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Posted October 22, 2006
re: Stoicism, Metrosexual
An old Stoic slave contra metrosexuality . . . it’s an old debate, and the bushy philosopher doesn’t necessarily come out looking best.
I’ve been reading Epictetus’s Discourses. Unsurprising conclusion? I’m no Stoic.
But I have endured Epictetus.
The Discourses are amazing brambles of thought, filled with peculiar twists of reasoning, and deep biases hidden behind sophistic rationalizations. Still, the main thrust of his ethical stance is worth thinking about: don’t worry overmuch about things outside your power; attend to things that are in your power. But perhaps we shouldn’t give it as much weight as he places on it, and place the strategem within a context different than he propounds.
Epicurus actually argues something similar, but in his treatment the tactic amounts to a spiritual economy, sometimes an economy of cutting Gordian knots when shown them.
But with Epictetus we get a lot of earnest and serioso talk about duty, not economy. And he pictures a nature somehow narrowly prescriptive.
Alas, a lot of it what he offers is nothing more than personal preference masquerading as ineluctable truth; that is, prejudice.
This element of prejudice becomes clearest in the first discourse of Book III, which is basically an attack on metrosexuality. Yes, there are few things new under the sun, and way back in Roman days some men plucked their body hair. How scandalous!
Earlier in the Discourses Epictetus confessed to rather dying than shave his beard. In this discourse he elaborates on what he thinks of as proper grooming at droll intensity. This discourse is in response to a visiting rhetorician who was dressed more carefully than usual and his attire in an ornamental style.
So of course Epictetus brings up dogs and horses.
I often wonder at the readiness with which interlocutors of the great philosophers supply the neat and tidy answers those philosophers need; how easily they succumb to the philosophers’ bullying dialectic. In this instance, our young metrosexual rhetorician goes along with Epictetus’s dog-and-pony act pretty quickly:
Stoic Slave: Tell me if you do not think that some dogs are beautiful and some horses, and so of all other animals.
Youthful Rhetorician: I do think so.
Stoic Slave: Are not then some men also beautiful and others ugly?
Youthful Rhetorician: Certainly.
Stoic Slave: Do we then for the same reason call each of them in the same kind beautiful, or each beautiful for something peculiar? And you will judge of this matter thus. Since we see a dog naturally formed for one thing, and a horse for another, and for another still, as an example, a nightingale, we may generally and not improperly declare each of them to be beautiful then when it is most excellent according to its nature; but since the nature of each is different, each of them seems to me to be beautiful in a different way. Is it not so?
Youthful Rhetorician: [admits with a shrug]
Stoic Slave: That then which makes a dog beautiful, makes a horse ugly; and that which makes a horse beautiful, makes a dog ugly, if it is true that their natures are different.
Youthful Rhetorician: It seems to be so.
Stoic Slave: For I think that what makes a Pancratiast beautiful, makes a wrestler to be not good, and a runner to be most ridiculous; and he who is beautiful for the Pentathlon, is very ugly for wrestling.
Youthful Rhetorician: It is so.
Stoic Slave: What then makes a man beautiful? Is that which in its kind makes both a dog and a horse beautiful?
Youthful Rhetorician: It is.
Stoic Slave: What then makes a dog beautiful?
Youthful Rhetorician: The possession of the excellence of a dog.
Stoic Slave: And what makes a horse beautiful?
Youthful Rhetorician: The possession of the excellence of a horse.
Stoic Slave: What then makes a man beautiful? Is it not the possession of the excellence of a man? And do you then, if you wish to be beautiful, young man, labor at this, the acquisition of human excellence. But what is this? Observe whom you yourself praise, when you praise many persons without partiality: do you praise the just or the unjust? The just. Whether do you praise the moderate or the immoderate? The moderate. And the temperate or the intemperate? The temperate. If then you make yourself such a person, you will know that you will make yourself beautiful: but so long as you neglect these things, you must be ugly, even though you contrive all you can to appear beautiful.
This is the standard brand of ancient nonsense. You find such discourses in most philosophical schools. It is absurd. Risible. The young rhetorician has let himself be tricked by a clever older man (an old story), and it is up to the modern reader to identify the trickery.
What does it consist in? Of hasty generalization. I’ve known both ugly and beautiful dogs. A retriever mangled in a fight, with droopy bits of flesh in the wrong places, horrible scars about the face, a chewn-off ear: this dog was not beautiful. And yet it remained a great retriever, smart and enthusiastic and friendly to the end of his days. He had the excellence of a dog, I’m sure we could get the young rhetorician to admit. But he was ugly as a decaying corpse.
Beauty does have something to do with the natural excellence of a being. But there’s a lot contingent to beauty, too. And beauty comes in many, many packages.
Further, there are many excellences for any one being. Only some apply to beauty. Many qualities are only tangentially related. Numerous do not apply at all.
Switching the subject from appearance to the excellence of a man
— in particular the excellence of his reasoning faculty (as if there were no irony here at all, as if the reasoning in this instance was worth much of anything!) — shows an unconscionable leap in logic. And yet it is part and parcel of a characteristic style of philosophizing in ancient times, and of Stoic style in particular.
Epictetus, after much yammering, goes on, of course, moving in for the kill, so to speak:
Stoic Slave: Young man, whom do you wish to make beautiful? In the first place, know who you are and then adorn yourself appropriately. You are a human being; and this is a mortal animal which has the power of using appearances rationally.
Youthful Rhetorician: But what is meant byrationally?
Stoic Slave: Conformably to nature and completely. What then do you possess which is peculiar? Is it the animal part?
Youthful Rhetorician: No.
Stoic Slave: Is it the condition of mortality?
Youthful Rhetorician: No.
Stoic Slave: Is it the power of using appearances?
Youthful Rhetorician: No.
Stoic Slave: You possess the rational faculty as a peculiar thing: adorn and beautify this; but leave your hair to him who made it as he chose. Come, what other appellations have you? Are you man or woman?
Youthful Rhetorician: Man.
Stoic Slave: Adorn yourself then as man, not as woman. Woman is naturally smooth and delicate; and if she has much hair (on her body), she is a monster and is exhibited at Rome among monsters. And in a man it is monstrous not to have hair; and if he has no hair, he is a monster; but if he cuts off his hairs and plucks them out, what shall we do with him? where shall we exhibit him? and under what name shall we show him? I will exhibit to you a man who chooses to be a woman rather than a man. What a terrible sight! There is no man who will not wonder at such a notice. Indeed I think that the men who pluck out their hairs do what they do without knowing what they do. Man what fault have you to find with your nature? That it made you a man? What then? was it fit that nature should make all human creatures women? and what advantage in that case would you have had in being adorned? for whom would you have adorned yourself, if all human creatures were women? But you are not pleased with the matter: set to work then upon the whole business. Take away — what is its name? — that which is the cause of the hairs: make yourself a woman in all respects, that we may not be mistaken: do not make one half man, and the other half woman. Whom do you wish to please? The women?, Please them as a man.
Youthful Rhetorician: Well; but they like smooth men.
Stoic Slave: Will you not hang yourself? and if women took delight in catamites, would you become one? Is this your business? were you born for this purpose, that dissolute women should delight in you? Shall we make such a one as you a citizen of Corinth and perchance a prefect of the city, or chief of the youth, or general or superintendent of the games? Well, and when you have taken a wife, do you intend to have your hairs plucked out? To please whom and for what purpose? And when you have begotten children, will you introduce them also into the state with the habit of plucking their hairs? A beautiful citizen, and senator and rhetorician. We ought to pray that such young men be born among us and brought up.
The extremity of Epictetus’s opinion, his chauvinistic sexism, his narrow opinion on human diversity, his goofy belief in prescriptive nature, a nature that must be followed in complete conformity
— everything is here. What extravagant hogwash!
Epictetus’s bigotry is most striking. I am a monster in his view, since I have scant chest hair. The idea that I should be exhibited as a monster is of course idiotic. I know many men who do not naturally wear the hirsute hair suit, for example . . . many of them, of course, from Asiatic races. (I’m of Finnish extraction, and what traces there are of Asia in my genes do not carry to darker skin; just less-than-European body hair.)
It does not cross Epictetus’s mind that there is a broad variation in physical as well as other characteristics in animal species and races, and that one extreme of them cannot be simply and confidently asserted as natural excellence
and the other scorned as monstrous.
Indeed, this gets to the heart of the idiocy that is Stoicism. There is tremendous diversity in nature, and some things fit best in some environments, others in different ones, and there’s no easy argument to favor one over the other, on grounds of nature, anyway.
And yet the Stoics pretended that one can extrapolate from one characteristic of man (his rationality) to others (his aesthetic taste regarding body hair). What silliness.
Epictetus tries to come up with a sensible conclusion to his casuistic nonsense, and he goes out on a high note, appealing to Socrates (the ugliest of men, it is said, but beautiful
if you think only of his thoughts, I guess):
But see what Socrates says to the most beautiful and blooming of men Alcibiades: Try then to be beautiful. What does he say to him? Dress your hair and pluck the hairs from your legs? Nothing of that kind. But adorn your will, take away bad opinions.
Common-Sense Challenge: How with the body?
Stoic Response: Leave it as it is by nature. Another has looked after these things: entrust them to him.
Common-Sense Challenge: What then, must a man be uncleaned?
Stoic Response: Certainly not; but what you are and are made by nature, cleanse this. A man should be cleanly as a man, a woman as a woman, a child as a child. You say no: but let us also pluck out the lion’s mane, that he may not be uncleaned, and the cock’s comb for he also ought to he cleaned. Granted, but as a cock, and the lion as a lion, and the hunting dog as a hunting dog.
Now, I’m not saying I think Epictetus’s advice on grooming flies in the face of my preferences. I’m saying his reasoning is piss poor and his intensity of opinion unbalanced to the point of hysteria.
I, personally, prefer to let grooming remain as simple as possible. I gave up the extensive shaving of my face a decade ago. It is easier to trim a beard and mustache than to daily shave against the grain of skin and follicles, risking injury in every stroke. Further, I don’t often get professional hair cuts, to trim my mop
(as my father would put it). I cut back the more extravagant locks, keep the hair out of my face, and every now and then get a real hair cut, rather than continue growing out the hair to my shoulders.
Now, I used to let the hair grow out that long, but not for reasons of vanity. It was a practical thing. I wore an open-faced helmet on my motorcycle, and shorter locks tended to squirm out of their confines and get in my eyes, to my danger. So it was either shorter hair or longer. I chose the longer.
Later, I stopped the motorcycle driving, and found the long hair a bit too much of a bother.
A few men of the older generation thought such hair effeminate; I didn’t pay such culturally bound notions any mind. Contrariwise, I find constantly groomed short hair to be over-refined, and, when I think about it, it strikes me as expressing a vanity that I eschew. Still, it’s not my business how other men cut their hair.
Yes, I prefer a well-groomed front and an ill-groomed top-to-back. Combining a cultural practice, grooming of the beard, with an erratic grooming of head hair, strikes me as an easy compromise of style and effort. Further, I am pleased when men have some aspect of wildness about them. But we live in a highly cultured, Apollonian society, and the Dionysian must not be given free rein. So the bear
look, the Mountain Man aesthetic, is not to my taste. And metrosexuality
is in.
But I recognize the difference between my aesthetic preferences and the full weight of moral reasoning, as they pertain to something of only small importance. In truth, I am also pleased by a diversity of approaches to grooming. I see nothing wrong with men who shave their faces and groom their heads for shorter hair, or for men who shave their scalps but not their beards, or for men who shave their chests and pubes but not their scalp. Whatever.
The various ways women groom themselves are even less my business. I can express my preferences. I note that Epictetus’s advice to the young metrosexual rhetorician would not easily carry over to women, at least in our culture. Women by their nature have arm-pit hair. Most women in our culture shave it off. What would Epictetus advise? It doesn’t matter. Shave your arm pits, pluck your eyebrows, groom your pubic patch. Or trim some, let others grow wild.
These matters are of no great moment to the philosopher.
They should have been of no great moment to Epictetus. But he had deep prejudices. And something even more dangerous: a system!
Well, I’ve got a system too. But mine has a place for liberty as options, and owes more to Epicurus than any other of the ancients. Most importantly: We must not treat nature as a guide, or a lawgiver. Instead, we must study nature, and, unafraid, learn how best to live given the options available to us.
Of course, we shouldn’t follow Epicurus blindly, either. Lucian of Samosata is a better guide to the schools of philosophy than any partisan. Still, Epictetus’s hysterical and nearly unreasoning denunciations of Epicurean advice, such as in the 23rd discourse of Book I, does little to dissuade me to continue on in Epicurean fashion.
I am not aware of an Epicurean discussion of body hair. My guess is that, when an Epicurean comes across Epictetus’s admonitions on the subject, he or she is too contorted with laughter to write a reply.
The refreshing thing about Epicureans is that they don’t look to nature for syllogistic proofs of how to live, and certainly not for advice honed down to the last follicle. What nature provides is a riot of competing powers. It’s man’s lot (and woman’s) to carve out a niche to live in as best can be made. And as peacefully. By nature
it may be that we are hunters, killers, tyrants . . . and slaves. In civilization we can make of ourselves beings better conceived. To some degree, at least. The Garden is Epicurus’s homiest metaphor. We cultivate the parts of nature we like. Pull as weeds that which we don’t.
And if you like your sexual partners to be smooth? Give the gift of tweezers or a razor; forget the hectoring of Epictetus.
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