“This body does not belong to you, it is only cunningly constructed clay.”
— Epictetus
Try this exercise — think of parts of yourself in turn. Look in the mirror if you must. Think “this is my head”, “these are my arms”, “this is my hand”, “these are my eyes”, “this is my fingernail”, and so on and on.
At what point does that “taking stock” reach its end? At what point do we complete the list of things to reach the “my” in the middle of each of those little declarations?
Where is that “I” which claims these things to be “my this” and “my that”? Where is the entity that possesses all those things — that head, those arms, that hand, those eyes, the fingernails, and so on?
Isn’t this very nothingness the root of why the immaterial soul had to be invented? There must be something, after all, our ancestors no doubt thought, that must possess all you have.
The self exists and doesn’t exist, it is like a shadow — wholly dependent on the body that casts it and yet indestructibly consistent to that body.
When we reflect on our self in the mind we’re perceiving what is “out there”. We’re describing cells and atoms, past behaviours and actions. To perceive these things as our “self” itself to make a grave mistake.
It would be a mistake to take the shadow for the body, or reflections for the mirror itself. Our mind reflects things constantly, just as the mirror cannot help but always be reflecting. Your self will ofen appear among those reflections, but it’s not really what is reflecting.
When you capture yourself as an image in your thoughts you trap that self into labels and metaphors — all the ways the mind makes sense of the world.
But the self — the human — is always more than it comprehends itself, it is the limit of the world looking in and of the world itself. And so to capture our selves as a thing, using metaphors, labels, and even descriptions, is to degrade ourselves.
We are more than a thing in the world. To understand how so, we need to delve for a moment into the very nature of existence.
The Oneness of the Cosmos — Which Includes You
Everything is contingent. By that we mean everything’s existence is dependent upon the existence of other things. Your existence is contingent on your mother, and water, and carbon, and planet earth and so on and on. If those things did not exist, you wouldn’t exist. You’re part of a vast web of dependencies between things.
Whatsmore, every one thing is dependent on all things taken together. To explore this idea, let’s start with a very simple analogy. A word is made up of letters. Each of those letters is contingent on the other letters to play its role in making up the word. “W” requires the “o”, “r” and the “d”, and the “o” requires the “w”, “r” and the “d”, and so on.
So it is with every existing thing in the cosmos. Each is dependent on other things — contingent. The cosmos has the integrity of a word in that everything that makes it up is dependent on something else, just as the letters of a word are.
The Cosmos is also always changing. All things are inevitably destroyed while the cosmos as a whole is indestructible. The contingency of everything in the cosmos makes the cosmos both All — it is made up of all things, not something that contains all things, and One — all things, taken together, are not contingent on anything else, and therefore are one.
Nature — the Cosmos, the One, the Whole, the All — is entirely self-sufficient. There is no “bad” in nature — what rots, burns, dies, or falls apart is born again in other guises. Nature is always and everywhere complete and resplendent.
Ironically, everything that marks you out as an “individual” is contingent too. This makes you part of the oneness of all things, being part of the web of dependencies between all things. You’re a process, or rather a confluence of millions of processes.
If we want to be free and content, we must accept those facts. We have to acknowledge death as part of the ongoing transmutation of everything. Heraclitus, a distant precursor of the Stoics, described the cosmos as fire — all is a process, as combustion is a process. We burn in the fire of unceasing transformation.
And yet, as that confluence of processes you’ve integrated a lot of information in order to form a coherent and enduring image of selfhood. That confluence of processes has somehow formed a consciousness of ideas.
As an individual you are a manifestation of the cosmos represented to itself. As an individual you’ll expire one day like everything else, and everything that makes up you will dissolve back into the cosmos. But you know eternity in this moment you’re alive, because you have the capability to know.
The Self in the Mind and the World
There is a distinction between thought — the idea of a chair in your mind for example, and extension — the physical chair in space.
Our bodies are made up of physical matter and at the mercy of natural cause and effect. But our minds are different. Our thoughts and emotions are non-physical, you can neither see nor touch them. So how do our minds interact with our physical bodies?
This problem has led people to believe that there is a division between mind and world. This led to the idea of “substance dualism”. This means that mind and world are separate substances which somehow interact.
The Stoics thought differently. They considered all the world to be material — an unfolding of material process guided by a divine logic that was imbued in all things. Everything that exists can act or be acted upon. If something cannot act or be acted upon, it does not exist according to Stoic doctrine.
But if the world is entirely physical, what about non-physical things like concepts and skills? A great innovation of Ancient Stoicism is to suggest that the highest genus of reality is not “existence”, but “something”.
That category of “something” is made up of things which exist in that they are physical, and things that subsist, in that they are not physical, but owe their dependence to something physical. “Nothing incorporeal is separated from a body”, Chysippus of Soli is reported as writing.
These subsistent things lack the properties that existing things have, such as solidity, extension in space, weight, and resistance, but they depend on things that do.
Imagine a word scratched into a plastered wall. That word consists literally of nothing — it’s a negative space — and is dependent on the substance of the wall to exist. The same principle, according to the Stoics, applies to ideas.
Consider the idea of a centaur. It’s unlikely that centaurs exist, and the idea of the centaur exists in a number of ways — it’s printed in books, painted on canvases, etched in silverware, developed on tape, stored on computer servers, and held as a thought in the brains of many people.
The idea of the centaur depends on the material substrate of all those things to exist. If the sun were to explode, destroying our planet, the idea of the centaur, along with most other ideas, would disappear from the universe. There would be materially nothing left to “host” the idea.
In this way the Stoics reject Plato’s idea of universal forms. Plato suggested that everything is an imperfect copy of an immaterial “Form”, that there is a duality of the world of perfect Forms and a derivative — and therefore imperfect — world of matter.
A universal — a single quality we perceive in lots of different things like “red” or “round” — is a Form. For the Stoics, things which subsist are immanent and individuated according to how they appear in the material world, much like the word scratched in the wall. In a world of unending process, there is no “universal”.
Virtue — a quality that Stoics actively seek — is not something we can touch but it is still dependent on what we can touch. The Stoics argue that virtue is perceptible in our deeds — and our words as deeds. So virtue is still a material thing in so much that it’s a disposition of a body through time. There’s no universal form of virtue that manifests in people.
This means that the person who is virtuous has a kind of imprint of virtue in the way they act, which presumably follows from a model of virtue that they carry among the synapses of their brains.
To take a simple analogy, the way we behave is like an imprint on wax — it’s a way a substance is physically shaped. Where we see similarities in those “imprints” we can make categories such as “virtue” and “vice”. The idea of subsistence accounts for our subjective experiences as objective realities.
But there are a number of problems with this overarching explanation — as brilliant as it is — for non-material things within a purely material cosmos.
The first problem is that subsistence can explain the propositional contents of thoughts — i.e. centaurs — but it can’t account for the structure of thinking itself.
We can identify different representations of centaurs as centaurs because they are similar, but how do we account for similarity per se through the modality of subsistence? How does subsistence account for other fundamentally abstract ways of dealing with the data that we gather from our senses such as difference, duration, and quantity?
The other problem we have is how ideas or thoughts — being incorporeal — can causally interact with the physical world. If I have a thought in my head, I can choose to act on it or not act on it, how does that thought interact with my physical body?
It comes close, but subsistence doesn’t quite explain this. The best it can do is offer a parallelism whereby my thoughts are simply registers of bodily experience as the body goes through the automatic motions of living in a fully deterministic cosmos. This makes sense if we consider that Stoicism is a deterministic philosophy built on the theological assumption that the world and God are one and the same thing.
But it’s still not satisfactory, because we have the feeling of control — even if we’re not in control — through the coherence of consciousness. In other words, how does this Stoic bundle of impressions explain the coherence of consciousness and the feeling we have of agency?
The Stoic innovations in explaining the structure of reality are an attempt to reconcile the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the conscious world of ideas and the physical world.
It’s a successful attempt only if we accept the notion that thoughts are passive registers of bodily change. To accept this requires the acceptance of the Stoic faith that the cosmos is a living being identifiable with God (Zeus).
The Twist — The Möbius Self
To accept the Stoic explanation of reality, then, is to accept the Stoic deterministic explanation of the world, which is that everything is part of God.
For reasons already given at length, my interest isn’t in a dogmatic Stoism that follows the ancient theology of its founders. The goal here is an ecumenical ethical Stoicism that can be “layered” over whatever cosmological beliefs you may have, whether you are religious or an atheist. Beliefs about the origin and function of the cosmos are always going to be metaphysical and speculative.
The goal here is to create an ethical system that is based on self-evident truths about the cosmos and our place in it. That “place” we have is what we can call the “human condition”. The contingency of all things in the cosmos — including you — is just one self-evident truth from which we can build a model of the human condition.
The human condition is not an empirical claim about the world, and it’s not a universal claim, nor is it a speculative claim, nor is it a theological claim. It’s what philosophers would describe as a “conditional necessity” — it’s shaped by an interplay of biological, cultural, and psychological factors that are consistent but not necessarily eternal.
What matters for the purposes of a modern and truly ecumenical Stoicism is that there is mind and matter and there is body and self. This emergent duality is self-evident. It is the condition we know objectively, and the condition we contend with as we live out our lives.
Our self is fixed in time and place by a body, despite the fact that it is immaterial for all the reasons given previously. Accounting for why this is the case has never been satisfactory and would only ever be a matter of faith or subjective instinct.
We ought to instead take consciousness for what it is — the world represented to itself. You’re made of matter, but somehow that matter becomes immaterial to itself.
The Möbius strip is a strange object much like the human being. It’s a band with a single half-twist, yet this half-twist makes an enormous difference. It gives the strip one single continuous side, not two as you’d expect with a band.
If you trace your finger along the length of the band you’ll find that your finger tip travels through the inner and outer facing parts of the band without ever having to cross over an edge. It seems to have two sides but has in fact only one.
What we have in the Möbius strip is a oneness — a single surface, that gives rise to a duality — an inner and outer. The Möbius strip serves as an analogy for how thought and extension, mind and matter, self and body, emerge from the oneness of the cosmos.
The self is like the Möbius strip. It is at moment one thing — flesh, blood, brain, and mortal; and at another moment another thing — mind, idea, immortal.
The Möbius strip is a “non-orientable surface”, which means it has no distinct inside or outside. This “non-orientable” aspect of the strip can symbolise how the self is inseparable from the world.
We are part of the continuity of all things — everything being contingent and in flux. Every part of us — from the molecules that make us up to the thoughts in our mind — is dependent on everything else for its existence. And yet, that self image gives us a coherence unobservable in inert objects.
In short, we’re twisted.
It is thinking about the self in this sense that can ground us the Stoic ethical system without recourse to making any speculative statement about the origin or nature of the cosmos itself.
This leaves Stoic ethics intact. The cosmos knows no good or bad. It is good to see all that was once “good” and “bad” to you as being indifferent. It’s bad to worry yourself about what is good or bad.
These statements are not paradoxes, the only good and the only bad are morally good and morally bad thoughts. And thoughts are not of the world. If you follow the dictates of reason, you may achieve the self-coherence that mirrors nature’s own.
What is self-evident is that the cosmos is self-corent and complete in our experience of it, and we are but a part of it, as contingent and in flux as everything else.
Failing to understand that leads to anxiety, grief, and sadness. Understanding is exulting in the resplendent beauty of the whole and our place in it.
@steven,
The formless and the form coexist.
All the spiritualist studied the formless and got pushed into oblivion.
All the Scientists studied form and are stuck with chaos and randomness.
The coexistence proves that form can not exist without being energised by the formless.
The existence of formless can not be proved unless the form understand and knows of its existence.
I have all the answers and in humility would request you to have that call with me which I have been requesting for over 3 years now to help you know experience and realise EXISTENTIAL REALITY .
You are such an evolved soul and if you understand and share this knowledge with the world we will prevent the planet from becoming another burning ball of fire like the sun.
Best regards,
Anand Damani.