Meditation, Part II

This continues my previous post on Meditation.

For the most utilitarian of reasons, I've been wanted to start meditating for a while now. Perhaps meditation would help me maintain concentration at work, which is something that wanes more than I'd like it to. I sometime feel a little guilty that my goal is just for improved focus instead of inner peace or spiritual fulfillment. But, in the spirit of Stoicism, the more you can focus, the more you can help others, and the more rational you can be.

I've finally started a month ago. Every day I mediate for 10 minutes, which is all I think I can spare for now. I can't say I've seen any particular difference in my life so far, but it seems to be pretty good at breaking up bad thought patterns and sort of "resetting" my mental state. So far, this has been of some limited use.

One of the thoughts that often (and involuntarily) cross my mind while meditating is imagining the scene of a room full of monks meditating, who are watched over by their teacher, who occasionally hits them with a stick. I don't know where I've seen this, and I have no idea what this practice is called. I also have no clue as to why the teacher is hitting them. But I wonder if he just hits everyone. Imagine trying to meditate when you know you'll get hit at some random time. If you knew this, the only way to meditate successfully would be to live entirely in the present. Your focus would have to be very strong for this. If it is a real technique, it is a pretty interesting one, and I'm almost curious to try it. But I doubt I'll ever be good enough to attempt such a feat.

I haven't decided yet if meditation would be useful to Stoicism. In theory, I'd say it would be, since it would help with the Stoic detachment that is often necessary. In practice, I'm not sure what use I'm getting out of it. I'll keep meditation for another month or two and re-appraise the situation at a later time.

The Stoic way to eat out

Probably a Stoic would have no need to eat out. Certainly, no one with a kitchen technically needs to eat out. Thoreau, in Walden, survived his year quite Stoically eating mainly meals of simple breads made of just flour and Indian rye. Seneca writes

Coarse bread and water to a temperate man is as good as a feast

This is true, undoubtedly, but in this case men that temperate seem to be extremely rare.

For myself, I enjoy the variety and education I get when eating out. Yes, education. I learn about faraway cultures, I learn about ingredients and new ideas in cooking. None of this is strictly necessary, but I like it. Still, after reading up on Stoicism, I've tried to curtail my worst eating habits. I find that I almost always over-order in restaurants, and I feel that most people are even worse. A reasonable meal should be an entree per person, and perhaps a shared appetizer. No dessert. Really, though, one entree and an appetizer might suffice for a meal for two, if portion sizes are large. There's no need to leave a meal feeling stuffed, especially if one is paying top price for the food. Alcohol is usually marked up way too much, so I normally skip it.

One problem is going out with a group, though. Groups spend more at a restaurant, since everyone is sharing the costs. It's sort of a tragedy of the commons thing going on. I don't have a good solution to this. Socialization is important, and no Stoic is against that. Maybe just limiting the group meals to once in a while would help. Or just not going, and perhaps finding other ways to socialize. That would be too extreme, though. Eating with a group over food is one of the classic cultural social experiences, and I'd like to try to not avoid it.

Are there other Stoic restaurant ordering techniques that I'm missing?

Meditation

To live in the present is literally the only way. Our entires lives are composed of a succession of nows. We never quite reach the future, and the past is endlessly generated and endlessly remote. This was not lost on the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius writes:

You consist of three parts — your body, your breath, and your mind. The first two are yours to take care of, but the latter is properly your person. Therefore if you abstract from the notion of yourself, that is, of your mind, whatever other people either say or do, or whatever you may have said or done yourself formerly, together with all that disturbs you under the consideration of its coming to pass hereafter; if you throw the necessary motions of your carcass out of the definition, and those of the vortex that whirls around you, and by this means preserve your rational faculties in an independent state of innocence, free from the allotments of fate, holding close and steady to the virtues of justice, truth, and acquiescence; if I say, you keep your mind separate and distinguished from the objects of appetite and the events of time, both past and future, and make yourself like Empedocle's world, "Round as a ball in joyous rest reposing," and concern yourself to live no longer than your real life, that is the present moment; if you do all this, you may move on till death stops you, with credit, and in harmony with the deity within you.

The focus on the present is not often talked about in Stoic writings. Other philosophies put more emphasis on living on the present. Mindfulness meditation seems to be the key to this practice, according to some. I wonder what the Stoics would think of meditation, as a useful practice to train ourselves to live in the present. Was there any concept of this in ancient Greece or Rome? I've never heard of any. Somehow, mediations and Stoicisim doesn't seem like a natural fit.

I'm going to write up some more thoughts on mediations, as well as my experiences, in the next blog post.

Honey is sweet

I've been reading The Skeptic Way, as I've mentioned. It's full of interesting arguments, but arguments that I think are ultimately wrong. One of the precepts of Skepticism is the distrust of our very senses. If we can't trust our senses, can we really profess to know the truth? They believed not.

One of their example arguments was about honey. We claim that honey is sweet. But, it is not necessarily sweet to everyone. From Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism:

For example, the honey appears to us to be sweet. This we grant, for we sense the sweetness. But whether it is sweet we question insofar as this has to do with the [philosophical] theory, for that theory is not the appearance, but something said about the appearance.

This was interesting to me, since I have experimented with the Indian herb Gymnema Sylvestre, which is a sugar-blocker. If you eat it, you won't taste any sweetness for about an hour. It's a pretty lousy hour. After ingesting the herb, I ate a few sweet things, which were radically transformed. Sugar tasted like sand, and honey was just fairly tasteless glop. So, honey is sweet? It depends.

Still, the Skeptics would say that this proves we can't even say that honey is sweet, since it obviously was not sweet to me. And they would be true that the statement "honey is sweet to all humans all the time" is wrong. But "honey is sweet" is just shorthand for "honey is sweet to almost all people, almost all of the time", which is typical of the sort of hedging we would have to do if we wanted to lend our thoughts some precision. My experiences don't mean that honey isn't sweet, but it serves to define the cases in which honey would not be sweet. Knowledge is gained by the sugar-blocker experiment, not taken away.

This is, I think, the problem of the Skeptics. They are correct in not believing most of what they hear. But instead of approximating the truth, and then refining, they propose to not believe anything. This is far worse, I think. We need to believe things, since knowledge in general helps us lead lives that are benefitted from societies' collective wisdom. We just need to be open to new evidence, and to refine our beliefs when they are proven wrong.

The Moral Landscape, Part 2

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been reading Sam Harris's book, The Moral Landscape. I finished it this last weekend, and wanted to post a few thoughts on it.

Sam Harris has a sympathetic audience in myself. I'm a big fan of science, and not a particularly big fan of religion. Throughout most of human history, religion set itself up as the arbiter of morality. Or so it would seem, and so Sam Harris argues. I actually think religion has little effect on actual morality. Our sense of what is right and wrong has changed fairly dramatically over the past thousand years, even as the religions involved have stayed mostly constant. So I think Harris gives religion a little too much credit as a driver of morality.

Science, Harris argues, should be able to answer moral questions. For example, should we administer corporal punishment? Well, the Bible tells us that if we spare the rod we spoil the child, but science tells us beating kids is not actually very good for them. Much of the book is devoted to persuading the reader that there is a right answer, and even if we don't know what it is, that's no reason to think we will never know what it is.

Some of the best parts of the book was where Harris goes on the attack, and criticizes those who attempt to make peace with the religious, and say that religion still has a role in determining morality, and how to live the good life, and that science cannot answer these questions. Or, he argues, the mere fact of fundamental religious disagreements about morality cannot mean the problem is not a factual one. It only means there is disagreement. I agree with all these points, and I love Harris's righteous fury against illogical religious appeasers.

Although Harris does not talk about ancient philosophies like Stoicism, I think his point holds in regards to these as well. Stoicism offers some sage advice about how to live your life. But, does it work? Does it work better than competing philosophies? This would be hard, perhaps impossible, to study. Nevertheless, there is an answer. We should try and find it out.

Philosophically, I think Harris is on solid ground. Practically, I'm a bit unsure about grounding morality completely in science. Morality would be a fairly difficult area to study, and some of the problems seem intractable to me. Worse, science often goes astray, and the media often report results later shown to be unreproducible or plain fraudulent. The public don't seem well equipped to apply the science of morality in any sane way.

The best way, I think, is to keep what we have now, which is surprisingly close to what Harris wants. He doesn't seem to realize it, though. Science does do research that affects our culture's views of morality. And those cultural shifts affect everyone. Yes, maybe it affects the religious people least, but it still affects them. Science is a powerful tool to shape morality, and I think it is already doing so, and will continue to do so. It's taking a while, but slow change is not necessarily a bad thing.

Koyaanisqatsi

Marcus Aurelius writes:

There are three things ever to be kept in mind. First, whatever thou does, see it be done not at random, but so that Justice herself could not have acted otherwise; and remember that all external contingencies are dispensations either of chance or Providence, and that it is folly to blame the former, and impiety to accuse the latter. Second, ponder the progress of every being from its generation to the hour when it receives a soul, and thence again to the time when it renders back that soul, together with the elements whereof all things are compound, and into which they must be dissolved. Third, reflect that were some sudden power to bear thee aloft to a pinnacle, whence thou couldst survey human life in all its multifariousness, after gaining withal a glimpse at the multitude of creatures that people the surrounding air and ether, the sight would inspire thee with contempt; and oft as the ascent might be repeated, the same spectacle would always meet they aze: monotony of form and brevity of time. These are the objects of our pride!

This third point makes me think of the movie Koyaanisqatsi, a beautiful movie that shows human life. It has no dialogue, no characters, and no plot. It's just videos of humanity set to a classic score by Philip Glass. Koyaanisqatsi is one of my favorite movies, and it shows that perspective that Marcus Aurelius is writing about, that high perspective from which we can see the smallness of our lives, the swarm of people in which we live, and the never-ending cycle of mindless living. Instead of just imagining, we can experience it by watching Koyaanisqatsi. And I recommend watching it every year or so, just so we can remind ourselves what the world is really like.

The Moral Landscape

I recently started reading Sam Harris's new book, The Moral Landscape. The basic argument that Sam Harris makes is that science can have something to say about morality. We can try and perhaps succeed at figuring out moral truths. He spends much of the first part of the book arguing against moral relativism. I actually didn't know that it remains so accepted in academic circles, since it seems pretty easy to refute in my opinion.

This reminded me of Epictetus's argument against the truth-denying arguments of the Academics:

Do you comprehend that you are awake? I do not, the man replies, for I do not even comprehend when in my sleep I imagine that I am awake. Does this appearance then not differ from the other? Not at all, he replies. Shall I still argue with this man? And what fire or what iron shall I apply to him to make him feel that is deadened? He does perceive, but he pretends that he does not. He is even worse than a dead man.

I'll write more on Harris's book later. I don't agree with some of his points, but his arguments against moral relativism are true. Like Epictetus's argument, that sort of blindness makes you want to just shake the relativist and make them see reason. They have taken a reasonable precaution and turned it into a rule that negates common sense or any logic.

DIY

After reading yesterday's post, my very first (and, let's face it, only) reader of this blog, Delodephius pointed me towards a great blog by Jules Evans that seems to often delve into Stoicism, The Politics of Well-Being.

This seems to be a really valuable blog, both frequently updated and with actual well-thought out content. I'll keep an eye on it and point out any particularly good posts.

While skimming the history, I came across this blog post on DIY philosophy. This interests me a great deal, because this blog is of course part of that movement. Doing things yourself instead of involving an actual authority figure is generally a way that practice can scale to the masses. Especially for something like philosophy, where actual practical philosophers are globally few and their time is limited. Compare with learning, for example, karate, where there are many qualified teachers in any city of sufficient size. So, if you want to do something with actual practical philosophy, DIY is the only way.

As Jules points out, issues of legitimacy and scientific integrity abound. I could claim that Stoicism changed my life, and that if you try it, it will make you a happier person. That may be my opinion, but it isn't going to be true. I haven't done a study that shows the effects of Stoic practices on happiness, nor do I know of a study. And even if there was a study, that wouldn't be enough. There really need to be a whole slew of studies to prove it. But it wouldn't prove any absolutes, surely. Maybe Stoicism would help 60% of people get 15% happier, for example. Those are the kind of truths we get from science; real truths that are never as simple as we'd like them. People read such truths and obviously find it hard to apply. So the random person on the internet who claims Stoicism is the answer gets too much trust placed on them, and may be held up as a sort of teacher or expert eventually. But their expertise is hollow, because it isn't based on actual evidence. At best, the expertise can be of knowledge of Stoic and related philosophies, but I fail to see how even that would lend one person's thoughts to be any more universal or true than any other random blogger. This is the problem with any practice too heavily weighted towards DIY. My only hope is that philosophy will encourage us to be more introspective than usual, and to avoid these traps.

One more thing. Since I now realize I'm part of the DIY movement, I realize I must grow a beard, wear hats, and move to Brooklyn.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

On the Wikipedia page for Stoicism, I learned that there's a kind of therapy called "Cognitive-behavioral therapy" that incorporates elements of Stoicism. This is quite interesting to me, so I looked around, and found a page describing it.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy is based on the idea that our thoughts cause our feelings and behaviors, not external things, like people, situations, and events. The benefit of this fact is that we can change the way we think to feel / act better even if the situation does not change.

CBT is based on aspects of stoic philosophy [...] Cognitive-behavioral therapy does not tell people how they should feel. However, most people seeking therapy do not want to feel they way they have been feeling. The approaches that emphasize stoicism teach the benefits of feeling, at worst, calm when confronted with undesirable situations. They also emphasize the fact that we have our undesirable situations whether we are upset about them or not. If we are upset about our problems, we have two problems -- the problem, and our upset about it. Most people want to have the fewest number of problems possible. So when we learn how to more calmly accept a personal problem, not only do we feel better, but we usually put ourselves in a better position to make use of our intelligence, knowledge, energy, and resources to resolve the problem.

I really like this logical way to think about issues, of calmly accepting problems. And I'm conversely not a believer in the need to vent anger. First of all, I think that acting angry only makes you more inclined to be angrier later. You are practicing anger. Second of all, from what little I've read on it, the evidence is that "blowing off steam" does not help. It's better to just calmly accept and deal with the problem.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy actually seems like the last vestige of Stoicism in modern times. But it's purely practical, and not concerned with morality at all. That's fine, though. This is not a philosophy, it's a therapy. Most of us won't be going to therapy sessions any time soon, but we can still benefit from this advice.

I'm going to try to read more into this therapy later. There is almost certainly quite a bit more to it.

Tales of Socrates

Everyone loves Socrates. Is there a school of Greek philosophy that didn't think he was the bees knees?

A few days ago I came across what is another example of his heroism, the tale of the arrest of Leon of Salamis. The group that ruled Athens at the time, called The Thirty, ordered Socrates and several others to bring Leon in for execution. Leon was known for his good character, and everyone hated the Thirty, a group installed by the Spartans after the Peloponnesian War. So, while the rest of the group went in search of Leon, Socrates simply went home.

In Socrates words,

I showed again, not in words but in action, that, if it's not crude of me to say so, death is something I couldn't care less about, but that my whole concern is not to do anything unjust or impious.

Socrates is most famous for drinking the hemlock as ordered by the government, but here he proves that the simple act of doing nothing can be a powerful statement for justice.

Maybe

From a collection of Zen stories on awakeblogger.com.

Once upon the time there was an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.

“Maybe,” replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.

“Maybe,” answered the farmer.

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.

“Maybe,” said the farmer.

I was going to point out how similar this is to Stoicism, but on a second read, it seems closer to classical Skepticism. In separate ways, both of these seem somewhat similar to Buddhism, and I'm certainly not the first to remark on this. This is something I want to explore in future posts.

Lenin

A little while ago, I read a biography of Lenin. What's interesting about Lenin, from a Stoic point of view, is that's he is a great example of someone who had many of the attributes of a great Stoic, but also fell short of the Stoic ideals in very fundamental ways. The great drive of Lenin's life was for revolution in Russia, a revolution specifically according to his ideas. And to have a revolution the way he wanted it, he of course had to be in charge. He devoted his life to this revolution. He betrayed his friends, and sacrifices his morals to achieve his goals. He succeeded because, first of all, he was brilliant and capable, and second of all, he wanted it more than anyone else. Enemies like the Mensheviks could have triumphed, perhaps, but they weren't ready to sacrifice everything to the cause. Lenin was.

A Stoic could not have made these sacrifices, I think, because there is nothing important enough that it would require compromising his ethics. Those ethics are all we as humans have, and trading them off for a better chance of controlling the world around us is fundamentally un-Stoic.

Like the Greek and Roman Stoics of old, Lenin did risk his life for his beliefs, and was in fact exiled and jailed because of them, on several occasions. But he was missing out on one of the key aspects of Stoicism, which is to understand and properly judge things. I think this is the fundamental problem that caused him to believe that his revolution and his power were the things most important, when in fact they could not have been.

The story of Stilpo

In Seneca's Of a Happy Life, he tells the tale of Stilpo:

Demetrius, upon the taking of Megara, asked Stilpo, the philosopher what he had lost. "Nothing" said he, "for I had all that I could call my own about me." And yet the enemy had then made himself master of his patrimony, his children, and his country; but these he looked upon as only adventitious goods, and under the commands of fortune.

"I have made my way," says Stilpo, "through fire and blood — what has become of my children I know not; but these are transitory blessings, and servants that are bound to change their masters; what was my own before is my own still. Some have lost their estates, others their dear-bought mistresses, their commissions and offices: the usurers have lost their bonds and securities: but, Demetrius, for my part I have saved all, and do not image after all this, either that Demetrius is a conqueror, or that Stilpo is overcome — it is only thy fortune has been too hard for mine."

And in this instance of Stilpo, who, when he had lost his country, his wife, his children, the town on fire over his head, himself escaping very hardly and naked out of the flames; "I have saved all my goods," says he, "my justice, my courage, my temperance, my prudence;" accounting nothing his own, or valuable, and showing how much easier it was to overcome a nation than one wise man.

One of my favorite stories of Seneca's.

Sniping

Roger Ebert has an excellent blog post today on the practice of internet sniping, which is what he calls the practice of anonymous, malicious criticism. Ebert, of course, is well positioned to understand criticism, and form criticism of the criticism.

Reading it, I was reminded of Prof. Irvine's reflections on how being a Stoic had changed his life. One of the things he said was that when replying to emails, he re-read his text and deleted anything that existed for only the purpose of self-promotion. Sometimes, he said, that ended up deleting his whole email.

Similarly, Roger Ebert makes a point that this sniping is mostly for the purpose of ego gratification. Tearing someone down is how many people get to feel better about themselves.

Obviously, the various snipers, trolls, and griefers out there aren't going to change anytime soon. There is essentially an endless supply of them. So, realizing that they exist and will always exist, we can make sure it doesn't bother us, anymore than any other constant of life should bother us. Furthermore, we should reflect on our actions when communicating, especially on the internet. Let's take Prof. Irvine's advice, and resist adding all non-helpful and ego-driven messages.

Skepticism

I recently picked up from the library Benson Mates's The Skeptic Way. I hadn't known about the the Pyrrhonic Skeptics, a philosophy advocated by Sextus Empiricus. I'm just reading about it now, so expect some summaries of what I learn to periodically be written about in this blog.

The Skeptics were opposed to the Stoics, but they also seem similar in some ways. Like the Stoics, the Skeptics advocated a particular practical mode of life from first principles. In this case, though, they felt that they didn't have enough reason to believe in anything in particular, so they felt that it was wrong to judge life as it came. So, in the end, they accepted the various fortunes of life like the Stoics did. But of course, that is just one aspect of Stoic thought. Once I get farther with the book, I should have more insight into the Skeptic way of thinking.

What drew me to the book is that I identify as a skeptic. Note the small 's'. I don't believe in God. I don't believe in things that seem improbable to me. I'd like to think I have a pretty good system for deciding what to trust or not. Such as system can never be perfect, but I feel my system is essentially a skeptical one. The belief that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, the use of Occam's Razor, and the understanding of logical arguments are all key components of critical thinking, and skepticism as I define it is no more than critical thinking. This seems quite a bit different than the sweeping claims of Sextus Empiricus, I think. More on this later.

Annotated Meditations

Russell McNeil has written a pretty nice book on annotated Meditations, which has an accompanying website. I'd encourage anyone interested in Stoicism to check it out. The nice thing about it is that, first of all, Marcus Aurelius's writings can be dense at times. They were translated to English from Greek, a scholarly language that Marcus Aurelius wasn't completely fluent in. So, it's stilted for good reason. Moreover, since the Meditations were really just private notes to himself, they don't follow any sort of logical order. But Prof. McNeil's book actually groups similar passages together, which helps us form a coherent view of Aurelius's thoughts.

His book is brief, but his website compensates for my adding much more material. I would quibble with some of the interpretations in it, which don't quite jibe with how I read things. Then again, I truly don't know much about Stoicism, so I'm willing to give Prof. McNeil the benefit of the doubt.

The book and website are both a worthwhile read, but like Aurelius's writings on their own, it is strong medicine, and best absorbed slowly.

Seneca on flame-wars

Seneca of course never commented on internet debates, but if he did, I'm sure he'd realize how quickly they can lead to anger and fruitless discussion. In Of a Happy Life, he writes of reflecting on his past actions of the day:

"I was a little too hot in such a dispute: my opinion might have been as well spared, for it gave offence, and did no good at all. The thing was true, but all truths are not to be spoken at all times; I would I had held my tongue, for there is no contending either with fools or our superiors. I have done ill, but it shall be so no more."

I think that captures what would have been the Stoic viewpoint to internet discussion. I'd boil it down to one rule: contribute to discussions in which you can help. Correcting someone's ignorance can be a help, but actually make sure you are helping other people, not just gratifying your ego in some way. I personally find it is rare that I have anything to contribute to most discussions, so I tend to stay silent.