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Dr. William Irvine has done me a favor and beat me to punch at the same time. If I were driven by my repetile brain and out of a sense of pride, I would be jealous. If I take Seneca’s advice, however, as Dr. Irvine would advise me too or if I took Epicurus’s advice as I have an inclination to do, I should thank him.
What is all this about you ask? Well, listening to KPFA’s Against the Grain and doing research on finding an internalized moral philosophy (or actually multiple) from Chinese, Greco-Roman , and Indian classical philosophy. I have felt that natural, epistemic, and political elements of humanist philosophy are well-developed. The internalized moral philosophy often pulls from older religious traditions or from cultural inertia in the humanist movements.
Now, I think that “philosophy of life” is a good term for these internalized philosophies. I thought that the highly secularized form of Buddhism that is often very popular amongst the “spiritual but not religious” because in our current time these philosophies are so linked to religion and to irrational thinking that we have largely ignored them philosophically or regulated them to self-help books.
I, like Dr. Irvine, feel like this is a lose. I find that many humanists–such as Humanistic Jews and Humanistic Buddhists (two groups I mention because I have either ethnic or cultural ties to them)–often dig their internal morality from this context and then move add skepticism and naturalism to the core. I, however, have found this problematic because of the ethno-centric or arational elements of those philosophies really don’t go away.
In fact, Dr. Irvine discusses his own interest in Zen Buddhism and then becoming disenchanted by its irrationalist elements. My background is similar as I considered myself a Buddhist for most of my life until about four years ago when I felt like I couldn’t be honest and embrace Buddhism. In moving into an more explicitly scientifically skeptical and humanistic world view, I have often felt like the there was something missing in the development of personal ethics. I often here descriptions of evolutionary ethics or why the status quo exists, but every little about how to prioritize ones relationship to ethics and what traits one should value.
So to get to Dr. Irvine’s book: Dr. Irvine presents Stoicism in its own context from the Roman period (which is the one where the ethics are more clearly developed, although it doesn’t deal with the virtue and proto-physics of the Greek Stoics) and then puts it in a modern psychologized and evolutionary context.
First, this book is wonderfully layman friendly. He doesn’t use the exact Greek and Roman terms. He doesn’t discuss apatheia, prohairesis, and sunkatathesis. Dr. Irvine discusses tranquility, virtue, and reason. Dr. Irvine also uses some sound psychology in talking about hedonic adaption and how it leads to anhedonia–or, in short, how the more desires you have, the more you fullfill them, the less the things you lusted over make you happy.
The there are a good fifty pages devoted to putting Stoicism in its context, including all the Zeus-driven bits that alienate atheists and agnostics like me. Dr. Irvine, however, makes a fairly convincing polemic that Stoic philosophy is perfectly consistent with an evolutionary worldview and nontheistic elements.
The majority of the book is devoted to various psychological techniques that are designed to head off hedonic adaption. Or, as I like to call, “how to shoot the alcoholic, nymphomaniac, shopping-addicted inner-voice in the head.” These include fatalism in regards to the past and present, negative visualization, voluntary discomfort, and delaying gratification. Irvine develops these from the writings of Seneca the Younger, Marcus Aerilius, and Epictetus. Dr. Irvine also puts these in a modern context and admits the difficulties of many of the techniques in modern culture.
If there are explicit flaws in the book, it could be that it is too layman-driven for people already somewhat familar with Classical philosophy and doesn’t go into what the Stoics (particularly the Greek varieties) thought about politics and virtue. In fact, the Greek Stoics are largely ignored after the historical chapters in the beginning of the book. These faults will annoy people with my background, but I don’t think we are the primary audience for this book.
I think if you want to take internal moral philosophy more seriously and perhaps attempt to slow hedonic adaption, this is a good book to start with. Dr. Irvine may not convince you to become a full blown Stoic, but he will have you take the classical philosophers of lifestyles much more seriously. It also gets a rationalist framework for ethics–including how to drive your own mind–in a way that does not demand either an explicit political OR theological point of view.
