Stoic

 

What do you do if you walk out to the car and see your tire is flat?

Do you kick the rubber and yell out words that your granny would not approve of? Do you call the police to report a crime? Do you get on social media to tell everyone what crappy tires you bought?

 

If you are stoic, you realize the situation, call a auto service for assistance or get the spare and change the tire yourself.

 

Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BC. It is a philosophy of personal ethics informed by its system of logic and its views on the natural world.

 

The word “stoic” commonly refers to someone who is indifferent to pain, pleasure, grief, or joy. The modern usage as a “person who represses feelings or endures patiently” was first cited in 1579 as a noun and in 1596 as an adjective.

 

The Stoics elaborated a detailed taxonomy of virtue, dividing virtue into four main types: wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. Wisdom is subdivided into good sense, good calculation, quick-wittedness, discretion, and resourcefulness. Justice is subdivided into piety, honesty, equity, and fair dealing.

 

So Stoicism is inimical to freedom. It is true that we cannot control everything, but Stoicism is the wrong response. But Stoicism is unable to work the “magic” of emotion, as Sartre says. In his view, people initiate emotions when they are confronted with obstacles they seemingly have no rational way of overcoming.

 

The Stoics viewed death as natural, a return to Nature. It is the value judgments we place on death that makes it as terrible as it is. This is the existential dilemma we all will face at one point or another in our lives. It often appears after the passing of a loved one or someone close

 

Opposite to stoic is to be easily perturbed, agitated, upset or excited.

 

Focus on what is under your control, the Stoic would say, even in love. Accept the human condition and the bounds set for you by nature. Understand that you cannot possess what you love. We have our loved ones on loans and should rejoice in them as long as they are present.

 

Being stoic is being calm and almost without any emotion. When you’re stoic, you don't show what you’re feeling and you also accept whatever is happening. The noun stoic is a person who's not very emotional. The adjective stoic describes any person, action, or thing that seems emotionless and almost blank.

 

Stoicism, a school of thought that flourished in Greek and Roman antiquity is one of the loftiest and most sublime philosophies in the record of Western civilization. In urging participation in human affairs, Stoics have always believed that the goal of all inquiry is to provide a mode of conduct characterized by tranquility of mind and certainty of moral worth.

 

Its chief competitors in antiquity were: (1) Epicureanism, with its doctrine of a life of withdrawal in contemplation and escape from worldly affairs and its belief that pleasure, as the absence of pain, is the goal of humans; (2) Skepticism, which rejected certain knowledge in favor of local beliefs and customs, in the expectation that those guides would provide the quietude and serenity that the dogmatic philosopher (e.g., the Stoic) could not hope to achieve; and (3) Christianity, with its hope of personal salvation provided by an appeal to faith as an immanent aid to human understanding and by the beneficent intervention of a merciful God.

 

 

Do what you can, where you are with what you got…