A Lifeboat
It is Tuesday morning. The sun rises gloriously. The air is still and cold, about 13 degrees F. 
The President will deliver his first State of the Union address tonight. I will not be watching. I plan to be with friends sampling Scotch and philosophizing about an essay by Seneca on friendship. Friendship takes on new meaning in a time of uncertainty, when language is daily turned inside out, used as a battering ram, a siege machine to batter those with a different viewpoint into submission. This is now called “negotiation.”
I will read the President’s speech later in text form. I have heard him speak many times before. He is barely literate. His language is replete with malapropisms, platitudes, euphemisms that are emotionally loaded, but refer to nothing in particular. He often denies what he just said, or said yesterday. I give up. Those who believe will have to be his audience.
I read an overview of Stoicism in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The roots of Stoicism go back to Heraclitus of Ephesus who conceived of reason as a creative fire residing in the universe and in the individual. Unending change was the rule. The early Stoics were cosmopolitan, loving nature as superior to political power or local convention. They believed above all in the autonomy of the virtuous man/woman. The ethic was influenced by the image of Socrates whose life and death was an exemplar of rational self-control.
When Zeno of Citium taught in the Stoa at Athens in 300BC.—the city-state was losing its ascendance in Greek life, The popular religions were waning. Athens was no longer the center of world culture. Science, religion and politics were becoming international. Scientific research was was going on in Alexandria, Antioch, and Pergamum. The axis of culture was shifting. That sounds familiar.
Stoicism was a life boat, a vessel of conveyance, a philosophy that sought to make the personal and political lives of individuals as orderly as the cosmos.
