I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
I enjoyed the latest episode of the Philosophize This! podcast from Stephen West,1 covering two critiques of Stoicism, one from Nietzsche and one from Schopenhauer. I’ve never been a huge fan of Stoicism, but I didn’t have any cogent thought for why, and this episode helped me develop and clarify my thinking.
In my view, Stoicism is like cognitive behavioral therapy: it reduces our experience of our lives to (supposedly changeable) thoughts that can be rationally explained and managed, and behaviors based on those thoughts that are similarly tractable. This, to me, ignores the fact that our thoughts, actions, and emotions are in constant communication with each other, affecting each other in bidirectional relationship.
Besides that, reducing the experience of your life to something that can be managed by looking for “thought distortions” seems to suck a lot of the interest and power out of life.
Nietzsche thought that the Stoics emphasis on seeing our lives and the universe as rational and stable was incomplete, according to West:
he thinks that if you treated reason as though it’s the tool that can explain all of reality for you, then you’re always going to be missing out on all sorts of more dynamic pieces of our reality that are just unfolding in every moment. Creativity, improvisation, instinct, passion. In other words, anything about reality at the level of becoming and emergence. It’s people ignoring these important pieces of reality in favor of the rational that’s a big contributor to this cultural decline. Turns out these things are very important for our understanding of life in the universe.
And, he thought that the universe is essentially indifferent and always changing, not amenable to the kind of imposition of rational order and understanding the Stoics were trying to attempt.
The Stoics said you should “embrace everything that comes your way,” and “Love your fate.” But Nietzsche thought their version of amor fati–love of fate–was a very weak version:
the amor fati of Nietzsche, he says, is far more radical than that. He wants to love his fate, whether it’s rational or not. Whether it’s order, disorder, chaos. I mean, to Nietzsche, to say that nature is indifferent and then to really take that statement seriously,
that means you’d be someone who would affirm reality whether there was some kind of ultimate rational plan to it or not. And the challenge Nietzsche puts out there for people is for you to live so passionately, so affirming of anything necessary the universe throws your way. That you don’t need any sort of transcendent purpose that makes things feel more palatable to you. You wouldn’t have a need to try to control and govern down what a human life is just to make it something more manageable.
My favorite concept from Nietzsche has always been eternal recurrence, expressed in this quote from The Gay Science:
The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh… must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!’
This is his formulation, his thought experiment, his way of expressing the need to affirm the life you live, with its irrationality and meaninglessness. It’s a way of giving life meaning when it has none, with a love of fate so thorough that you wish for everything that happens to reverberate into eternity.
- I can’t find a page for this episode on the Philosophize This! website so linking to where I found a transcript. ↩︎