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Nancy Sherman, Stoic Warriors:
Mitsis, Phillip
Mitsis, Phillip
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MitsisShermanReview.pdf
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Unlike their hero Socrates, who in one of antiquity’s taller war stories, warded off enemies in the Athenian retreat from Potidaea with a mere goose-like glance (Symposium 221b), Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, the founding fathers of Stoicism, were foreign metics who never served Athens in any military capacity. Moreover, what we have of their political theory suggests they were the original commie peaceniks. They were dead set against currencies, law courts, and private property, and gung ho for same sex dressing, incest, Zeus’s universal laws, and world peace. How is it, one might well wonder, that Stoicism seems to have achieved such a vogue among America’s military elite, not to mention among legions of vicarious warriors on Wall Street? Sherman claims that there is a natural and deep relation between military values and those attitudes that in common parlance we take to be “stoic”. But I doubt this gets us very far toward an adequate explanation of the recent buzz, since a quick shake out of our conceptions shows rather more tenuous and contingent connections. We can easily imagine Gandhi, for instance, taking slaps from British officers “stoically” or generations of downtrodden, starving peasants enduring nature’s blows with “stoicism”. In this sense, “stoic” is just as readily associated with peace, agriculture, and stray dogs faced with fleas. By the same token, Achilles, Alexander, Napoleon, and Patton hardly conjure up visions of stoic calm and indifference. Accounts of military excellence have and will continue to get on just fine without any necessary reference to stoicism. At the same time, Sherman offers no historical evidence of any longstanding or systematic links between Stoicism and America’s military ethos. So the question remains. What is behind the recent vogue for Stoicism among America’s military and economic warriors, especially since it seems to be both recent and a vogue?
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2005
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With permission of the license/copyright holder