28 October 2023
We continue, this week, to expand our understanding of what the Stoics called appropriation. Stephens (2023) provided four synonyms: orientation, familiarization, affinity, or affiliation. Last week we saw that appropriation can go two ways for a person leaving childhood and entering adolescence. One way is described by the four synonyms showcased above; the opposite is alienation, which was examined in some detail last week. The ultimate target of this series of blogs is a better understanding and explication of what the Stoics called indifferents. We arrive at our destination today and begin exploration next week.
Let’s look at human beings fortunate enough to have been raised in loving, supportive, and healthy families. The Stoic prediction is that healthy appropriation will involve “…recognition of [one’s own] body as ‘belonging to’ itself” (Stephens, 2023, 2. Theory of Appropriation). The Stoics held that this awakening awareness of self, through body, was enough to engender responsible self-care. By Stoic reckoning, this is how that self-care played out: With good will and a supportive environment, fortunate creatures come to enjoy healthy self-maintenance by moving further toward well-being while avoiding self sabotage. In pre-teen years self-care is focused mostly on the body, and one’s identity may be tied up in physical being. As adolescence unfolds, healthier young people identify with their own minds and that mind’s ability to understand and reason. In short, a harmonious relationship is formed between what is perceived as a beneficent world and the young person’s soul—a sense of belonging, or as Stephen’s put it, affinity or affiliation.
The climax of that affinity, or belonging, is a high degree of harmony with the world. To the Stoics, the more rational the soul, the more harmonious it is with reality and, thus, the more virtuous. In short, Stoic virtue is rational harmony with life. As the life of a growing person involves her relationship with others, and the world, her circle of awareness and concern increases as she grows and learns. While Stephens described this as altruism, I would describe it as a natural by-product of self-actualization. In fact, in many ways, that broadening sphere of concern is deeply self-ish in the sense that if we become aware of environmental conditions, that foster the growth of rational well-being, it is in our own interest—and in the interest of humanity—to foster, maintain, and protect such conditions. I don’t believe this happens as naturally and easily as the Stoics believed.
Aristotle was, to the best of my limited knowledge, the first of the ancients to identify habituation as a life-changing factor or virtue: “Excellence, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual excellence in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral excellence comes about as a result of habit…” (Barnes, V.2, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk II., 1103a 14-17). Aristotle went on to explain that, in fact, the derivation of the word habit, in Greek, was etymologically related to ethics in approximately this way: moral à mores ≈ tendencies à habits. This is a critical junction in the difference between Stoic and Aristotelian virtues/values.
Per the theory of appropriation, the mere consciousness of one’s body was enough to set a young person on his way to positivity, responsible self-care, and healthy growth. Methinks not (i.e., I do think, but not that it happens that way!) Like everyone reading this blog, I know only my own life from an inside perspective. As a psychotherapist, I come to understand the lives of others quite well, but always from an external perspective—only my clients know their lives in the same way I know mine. (Interestingly, habituation changes even our capacity for that self-knowledge.) But the main point is that, if we emerge from the womb with a north star directed at goodness (probable) our internal compass functions the most accurately in those who are well habituated to the acceptance of reality on reality’s own terms.
I will go further. In some ways psychotherapy is the art & science of re-habituation. Research journals and media have been informing us, for more than a decade, that we’re in the midst of a mental health crisis. If my premise above (first sentence, this para) is accurate, that means we’re in a crisis of poor habituation i.e., the way our children were and are being raised and educated is failing to promote robust and resilient young human beings.
Returning to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Stoics observed that a parent is naturally impelled to love her own children and have concern for their welfare. Parental love is motivated by the child’s intimate affinity and likeness to her” (Stephens, 2023, 2. Theory of Appropriation). All true if—and this is the critical if—that parent is well-habituated, securely attached, well-supported, and has the resources she requires to foster well-being. How many people do you know who have been that fortunate? I grew up in what is now (mis)characterized and prejudged to be a privileged upbringing. Some of my clients and attendees of recovery meetings share that apparent background but to little advantage. Here’s why: Money, ethnicity, or even multiple academic degrees do not create a well-habituated human being. Nor, sadly, does the Stoic formula of nurturant, supportive love based on likeness succeed. For my money, at this state in my own unfolding, good habituation trumps all.
Next week we meet the Stoic indifferents.
Dan Chalykoff is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying). He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.
References
Barnes, J. (Ed.). (1995). The complete works of Aristotle: The revised Oxford translation. Princeton University Press.
Stephens, W. O. (2023, September 1). Stoic Ethics. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/stoiceth/#:~:text=All%20other%20things%20were%20judged,be%20used%20well%20and%20badly.
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