Lessons From the Philosophy of the Ancients

There is a substantial amount of wisdom contained in the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. The most noteworthy philosophers of ancient Greece were predominantly concerned with the question of happiness and human excellence. Stoicism, which was a school of philosophy in ancient Greece which had a significant influence on the Roman empire, was no different. Their philosophical thought centered around understanding humanities place in the universe and what the excellence and happiness of such a creature consists in.

Stoic philosophical thought is very complex. There is one lesson from the Stoics I would just like to briefly discuss because it is still very relevant to us today. The thing that I would like to discuss is the Stoic understanding of the sage’s experience of the world. The sage is a person who has become completely virtuous. In other words the sage is a person who has fully achieved human excellence.

The sage’s experience of the world is peculiar to him alone. As is noted by Hadot[2] the Stoic sage has a fundamentally affirmative demeanour towards the entirety of existence. He is impartial and is not influenced by any attachment to outcomes. The Stoic sage is fundamentally concerned with doing the right thing, his formal goal is not to be become rich or famous, his formal goal is to do what is appropriate. This enables him to have a “pure” perception of the world, he is able to see things as they are not as they are useful for becoming rich or powerful or famous. The sage then never loses touch of the view of the whole, of the view of the cosmos. We see in the sage a sort of “cosmic consciousness” or “divine perspective” which results in an experience of deep appreciation and awe, i.e. aesthetic experience. The Stoic sage was to assume a detached mode of observation in a manner akin to the perspective of Zeus, the impartial but appreciative observer.[3] This enabled the sage to appreciate and wonder at everything, even the most ordinarily horrific things. Marcus Aurelius said:

“If a person has experience and a deeper insight into the processes of the universe, there will be hardly any of these processes that does not appear to him, in at least some of its aspects, as pleasant. And he will look upon the gaping jaws of wild beasts with no less pleasure than upon the imitations of them that sculptors and painters offer us.”

The Stoic sage has an almost divine perspective on things, a perspective that allows him to appreciate the magnificence in the horrifying. It is this perspective that poetry was thought to aim at expressing. Mitchell[4] notes in his introduction to the Iliad that poetry must give joy, even when depicting the most desolating of human experience. Such experiences when raised to the level of poetry must be a joy to be savoured, provided one allows oneself to get lost in the words. The joy gained from true poetry, such as the Iliad, is the joy of understanding where everything – from cruelty to reconciliation, from suffering to ecstasy, from the revolting to the sublime – is appreciated for what it is, with the purest attention. Poetry such as the Iliad and the Odyssey expresses the divine perspective of the ideal observer who, though deeply concerned, is in a state of complete joy.

I am concerned: so many of them will die.

But now I shall sit here at ease on a ridge of Olympus

where I can watch to my heart’s delight.

[Iliad, 20.20-2]

The ideal observer looks at the world with a deep sense of peace, he is unattached to any outcomes. All he sees is beautiful, even the most horrendous suffering. This is a perspective in which even the most tragic reality is perfect as it is. This is the experience of the sage and I understand this to be aesthetic experience. The sage experiences all of life in such a manner. The experience of the sage transforms the horrendous into the beautiful.

Now, we should remind ourselves that the defining attribute of a sage is the sage’s possession of wisdom. This is an important point because the sage’s experience of the world is rooted in his/her understanding of the world. Wisdom is the grounds of aesthetic experience. There are of course numerous accounts of what wisdom is. The Stoics for example thought wisdom is a matter of elevating the soul to a divine perspective, that of Zeus.[5] Marcus Aurelius tells us that we are to:

“Look on earthly things below as if from some place above them – herds, armies, farms, weddings, divorces, births, deaths, the noise of law courts, lonely places… a mixture of everything and an order composed of contraries.”[6]

This view from above bids us consider the whole of human reality from the perspective of the immeasurable dimensions of the cosmos that dwarfs it. From this perspective all the things that we get caught up in worry over such as health, wealth, fame, etc. are reduced to their true dimensions. Wisdom for the Stoics is best understood as this existential standpoint or outlook; the detached perspective of Zeus.

The practical implications of this for us is a reminder to work on not getting caught up in the insignificant. It is fundamentally important to work on being able to step back and appreciate things in relation to a greater reality. We should be able to see things in their true dimensions. In the grand scheme of things it is not a tragedy that my favorite team lost the football match. If I was to place this event in the grand scheme of things I can only be glad for it, it is part of the relentless unfolding of the universe, not something to cry about.