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Tag Archives: stoicism

How to Live

24 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Catholicism, Cicero, deism, Epicureanism, Essays, Fideism, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne, Judaism, Julian Barnes, Life, Michel de Montaigne, Montaigne, Philosophy, Plato, Platonists, Renaissance, Sarah Bakewell, Socrates, stoicism, The Complete Essays of Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne

“When I dance, I dance. When I sleep, I sleep; and when I am strolling alone through a beautiful orchard, although part of the time my thoughts are occupied by other things, for part of the time too I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the delight in being alone there, and to me…

To enjoy life requires some husbandry. I enjoy it twice as much as others, since the measure of our joy depends on the greater or lesser degree of our attachment to it. Above all now, when I see my span so short, I want to give it more ballast; I want to arrest the swiftness of its passing by the swiftness of my capture, compensating for the speed with which it drains away by the intensity of my enjoyment. The shorter my lease of it, the deeper and fuller I must make it.”

__________

A section excerpted from “On Experience” by Michel de Montaigne, featured in his Complete Essays.

More and more recently, I see thinkers I admire cite Montaigne as one of those unassailable luminaries – like Augustine, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, or Dr. Johnson – whose voice is wise enough, and work compendious enough, to cut through our frenetic cultural discourse with the weight of a primary source.

Julian Barnes calls Montaigne our philosophical link to the Ancient World. He was also the man who said “Philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir,” or “To be a philosopher is to learn how to die” – a vital reflection that is also perhaps the most misunderstood sentence in philosophy (until Marx started to talk about religion as an opiate…).

The reflection is especially essential to the excerpt above, sourced from perhaps the most seminal of Montaigne’s many celebrated essays. Montaigne had imbibed the Platonists, and thus in linking the practice of philosophy to eventual peace with mortality, was not claiming that we can learn to feel comfortable with the fact of death if we simply muse enough on the subject. Rather, as a Catholic of Jewish origins who flirted with Deism, Montaigne was merely reframing a claim made by Socrates and later Cicero: namely, that in death you are finally unfettered from your corporeal chains, so you better get your mind – or, if you prefer, your soul – in shape because that’s all you’ll have when your star finally sets. Montaigne’s quasi-Deism (which consistently reads like Fideism to me) factors into this equation in an essential way. While a convinced Catholic may take his next existence for granted, brooders like Montaigne often struggle with a concept so uniquely divorced from empirical confirmation. Cicero was one of these thinkers; as an Epicurean he doubted a life-to-come, but as a devotee of Socrates, he thought that perhaps he would outlast his mortal coil. So a convenient compromise arose in his mind. We are heading towards either transcendence or nothingness, he thought, so why fret? Neither option is bad. And you can’t decide the course anyway.

In my reading, Montaigne replaces this rigid Stoicism with a penchant for falling into spectacular daydreams about issues of life and death. Perhaps his most stunning feature is how anti-melancholic he remains despite the weight of his preoccupations, as Ciceronian coolness gives way to warm reveries about the things we humans care about but cannot know for certain. This is not to say that Montaigne had some palpably intense joie de vivre (he didn’t), rather that as a Christian humanist he felt the force of life in a powerful way – a force catalyzed by contemplation, reflection, and an ability to perceive variances of light, even in the shades and shadows of existence. He is a thinker who is continually elated by the sunlight that silhouettes clouds.

I just finished Sarah Bakewell’s fantastic biography How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. I cannot recommend the book enough, especially to those who are, like me, interested in both the work and the life, as well as that looming question of how we should live.

Below: Montaigne’s chateau in Bordeaux. His study was in one of the towers.

Montaigne's Château

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‘Through the Haze of Pain’: Robert Kennedy Rises from the Depths

25 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Philosophy

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Aeschylus, American Government, American Politics, Arthur Schlesinger, Bobby Kennedy, campaigns, Camus, Corridors of Grief, existentialism, future, Government, Greek, Greek tragedy, history, JFK, John F. Kennedy, Kennedys, plans, politicians, politics, President, RFK, Rita Dallas, Robert Francis Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and His Times, stoicism

Robert Francis Kennedy

“With all he had striven for smashed in a single afternoon, [Robert] had an overwhelming sense of the fragility and contingency of life. He had never taken plans very seriously in the past. He could not believe in them at all now…

Robert Kennedy at last traveled in that speculative area where doubt lived. He returned from the dangerous journey, his faith intact, but deepened, enriched. From Aeschylus and Camus he drew a sort of Christian stoicism and fatalism: a conviction that man could not escape his destiny, but that this did not relieve him of the responsibility of fulfilling his own best self. He supplemented the Greek image of man against fate with the existentialist proposition that man, defining himself by his choices, remakes himself each day and therefore can never rest. Life was a sequence of risks. To fail to meet them was to destroy a part of oneself.

He made his way through the haze of pain—and in doing so brought other sufferers insight and relief. ‘For the next two and a half years,’ wrote Rita Dallas, his father’s nurse, ‘Robert Kennedy became the central focus of strength and hope for the family…. Despite his own grief and loneliness, he radiated an inner strength that I have never seen before in any other man…. Bobby was the one who welded the pieces back together.’ As his father had said so long before, he would keep the Kennedys together, you could bet.

He was now the head of the family. With his father stricken, his older brothers dead, he was accountable to himself. The qualities he had so long subordinated in the interest of others—the concern under the combativeness, the gentleness under the carapace, the idealism, at once wistful and passionate, under the toughness—could rise freely to the surface. He could be himself at last.”

__________

A passage pulled from Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.

I promise this is the last section from Schlesinger or Dallek that I’ll post — at least for awhile.

RFK / JFKRobert Kennedy FamilyRobert Kennedy and ChildrenRobert Kennedy and daughterJohn F. And Jacqueline Kennedy With Baby Caroline Kennedy

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The Discourses of Epictetus

07 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Epictetus, General Philosophy, Greek philosophy, personality, Socrates, stoicism, Stoics, The Discourses, The Enchiridion, The Handbook of Epictetus, Wisdom

Romans Statue

“Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act toward children, so toward a wife, so toward office, so toward wealth…

But how long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary.

From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.”

__________

From Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher who was born a slave. These words were recorded by his pupil Arrian in Book Two of The Discourses, and were later compiled in The Enchiridion (The Handbook of Epictetus).

Other shards from The Enchiridion worth noting:

“If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, ‘He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.’”

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”

“Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.” 

“Asked, ‘Who is the rich man?’ Epictetus replied, ‘He who is content.’”

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don’t wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other.”

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Do Not Act As If You Were Going to Live Ten Thousand Years

07 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

C.S. Lewis, ethics, Jorge Luis Borges, Marcus Aurelius, Mortality, posterity, Rome, stoicism, The Meditations, Time

Marcus Aurelius“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, at the seashore, and in the mountains; and you tend to desire such things very much. But this is a characteristic of the most common sort of men, for it is in your power whenever you will to choose to retreat into yourself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retreat than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately perfectly tranquil; and I affirm that tranquillity is nothing other than the proper ordering of the mind.

Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.

How much trouble he avoids who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only to what he does himself, that it may be just and pure; or as Agathon says, do not consider the depraved morals of others, but cling to the straight and narrow path without deviating from it.

He who has a powerful desire for posthumous fame does not consider that every one of those who remember him will himself also die very soon; then again also they who have succeeded them, until the whole remembrance shall have been extinguished as it is transmitted through men who foolishly admire and then perish. But suppose that those who will remember are even immortal, and that the remembrance will be immortal, what good will this do you?

Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.”

Marcus Aurelius and Horse

__________

From Book Four of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

A good friend from college, MS, often carries The Meditations in his backpack or back pocket, occasionally glancing at the thin and worn volume whenever he has a spare minute. On a lazy day last Spring, I asked him about the book, and he handed it to me, directing my attention to several dog-eared pages and marked passages — words that are nearly flawless in their logic and stoicism.

It’s impressive that Marcus Aurelius wrote The Meditations in his spare time. He was a statesmen; his philosophical reflections — which espouse self-discipline, virtue, and ethical reflection — came from private moments which he snatched away from a public life. He wrote this in the year 167 CE.

Marcus Aurelius’s understanding of posterity, of the uselessness of being remembered beyond death by men who will themselves die, calls to mind C.S. Lewis’s crisp observation that, “All that is not eternal is eternally useless.”

I especially like the final sentence which analogizes time as a river. It was echoed some eighteen centuries later in Borges’s unforgettable line:

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river…”

Note: I haven’t been writing anything original for this blog for the past week or so, and that’s because I’ve been swamped with writing work for my day job (as a grad student). So recently I’ve just been putting quotes and commentary on here. I apologize for this: at least for now you’re stuck with the words of much greater men.

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