Do you think you are stoic? You may be without knowing. Read this post and find out!
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
Mrs micozzi would be proud of you
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