KarlJung [none/use name]
I think it’s far better than the baseline beliefs most people follow, but the actual philosophy (not the pop version) still has it’s flaws. I wrote a whole thing in another comment chain.
What doesn’t have flaws, though? I guess all we can do is hammer away at the philosophical anvil until we have something vaguely resembling what we want.
I don’t see anyone in the present day actually following Stoicism (as in the original philosophy, not the generic and pop culture version of it). Acceptance of one’s own emotions (but not necessarily acting on them) seems way more useful than trying to :galaxy-brain: your way out of sadness. Both are better than no regulation at all, of course.
Yeah, but this doesn’t seem that insightful. Not beating yourself up for things that you can’t control is pretty much common sense. But when you view your emotions as these things you can just control at will (or rationalize yourself out of), it actually opens yourself up to a lot more hurt as you try to fight your brain, instead of working with it. It’s like trying to fight a rock.
I feel like a lot of this stuff is either common sense, interesting but flawed, or correct but arrived to again through Marxism or a similar position
It’s like mathematics from the same time period. They had a lot of correct ideas but anyone who calls themselves a Pythagoreanist and insists that everything Pythagoras wrote was correct and without flaw is going to be missing a couple hundred years of critique and philosophical development
And the fundamental assumption of Stoicism that all issues come from internal judgements about external things is false. It sounds true, because our perceptions of things are the reason why we care about these things at all, but there is a lot of stuff we can’t change that’s apparently internal, like our need for food or water. The greatest sage cannot ignore the feeling of thirst, it will still suck.
It’s worth raising the concern that trying to subvert or ignore irrational emotions only makes sense when you have a different irrational goal that it serves. This is because all goals are inherently irrational, there is no inherent meaning to life. There is no god from on high who decides that collecting rocks is less important than engineering.
They’re talking about making the “blackout” indefinite, like a real strike. I think there’s a lot of agitated moderators who could be convinced to further organize there.
I want to open by saying that I misspoke in my earlier comments, quite significantly. Stoicism is, like all works of philosophy, an idea with a lot of things worth considering in it.
I don’t know if I’m really :galaxy-brain: to give much more to this conversation, other than that this reminds me a lot of how, supposedly, an outside observer seeing Stoic and Epicurean philosophers argue would be confused, as they would be advocating for quite similar lifestyles. I don’t know if this is actually true, but it’s something I’ve seen mentioned in a few, admittedly shitty, philosophy books. Of course, I do think that Stoicism did a lot better of a job advocating for this lifestyle, because lots of people seem to have interpreted Epicureanism drastically incorrectly during the time period.