Abstract
The aim of this essay is to offer a reinterpretation of classical Stoic philosophy from contemporary phenomenology, hence the expression of the title “phenomenological Stoicism.” The two basic authors for this purpose will be Seneca and Ortega y Gasset, whom I will put into dialogue taking as central themes, first, the notion of human life (philosophical anthropology) and, second, the theory of value (axiology) that bases their ethical proposals. To offer a concrete example of the notions of virtue, freedom, and happiness that follow from this philosophical proposal, we will briefly analyze in the last section of the work the theory of suicide defended by Seneca.
This study has been carried out under the research project PID2021-123252NB-100 and the support of the Department of Philosophy and Moral and Political Philosophy of UNED.
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Notes
- 1.
For this topic, see Ortega’s essay “Introduction to an Estimative Science. What are values?”, recently translated in the volume The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (2022, pp. 125–139).
- 2.
There are, of course, notable exceptions, but the fact is that it remains a field of research yet to be explored. I limit myself here to citing as a sample of such exceptions the suggestive work of Cassanmagnago, entitled, precisely, “La ragione e la virtù dell’uomo nel De vita beata di Seneca, in rapporto alla fenomenologia di Husserl” (1987), or the more recent one by Majolino (2021) on Husserl and the Stoic doctrine of lekton. In my opinion, Gabriel Schutz’s doctoral thesis—directed by Antonio Zirión—which later became a book, Éticas de la serenidad (2016), deserves special mention, where he offers us a precise and brilliant interpretation of Hellenistic ethics, with special attention to Stoic ethics, from a phenomenological perspective. I do not ignore nor is it my intention, of course, to undervalue the very valuable studies of Nussbaum nor those of so many other contemporaries who, following in the wake of Hadot, as is the paradigmatic case of the late Foucault, have contributed to the important recovery of the ancient ethics of “care,” with Heidegger, by the way, as one of the central references (cf. Mayeroff, 1971; Mortari, 2022), but I refer only to the striking absence of works specifically devoted to Stoic philosophy by contemporary phenomenologists. This absence is even more conspicuous when compared, for example, with those dedicated to Plato or Aristotle, and this is pointed out by Majolino himself (2021, pp. 27–28) in the collective volume Phenomenological Interpretations of Ancient Philosophy, in which this lack is also reflected.
- 3.
Let us recall that the idea of the political materialization of this “moral order of the world” in a “universal republic” claimed by Husserl in the IV article of Kaizo (1923–1924), namely, “the ultimate idea of a universal ethical Humanity, the idea of a truly human universal people embracing all singular peoples and all constellations of peoples and cultures; and to the idea of a universal state embracing all singular state systems and all individual states” (1989, p. 59) appears already formulated— practically in its literalness—in Seneca’s essay On Leisure (cf. 2015, pp. 222–225).
- 4.
Since it fully concerns my proposal to put phenomenology and Stoicism in dialogue by turning to Seneca and Ortega, it is very pertinent to recall how Julián Marías concludes in 1943 his long “Introduction”—of thirty pages—to the translation that Ortega himself commissioned him to make of Seneca’s De vita beata: “It is clear that there is a different possibility: that of a maximum morality, capable of overcoming the situation by relying on a saving God. And this alone suffices to show the absolute distance, despite certain epidermal similarities, between the Stoic, the ancient man, and the Christian, who is, in a radical sense, the new man” (2004: 32). Both Marías’ “Introduction” and the sixty footnotes he adds to his translation of this work assume and reproduce the two aforementioned prejudices, the ethical and the metaphysical-religious. Taking into account the influence of Marías in the Spanish-speaking intellectual sphere, as well as the impressive diffusion of his translation of this work in Alianza Editorial—from 1981 to 2004 fifteen reprints were printed, and it continues to be reprinted—this is not a minor fact, at least as far as Spanish-speaking readers are concerned. This misrepresentation of his philosophy is, moreover, accompanied by the “black legend” that drags the image of Seneca, forged already during the philosopher’s lifetime, as demonstrated by the monumental intellectual biography of Monterroso (2018), and from which we have not yet managed to detach ourselves.
- 5.
I follow here San Martín’s approach in his Philosophical Anthropology, where he lists the following “dimensions” or “basic structures” of human life: bodily being (corporeality), worldliness and spatial horizon, temporality, linguisticity, selfhood, recursivity, sociality, and historicity (2015a, pp. 39–42), as well as the basic “scenarios” of human life—called by Eugen Fink “fundamental phenomena”—: work, love, power, death, and play (ib., p. 55).
- 6.
The passage quoted by Ortega, with some transcription errors (he writes, as we see, “dignitates se pretia rerum” instead of “dignitates et pretia rerum”), is taken from sections 14–15 of letter 89: “Ergo cum tripertita sit philosophia, moralem eius partem primum incipiamus disponere. Quam in tria rursus dividi placuit, ut prima esset inspectio suum cuique distribuens et aestimans quanto quidque dignum sit, maxime utilis. Quid enim est tam necessarium quam pretia rebus inponere? Secunda de impetu, de actionibus tertia. Primum enim est, ut quanti quidque sit iudices, secundum, ut impetum ad illa capias ordinatum temperatumque, tertium, ut inter impetum tuum actionemque conveniat, ut in omnibus istis tibi ipse consentias. Quicquid ex tribus defuit, turbat et cetera. Quid enim prodest inter se aestimati habere omnia, si sis in impetu nimius? Quid prodest impetus repressisse et habere cupiditates in tua potestate, si in ipsa rerum actione tempora ignores nec scias quando quidque et ubi et quemadmodum agi debeat? Aliud est enim dignitates et pretia rerum nosse, aliud articulos, aliud impetus refrenare et ad agenda ire, non ruere.”
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Expósito Ropero, N. (2024). Toward a Phenomenological Stoicism in Dialogue with Seneca and Ortega y Gasset: Philosophy in Times of Crisis. In: Magalhães, L., Ferreira Lopes, M.J., Nobre, B., Onofre Pinto, J.C. (eds) Humanistic Perspectives in Happiness Research. Happiness Studies Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38600-8_4
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