Re: are you a Stoic and what is your philosophy?
The following text is an excerpt from an exchange that I am sharing with the permission of my correspondent without disclosing their personal information.
I wanted to ask you whether you consider yourself to be a Stoic. What is your philosophy exactly? Could you give me a brief explanation?
I would like to learn about Stoicism, but I don’t know where to start, so I thought I could consult you for this.
I do not consider myself a Stoic, though there are elements of my thought that are found in Stoic works as well. I do not subscribe to a specific school of thought, as I draw influences from various sources, ancient and contemporary, combined with my own thinking and temperament.
The way I see Stoicism from a modern perspective is as the gateway to the ancient world of Greece and pre-Christian Rome. It is a throwback to an era when people were polytheistic: they had a completely different worldview than the predominant one we are immersed in, even if some of them were not religious per se.
This is my outlook as well. I do not consider myself religious, though if I was forced to identify with a certain tradition it would be with polytheism in the broadest sense. And because I am most familiar with my own culture, this polytheism would be the ethnic Greek religion. Though, again, I must stress that I am not religious.
Fundamentally, polytheism is the view of the world as oneness, hence the Greek word for “universe” is “synpan” (σύμπαν) which is a composite of words we find in English as well, namely, “syn” (like “synthesis” or “symbiosis” or even “system”) and “pan” (like “pandemic”, “panther”, “panorama”). “Syn” means “together” or “jointly” or “plus”, while “pan” means “all”. The universe, then, is the joint presence of everything and, thus, the common participation of all presences in the continuum of life. Oneness, of course, implies that all that is, is of one substance, hence consubstantiality. The multitude is an expression of the multifacetedness of the one, in the same way we can express an entire world of representations with just binary language.
It is for this reason that the polytheist will identify the divine everywhere as a pattern in the cosmos. Gods or god (which are interchangeable, by the way) is not outside the world but always “there”. Polytheists will give it a name to make it easier to talk about it and will then analyse it into its specific manifestations. Hence archetypes such as harmony, beauty, wisdom, are described as the deities of Apollon, Aphrodite, Athena. One does not need to believe in or to worship those gods in order to recognise the presence of the archetypes they reference. Harmony exists with or without faith in Apollon, for instance.
Names and imagery are for people. Apollon does not need prayers to exist and humans do not need to perform rituals in his name for harmony to be part of the cosmos—it always is. There is no need for any kind of convincing or proselytising. Names and imagery help people relate to the greater magnitudes of this world and to communicate with each other. Thoughtful imagery and narratives also have didactic value as well as staying power: they capture the imagination and can be passed down through generations even without any writings. But the specifics of those symbols are of no import when it comes to the underlying principle of oneness.
Against this backdrop, we understand the significance of Logos. This is the Greek word for “reason” (as in “reasonable”), “ratio”, “pattern”, “cause”, “speech” or more broadly “language”. All these significations apply to the cosmos at-large. Everywhere we look we find pattern and structure. There is cause and effect, which is a feedback loop of presence and absence, else of communication. The more we study the world, the more we realise how there is reason embedded in things and that absolute chaos (“logoslessness”, if you will) does not exist.
The early Stoics stress the importance of logos because the Greeks already believed in its immanence and could directly make sense of the greater points. Logos is always there (and, anyway, logos as a concept predates the Stoics, such as in the works of Herakletos). As such, I understand the central Stoic dictum of “live in accordance with nature” (κατά φύσην ζην) to be an appeal to the person to recognise the world all around them and to not be misled by unattainable wants. It is, in other words, a call to practicality and the concomitant reasonableness.
But this Stoic dictum cannot be appreciated in full independent of the preexisting tradition of the three core Delphic maxims: (i) “know yourself” (γνώθι σεαυτόν), (ii) “nothing in excess” (μηδέν άγαν), and (iii) “certainty is beside ruin” (εγγύα παρά δ’Άτα). Those precepts are taken as a tandem. They are instructions for the person to know who they are, which necessarily means that one must study the world around them (because of the aforementioned oneness). In the process of learning, one must try to find moderation, so as to not push towards unsustainable extremes. And their inquisitive outlook must be couched in terms of dubitativeness, otherwise misplaced certainty leads to catastrophe (actually, the literal translation of that maxim is “guarantees beside Ate”, where “Ate” is the goddess of ruin).
From an ancient perspective, then, the Stoics (at least the early ones) are yet another way of expressing ideas that were already in circulation. There is value to this in all eras, as even the things we know we can see them again through a slightly different prism or in relation to something new and thus gain a new appreciation of them.
Anyway, I do not want to belabour the point I am making: Stoicism decoupled from its polytheistic underpinnings is an empty shell.
Finally, to your question on where to start. I always prefer original sources over derivatives. For example, the Enchiridion of Epictetos is a good place to start. Once you read that, you will have new ideas which will help you formulate the next queries.
Good luck and remember that the whole point is to continuously discover ourselves and the world rather than to pick a school/gang/dogma to fight for, as certainty is right next to disaster.