"The Supreme Virtue" (from "The War of Art")

From Steven Pressfield's The War of Art:

"Someone once asked the Spartan king Leonidas to identify the supreme warrior virtue from which all others flowed. He replied: 'Contempt for death.' 

For us as artists, read 'failure.' Contempt for failure is our cardinal virtue. By confining our attention territorially to our own thoughts and actions - in other words, to the work and its demands - we cut the earth from beneath the blue-painted, shield-banging, spear-brandishing foe."

 

What a wonderfully Stoic idea, is it not? If we measure failure by the opinions of others, we are giving them power over us, valuing external indifferent things. Contempt of this . . . yes, in a way, this is close to a statement of the supreme virtue in Stoic thought as well . . .

From "The Inner Citadel" on Virtue and Joy

     In Pierre Hadot's The Inner Citadel, he analyzes some of what is meant by "Virtue" and how it leads to joy . . .

     Hadot believes that he detects a threefold structure repeated throughout the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, derived from Epictetus, and accounts for it as "an internal necessity, in the sense that there can be neither more nor fewer than three exercise-themes for the philosopher, because there can be neither more nor fewer than three acts of the soul."

     The Greek word translated as "Virtue" is "Aretē." Aretē originally denoted pure excellence in an aristocratic warrior-elite sense, rather than moral excellence, but over time the sense had shifted somewhat. "We may suppose that this ideal of excellence and value always remained present in the mind of the philosophers. For the Stoics, aretē is absolute value, based no longer on warrior nobility, but on the nobility of the soul represented by the purity of our intentions." Virtue is one, in Stoic thought, yet may be thought of as consisting in the four "cardinal virtues," all of which, Hadot notes, imply one another, creating this unitarian view of Virtue.

     Hadot notes that Marcus "often summarizes the three disciplines - of assent, of desire, and of action - by making the names of the virtues correspond  to them. Thus the discipline of assent takes on the name of the virtue of 'truth;' the discipline of desire acquires the name of the virtue of 'temperance;' and the discipline of action, that of the virtue of 'justice.'" (Substituting "trutt" for the usual phrasing, "prudence," is not surprising, notes Hadot, since Plato uses "truth" for "prudence" in The Republic). There is a lengthy passage of the Meditations (IX, 1) cited to show Marcus following this division, in which "it is easy to recognize the three disciplines: that of action, which ordains that people should help one another; that of assent, which consists in distinguishing the true from the false; and that of desire, which consists in accepting the lot which universal Nature has reserved for us. To these three disciplines correspond three virtues. In the discipline of action, we must respect the value hierarchy of people and things, and thus act in accordance with justice. According to the discipline of assent, our discourse must be true, and the virtue particular to this discipline is truth. He who knowingly lies commits a twofold sin: in the area of assent, since his discourse is not true, and in the area of action, since he is committing an injustice with regard to other people. As for the person who lies involuntarily - in other words, who deceived himself - it is because he has not succeeded in criticizing his judgments and in becoming the master of his assent that he is no longer capable of distinguishing the true from the false. Finally, in the discipline of desire, we must desire only that which universal  Nature wants, and we must not desire pleasures or flee sufferings. This discipline is characterized by temperance."

     According to Hadot's analysis, then, "Nature appears to us in three aspects. She is the principle of attraction, which urges human beings to help one another and to practice justice, and is therefore the basis of justice. She is also the basis of truth; that is to say, the principle which founds the order of discourse, and the necessary relationship which must exist between beings and the true attributes that are said about them. To speak falsely, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, is therefore to be in disaccord with the order of the world. Finally, universal Nature, since she is indifferent to indifferent things, is the basis of temperance, in other words of that virtue which, instead of desiring pleasure, wants to consent to the will of universal Nature."

     "Marcus here portrays universal Nature as the most ancient and august of goddesses, in such a way that any lapse with regard to the virtues - justice, truth, and temperance - of which this goddess is the model and the principle, is an impiety. The Stoics traditionally identified God, Nature, Truth, Destiny, and Zeus."

     "In Marcus' view, these three disciplines and virtues bring into the soul the only true joy which exists in the world, since they place the soul in possession of all that is necessary: the one absolute value." "Joy, then, is the sign of an action's perfection." "Unlike Epicurean pleasure, Stoic joy is not the motive and end of moral action: rather, virtue is its own reward. Virtue seeks nothing above and beyond itself; instead, for the Stoics, joy, like Aristotelian pleasure, comes along as an extra surplus in addition to action in conformity with nature . . ." "Such joy is not, moreover, an irrational passion, because it is in conformity with reason."

What is Virtue?

     It has occurred to me that there is an apparent flaw in the otherwise perfect logic of Stoicism. Stoicism defines Virtue as the only real good - as the Good, in fact. According to the Stoics, only decisions to act in accord with Virtue can be good, and nothing else is. Decisions to act in opposition to Virtue are the only Evil, and everything else is indifferent, although according to some Stoics, we may distinguish between "preferred" and "dispreferred" indifferents.

     So the non-sage may think that money, or possessions, or good health, or long life are good things. But they are not; they are indifferent (though we may prefer them to the alternatives). Only things that enter the sphere of moral action can be good or evil.

     The apparent flaw? Well . . . what is Virtue? It is fine to say, "Only acting with Virtue is Good," but one must know what that means. Do the Stoics?

     Interestingly, I don't know of a single place where a Stoic author defines what is and is not Virtue, not definitively. It almost seems like the famous "definition" of "pornography" - "I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it!" But I think there are clues to the thought of the ancient Stoics.

     For one thing, the Stoics often speak of and seem to take for granted the "four cardinal virtues" - Wisdom (Sophia), Courage (Andreia), Justice (Dikaiosyne), and Temperance (Sophrosyne). In some places, these seem to be synonymous with the Virtue, in other places, they are simply spoken of as if they were "part of" Virtue, or contribute to it somehow. But even these may seem vague, anyway. What, after all, is Wisdom? Or Courage? Or Justice, or Temperance?

     I think another clue is to be found in the fact that the Stoics, like virtually every school of ancient philosophy, considered themselves to be the intellectual heirs of Socrates. I think they have a better claim to it than most. The important point here is that Socrates would never have given a final definition of any of these virtues, nor of Virtue. He would be perpetually seeking it through Reason. So many of his discussions, as Plato depicts them, begin with him asking someone who considers himself an expert, "So, what is 'Courage,' anyway?" The purpose of the dialogue is to expand and refine that definition, to seek its heart, to understand it better . . . and to always keep asking, rather than to settle for a fixed definition. Plato would later depict Socrates as believing in absolute fixed "Forms" of concepts like "Courage," but it seems totally out of character from what we know of Socrates, the eternal questioner, that he would accept that anyone living could really know it. Only by philosophy - only by asking questions - can we even approach the Truth.  And I rather think this might be part of the "missing" component of Stoic thought on Virtue - that while it may (or may not be) a fixed and eternal Truth, we cannot perfectly know it, and are obliged to keep considering it, questioning it, and learning it.

     Other than this, say the Stoics, Virtue consists in knowing the difference between what you can control and what you cannot, accepting that which you cannot change, and doing your best to use your faculty of moral choice for those things you can.

     These are just some thoughts, not necessarily as coherent as I would like, on the topic. I may have to expand this more at a later time . . .