The Cosmic Viewpoint

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Life can get hectic, fast, often, and out of nowhere. It is during such times that our commitment to whatever philosophy we subscribe, is truly tested. Do we have the courage of our convictions? Can we practice what we preach?

In this week’s edition we’re going to talk about the Stoic exercise of “taking the view from above” — also known as the Cosmic viewpoint. Before that, though, you might be interested in knowing that a new episode of the Practical Stoicism podcast is out today. If you don’t already listen, consider checking it out. It is unique content, not a repurposing of the content here. I feel certain you’ll like it if you give it a try.

Right. Let’s get started.

The Cosmic Viewpoint

Imagine you’re married. Imagine, further, that your spouse has just asked for a divorce. Finally, imagine you have two younger children who are going to be caught up in all that this divorce will entail.

In addition to these slices of life-altering life, you’re performance at work has been underwhelming lately (or so your boss tells you) and you’re nervous about the future of your career, and, just to make it extra stressful, tonight, mere hours after learning that your marriage will be ending, all the in-laws are coming over for Christmas dinner.

Oh, didn’t I say? All this is happening on Christmas Day.

I think even the “sage-iest” of sages would pop like the mango pearls in their bubble tea under such mounting and serious pressure.

You’ve perhaps heard that a “Stoic” way to respond to such stress is to adopt the so-called “cosmic viewpoint.”

The idea being that some relief can be found by remembering that, in the grandest of grand schemes, the goings on in our lives don’t amount to much more than, to quote my father, “a fart in a windstorm”.

Wonderfully down-to-earth fellow, my father.

This is him, by the way ⬇️

He’s not mad, this is just how he poses when I tell him I’m going to take his photo. I think we all hope we can hold our middle fingers up with this kind of disinterested bravado when we’re 80 🙄

But maybe the Cosmic Viewpoint isn’t what we think it is

I don’t know that the point of Marcus’s words here were to encourage us (or himself — remember, Meditations was a journal) to reduce the mattering or importance of our struggles to laughable unimportant nonsense. It doesn’t seem like a particularly Stoic thing to do (with the circles of concern in mind) to attempt to reduce the mattering of something in this way.

I think, rather, that the Cosmic Viewpoint is meant to encourage us to see our struggles as part of the rational execution of time — rational as it is arising within a rational, Logos-centric, Cosmos.

Not because it is “god’s plan”, that’s not what I’m suggesting, but because, given the Stoic’s ideas of fate of determinism, anything which happens happens because it must (not for a reason, but because it could have happened no other way given the conditions leading up to it).

So we’re adopting the Cosmic viewpoint to remember that this, whatever this is, is a part of something intrinsically rational.

This, no doubt, will make the Cosmic viewpoint far less palatable to some of us — and for at least one obvious reason:

How could [these terrible things that are happening to us] be rational or logical?

Anyone who has ever criticized Abraham’s Yahweh will hear, in any such suggestion, a strong echo of the Christian advice that we see everything as part of god’s graceful plan — that we should place our trust in him because he always has our best interests in mind.

This is, of course, something that all of us, atheist, theist, or otherwise, can confidently agree is a pretty difficult thing to hear when we are (or someone we care for and love is) suffering.

Our proximity to a struggle isn’t the measure of its mattering (to us, or anyone else)

In the Circles of Concern, the self/mind is more distal to friends than it is to family, but does that reduction in proximity have any influence on the degree to which the suffering of a friend matters?

No.

What it does have influence over (or, rather, what it reminds us we have to figure out) is how we ought to go about expressing that care, as concern, within the hyper-personal context of having many things to concern ourselves with and a truly limited amount of time with which to express that concern.

No matter how distal our problems are from the “Cosmos circle”, they cannot be said not to matter — so the point of the Cosmic Viewpoint cannot be to reframe our concerns as being insignificant, unimportant, or, ultimately, silly. Such advice would be useless and, in most cases, even if unintentionally so, cruel.

How to properly utilize the Cosmic Viewpoint

The Cosmic Viewpoint is a reminder of a few things:

1. That we are part of a very, very large whole

2. That our struggles, and specifically how we cope with them, must be framed with the knowledge of appropriate concern given our place within that whole

3. That our struggles (whatever they may be) have arrived as part of a sequence of events that could not have been otherwise, cannot be changed, and, since they directly involve us, present a nexus at which we must choose our way forward, and

4. That, as with everything, time will eventually rob these concerns of urgency and rob us of the opportunity to navigate them justly

I believe that this is the proper use of the Cosmic Viewpoint and that, having utilized it in this way, one returns to one’s struggles not with some vague new feeling of not caring as much (in the style of Ron Livingston’s character in Office Space), but, instead, with a refreshed motivation and vigor to navigate their struggles justly and appropriately.

Thanks for reading, enjoy the rest of your week, and I’ll see you next time.

-Tanner