In a previous article I described what I called the cosmic consciousness of the Stoic sage. It has to be admitted that the cosmic consciousness of the sage does seem to be, initially at least, completely alien to us. This will of course strike most as a problem because it is not entirely reasonable to assent to the value of an existential position that we are not able to grasp. However, it is in fact possible to show that the cosmic consciousness of the sage is not so completely alien to us. Our engagement with works of art, in particular our aesthetic experience of artworks, allows us to further imagine what the cosmic consciousness of the sage might be like and hence substantiate its plausibility.[1]
Aesthetic Experience:
The key theme that permeates all discussion of aesthetic experience is its disinterested/detached character. It is for this reason that aesthetic experience is unique in its poignancy. Aesthetic experience can be described as an appreciation of the world for itself and not for how it is useful. The appropriate form of engagement with an artwork is contemplation or attention to the thing as it is rather than attention to the thing as a tool for action. Aesthetic experience is “innocent” experience. The innocence of aesthetic experience seems to consist in its selflessness, or its emptiness of an agenda, i.e. its disinterestedness. This innocence of aesthetic experience gives an excellent insight into the psychological standpoint which constitutes it. Edward Bullough explicates very well the mode of engagement involved in aesthetic experience. He refers to this mode of engagement as psychical distance. Bullough illustrates his notion of psychical distance with the use of a wonderful example.[2] It must be noted that Bullough’s notion of psychical distance is a notion that bears directly upon the cosmic consciousness of the sage.
Bullough uses the example of a heavy fog at sea to illustrate his point. To be on a ship that is in dense fog can be a distinctly unpleasant experience for both seamen and landlubbers. Fog can engender anxiety and fear over the possibility of hidden dangers and as such is regarded as a “dreaded terror” of the seas.[3] The fog contains the possibility of numerous hazards. Perceived as such it is only natural that one’s experience of it be negative. But as Bullough points out so eloquently “a fog at sea can be an intense source of relish and enjoyment.”[4] It seems that the anxiety and fear exists only as long as the desire for self-preservation gets in the way.[5] What the subject needs to do is detach himself from his desire for self-preservation to open up the possibility of the perception of the world as it is transformed by the fog. He needs to detach himself from the habitual and utilitarian perception of the fog, where after what is left is an experience of those aspects of the world, as it manifests through the fog, which transcend our ordinary experience.
[The] veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outline of things and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness; observe the carrying power of the air, producing the impression as if you could touch some far off siren by merely putting out your hand and letting it lose itself behind that white wall; note the curious creamy smoothness of the water, hypocritically denying as it were any suggestion of danger; and, above all the strange solitude and remoteness from the world, as it can be found only on the highest mountain tops: and the experience may acquire, in its uncanny mingling of repose and terror, a flavour of such concentrated poignancy and delight as to contrast sharply with the blind and distempered anxiety of its other aspects.[6]
The three eloquent passages of philosophical writing of which the above quotation forms a part seems to highlight with impressive clarity the possibility of two seemingly contrary experiences of the same phenomenon, the first fearful and the second seemingly expressive of a deeper understanding. In the second the perceiver’s eyes have been opened as it were to aspects of the experience which are ordinarily hidden. It seems to the perceiver as though the world has revealed itself.
I take it that the point of the example is that the experiences alluded to above are differentiated by the perspective the agent takes on the world. In the first instance the 
fog was perceived as the harbinger of danger, the agent adopted a practical standpoint towards the fog such that it is experienced in relation to the agent’s practical agenda. The beautiful aspects of the world as it manifests in the fog were not perceived but hidden behind the practical import the fog presents. In the second instance the experience is radically different. The world itself is perceived (mutated as it is by the fog) in a more holistic manner whereupon the sublime characteristics which objectively constitute the experience reveal themselves. The world as it exists, irrespective of the agenda of the agent, reveals itself. This radical difference is indicative of a distinct psychological standpoint adopted towards the fog.
The Practical Standpoint:
We should remember that our lives are for the most part conducted from a practical standpoint. From within this standpoint of practical perception we are selective in our perception, retaining only that which contributes to our action in the world. This practical standpoint hides from us the world qua world.[7]
Transcending the Practical Standpoint:
Distance, as Bullough articulates it, involves a radical transformation of our relationship to the world. This transformation entails a suspension of the practical standpoint. Our pragmatic attitude must be cut out of our apprehension of the world.[8] To adopt the distanced perspective is to become distanced in sense very similar to this. The distanced perspective is a psychological standpoint of “pure” attention to the world as it is and rather than thinking of it as a tool for some further use.
Bullough describes[9] this cutting out of the practical standpoint as putting the phenomenon ‘out of gear’ with one’s practical self. This means that there must be a distance between the self and the affections. Bullough uses the term “affections” in its broadest sense to mean anything that “affects our being, bodily or spiritually, e.g. as sensation, perception, emotional state or idea.”[10] Affections then include fears and desires such that one’s own instinctive affective responses become part of the phenomena and hence also become the object of contemplation and understanding. When putting a phenomenon out of gear with the practical self one allows the phenomenon to stand outside the context of one’s personal needs, ends and pragmatic agenda. At its core then what is required is a detachment from things we ordinarily take to be good. This is a distancing from our own ends and the suspension of our fascination with seeing these ends realised.
The soul has attained the culmination of happiness when, having crushed underfoot all that is evil, it takes flight and penetrates the inner recesses of nature. It is then, while wandering amongst the very stars, that it likes to laugh at the costly pavements of the rich… But the soul cannot despise all these riches before it has been all around the world, and casting a contemptuous glance at the narrow globe of the earth from above, says to itself: “So this is the pin-point which so many nations divide among themselves with fire and sword? How ridiculous are the boundaries of men!” [Natural Questions, I, Preface, 7-9][13]
The Distanced Perspective:
We see then that the invulnerability of the sage is not so bizarre. It is simply the result of the insertion of distance. To further illustrate the point we can look at an analogy. To attain to the wisdom of the sage is to adopt a perspective similar to the perspective of a spectator at a play. As Sedgwick says:
The peculiar pleasure of the theatre then is the spectacle of life…and this spectacle, when it pleases or holds us, we do not view with the “swelling of pride” of superiority, but with a sort of paradoxical sympathy; for though it is sympathy, it is likewise detached.[14]
The spectator does not experience the events in the play as relevant to his practical agenda. He is, or at least he should be, at ease with all eventualities which constitute the plot of the play. He observes objectively, taking note of the intricacies and intrigues of the plot, savouring the feelings and emotional responses that the play excites within, free from his practical mode of experience. The spectator is free to be moved by the events, never pushed to anguish or despair, free from anxieties that affect his own being and free from any sense of threat to himself. Even the negative affective responses excited by the play such as fear, pity, anger, etc. are blunted such that they themselves are the object of appreciation and excite a certain pleasure in the spectator. The spectator is free to become aware of and understand the unfolding plot and his emotional responses to it in a manner which would be closed to him if he were to be one of the characters, caught up the events that constitute the plot. He observes as that divine spectator, uninvolved and immune, but deeply concerned. To attain to the wisdom of the sage is to become distanced in precisely this manner so as to experience all events as part of a grand play. It is to elevate oneself so as to experience all events, even one’s own action and feeling, as an “audience member” and not as an “actor”, even though one finds oneself situated centre stage in the grand production.
It is important to stress however that there is no need to spend time exploring the differences between the distancing expressed by Bullough and the distancing of the sage. What is significant is how they are a-like. Both essentially involve the insert of distance between the self and the affections and thereby render the happiness of the person invulnerable. The distancing expressed by Bullough is a phenomenon we are familiar with since we often experience this sort of distancing in our engagement with artworks. Given that we are familiar with the distancing described by Bullough we can thus easily make sense of how the wisdom of the sage makes him invulnerable. The sage’s happiness is invulnerable because his wisdom involves an insertion of distance of the like we see in Bullough. The essence of wisdom then is that it is a distanced perspective. We see the wisdom of the sage approximated by the distancing described by Bullough.
I should remind the reader here that the wisdom of the sage is an ideal. This is something we are to strive for but whether or not we will ever manage to get there, and whether or not we will ever manage to truly be happy, is doubtful. It is again for this reason that philosophia or the love of or progress towards wisdom, plays such a significant role in Ancient philosophy, not least in Stoicism. As Hadot tells us:
The Stoics… declared explicitly that philosophy, for them, was an “exercise.” In their view, philosophy did not consist in teaching an abstract theory – much less in the exegesis of texts – but rather in the art of living. It is a concrete attitude and determinate life-style, which engages the whole of existence. The philosophical act is not situated merely on the cognitive level, but on that of the self and of being. It is a progress which causes us to be more fully, and makes us better.[16]
The role played by the consideration of the sage and his way of being is that it provides us with a goal to strive for with philosophical activity. The validity of this 
endeavour is grounded in the goodness that is thought to consist in the sage’s way of being. The philosophical act is a worthy endeavour because the end it aims at is wholly good. The ideal represented by the sage represents the possibility of our own happiness. This is because happiness is to be understood as the possession of the good and virtue, as it is articulated in the person of the sage, constitutes that good.
Once all the dogmas of Stoicism have been stripped away we can come to the essence of the Stoic pursuit. The essence of the Stoic pursuit is to attain to the distanced perspective, to attain to the cosmic consciousness of the sage. This is to attain to virtue or greatness of soul. To attain to the distanced perspective is to rise above individual, passionate subjectivity to the universal perspective which holds within itself the thought of the Whole.[17]
Stoic virtue is the fruit of the universality of thought. This understanding of virtue is not a consequence of Stoic doctrinal assertions. Rather all Stoic doctrinal assertions are sub-servant to virtue so understood. It is the pursuit of attaining the distanced perspective that is of primary significance and it is this that grounds Stoic doctrines and not the other way around. They exist solely to usher aspirants towards this most wondrous prize.[18]
We should avoid the urge to judge the validity of the end based solely on the discomfort we feel with one articulation of it, especially if this articulation serves only to assist us in the pursuit of attaining the end. It would be unwise then to dismiss the validity of the Stoic endeavour solely because we are uncomfortable with one or more of the Stoic doctrines. This would be like denying the existence of a hospital based solely on the fact that we are uncomfortable with the description of hospitals provided in the map we are given to find the hospital.
[1] Pierre Hadot makes precisely this point as well. Hadot (1995: 255)
[2] Bullough (1989: 758-59)
[3] Bullough (1989: 759)
[4] Bullough (1989: 759)
[5] The point is not that one cannot act to preserve oneself as it were. The point is rather than one’s experience must not be structured in terms of this agenda. One may still respond to preserve one’s constitution but one’s experience of the fog must not be the experience of a thing-threatening-my-constitution.
[6] Bullough, (1989: 759)
[7] Hadot (1995: 254)
[8] Bullough (1989: 760)
[9] Bullough (1989, 760)
[10] Bullough (1989: 759)
[11] I have Dylan Futter to thank for the formulation of this particular point.
[12] Hadot (1995: 251)
[13] Seneca, Natural Questions, I, Preface, 7-9
[15] Bullough (1989:759)
[16] Hadot (1995: 82-83)
[17] Hadot (1995)
[18] See Hadot (1995: 81-109)