A Brief Break from Kant

I have been reading bits of Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life. It's a book about ancient philosophy as spiritual practice which inspired some of Foucault's late work. It tries to relate every aspect of ancient philosophy directly to an ethical ideal, saving it from the doctrine-oriented interpretations to which it has been subject.

It seems that the Stoics spent a lot of time reminding themselves of the objective facts about the Universe, as for example that a given human life is gone in the blink of an eye or that fornication is a brief and meaningless spasm, that all that is beautiful will soon putrify and that human desire can find no satisfaction. They didn't just write books about this-- that was beside the point for them. Every morning when they woke up and every evening while falling asleep they would, say, close their eyes and imagine flying up and up, farther and farther away from the Earth, until it looked like a tiny marble in a vast and uncaring black sky, until they could no longer locate the Empire on it and they couldn't even see the consul against whom they had sworn bitter revenge or tell whether there would be famine next year.

This isn't quite as grimly "Stoic" as it sounds, according to Hadot. In willing against nature, as humans always do, we're fighting the inevitable by acting as though the world were made to conform to our desires. We're going to be full of hate and disappointment and misery if we do this, because it's insane; why hope for rain in a desert? So the Stoics sought two kinds of truth to escape this: the study of natural law and the profound understanding of scale. When we understand natural law we won't expect things never to die or arbitrarily decide that rotting is better than growth, since we'll know that they're both arbitrary determinations. When we understand scale we won't be so caught up in our own desires that we're constantly pulled from nature. (Marcus Aurelius used to read history in order to remind himself that two hundred years ago there were thousands of individuals with passions just as desperate and intense as his own, and that every single one of them is dead.)

To understand these things doesn't just make life bearable, it opens our eyes to beauty. In Greek, when something is always happening it is said that this or that "loves to happen"; the Stoics thought that if we understood the truth we could feel and love the cycle of nature loving itself. We could love to happen, too. It's only our silly worries distracting us from participation in the great All; we're like someone watching a storm come in over the ocean and wondering whether he closed the windows at home.

Hadot thinks this is the essence of philosophy, tout court. He quotes Plato saying that the philosopher is characterized by the capacity to grasp all Time and Being and the correlative contempt for human affairs. Is it true that part of the pleasure of seeking knowledge is removal from the worldly into something calmer-- into a perspective, precisely, where you can love the world? When I started writing I was dismissive of this kind of practice-- a typical ancient philosophy / Buddhist attempt to stop being human because it's hard, I thought. And it's true that I wouldn't want to live there. But I think there's something maybe necessary in this kind of distance and the love it opens up-- something one also finds in laughter.