Tuesday, 20 October 2020

ARE YOU STOIC? READ AND FIND OUT!

 

 


Do you think you are stoic? You may be  without knowing. Read this post and find out! 

Stoicism is a school of philosophy that dates back to ancient Greece and Rome. Stoicism was one of the greatest schools of thought which provided answers to anxiety, stress, fear, and troubling.

It’s a philosophy of life that maximizes positive emotions and helps individuals to improve their virtues. In any situation and at any stage of life, Stoicism reminds people of what is truly important, providing practical strategies to get more of what is valuable.

For the Stoics, the universe is a rationally structured and cohesive whole, with each of its parts directed and determined, working together in a unison to some logically dictated end. In a word, the cosmos is itself tending toward something, and tended to by itself in this tending. This cohesive whole has what can be called a sort of seminal rationality, or logos, manifest in the beings which are both part of and inhabit it.

Nature is one of the key concepts within Stoicism, and is founded in this particular interpretation of the cosmos. A thing’s nature is its facility and predilection toward a certain mode of being. For plants, it is vegetative growth and acquiring ends for itself. For animals this likewise is the case, but in additionally the pursuit of actions dictated by their impulses. For the human being, which is endowed with reason and defined by rational action, its nature is to act rationally; however,  there is a choice to act rationally and this acting requires degrees of moral, ethical and physical growth. Therefore man’s end is to live ‘in accordance with reason’, and in doing so both understand the rationality that pervades the universe and to abide by it.



The Stoic sage is one who lives in complete accordance with his own rational nature; the individual practicing Stoic (who is not yet a sage), however, though possessing a rational soul, is subject to various passions. They distract the practitioner from his various duties to self and others and they may also consume the life of the individual if left undealt with (i.e. as is the case with anxiety). Due to their destructive and deleterious nature if left unchecked, they are referred to in Stoic sources as diseases needed to be treated and extirpated from the soul. This process of the extirpation of the passions is the study of philosophy and it’s necessary, not only to promote the health of the soul, but to even approach the ideal of becoming the sage. The Stoic sage, being in a state of apatheia, possesses a fully realized knowledge of the world as it is.

 

The Stoic recognized that virtue was not only something that made a man extrinsically excellent, but that virtue was something that pertained to the inner life and so made a man excellent in his interior life. Thus virtue's intrinsic goodness is not necessarily measured by results, but rather by what is right and good, this was called adiaphora. The Stoic, therefore, came to see virtue as its own reward, irrespective of consequences or happiness. The Stoic saw a great many goods as pre-moral goods to which a sage ought to be indifferent.

Well, if you are thinking this is just old stuff, abstract philosophical reasoning, useless and impractical thoughts, I'll leave you with these words by Marcus Aurelius which may be very useful to face the complicated situation we are living at present:

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

SILVIA  5sc 

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