p Like the quietist ideal, the stoic ideal unfolds its provisions on the basis of nihilistic tenets. According to the stoic principles, man has not the least hope of changing the world that is hostile to him. The exponents of stoicism declare that ideals founded on such hopes are spectral and can bring nothing save camouflaged bondage: orientating people on fortuity they deliver their adherents from suffering only hypothetically, for on fortuity depends only the form of suffering.

p These common features of attitudes do not prevent the stoic from being critical of the quietist ideal. Devoid of the spirit of protest and struggle, the latter, according to the stoic, is humiliating by its submissiveness to fate with its “without us" motto. In its original form this escapist ideal mirrors nothing less than fear of action. In its extreme conclusions, quietism is a mitigated form of suicide, when spiritual death precedes physical death. This ideal’s assurances about the development of freedom and the preservation 174 of the individual’s integrity are cowardly and demagogic, to say the least. Fear is the lot of slaves. Fear that prevents recognition of the world’s absurdity and the falsity of any optimistic incantations, or fear that compels people to seek salvation in (light and to surrender to the world’s severity paralyses the heroic in man and leads to amorality by various paths. Such is the stoic assessment of the quietist ideal.

p Stoicism claims that it has the secret for preserving freedom and promoting the individual’s integrity outside and in spite of history. It argues that a person who has understood that his fate is ill-starred is capable of holding it and all fatal prophecies in contempt. Such knowledge oi oneself, acquired by intuition rather than by discoursive analysis, allegedly helps the stoic to rise above fate and surmount misery. Man, he says, derives comfort and, in a certain sense, happiness from self-discipline, from the constant mobilisation of his will, from heroic effort that enable him to free himself from routine. But no hope, the stoic asserts, can be derived from a scientific knowledge of the world, from history, or from a prevision of the future. He enjoins upon people to have the courage to admit that they do not believe in the laws of history, in political Utopias or the unfurling banners of any ideology. Proper behaviour cannot be deduced, he contends, from social need, from expediency of any kind, and much less from accepted standards. But do nqt despair! The perspective, the antifate must be created by inner effort and realised in the discharge of duty, which in a certain sense “invents itself”. As a magic wand, moral intuition prompts the content of that duty. The stoic believes that the fulfilment of this duty under the most onerous and discouraging circumstances enables people to acquire self-respect, dignity, grandeur of spirit and, consequently, self-satisfaction and true contentedness devoid of na’ive faith in social welfare and historical insurance, for history is not deus ex machina, it offers man nothing.

p The stoic believes that the advantage of his armoured isolationism is that there is nothing he can be deprived of that can reduce him to a state of fear or unhappiness. Whatever is affected by alienation (things or even life itself), his shield is his belief and faith that he can do 175 without what is taken away from him. Delivered from bondage to passion and lust, the stoic is thus also rid of the vain and, at the same time, naive desire that everything should bend to his will; on the contrary, he wants things to go their own way. He is prepared for any defeat, despite his—so it seems to him—ideological and psychological superiority over any adversary; equally, he is prepared for victory, which can change nothing. It is asserted that only he is free who is always prepared to die, not by suicide but in the performance of his rigoristic duty with unshakable conviction and in accordance with the inexorable injunctions of self-discipline. Thus, for the stoic, there is happiness only in not wishing happiness, in any case such as would in some way depend on somebody’s arbitrary will—society or an individual. The happiness desired by the stoic must include not deliberate renunciation of, but scorn, reinforced by habit and training, for the blessings of life. It must be founded entirely on inner purity and conviction. Virtue is not a means of attaining happiness; it is exclusively an end in itself. The stoic believes that happiness lies in philosophical calm and tension, in surmounting fear of the vicissitudes of life, of the tragedy of existence, and of death. The new attitude evolved by man towards suffering, the stoic says, gives meaning to the fearless confrontation with fate in the hostile environment of the technosphere, institutional structures and the orgy of consumption.

p Let us consider these arguments. First there is the question: What is the purpose of fighting to preserve the individual’s independence against pressure and manipulation by the social organisation in pursuance of the duty to disobey and disagree with society? For the sake of self-contemplation? Abstract freedom for its own sake? Especially as the purpose of effort can under no circumstances be turned into a means of social development in a definite direction: the stoic is indifferent to the fate of absurd capitalist society.

p However, stoicism leaves a slim ray of hope from the belief, and nothing more, that individual perfection can stop progress, beneficially influence the social arrangement, although historically this belief in the correction of the mass consciousness, in its avalanche-like mutation, in the emergence of a new frame of mind and in easing the spiritual 176 atmosphere of the epoch cannot be proved. This only weakens but does not destroy anti-historical nihilism, for how is it possible to change the world for the better when all the calls for self-command demand the elimination of historically founded action perceived as the basic indication of nonindependence, as a sort of contented slavery, dependence on enfeebling morals? How can the world be changed for the better when all efforts are reduced to adaptation in critical, borderline situations, to their acceptance through immunity to suffering, to changes in the inner state of mind and in human relations that can allegedly be made independent of changes in property and political relations?

Worst of all is that the attractive aspects of stoicism, its elements of heroism and absence of falsity, appeal to those who, by virtue of their high morals and strong will, could be particularly useful in the struggle for the lofty ideal that harmonises closely with the course of history. By putting forward notions about what the individual must be like in the epoch of calamity, upheavals and cynicism, stoicism robs the revolutionary forces, and by preventing this individual from adopting a consistently democratic and humanist attitude does not let him do what is most important, namely, to surmount the tragic state of helplessness, understand how to deal with the agonising world of the absurd and find the outlet for mass social action.