Jan 5, 2020 - Musings    No Comments

How to Live Like a Stoic

The following quotes are from Massimo Pigliucci’s book How to Be a Stoic

“The Stoics adopted Socrates’s classification of four aspects of virtue, which they thought of as four tightly interlinked character traits: (practical) Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, and Justice.

Practical Wisdom allows us to make decisions that improve our Eudaimonia, the (ethically) good life.

Courage can be physical, but more broadly refers to the moral aspect—for instance, the ability to act well under challenging circumstances…

Temperance makes it possible for us to control our desires and actions so that we don’t yield to excesses.

 Justice, for Socrates and the Stoics, refers not to an abstract theory of how society should be run, but rather to the practice of treating other human beings with dignity and fairness.”

Massimo thoughtfully walks us through the four cardinal Stoic virtues: Wisdom + Courage + Temperance + Justice.

“The Stoics derived their understanding of virtue from Socrates, who believed that all virtues are actually different aspects of the same underlying feature: Wisdom. The reason why Wisdom is the ‘chief good,’ according to Socrates, is rather simple: it is the only human ability that is good under every and all circumstance.”

Massimo continues: “Other cultures have developed, more or less independently, their own sets of virtues as socially important character traits, each arriving at its own classification of the relations among virtues. Interestingly, though, there is much more convergence than we would expect in these days when cultural relativism is so often portrayed as the norm. A study by Katherine Dahlsgaard, Christopher Peterson, and Martin Seligman looked at how virtue is articulated in Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Judaism, Taoism, and what they call ‘Athenian philosophy’ (mostly Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle).

They found a rather surprising amount of congruence among all of these religious-philosophical traditions and identified a set of six ‘core’ virtues: Courage, Justice, Humanity, Temperance, Wisdom, and Transcendence.

Four of the six are indistinguishable from the Stoic virtues. Stoics also accepted the importance of ‘humanity’ and ‘transcendence,’ although they didn’t think of these as virtues, but rather as attitudes toward others (humanity) and toward the universe at large (transcendence).”

Remember ‘Intention’ is a KEY. ‘Action’ is the ANSWER.

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