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Thursday November 28th 2019Tim
Candler9
In the 16th
and 17th Centuries more humanist thinkers blended the
Christian tenets with Stoicism. And the principle reason
for this had to do with the Stoic idea of a natural
order, or what they sometimes called Divine Reason. My
own argument would be that the natural order or Divine
Reason are expressions that simply attempt to explain
those parts of our world over which we as individuals
have less, or no control and where we feel most unsafe.
Take for example the more ancient idea of The Fates. On
the one hand they were three Goddesses who weaved our
individual destiny, and to give a narrative of hope,
each Goddess had different personalities ranging from
nice to nasty. Each Goddess had a name and no doubt far
too often the nicer Goddess got lots and lots of
presents on her special day, which really pissed off the
nastier Goddess who only very rarely got a present for
being particularly unpleasant to someone every one
hated. On the other hand The Fates in mythology were
much less motivated, they were three angry blind men,
dour as aging gardeners in the shorter days, randomly
hacking away at the invisible strands that determine our
destiny, a brutal but necessary business. In this
respect for Stoics it was Knowledge that supplied us
with the necessary armor to protect us from reacting
poorly to the shears of the blind men or the moods of
the weavers. Then, when Divine Reason becomes an
Almighty Creator, an all knowing entity, and often he or
she passeth our understanding, a problem arises. Is
Nature fundamentally good or fundamentally evil.
Difficult to tell. One answer has always been an
iteration of good battling evil which reaches a zenith
of absurdity with "Good Guys with Guns, Bad Guys with
Guns." From other branches of understanding there's
Survival of the Fittest.
Past
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By the
end of the 20th Century, in what's called Modern
Stoicism, the Ancient idea of Divine Reason was modified
so as to better fit the templates of thinking, or the
conceptual frameworks, of recent times. In terms of
Knowledge, a great deal has happened in the last 2500
odd years, just look around, yet how to maintain
emotional balance when confronted by that over which we
have no control remains a singular preoccupation in just
the same way as it always has. Modern Stoicism seeks a
clearer understanding of the nature of Divine Reason in
scientific areas such as cognition, psychology and so
on. These are areas where the language used is the
language of science. In other words The Fates as weavers
of destinies, or The Fates as bad tempered blind men,
might well be up there somewhere, but they are
interpreted not through the Knowledge of myth, but
through a Knowledge built around how our minds
physically interact with our daily life. It's also the
case that very often from these recent explorations of
mind it emerges that we people are motivated to find a
meaning in life, without which we are more prone to an
unhappiness, frustration or whatever. Worth noting it's
not The Meaning, it's A Meaning. And here you can never
really get away from that ancient prophet who fortunate
enough to find himself in conversation with his God,
asked "What are you. what shall I call you?" Clearly not
a question God had ever been asked before. On that
occasion God was a Stoic, his most unsatisfactory reply
was, "I am THAT I am." And you can kind of see in the
Divine answer a Being in Progress, a going somewhere,
who knows where, trust me, even though I'm eternal, I'm
as adrift as everyone else, so just get over yourself.
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