Heraclitus was the first philosopher, at least in my mind, who offered an intelligible and insightful perception of the world as a constantly shifting and unstable flux, to which all things will eventually be reclaimed by, with none escaping transformation and destruction. This latter state of affairs also introduces the concept of strife as justice, as while there are no gods to dispense equity, all who are unjust, will eventually be “judged” by the destruction of change, they will not live forever, even if they do manage to kill off the righteous first. The universe as perpetually changing and ultimately out of our control would also inspire the Stoic notion of dividing the mind into things out of our control, and within our control. An individual, who practices this discipline, judging things which are the product of the world’s movements against those which are the product of his own devices, will enjoy wisdom and clarity of perception capable of bringing about true tranquility of spirit, as he will not be afflicted by things which cannot rightly affect him.

It is in this fashion that Heraclitus was perhaps the first philosopher to emphasize practice and an ascetic life rather than philosophy as a science, a tradition which continued up until the time of Descartes, and was especially emphasized by Socrates, the Stoics and Cynics. It is philosophy as a way of life (as Hadot calls it) which is the only good use of philosophy: used as a vessel to temper our misfortunes, to develop good wisdom and virtue and to enable just and excellent action toward other human beings. This calling of philosophy as a lifestyle rather than as a sophist’s payday, is a notion which Heraclitus seems to have introduced, and to whom Socrates, who codified its calling, as well as all of us who bare the fruits of both labors, must be eternally grateful for.

Truth relates to the presentation or knowledge of the actual state of affairs; we can interpret truth as being a realization of the state as is and the particular relation of ideas and entities. Following the Stoic doctrine of differentiation between things in and outside of personal control we can argue that a man who realizes that he cannot lay claim over external things is more aware of the truth as opposed to a man who attempts to manipulate his fortune.  A man who curses the gods or others when he is overcome by misfortune is ignorant to the true state of affairs: that he is only in control of his own actions, decisions and judgments, and that anything else, including weather, the stock market or the reckless driving of others, must remain indifferent to us, as we have and can gain no control over it.

Appropriate to this frame of reference is the notion of treating people justly on the basis of responsibility. If for example a friend happens to lose control over another’s car during a snow storm and the vehicle is destroyed, the owner can find no fault in the friend, and must not judge him harshly or rebuke his ties of fellowship, but must accept the state of affairs as indifferent to him. Furthermore, if that same man is deceived by his mate he cannot blame himself for the actions of another – for he had no control in that regard. A man who is thrown into a rage upon learning that his car had been scratched is not behaving justly; he has yet to grasp the true nature of ownership over his car (which is none) and is acting out of ignorance. Yet justice is not limited in simply tempering the spirit against what the world afflicts against us but also guides how we act toward others. If this same man were to come across a wounded stranger on the side of the road, he must realize that it is truthfully within his power to act in his aid and that indecision or indifference will result in the death of the man. We might argue the criteria for an ethical or unethical resolution in his matter, but we must agree that responding will be measured in justice, as individual actions fall within the realm of personal control.

As with all other more esoteric contemplations of truth: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

How to Temper Misfortune

from wikiHow – The How to Manual That You Can Edit

Nothing can harm a good man, either in life or after death. – Socrates, the Apology

Steps

1. Realize: Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.
2. The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you suppose that only to be your own which is your own, and what belongs to others such as it really is, then no one will ever compel you or restrain you. Further, you will find fault with no one or accuse no one. You will do nothing against your will. No one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you not be harmed.
3. Work, therefore to be able to say to every harsh appearance, “You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be.” And then examine it by those rules which you have, and first, and chiefly, by this: whether it concerns the things which are in our own control, or those which are not; and, if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.
4. Practice on a constant basis dividing up things between which are inside and outside of your control, and learn that no harm can befall you from things which are outside of your control.
5. At the beginning of each day, recite the Premeditation of Seneca:

The wise will start each day with the thought…
Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own.
Nothing, whether public or private, is stable; the destines of men, no less than those of cities, are in a whirl.
Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed in a single day. No, he who has said ‘a day’ has granted too long a postponement to swift misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires.
How often have cities in Asia, how often in Achaia, been laid low by a single shock of earthquake? How many towns in Syria, how many in Macedonia, have been swallowed up? How often has this kind of devastation laid Cyprus in ruins?
We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die.
Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth.
Reckon on everything, expect everything.

Tips

• Read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Letters of Seneca, Discourses and Enchiridion of Epictetus
• If you expect certain behaviors of things outside of your control you will always be miserable. Only expect certain behaviors from yourself.
• If you expect people to behave in a certain way you will always be miserable, focus on your own behavior and consider the rare instances of good behavior from those around you as divine gifts rather than “rights” to be expected from all people. You have no rights in the face of the universe.
• Meditate on death – realize that nothing bad can happen to you, including death. Define bad or evil as ignorance of what is in or outside of our control. If you behave in a dishonest or ignorant way, that is the only measurable evil, and the only one which you can remedy. Be strict with yourself and tolerant of others.
• Do not expect people to be honest, trustworthy, merciful, generous or just – most of them will not be. IF you expect people to be kind, or to follow the rules of the road, you will never be happy. Pity unkind people rather than hate them.

Warnings

• Contrary to popular opinion, everything will not always “work out” or “be ok” – prepare for misfortune so that when it afflicts you, you will not be devastated.
• When you become skillful in tempering misfortune, do remember to show magnanimity to those who are unskillful and fall upon hard times. Simply because you have a knowledge of what is within and outside of your control does not mean others will.

Things You’ll Need

• Courage
• Wisdom
• Temperance
• Justice

Sources and Citations

• Plato – the Apology (41d) ** Intro
• Enchiridion of Epictetus, trans. Elizabeth Carter (Aphorism 1) ** Steps
• The Consolations of Philosophy, by Alain De Botton (translation of Seneca’s Premeditation) ** Steps

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Piety as we have discovered in the Euthyphro has less to do with faithful religiosity and more to do with asserting power over others; Euthyphro is revealed to have an ignorant conception of piety through the investigations of Socrates and rather than admit his ignorance and refrain from judging his father on its attributes he yields to the seduction of authority. What then is piety but a vessel for concealing a tyrant? We, as it must have been with the Athenians, are far too eager to justify the irrational and murderous because we perceive an individual to be devout. This I think is the implication of Socrates’ investigation: the importance of challenging the supposedly pious and to pierce through with our reason the thin gilding of the priest robe, to judge arguments on their merits rather than on the merits of social prestige, to judge a word in itself rather than by the tongue which spoke it. We should not, as is customary, blindly accept what comes from the mouth of supposedly religious people, as we find in observing more closely, they commonly speak out of ignorance of the virtues they espouse, a realization created hastily upon interrogation.

Socrates is also implying that all human beings have equal footing in their ability to judge arguments, a revolutionary concept for his era. While the faux-pious Euthyphro flees at the end of his discussion with the gadfly rather than come to the stark realization that he is a phony, we all can have the confidence in our own reasoning to stand our ground and judge on the merits of evidence and cogent argumentation. Socrates implies that we should judge what is being said by itself, without considering the title of the person speaking, disregarding the Tyrian purple and holding wisdom and truth above wealth and esteem. Socrates argues that we must hold the same standards of evidence which we apply to everyday conversation to that of religious claims; that no argument is outside the reach of inquiry. Why are no thoughts sacred, none protected, none privileged? When irrational thinking infests a people, they, as Euthyphro did, murder men without having a true knowledge of why, and compound human misery unnecessarily by virtue of their power-drunk self-righteous judgment. Euthypro’s father was charged for offending the gods by his son, a pretender who lacks a true knowledge of piety – thus it was an unjust charge, and a man was executed for no offense made, other than as wrongly perceived in the tightly insulated and delusional mind of the priest. So we see that those who claim to be pious must be scrutinized, lest the power they are granted through society be wielded to unjust ends.

The question was posed: “what is a religious person?” This question is meaningless to answer without first defining religiosity. A religious person can be said to be someone who remains intellectually honest in faithfulness to a codified system of conduct and metaphysical frame of reference. In this sense, I believe there are few authentically religious people living in modern Western civilization, as the people’s conduct and beliefs vary so drastically from the code they pretend to have knowledge of, especially in the case of the religious descendants of Abraham. The liberal dispositions of Western peoples, the majority of which claim to respect the opinions of others and call themselves Chirstians, contrasts sharply with the petty, vindictive, callous and murderous God of the desert. In the contemporary era people do not study the code and instead live by the presumptions of pop culture in understanding the religion they claim to be faithful to, thus failing to meet the definition of a “religious person.”

It is perhaps of benefit to humanity that the people of Western democratic cultures do not adhere more honestly to their own religious codes, lest the imperial grandstanding of tyrants such as HRH Bush II, a fundamentalist Christian carving up the world into realms of darkness and light at the expense of millions of innocent lives, would be more tolerated than it is in the present. Yet it is for this latter reason that we must be hostile to claims of religiosity: when governments are dominated by the magical thinking of the Bible, only dysfunction and the suffering of the innocent is the product. Healthy governments must operate in the domain of insight, logic, magnanimity and impartiality, and these virtues become vices in the face of religion, as evidence and chains of reasoning, components so crucial in sound policy making, are antagonistic to metaphysical claims.

The keen blade of reason is dulled to a butter knife by delusions of afterlives, divine intervention and burning bushes, allowing nonsense, fallacy and presumption to go unchecked in the face of inquiry, or perhaps even more disturbingly, being championed as goods of public devotion. In the past decade the advances of reason and science have been slowly eroded by the machinations of powerful Christian interest groups and a fundamentalist electorate, bringing about a paradigm in which belief and opinion are increasingly valued over knowledge and well-argued claims, reducing our political discourse to contests of deception and seduction. Beliefs and opinions may be tolerated in picking favorable flavors of ice cream or other inconsequential judgments, but they must be scrutinized in all affairs public and political. If we abandon this latter calling, by product of our own inability to cope with reality and to perceive the case of things as they are, we resign to being only a step away from condoning the ascension of an autocrat.

We stand now on the cusp of disaster as the American people are seriously considering electing such an individual into the highest seat of power, inevitably the product of their failure to perceive the world in a rational fashion. John McCain, no stranger to the absurdities of the Christian dogma, would bring with him an even more dangerous threat to the wellbeing of the republic in Sarah Palin, a woman that believes that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans once co-existed together[i]. When one considers the actuarial tables it can be estimated that Palin has a 27% chance of becoming the president by 2015:[ii] if one chooses to elect McCain, they are also condoning the presidency of an individual who would welcome the destruction of New York City with trembling open arms, as it might usher in the apocalypse and the coming of the Messiah. Should we entrust our national security to an individual who believes in such dangerous misconceptions about the case of things, who believes most fanatically in the not-so-noble lie of global terrorism and a world divided into darkness and light, unwilling to compromise in the face of reason and evidence, who holds that opinions are equally as valid as knowledge?

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[i] Palin treads carefully between fundamentalist beliefs and public policy. Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-palinreligion28-2008sep28,0,3643718.story?track=rss

[ii] Palin: average isn’t good enough. Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-harris3-2008sep03,0,5745350.story