Livin Your Best Life

dan wrote:Yes, thanks, Hubert makes it all so simple.  

He doesn’t quite say that the only way out is immaterialism……. but that is the unstated thesis of phenomenology……. everything is just a mental construct……. held together by the Logos.

Will Johncock: Beyond the Individual wrote:This rational awareness that we are parts of a greater whole is the crucial first step to understanding what “social” really and positively means for the Stoics. The comings and goings in the town square or other public spaces for example, while presenting important arenas for the practice of philosophical activity and intercourse, are not in themselves reliant on rational modes of interconnection and therefore are not rationally social in the Stoic view.

Such socialization in the places we together frequent might indeed occur without any concern for our grander, rationally shared, conditions. We can instead begin to understand our shared, and therefore our social, rational constitutions if we return to Epictetus’ insight that all our minds are bonded to the same universal reason. There we have reviewed his logic that if our bodies are linked to the world and its rhythms, then why would our minds not also be. It is according to these mental rational links, and in particular to how Epictetus attributes these links to what he calls our “daimons,” that we can more comprehensively explain our mutual, kindred, and inherently communal or social existences for the Stoics.

What then is a daimon?

Furthermore, in what way can a theory of this daimon convince us that in Stoic philosophy, what is internal to the self—rationality—is something shared with a world beyond the self? To understand what Epictetus means by the daimon, we firstly must appreciate the context from which his sense of the daimon derives. We can here commence with a preceding position from Plato. In his work Apology, Plato reports that Socrates speaks of a “divine sign” that guides him when he thinks, decides, and performs other mental functions. Also called an inner “voice,” this is said to be the “daimon” within Socrates that prevents him from making irrational decisions that he otherwise would be “about to do.” The grander point is that this kind of internal guide is not exclusive to Socrates but rather inhabits all rational beings. Given the Socratic influences in Stoicism, it is not surprising that this interpretation of a daimon that is our divine voice and caretaker is taken up by Epictetus. Diogenes Laërtius reports in fact that across the Stoic eras the daimon is understood to have this kind of guardian role, according to the belief that “there are some Daemones, who have a sympathy with humankind, being surveyors of all human affairs.” Before the time of Epictetus, possibly the most important surviving Stoic impression of the overseeing function of our daimon comes from the middle era Stoic, Posidonius. Cicero’s On Divination informs us that for Posidonius, this caretaking and even ruling daimon that we embody steers each of us toward what is true.105 As we move through Posidonius’ Stoicism, we encounter the sense that the daimon provides genuine guidance for each of us, and that this guidance derives from a rational source that is beyond ourselves. Our decision-making rationalizations lean upon this element of ourselves that is not reducible to any of us individually, and even circumvents our own adverse emotional impulses.

The internal part of each of us that is our daimon, which is also a part of the world that operates beyond our strict personal borders, duly contributes to how we steer ourselves toward rational lives, even seemingly during the most basic decisions we make every day. How though does this feature of the self that is called the daimon perform this role? In the translations of Posidonius’ fragments, we encounter a standard classical era definition of daimons as “immortal” and “divine go-betweens.” While the term “go-betweens” can present some confusion, it just refers to how daimons operate between each of us and God. In raising the topic of God, we must of course take into consideration our earlier qualification regarding our comprehension of what is divine. If the Stoic God is the rational order and rhythm that permeates the universe, then our daimon as our go-between is part of our access to that order and rhythm. This coheres with our ongoing definition of our rationality also as an expression of that universal order and rhythm, meaning now that our daimon is our access to our own rationality. The same applies for all other rational humans. We are all accessing the same rationality. We are all integrated with the same worldly order. Our daimon does not simply from within us “access” a universal rationality though. More interestingly it represents the aspect of ourselves that is simultaneously beyond ourselves. Our daimon is internal to each of us, we each have our own “fragment of God” as Epictetus describes it, whereby our rationality is composed by “a particle of God; there is a bit of God within you.” The daimon therefore is our own rational function, however what is our own is never really ours alone. For Epictetus our internal self is a trace of something that is also common to everyone else. The source of what is fundamental about you, your rational functions, is also the source of what is fundamental to someone else’s rational functions, and indeed of what is fundamental to the ordering and functioning of everything, and everyone, together. In this way, each of our internal selves, our minds and rationalities, are for Epictetus the shared traces of what is not exclusively internal to any of us. What is up to you, what is internal to your rational nature, conventionally infers something housed within you locally, in your brain or mind, as a capacity that moves around with you solely. With this Stoic conception though, it becomes apparent that what is internal to your rational nature is a reference to a nature that functions beyond your individualized self. This means that what is internal to you is never absolutely localized to your specific brain, mind, or the particular spot in the world where you are. Your internality is out there in a world, where the word “out” does not designate what is external or peripheral to you but rather is an indication of how dispersed we each are. Our internal self is the rational universe and order. Marcus Aurelius reiterates this kind of definition in which our rationality and our mind are that of God as the universe,

“in that when living rationally we are obedient to the will of the guardian-spirit which Zeus has granted to each of us as a portion of his own being to serve as our overseer and guide; and this guardian-spirit is the mind and reason of each one of us.”

Where Marcus here describes our personal rational existences as “portions” of a greater will that we “obey,” we get the sense that what we might believe that we control individually and rationally, actually occurs in concert with the overall source of that rationality. We can each think because we think through and with a rationalized world and condition. We do not think, we do not control our thoughts, separately from that world and condition. The shared territory between our individually internal self, and what might otherwise have appeared to be outside the individual self, is further emphasized in Epictetus’ description of what is omnipresent and internal to us about the universal:

“when you close your doors and create darkness within, remember never to say that you’re on your own, for in fact, you’re not alone, because God is within you, and your guardian spirit too.”

When we each think individually, when we each act individually, we do so in accordance with a universal rationality that involves and implicates all of us. Regarding a point that we will expand thoroughly in the coming chapters concerning our inherent Stoic responsibilities to a world of people and things beyond ourselves, what this means for Marcus is that our rational thoughts and actions are never reducible to motivations of individualized or personalized prosperities or benefits. In thinking and acting rationally rather, we think and act on behalf of, and in service of, the source of that rationality, the world itself. Rational acts are those which function in accordance with this universal order, Marcus instructing that if “you live and act as it dictates, then everything in you is intelligently [rationally] ordered.”

This belief from Marcus is evidently informed by the preceding position of Epictetus:

“Don’t you want to keep in mind, when you eat, who it is that is doing the eating, and whom it is that you’re feeding? And when you engage in sexual intercourse, who it is that is doing so? In your social relationships, in your physical exercises, in your conversations, aren’t you aware that it’s a god whom you’re feeding, a god whom you’re exercising? You carry God around with you. Do you suppose that I mean some external god? It is within yourself that you carry him.”

The God that you service in this sense is the interconnecting ordering thread among all things in the universe. If acting rationally is acting in accordance with the divine fragment that constitutes us mentally, we do not serve a transcendent creator but instead all rationally interconnected things. Where such things are humans, because our rationalities and associated mental processes share in these kindred, rationalized conditions, the Stoic view follows that when we think and act rationally, we do so communally.”