dead stoics society

Simon Critchley has as eye for the bizarre and unseemly side of philosophy.  In today’s reading we learn that Diogenes abused himself in the marketplace, saying he wished it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing his stomach. It’s not too surprising to learn that he never married, but it is dispiriting to think of him as the original poster boy for cosmopolitanism.* Maybe he just meant to abuse public decency laws everywhere in the world… like fellow Cynics Hipparchia (herself a disappointing “first female philosopher” who was bettered by Hypatia**) and Crates. I do like his comment on Plato’s metaphysics: The table and cup I see, but I do not see tableness and cupness.

*Carl Sagan’s notion of what it means to be a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the cosmos, is far more inspiring. We speak for Earth:

Also noted by Critchley:

>There is no more relevant ancient philosopher for our time than Epicurus, who said “when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city… living well and dying well are one and the same.”

>For Seneca, anxiety is caused by fear for the future… The philosopher enjoys a long life because he does not worry over its shortness. He lives in the present… the only immortality that philosophy can promise is to permit us to inhabit the present without concern for the future.

>For Stoics, like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, the human being is a compound of soul and body. But soul for the Stoics is “divine breath.” At death it is rejoins the “divine macrocosm”– not unlike the Taoist image of soul as a drop re-absorbed by Mother Sea.

>Epictetus, an early exponent of self-reliance, said we are “disturbed not by things but by the opinions which we have of things”… If we keep death constantly before our eyes and in our mouths, then our terror of it and our attachment to worldly things will fall away.

>Marcus Aurelius said “live each day as though one’s last”… Death is only a thing of terror for those unable to live in the present.

But, crucially: “living in the present” is not the same as not caring about the future. Real cosmopolitans care. We may cultivate an attitude of indifference towards our personal, individual deaths, but the prospective, premature,  self-inflicted death of our species would be something to mourn. It’s also– and this may be un-Stoical– something to deplore and to resist, while we’re still here to do it.

*Sagan also composed the best tribute I’ve seen to Hypatia, who said in a most Saganesque moment: To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing.

Sagan’s Cosmos can be found here.

Tags: Carl Sagan, cosmopolitanism, Cosmos, Diogenes the Cynic, Hypatia, Simon Critchley, Stoics