--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> It is my vague impression that Stoicism is less
> about
> avoiding or minimizing pain than accepting and
> enduring it without complaint -- stoically, as one
> says. But I have never really studied the Stoics,
> just
> read Marcus Aurelius a long time ago. jks
>
Aurelius IMO isn't really a philosopher. Those are basically his notes to himself. Unfortunately, all the works by the main stoic philosophers have been lost (what a loss!), so we have to stick with him and Epictetus. (Interesting, an emperor and a slave.)
Stoicism was a huge movement that lasted for over half a millenium and changed a lot with different schools and so forth (and made great contributions in logic). But insofar as ethics go, the Stoic belief was that everything that happens is inevitable and the will of God/Zeus/logos/the divine fire (same thing). Therefore, the road to happiness consists in giving one's assent to everything that happens, without exception.
Oddly enough, this sounds kind of like Nietszche.
Doesn't Aristotle specifically say that people's eudaimonia is affected by events that take place after their death, things that happen to their descendents and their honor?
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