic Stoics singing, "Praise God for this wonderful life!" when, no, it's not wonderful, but mixed and problematic.  Men and Women, Democrats and Republicans, Christians and Muslims?  War, serial killers, torture, disease, tooth-and-claw?  This may be a providence, a gift of animation, but it cannot be called "a wonderful life". 

"Thank you for the loan, God; I'll try to take care of it as I ought to, this Life, before you get it back from me."  I think that sums up the relationship quite well, "incessant praise" aside.   If you want God, read Thomas Paine and Camus and you will have a good beginning.  Stoicism is to be praised, I think, for putting all that -- earthly experience -- into perspective without resorting to either inflation of the Human Ego past its proper degree, or erecting Idols and demanding sacrificial victims, or simply sugar-coating the whole mess and ignoring evil.  Tie your shoelaces and save the drowning, as Thoreau advised; there's no need to get absurd in response to reality's absurdities. 

Vale, et aude sapere. 

Friday Blues: Not Too Unusual

Salvete qui legentes êstis -

Sometimes Friday is graced, not with Venus or Friya or Frigg, but with the proximity of freedom.  Not true freedom, for that is rare and has to do more with ability and virtue than with a lack of fetters, but the relative freedom of the coming weekend, Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, closing in a kind of eclipse on Sunday evening. 

But sometimes Friday is simply Fatigue-Day, Down-Day, Out-of-It-Day.  So today for me.  I am in a down cycle, emotionally, and trying to find fresh sources of oxygen (as it were).  What is to hand? 

First - Only what is "up to me", what I can do and control or affect.  This includes my mood, but not all of it, not my body or my neurology or my complement of good sleep.  Those things I can affect, but not command.  Even my state of mind, available to suggestion and even command from the "ruling faculty", can be an obstacle and a pitfall. 

But here memory is important, and an internal vigilance: 

1. To recall that your emotions and mood are susceptible to your Reason, that Reason is our gift from the Gods or from the Creation, that Great Source of Turmoil, with which to deal with its debris on earth. 
2. I can keep a mental eye open for the self-defeating, the undeservedly-self-castigating, the either-or-despairing, and other fallacious tricks of the mind that -- quite automatically, in my case -- cripple my little self and urge it to self-destruction. 
3. I can patch up what I can in the outside world -- whether at work, with my co-workers, with my family, with my friends and acquaintances, with problems financial -- patch things up with whatever I have of good humor and sensitivity and diligence.
4. I can above all watch out for Fear, for the Habit of Dread that infects me and my family, and recognize its imprimatur on my thoughts, on my disposition, on my judgments, and pull myself back when I lean too far into it, or reverse my opinion when I see its fell influence on an opinion.
5. I can look to the 'Engine Room' -- fuel supply, body status, metabolism -- and, quite literally, feed myself with an eye to decent fueling, decent material and nutritional input.  I can even improve the 'Guest Quarters' upstairs with a bit of fun food or a glass of wine, some luxury for the weary fool. 
6. And, in terms of what's up to me, I can cut myself a little slack, remember that I'm just a beastie trying to emulate the Gods, a mortal, "only human" as Robocop once said, a multicelled macro-animal gifted with Reason, and that the world is -- above all -- IM-perfect, not made okay, not made safe or good or complete or glorious, but rather dirty and dangerous, uncaring and paltry: as a termite with some Divinity in him, I can rebel against defeat and decline and dismay. 

There!  I'm better already!  Improved thanks to Lore, Thought, Reason, thyroxine, caffeine, Ensure© and some sandwich from Subway©, and neither should I forget the affable conversation and amusement afforded us by my boss.  Now to the rest of the day, and on to the weekend. 

Omnibus, valete bene.

Contrary Old Nature Consuming Me

Salvete, quicumque legātis -

The one thing we know the Universe likes is friction. Collisions, mutations, heat, stress, movement of life, consumption of life by life - it seems to me the broad essential link is movement and conflict, whether it's at the sub-microscopic levels of nuclear particles, or among the rude little multicellular animals in a scummy pool, or between technologically endowed nations or movements throwing terror at each other, or in the collisions of asteroids, or in the super-nuclear super-heating of ineffably massive stars. Even light, as a body, collides and warms.

Speaking of mutation: According to my doctors, I've been visited by a nasty variety of it - squamous cell cancer. I have just turned 60 and now - bang - Nature plays the cancer card. More to come in terms of medical imaging and medical guesswork and treatment. The timing, of course, is less than ideal. A very bad way to begin Lunar New Year.

Once again - just as when I went to pieces in 2006, and then when someone near and dear to us ruined our finances that same year - events are crowding us out. My kids are still trying to find their niches in the new Republican slave economy, trying to become self-sufficient! I'm not expecting, at this point, that I will ever see my grandchildren. My 85-year-old mother (God keep her!) will quite possibly outlast me!

Still, what can you do? Death will come; it will take each down to dissolution. I have no particular fear of death, but I do have a lurking horror of the pain and suffering that may precede it. The final suffering will most likely be horribly intense and lonely, but I shan't dwell on that. That's all in the future, and beyond my control. (After all, I can hardly conjure up my death throes and tell them, "No; not that way! I won't have it!")

What is, after all, our one sure goal in life? Not conscious, not chosen, but entirely assured? Our death. Each man's arc of life ends up there, sooner or later, but assuredly. It's as natural as our facility of movement, our impulses, as universal as germination and birth.

Felix est quem ....

Participating in our present age's revival of Stoicism, I have often had occasion to ask myself: How in the world can I, arguably an abject slave of pleasure and indolence, a rattle-headed, timid, and puerile old do-nothing, how can I of all people call myself a Stoic? For many is the time that my own native scrupulousness has argued that I was a hypocrite to do so while I remained so full of petty defects and so short on decisive willpower; and many is the time that I've been tempted to just jump ship and go native, to simply devote myself to whatever overpowering pleasure I can find.

Well, I haven't jumped ship. In fact, you might say that I'm still aboard, swabbing the deck. I haven't given up because I remember (a) that Nature is anything but simple, anything but black and white - that almost nothing is perfect or absolute; (b) that half a man is better than none, and an educated half-a-man may well be better still; and (c) that God has given me a certain problem to work on (i.e., myself), unknown to others, and that therein I have my work cut out for me.

And there's another rationalization that I think has substantial weight to it: (d) that "Felix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum" (which I read as: "Happy is he whom other people's dangers make cautious"). In other words, why not improve oneself?  Moreover, even if I am not living a Cynic's life, homeless on the street, even if am neither Saintly nor Sagely, even if I cannot BE perfect, I can at least participate in the transmission of this most useful philosophy and way of life. Helping others to learn and understand how to live, in the course of living my own transient, microscopic little life, this benefits them, myself, and the world at large.

We are all aliens and strangers, and each comprises a little hidden world of his or her own. If we recuse absolutism and fanaticism and set about living decent lives, in toleration if not in real harmony, then the good of one can rub off on the good of another.  In fact, the more that people are decent -- or better yet, virtuous -- the more lives and souls can be spared violence or the guilt of violence. Apply your Stoicism, apply your virtues, and try to live well. It's what we're meant to do.

Emerson - my Introduction

When I wandered into the library the other day and perused the philosophy section (as I am wont to do when I can catch the reduced-hours library still open), I found a book on "Transcendentalism in America", by Koster. The very first page is a three-photo splash of Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman. Perhaps, I thought, this book will explain just what these folks were all about, what the thread of Transcendentalism was, and most important in satisfying my ignorance, what Emerson was all about, he the most famous of the three and the least accessible to me. 

So, I am reading. 

Was Emerson a philosopher?  He thought so, I guess.  And the quotes from him in this book tend to cover ground seemingly Neo-Platonic and even, perhaps, Stoic: 

"A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work."

"A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time, is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.  Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world." 

"What we are, that only can we see." 

"As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg."

But what remains most apparent is that Emerson's cart always seems to be hitched neither to stolid horses nor to hard men, but to clouds of mystic supposition.  I read Koster's remarks on him and I say, Yes, our pertinent time IS indeed the "everlasting now", "the present, which is all there is" (as Koster puts it - for there is no past, except in its forming of  "Now", and no future, except in its becoming "Now").  Or I say, Yes, we see things not as they are, but as we are (quoting Anais Nin, I believe).  But then at other times Emerson loses me:

"Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and by the very knowledge of functions and processes to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole." 

"Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it....  Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven."

"No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.... the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it."

"Who shall define to me an Individual?; I behold with awe and delight many illustrations of the One Universal Mind; I see my being imbedded in it....  I can even with a mountainous aspiring say, I am God, by transferring my Me out of the flimsy and unclean precincts of my body, my fortunes, my private will, and meekly retiring upon the holy austerities of the Just and the Loving - upon the secret fountains of Nature."

Emerson finds it important "to feel after the evidence of things not seen"; and then, in the same breath and in supposed apposition, explain that one does that "to explain the mazes of mortal things."  The first I mistrust; the second (quite rightly a task for men, whether philosophers, laborers or businessmen) I must think can be explained only (if at all) with reference to concrete things.  For the Emerson-inclined, how can he or she escape the wishful thinking that "feeling after" the misty "evidence" of still mistier "things not seen" only too easily leads to?  How can one avoid a merely personal, pseudo-mystical cloud?  How can one get a grip, EXCEPT by the corroboration and criticism provided by example and hard proof? 

Notion vs. Ignorance vs. Facts vs. Blather.  These are the four corners, you might say, of any serious discussion.  Will or an idea or a need urges us a Notion, our Ignorance shapes it, then the visible or provable Facts re-shape it, and we repeat the re-shaping, continuing to trim away the mere Blather.  Emerson went through this but, perhaps, either got stuck venerating the Blather, or simply dismissed as unimportant the facts available to refer to.