Passions are always a response mechanism to a perception (epistemological/phenomenology) which may operate at a conscious or unconscious level. They do not emerge from nowhere. In “unconscious,” I mean that one has not yet explored the basis of those passions. I do not find people, even supposedly pietistic Christians, to be all that good at understanding the motions of their own psyche, partly because they are dishonest about themselves and the world. Like physiological feelings, the emotive passions serve as a first warning system. They may be wrong. But failing to investigate these intuitions may lead to peril. I was saved from child sexual abuse because of paying heed to those warning intuitions.
Secondly, empathy, despite the plausible reality of provoking greater and deleterious passions, is always better the sympathy. For empathy can provide experiential wisdom and counsel (in that the empathetic has experienced something similar) that the mere sympathetic.
There is obviously much more to say. Perhaps, when I go to full war of Divine Impassibility, I might do it there.
One more thing. Have you seen or read "The Giver?"
There is much in Stoicism to recommend it. Stoicism provides the only philosophical movement, that I know of in history, which have martyrs (Google Stoic Opposition in the First Century CE), upon whose blood of their martyrs, Stoicism came to culturally prevail in the second century CE. Yes, your definition of love is more valid, “love is in fact a seeking of the good of another,” than the sentimentalists.
However, Stoicism had no understanding of genuine grace or even magnanimity, but operated upon dry duty and justice.
Stoicism is unlike Roman Republican mores. For the latter was concerned about the common good and saw relationship between the ethical good and ontological flourishing. Stoicism is particularly atomistic, even egoistic. It attempts to give a reasonable motive to pursue the virtuous and prudent within a society which does not, and thus disadvantages the virtuous and prudent. For that reason, it has lost hope in the relationship between the ethical and the ontological.
It is interesting that, because it supplies such a psychologically arid existence, that Nero, who was mentored by Seneca, and Commodus, the son of philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius, reacted in Newtonian fashion (The Third Law of Emotion). I also suspect that through Aurelius’s foolish choice of successor, violating a political principle of the Five Good Emperors, Stoicism was discredited and would decline and give way to Neoplatonism in the third century CE.
In so many blog essays, you are correct, indeed, impressively so. But on Christian Stoicism, (or any form of hyphenated Christianity), you are in deep error, which produces deleterious ontological consequences, this counsel coming from one who practicably lived 35 years in terror of the overwhelmingness of his passions.
Christ is an opponent of the passions??? (Herein, one is speaking of both sensual and emotive passions.) Did not the God of Christ create them in humanity (as a component of His image)? And did He not say that the passions, with everything else, was good? (Augustine had denied that the passions existed in the act of marriage before the Fall.)
From Homer’s story of Helen of Troy, Hellenic culture located the root of vice and folly in the passions. It also led to extreme degrees of misogyny as the woman was deemed more passionate and a strong source of such vice/folly in the male through passions. This would, in turn, lead to the "Greek Vice."
Stoicism, like Pyrrho, Aristote, and Epicurus, etc. all sought to devise ways by which to diminish the power of these seemingly ungovernable passions.
The Stoics sought to sever the connection between the passions and the mind/volition. Some tried to repress them altogether.
First of all, it does not work. For in contriving to deny the natural expression of the passions, these passions will invariably burst out in unnatural expressions and/or lead to the “flat effect” of the psyche/soul which is an experiential hell.
Good - at a certain point in writing this, I had confused Sorge and Angst. I thought "care" and "anxiety" might be the same German word. However, with an edit or two, I kept the point. Without a belief in the objectivity of goodness, of the sort common to Christianity and Platonism, the logical positivists win - good is a projection of human psychology, emotion. Then, the ethic that arises from that will have to be founded in psychological projection.
This is certainly how things play out when liberals do analytic philosophical ethics and philosophy of emotion. Everything comes down to "valuing." But "valuing" is the source of value, rather than a response to value having been detected in the world. So valuing is a mere projection.
Stoicism is a philosophical ethic. As a result, it implies at least some objective standard beyond human psychology from which to critique the common workings of human psychology and passion. That's the core of the argument. I'm actually very sympathetic to Heidegger's critique of positivism/materialism - I think phenomenological critique of materialism (like Jordan Peterson's) point to the objectivity of the moral or "value"-dimension of things. But in the cultural zeitgeist, we have a world stripped of all objective value (scientism), and an ethic of self-realization and subjectivism (emotivism), approximately.
"Merely added?" To my mind, Christianity adds to Stoicism if Stoicism can be acknowledged to have gotten anything right at all. The presuppositionalists will always argue that if you have one doctrinal difference, then the whole system is a different system (ideology)! Au contraire, it is possible for people who disagree on individual points to agree on other points. It is also possible for a philosophy to only go so far, namely to provide philosophical therapy. With respect to that, Christianity can simply "republish" that philosophical therapy and then add to it real salvation.
Thanks for the interaction - and I will certainly interacting with whatever you write on the subject!
Part 3 of 3
Passions are always a response mechanism to a perception (epistemological/phenomenology) which may operate at a conscious or unconscious level. They do not emerge from nowhere. In “unconscious,” I mean that one has not yet explored the basis of those passions. I do not find people, even supposedly pietistic Christians, to be all that good at understanding the motions of their own psyche, partly because they are dishonest about themselves and the world. Like physiological feelings, the emotive passions serve as a first warning system. They may be wrong. But failing to investigate these intuitions may lead to peril. I was saved from child sexual abuse because of paying heed to those warning intuitions.
Secondly, empathy, despite the plausible reality of provoking greater and deleterious passions, is always better the sympathy. For empathy can provide experiential wisdom and counsel (in that the empathetic has experienced something similar) that the mere sympathetic.
There is obviously much more to say. Perhaps, when I go to full war of Divine Impassibility, I might do it there.
One more thing. Have you seen or read "The Giver?"
Part 2 of 3
There is much in Stoicism to recommend it. Stoicism provides the only philosophical movement, that I know of in history, which have martyrs (Google Stoic Opposition in the First Century CE), upon whose blood of their martyrs, Stoicism came to culturally prevail in the second century CE. Yes, your definition of love is more valid, “love is in fact a seeking of the good of another,” than the sentimentalists.
However, Stoicism had no understanding of genuine grace or even magnanimity, but operated upon dry duty and justice.
Stoicism is unlike Roman Republican mores. For the latter was concerned about the common good and saw relationship between the ethical good and ontological flourishing. Stoicism is particularly atomistic, even egoistic. It attempts to give a reasonable motive to pursue the virtuous and prudent within a society which does not, and thus disadvantages the virtuous and prudent. For that reason, it has lost hope in the relationship between the ethical and the ontological.
It is interesting that, because it supplies such a psychologically arid existence, that Nero, who was mentored by Seneca, and Commodus, the son of philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius, reacted in Newtonian fashion (The Third Law of Emotion). I also suspect that through Aurelius’s foolish choice of successor, violating a political principle of the Five Good Emperors, Stoicism was discredited and would decline and give way to Neoplatonism in the third century CE.
Part 1 of 3
In so many blog essays, you are correct, indeed, impressively so. But on Christian Stoicism, (or any form of hyphenated Christianity), you are in deep error, which produces deleterious ontological consequences, this counsel coming from one who practicably lived 35 years in terror of the overwhelmingness of his passions.
Christ is an opponent of the passions??? (Herein, one is speaking of both sensual and emotive passions.) Did not the God of Christ create them in humanity (as a component of His image)? And did He not say that the passions, with everything else, was good? (Augustine had denied that the passions existed in the act of marriage before the Fall.)
From Homer’s story of Helen of Troy, Hellenic culture located the root of vice and folly in the passions. It also led to extreme degrees of misogyny as the woman was deemed more passionate and a strong source of such vice/folly in the male through passions. This would, in turn, lead to the "Greek Vice."
Stoicism, like Pyrrho, Aristote, and Epicurus, etc. all sought to devise ways by which to diminish the power of these seemingly ungovernable passions.
The Stoics sought to sever the connection between the passions and the mind/volition. Some tried to repress them altogether.
First of all, it does not work. For in contriving to deny the natural expression of the passions, these passions will invariably burst out in unnatural expressions and/or lead to the “flat effect” of the psyche/soul which is an experiential hell.
Good - at a certain point in writing this, I had confused Sorge and Angst. I thought "care" and "anxiety" might be the same German word. However, with an edit or two, I kept the point. Without a belief in the objectivity of goodness, of the sort common to Christianity and Platonism, the logical positivists win - good is a projection of human psychology, emotion. Then, the ethic that arises from that will have to be founded in psychological projection.
This is certainly how things play out when liberals do analytic philosophical ethics and philosophy of emotion. Everything comes down to "valuing." But "valuing" is the source of value, rather than a response to value having been detected in the world. So valuing is a mere projection.
Stoicism is a philosophical ethic. As a result, it implies at least some objective standard beyond human psychology from which to critique the common workings of human psychology and passion. That's the core of the argument. I'm actually very sympathetic to Heidegger's critique of positivism/materialism - I think phenomenological critique of materialism (like Jordan Peterson's) point to the objectivity of the moral or "value"-dimension of things. But in the cultural zeitgeist, we have a world stripped of all objective value (scientism), and an ethic of self-realization and subjectivism (emotivism), approximately.
"Merely added?" To my mind, Christianity adds to Stoicism if Stoicism can be acknowledged to have gotten anything right at all. The presuppositionalists will always argue that if you have one doctrinal difference, then the whole system is a different system (ideology)! Au contraire, it is possible for people who disagree on individual points to agree on other points. It is also possible for a philosophy to only go so far, namely to provide philosophical therapy. With respect to that, Christianity can simply "republish" that philosophical therapy and then add to it real salvation.
Thanks for the interaction - and I will certainly interacting with whatever you write on the subject!