INDIFFERENCE IS POWER - PRINCE KUMAR
We do this to our philosophies. We redraft their contours based on
projected shadows, or give them a cartoonish shape like a
caricaturist emphasising all the wrong features. This is how
Buddhism becomes, in the popular imagination, a doctrine of
passivity and even laziness, while Existentialism becomes
synonymous with apathy and futile despair. Something similar has
happened to Stoicism, which is considered – when considered at all
– a philosophy of grim endurance, of carrying on rather than getting
over, of tolerating rather than transcending life’s agonies and
adversities.
No wonder it’s not more popular. No wonder the Stoic sage, in
Western culture, has never obtained the popularity of the Zen
master. Even though Stoicism is far more accessible, not only does
it lack the exotic mystique of Eastern practice; it’s also regarded as
a philosophy of merely breaking even while remaining
determinedly impassive. What this attitude ignores is the promise
proffered by Stoicism of lasting transcendence and imperturbable
tranquility.
It ignores gratitude, too. This is part of the tranquility, because it’s
what makes the tranquility possible. Stoicism is, as much as
anything, a philosophy of gratitude – and a gratitude, moreover,
rugged enough to endure anything. Philosophers who pine for
supreme psychological liberation have often failed to realise that
they belong to a confederacy that includes the Stoics. ‘According to
nature you want to live?’ Friedrich Nietzsche taunts the Stoics
in Beyond Good and Evil (1886):
O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a
being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond
measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and
justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine
indifference itself as a power – how could you live according to this
indifference? Living – is that not precisely wanting to be other than
this nature? Is not living – estimating, preferring, being unjust,
being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your
imperative ‘live according to nature’ meant at bottom as much as
‘live according to life’ – how could you not do that? Why make a
principle of what you yourself are and must be?
This is pretty good, as denunciations of Stoicism go, seductive in its
articulateness and energy, and therefore effective, however
uninformed.
Which is why it’s so disheartening to see Nietzsche fly off the rails
of sanity in the next two paragraphs, accusing the Stoics of trying to
‘impose’ their ‘morality… on nature’, of being ‘no longer able to
see [nature] differently’ because of an ‘arrogant’ determination to
‘tyrannise’ nature as the Stoic has tyrannised himself. Then (in
some of the least subtle psychological projection you’re ever likely
to see, given what we know of Nietzsche’s mad drive for
psychological supremacy), he accuses all of philosophy as being a
‘tyrannical drive’, ‘the most spiritual will to power’, to the ‘creation
of the world’.
The truth is, indifference really is a power, selectively applied, and
living in such a way is not only eminently possible, with a
conscious adoption of certain attitudes, but facilitates a freer, more
expansive, more adventurous mode of living. Joy and grief are still
there, along with all the other emotions, but they are tempered –
and, in their temperance, they are less tyrannical.