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Category Archives: Critics of Stoicism
Julian Baggini on Stoicism and the problem with self-help
Freelance philosopher and author Julian Baggini has a problem with self-help, with philosophy when it comes close to self-help, and therefore, apparently, with Stoicism. I take what Julian says seriously, since he is a thoughtful person, the founding editor of The Philosophers' Magazine (for which I occasionally write), and the author of a number of really, really good books that ought to be read widely. For instance, over at my other blog, Footnotes to Plato, I devoted a whopping eleven posts to an in-depth discussion of his marvelous The Edge of Reason: A Rational Skeptic in an Irrational World. Nevertheless, in what follows I'm going to push back on Julian's take on self-help type philosophy in general, and Stoicism in particular, focusing on two short articles he wrote: "Should we be more Stoic?," co-authored with Antonia Macaro (who, interestingly, recently published More Than Happiness: Buddhist and Stoic Wisdom for a Sceptical Age), and "The problem with self-help." (Notice that the first piece is from 2013, the second one from this year.)
"Should we be more Stoic?" was written on the occasion of the very first Stoic Week, and is part of a long running series of columns by Macaro and Baggini published in the Financial Times and eventually in book form. Macaro's take is that there is a lot more to Stoicism than a bag of tricks or some useful therapeutic techniques, and I couldn't agree more. However, she advises "unashamed cherry-picking" because "we live in very different times and it would be unreasonable to take on chapter and verse of Stoic philosophy."
Well, yes, we live in different times from those of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, but only up to a point, really. Human nature hasn't changed, and the following premeditatio malorum by Marcus still very applies today:
"Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. … I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him." (Meditations, II.1)
That is why Stoicism (like Buddhism, the other subject of Macaro's own book, written a few years after her column) is still so very pertinent today. And while it is certainly the case that one should not take onboard wholesale a philosophy that got started 23 centuries ago (see here, for instance), it doesn't follow that one should do unashamed cherry-picking. First, because Stoicism is a coherent system of thought, not really amenable to too much cherry-picking; second, because cherry-picking is a close companion to pure and simple rationalization, where one ends up "picking" what is convenient and neglecting what is harder and yet useful.
But it is Baggini, in that column, that fires heavy shots against Stoicism. He begins by stating that "when it comes to adopting any kind of philosophy, the lower case is king," continuing: "the only followers philosophers should have are the kind that follow up and through, and not simply after." Well, Seneca himself agreed when he said:
"Will I not walk in the footsteps of my predecessors? I will indeed use the ancient road — but if I find another route that is more direct and has fewer ups and downs, I will stake out that one. Those who advanced these [Stoic] doctrines before us are not our masters but our guides. The truth lies open to all; it has not yet been taken over. Much is left also for those yet to come." (Letters to Lucilius, XXXIII.11)
So much for just following after instead of up and through. Baggini insists: "Given that more than two millennia have elapsed since the Stoics developed their ideas, it would seem especially odd to relight their torch and carry it through the streets of our modern cities. The idea that the driving forces of the universe are reason and fate, for example, should have been exploded by the discovery of the Big Bang." But this betrays a somewhat superficial acquaintance with Stoic philosophy, both ancient and modern. Few modern Stoics accept the original pantheism and the idea of a living universe animated by the Logos. And even the ancient ones openly admitted that their metaphysics under-determined (to use a modern philosophical term) their ethics. That's why Marcus has several "gods or atoms" passages in the Meditations. Moreover, remember that the crucial part of the Stoic curriculum, even in ancient times, was the ethics (how to live your life), not the physics (natural science and metaphysics) and the logic (logic, rhetoric, and cognitive science). The three are certainly connected, but they don't admit of a simple linear mapping onto each other.
Julian is right when he says that "we can adapt and borrow any particular Stoic methods that work. But that no more makes you a Stoic than practising meditation makes you a Buddhist." But this would imply that therefore there are no modern Buddhists, only meditators. Or perhaps that Buddhism-the-philosophy is quaint and obsolete, and that only meditating techniques ought to survive. That is a strange and hard proposition to defend, though. Philosophies, like religions, evolve and adapt to new times and new knowledge, but they are useful insofar they still provide their adopters (or followers, in the case of religions) with a framework for navigating the world, a moral compass, as it were, which goes well beyond whatever practical techniques may have been developed within such philosophies and religions in the course of millennia.
Baggini concludes the first article by stating that "Stoicism itself stands or falls – or more likely limps along – on the soundness of its arguments, not its effect on our psychological wellbeing." Again, true. But there ain't no limping going on here, and if one needs any convincing that 21st century Stoicism is alive and logically sound, then I suggest a good reading of Larry Becker's A New Stoicism (or, if you are in a bit of a hurry, of my author-approved ten part series on the book).
The second, more recent piece I want to comment on is a solo production by Julian, written five years after the first article, and focusing on the "problem" of self-help. It begins by paying homage to concert pianist James Rhodes, who doesn't like the idea of self-help because "the 'good-enough human being' should indeed be good enough. … There is a huge amount of space between happiness and unhappiness and someone in between is OK."
Good enough "should" indeed be good enough? On what grounds? I know what Rhodes and Baggini are complaining about, as I'm not a fan of the standard self-help genre where one is promised the Moon if only one adopts seven habits, follows ten rules, or asks himself who moved his cheese. But as Julian himself immediately adds, there is nothing wrong with the idea of self-help per se, the issue is how it is done and for what purpose. A tendency of self-help authors to over-claim and over-simplify is certainly both common and damnable. But one can hardly accuse the Stoics of ether sin, unless one utterly misunderstands (which Baggini does not) passages like this one from Epictetus:
"If you regard only that which is your own [i.e., under your control] as being your own, and that which isn't your own [i.e., not under your control] as not being your own, as is indeed the case, no one will ever be able to coerce you, no one will hinder you, you'll find fault with no one, you'll accuse no one, you'll do nothing whatever against your will, you'll have no enemy, and no one will ever harm you because no harm can affect you." (Enchiridion, III)
Julian writes: "these books assume we know what we want and what a good life looks like and simply help us to close the gap between life as it is and life as we'd prefer it to be. That's why I think philosophy is not 'self-help' in the contemporary sense. Philosophy asks us to question what it means for a life to go well, what it means to be a good person. Not only might it provide no help reaching our current goals, it might even make us change them." There is a lot packed in here, both exactly right and exactly wrong. I don't see as inherently objectionable to write books that are prescriptive rather than just descriptive. That's what philosophy (unlike psychology) does, so it is strange for a philosopher to complain about books that tell people what a good life is. Socrates would certainly have written one such book, had he written anything at all. The problem is with the distorted potrary of the "good" (meaning, worth living) life which many modern self-help books present to their readers: it's all about money, success, getting laid, and feeling "happy." All things that the Stoics classed at best as preferred indifferents, which when pursued as a major goal distract us from what is really good about human life.
"Philosophy helps us to live better because living better doesn't mean feeling better," says Baggini, "if instead we're reading self-help books, we're allowing our pursuit of happiness to get in the way of our pursuit of the truly good life." Indeed, completely agreed. But then it is strange, if not downright contradictory for him to write: "[That's] why, for all its virtues, I was irritated by Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy, which had in large type on its back cover just one quote from Epicurus: 'Any philosopher's argument which does not therapeutically treat human suffering is worthless.' There goes Kant's Critique, Descartes' Meditations, Berkeley's Treatise, etc, etc.."
I'm not a fan of de Botton, though I think he gets a bad rap from academic philosophers, largely because he is so successful and popular (Baggini himself has made a career as a freelance philosopher, and he is good at it, so perhaps he should be more charitable toward fellow travelers). And I'm also not, broadly speaking, on the side of Epicurus. But just as Seneca puts it when he explains to his friend Lucilius why he often quotes Epicurus in his letters:
"It is my custom to cross even into the other camp, not as a deserter but as a spy." (Letters to Lucilius II.5)
In the specific case, Epicurus had a point, and he was speaking specifically — like the Stoics often did, including Seneca and Epictetus — of people who are interested in philosophy for the sake of hair splitting, engaging in logic chopping as a sport, with no thought toward searching for truth or improving themselves. As for Kant, Descartes, Berkeley, and many others, I'm pretty sure they were convinced that their work would make this a better world, which is why they were interested in ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. I'm guessing that de Botton chose that quote by Epicurus to make the point that much modern (academic) philosophy has instead devolved into precisely the sort of hair splitting and logic chopping that we should all find objectionable. Including Julian.
This entry was posted in Critics of Stoicism on February 27, 2018 by Massimo.
Stoicism, stoicism, and mental health
You can tell Stoicism is getting popular when anyone who disagrees with me on Twitter resorts to the "argument" (I'm using the word very loosely): "but what you said is un-Stoic!," pretty much regardless of what I actually said, or of its logical connection to Stoicism. Anyway, another sign of popularity is the fact that mental health professionals are beginning to take an interest, wishing to empirically assess the effects of practicing Stoicism on people's psychology.
Since Stoicism itself has from the beginning been a philosophy that included the study of psychology (under the field of "logic"), and moreover has always been explicitly open to revision, this is welcome news. What is not so welcome is when people, predictably, claim that they are studying Stoicism, while in fact they are studying stoicism (for this crucial, and not even that subtle distinction, see this article by Don Robertson).
Which is why a paper published last year in BMJ Open and entitled "Stoic beliefs and health: development and preliminary validation of the Pathak-Wieten Stoicism ideology scale" was a missed opportunity. Authored by Elizabeth Pathak, Sarah Wieten, and Christopher Wheldon, it purports to develop a scale with which to measure, as the title says, Stoic "ideology," with the purpose of beginning to explore the mental health effects of practicing such ideology. Unfortunately, the paper hopelessly mixes Stoicism and stoicism, with a strong lean toward the latter.
The authors identify four "key domains" of Stoicism: imperviousness to strong emotions, indifference to death, taciturnity, and self-sufficiency. It is on the basis of these domains that they build their scale, which they then test on 390 subjects, most of whom are young students (aged less than 25), mostly white (though somewhat gender balanced), almost all American born.
Setting aside the usual problems with the sampling of subjects used in this sort of study, which there is very little reason to think is representative even of the American population, let alone beyond, let me begin with the four domains just mentioned. I will then move to a brief examination of additional problematic statements made by Pathak and collaborators in the paper.
I. Imperviousness to strong emotions: it is absolutely not the case that this is a Stoic value (although it certainly is a stoic one). Consider, for instance, what Seneca says to his friend Marcia in his letter of consolation to her:
"'But,' say you, 'sorrow for the loss of one's own children is natural.' Who denies it? Provided it be reasonable? For we cannot help feeling a pang, and the stoutest-hearted of us are cast down not only at the death of those dearest to us, but even when they leave us on a journey." (VII)
A bit earlier he writes to her:
"I am not soothing you or making light of your misfortune: if fate can be overcome by tears, let us bring tears to bear upon it: let every day be passed in mourning, every night be spent in sorrow instead of sleep." (VI)
Does that sound to you like someone who is trying to be impervious to emotions? Or consider just how explicit on the subject Epictetus, notoriously the most stern of the ancient Stoics, really is:
"I must not be without feeling like a statue, but must maintain my natural and acquired relations, as a religious man, as son, brother, father, citizen." (Discourses III.2)
And here is what modern scholar Margaret Graver, who wrote a whole book on Stoicism and Emotion, says: "If the psychic sensations [i.e., feelings] we experience in emotion are not simply identical with the pathē [i.e., negative emotions], then the norm of apatheia [i.e., lack of negative emotions] does not have to be cashed out as an injunction against every human feeling. One might be impassive in the Stoic sense and still remain subject to other categories of affective experience."
So, no, the Stoics do not seek to be impervious to emotions. Rather, they work toward improving their judgments about externals, in order to re-align their emotional spectrum, de-emphasizing unhealthy emotions and nurturing and developing healthy ones.
II. Indifference to Death: one can see how people may develop a misconception here, for instance while reading what Seneca writes to Marcia:
"Reflect that the dead suffer no evils, that all those stories which make us dread the nether world are mere fables, that he who dies need fear no darkness, no prison, no blazing streams of fire, no river of Lethe, no judgment seat before which he must appear, and that death is such utter freedom that he need fear no more despots. All that is a phantasy of the poets, who have terrified us without a cause." (XIX)
This, however, is an explanation of why we should not be afraid of what will happen after we die (because there won't be any "us" to be concerned by things), it is hardly a council not to care about dying.
True, death — like everything that is not virtue — is categorized within the "indifferents," either preferred or, in this case, dispreferred. But that word has a very clear technical meaning in Stoic philosophy: it doesn't mean that one shouldn't care about dying, but rather that death itself is irrelevant to virtue, in the sense that dying or staying alive, per se, doesn't make you a better person.
Not convinced? Here is how Epictetus reacts to the news that a friend of his has decided to commit suicide for the hell of it:
"If your decision is justified, look, here we are at your side and ready to help you on your way; but if your decision is unreasonable, you ought to change it. 'We ought to hold to our decisions.' — What are you up to, man?" (Discourses II.15.6-7)
Again, does this sound like indifference (in the ordinary sense of the word) to death? I should think not.
III. Taciturnity: stoicism appeals to men, according to the authors, and goes well with the ideal (myth, really) of the solitary man who speaks by his actions. Think Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, or in any of his other movies, for that matter. But Stoicism (the philosophy) advocates nothing of the sort. True, Epictetus famously advises his students to talk little and of important things:
"When you're called upon to speak, then speak, but never about banalities like gladiators, horses, sports, food and drink — common-place stuff. Above all don't gossip about people, praising, blaming or comparing them." (Enchiridion 33.2)
Immediately below, Epictetus adds:
"In your conversation, don't dwell at excessive length on your own deeds or adventures. Just because you enjoy recounting your exploits doesn't mean that others derive the same pleasure from hearing about them." (Enchiridion 33.14)
It's obvious that this an injunction not to annoy people, and to engage others in meaningful, as opposed to idle, conversation. After all, the Stoics we know of were teachers, senators, generals, and emperors. Hardly the kind of individual who spends his life in a taciturn mood.
IV. Self-sufficiency: here too, stoicism (the attitude) seems to rely on the myth of the solitary hero who depends on no one. But Stoicism (the philosophy) is quintessentially cosmopolitan, and teaches that our primary concern should be to do good on behalf of the human polis. Sure, Marcus is often cited as saying:
"Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. … I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him." (Meditations II.1)
But that's simply an honest analysis of his expectations about other people qua emperor. He also tells himself in his personal diary:
"Have I been made for this, to lie under the blankets and keep myself warm? But this is more pleasant. Do you exist then to take your pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion?" (Meditations V.1)
And what action and exertion is he referring to, other than the obviously military one (he was encamped on the Danube fighting the Marcomanni tribes when he wrote the above)?
"Do what is necessary, and whatever the reason of a social animal naturally requires, and as it requires." (Meditations IV.24)
Seneca says something interesting about this matter:
"The wise man is self-sufficient. Nevertheless, he desires friends, neighbours, and associates, no matter how much he is sufficient unto himself." (IX. On Philosophy and Friendship, 3)
It is clear in context that by "self-sufficient" he means capable of maintaining virtue. And at any rate he is talking about the Sage, which is as rare as the mythical phoenix. He immediately adds that even the Sage desires friends, neighbors, and associates. So, no, there is no basis in Stoicism for the idea of self-sufficiency as understood within the context of stoicism.
This brief analysis should make clear that there is a huge difference between Stoicism and stoicism. Unfortunately, Pathak et al.'s article completely mixes the two, with a far stronger dose of stoicism than Stoicism. The result is a scale that measures something, but definitely not the effects of adopting a Stoic philosophy.
Let us take a look at some quotes from the paper itself, to make sure I am not misinterpreting what the authors are doing. "Stoicism has also been invoked as a defining characteristic of masculinity and as a key explanatory factor for certain health behaviors and outcomes among men" (p. 2 of the online version). This very clearly refers to the stiff upper lip attitude, not the philosophy. Indeed, on the very same page there is mention of the Liverpool Stoicism Scale, which includes "three items that are ideological, for example, 'one should keep a stiff upper lip.'" Precisely, but no Stoic ever advocated that, so the scale should be renamed the Liverpool stoicism Scale…
Pathak et al. "attempt to articulate an explicitly theory of stoicism [the fact that they are using the lowercase here and elsewhere is not indicative of a distinction being made between the philosophy and common parlance] and its potential impact on health. … stoicism is an ideology … we theorize that people who strongly endorse a personal ideology of stoicism may be more likely to avoid or delay seeking professional medical intervention for serious signs and symptoms of disease" (p. 3)
This can be extremely misleading, if it will lead to adoption of the scale developed in the study for social health research that focuses on stoicism but makes claims about the medical unsoundness of Stoicism.
The results are also difficult to interpret, again because of the complete confounding of stoicism and Stoicism. For instance: "men were more than two times as likely as women to fall into the top quartile of responses" (p. 5), meaning that men agreed more readily with a self-description as "stoic." "Scores for stoic taciturnity were strongly correlated with scores for both stoic endurance and stoic serenity, but stoic endurance and stoic serenity were not highly correlated with each other. Stoic death indifference … was least correlated with the other three domains" (p. 4). Moreover: "In this study population, respondents were least likely to endorse stoic serenity and most likely to endorse stoic death indifference" (p. 5).
It is hard to know what to make of these findings, since it isn't clear at all to what mixture of stoicism and Stoicism they refer. Please note, of course, that so far as we know likely none of the participants to the study actually had any training in, or exposure to, Stoic philosophy. Based on that, I'm inclined to say that the relevance of the study to Stoicism is close to zero, while it may tell us a lot about stoicism.
The authors draw some conclusions that seem to me to be rather unsubstantiated, or at least, again, ambiguous as to their referent: "Ironically, a personal ideology of stoicism almost guarantees failure to live up to one's ideals. … An ideology of stoicism creates an internal resistance to external objective needs, which can lead to negative consequences. … a study of major strain among family caretakers of elderly patients with dementia found those who used stoicism as a coping strategy suffered burnout, while those who sought social support did not" (pp. 6-7).
Right, but that sounds a lot like stoicism, not Stoicism. Now one could perhaps argue that Pathak et al. never actually intended to address Stoic philosophy, only the stiff upper lip modern attitude. But that is clearly not the case from the opening line of the paper: "Stoicism is a school of philosophy which originated in ancient Greece" (p. 1).
Which makes some of their conclusions particularly troublesome, especially for people who are trying to practice the philosophy: "We hypothesise that illness behaviors may become 'noncompliant' or 'irrational' or 'self-harming' when specific courses of action would create an internal conflict with patients' ideas of who they are. … This internal conflict will lead to delays in or avoidance of help seeking, with potentially life-threatening consequences. For example, empirical studies of male suicide in rural Australia have identified hegemonic masculine norms of stoicism as an important causal factor in the context of severe economic stress" (p. 8).
The situation of rural men in Australia subject to economic stress and committing suicide at high rates is horrible, but it does not seem to have anything to do with Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, names that are very likely entirely unknown to the people in question. It is therefore highly misleading, dangerous, and — I'm sorry to say — irresponsible to so casually mix stoicism and Stoicism.
Of course, as Don Robertson points out in his article on the matter, the same problem applies to other philosophies. I can easily see a study of "epicureanism" showing that if people indulge frequently in large meals, a lot of drinking, and unprotected sex with multiple patterns, they will incur health risks. But to blame Epicurus — who argued for restrain in or abstention from all the just mentioned activities — would be bizarre.
So I urge Elizabeth Pathak, Sarah Wieten, and Christopher Wheldon to scrap the whole exercise, ideally retracting their paper, and writing up their findings again while making crystal clear what they mean by "stoicism." Better yet, since there is a philosophy that has carried that name for the past 23 centuries, avoid to use the term altogether and write a paper on how to measure the potentially negative health consequences of trying to live like Clint Eastwood in a Western movie. The underlying problem — that an image of extreme self-reliance is bad for one's health — is likely real and deserves attention. But the relevant research ought to be carried out properly.
This entry was posted in Critics of Stoicism, Psychology, Science on January 12, 2018 by Massimo.
A friendly salvo against modern Epicureans
Zeno vs Epicurus
"The thought for today is one which I discovered in Epicurus; for I am wont to cross over even into the enemy's camp — not as a deserter, but as a scout," says Seneca to Lucilius in Letter II, On Discursiveness in Reading, 5. He writes this because he had made a habit, for a while, of closing his letters to his friend with a "present," a quote from another philosopher, usually Epicurus.
I don't think of Epicureans, or Buddhists, or Christians, as "enemies." My take is that it is useful to develop and adapt a philosophy of life — because it provides us with a moral compass and a framework to distinguish important from unimportant things in life — but that which philosophy one chooses is less important. Your specific choice may have to do with your cultural background, your personal history, your character and personality, or your stage in life. If it works, go for it (so long as it isn't a destructive philosophy, like, you know, fascism). I write this blog, now in its third year and counting 348 posts, to help others for whom Stoicism resonates, but I'm certainly not here to make converts.
That said, the blog also has a special category of entries termed "critics of Stoicism," where I respond to the surprisingly many, and often surprisingly vicious, attacks on our philosophy. You are about to read yet another of these responses, this time to "The seductive dead-end of Stoicism," written by one Cassius Amicus (obviously a pseudonym) over at newepicurean.com.
"Cassius" is, apparently, moved by a concern for his many Stoic friends, especially because they have a high regard for Marcus Aurelius, who he does not trust after "spending much of a weekend reviewing" the Meditations. He adds: "As one generation passes and new students of philosophy arise, the old errors constantly attract new converts. It is regularly necessary for Epicureans to recalibrate their guns and fire again on Stoicism, lest it infect new generations. For the truth is, those who espouse the Stoic platitudes — which I regret to say includes both Marcus Aurelius and Cicero — are like philosophical vampires, always lurking in the shadows to steal the life from the unsuspecting; always in the service of the oldest dead-head vampire of them all — Plato."
Strong words! Fighting words! But, wait, Plato?? If there is anything that is far removed from Plato — apart from Epicureanism itself — is precisely Stoicism, and perhaps even more its cousin, Cynicism. Don't forget that Plato himself referred to Diogenes the Cynic as "Socrates gone mad."
So what's Cassius' issue with Marcus? He thinks that the Meditations reek of religionism, fatalism, and passivism, which he maintains are attitudes utterly incompatible with Epicureanism.
Well, he is right on the latter, though the Epicureans themselves — contra modern lore — where not atheists, they were what we would today call deists. It is also true that their metaphysics was very different from that of the Stoics: atoms swirling in the void in the first case, cause-effect determinism in the latter. The Stoics did believe in "providence" of some sort, though they did not mean the Christian variety at all, but rather a consequence of what they saw as a universe being alive and doing its thing. Since we are bits and pieces of that universe, there is a sense in what happens to us, and that sense is precisely analogous to the role of a foot stepping in the mud, if the whole body to which that foot belongs has to get home and there is a puddle of mud in its way. (That is, in fact, an analogy used by Epictetus, in Discourses II.6.9-10.)
Sure, modern science — as Larry Becker maintains in A New Stoicism — has discarded the organismal view of the cosmos in favor of a mechanistic one. But this should be of little comfort to the Epicureans. Not only the "atoms" they were talking about have precious little to do with the atoms of modern science, but they made a special plead to save human free will by arbitrarily introducing their concept of the "swerve," an idea that looks pretty close to magic from a modern scientific perspective.
As for "religionism," indeed Marcus sounds very pious when he is talking to himself (and even so, he constantly repeats the "providence or atoms" mantra, more than hinting at the idea that whatever metaphysical theory one subscribes to simply doesn't matter in terms of the crucial thing: ethics). Perhaps he really was pious, it's hard to say. But a fair reading of the Stoics always has to keep in mind that for them "god" was made of matter, and coincided with the universe itself. Not to mention that, despite the oft-brought up example of Cleanthes' "prayer" to Zeus, we know from Diogenes Laertius (VII.33) that Zeno of Citium, the founder of the philosophy, clearly stated that in an ideal Stoic republic there would be no temples, i.e., no organized religion or worship.
Regarding fatalism, the concept itself is muddled, and again Becker makes a good case for why the Stoics were not fatalists, but determinists, there is a difference, and modern science, and much of modern metaphysics, lean toward the Stoic, not the Epicurean, position.
To accuse the Stoics, and especially Marcus, of passivism is, of course, ridiculous on the face of it, though a common sport amongst our critics. A fundamental tenet of Stoic philosophy, and one often repeated by Marcus, is that we ought to work on our faculty of judgment, to arrive at better decisions about what to do, and especially how to be helpful to others (something the Epicureans infamously shied away from, uninterested as they were in politics and social issues, on the ground that to engage in those areas causes pain, a no-no for them). And anyone picking up a biography of Marcus, or of Cato the Younger, or even Seneca, or Epictetus, will certainly realize that these were not people who passively accepted their "fate." They fought hard, sometimes literally, for what they believed, in order to make the world a better place. Nothing of the sort can be said of any Epicurean I'm aware of.
Next, our friend Cassius takes aim at the Stoic doctrine of "living according to nature," where he says: "for the constant Stoic incantation of 'Nature' is nothing but illusion. Stoicism fails to define or ground the guidance of Nature in anything real — unlike Epicureanism, which grounds Nature's guidance in pleasure."
Au contraire, Stoicism grounds its philosophy in the empirically tenable idea that human nature is that of a fundamentally social being who is capable of reason, from which it follows that the natural way of living for us is to deploy reason in order to improve social living. As Marcus puts it: "Do you have reason? I have. Why then do you not use it?" (IV.13) And: "So long as nothing … drives me out, I remain, am free, and no man shall hinder me from doing what I choose; and I choose to do what is according to the nature of the rational and social animal." (V.29)
Moreover, it is the Epicureans who clearly get human nature wrong, as Cicero has Cato the Younger explain in book III of De Finibus: "Infants desire things conducive to their health and reject things that are the opposite before they have ever felt pleasure or pain; this would not be the case, unless they felt an affection for their own constitution and were afraid of destruction." (III.16) One of those things that infants strive for because it is good for them is learning how to walk. Which is painful, not pleasurable.
Cassius then invokes a namesake, Cassius Longinus, who in 45 BCE told Cicero that the Stoic idea that one chooses good for its own sake is nonsense: "For it is hard to convince men that 'the good is to be chosen for its own sake'; but it is both true and demonstrable that pleasure and tranquility of mind is acquired by virtue, justice, and the good. Why, Epicurus himself, from whom all the Catiuses and Amafiniuses in the world, incompetent translators of terms as they are, derive their origin, lays it down that 'to live a life of pleasure is impossible without living a life of virtue and justice.'"
Okay, to begin with, where on earth does Epicurus get the strange idea that it is impossible to live a life of pleasure without being virtuous and just? Do the Epicureans not read the newspapers? Or watch Real Housewives of New Jersey? More to the point, the Stoics do not argue that one ought to do good for its own sake, they argue that to be helpful to others is good because we are all deeply interconnected in a web of cause and effect, not just with the universe as a whole, but specifically as a species of highly social beings. In this sense, for the Stoics — and contra much modern moral philosophy — there is no sharp distinction between selfishness and altruism: every time I do something for myself I improve the wellbeing of humanity, and vice versa, every time I do something for others I indirectly improve things for myself.
Even more to the point, the Stoics — following Socrates in the Euthydemus — think that virtue is the chief good. "Chief" doesn't mean "only," hence the further category of preferred indifferents. But why would virtue be the chief good, and not, say, money, or health, or education? Because virtue is the single thing (and those others are not) that can always and only be used for good. It makes no logical sense to say that one commits a virtuous crime, for instance. But it does make perfect sense to say that wealth can be used for good or for evil (i.e., it is morally neutral, hence an "indifferent").
Epicurus, again quoted by Cassius was right on one thing though: "We must also recollect that which principally contributes to trouble the spirit of men is the persuasion which they cherish that the stars are beings imperishable and perfectly happy, and that then one's thoughts and actions are in contradiction to the will of these superior beings. They also being deluded by these fables, apprehend an eternity of evils, and they fear the insensibility of death, as if that could affect them." (From the Letter to Herodotus)
But the Stoics wouldn't disagree here, as it is made abundantly clear by Seneca in this passage: "Reflect that the dead suffer no evils, that all those stories which make us dread the nether world are mere fables, that he who dies need fear no darkness, no prison, no blazing streams of fire, no river of Lethe, no judgment seat before which he must appear, and that Death is such utter freedom that he need fear no more despots. All that is a phantasy of the poets, who have terrified us without a cause." (To Marcia, On Consolation, XIX)
Cassius goes on quoting Epicurus' Letter to Menoceus: "The wise man sees that Fate or Necessity cannot exist if men are truly free, and he also sees that Fortune is not in constant control of the lives of men. But the wise man sees that our actions are free, and because they are free, our actions are our own responsibility, and we deserve either blame or praise for them."
Well, the wise man in question just turned out to be wrong, didn't he? Epicurus here is espousing a species of hard incompatibilism, according to which the ability to make decisions, and the moral responsibility that accompanies those decisions, are impossible in a deterministic universe. But, as the Stoics already surmised, and both modern science and much modern philosophy confirm, we do live in a deterministic universe, at least in the sense of a universe governed by cause and effect. The Stoics also figured out, just like modern day compatibilists, that there is an important sense in which our decisions are truly ours, a topic for which I refer the reader to my essay on Chrysippus' analogy of the rolling cylinder, as well as to part of my commentary on Larry Becker's A New Stoicism.
Cassius proceeds with a bizarre, and largely irrelevant, further attack based on Thomas Jefferson's criticism of the Stoics. But, to begin with, Jefferson was an amateur philosopher whose opinions on the matter are no more weighty than those of someone who picked up the Meditations for an entire weekend; moreover, Cassius quotes Jefferson at length, railing against Plato! Once again: Platonic philosophy has precious little to do with Stoicism, so criticism of the first says nothing at all about the second.
The last bit of Cassius' rant is a simple series of selected quotations from the Meditations, each bit of which is accompanied by entirely unsubstantiated and unhelpful comments, usually along the lines of "Epicurus held that…" Insofar this list is meant to convince readers that Stoicism and Epicureanism are different, and often at odds with each other, well yes, though we knew that. If it is meant to show the alleged superiority of Epicureanism, however, a hell of a lot more work needs to be done.
One final comment about the "truth" of philosophical doctrines (something I also recently brought up in response to my friend Dan Kaufman's criticism of Stoicism from an Aristotelian perspective): certain aspects of a given philosophy, like the metaphysical claim that we live in a deterministic universe (or not) are either true or false, though it is often highly contentious whether we have satisfactorily arrived at one conclusion or the other. But a philosophy of life, such as Stoicism or Epicureanism (or Aristotelianism, Buddhism, Christianity) cannot be true of false. That is a category mistake. Philosophies of life are more or less coherent, and more or less useful to individuals and society. In those respects, both Stoicism and Epicureanism are coherent philosophies; and they can both be useful to individual practitioners. Though I would argue that Stoicism is far more useful to society than Epicureanism is, simply because the Epicureans pointedly withdraw, as I mentioned above, from social-political life, while the Stoics embrace it.
So, my Epicurean friends, no need to hurl insults at us (they wouldn't take anyway, see Discourses I, 25.28-29), or waste much time to try to show that we are "wrong." Incidentally, isn't so much passion about philosophical discourse with strangers a precisely non-Epicurean thing to do, since it likely brings pain and no pleasure? Here is what our own Epictetus had to say about it: "What was it, then, that awakened Epicurus from his slumbers and impelled him to write what he did? What else than what is most powerful of all in human beings, nature, who constrains everyone to her will, groan and resist though he may. 'For since you hold these antisocial views,' she says, 'write them down and hand them on to others, and stay awake at night because of them, and so become, through your own practice, the denunciator of your own doctrines.'" (Discourses II.20.15-16) Oops!
This entry was posted in Critics of Stoicism, Metaphysics on November 3, 2017 by Massimo.
Why virtue is sufficient for a life worth living
My friend Dan Kaufman, over at the Electric Agora, has written a nice compact piece arguing that the Aristotelian view of eudaimonia — the life worth living — is significantly more defensible than the Stoic one. (Except, as even Dan acknowledges, when things aren't going well and people live in times of turmoil. Which, one could argue, is most of human history.)
Dan and I, together with our colleague Skye Cleary, are assembling a collection of essays by multiple contributors offering a panorama of possible philosophies of life, that is, of different philosophical frameworks one may adopt as a compass to guide them to a better, more meaningful life. So this exchange between Dan and I can be seen as a preview of what the book is about, as well as of how to compare and contrast two of the most ancient philosophies of life.
The Aristotelians and the Stoics battled for the soul of their practitioners, so to speak, already 23 centuries ago, after Stoicism was established in Athens by Zeno of Citium, so this exchange belongs to a long tradition of which, I'm sure Dan would agree, the two of us are among the latest, and least worthy, interpreters.
The debate was about the sufficiency, or not, of virtue for a eudaimonic life. The Stoics (together with their close cousins, the Cynics) argued that virtue is both necessary and sufficient. In particular, the four cardinal virtues of phronesis (practical wisdom), courage, justice, and temperance. The Stoics (unlike the Cynics), also recognized that people want a number of other things, including health, wealth, education, love, friendship, and so forth. They referred to those as "preferred indifferents" (and to their negative counterparts, such as sickness, poverty, ignorance, etc., as dispreferred indifferents). They are preferred because it is reasonable for people to pursue them, so long as they do so without compromising their virtue (i.e., their moral character), but they are indifferent because, in themselves, they do not make one more or less virtuous. And since virtue is the only thing that matters for eudaimonia, they do not contribute to that either. It is a perfectly coherent system. But is it "true"? (I will come back later to why I put scare quotes around that word.)
The Aristotelians thought not. As Dan says, their philosophy also belongs to the eudaimonic tradition, and they too thought that virtue is necessary for a life worth living. But they did not think it was sufficient. Those things that the Stoics refer to as "preferred" are also needed. If your life does not — even through no fault of your own — include at least some health, wealth, education, and even good looks, you are screwed. No eudaimonia for you.
The distinction sketched above makes Aristotelianism an elitist philosophy, as it applies only to a subset of humanity. How large of a subset depends on the time and place, and also on just how much externals are really needed (Aristotle was pretty vague on this point). By contrast, Stoicism is for everyone: rich or poor, healthy or sick, educated or ignorant, you can still be eudaimon. Unlike the case of Aristotelianism, where luck is needed, for Stoics your eudaimonia is entirely up to you, Fortuna simply doesn't enter into the equation.
As Dan clearly perceives, much — if not all, really — here depends on exactly what eudaimonia is taken to mean. I completely agree with my friend that translating the Greek word, as is often done, as "happiness" misses the mark. Happiness, in modern parlance, chiefly (though not exclusively) refers to a state of perceived wellbeing in the moment. It's a feeling of elation, as in "I'm happy when I play the piano" (or when I have sex, or when I read a book, or whatever). This, very clearly, is not what either Aristotle or the Stoics had in mind.
But Dan makes a mistake, I think, when he seems to assume that the Aristotelians and the Stoics meant the same thing by eudaimonia. They didn't, nor did several of the other Hellenistic schools. Indeed, a major way to classify and understand the differences among those schools is precisely to look at how they construed eudaimonia and the path to its achievement. Aristotelians and Stoics certainly disagreed between them, bu they both thought that the Epicureans, with their emphasis on ataraxia (tranquillity of mind), and their recipe of virtue plus physical and mental pleasure minus physical and mental pain, were far more misguided.
Dan, not surprisingly, adopts the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, that of the flourishing life. Flourishing means that a eudaimon being is capable of pursuing a number of personal projects because she has sufficient material and psychological resources, including of course a measure of the above mentioned externals. She is sufficiently educated, say, to become a university professor. She is attractive enough to marry a good and interesting person and have children. She has meaningful relationships with her family and friends. And so forth. If we conceive of eudaimonia that way, it then becomes obvious that externals are not just preferred indifferents, they are necessary.
But the Stoics explicitly referred to their school as "Socratic" (which the Aristotelians definitely didn't), in part because they inherited their definition of eudaimonia from the Athenian sage: it consists in a life worth living. This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but it isn't. Certainly an Aristotelian life of (virtuous, let's not forget) flourishing is worth living, but that's not the only kind falling into the broader category favorite by the Stoics.
Take, for instance, the example of Cato the Younger, a Roman Senator during the last years of the Republic that is one of the Stoics' preferred role models, particularly by Seneca. Although Cato had access to some of the externals that Aristotelians think are necessary, he gladly did without them. While wealthy, he often walked around the streets of Rome in tattered clothing. He ate simple meals, though he could afford extravagant ones. And when he served as commander in the army he walked side by side with his soldiers, instead of comfortably travel on horseback.
More importantly, Cato's life was marked by repeated failures. He lost two crucial elections, as praetor and as consul, that would have allowed him to more efficaciously oppose his political archenemy, Julius Caesar; he was unjustly accused of hoarding wealth for himself during his governorship of Cyprus, even though he was actually one of the few Roman officials immune from corruption; and, most of all, lost the civil war against Caesar, something that meant everything to him not juts as a politician and commander, but as a Roman citizen.
And yet, how did Cato react to such misfortunes? When he heard of the election results he went off to play with his friends. When he was accused of financial improprieties he showed his fellow citizens what sort of men he really was by way of his conduct, so much so that Romans adopted a saying for excusing their own moral failures, "not everyone is a Cato." And when he lost everything, he had the courage to commit suicide by literally ripping his guts out of his self-inflicted dagger wound, in order to retain his integrity and not be used by Caesar for political gain.
Was Cato's life a flourishing one? Hardly. Was it worth living? The very fact that we are still talking of the man in admiring terms more than two millennia after his death is a testament to that, one that even Aristotle (who thought that eudaimonia could be assessed only after one's demise) ought to have bowed to.
And it is not difficult to find modern examples like Cato's either. James Stockdale was shot down in Vietnam and survived seven years of torture and isolation (which left him crippled for life) in part thanks to his studies of the Stoic philosophy of Epictetus. Nelson Mandela was not a Stoic, but his pivotal change from angry and bitter victim of the apartheid government to peaceful and forgiving leader of the resistance was helped by a smuggled copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. He still had to suffer 28 years in prison, though, hardly a life of flourishing in the Aristotelian sense, but certainly one worth living in the Stoic one.
The Stoics, as Dan acknowledges, do want to succeed at their endeavors. Cato wanted to beat Caesar; Stockdale not to be captured in Vietnam; Mandela not to spend decades in prison. But while the Aristotelians give up and declare one's life a failure when things don't go well enough, the Stoics find inner resources in their conviction that the true measure of a person is in her character, not in the vagaries of fortune.
The Stoic attitude is not at all the cheap consolation prize that Dan describes when he says that it is akin to telling a kid who lost the race that he "did his best." The point isn't to feel better, the point is to look squarely at what cards life deals us and play them to our best, because that is all we can do. Dan is therefore profoundly mistaken when he characterizes the Stoic approach as a way to be happy with one's life even if it isn't a eudaimonic one. Happiness doesn't enter into the Stoic equation. Knowing that one has done one's best, and especially that one has tried to be the most moral person one can be, that is the standard by which a life worth living is being measured.
Dan argues that the Hellenistic philosophies are "philosophies under siege." They, like Christianity thereafter (and like Buddhism in India, or Confucianism in China) are good for when people feel they have no control over their lives, especially in terms of the big picture. Aristotelianism, by contrast, is conceived by Dan as a "bourgeois" philosophy well tailored for "a time and place where there is unprecedented material prosperity, longevity, and overwhelming safety, as there is in the modern, industrialized world."
Well, even if that were the case, I would remind my friend that most of the world, much of the time, has been, and still is, in a decidedly non bourgeois state of affairs. Even in the 21st century very large numbers of people live in poverty, war zones, slavery (literal or in terms of labor conditions), famine caused by environmental catastrophe or by the actions of fellow humans, and so forth. But in fact even we lucky (in the Aristotelian sense), or privileged (as the current parlance goes) Western white males face major uncertainties at both the macro- and the micro-scale.
At the macro-level, one only has to open a newspaper to find news of unfolding global environmental disaster, the possibility of a nuclear war triggered by an incompetent narcissist currently seating in the White House, and the resurgence (yet again) of a greedy Wall Street that is gearing itself to possibly cause another global financial catastrophe as if 2008 had never happened. And you think the death of Alexander the Great was destabilizing? Ah!
At the micro-level, we are all guaranteed to suffer major setbacks in our lives. If for nothing else because we are destined to die. And so are our loved ones and friends. We get sick, we lose love, and we may lose our job. Every such turn of events is a nail in the coffin of your eudaimonia, according to the Aristotelian way of looking at life. But for the Stoics every single one of those unhappy instances is an opportunity to test our character and to demonstrate to ourselves that we can get through it. As Marcus Aurelius put it: "Our actions may be impeded … but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." (Meditations V.20)
This attention to the everyday life of every human being is what makes Stoicism appealing, and what condemns Aristotelianism to elitism. Dan says that plenty of things that are elitist and unfair are nonetheless true. But "true," when applied to a philosophy, is a category mistake, as I've argued at book length. Philosophies in general, and philosophies of life in particular, are neither true nor false. They are, instead, more or less useful ways of thinking. They provide users, that is, practitioners, with a framework by which to organize their lives, to set their priorities, and through which to attempt to cope with whatever life — which truly is neither fair nor just — throws at them.
Stoicism is one such powerful tool, and so are kindred philosophies like Buddhism and Taoism. They are not meant to "console" people, which would be patronizing. They are, rather, meant to empower them, to show them that no matter what happens, they can still find meaning in what they do. As Marcus, again, says: "In the morning, when you rise unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being." (Meditations V.1) And what does the work of a human being look like? Something along these lines:
That is, life is always hard and full of challenges, even for a privileged member of the bourgeois. But we can all look at how things are, eschewing wishful thinking, and decide — regardless of the vagaries of Fortuna — to act in the right way toward ourselves and our fellow human beings. That, really, is all there is to it.
This entry was posted in Critics of Stoicism, Virtue Ethics on October 27, 2017 by Massimo.
Why Modern Stoicism does not miss the point
And we come now to a new exciting entry in my ongoing "someone else doesn't like Stoicism and likely misunderstands it" series of posts. Today's entry is about an article published by Mark Vernon over at The Idler, entitled "Why Modern Stoicism misses the point," and accompanied by the tag line "there is more to Stoicism than self-control, it is about surrendering to the divine will."
Vernon begins by hoping that his readers will go and check out Epictetus' Enchiridion for themselves, because "it will show them how etiolated modern Stoicism has become, and how challenging the way of life advocated by Epictetus and his fellows, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, really was. It's only in this challenge that it has anything striking and useful to say to us today. Stoicism now focuses on Epictetus' best known remark. It's commonly glossed thus: 'it's not what happens to you that matters but how you respond that matters.'"
Vernon continues: "It's the advice behind today's virtue à la mode, resilience: grin and bear it. Little wonder big corporates pay good money for seminars teaching such passivity. It's compliance dressed up as a philosophy. The slave-cum-scholar-cum-stoic secures your future as a wage slave. Only, something crucial to Epictetus has been stripped out."
Before we get to what modern Stoics have allegedly stripped out, let me address what Vernon has said so far, beginning with the idea that (ancient) Stoicism was challenging. Of course. All philosophies of life, or religions (which come with a built-in philosophy of life) are challenging, if one means to practice them seriously. If you think being a Christian or a Buddhist isn't challenging you have not understood what Christianity or Buddhism are about. And that's true for the ancient as well as the modern versions of all these approaches to life. I don't know many modern Stoics who don't think that to be the case, and indeed lots of discussions at the large Stoicism Facebook community (almost 24,000 at current counting) focus precisely on the challenges of practice, the community being, in a sense, a large mutual support group.
Vernon then says that Epictetus' dichotomy of control has been reduced to today's "virtue à la mode," as he calls resilience. I'm not sure where he is getting that, but it is nowhere to be found in any of the modern books on Stoicism I've read thus far, including Don Robertson's, Bill Irvine's, Larry Becker's, or my own.
But it appears from his sneering at "corporate" Stoicism that Vernon's real targets are the likes of Ryan Holiday and Tim Ferris. I have written about what I think of that approach before, but even in those books I see little to substantiate Vernon's attitude. Sure, they are more self-help than philosophy, addressed to a particular audience, and written in a style that is alien to my own way of writing. But so what? If they are helpful to people, that's a good thing. And who knows how many that would have never heard of Stoicism before have taken or will take a look at the ancient authors as a result of reading Holiday or Ferris. That's a good thing too.
Vernon's more fundamental issue, however, concerns something else entirely:
"What Stoicism-lite removes is the cosmic view that informed [Epictetus] advice. He was convinced that the ways of the world and the universe were determined by an omnipresent, omnipotent force. Stoics called it the Logos. It was divine. It was irresistible. And crucially, it was benign."
Ah, yes, the old "gods not atoms" objection. Except that even the ancient Stoics were pretty clear that their metaphysics underdetermines — as modern philosophers would put it — their ethics, meaning that their ethical practice is compatible with more than one (but not just any) metaphysical stance.
Here is Marcus, for instance:
"Recall the alternative; either there is providence or a fortuitous concurrence of atoms." (IV.3)
"Either all things proceed from one intelligent source and come together as in one body, and the part ought not to find fault with what is done for the benefit of the whole; or there are only atoms, and nothing else than mixture and dispersion. Why, then, are you disturbed?" (IX.39)
"Whether the universe is a concourse of atoms, or nature is a system, let this first be established: that I am a part of the whole that is governed by nature; next, that I stand in some intimate connection with other kindred parts." (X.6)
And several more examples can be found throughout the Meditations. Seneca too says pretty much the same:
"Whether Fate binds us down by an inexorable law, or whether God as arbiter of the universe has arranged everything, or whether Chance drives and tosses human affairs without method, philosophy ought to be our defense." (Letter XVI. On Philosophy, the Guide of Life, 5)
It is hard to read any of the above and not agree that for the Stoics it simply did not matter whether the universe is arranged by a benevolent Providence or not. One still has to do one's best to contribute to the polis of humanity.
Moreover, Vernon's vocabulary is misleading: "omnipresent … omnipotent … divine … irresistible." This sounds too much like Christianity, which is not surprising given that the author is a former priest for the Church of England, who now considers himself an "agnostic Christian."
But the Logos was nothing like that. The Stoics were pantheists, so their "god" was immanent in the universe, and made of matter. Indeed god simply is the universe for the Stoics, and accordingly they used words like "god," "nature," and "cosmos" interchangeably. The "divine" is everywhere, and we are literally bits and pieces of it. There is nothing at all in this conception that hints at omnipresence, if not in the trivial sense that the universe is everywhere (where else would it be?), and even less so omnipotence. The "irresistibility" of the Stoic god is the irresistibility of the universal web of cause and effect, as explained by Chrysippus.
As for the allegedly benign character of Providence, this should not be interpreted, again, in anything like the Christian sense of a grand plan of which we are a part. Rather, the Stoics thought of the world as a living organism, and that organism tries to do whatever is best for it as a whole, which sometimes means that some of its parts bear the unpleasant brunt of its actions. Here is how Epictetus famously explains it, quoting Chrysippus:
"If I in fact knew that illness had been decreed for me at this moment by destiny, I would welcome even that; for the foot, too, if it had understanding, would be eager to get spattered with mud." (Discourses II.6.9-10)
Vernon will have none of it: "Remove your desire? Abandon your freedom? Give up your will? In a godless cosmos, red in tooth and claw, governed by the ruthless laws of evolutionary survival, your desire, freedom and will are all you have. Nietzsche, the herald of the death of God, saw through Stoicism-lite: 'You desire to LIVE according to Nature? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power – how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live – is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature?'"
Ah, you've got to love it when a former priest approvingly mentions Nietzsche, the uber-bad boy of philosophy! At some point I will write a separate post on Nietzsche and the Stoics, apparently it's sorely needed.
For now, though, suffice to point out two things: first, contra both Nietzsche and Vernon, plenty of agnostics and atheists seem to have no trouble at all finding meaning and conducting an ethical life within a world "red in tooth and claw," so one ought to at least pause before making fun of modern Stoics, who are just one such group of people. (I should further qualify that I think of Modern Stoicism as a big tent, metaphysically speaking, which includes theists, atheists, agnostics, and even some pantheists.)
Second, Nietzsche literally had no idea what he was talking about in that passage. "Living according to nature," for the Stoics, meant (and still means) living by developing the highest potential as human beings. And that translates into applying one's reasoning ability and judgments to improving social life. As Marcus puts it:
"Labor not as one who is wretched, nor yet as one who would be pitied or admired; but direct your will to one thing only: to act or not to act as social reason requires." (Meditations, IX.12)
This is the same "gods or atoms" Marcus as above, of course. And here is Seneca, railing against philosophers who'd rather engage in logic chopping than in helping people:
"I should like to have those subtle dialecticians of yours advise me how I ought to help a friend, or how a fellow man, rather than tell me in how many ways the word "friend" is used, and how many meanings the word 'man' possesses." (Letter XLVIII. On Quibbling as Unworthy of the Philosopher, 4)
None of that may have meant anything to Nietzsche himself, but when Nietzsche says that the point is precisely to be otherwise than nature, he seems to impute to the Stoics a type of appeal to nature, a logically fallacious argument (X is natural, therefore X is good) that would have taken Chrysippus a nanosecond to dispatch of.
Vernon quotes Marcus in his favor: "You must consider the doing and perfecting of what the universal nature decrees in the same light as your health, and welcome all that happens, even if it seems harsh, because it leads to the health of the universe, the welfare and well-being of God. For he would not have allotted this to anyone if it were not beneficial to the whole." (No ref.)
Yes, that is one of the most Christian-sounding sound bites from Marcus, though there is a lot of room for a more neutral interpretation there too. But what about this, also from the emperor-philosopher?
"And by the Universal Nature treating these [pain, pleasure, death, and life] with neutrality I mean that all things happen neutrally in a chain of sequence to things that come into being and their after products by some primeval impulse of Providence, in accordance with which She was impelled by some primal impulse to this making of an ordered Universe, when She had conceived certain principles for all that was to be, and allocated the powers generative of substances and changes and successions such as we see." (Meditations IX.1)
Things happen neutrally because of a chain of cause-effect that began in a primeval impulse. I doubt this would sound too alien to anyone accepting what Vernon contemptuously refers to as the take on nature "sanctioned by today's high priests, the scientists, with their creed of mechanistic materialism."
Vernon concludes that "without a transcendent perspective on life's harshness, without trust in an unfolding higher than human vision, all we have is our desire, our frightened calls for control, our empty cries for freedom echoing about in the indifferent void."
That's a pretty bleak take not just on modern Stoicism, but on the human spirit. There is no question that if one believes in a benign Providence and in a grand plan orchestrated by a benevolent God then life is easier to bear. But it is highly doubtful that even the ancient Stoics accepted anything like that view of the cosmos, and it is certain that they didn't think it was required in order to "live according to nature," i.e., to be decent people who do their best in order to make existence a little bit better for everyone. And to impute either shallowness or willful ignorance to modern Stoics if they don't accept Vernon's particular theology is downright insulting. Except that Stoics, ancient and modern, don't believe in insults. But neither Nietzsche nor Vernon are in a position to understand why.
Stoicism and the "inadequacy of the invincible"
Stoicism is not new to criticism. Many of the fragments of Stoic texts that we have, especially referring to the early Stoa, are actually from authors who were not just critical, but seriously pissed off at, the philosophy. And now that Stoicism seems to be on the upswing again, the critics have come out of the woodworks once more. There is, of course, much value in serious criticism of one's philosophy (for instance, from the likes of Martha Nussbaum), and the Stoics themselves repeatedly took good ideas from whenever they found them, be that the Cynicism so admired by Epictetus, or even the Epicureanism in which Seneca made a number of forays "not as a deserter, but as a scout" (II. On Discursiveness in Reading, 5).
Some of the modern critics have tried to top Sextus Empiricus' famous "Against the Professors," managing to express a level of venom probably better suited to other targets. Here, for instance, is my response to Existentialist philosopher Sandy Grant, who I think managed to write one of the most uncharitable recent commentaries on Stoicism. (Then again, none other than Bertrand Russell himself, one of the philosophers who most influenced me early on, botched the job fantastically in his History of Western Philosophy.)
This entry was posted in Critics of Stoicism, Marcus, Modern Stoicism on May 16, 2017 by Massimo.
Bertrand Russell got Stoicism seriously wrong
When I was growing up in Italy, the very first book of philosophy I ever laid hands on was by Bertrand Russell. Well, to be exact, it wasn't a book of philosophy, but about a philosopher: his autobiography. From then on, I went to read Why I am Not a Christian, which solidified my own misgivings (as a teenager) about the Catholic faith I was brought up with. And of course soon afterwards I read Russell's famous History of Western Philosophy. I realized even then that this was no neutral historical survey of the philosophical canon, but rather a highly opinionated personal take on more than two millennia of philosophizing. But I was a teenager, with little or no previous knowledge of philosophy, opinionated was fun! Recently, however, a viewer of my YouTube channel asked me what I thought about Russell's harsh criticism of Stoicism. I couldn't resist, I went back to the book, and oh boy…
This entry was posted in Ancient Stoicism, Critics of Stoicism on May 11, 2017 by Massimo.
Who's afraid of Stoicism?
One of the hallmarks of a successful movement is that media coverage begins to shift from treating it as a curiosity to presenting it as a possible threat, or at the least as overblown, simplistic, and possibly a vehicle to swindle people. If that's the case, the past couple of weeks have given us incontrovertible signs that modern Stoicism has grown enough to trigger a journalistic hack job and to attract the hires of at the least one professional philosopher. Let's take a look. (Incidentally, want proof that Stoicism is trendy? We made it into the New Yorker!)
This entry was posted in Critics of Stoicism, Modern Stoicism on December 22, 2016 by Massimo.
Cicero's critique of Stoicism, part II
Cicero in the Forum
We have seen some of the major arguments that Cicero uses against the Stoics, in book IV of his De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Goods and Evils), and I'm going to complete my brief analysis in this post.
At #48 we find a fascinating, and in some sense, very modern, passage: "Considerations of conduct or duty do not supply the impulse to desire the things that are in accordance with nature; it is these things which excite desire and give motives for conduct."
This entry was posted in Cicero, Critics of Stoicism on August 26, 2016 by Massimo.


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WellnessMedical Marijuana
Study Finds Drop In Prescription Drugs In Medical Marijuana States
They also saw $165.2 million in Medicare savings.
Nina Golgowski
Breaking News Reporter, HuffPost
Jul 24, 2016, 05:18 PM EDT | Updated Jul 25, 2016
John Vizcaino / Reuters
A new study found that states with legalized medical marijuana in 2013 saved $165.2 million in national Medicare program and enrollee spending.
States looking for a way to reduce Medicare spending and prescription drug use may want to turn to legalizing medical marijuana, a new study suggests.
The District of Columbia and the 17 states that had medical marijuana as an alternative to prescription drugs in 2013 saved an estimated total of $165.2 million in Medicare program and enrollee spending that year, researchers at the University of Georgia reported in the journal Health Affairs this month.
"The results suggest that if all states had implemented medical marijuana the overall savings to Medicare would have been around $468 million," a press release on the findings stated.
John Moore via Getty Images
The study reviewed drug prescriptions for ailments that could be treated with medical marijuana. One such ailment, which is often treated with oxycodone pills, is pain.
The researchers looked at prescriptions filled by Medicare Prescription Drug Plan (or Part D) enrollees from 2010 to 2013. They then narrowed the prescriptions down to ones that could be substituted with medical marijuana. Those prescriptions were for ailments that included anxiety, depression, glaucoma, nausea, pain, psychosis, seizures, sleep disorders and spasticity.
Their results found that there were fewer prescriptions filled for the majority of those categories. The pain category, for instance, saw a decrease in 1,826 daily doses, while the depression category saw a 265 daily dosage decrease.
As the researchers noted in their release, they specifically looked at glaucoma patients' use of marijuana.
"It turns out that glaucoma is one of the most Googled searches linked to marijuana, right after pain," Dr. David Bradford of the university's School of Public & International Affairs, who co-authored the report, stated in the university's release.
The eye disease can be extremely painful and lead to blindness for some patients. Those sufferers who use marijuana, however, can experience a 25 percent decrease in eye pressure that's caused by the condition, according to the release.
David McNew / Reuters
Jars containing marijuana are seen at a medical marijuana farmers market at the California Heritage Market in Los Angeles.
The relief provided by marijuana only lasts about 60 minutes, however, and expecting patients to take it once an hour is considered "unrealistic," they concluded. Because of that, they stated that they fully expected prescription drug use to remain strong for the disease even when marijuana was an available alternative.
As the university's release notes, "they were not disappointed."
Though there were fewer drug prescriptions written for the other ailments, the daily doses of prescribed glaucoma medications increased, they stated.
That led them to believe that medical marijuana users are not requesting prescriptions just to enjoy a high, but are basing their decision on medical needs.
"The results suggest people are really using marijuana as medicine and not just using it for recreational purposes," the study's lead author, Ashley Bradford, who completed her bachelor's degree in sociology in May, said in a statement.
Speaking in a recent YouTube interview, Bradford expressed hope "that this research will influence and reform policymaking."
Decreasing Americans' use of prescription drugs may not just be of monetary benefit, but depending on the type of drug, could help fight Americans' addiction to prescription painkillers as well.
The U.S. is in the midst of an opioid overdose epidemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2014 alone, opioids ― including prescription opioid pain relievers and heroin ― killed more than 28,000 people, more than any year on record. At least half of all those deaths involved a prescription opioid.
"We now know that overdoses from prescription opioid pain relievers are a driving factor in the 15-year increase in opioid overdose deaths," the CDC states on their website. "Since 1999, the amount of prescription opioids sold in the U.S. nearly quadrupled, yet there has not been an overall change in the amount of pain that Americans report."
Three of the most common prescription drugs involved in opioid overdose deaths were methadone, oxycodone and hydrocodone.
Today, 25 states and Washington, D.C., have some form of legalized medical marijuana.
50 Years Of Marijuana Polling
8 Home Goods From Etsy That Could Be From A High-End Design Store
A Dermatologist Reveals What To Do If You Over-Exfoliate Your Skin

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The mission of Production and Operations Management is to serve as the flagship research journal in operations management in manufacturing and services. The journal publishes scientific research into the problems, interest, and concerns of managers who manage product and process design, operations, and supply chains. It covers all topics in product and process design, operations, and supply chain management and welcomes papers using any research paradigm.


In case you forgot, here is the navigation path to your preference settings: Once in your company file navigate to Edit > Preferences and follow along. It is also helpful to note that each preference category has a "My Preferences" tab and a "Company Preferences" tab. To customize the settings only linked to your specific user profile, edit the "My Preferences" tab. To standardize settings across all users, edit the "Company Preferences" tab. For the latter, you usually need to be in single user mode and signed in as Admin as an added measure of control.
Automatically open drop-down lists when typing – This allows you to quickly access the GL account as opposed to manually navigating to it or type the full account name.
Automatically recall past information – This function enables you to enter transactions faster by defaulting to the GL account that was last associated with a particular vendor/customer. You should always validate that it is in fact the correct GL account.
Keep custom item information when changing items in a transaction – To give an example, if you want to change the item that is being used on a customer invoice but you have valuable information in the memo line that you don't want to lose, this function will retain that data even if you change the item.
Warn about duplicate purchase orders – This will automatically notify you if a transaction number has been entered twice.
Warn if not enough inventory quantity on hand to sell – This is a good control to make sure you can actually fulfill on your customers orders.
Enable ViewMyPaycheck – Checking this box will allow you to send payroll data by employee to ViewMyPaycheck so your employees can login at anytime and have access to their paystubs, vacation & sick balances, mileage reimbursements, etc.
This preference allows you to customize the messages that are sent to your customers via email for invoices, estimates, credit memos, sales orders, sales receipts, etc.
QuickBooks has many other features that can help automate your day to day processing. Taking a couple minutes to do some customizing upfront can save you a lot of time and frustration down the road. TGG Accounting can help implement these processes in your business. Call us today to get started.


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Toronto Raptors send 'wake-up call' to Indiana Pacers with embarrassing blowout
IndyStar
TORONTO -- For whatever reason, or reasons, the Indiana Pacers haven't been able to close games at Scotiabank Arena.
It's not just the Feb. 5 meltdown vs. the Toronto Raptors, when they lost an 11-point lead in the waning minutes against the second-best team in the East and lost by one.
Even a season ago, the Pacers led by 13 with 10 minutes left and lost by three.
Box score: Raptors 127, Pacers 81
That lack of poise here has been a nasty habit that predated the eight new players on this roster.
The outcome was decided in about 3 minutes Sunday in a 127-81 loss. The Pacers' previous low scoring performance this season was 83 vs. Milwaukee.
"This is a wake-up call. That team is playing for something big and they showed us what February, March, April, if you can get into May and June, what it's going to look like," coach Nate McMillan said. "They jumped on us. They played with intensity. They played with sense of urgency, a team that's connected out there. We're back on our heels from the start. We got to get to that level."
Aaron Holiday, starting with Victor Oladipo (sore back) out, couldn't make an open shot. T.J. Warren opened 0-for-7. The starters were 5-for-31, or 16%, in the first half.
The season series goes to the Raptors, 3-1.
The Pacers have defeated top-shelf opponents this season, beating the Boston Celtics, Philadelphia 76ers (twice) and Denver Nuggets.
What's absent, however, are road wins vs. quality playoff teams in the East. That 119-118 loss to Toronto was an opportunity lost. So was a 119-116 loss at Philadelphia, when the Pacers turned it over three times in the final 13 seconds in a game they had in control.
That's what they have to show they can do -- win on the road against teams of that caliber -- to prove this Pacers team is better than last season's.
That 48-win team, which flamed out down the stretch of the regular season without Oladipo, had too many games like this where they failed miserably. They were swept out of the first round by Boston.
The Pacers (33-24) were chewed up swiftly Sunday.
"We just didn't come out ready to play," said Domantas Sabonis, who shot 6-for-16. "We were getting open looks. We just weren't converting, even easy ones under the basket.
"We're professionals. We have to show up. We just didn't do it."
They came out of a timeout down 13-1 and turned it over. Malcolm Brogdon's layup was their first field goal almost midway through the quarter. The next field goal from Justin Holiday didn't come until 3 minutes later.
Myles Turner, who is 10 inches taller than Fred VanVleet, couldn't covert a post-up vs. the guard. Jeremy Lamb took a terrible turnaround jump shot over Kyle Lowry who he's 5 inches taller than and it missed by a mile. Turner missed a shot over Lowry.
The bad offensive vibes were contagious for Indiana. And Toronto is playing without key contributors Marc Gasol and Norman Powell.
The Raptors were like Secretariat, a team full of thoroughbreds with championship mettle, while the Pacers were the rest of the field being left in the dust, trampled and thoroughly outclassed.
Standouts: Sabonis (14 points, 11 rebounds, 5 assists) and Justin Holiday (12 points, 3 steals) were the only Pacers to get anything done when it mattered. The starters outside of Sabonis combined to shoot 15-for-49, or 30.6%. Serge Ibaka (15 points, 15 rebounds) made the game's first three shots to get the Raptors out fast as Lowry (16 points, 11 assists, 7 rebounds, 5 steals) and Pascal Siakam (21 points) got them up huge.
Xs and Os: The Raptors got into their offense quicker because of the push with the pass. They found mismatches and attacked before the Pacers could organize and send help. It didn't matter if there was a man or zone defense because they saw the game two steps ahead. Defensively, they pushed the Pacers out of the operational zone. They forced Sabonis above the 3-point arc to initiate tosses. They forced him beyond his preferred spot on post-ups. Everywhere the Pacers got the ball in half-court led to extremely difficult shots against the extended pressure. Aaron Holiday (14 points, 6 assists) went uncovered and missed all four attempts from 3 as the Raptors crowded Sabonis and sent aggressive double-teams on post-ups. "It changes our confidence and it changes their ability to pressure us and dictate the game," Brogdon said of the Pacers 4-for-23 shooting in the first quarter which led to them trailing 34-12. Brogdon shot 4-for-15 overall, missing all 4 attempts from 3. He's 3-for-25 from 3 in his last six games.
Injury front: Jeremy Lamb (5 points) had to leave after being challenged by Terrence Davis (13 points) on a breakaway layup and coming down awkward on his left knee. He stayed on the floor for a while, got up to make the foul shots and exited at 9:54 of the second quarter. Lamb will get an MRI Monday morning, but he had to be helped up by a team athletic trainer after talking postgame and couldn't walk unassisted. "I'm not upset about it. He tried to make a play on it," Lamb said. "That happens all the time. He bumped me in the air and I hung on the rim. I don't think it was dirty. Looking back on it, I probably should've not held on to the rim. It's sore and swelling. Nothing cracked."


Office Cleaning Agency Barking, Stratford, Canary Wharf, London Office Cleaning Agency Services Barking, Stratford, Canary Wharf, London UK.
The Instant Guide to Stop Being Messy Now!
Home / Cleaning Tips / The Instant Guide to Stop Being Messy Now!
Are you a messy person? Do you envy those who seem to have a knack for keeping things tidy and organized? Then you need to turn around your perception. You're not really untidy… everyone else is just obsessively organized!
Seriously though: the key is to realize that messiness and neatness are essentially states of mind. By cultivating them in your thinking, your surroundings will reflect the same quality without an effort.
Have you heard about mindful cleaning? That's where you use cleaning as a type of meditation. For example, let's imagine you have to sweep the floor. Rather than over-thinking about it and putting it off forever, you just embrace the experience and get involved fully in the motions… and that's when magic happens. By quieting your nagging inner messy child, you'll actually appreciate the cleaning as a process – and when you're done you realize that after the act of cleaning is done, your mind seems more organized as well. Once you appreciate this, you'll feel like sweeping the floor not because it's dirty but simply because you want it done. And if you want it done, it's no longer a chore; it's a ritual.
When cleaning your environment, it's tremendously useful to focus on organizing items rather than simply de-cluttering the space. You don't just throw everything in the closet haphazardly… otherwise chaos will come back sooner than you know it. Instead, you have to decide on a specific place for every little thing you own. Don't rush it, just be in the moment. This may seem counterproductive at first, but soon you'll know where to put each item. This will ensure you don't have to clean as often: once you get in the habit of always putting every little in its place, soon you'll realize that orderliness is soothing. Never again will you tolerate having undifferentiated heaps of objects anywhere in your house.
Going on a cleaning spree might seem like the appropriate course of action when looking for redemption from chronic messiness, but that's hardly ever the case. If you force yourself to spend two days on end cleaning the house… the results may be sparkling, but so will your frustration and weariness. Which likely means that you won't want to clean anything for the foreseeable future, and back to messy mess you go in record time. You need to focus on the process rather than the effects! Get into the habit of doing a little cleaning every now and then, and make it a part of your routine and mindset. You may be surprised to realize, in a matter of weeks, that everything around you is just tidier without any struggle whatsoever.


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Q: Unable to fill spots array in fl_charts I am working with fl_charts in flutter and can't seem to fill in the spots array with continuous data. My data is continuously coming from Firebase's Realtime Database and I tried to set the state of an array equal to elements of type FlSpot as seen below.
var temp_arr = [];
setState(() {
  for(int i = 0; i<tempList.length; i++) {
      temp_arr[i] = FlSpot((i*1.0), double.parse(tempList[i].humidity))
    }

});

Then when I tried to do this spots:temp_arr
final LineChartBarData lineChartBarData2 = LineChartBarData(

    spots: temp_arr
...

I would get an error saying it can't find the range. Do you think I am close or is there a better way to fill our graph with dynamic data?

A: I found out how to feed live data. And am currently working on how to fix the range.
List<FlSpot> gatherWeightData(){
    List<FlSpot> spotWeightList = [];
    List<FlSpot> removedSpotWeightList = [];
    for (int i = 0; i < weightList.length; i++) {
      spotWeightList.add(FlSpot((i * 1.0), double.parse(weightList[i].hive_weight)));
      if (spotWeightList.length >= 19) {
        spotWeightList.removeAt(0);
        removedSpotWeightList = spotWeightList;
        return removedSpotWeightList;
      }
    }
    return spotWeightList;
  }

Here we are creating a List of type FlSpot and adding in (x,y) values needed, then I am having spots equal to the method that is creating these lists.
List<LineChartBarData> linesBarData1() {
    LineChartBarData lineChartBarData1 = LineChartBarData(
      spots: gatherHumidityData(),
...

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Home/Community/Spring Hill Lady Bears Basketball Team helps former teacher with yard work
CommunitySchool NewsSportsSpring Hill School District
Spring Hill Lady Bears Basketball Team helps former teacher with yard work
Jordan WoodsonJuly 16, 2021
The Spring Hill girls with Mrs. Shirey (far right)
The Spring Hill Lady Bears Basketball Team got together to help a local woman and former Spring Hill teacher with yard work Wednesday morning after she received knee surgery.
Barbara Shirey, a former Spring Hill music teacher, recently had knee surgery for a joint replacement and, with her husband being a disabled veteran, was unable to do yard work herself. That's when the Spring Hill Lady Bears Basketball Team stepped in to help.
"She is a teacher at our school and a big supporter of our teams and kiddos," Austin Kidd, the coach of the Spring Hill Lady Bears Basketball Team, said. "I stress to the girls the importance of serving your community and servant leadership. It's something we really stress in our program about helping others and hard work"
The girls got there around 11 in the morning and helped for two hours with yard work, weeding, raking, picking up sticks, cleaning carport drive way, cleaning the flower beds, picking up pine cones and other regular yard work-related activities.
"It was wonderful," Mrs. Shirey said. "They chose to do some community projects and they knew that I had surgery and that Mr. Shirey had some health issue. They came over and worked in our yard and did some things that we weren't able to do. We greatly appreciated it."
Mr. and Mrs. Shirey gave out snacks and water to the girls and Mrs. Shirey says that the girls put out an amazing effort.
"Each one of the girls worked really hard," she said. "They came with their smiles, their work gloves and their good work ethic and did just an amazing job. It was just a great coming together of hard workers and people that knew each other."
Mrs. Shirey says that she's thankful that Coach Kidd is teaching the girls life lessons like these.
"We just commend Coach Kidd for recognizing that all of that builds character," she said. "The girls were very receptive to the work; there wasn't any mumbling or groaning from any part of the girls. They just each came in and got some type of work toll. It was just an extension of what those girls are being taught on the court. It was a wonderful effort on the part of the Lady Bears."
Mrs. Shirey says that Coach Kidd got in contact with her about having the girls help out while she was watching one of their practices.
"Mr. Shirey and I are both big fans of all of the sports in Spring Hill," she said. "We've been fans for over 35 years and we continue to be fans. Coach Kidd saw me on campus and asked 'how are you all getting around?' I told him it was really difficult because I had a total knee replacement and Mr. Shirey, as you all know, is having some difficulty with his health. He said that they would like to come and do a community project in the yard and I said it would be greatly appreciated."
For the Coach Kidd and especially the girls, helping out Mrs. Shirey was a no-brainer.
"All of our students love Mrs. Shirey, 'Mrs. B' as they call her," Nicki Purifoy, a mother of one of the Spring Hill girls that helped out, said. "It didn't matter what she needed done, any student at that school would do it with a smile and ask what else they can do."
Mr. and Mrs. Shirey were very appreciative of the Lady Bears helping out and even got emotional over it according to Purifoy.
"I think at one point her and her husband both were in tears because they were so proud of the girls and voiced it over and over to each of the girls," she said.
Purifoy says that helping each other out is just apart of what makes the community of Spring Hill special.
"That's one thing about our school and our community, everyone pulls together to help when one of theirs, or anyone they know, is in need," she said. "The entire school loves Mrs. B, they would do anything for her."
As for Mrs. Shirey, or "Mrs. B" as the girls call her, she says that she is doing better after her surgery.
"I'm progressing pretty well," she said. "I have six more weeks of physical therapy. I go three days a week to Texarkana and I'm making really good progress with the PT. I'm just thankful and grateful that I have two really good therapists that have been working with me and continue working with me."
spring hill basketball spring hill lady bears


#1 Sticking an avocado in a beer koozie can help it ripen fast.
Random avocado Pro-Tip: One time I tried putting an avocado in a beer koozie and it was ripe the next day. Been doing it ever since.
#2 Ski goggles while chopping onions = no more tears.
#3 If you're in a hotel room without a bottle opener, your door can do the trick.
#4 A few pool noodles can save your fingers and toes some serious trauma on the trampoline.
#5 If you're in a hotel room where the curtains don't close all the way, check the closet for a coat hanger with clips.
#6 Staying in a hotel? Attach your car keys to your phone charger so you can't forget it.
#7 If you're moving, you can use this method to easily transport all the clothes that you hang.
#8 Stick a dish rack on top of your loose tupperware before running the dishwasher to keep them from flying around in the wash.
#9 Need a simple way to keep your computer from falling asleep? Stick a watch face underneath the mouse — endless movement!
#10 Turn a hoodie backwards and you've got the perfect receptacle for snacks.
#11 Want that movie theater butter mixed all the way through your popcorn? Insert it through a straw.
#12 Staying somewhere without a nightstand? A simple fold in your sheets will come in handy.
#13 No personal TV on your flight? Stick your phone in a baggie and hang it from the tray in front of you.
#14 …Or karate-chop a soda can and DIY a little stand for yourself.
#15 If your plastic baggies are too small, you can turn one inside out and then seal two together.
#16 If your laptop hinge is broken but everything else works, an old picture frame can offer a cheap fix.
#17 Instead of stashing all your grocery bags loose in a cabinet, try repurposing an old tissue box. Much neater, and more convenient!
#18 You can stop those pesky chargers from falling off your desk with… LEGO HANDS!
#19 Shower rings on a coat hanger are a major space saver for storing tank tops.
#20 A few Command hooks on the inside of your kitchen cabinet doors make for the perfect place to stash pot lids.
#21 Instead of storing all those pill boxes in your medicine cabinet, simply cut out the directions and place them in baggies along with the meds. So much space saved!
#22 My girlfriend devised a way to keep the plastic shopping bags we re-use as bin liners in place by using removable picture hooks.
#23 A binder clip can help you store your toothpaste a little more neatly on the counter — AND make sure you get every last drop.
#24 Here's a handy way to dunk your Oreos in milk while still being classy AF.
#25 Snap off a leg from one of those little white plastic things in pizza boxes, and you've got yourself an instant phone stand.


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What's Coming for Shadow's Edge in 2022
Hi this is Kevyn Eva. I am the design lead for Shadows Edge.
I facilitate the process from player research to design, testing to finished game. My job is to bring together the psychological process with asks and ideas from players, concepts from the game studio, ideas from our team and from the game writer. My job is also to keep our focus on creating a game that is helpful and useful for emotional/mental wellbeing, while being engaging and relaxing.
Firstly, I want to wish you a wonderful 2022 with lots of beautiful experiences, lots of learning and lots of beautiful and meaningful encounters with yourself and others. And I want to give you an update on what's coming for Shadow's Edge in 2022:
A lot of what we're doing is based on the research that we did with players in the last 18 months around the globe and in Colombia. We observed players playing for many hours while they told us what they think. The key ask from players was that they would like gameplay to be more like a quest. They told us they like bonding with the Guardians and want to know more about them. Players also said they want to understand more about the psychology in the game and why it is useful. And, for the ones that feel less artistic, to be supported to make more art.
So, without much ado, I'd like to introduce the key change that we're bringing to the game.
It's a new character in the Shadow's Edge cast. Please prepare for… the Antagonist. They've been missing in our game, players told us. We don't want to give away too much just yet – but the antagonist lingers in the shadows. And there will be a connection to finding out more about what lies in the shadows. That way the player can support the guardians to deal with the antagonist. Spoiler alert: there's a treasure in the shadow to be unearthed… The quest is going to be packaged into story missions – the more you play, the more story you can unlock. And you will be able to support the guardians to learn what they need to know about themselves to succeed by learning about yourself.
We're also adding more depth about why writing and art are therapeutic and how to go about it to integrate it into real life once you leave the world of Shadow's Edge.
There are some features making it clearer how to get XP, how XP gets you rewards and how you can use these rewards to help the guardians face the Antagonist. Additionally, we have some cool mini games coming up, because even a "serious" game needs some relaxation.
All in all, we've got three updates in the pipeline coming your way.
In terms of timing, we're planning a beta starting in February and a full release around April. If you want to see storyboards, test early prototypes, or read early versions of the story to let us know what you think, what you would change or what you would add, please contact Lacey, our community manager.
Thanks for reading! I hope to see you in our insider community! And once again – happy 2022 – I'm feeling kind of nerdy about this year with all the cool dates coming our way in February…
Kevyn Eva
Kevyn Eva is part of the creative team of Shadow's Edge and also ensures players can give input to the future game development and coordinates academic research about self-expression and gaming. She's a humanist (studied languages and literature) and technologist (then went into the tech industry). She lives in Zurich Switzerland and loves meditation and sports and believes our inner human worlds want to be discovered more. Contact her if you want to know more or participate in how the game gets created kevyneva@shadowsedge.com.
Other topics	The Twinge: Story of a College Diagnosis, Part 1 Five Ways to Express Your Emotions (Without Showing Everyone!) A Guide to Finding Affordable Mental Health Care
Teens Talk


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Point Guard Prenup: Eva Longoria-Parker Files for Divorce
Eva Longoria-Parker Files for Divorce
Will Will and Kate Sign a Prenup?
According to an article in the Guardian News, "prenups still seem a bit too un-British." There is apparently, "no evidence that a British royal has ever signed a prenup before." A prenuptial agreement might make sense for Kate Middleton, daughter of business millionaires, and Prince William of Wales, who will be the first King of…
"Marriage Comes and Goes, But Divorce is Forever"?
The day after Thanksgiving, The New York Times reported on one of The Huffington Post's latest sections: Divorce News.