“As for us, we can only investigate by groping, walking in the dark and by conjecture, without being sure of finding what is certain, but also without despairing of it.” Seneca, Natural Questions, Seneca practiced walking, reading, meditating, dissertation or explaining some ideas.
I consider that there is a lot of good in being somewhat syncretistic and eclectic. Somehow, the ideas and theses of human beings have been shaping the world. It is only necessary to extract the best from them and, as far as possible, to reconcile the best and most viable ones.
The generic scheme of the Stoic philosophy of life is that every human being should live in function and according to Nature. They contemplated it from the point of view that we are social beings (Post HOMO SOCIABILIS OR SOCIALIS? HUMAN AGGRESSION WALKING IN CROWDED PLACES. PART IV of IX), that we function within a society and for this we must apply our reasoning. They considered that our behavior should be governed by reason and thus, the rest of the things will have to be conducted according to reason.
The fundamental lever of their philosophy was to apply (observe, attend, take into consideration, take care to comply) with care the human virtues, and thus tend to the improvement of society as a whole and to improve as a person.
They were 4 the virtues that they showed as mechanisms for this progress of the human being: 1) Wisdom, 2) Courage, 3) Temperance and 4) Justice.
In the words of the Stoic Seneca we could say, paraphrasing him, that the human being must seek wisdom, which is reached by following the wise steps of Nature, a trace that is defined by its natural laws. Of course, Nature is governed by reason.
From my perspective, the Stoics presented in their actions an extremist position, being that, as Aristotle and other thinkers have affirmed, one must walk through the intermediate points (Post THE PATH OF VACUITY).
Now, we said in Post EMOTIONS AND THE WALK-RWD SYSTEM that emotions can be of the positive or pleasant and negative or unpleasant type, and in Post THE POWER OF EMOTIONS, we said: “In addition to that grand categorization, of positive and negative, the acceptably ‘healthy’ human being, of adult age, is a complex and continuous whole of mild emotions-at one extreme-and powerful ones-at the other extreme; that is, they are dissected into maximally opposite pairs: Simple and Complex, Tenuous and Acute, Weak and Strong, Hesitant and Firm, etc.; in short, emotions ranging from the Mildest to the Most Powerful threshold.
Something very significant about them is that they can become the cause of various diseases.
In this regard, the Stoics classified emotions into positive and negative, and their naturalistic exhortation was that the human being should move away from the unpleasant ones and approach the pleasant ones, for which they defined -within their philosophy of life- several effective and specific recommendations; one of them we expose below.
Why have some of the theses of the Stoics been abandoned?
Independently of the answers, which we will expose in the following conceptions, the contact with nature for them was fundamental: “every human being must live in function and according to Nature” and “the human being must seek wisdom, which is reached by following the wise steps of Nature, a trace that is defined by its natural laws”. This philosophy can be glimpsed in our syncretism (eclecticism), on the concept of ‘Nature’ and its link with walking.
Walking is something natural in the human being, and we have been abandoning it: In a planned way in response to technological interests?
In the words of Stoicism itself: every event or state of things is the necessary consequence of previous causes, it is the result of an indispensable and essential causality, but is it really indispensable and essential? Here would enter determinism, an aspect that we take into consideration as well as the concept of cause-effect.
It is put into consideration if everything that happens is necessary. We could well question that if I will not go for a daily walk for the rest of my days, it will be necessary to change my approach.
The answer: not everything that happens is natural; so it is not necessarily Nature’s answer.
The Stoics have their own answer: their Determinism. They asserted that every event or state of affairs has a cause, -to walk or not to walk-, and that every cause is truly sufficient for its effect -we walk because we choose to. If they were to invent a medicine to supply the body (physical and mental) with the same beneficial effects as walking, the Stoics would argue -as would I- that this is not natural.
And here two concepts come into play: the responsibility of the subject and his freedom.
If we are already determined to lose our practice of walking, there is nothing to be done about the responsibility of the human being, since everything is already defined.
In other words: We cannot be responsible for taking an action (walking!) if we did not have the freedom to do it (Post WALKING ALONG 2 IMPREGNABLE SUMMIT OF FREEDOM, Future Post THE WALKING OF 20 THINKERS ON THE CONCEPT OF FREEDOM. PART I of III). As Humanity it seems that everything indicates that we will not be able to avoid becoming a sedentary living mass!
However, the Stoics affirmed that every individual -man or woman- was fully responsible for his or her actions, and therefore, although human acts are determined, the human being is responsible for his or her own actions, and therefore, he or she can, according to his or her restricted freedom, make certain decisions for his or her natural and pertinent sense of life.
According to this Stoic thesis, we can, with judgment and reasoning, take up again the path that Nature has traced for us to walk on this planet Earth. Let us remember Prometheus in his most significant message, in those mythical times, that the only unavoidable mission that we must carry out is: “To walk on the planet Earth”. The same we can indicate and assure, paraphrasing Ortega y Gasset: “Man has a mission to walk on the earth. This mission has not been imposed by anyone or anything. He carries it within himself, it is the very root of his constitution”.
By way of conclusion.
Regardless of whether everything was determined and defined, we will still have to walk, even if we were to lose this natural activity.
Placing ourselves in this diatribe, it would be interesting to prepare ourselves to walk challenging the stoic determinism and thinking that since walking is an innate activity in the human being and therefore natural, it would respond to the laws of Nature, and perhaps in the future we would find that walking in the human being would be responding to a determinism because he has listened to the indications of Prometheus. Therefore, let us start walking to the natural rhythm of the Stoics.
“…happening to them what happens to walkers, who, while they are engaged in some conversation or some reading, or some inner thought, find that they have reached the place before they understood that they were near. Thus this continuous and hurried journey of life, in which we go at the same pace, the sleeping and the awake, is known only to the busy ones when it is over”. Seneca.