The Stoic Caricature, From Universal Reason to Masculine Ideal

“ There were in Stoicism two serious defects which made it impossible for it to become the guide and rule of life for the multitude. First, it was too intellectually exalted and cold to make appeal to the common people. ”

“ At this point, if not before, we feel that Stoicism is doing violence to the nobler feelings of our nature, and are prepared to break with it. Stoicism is too hard and cold and individualistic to teach us our duty, or even to leave us free to act out our best inclinations, toward [Pg 77] our neighbour. ”

“ Such a philosophy is fatal to the drama. It allows no room for human sentiment or human weakness; the most virtuous affections are chilled and robbed of their attractiveness: there are no gradations of temperament, intellect, or character: pathos disappears. The Stoic ideal was a being in whom the natural impulses and desires should be completely subjected to the laws of pure reason. It tends in its intensity to a narrowness, an abstract unreality which is unfavourable to the development of the more human virtues. ”

“ Divine providence, though frequently dwelt upon, signified little more for the Stoic than destiny or fate. Harmony with nature was simply a sense of proud self-sufficiency. Stoicism is the glorification of reason, even to the extent of suppressing all emotion. Sin is unreason, and salvation lies in an external control of the passions—in indifference and apathy begotten of the subordination of desire to reason. ”

“ This Stoic fashion, though efficacious and heroic enough in its place and time, is, it must be confessed, only possible as an habitual mood of the soul to narrow and unsympathetic characters. It proceeds altogether by exclusion. If I am a Stoic, the goods I cannot appropriate cease to be my goods, and the temptation lies very near to deny that they are goods at all. ”

“ To make the higher part of our nature our whole nature is not to restore but to mutilate humanity, and this mutilation has never been attempted without producing grave evils. As philanthropists, the Stoics, through their passion for unity, were led to the extirpation of those emotions which nature intended as the chief springs of benevolence. As speculative philosophers, they were entangled by the same desire in a long train of pitiable paradoxes. ”

“ If his own misfortunes excited no passionate grief, if his own injuries called forth no lively resentment, reason, or a regard to the general rules which determined what was right and fit to be done, would commonly, they thought, be too weak to prompt him to avoid the one or to beat off the other. The Stoics, on the contrary, demanded the most perfect apathy, and regarded every emotion which could in the smallest degree disturb the tranquillity of the mind, as the effect of levity and folly. ”

“ Thus if one man possesses a stoical apathy of soul, acts independent of the opinion of the world, and fulfills every duty with mathematical exactness, you must not expect that man to be greatly influenced by the weakness of pity, or the partialities of friendship ”

“ The Stoic Philosophy shows us all which can be most elevated in active life; but it makes abstraction of the animal nature, and absolutely fails to recognize all which belongs to the life of the spirit. Its practical morality is beyond the forces of humanity. Christianity alone embraces the whole Man. It dissimulates none of the sides of his nature, and avails itself of his miseries and his weakness in order to conduct him to his end in showing him all the want that he has of a succor more exalted. ”

“ Springing up in Greece as an offshoot of the Socratic philosophy just after the death of Alexander, Stoicism became the creed of the select spirits of the age. The crowning virtues of the moral ideal it held aloft were self-control, imperturbability, the patient endurance of the ills of life. Amidst the wreck of worlds one must stand unmoved and erect.
In the very rigid restraint it placed upon the appetites, passions, and emotions the Stoic ideal of character differed widely from the ordinary Greek ideal. ”

“ The ideal explained in the Stoical philosophy is the most complete development of practical reason in the true and genuine sense of the word; it is the highest summit to which man can attain by the mere use of his reason, and in it his difference from the brutes shows itself most distinctly. For the ethics of Stoicism are originally and essentially, not a doctrine of virtue, but merely a guide to a rational life, the end and aim of which is happiness through peace of mind. ”

“ Therefore, good and evil can be only those things which depend entirely upon our moral purpose, what we generally call, but from the Stoic's point of view a little inaccurately, our free will; they cannot consist in any of those things which others can do either to us or for us. Man's highest good lies in the reason, which distinguishes him from other animals. This reason shows itself in assent or dissent, in desire or aversion, and in choice or refusal, [26] which in turn are based upon an external impression, φαντασία, that is, a prime datum, a "constant," beyond our power to alter. ”

“ The Stoics, arising when the Greek city life was decaying, contemplated man as an individual, and undertook to show him how to lead a good life. A good life means a 'life according {100} to nature,' or 'according to reason': the reason of the individual being a part of the universal reason or God. And as a help in living according to reason, the Stoics laid stress upon the conscience in each man, i.e. a faculty lying behind his ordinary surface self, passing judgement according to reason upon his actions, and 'making cowards of us all,' inasmuch as we all do wrong. ”

“ Now since man is of course a part of the cosmos, the Stoic argued that in him the world-reason naturally expresses itself; it is that which guides him, in fact it is his reason, the directing portion of his soul. And it is the possession of this soul, itself a part of the universal reason, which makes it possible for man to live in accord with Nature, for he attains that aim whenever his soul is in agreement with the universal soul which is its source. In this way the Stoic, for all his materialism, emphasized the divine nature of man and the community of human reason with God. ”

“ The saving grace is a sense of reality. The virtuous man is not one who remakes the world, or draws upon it for his private uses; even less one who rails against it, or complains that it has used him ill. He is rather one who recognizes that there is but one really valid claim, that of the universe itself. But he not only submits to this claim on account of its superiority; he makes it his own. The discipline of Stoicism is the regulation of the individual will to the end that it may coincide with the universal will. ”

“ Thrown back upon themselves, by violence or the lack of interests, the souls of mankind studied the inner life more earnestly, and the essential qualities of its virtue and greatness.
Hence the new characteristics of stoicism—the preaching tone which took the place of philosophical discussion, a science of life unknown until then, and a peculiar art of disentangling the most obscure sophisms of vice and weakness, but above all a stern tenderness for humanity. The philosopher is no longer a logician who makes dissertations, nor a fine speaker aiming at applause. ”

“ The ἀπαθεια of stoicism was an energetic acting against passion; and, if our word apathy means this, let us make use of it in characterising that philosophy. But we apprehend that our word apathy signifies an indifference, a passiveness, a listless torpidity of character, which either avoids the presence of the passions, or feels it not; in short, an unconsciousness of passion, a state diametrically opposed to the apathy of stoicism, which consists in the most vital consciousness of the passions, and their consequent subjugation thereby. ”

“ That this was the sense in which the Stoics understood the term apathy we have their authority for saying, as given to us by Diogenes Laertius. He says, "According to the Stoics, the wise man is apathetic; that is, is free from perturbation, by being superior to error or false judgment; not, as many people (absurdly) interpret their statement, by being superior to all sense, emotion, feeling, or affection. The Stoics, indeed, have specially guarded themselves against this misinterpretation of their doctrine. ”

“ Otherwise, the Stoic’s sense of man’s subordination in the universal scheme, and of the all-ruling destiny, brings him into touch with our own philosophical views, and his doctrine concerning the “sociable” nature of man, of the reciprocal obligations which exist between all who live, are entirely congenial to the better spirit of our day. His fatalism is not mere resignation; one has not only to accept one’s lot, whatever it is, as inevitable, but to accept it with joy, with praises. ”

“ Man exists for society, and virtue is impossible apart from the social state. So Stoic teaching inculcated subordination of self to more general interests—to family, country, mankind. It taught that all creatures are "children of one father,"48 and duty was owed to all. We may hardly, however, speak of this as "altruism," in the sense of unselfish benevolence or self-sacrificing goodness; since, in the general Stoic philosophy, not the sentiment of sympathetic helpfulness, but of victorious superiority to pain, was the temper fostered. Love was almost submerged in the stern spirit of duty. ”

“ Pleasure and pain are, however, really accidents, to be met by the wise man with indifference. He alone is free who acknowledges the absolute supremacy of reason and makes himself independent of earthly desires. This life of freedom is open to all: since all men are members of one body. The slave may be as free as the consul, and in every station of life each may make the world serve him by living in harmony with it.
There is a certain sublimity in the ethics of Stoicism which has always appealed to noble minds. ”

“ Moreover the Stoic could not limit his view to the small political unit or to the society contained therein; but inasmuch as each individual possesses a soul that is a part of the cosmic reason, all mankind is a community of reasoning beings, and every man is a brother of every other. [231] Thus Stoicism gave a philosophic basis to the idea of the brotherhood of man. It taught also that external circumstances, birth, wealth, high position, physical freedom or slavery, are indifferent matters; that the slave if a philosopher is the equal of the philosophic emperor. ”

“ Friendship rather than love, hospitality rather than charity, magnanimity rather than tenderness, clemency rather than sympathy, are the characteristics of ancient goodness. The Stoics, who carried the suppression of the emotions farther than any other school, laboured with great zeal to compensate the injury thus done to the benevolent side of our nature, by greatly enlarging the sphere of reasoned and passionless philanthropy. They taught, in the most emphatic language, the fraternity of all men, and the consequent duty of each man consecrating his life to the welfare of others. ”

“ It was a necessary thing to assert the value and dignity of the mere individual man against the despotisms, but to isolate the man from mankind and from the world of nature was a fatal mistake. Of course, the Stoic did not do this in theory, for he insisted on the polity of gods and men, the "one city," [115] and the duty of the "citizen of the universe" (kósmios) —a man is not an independent object ”

“ For the man born in a time when the nobler instincts have been deadened by the lust of gold and power and sensual excess, the virtuous will can only be won by a hard struggle.
Confronted with the facts of life, and fired with a passion to win men to a higher law, the later Stoicism had in some points to soften the rigid lines of earlier theory. The severe idealism of the great doctors was a mere dream of an impossible detachment, the inexorable demand of a pitiless logic. ”

“ The affections are as essential to man as his reason. It is a poor substitute for the warm, sweet, tender ties that bind together husband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend,—this freezing of people together through their common relation to the universal law. I suppose that is why, in all the history of Stoicism, though college girls usually have a period of flirting with the Stoic melancholy of Matthew Arnold, no woman was ever known to be a consistent and steadfast Stoic. Indeed a Stoic woman is a contradiction in terms. ”

“ She remains, in such a world of compulsion and outward conformity, the subject of the deep monologue of the lonely wanderer or the chance prey of any hunter, the dark secret of the chamber or the daily talk of the old men and children at the university. No one dare fulfil the law of philosophy in himself; no one lives philosophically, with that single-hearted virile faith that forced one of the olden time to bear himself as a Stoic, wherever he was and whatever he did, if he had once sworn allegiance to the Stoa. ”

“ Let us never forget that the difference between man and woman is not merely of physical conformation. It is psychical. "Woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse." She is governed far more by instinct, by impulse, by affections, than by logic, by purpose, by principles. For her, materialism means more utter ruin than for man, for it extinguishes the ideal which is her one light of life. As it destroys the sense of duty in man, so is it fatal to pure love in woman. ”

“ It is not always the philosopher who makes the best out of the saddest moments in life. Women can be philosophic; the little old white-haired lady was philosophic then, as she stood gazing out into the empty darkness. And yet, no woman is really a philosopher. ”

“ It also preached the obligation to universal benevolence on the principle that all men are brethren. Regarding virtue as the sole end, to be gained mainly by habit and training, the Stoics furthermore succeeded in reforming matrimonial life as well as the conceptions about women, In these efforts they were aided later on by an ethical movement of still greater power, namely Christianity. ”

“ We can better leave the "sphere" of woman to the future than confine it in the chains of the past. Words change nothing. Prejudices are none the less prejudices because we vaguely call them "nature," and prate about what nature has forbidden, when we only mean that the thing we are opposing has not been hitherto done. ”

“ It is this attitude of women that is gradually disappearing with the awakening of a new sense of themselves as individuals. Their changed attitude towards each other—the recognition of their own values, and the growing realization that only in solidarity can any permanent impression be made on the old conception of woman as an inferior, dependent creature, useful for one purpose only—constitutes the most marked difference between their present social condition and that of the past. ”

“ Why should good women’s lives be wrecked for a convention? Why in the blind following of some society fetish should life lose its charm, its possibilities? Why should love eat its heart out, in vain? The time will come when women will not be afraid to speak to men, as they should speak, as free and equal. Surely if a woman is to be the equal and lifelong companion of a man, the closest to him—nay, the only one really close to him: the mother of his children—she should be free at the very outset to show her inclination to him just as he would to her. Don’t be frightened, Auntie dear ”

“ They forget that the right to be what she wishes entails often for the woman, as for the man, the obligation to suppress that which she really is by nature and feeling. They forget that the personality has deeper claims than the right to work. They overlook the infinite variety of shades of feeling, thought and character which caused the demand of solidarity in opinions and actions, among the women active in the woman question, to degenerate into suppression of woman's individuality. ”