Running with the Stars 💫
Stoicism for Modern Lives
“Observe the movement of the stars as if you were running their courses with them, and let your mind constantly dwell on the changes of the elements into each other. Such imaginings wash away the filth of life on the ground.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.47.
Stoic philosophy is beautiful. It’s imbued with many aspects that beautiful things share. It is simple, coherent, consistent, and self-integrated. It has symmetry, balance, and unity.
In the whole are a harmony of parts, and each part reflects the whole. If you cut up a hologram, even into small pieces, you’ll still see the same scene in each fragment. The same is true of Stoic philosophy — we see the whole even in its fragments.
The whole is in each part because the whole is so simple: one must live in accordance with nature. Not in accordance with your nature or “human nature”, we mean nature here as the cosmos — “the All” or “the One”. And so Stoic philosophy in its theoretical one-in-the-all/all-in-the-one reflects the cosmos as Stoicism understands it — a oneness that is eternally complete and self-coherent.
To be in accordance with nature is to be self-coherent and without superfluous desires. Seneca’s perfect explanation for virtue is “Always want the same thing, and always refuse the same thing.” (Letters to Lucillius, Letter 94)
There’s no need to explain or qualify what we should want or refuse, according to Seneca, because things can only be consistently and universally pleasing if they are ethically sound. And so we have a unity of opposites — to want good, to refuse evil. One must pull strings in opposite directions to tie the knot.
In Cicero’s De Finibus Cato comments that no thing in the world has such a finely arranged and firmly welded structure as the Stoic philosophical system.
Marcus conjures Empedocles’ description of a “perfect orb rejoicing in the solitude it enjoys”. He writes,
“Separate from this directing mind of yours the baggage of passion, time future and time past, and make yourself like Empedocles’ ‘perfect orb rejoicing in the solitude it enjoys’, and seek only to perfect this life you are living in the present, you will be able at least to live out the time remaining before your death calmly, kindly, and at peace with the god inside you.” (12.3)
Empedocles was a pre-Socratic philosopher who originated the notion that the world is composed of the four elements — earth, air, fire and water. The divine forces of attractive love and repulsive strife mix and separate the elements respectively.
The fabled orb is the original state of the universe, in which the four pure elements were unified by love, while strife guarded their extremes. That balance of attraction and repulsion formed a perfect sphere, much like a perfectly round soap bubble.
For the Stoics, nature — by that we mean the Whole, or the Cosmos — as it is now is equal in perfection to the hypothetical orb of Empedocles. The cosmos wants nothing — it is coherent, complete, harmonius in its opposites and balanced in its forces. The only disharmony of attraction and repulsion is within the mind of each person, rather than the Whole.
By guarding the sovereign directing mind, one can rejoice in the freedom and peace that mirrors such a Oneness. This work of guarding requires a unity of elements, so to speak, that make up the Fourfold Root of Stoicism.
Each element of the Fourfold Root reflects one of the four aspects of Stoic ethical philosophy and its corresponding disciplines and spiritual exercises.
These elements are,
Autonomy — the prudence of self-knowing.
Control — the moderation of power and desire.
Perspective — the just reckoning with the greater whole.
Objectivity — Seeing all things as they really are.
All these elements are yoked together by reason — the distinctly human capacity to apply logic in the forming of judgements.
A Layer-Two Philosophy
We have explored how the cosmology — an explanation for the universe — of Stoicism is the basis of ancient Stoic ethics. The aim from the outset was to replace Stoic cosmology with a basis for Stoic ethics that does not make theological or scientific claims — such as the cosmology of Stoicism — but is not fully fully contingent either, and does not lose the coherence of the Stoic system.
We subtracted the scientific and theological claims of ancient Stoicism — claims about the origin, nature and purpose of the cosmos — leaving just the notion of the “Stoic self”, grounded as it is in the human condition.
The human condition here is distinct from so-called “human nature”, a folk concept that doesn’t describe anything. The human condition is not properly universal, it is rather a set of contingently necessary aspects of being an adult human. It is grounded in the inevitable events of life that all human beings go through.
We are born, we mature, we die. Accompanying those events are processes we go through. We develop a rational mind, a sense of a cognitively independent, enduring and coherent self, and come to understand that our bodily existence, at the very least, will come to an end at some point in the future. And so a sense of self is incidental to the many processes that all mentally fit human beings go through in time.
The Stoic idea of self, is therefore “produced” by the intricate webbing of our biological and social existence. There is no pristine “self” prior to our social existence. The attitudes of the self are mimetic attributes — we mimic our kin and neighbours in the process of forming our beliefs and desires, but we also have the power of reason to form judgements through the abstractions of logic.
Being abstract, logic is universal and therefore non-mimetic. We are therefore autonomous — since we can choose our beliefs, desires, and attitudes by reason, even if the substance of those desires, beliefs and attitudes is formed through mimesis.
The purpose of this cycle of essays is to map out Stoicism as a “Layer-Two” philosophy. That is, an ethical philosophy that can stand above any beliefs you have about the origin and destiny of the universe without touching them.
You may be a devout Christian or Muslim, you may be an atheist, you could even be a Stoic pantheist in your view of the universe. This should not change your way of life if you embrace this ethical philosophy.
Other Stoics have attempted this by putting in place a “scientific” foundation that broadly aligns to the ancient Stoic belief in determinism.
There are many problems with this approach. Firstly, and fundamentally, scientific propositions are by definition falsifiable through observation. There can be no such thing as a scientific proposition that is universally — that is, always — true. To claim a scientific proposition to be universal is a matter of belief, and so you’re then making arguments about the nature of the world that may run contrary to others.
In the Fourfold Root system, your existential beliefs do not matter to this particular form of Stoicism, because the foundations of its ethical structure are formed in looking at the human condition, rather than any particular explanation for the cosmos.
The human condition entails that we understand an agent — the self — that is autonomous, that understands it has autonomy but also understands that there are constraints on what is and isn’t possible, and makes choices according to this predicament.
Even if we believe we do not have choices or we believe those choices are not our responsibility, we must still make choices and understand ourselves to be the carrier of those choices. And so, we must act, as an autonomous self, in accordence with nature in order to live in virtue.
Personae Theory
The Fourfold Root is a distillation of Stoic ethics into a programmatic approach to negotiating the world. It touches each aspect of Stoic ethical enquiry and spiritual exercise without touching Stoicism’s cosmology. These aspects of ethical enquiry intersect, and it is in the intersections that we get a more operative way to live our lives as Stoics.
The Fourfold Root’s intersections correspond to the “Four Personae” theory of living as a Stoic outlined in Cicero’s On Duties. According to Cicero, the theory originates with Panaetius, a Middle Period Stoic, and serves in Cicero’s text as a guide to living up to our obligations according to Stoic principles.
The theory attributes four different aspects (personae) that encompass the identity of human beings. These are:
Our universal or common nature — what we are.
Our individual but natural dispositions or traits — who we are.
What external circumstances make of us — what happens to us.
The pursuits that we freely choose within the constraints of those external circumstances — what we do.
And so human beings have two inherited “natures” — one common and one individual. The common nature takes into account the shared characteristics of human beings, such as reason, the use of language and our social interconnectedness.
We also have individual character traits and dispositions — we may be intelligent or physically strong, or artistic or analytical. The mix of these traits is unique to each of us.
External circumstances include where and when we were born, our parents, our gender, our race and so on. We have no choice in so many facets of our individuality. We may have aristocratic blood, as Marcus had, or be born into slavery, as Epictetus had been. You can have good luck and bad luck that is beyond your making. These circumstances shape us, we can work with them when they are advantageous, or against them when they are disadvantageous to our flourishing.
Our individual pursuits are the things we choose to do. We may choose to play sports, go into politics, sail across the Atlantic, or all three. In each case there is some choice.
Every choice is shaped by our external circumstances, and also our individual nature. But they are not determined by those external circumstances or our individual nature.
People with no legs have participated in marathons, somebody born into poverty can work their way to buying that sailing boat to get across the Atlantic, a person who has a naturally short temper can find life-long serenity.
In such cases, these people have utilised the reason of their common nature and, in turn, the best traits of their individual nature to overcome inherited or circumstantial constraints.
To serve the human community, we ought to align our individual pursuits to the common nature, we must accept that the traits of our individual nature are conditioned by the chance of genetic inheritance and upbringing. We are thrown into circumstances that we have no choice over, but must put them to the best use by our common nature.
We ought to conform to traits of our individual nature but only so long as they are aligned to the common nature. We may, for example, have negative traits such as a quick temper, impatience, or the tendency to be pessimistic. We can mitigate negative traits by using our reason and focusing more on our positive traits.
When these four aspects of our existence as individuals are in harmony we can thrive in virtue. Panaetius reminds us that to live according to nature is as much to live according to our own nature as according to our common nature.
Intersections of Virtue
We can make the best use of the four personae within the intersections of the Fourfold Root. Individual pursuits — the actions we undertake of our own will — both align with and transcend our individual nature and our circumstances when considered in the light of Control and Perspective. We understand what is within and without our control, whilst having the greater perspective of our part in the whole in mind.
We can make best use of our circumstances when we see them objectively — understanding events and objects that surround us in their place in the Whole, while also elevating our minds to see the circumstances we are thrown into in the wider Perspective of Stoic consideration.
We make the most of our common nature when we hone our Autonomy — the freedom of the “directing mind” — to make choices that conform to the common good. We are most free when we make the one choice that is necessary — the rational choice. Through the discipline of assent, objectivity reminds us of this great necessity at the heart of our freedom.
Fulfillment
The world that Marcus was born into — his circumstances — was a geocentric world. Marcus very likely believed, like most people at the time, that all the celestial bodies turned around the earth.
The predictable movement of the stars, shining out over the life below, were an image of the perfection of the whole — constant and harmonius. The time of day, the tides, navigational paths and crop seasons depended on the movement of the celestial spheres, which seemed to serve terrestrial life by their constancy.
The stars represent the inherent reason in nature at its most pure — in the consistent abstractions of their movement. “Observe the movement of the stars as if you were running their courses with them,” is the exhortation to live according to nature — to reflect reason in nature with the reason within.
We now know that the earth revolves around the sun, and the courses of heavenly bodies have been further abstracted into Newtonian calculus. But we can still “run with the stars” — taking the higher view over things, washing ourselves of the mud of incohesion and confusion that we’re easy mired in when we immerse our reasoning mind in the day to day.
The nature of our lives is such that it is enmeshed with nature, history, and our fellow people. But that doesn’t prevent you from recognising your own autonomy and the control you have over what is most important — your own choices.
As such, a fulfilled life depends on very little. It doesn’t require material or social “success”, it depends only on your own thoughts, that nobody else can touch. It’s possible to live a blessed life of fulfillment and happiness without the recognition of other people. What matters is that you recognise your own power to choose happiness.
Thank you for reading.