Stoic Perspective
Seeing your world as it really is
“Don’t you know how small a part you are by comparison to the whole? With regard to your body, I mean; for when it comes to your reason, you’re not inferior to the gods nor do you fall short of them, because the greatness of reason is measured not by height or length, but by the quality of its judgements.”
Epictetus, Discourses, 1.12.26
Egoism encloses the soul. It can overwhelm us. We become mired in worries because of our self-importance. We worry about our reputation, our belongings, our popularity, the flimsiness of our beliefs. We build walls around us to shore up the fragile self. And yet, in doing so, we end up feeling like a shark in a bathtub. A small world of our own making limits and frustrates us.
To gain a better understanding of our lives we can consider it from a larger perspective — to use some imagination to step outside of ourselves and consider the greater setting we are in.
This idea occurs frequently in ancient literature, most notably in Plato, Cicero, Lucian, and Boethius, and in the writings of the later Stoics.
In the famous “Dream of Scipio Aemilianus” passage in Cicero’s Republic, the Roman statesman is guided by the spirit of his grandfather, Scipio Africanus, into the “shining circle” of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
From this point of view, he sees our planet as tiny as the point of a pin, and the whole Roman Empire as just a tiny part of that speck. But Scipio is mildly chided by his grandfather for his fascination with the tiny Earth, and urged to consider the “magnificent temples” of the galaxy around him.
In Lucian’s account of the Icaromenippus — “the man who flew over the earth” — the Cynic philosopher Menippus grows tired of debates about human nature and the natural world. He affixes wings to his arms to get a high enough of a view to see for himself how things really are. He observes different nations and cultures and the people within them. He sees people working, waging war, voyaging on the seas, committing crimes and misdeeds.
He describes all this as a hodge-podge, a cacophony. He ridicules the importance humans place on boundaries and borders, the many different prayers those tiny specs send up to Zeus, and the pride of the rich, whose properties are feeble when seen from space.
It is in these two very different tales that we see how a view from above can render our petty insecurities and vanities insignificant, while also observing the majesty of the greater whole of which we are a part. It is from high that we can reach a better understanding of our place, and the greater whole we are within, as individuals and as a species.
Running with the Stars
In the Meditations, Marcus touches on taking a greater perspective on life a number of times. A greatly widened view is perceived in time as well as space — the minuteness of our lifespan in the vast expanse around us. Our cares and mores flow past us rapidly like a river when we consider the constancy of reason in time.
He writes in one part,
“You can strip away many unnecessary troubles which lie wholly in your own judgement. And you will immediately make large and wide room for yourself by grasping the whole universe in your thought, contemplating the eternity of time, and reflecting on the rapid change of each thing in every part — how brief the gap from birth to dissolution, how vast the gulf of time before your birth, and an equal infinity after your dissolution.” (9.32)
Like Pythagoreanism and Platonism, Stoicism saw inspiration in the consistency of the celestial bodies. The paths of stars and planets are predictable, and this was seen as evidence of an underlying order in the universe.
To the ancients, there was no notion of the “laws of physics”, the stars and the planets moved of their own accord or were part of some great mechanism of the heavens, and so their movement was of profound importance. Marcus comments frequently on the duty of the stars, their order, constancy, and “nakedness” as well as the cosmic perspective they offer to one’s imagination.
“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 will wash away the filth of life on the ground […] View earthly things as if looking down on them from a high point above.” (7.47)
While taking a view on life as if from a higher perspective can be a way to distance ourselves from our hour-to-hour living patterns, it also mirrors the very act of philosophical contemplation.
The task of philosophy is to step back, as it were, and take sight of general principles that we could not perceive when we are swept along by the various activities we are engaged in.
By reflecting from a higher perspective, we see that the object of our focus was a part of something greater, perhaps part of a pattern within that greater whole. From here we can appreciate the greater workings of which we are a part.
The boat maker builds boats according to habit and custom, the master craftsman can make better boats because they understand the underlying principles of boats — they have a whole taxonomy of boat-types in their mind as a result of their grasp of the universal principles of woodwork, buoyancy, and structural integrity.
The difference between these artisans is the way they see the boats. Patterns and abstractions emerge from the wider view on things, and these patterns and abstractions give us a new degree of mastery over our own thoughts.
This is why wisdom is so often correlated with age — the more we experience life, the more we have in view when we look back on past experience to solve new problems.
Think also of armies seeking advantage, and people in positions of power take up the higher viewpoint over those they rule. Mastery and vantage point — in space and in time, are practically conjoined.
Yet, for the Stoic, we have everything we need for mastery. We can use reason alone to understand our selfhood, and realise that we can control everything that ultimately matters — the power of our own choices. Remember the self-admonishment of Marcus, “Everything you’re trying to reach — by taking the long way round — you could have right now, this moment.” (12.1 ML)
The higher perspective is one of two principle elements of control — the other being objectivity — that the Stoic exercises to obtain virtue and further reinforce self control. Of the three “disciplines” of Epictetan Stoicism — assent, desire, and impulse — perspective as a means of control is closest to assent.
The discipline of assent concerns itself with our choice over value judgements. It is through taking on a new, wider perspective that we can reframe perceptions and emotions about the objects and relationships of our focus. Artificial desires and preoccupations become insignificant in the vastness of space, and the mighty flow of time that we can imagine.
Cosmic Significance
But we should not let this exercise confuse our values. It has become a cliché to take this view of the world as revealing our own insignificance. This idea is wrong in the context of Stoic thought, and it’s also damaging and dangerous. We are not insignificant, even if we are less than a speck of dust in the grand scheme of things.
Why? In ancient Stoic thought, God is one with nature or the cosmos. If we are part of the cosmos, we are part of God. Could it be said that even an iota of God is insignificant? What’s more, human beings have a higher degree of pneuma (the divine breath of God) within than anything else, and so can come to understand the logic of the cosmos through reason.
Imagine every single part of the universe as a great chain, infinitely long. Each link in the chain is as important as the whole chain itself to the chain’s integrity. So no matter how long the chain is, no matter how much the links themselves differ in shape or strength, each single link is as important as any other link, or any number of links. Without each link there is no chain, and without the chain there is no link.
This holds true even if we were to set aside Stoic theology and consider the matrix of Stoic principles as they stand up by themselves. Human beings are a community. Our place within that global community is essential when we consider our potential.
Even in times when we are at our most desolate, at our lowest ebb of esteem, we can grasp that we have within us the power to fulfil our natural obligations to the community — to help, cooperate, and assist others, and to rejoice in the fulfilment of the purpose we put ourselves to. Reason reassures us of this.
We are a species of cooperation. Marcus compares our being to eyelids and rows of teeth — one cannot do one’s purpose without another fulfilling their purpose. We are not insignificant to ourselves at a deeper level, because we recognise our place in the world. The goal is to disentangle the actual world from a muddled world of our own ego’s making.
The Cosmopolis
This leads us to understand the effect of perspective on our capacity to cooperate and live in peaceful collaboration. When we see ourselves from afar, we see how similar we can be to others, yet also how different.
Marcus — a worldly, well-travelled man, echoes Menippus when he describes the “hodge-podge” of the differences and rhythms of human life. And yet, he comments that there is the “harmony of contraries”.
Think then of human life viewed from afar as being like a tessellated pattern — people’s similarities forming the regularity in lines and shapes, and people’s differences in the colours and textures of the tiles. Difference and similarity find harmony when we step back enough to see the whole.
We ought not to think that the many cultures and nations are irreconcilably different, nor should we vainly assume that all people are ultimately the same.
What we can be sure of is the communal nature of our very being. Every time you speak or make use of words in your thoughts you reaffirm this. We are enmeshed in the codes of language, a public utility. We are labelled and we use labels.
As such we have bonds with those closest to us — family, locality, region, nation. When we take a greater perspective on things, we see the same among other people, and we can see why Menippus made fun of those who take excessive pride in their tribes and nations. We understand Seneca’s view that, when we see from above, we recognise the “fatherland” is “everything which the sky and the world contain.”
Stoic perspective, then, entails cosmopolitanism — recognising oneself as a citizen of the whole cosmos.
The philosopher Hierocles invites us to imagine our familiarity as concentric circles. The inner circle is our individuality, then family, then our extended family, our tribe or locality, our city or region, our nation, and finally, humanity as a whole. Hierocles implores us to draw these circles in towards the centre, so that we may regard strangers as if they are our kin.
We are, after all, of the same substance. We are a kink in the same fabric of being, We are like rain drops in a downpour, or waves of the sea, or the bubbles of a stream — formed only momentarily from an undifferentiated mass, only to be absorbed again into that mass. We are part of the universal metamorphosis of the totality of the cosmos.
When we contemplate from the perspective of the stars, we can realise that the causes of material desires and insecurities, jealousies and rivalries are not significant.
This is not because of the sheer size of the universe but rather because we ourselves are part of the vast whole. The whole does not exist for our benefit, and neither do we for its benefit, since it requires nothing. We can reconcile ourselves with the unity of which we are a part. As we do so, our bodies shrink to nothing and our souls grow vast.
A spiritual exercise for perspective
Rise out of yourself. View yourself from the ceiling above you. Consider how you look down there. See the room around you. Consider what you are thinking about at this moment. Does it matter? And if it does matter, how can that matter pass? Rise up further out of the building and high up to where the birds turn circles. See the roads, the buildings, the people. Consider these people, as small as letters on the page of a book. Consider the thoughts that they may be having and consider them as part of the greater structure sprawled out around them.
Rise up further, into the sky. See the tiny specks of cars and people, now as small as gains of dust. See the patchwork of city and countryside. How does it feel to be this far removed now? Think about where you left yourself, the state of mind you were in.
Go up further still, out of the atmoshere, watch the earth shrink into a fleck of light in space, watch as it’s subsumed into a vast cloud of planets and stars. See the motions of planets and stars as like spiralling dust in an eddy of wind. See the ocean of time and space of which the Earth is a mere molecule in the wash.
Feel time as nothing and imagine all the goings on you left behind as plasma in a bolt of lightening. This is the world, and your life in it, as it is.
Train yourself to see in this way, and events will unfold before you as winks of light glimer on the surface of a lake.
Brilliantly written, Steven. Thanks for capturing such an important teaching of Stoicism. Pierre Hadot coined the phrase the “View from Above.” His works are a great scholastic tour of Stoic philosophy if you are so inclined. Thank you for being part of the great Cosmopoli. We have a responsibility to bolster it. Cheers.