Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

To the memory of Christopher Nelson Lasch No image comes as quickly to mind when thinking about the ancient Stoics than that of stone-cold busts from antiquity. Frozen in time, the taut and grim facial muscles secret away any feelings that might have roiled the hearts buried deep beneath the weighted folds of drapery. To be Stoic has long been dismissed as being devoid of strong passion, colorless. Recent studies and museum exhibits, thanks to ultraviolet lights and other tools, have now restored to collective memory the colors with which ancient artists painted their sculpted limestone and marble statuary. They were stone but not quite stoney. In much the same way, the effusive new interest in Stoics’ philosophy of life, popular and scholarly, can restore the vivid hues of the inner life as they depicted it, possibly even recalling us to elements missing in our own self-understanding. We can begin by adding to the stately visual imagery of the busts, such as those in the Capitoline Museum’s Hall of Philosophers, a more tempestuous scene. Let us close our eyes and see what colors flood them. Imagine liquid clouds billowing above the midnight ocean like a field of rosebuds all opening at once in the dark, or a blazing scarlet finale of underwater fireworks. Pigment spills into the waves, diffused into the mass of gray swirling and churning beneath evil skies and mad winds. Its shade more than hints at other horrors, such as casualties of naval battles tinting the sea or the effluvium of tribal whale hunts washing up on shore. But just as purple does not capture what we see, neither does red. It is a particular shade from the lesser-known terrain between red and blue — what we now think of as royal purple, but the ancient kind. For moderns, royal purple has more blue and borders on indigo or violet, but to the ancients it had more red and is closer to dark magenta, burgundy, or maroon, rather like the outer layer of a red onion. It was said to be the color of dried blood tinged with black. Someone else saw it as the color of a dark rose. And “Tyrian purple,” once you fix the color in your mind’s eye, is one of those things that starts turning up everywhere. You can find it at a paint store, and Lowe’s Valspar actually offers a red called “Stoic.” In Stoic lore, the color turns up in its very foundation legend, as we shall see. But first a word on why we are talking about Stoicism in the first place. Whether you think it deserves just a smiley or frowny face or some deeper response, Stoicism is plentifully back in fashion. That phrase alone should cause mild consternation, if not outright alarm. This is not because the Stoics cut an unattractive figure on the cultural horizon. Far from it. They are certainly dashing personages, some of them with cinematically exciting biographies, others with lasting intellectual achievements. Between their sturdy poses and their piercing aphorisms, they speak eloquently to current problems. And Stoicism has been revived before, notably in the bloody and turbulent early modern centuries in Europe, where it became widespread in thought and culture, and was known as neo-Stoicism. We are now witnessing another such revival — neo-neo-Stoicism, or the New Stoicism, or Modern Stoicism, to use the emerging appellation. But does “our” Stoicism resemble at all the ancient philosophy which it purports to model? And if it does, is that always a good thing? Is a new Stoicism what we need now? Right off, it is a charming contradiction that a school of thought so stringently opposed to the entire mentality of fashion, of surrender to the contemporary, should itself become chic. In a time characterized by dispersed attention and mass celebrity (now there is an innovation!), and besotted by goods of the material kind as measured in tweets, clicks, and the contents of your (real or digital) shopping cart, the focus of general aspiration in our society now is the momentous instant of trending, whether your own or that of someone taking your money. What business should Stoics have with trending —  with time-traveling