Welcome to a 'Stoic' Blog

 Welcome to a blog. A drop in the ocean of human chatterings. If it's worthy of the divine, may it condense in the akashic clouds you are reading and precipitate along with others'.

I have a private facebook group of the same name, but I've never really added many people to it given that it's private. I've sought feedback from a limited group of people, most notably the tireless Courtney Shipley of the Brisbane Stoics  and equally tireless Stoicon speaker Judith Stove (who is also an assistant editor at Modern Stoicism), and they have been generous in commenting. It's been a kind of scratchpad for some thoughts and I'll probably move some of them over to this blog eventually. We also share in Courtney's Facebook group Let's Read: Philosophy, Literature and Psychotherapy, a reading group with regular Zoom meetings.

But I've been engaged in online philosophy for many years, and my activity has largely been focused on wielding social media comments as a way of engaging in dialectic. I post far less often than I comment.

Stoa Philosophon was inspired by the (now MIA) Facebook group 'Stoa Antipodea' started by Christopher Lee. It's an interesting thing that there are many Stoic communities around the world now. Let the Stoai (or Stoas) proliferate I say!

I remember encountering Marcus Aurelius' Meditations in a bookstore around 2001, and perusing it, I wondered how a Roman emperor had become something akin to a Buddhist. I had not really made the connection to Stoicism, it wasn't something that had come onto my horizon yet. But I didn't re-encounter the book until 2011 after I had read Seneca's Dialogues and Epistles. 

 I had mainly developed my (unique) ideas apart from Stoicism, along the lines of Jewish philosophy and comparative religion. I had a healthy respect for science and had a long term interest in linguistics, particularly etymology. I had developed a kind of civic thought, rejecting the wings of politics as tending to the irrational, and I sought to learn from all corners whatever was needed for the sake of knowledge, and believing centrism to be a kind of golden mean. I was developing a long overdue attitude of respect, and had absorbed the interpersonal ethics present in Judaism but had also looked much farther afield than that. 

In the late 80s, when I was a teen (around 16), I had attempted to become frum (adopting Jewish orthodoxy), but it became a burden outside of any community involvement, and I decided not to commit to any religion, but to study them all. 

When I was 13, I cut school during the sports days so that I could read Bullfinch's Mythology, and after finishing that I attempted to read Plato's Republic for the first time, revisiting it since, but I think the first time I read it completely was in 2010. 

I'm jumping around now in the manner of free association, but I remember it was sometime in the late 90s that I declared myself a "citizen of the world" and I have no idea if I had developed that thought myself or had picked it up from somewhere, but I certainly hadn't known of the Stoic cosmopolis at that point. 

Rumi and the Tao Te Ching have also been decisive influences, and a particular Chan (Zen) poem. I have also constantly thought on the import and symbology of the Gospels, both canonical and “Gnostic”.

I have had several periods of intense poetry writing, the most notable and prolonged during 2010 and continuing on in the following years. 

I may well have come across a report about Stoicon in 2011, and that may well have put me on to Seneca, I don’t know, but if that’s the case I must have quickly forgotten about it, because I only realised there was an online Stoic community in 2017. 

Having been an avid ABC Radio National listener from 2004 onwards though, I had become quite a fan of Alan Saunder's show, The Philosophers Zone, and was quite shocked when he suddenly passed away in 2012. Given that I was in Fiji at the time and still listening to the output of that show. I'm entirely likely to have encountered Stoicism in that show, modern or otherwise. Here's an excellent blast from the archive: Samuel Johnson and the Stoics from September 2009.

But to be clear, I’m not dogmatic about Stoicism. I believe that most philosophies have their use cases. There is room for Pyrrhonist ideas and Epicurean as well as those mentioned above, and for the prodigious output of modern philosophy, because my aim is to test Stoic ideas against a broader world of ideas. I’m not really interested in reiterating Stoic doctrines either. I generally only mention them in passing. I tend towards analysis and critique of ideologies.

I also have many translation projects that I've uploaded to the Facebook group. I experience translation as a kind of "spiritual exercise" and I believe in accessing ideas happening both in and outside of the English-speaking world, and providing some of this likely unfamiliar output, in order to strike a different view from what we might perhaps be in danger of becoming too accustomed to.

Having said all this (and probably not enough), as a matter of background, I’ll post this and start working on the next post.

Vale. -- Health to all.