The eminent French scholar Pierre Hadot concluded from his detailed scholarly analysis of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius that Stoicism gave clear expression to a "universal" and "perennial" philosophical attitude which crops up in different guises throughout history and around the world (Hadot, 1993, pp. 311-312). Like many other people, he notes similarities between Stoicism and some Oriental philosophies. On this view, the Stoic tradition founded by Zeno and continuing right through to Marcus Aurelius, constitutes just one of a handful of archetypal philosophical attitudes that we find in human history. Hadot sums up four key attitudes at the heart of this generic Stoic-like "perennial philosophy", which he calls "eternal Stoicism";
The spiritual awareness that humans are not fragmentary, isolated beings but are essentially parts of a bigger whole, both of the totality of all mankind and the totality of the cosmos itself.
The basic feeling of serenity, freedom, and invulnerability that comes from accepting that there is no evil but moral evil, and that the only thing that matters in life is moral integrity or what the Stoics will call "honour" and "virtue".
Belief in the absolute value of the human person, which Hadot illustrates with Seneca's saying "man is a sacred thing for man" – a sense of kinship with all mankind which makes the wellbeing of humanity the chief preferred outcome of all moral action.
The psychological and philosophical exercise of "concentration of the present instant", which involves living as if we were seeing the world for the first and last time, while being aware that, for the wise man, each instant intimately connects us to the totality of space and time.
Most people are drawn to Stoic philosophy without having had a chance to wrestle with the complexities of the vast philosophical system and literature associated with it. Rather, they find something in a few fragmentary Stoic quotations that resonates with them because they sense it expresses a more basic underlying set of philosophical attitudes, one of several perennial human philosophies.
This is an excerpt of Donald Robertson's book Stoicism and the Art of Happiness. Please consider ordering it, if you've liked the excerpt.
Hadot, P. (1998) The Inner Citadel: the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Trans. by M. Chase, Cambridge University Press.
Robertson, D. (2013) Stoicism and the Art of Happiness - Ancient Tips For Modern Challenges: Teach Yourself. Teach Yourself.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2017) Stoicism (http://www.iep.utm.edu/stoicism/)
