Stoic and modern?

Stoicism is in fashion.

It's on bookstore shelves, next to self-help.

Most of them are popular texts that try to

the classics: Marco Aurelio, above all, very brief;

Except for Epictetus, very tough, and Seneca, very extensive and intellectually demanding.

Stoicism lasted six centuries (until II AD) and its powerful influence goes through Montaigne and Rousseau, among others, until it reaches today.

It comes back because it is a practical philosophy, a set of rules for internal change.

A calming method to achieve serenity.

It serves as an inspiration for current self-help because both deal with "caring for oneself", with a self-government project in order to contain suffering.

Stoicism is a rigorous philosophy based on extreme intellectualism;

reason must guide conduct and action.

Key is the control of passions and desires.

Self-care is achieved with rigorous emotional self-control.

Nothing to do with the predominance of the hypermodern man who extols feeling and spontaneity.

It is a heroic individualism focused on strengthening character that neither allows lamentation, even in the face of pain, illness and death, nor fear, which weakens.

We live in a weak individualism, now immersed in the culture of complaints where everyone considers themselves victims: bullying at school, work, sexual, discrimination and other abuses.

There is, however, a connection between, on the one hand, the Stoic education of the mind and the control of inner speech, and, on the other,

cognitive psychology and self-help inspired by it.

These try to change the style of thought, to put an end to the "negative" (rumination, "terribilization", etc.) that generates anxiety and stress, ubiquitous evils in late modernity.

But stoicism is much more extreme.

To achieve serenity you have to sacrifice hope, a source of disappointment, get used to loneliness and anticipate the worst, pain and death itself, always present in judgment.

Everything that is hidden by the current civilized society, consumer of the Orwellian soma.

To achieve serenity you have to sacrifice hope, a source of disappointment, get used to loneliness and anticipate the worst, pain and death itself, always present in judgment.

Everything that is hidden by the current civilized society, consumer of the Orwellian soma.

To achieve serenity you have to sacrifice hope, a source of disappointment, get used to loneliness and anticipate the worst, pain and death itself, always present in judgment.

Everything that is hidden by the current civilized society, consumer of the Orwellian soma.

Stoicism encourages us to focus on the present because the future, a concept foreign to Antiquity, is ignored and the past can be a source of sorrow.

It also throws away hope, a source of potential disappointment.

He preaches detachment from social goods —wealth and fame—, from friendship.

Stoicism's insistence on the present has, therefore, nothing to do with its current valuation in the self-help genre, which mixes Buddhist influences with New Age, and links the value of the present with that of "experience."

The conception of happiness of Hellenistic philosophy, and of Stoicism in particular, is opposed to that of late modernity.

That of Antiquity is part of a normative ideal;

For this reason, happiness is related to virtue and this, with reason.

His goal is to achieve stillness, the absence of disturbance through the elimination of passions and continuous emotional control.

It is a negative happiness, like a lack of restlessness, of restlessness.

On the contrary, the contemporary ideal of happiness is not ethical, but psychological.

And this because psychology is the ethics of late modernity.

And that of our happiness is, at least for two decades, positive.

It is an ideal that does not ask for resignations and whose possession is culturally valued.

"Positive" happiness has an elective affinity with success,

Modernity sinks its roots in two anchors, feeling and reason.

Stoicism only in this.

A requirement for tranquility and self-care is the embrace of Stoic autarky.

Serenity is achieved at the cost of solitude, or at least its embrace if necessary.

Modern culture values ​​self-sufficiency—one of the keys to successful self-help in a lonely society—as an anchor of security and because interpersonal mistrust reigns.

The assessment of self-sufficiency, key in the "age of emptiness".

But, despite its cultural value, because psychological advice manuals order it that way, hypermodern men and women are dependent beings —on others, real or virtual, on technological artifacts.

Because dependency is the stuff of society.

Also contemporary

Orphans of strong beliefs, with hardly any institutions that offer security in the face of the systemic uncertainty of post-capitalism, contemporaries turn their eyes to an Antiquity that is also individualistic and disbelieving.

To stoicism passed for an interested anachronism, that of the happiness industry.

To a practical and affordable philosophy for the reader, but shocking in its rational rigor and its pessimism.

Man seeks sources of meaning.

In religions, in ideologies, also in philosophy.

Helena Béjar

is a professor of Sociology and author of

(Tecnos) and

(Herder).

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