The Stoic in Me

People often don’t immediately understand my position relative to my two partners, Rob and Chris.  After all, Rob is “Ecoman” and Chris “The Skeptic”.  On the one hand, we have an approach to understanding the world from the perspective of intuition, mythos, poetry.  While on the other hand, there is an approach based upon the perspective of reason, logos, mathematics.  So, is a third perspective one that seeks the middle ground between these two opposing poles?  Well, no, not really.

My response is certainly not palatable to a culture that is increasingly polarized – it may sound too wishy-washy; too weak.  But I think the two opposing poles can be understood as one.  Even two sides of a coin are actually one by virtue of being connected along its edge.  And in all fairness to Rob and Chris, their perspectives are not as rigid as the roles they play.  Anyhow, my starting point for explaining my approach starts with the Stoics.

The Stoics are generally perceived to be people who don’t show emotion, and may even be rather distant and frigid.  At least this is what I thought.  That is, until I began to “sort of” consider myself one.

Stoicism, for those who don’t know, is a practical philosophy.  It was meant to be applied and used, as opposed to more modern forms of philosophy that stress contemplation and abstract questions.  The Stoics were in a way, proto-self-help gurus.

Stoics were a bunch of men and women – which was revolutionary at the time – who hung out on the stoop of a building overlooking the Agora in ancient Athens.  The Greek for “stoop” is stoa, and this is where the name derives.  The discussions were lead by Zeno in public, which is also something new at the time, as other philosophical discussions were usually held in private.  In a sense, this was also the proto-open-source platform.

One of the foundational elements of the philosophy is that life is uncertain.  And this uncertainty can lead to some pretty awful circumstances, emotions and suffering.  So what can a person do?  Accept it.  Accept the fact that life is uncertain, and you use this uncertainty as a tool to strategize your responses to the circumstances of life that are beyond your control.

One can use reason (logos) to determine what is within your control or not.  Using reason, one can see that negative emotions arise from a misperception of what is under your control vs. what isn’t.  Making this distinction, the Stoics see the only thing that one can control is one’s reaction to events.  Some may recognize this in “Logos Therapy” as developed by the Nazi camp survivor, Victor Frankl.

Now, this is where the parsing of my previous admission is important.  I do consider myself to “sort of” be a Stoic, but I also adapt it to include an approach that they would not have used.  Although I admire the notion of controlling one’s reaction to events, Stoicism uses a form of reason that I choose not to use.  I prefer Aristotle’s and Socrates’ form of logic, instead.  Socrates used his dialectical  method to pursue a very interesting goal:  to push the boundaries of reason to the point where they are transcended.  In essence, the Socratic method was meant to exhaust one’s mental faculties to the point where the participant must confess that they actually knew very little for certain, and at that point the individual was understood to have transcended the limits of human knowledge and come face to face with divinity.  This is logos in a very specific relationship to mythos – neither one of domination nor submission, but equal partners in understanding just what is going on here.

So, what the heck does this have to do with have sustainability?  Seneca, a towering figure in Stoicism, stated way back in the early 3^rd century B.C.:

“Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as to not injure future ones.”

To me this sounds very similar to the 1987 Brundtland Commission:

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”

In a world that increasingly seems uncertain because of the forces of climate, economics, politics and globalization, Stoicism offers valuable insight.