What's the point?

Why another blog?  Why this blog?  And ancient philosophy ...? 

Sure.  But with a twist.

It's easy to get the wrong idea about ancient philosophy: bunch of geezers sitting around in beards and robes talking about stuff that never existed and never will, wasting time in boring and pointless ways because nobody had invented television yet.  It's a compelling picture.  Or, as some apocryphal fifth-grader once put it in summarizing his class's recent unit on antiquity, "Socrates was an ancient Greek. He went around telling people what to do. They poisoned him."

But the picture is wrong in two important ways.

First, some of the insights of classical philosophy are truly useful, at least as useful as their modern equivalents if not more so.  Admittedly there is a lot of chaff to sift through.  I find Plato's psychology to be easier and far more natural than anything out of Freud or Jung; and the segue into his ethical system is smooth and obvious.  His puritanical prissiness about music, art, and sex?  Not so much.  (And indeed his puritanism is only half of a more interesting story, but that's all for another post.)  Or again, I think the overall structure of Neoplatonist theology is the most natural way to think about the subject in a world of many religions without just choosing one of them and rejecting all the others; but the stilted, academic arguments that Sallust uses to "prove" that there can only ever be exactly twelve gods have to be pitched in the rubbish as a bad joke.

Second -- and more important -- it's not all talk.  Oh, to be sure if you go to a bookstore or a university today and look for the stuff they peddle as "philosophy", talk is all you'll get.  But classical philosophy was primarily a way of life.  Philosophers lived differently from their neighbors, or at least somewhat differently.  They approached their lives differently.  And this was the truly important part.  The words, the writings, the doctrines, the speculative metaphysics -- all that stuff was secondary, it was just a crutch to help you live philosophically.  It didn't exactly matter if you believed all this stuff, so long as you could bring yourself to live right.  If you could live right, then your opinions could be whatever they were ... and anyway, no ancient philosopher ever thought that human beings could really understand the true nature of things.  They all figured we have to content ourselves with a likely story.  And a likely story might turn out to be wrong.

Hence my joke in the title of this blog, that I sit myself down on a patio -- that is to say, somewhere between the Porch [Stoicism] and the Garden [Epicureanism].  Everyone thinks these are opposites.  They often talked as if they were opposites.  But really?  The lives they preached were awfully similar.  In broad strokes, they recommended similar virtues: self-control, simplicity, peace of mind.  It's just that they recommended the same things for opposite reasons ... and so it was easy to fall into the trap of bad-mouthing each other.  Both Stoicism and Epicureanism strictly insisted you shouldn't bad-mouth anybody, but obviously even their adherents weren't listening.

So the point of this blog is to see afresh through classical eyes -- or to try, at any rate.  What can we understand better if we look at it that way?  What do we have to pitch as useless rubbish?  And the stuff that we can keep ... how much is there, and how valuable is it?