Confucius and Cicero

Confucius and Cicero Old Ideas for a New World, New Ideas for an Old World Edited by Andrea Balbo and Jaewon Ahn Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/22/19 12:21 PM Graham Parkes Confucian and Daoist, Stoic and Epicurean. Some Parallels in Ways of Living* The context for this essayisglobal warming,and the increasing harms humanity will suffer as aresult of persisting with business as usual instead of dealing with the problem. Blocking progress are threeobstructions: the financial clout of the fossil fuel industries in current politics, the political power of the religious right in the US Congress, and the attention-diverting abilities of the Internet Titans with theirInformation and Communication Technologies (ICT). Most of this is well-funded by asmall group of libertarian billionaires. Even if we can remove these obstructions, we still have to cooperate effec- tivelywith China (and then India, Brazil, etc) if we’re to mitigate the damage from climate change. And the best waytoachievethatistoacknowledge that the ancient Chinese ideas now advocatedbythe current Chinese government are helpfullyapplicable to our current predicament. What’sinteresting here is that thereare comparable ideas in the Western tradition,but they have traditionallybeen overlookedormarginalised. Forexam- ple, thereare significant parallels between ideas in Confucian and Daoist philosophies on the one hand,and Stoic and Epicurean thought on the other.An appreciation of these would provide common ground for more productive dia- logue with the Chinese and collaboration on slowing globalwarming. But even with full cooperation from China and other nations, we in the de- velopedcountries will have to reduceour consumption of energy and goods. The planet’sresources are finite, and alreadyoverexploited, and we in the developed world have consumed far more than our fair share. The global injusticeisglar- ing,insofarasthe countries hardest hit by the effects of global warmingare those who have contributed to it least.Itshouldn’tsurprise us, as the hits gets harder,tofind millions of climate refugees at our borders,and morethan a few foreign eco-terrorists among them. Not that the developed world is immune to the dire effects of climate change, as various extreme weather events have shown. When people heartalk of lower levels of consumption they tend to be dis- mayed – students especially, who haven’tyet enjoyed the fullnessofconsumer bliss. But the ancient wisdom of both the Western and Chinese traditions sug- * Ihavesometimes modified the translationsslightlyonthe basis of the original texts and other translations. OpenAccess. ©2019 Graham Parkes, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110616804-004 Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/21/19 5:24 PM 44 GrahamParkes gests such dismayismisguided, insofarasthese thinkers arguethat high levels of consumption actuallyget in the wayofafulfilled human life. At more modest levels we can take more joy in thingswithout feeling in anyway deprived. It’sa matter of findingout how much is enough. By an interesting coincidence, the Stoic and Epicurean schools of philosophy werefounded around the time when the two great Daoistclassics, the Laozi and Zhuangzi,weretaking final shape in response to the prevalence of the Confucian classics over the preceding century or two. In ancient Athens two remarkable thinkers initiatedthe Western conversation about “living in accord with nature”: Epicurus (341–269BCE), whose teachingsbecame the basis for the Epicurean tradition, and Zeno of Citium(334– 263BCE, not to be confused with the earlier Zeno of Elea and his paradoxes), who wasthe founderofthe Stoic school of philosophy. 1APhysics Requirement Forall these thinkers – Confucianand Daoist, Stoic and Epicurean – the human being is best understood in context,insofar as human flourishing depends on both society and the naturalenvironment.(The emphasis in what follows will be on the latter,inview of our current environmental predicament.) If you’re going to adjust your life to the prevailing circumstances, you’dbetter have an un- derstandingofwhat they are.The ancient Greek thinkers called the world in this sense physis,which originallyhad connotations of being bornand growing, of unfolding and developing.Atfirst applied to particular things, and so meaning the ‘nature’ of each and the ways in which it naturallygrows and unfolds, physis came to mean also the whole process whereby these particularnatures develop together in dynamic equilibrium.¹ Epicurus taught that we attain aserene and fulfilled life first by investigating and understanding the natural world, and then by “living in conformity with nature”.Natural science (physiologia)serves to dispel primitive dread of phenom- ena in the heavens aboveusand torment from gruesome events recounted in ancient myths. It’samatter,Epicurus says,of“determiningthe end ordained by nature”,which means understandinghow the world works in the broadest Hadot (2006) 17. Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/21/19 5:24 PM Confucian and Daoist, Stoic and Epicurean. Some Parallels in Ways of Living 45 sense and how we best fit in, in the sense of optimising our fulfillment and con- tribution to the whole.² Epicurus is concerned thatwenot violate nature but rather ‘obey’,and that we ‘follow nature’ rather than ‘vain opinions’.Ifweassess our actions onlyon the basis of what’sclosest to us, we lack perspective and asense of the scale and space that we getfrom keepingintouch with nature as we act.³ The Chinese thinkers would find this attitude congenial—except for the talk of the ‘end’ or ‘purpose’ (telos)ofnature, because they see the whole thing unfoldingas play,which has no purpose outside itself. Zeno was apparentlythe author of abook with the title Of Life in Accord with Nature (like all his other works,lost). He is said to have said that happiness con- sists in ‘agood flow of life’–justwhat the Daoists and traditional Chinese med- ical practitioners sayabout well-beingand qì energies. (For the Daoists the whole world is afield of qì energies of varying density and speed: rarefied and fast,aswith breath; condensed and slow as with granite). Zeno’ssuccessors in the Stoic school understood living in accord with natureastwo-fold: ‘accord- ing to our human nature as well as the nature of the universe’.The idea is that “our own natures are parts of the natureofthe whole”,(M. Aur. Med. 12.26), and so the task – as with their Chinese counterparts – is to harmonise microcosm with macrocosm.⁴ This is whythe Stoics and Epicureans make physics,understood as the ‘studyofnature’,central to their philosophies – not as apurelytheoretical exer- cise but rather as apractice of thinking and imagininginadeeplyexistential mode. Here is Lucretius,expressing gratitude to Epicurus for having taught him how to pursue an experiential science of nature: The walls of the world open out,Isee action going on throughout the whole void … There- upon from all these things asort of divine delight gets hold of me and ashuddering, because naturethus by your powerhas been so manifestlylaid open and unveiled in every part.⁵ When the doors of perception are cleansed by the discipline of Epicurean physics, there’sadivine pleasure – divinavoluptas! – and ‘shuddering’ (the Latinis Epicurus (1926)135,97, 91 (‘Fragments’ B, 57; ‘Principal Doctrines’ XI, XII; ‘Letter to Menoe- ceus’ 133). Epicurus (1926)101,109,133 (‘PrincipalDoctrines’,XXV; ‘Fragments’ A(Vatican) XXI, ‘Frag- ments’ B, 45). Diogenes (1959) 2:113;Long/Sedley (1987) 1.394–95. Lucretius, On the NatureofThings,3.17– 30,translation in Hadot (1995) 88. Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/21/19 5:24 PM 46 Graham Parkes horror), ashaking in the face of such an awe-inspiringvision of the cosmos and one’stinypart in it. Marcus Aurelius,the lastgreat Stoic thinker,had the same idea: right at the beginning of his Meditations he expresses gratitudetohis teacher for advocating “life in accord with nature”,and encourages himself to practise such away of living.When he writes that “all thingscome to pass in accordwith the Nature of the Whole”,hemeans thatsince we humans exist among all things, we do well to try to getasense of the totality and whereit’stending. We can accord with nature because our ownnatureissubject to the ‘ruling’ or ‘guiding princi- ple’ within us, which is one with the rational, divine power that governs the cosmos. Thanks to this internal guide, we are able to “follow Nature and be welldis- posed towardher” (M. Aur. Med. 1.9, 10.14). The ancient Chinese have asimilar physics requirement for becomingfully human, though the affectsinthe course aren’tasecstatic as with Lucretius (the composed joy of Confucius, cool spontaneity on the part of the Daoist sage). They recommend developing asense for the interactions of Heavenand Earth, the polaritiesofyin and yang, and so forth, so thatone can make one’s wayinlife as aparticulardynamic focus (dé)inthe overall Way(dào), or pattern- ing,ofthe qì energies thatconstitutethe world. Confucius said: “Great indeedwas Yaoasaruler! How lofty! It is Heaven that is great and it was Yaowho modeled himself upon it” (Analects 8.19). In this earlypraise of Heaven(tiān)asNature, the Master presents the exemplary in- stance of the Confucianemulation of role models: just as Yaoruled well because he modeled himself on the operations of Heavenand Earth, so we lesser mortals can learn from exemplars likeYao, and Confucius,

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