02_The Path IV.pdf

Path of the Sage:

an Introduction to

Stoic Philosophy

e 4th Edition

Erik Wiegardt

wordsmith press · san diego · california

CONTENTS

page

INTRODUCTION TO THE 4TH EDITION

THE STOIC TRADITION

I. The Greek Stoa

II. The Roman Stoa

III. The Christian Stoa

IV. The Fourth Stoa

PHYSICS

God, the Whole

Dynamic Continuum

Categories

Reason

LOGIC

Introduction

Inductive and Deductive

The Syllogism

Common Logical Fallacies

ETHICS

Introduction

Oikeiosis

Fate and Free Will

Good, Bad and Indifferent

METAPHYSICS

Introduction

The Mystical Experience

The Near Death Experience

The Spirit World

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The symbol on the cover was designed by Erik Wiegardt for the original website, The

Stoic Registry. The symbols at the center represent four conditions necessary for life on

Earth: sun, rock, water, plant. The Roman numerals are 2296, the date following Zeno's

the establishment of our school at the Stoa Poikile in Athens.

Introduction to the 4th Edition

The story of this book began long before it was written. And, it began in frustration,

a feeling of dissatisfaction with the world as it was when I was 19 years old and a

private in the US Army. I had recently discovered the Discourses of Epictetus , and

after reading it I remember saying to myself, “I’m a Stoic.” I wanted to be a Stoic

not only in theory and in practice, but also on paper, officially. I wanted to raise my

right hand and register my name as a Stoic. In 1964 such a place where I could do

that didn't exist.

Thirty-two years later, on 8 MAY 1996, I founded a website called the Stoic

Registry. Until that day, I had never met another person who was interested in

Stoicism. I was sure there must be someone out there somewhere, and I was

determined to find him, or her. But just in case I couldn't find anyone who was

already a Stoic, maybe I could get people interested. I decided to write a book about

Stoicism, one that was comprehensible to the average reader, and I would publish it

and give it away.

First I had to create a web site, and to do that I had to have a computer. I’d never

owned a computer and didn’t know how to use one. In 1995, when I first started

working on this project the home computer was still a new phenomenon. At the

time, a decent computer started at around $2500, and I paid for mine by working

overtime – after my 12-hour shift as a Correctional Deputy at Camp Barrett, an

honor camp for adult male felons. I didn't really like working overtime, so I kept a

record of exactly how much money I needed to buy a computer, and I took my

name off the overtime list, about six months later, as soon as much as I figured I

needed.

The good thing about this job at the honor camp was that although I worked 12

hours a day, seven days in a row, at the end of my full week on duty I got seven

days off. Seven on and seven off. In the week off, I studied academic tomes on

Stoicism I found at the local university library, taking notes hour after hour because

I wasn't a student and couldn't take the books home. From these notes I wrote The

Path of the Sage: An Introduction to Stoic Philosophy .

I self-published 100 copies of The Path and hired a webmaster to create my original

website, The Stoic Registry. Publishing the books and paying the webmaster cost

me about $1000, total. As soon as the Registry was up and running I gave all the

books away. They were offered free to anyone who came to the website and asked

for one. I even paid the postage. Then in 2009, following up on a suggestion from

one of the members, we changed the name of the website by a vote of the

members. With a 3:1 majority, the Stoic Registry became the cybercity, New Stoa .

Between 1996 and 2009, I added, deleted, and modified The Path so many times I

needed to write a new edition, then another, and now the 4 th edition. This edition has

evolved so much I recommend those who have read the original to forget it and read

this version. You will find so much that is new. The History section is mostly the

same, but Physics, Logic, Ethics, and especially Metaphysics all have important

additions and modifications.

The 4 th Edition is written for the general reader. If you are a scholar, you may be

disappointed to find that footnotes, the obsession of scholarly writing, are missing.

For those who think such an approach could be liberating, let me assure you that it

too has its difficulties. To quote Professor Colin Wells in his preface to The Roman

Empire , 2 nd ed. (Harvard, 1992), “...the professional scholar, writing in a field which

has seen so much scholarly activity, feels his colleagues looking over his shoulder,

and is obsessed with the need to justify himself, to reassure them that he realizes

when he is oversimplifying, or when he has passed over in silence a topic generally

deemed to be fascinatingly controversial, which generally means hopelessly

obscure.”

The Path was not written for scholarly colleagues, but for the rest of us who want to

know once and for all how to acquire the consciousness of a Stoic in our own

lifetime. We will not be arguing over the differences between tart and sour. We are

going to pass over the hopelessly obscure and focus on the essentials of what it

means to be a Stoic today, right now. By the time you finish this book you will

know whether or not you have the right stuff to be a new Stoic. How can I be sure

you will know? Because, if you finish this book, even at the rapid pace at which you

will be transported, both your reasoning mind and your intuitive mind will know

that you too can have the one thing in this world that money can't buy: a noble

character.

* *

The gender pronoun: Although I appreciate the literary liberation of women in my

lifetime, I still dislike the tedium and broken rhythm of always including he and she

and him and her with every passage that requires a gender reference. I try to be fair,

but I'm not always “politically correct.” The attempts by some authors to

compensate for millenia of gender one-sidedness can be extreme. I'm reminded of a

book I read recently written by a woman who was at one time assigned as a lecturer

to a US Military Academy. Although she was writing a book about the lives and

hardships of all soldiers, she had a rather perverse determination to exclude men

from her literary conversation. Although it is illegal for US military women to be

sent into combat, as of this writing, she wrote one long passage about the emotional

hardship of killing in close-up, hand-to-hand combat exclusively using the feminine

pronouns she or her —as if no men were ever engaged in this aspect of war.

Personally, I found that effort to redress her gender grievance unreasonable and just

plain silly. And, despite the lesson it provided for fairness in my own use of gender

pronouns, I am guilty at times of exclusionary practices. Mea culpa . For that I

apologize. My only defense is that this is an unpleasantly awkward time in the

evolution of language in these matters, and I find our prose often suffering because

of it. To put this suffering prose out of its misery, I will occasionally use my own

gender exclusively when I really mean to include both. If you find more he and him

than she and her when I am referring to Stoics, let me assure you that there is no

question in my mind that many women are Stoics. First rate. And, if you are a Stoic

and a woman, I'm confident you will be above all a reasonable person, and forgive

me.

* * *

I would like to quote a passage from Professor Margaret Graver's work, Stoicism

and Emotion (Chicago, 2007). “Central to Stoic thought is the claim that a rational

creature must follow nature, that 'nature leads us toward virtue.' This foundational

assertion implies that the best philosophical understanding of how a person should

live will be grounded in observation of the way nature has created us; that is, in the

corporeal and psychological characteristics of our species [this author's emphasis].

Nature does not pass out characteristics at random: if members of a species

regularly exhibit some significant structural or behavioral feature, then there must

be some way that feature promotes the interests of those species' members or of

their biological community. Birds have feathers because they have a use for

feathers; foxes hunt because hunting enables them to survive. The same is true in

human beings.”

Please allow me to add my own concluding comments to Professor Graver's

passage. We are what we are because Nature has given us certain attributes, and

chief among them is our ability to reason. As a species, our ability to reason, even to

reason about reason itself, brings us back to Nature time and again. For more than

2300 years Stoics have been searching Nature for instruction on how we can best

live in this phenomenon of existence. Nature is first, foremost, and always our

guide. This is what it means to be a Stoic. This is the meaning in our motto: live

according to Nature . Nothing is more important to a Stoic than this gift from Nature

to be reasonable. It defines our beliefs and the nobility of our character. And, when

we fail to live up to these ideals, we are the ones who suffer.

This book is about finding Nature's certain remedy when we do suffer and how we

can best transform ignorance and unhappiness into living our lives with excellence.

Nature does not demand devotion to dessicated and outdated dogma; it does expect

effort, but it is an effort that will be rewarded time and again throughout our lives. I

know this from personal experience and from the experience of so many Stoics that

I know. Join me now as I introduce you to the greatest wisdom philosophy in the

history of the world.

* * * *

Dedicated to my wife and editor Amielle Moyer.

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