In recent months, my wife and I have been beginning to travel in a class B van. We are taking short trips (learning the ropes) with longer trips in the offing. We rely on GPS a lot. I guess that’s not very different from most travelers. However, the more we deviate from the heavily populated and traveled routes, the less ubiquitous and solid WiFi and cell coverage we find. GPS becomes somewhat unreliable. When the GPS is intermittent you must plan for it to be unreliable. We have discovered that we need an old-school paper map. For those of a certain age, a paper map provides turn-by-turn instructions via a static interface. It also provides a sense of the overall broad journey; an early version of a search albeit manual. Chapter 2 titled “A Roadmap For The Journey“ is a paper roadmap for the remainder of How To Be A Stoic.
The chapter begins by providing a history of Stoicism. The first time I read this part of the book I was fascinated by the sweep of ancient and modern history of Stoicism. While I am more sanguine about history at this point, the explosion of philosophies (separate from metaphysics and religion) in Ancient Greece and Rome still holds my attention. Philosophical camps such as the cynics, academics, and epicureans (a small sample) interacted and influenced each other. Regardless of approaches, each focused on the same goal: finding a way to live that yielded a flourishing existence.
The framework of Stoicism is premised on the idea that “in order to live a good life, one has to understand two things, the nature of the world and the nature of human reasoning.” This framework contributes to a practical philosophy attuned to being more useful in human life than in a theoretical context. This makes stoicism a perfect philosophy for leading change in any type of organization.
As part of the framework that underpins Stoicism, Stoics focus on three broad areas of inquiry: physics, logic, and ethics. The definitions of these terms are a little different than they are today which caused me to need to read this section multiple times. For example, physics includes not only the physical world, like the natural sciences but includes metaphysics and theology. These were all related to the Greek understanding of the world. The evolution of words and ideas as we learn from ancient times to modern requires constant attention. To the ancients, the movement of the stars was no different than the activities of the gods.
The areas of inquiry are part of a relationship between the areas, three disciplines, and four cardinal virtues. Desire informs us what is and is not proper to want. The discipline of action tells us how to behave in the world. Assent tells us how to react to situations (aka Stoic Mindfulness). Each of the areas of inquiry yields discipline. Desire is derived from physics supporting the virtues of courage and temperance. Action is derived from ethics fostering the virtue of justice. Assent is derived from ethics and the virtue of wisdom. The relationship between the categories provides a roadmap to explore Stoicism in the rest of the book.
Buy a copy of How To Be A Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci and read along.
Week 1: Logistics and Opening Thoughts
Week 2: The Unstraightforward Path
