Stoicism, The Cool-Headed Philosophy For Our Overheated Times

–Essay–

PARIS — Across the globe, violence is on the rise. Wars, massacres, terrorist attacks… Not to mention the endless barrage of information that swamps our minds or the looming environmental catastrophes like the melting of the Arctic ice pack… In such challenging times, we have every right to ask ourselves what moral philosophy we should adopt. Should we rebel, engage, turn away, despair?

In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel identifies a doctrine particularly suited to “a time of universal fear and servitude”: stoicism, the path to a freedom that “always comes immediately from itself and returns in the pure universality of thought.” In other words, freedom is independent of external circumstances.

History seems to agree with Hegel. Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor, spent most of his reign on the battlefield, protecting Rome from invaders. He knowingly recommended building an “inner citadel” to take refuge from attacks while accepting the inevitability of events and opening up to the present, the only time that truly exists.

Montaigne made himself the heir to the Roman Stoics in the 16th century, at a time when society was torn apart by civil wars and damaged by the plague; here again, the aim was to create a “back room” where one could cultivate one’s inner self. And it’s no coincidence that Stefan Zweig dedicated his last biography to Montaigne. Exiled in Brazil, devastated by a Second World War that drove him to suicide, the Austrian writer in turn sought an inner asylum “in times when the masses are gripped by madness”.

This turning inwards, this distancing of passions, does not imply withdrawal from the world, as in Buddhism or Epicureanism. Marcus Aurelius repelled the Parthians and the Marcomanni, Montaigne became mayor of Bordeaux, and Zweig, in his memoirs, The World of Yesterday, uttered a poignant cry of rage against barbarism.

Michel Foucault’s analysis of stoicism showed how “self-concern” shaped the citizen, by establishing the individual’s sovereignty over himself. Controlling one’s emotions and thoughts, refraining from tweeting hot-headed reactions and ruminating on one’s judgments are all conditions for keeping a clear head and acting with dignity in the city.

Life must go on, as usual

One might say that all this philosophy leaves us quite unprepared for the intense confrontation in the Middle East or the horror of Islamist extremists killing schoolchildren. But maybe not. Stoicism is an eminently practical school of thought, so rich in practical advice that it’s up to each and every one of us to put it into practice. Here are some examples.

Life must go on, as usual

How do you react to an act of terrorism? By continuing to live exactly as before, says the stoic. By not giving the criminal the honor of upsetting our way of life or perverting our values. From this point of view, the most stoic political reaction to terrorism I know of was Margaret Thatcher’s after the IRA bomb attack on her Brighton hotel in October 1984. With a number of her relatives among the victims, the Iron Lady herself only just escaping death, she planted herself in front of a BBC journalist in the middle of the night. Her hair still disheveled, her voice full of emotion, she assured him that the conference scheduled for the following day would go ahead as planned because “life must go on, as usual”.

It is the same reasoning that the mayor of Arras in France used after the killing of a teacher early in October. Restaurants in town stayed open and teachers returned to their classes. Let’s hope that the central government will follow their example and not give in to the political convenience of “emergency measures“. We need to turn our souls into citadels to avoid turning our schools into bunkers.

A morning prayer

What attitude should we adopt when the wars of extermination resume? Refuse to choose an absolute and definitive side. Never reduce individuals to a people by assigning them collective responsibility. Resist the law of retaliation. My Israeli friends, like my pro-Palestinian friends, ask me to defend their cause. I have only one cause to defend, that of humanity.

I have only one cause to defend, that of humanity.

How can I keep up with the news when every dispatch seems to bring a new horror? Montaigne already deplored our “greedy passion for news”.

To discipline it, we need to give up the 24-hour news channels, news feeds and social media, and instead devote a set amount of time to the miseries of the world, diversifying our points of view as much as possible. Hegel called reading newspapers his “realistic morning prayer”. And this is the only prayer that could help us today.