Nietzsche, the Stoics, and the Aztecs On The Art of Life

When Fragility Is Strength

My grandfather was a retired medical doctor. A few years back, he went into his local clinic to see why his throat was persistently sore. After many tests, and some biopsies, the results showed that he had cancer. In fact, it had metastasized to such an extent that nothing could be done.

The diagnostic exams also revealed that his cancer hadn’t yet spread to any vital part of his body. So he was stuck. Neither would he die quickly, nor was there any way to alleviate his pain.

How would you respond to that news? Was it just bad luck? Did it happen for a reason? Or was it a sort of mixture?

Taken respectively, those responses are the ones that three different philosophical outlooks provide:

• bad luck — the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,
• happened for a reason — the Greek and Roman tradition of Stoicism, which began around 300 BCE,
• a sort of mixture — the Aztecs in ancient Mexico during the 14th -16th centuries.

I want to convince you that the Aztec view is the (most) right one — that’s my philosophical thesis. It’s also, ultimately, the path my grandfather chose.

For some context, my grandfather was a quiet atheist, so he initially took his Colt .38 with him into his back yard and was going to take his own life. But as he sat under a tree preparing himself, his wife unexpectedly returned from her errands and found him there.

Although she knew that he would face tremendous pain during the final months of his life, she was a strong Christian who believed that he would go to Hell if he took his own life. So she pleaded with him and he relented.

At that moment, he took the Aztec path. He accepted that the art of living well turns on embracing our fragility, even in the face of pain.

That view only makes sense, though, if our cosmos is a mixture of rational organization with chaos. So I’ll have to make it plausible.

Also, while I don’t think the art of life consists in Stoic tranquility or Nietzschean power-plays, I nonetheless hold that these outlooks provide superlative resources for living a better life — which is the practical lesson I hope to convey.

Let’s start with the Stoics since they are intuitive for most readers.

Why Stoic Happiness Follows Fate

Happiness, for the Stoics, begins with our place in nature. Writing in the 5th century AD, Joannes Stobaeus preserved much of what we have of Stoic philosophy. He outlines the idea this way:

[The Stoics] say that happiness is the goal … [that] consists in living in accordance with virtue, in living in agreement … or living in accordance with nature (LS 63A).

So if you want to be happy, then you need to learn to follow nature’s path. That’s a fairly common view. We might want to know, then, why does happiness follow from living in accordance with nature?

The Stoics’ answer is that nature, our cosmos, is rational. Diogenes Laertius, another ancient historian, but from the 2nd century AD, spells out the Stoic point in this way:

The cosmos is a living being, rational, animate, and intelligent.… [More specifically,] it is a living thing in the sense of an animate substance endowed with sensation (DL 7.142–143).

Because the cosmos is a rational animal, all events are organized in a rational way — they all happen for a reason. Living in accordance with nature, then, means living a rational and tranquil life.

Yet, if that’s right, then your goal in life is to accept things the way that they are. You should learn to love fate. If they were different, then our world would be less rational and so worse.

As the Stoics were fond of saying: we do not get to choose the part we have to play in life, only how well we play it.

How to Practice This

You may not entirely agree with the Stoic approach to the cosmos — I don’t — but I’ve written a lot on them because I think their practices of inward mastery are still helpful.

Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher during the Roman period, suggests the following practice.

You must stop blaming God, and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within your reasoned choice (Discourses, 3.22.13).

To apply this to your own life, try to go a week without complaining about anything. It’ll be hard, but each time you want to complain, you’ll learn something about yourself.

If something is a problem, go ahead and address it directly. Don’t just complain, change it.

If there isn’t anything you can do about the problem, then recognize that too and put it out of your mind. There’s no use in worrying about what you can change.

But I think this advice meets its limit is in serious cases. If you think that the universe is harmonious and rationally organized (as the Stoics did), then my grandfather’s diagnosis was all part of a divine plan. The most that he might have done was work to put things in order before passing.

Grief and upset, the Stoics say, is a mistake.

Most of us, however, think that a certain amount of grief is not only natural, but reasonable. So that the Stoic point is sufficiently counter-intuitive that you might go in search of another view.

For the outlook diametrically opposed to the Stoics’, the one that holds that the cosmos is anything but rational, you could look at Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche: Why Art of Life is the Art of War

A few philosophers, rather notoriously, deny any basic rationality to the cosmos. The name, in the ‘West’, most closely allied with this rejection is Nietzsche. He is notoriously difficult to interpret, but the basis for his rejection finds plausible support in some of his more well-known formulations.

In his mature work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche has life itself explain cosmic organization in this way:

Indeed, the truth was not hit by him who shot at it with the words of the ‘will to existence’ [e.g. Darwin]: that does not exist. For, what does not exist cannot will; but what is in existence, how could that still want existence? Only where there is life is there also will: not will to life but — thus I teach you — will to power (115).

What Nietzsche apparently means is this. If you want to understand how things actually happen in the universe, not how they should happen, but what actually explains its process, then the truth is staring you straight in the face: the strong overcome the weak.

Fish eat insects. Bears eat fish. Humans hunt bears. What exists doesn’t only want to live, as Darwinian evolution suggests. Living beings want to exercise their capacities, to exert their will to power. Power over what? Over everything they can.

As a result, the universe has no organization. Karma is false. And the Stoic love of fate is a consolation for the weak.

For Nietzsche, then, there is no path to enlightenment apart from accepting what is obvious to anyone. “Can you bear this truth?” he challenges.

If so, then you will need to learn how to exert your will to power to make whatever cosmic order you see fit. The path is not inward, like the Stoics’, but outwardly directed from whatever your inward vision dictates.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is best understood, then, as an instruction manual that hopes to teach one main lesson: the art of living well is nothing other than the art of war.

How to Practice This

Most of us don’t agree with Nietzsche, but we do usually accept that he is right at points or about certain circumstances.

When in a position that you are

1. dealing with anonymous persons, so that you have no basis for trust,

2. none has a clear advantage in power, and

3. solutions by way of mutual self-interest aren’t viable, so that you must compete

… then maybe Nietzsche’s emphasis on power is the right way to go.

Robert Green’s 48 Laws of Power is an international bestseller precisely because it tells you how to practice that Nietzschean view in your life. I think Law 41 is a helpful example. It reads:

Avoid Stepping Into A Great Man’s Shoes. What happens first always appears better and more original than what comes after. If you succeed a great man or have a famous parent, you will have to accomplish double their achievements to outshine them. Do not get lost in their shadow …. Establish your own name and identity by changing course.

To put this advice into a marketing context, can you name the first person who flew across the Atlantic? It was Charles Lindbergh. What about the second person? The third?

You actually do know the third person, it was Amelia Earhart (the second was Bert Hinkler — a name so obscure that Google gets it wrong).

She was also the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. She made her own name, then, specifically by changing the categories people used to think about her activity.

That’s a good bit of Nietzsche in action.

Yet, for the really serious situations in life, it’s not clear that Nietzsche proves a helpful guide.

To return to my grandfather’s case, if you think all is chaos, then you’ll be forced to deny that there is any justification for cancer and pain. You might, as a result, choose to take matters into your own hands and end it before the pain becomes overwhelming.

But he had his reasons for choosing the Aztec path instead.

The Aztec Art of Living Well

The Aztecs hold that neither of the previous outlooks are right. The Stoics and Nietzscheans have grasped but a part of the truth. For present purposes, you can understand the Aztecs in the following way.

We live under what the Aztecs call the fifth sun (CC 2.1–50). It is, they hold, the fifth organization of the cosmos. As a result, they did not think that there was an eternally pervasive order. Whole universes arise and decline and there is no necessary reason that the next might be better than the last. Nietzsche is right about that.

But it is obvious that our cosmos, our “sun,” does have some sort of organization that we can know and that seems to reward the right kind of behavior (CC 2.16–21). This is where the Stoics are right.

Taken together, the cosmos is a system of equilibria. These do collapse, as all things do, but there is beauty, goodness, and value in preserving it as long as possible.

A great deal, nevertheless, is out of our control. And given the generally chaotic pattern of creatures fighting and dying in our world, it is naïve to think that your individual efforts will be enough. We must start with the help of others and work our way towards inward stability, though this does not mean that inward practices have no role to play.

The art of living well for the Aztecs, then, consists neither in cultivating inward peace exclusively, nor in learning the practices of war, but in growing deep roots with one another, in our bodies, and in nature.

How To Practice This

The strongest contrast between the Aztec and Stoic views emerges from the practices they recommend. In his Handbook, Epictetus recommends the following practice of detachment.

If you are fond of a jug, say, “I am fond of a jug.” For when it is broken you will not be disturbed. If you kiss your own child or wife, say to yourself that you are kissing a human being. For when they die you will not be disturbed (3).

Perhaps Epictetus was being hyperbolic, but whenever my students run across this passage, they find an immediate problem in the comparison: our relations to jugs and to humans are not remotely alike.

As our understanding of human developmental psychology has grown, moreover, we realize that humans build relations of attachment with each other. These bonds, additionally, tend to shape our ability to empathize with others and our sense of security in the world.

Of course, that means that you will be disturbed in losing your loved ones and that you cannot have the kind of invulnerability Epictetus seems to be offering.

What Aztec philosophy gives you instead is a reason to think that the lives of our friends and loved ones have irreplaceable value.

Just as an improvisational musical solo is not diminished in its worth for its brevity, so too a human life’s value cannot be altered by having been made shorter.

My grandfather was a flawed man. His alcoholism ruined much of what might have been a happier life for himself and my grandmother. But in his final months, he chose to strengthen the bond that they had, sacrificing his own pleasure for her sense of well-being.

If we cannot always have pleasant lives, the Aztecs teach us that we can have worthwhile ones. We only need to strengthen our bonds with each other.

The World’s Philosophy as a Way of Life

I don’t think that one single tradition has all the answers to life’s problems. Instead, wisdom is to be found by taking the best from all the world’s traditions.

In another article, I wrote about the hardest daily exercise that the Stoics ask of you — it’s a special kind of courage. That tells you a lot about the “how” involved in living a good life.

In this article, I’ve been trying to explain the character of the good life that I find to be the most accurate, and that’s the Aztec approach. They hold that good lives are only made good because they embrace the fragility of what makes any of it worth living.

Misfortune is a thread in the fabric of a good life, but that doesn’t mean that you should avoid weaving your own pattern.

To explain the value of the Aztec approach, I’ll give you a final story.

Suppose that it turns out that all those science-fiction movies are true, and one day you happen upon a time traveler. He is someone from a different timeline — a parallel universe.

He offers you a gift if you can keep his secret for the next day. You get a choice of one of two items:

1. An almanac of all the outcomes of the future horse races for the next 50 years
2. Your journal, from your future self, which chronicles every significant mistake you’ve made and what the cause was.

These time-artifacts will update as your timeline changes with you. So there is no need to worry that if you correctly pick one pony race, or make one decision better, that the rest of the information will no longer be useful to you.

Under those circumstances, which would you choose?

I know that I would choose the journal. When I try this out with my students, they overwhelmingly agree. The point of having money, after all, is to live a better life, and the journal does directly.

What this means is that having the right goal in mind is worth an indefinitely large sum of money. That’s the value the Aztec view gives.

True to my word that wisdom must be found everywhere, I’ll leave you with a final quote about progress towards life’s goals from Epictetus’ Discourses (3.14).

Two things must be corrected in human beings: arrogant opinion and mistrust. Arrogant opinion expects that no further evidence is needed, and mistrust assumes that under the torrent of circumstances there can be no happiness.

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Sebastian Purcell’s research specializes in world comparative philosophy, especially as these ancient traditions teach us how to lead happier, richer lives. He lives with his wife, a fellow philosopher, and their three cats in upstate New York.