Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapter 14: Epicureans, Cynics, and Stoics
We now turn back to the legacy of the Axial Revolution in the West, or more precisely its reversal in Aristotle’s student, Alexander the Great. Through his conquest of much of the known world, Greek culture is simultaneously spread and thinned, no longer connected to the Polis and the depth of shared history and beliefs, leaving a feeling of domicide. This lack of belonging can be thought of as an early manifestation of the present day meaning crisis. It led to various cultural shifts, including syncretism in religion, and the characterization of philosophers as physicians of the soul, using wisdom to deal with the suffering of existential fear and anxiety.
One such group of early physicians were the Epicureans, who believed we suffer from anxiety due to mortality. Instead of trying to achieve immortality, they sought to radically accept mortality. Why should we be afraid of nonexistence, or the loss thereof? After all, “where death is, I am not”. What are we actually afraid of? It’s the loss of agency, i.e. what’s good or meaningful. Two of the most fundamental goods in life according to the Epicureans were friendship and the pursuit of philosophia, which we can do as long as we have cognitive agency. Therefore, they argued, focus on what is good, and in doing so accept your mortality.
The weakness of Epicureanism is that the fear of mortality was likely not the fundamental issue. This is where the Stoics come in. They originated in another one of Socrates’s students, Antisthenes, who developed the idea of conversing with oneself as Socrates did with his dialogues.
He had a follower in Diogenes, one of the most influential thinkers of Cynicism. The Cynics believed that the root of suffering lay in setting one’s heart on the wrong thing, in particular man-made and ephemeral notions such as cultural conventions and purity codes, rather than natural laws and morality. Inspired mostly by the confrontational aspect of Socrates, he is known for his adherence to “living like a dog” and making provocative public demonstrations, such as the hermit with the lamp and masturbating in public. His statements about purity codes vs moral laws are often relevant because of our perennial confusion between disgust reactions and moral judgments.
Eventually, one of his disciples, Zeno, integrates Plato and the Cynics. Rather than rejecting convention altogether (because humans are inherently social), Stoicism focuses on the process of how one becomes attached. This process is the fundamental way in which identity and agency are created, and explains Stoicism’s legacy in the psychotherapeutics of today.