 | By Peter Catapano Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
By any typical measure — say, modern-day Western capitalist principles — philosophy is useless. Whatever your parents may have wished for you, it was surely not that you grow up to be philosopher. |
Philosophy itself has never answered with any certainty the intractable ethical, social and political questions it raises — What is happiness? War, what is it good for? — and its impracticality has from its very inception been a subject of mockery. |
This point is expressed hilariously in the movie "History of the World, Part 1," when Mel Brooks's "standup philosopher," Comicus, waiting in the Ancient Roman unemployment line, explains his occupation: "I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and meaningful comprehension." Next! |
The mockery may be funny. But is it true? |
Here we are 2,500 years after Socrates. Philosophy was not forced to drink the hemlock or sent off to die. It has survived, not only as an academic discipline, but also as a strand of public discourse. We can't help but philosophize. And it has even found its way into our good old capitalist society. |
Our best-seller lists now include 2,000-year-old men like the Stoic philosophers Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, whose works have been repackaged and repurposed for a modern world hungry for self-improvement, inner peace and personal strength. |
In a guest essay, Nancy Sherman, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown, weighs in on how the popular self-help/life-hack version of Stoicism — complete with "daily digests of Stoic quotes, books and websites packed with Stoic wisdom to kick-start your day, podcasts, broadcasts, online crash courses and more" — misses an essential point about the works of the original Stoics. |
Sherman was first drawn to the discipline when she was asked to develop an ethics course at the U.S. Naval Academy after a cheating scandal that rocked the institution in 1994. Among the military officers and midshipmen she met, she found that the practical reflection and mental discipline of Stoicism, though founded in the third century B.C., still resonated. |
"They felt that a philosophy that dealt with surviving deprivations and hard times was their philosophy," she said in conversation with me last week. After decades of exploring themes of war, trauma and moral injury in her work, her new book, "Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience," makes its own case for the philosophy's relevance. |
It's perhaps not surprising that the Stoicism industry has flourished as the world has been devastated by the coronavirus pandemic. With so many people facing so much hardship, pain and loss, the fortifying and comforting insights of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and others may, even in their simplified, repackaged form, provide some strength for the struggling, or for the bereaved, a balm. And that's not so impractical after all. |
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