Helen's Quest [Part I]

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I received an email from reader Helen last week. Helen was asking for clarity on a range of principles and ideas in Stoicism. I responded via email but realised after she replied to my reply with a request for even more clarity, that the information I was providing would probably make a good standalone edition of Practical Stoicism in Print. This month, then, we’ll work through Helen’s questions one at a time and see if doing so provides all of us with a better understanding of Stoicism in general.

Helen’s questions were, and I’m rephrasing them a bit as Helen’s email wasn’t written with the knowledge that I would ask to share them publicly (hope I’ve reworded these well, Helen!):

1. If Nature is Virtuous, and everything it does is virtuous, and human beings are both a product of and a part of Nature, how can any human behaviour not be both in alignment with Nature and, thus, virtuous?
   

2. Is acting in accordance with our own personal nature (small “n”), virtuous when doing so would seem to encourage vicious behaviour?
   

3. How do we determine what is in accordance with our own nature?

These are heavy questions and, as a result, I have no doubt this month’s editions will be extra interesting. Thanks, Helen. Prepare your rational faculty, prokoptòn!

“If Nature is Virtuous (and humans are a product of Nature) how can any human behaviour be vicious?”

Nature (capital “N”) is the “God” of Stoicism.

God (for the Stoics) is synonymous with the Universe, the Cosmos, and, sometimes, the Logos.

The Stoic God is not a being, it doesn’t listen to prayers, it doesn’t have a church or a chosen people, and it doesn’t want your donations. The Stoic God is wholly natural and is, physically, the totality of all things.

Every rock, every star, every human being, every episode of the Simpsons, every accidental fart in every cramped elevator, every apple pie your grandmother ever baked, every embarrassing thing your parents ever did, all of this is a part of the Stoic God.

Beyond that, the Stoic God is the phenomenon set into motion at the birth of the Universe which we call the causal chain.

The Stoic God is also the stability and seemingly rational design of the (seemingly homeostatic — or, at least, homeostatic enough) system we all reliably exist within and depend on every day.

Lastly, the Stoic God is what the Stoics would have called, “Fate” (the things that happen).

All of that completely not-supernatural stuff, are various aspects and/or parts of the Stoic God.

Helen’s question forces me to take an axe to any potential woo-woo supernaturalism surrounding the Stoic concept of God

While there is nothing supernatural about the Stoic God, more spiritually inclined contemporary Stoics have a tendency to talk about it in a very “on the bubble” sort of way. To the extent that it’s not too difficult to get the idea that the Stoic God is some sort of cosmic thinking, planning, plotting, benevolent space mind/soul that has a particular concern for humans. But this is wrong.

The Stoic God is not an entity with plans. I’ve written out this before and am reminding you of it now because of what I will write next.

Nature is insurmountable… it’s also infallible

If the laws of Nature (and/or nature) don’t allow for something, then that something cannot be made manifest through sheer will (nor any other force).

Nothing that can’t happen, won’t.

Everything that can happen, might.

Anything that will happen, won’t be known until it has happened.

Anything that has happened, cannot be undone.

These are the self-evident truths that gave rise to the popularized (not Stoic canon) saying “Amor Fati” – or, love thy fate. Though, in truth, this is just cool-sounding (probably dogleg in origin) Latin shorthand for accepting both the limitations and realities imposed by Nature and persisting in our pursuit of moral goodness anyway.

Nature is capable of giving rise to all manner of unvirtuous things – but probably only if you’re being too human-centric in your understanding and framing of Virtue.

What do I mean by that?

There’s a moment in an interview, and older interview, with Stephen Fry where Fry talks about the cruelness of the Abrahamic God by explaining the lifecycle of a rather nasty parasite:

It would be, and is, very difficult to parse the concept of a supernatural God who:

1. Created the entire Universe just to create human beings

2. Is solely concerned with the well-being and behavior of those human beings, but who also

3. Created cancer, AIDS, cholera, and a whole host of other things that one might say are incredibly cruel devices for testing one’s faith

And faith in what, exactly? Well, here, in the Abrahamic tradition: a supernatural God who, all things being equal, seems petty, capricious, and insecure.

But what if the Abrahamic faith traditions were just trying to personalise the Stoic views of God, Nature, and the acceptance of Fate? What if the Stoic God was too abstract for most people to understand and incorporate into their behaviour and life?

The Stoics didn’t feel that their “God” (the Cosmos/Nature) could do no wrong so much as they felt God could do nothing illogical.

Is it though?

Once we stop using human well-being as the yardstick by which we measure what is morally appropriate and logically sound (of “God” to do), it’s a lot less difficult to understand how and why they felt and thought this.

Understanding God as supernatural and human-centric makes belief in God difficult.

Understanding God as natural and whole-system-centric makes disbelief in God really quite difficult.

The Ancient Stoics didn’t believe that the Cosmos favoured them in any way (though some Traditional Stoics will argue with this, citing second-hand accounts by critics of Stoicism as their primary proof). Instead, I think the Ancient Stoics believed that the logical nature of the Universe meant that everything within it had a chance to embody its full potential — even though they did not believe that everything would, unfailingly, embody its full potential.

“Full potential” looks different for everything that exists.

Rocks have a “full potential”, planets too, and trees and mushrooms, I’d wager, but none of us humans are capable of knowing what those full potentials are or whether they’ll be reached by those things. We only know that those things are free to exist and that such existence means, at least, an opportunity to flourish (completely) in their own way.

“In their own way” means “according to their nature” (small “n”).

Everything that exists has a nature, whether that’s a rock, a mushroom, or a human being. Lowercase “n” nature, in this case, refers, at least partially, to that “full potential” I mentioned a moment ago.

There’s a natural expression that comes out of things that, in most cases, isn’t a choice.

A tree doesn’t choose to do tree things; it just does tree things. But perhaps parasites do parasite things, and that tree (doing tree things) can’t flourish as a result of parasites doing parasite things to its leaves and root system. The tree doesn’t flourish, but the parasite does. Both had the opportunity, only one was able to realise it.

This isn’t “God’s will”, it’s the reality that comes to exist in a Universe where everything has an opportunity to live up to its potential.

Humans, however, do seem very different

Humans, prior to a certain point in our evolution, probably did spend all their time just “human-ing.”

Eventually, however, and it probably had something to do with the increasing number of neurons in our brains as we evolved (we have 16 billion presently, and the next most-neuron-rich brain is the Chimpanzee’s with 8 billion), we gained a seemingly unique ability: the ability to choose to act in ways other than how our base nature compelled us.

Now there was what we felt compelled by our base nature to do, and also countless other options that we could elect to choose to do that were not in our base nature to do.

This leads to a worthwhile question, one that Helen is asking without (I think) knowing she’s asking it: are humans an aberration of Nature? Have we, through a “mistake” of Nature, escaped the confines of “human nature” (base nature) and become like Agent Smith or Neo in The Matrix?

No, we’re not an aberration of Nature

If I’m right about that, then humans reaching such a state is both not unnatural (and so not an aberration of Nature) and part of what degree of flourishing “made sense” for humans at the time such opportunity presented itself.

Not an accident, nor a divine decree from some alien space Jesus, only what happened when the opportunity for it to happen, within the context of the causal chain, came to pass.

As a consequence of this, let’s call it our “degree of thinking power”, human nature changed.

At the “dawn of man”, human nature was one way.

At the dawn of someday, some many thousands of years later, human nature was not the same. It was changed.

A human living in accordance with their evolutionarily outmoded (base) nature today, is actively choosing not to embrace their evolved nature – and to avoid living in accordance with what we know to be our new nature is to avoid living in accordance with Nature.

However, that active choice might, in reality, be a passive one.

Role models and teachers are among those who first inform a person ignorant of “XYZ”, that “XYZ” both exists and is worth considering as an idea.

A human being living in accordance with their evolutionarily outmoded nature may choose otherwise once a role model, teacher, or someone else has presented the idea and value of living in accordance with one’s evolved nature

This is why I do what I do, which some people might think of as a form of non-ecclesiastic proselytizing. I’m the Stoic version of a Jehova Witness knocking on your door to ask, “Would you like to hear the Good word of Zeno today?”

I’m trying to be funny, but, in a way, I suppose it’s true.

We Stoics have an idea about the best way to live and conduct ourselves – and it’s absolutely a preferred indifferent that everyone might get on the same page as us, but what would it say about our character if we didn’t share the philosophy we believe might save the world from ignorance and vice?

Where we differ from the missionaries and proselytizers of organized religion, is that there’s no punishment or reward for our “conversions” – just the opportunity to talk about Stoicism in useful ways when we feel doing so is in alignment with our pursuit of Virtue (in fact, this publication is an example of my answer to “what is appropriate for me to do as someone who wants more people to consider Stoicism as a life philosophy?”).

To wrap up this first of Helen’s questions, here’s a quick review:

• Nature is insurmountable and infallible

• Base nature is human nature only if the human is unaware of their evolved nature – but since ignorance is vice, the expression of base nature is vicious regardless of whether or not the human is unaware of their evolved nature

• Alignment with our evolved nature is alignment with Nature

Thanks for reading this week, I hope it wasn’t too heavy and that it provided you with some clarity on the topic. For the next few weeks, I’ll answer an additional question from Helen in each new edition.

Thanks again for reading. Take care.