Episode 14: Epicureans, Cynics, and Stoics

So last time we finished up our look at what was going on in Buddhism and then we moved back to the West and we started to take a look at what was coming after the Axial Revolution. We saw that Aristotle's disciple Alexander ushered in a period of turmoil and cultural anxiety, a period when many people were expecting or were experiencing domicide, a very deep and profound sense of loss of home. Not of having a house or dwelling, but that connectedness, that rootedness to one's culture, one's place, one's history, one's language group, one's religion, one's community, etc.

We saw what happens is a change in the cultivation of wisdom. Notice again the deep connection between the cultivation of wisdom and the attempt to enhance meaning in response to a meaning crisis. What happens is a change in the notion of wisdom, and wisdom now takes on a therapeutic dimension in which the philosopher is the physician of the soul and has to learn to hear anxiety.

Then we learned how the Epicureans responded to this, how they diagnosed the problem like a physician and prescribed a response. They diagnosed the anxiety of the period of the Hellenistic Domicide as being caused by an anxiety about one's own mortality, and we look at how they responded to that. They advocated giving up (I would argue) the quixotic attempt to achieve immortality and instead trying to come to a lived acceptance of one's mortality. They did that by slowly getting you to realize getting clear about your nebulous anxiety, that is not about non-existence and not about experiencing total loss, it's about experiencing partial loss.

Then there's a remedy to experiencing partial loss, which is to set yourself upon those things that are actually constitutive of meaningful happiness, and then deeply realizing and structuring your lives so that you will have those up until the moment of your death, which is philosophically informed friendship, meaningful relationships in which we are afforded the cultivation of wisdom and self-transcendence.

Now, while I think mortality salience is definitely a part of the Hellenistic crisis, I don't think the Epicureans have a comprehensive understanding, and to get a more comprehensive understanding and diagnosis we turn to the Stoics. But in order to understand the Stoics, we have to understand the group they developed out of: those were the Cynics.

The Cynics were not as impressed by Socrates as argumentation as Plato was. They were much more impressed by Socrates's capacity for confrontation and provocatively inducing [aporia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia) in people. They started to practice this and in doing so they started to force people to realize the distinction between moral codes and purity codes, and to thereby pay more careful attention to what they're actually setting their hearts upon so that their hearts would not be broken by being set on man-made impermanent cultural systems and values.

Zeno (the Cynic) was deeply impressed by this but he was also impressed by Plato's argumentation. He wanted to integrate the two together and he also had the fundamental insight that although particular cultures and historical institutions are contingent, being social is not. We are inherently social in the depths of our humanity, so leaving the polis was not actually an option according to Zeno. Instead what we have to do is realize our issue isn't what we're setting our hearts upon, but how we're setting our hearts. Pay much more attention to the process than the product.

So you can see how the Stoics are even picking up on something that's implicit in the Epicureans. The Epicureans aren't trying to change the world and eradicate death by bringing about immortality, the Epicureans are trying to get you to reframe, have an insight, not just an intellectual insight but an existential insight that changes the meaning of your mortality. This was the core of the Stoic insight: pay attention to how that existential meaning is being made. Pay attention to how that process of co-identification (the way we're assuming and assigning identities is occurring), because that's where your self and your identity and your agency are being forged.

The problem is most of us let that process by mindlessly, automatically, and reactively, and so we MAR this process. We make it susceptible to distortion and that will affect the very machinery of our self, of our being in the world.