Directing Mind

The War between Intelligence and Will

"Whatever it is, this being of mine is made up of flesh, breath, and directing mind."¹

Stoic being is asserted as forthrightly rational. Man, is his own guide through the fog. An opaque backdrop constituted of the beasts of nature. Far above the clouds, in the conception of Marcus Aurelius, man stands separated. Direction, goal and rationality superseding the lower aspects of the human animal. This optimistic view of all that makes humanity is in direct opposition to the primacy of the will as conceived by the pessimistic Schopenhauer.

These two views about what truly drives man, although overtly appearing in stark contrast, have an important commonality. Both make concessions for the ability of man's 'higher' faculty of mind to potentially be the prime mover of his existence. The stoic might call this "judgment" and Schopenhauer would call it "intelligence". The important difference being that Schopenhauer considers these moments only "a lightning-flash".² Brief and rare oasis's of consideration beyond the grasping, chewing and penetrations of base will. Whereas the commanding voice of antiquity sees such temperance as an ideal. A state of normative balance where man is at his ethical highest and physical strongest, the facilitator of impulses towards ends which serve an often transcendent standard of value.

"Revere your power of judgment. All rests on this to make sure that your directing mind no longer entertains any judgment which fails to agree with the nature or the constitution of a rational being. And this state guarantees deliberate thought, affinity with other men, and obedience to the gods."³

The inherent optimism of this view is evident, as if the entire universe has been ordered in line with the rationalizations of man. Antiquity views all conflict as misunderstanding and is thus ultimately epistemological. The unseen and unknown being deferred to "gods", a seed that would have some part in the germination of a later Christendom.

A "rational being" is one were intellect is the driver of that being. This view ultimately hinges on conceptions of control, notions of free will and assertions of self-creation. "The directing mind is that which wakes itself, adapts itself, makes itself of whatever nature it wishes, and makes all that happens to it appear in the way it wants."⁴ The key word here being "wants", the stoic view ultimately acknowledges desire yet often imagines it as congruent with rationality. This results in an arbitrary sorting of desires into ethical and unethical, warranted and unwarranted, rational and irrational. This takes us to a linchpin of the stoic conception: "restraint". For the stoic, restraint is an indispensable virtue. A virtue which allows not only the mind to be primary, but for the mind to be "directing" in regards to the "proclivity" generated by biological substrate. This virtue, naturally, does not save you from the constant struggle of the stoic project which is the cultivation of man away from his defects:

"If you do refrain from some ways you still have the proclivity to them. If you do refrain from some ways you still have the proclivity to them, even if your restraint from ways like theirs is due to the fear or pursuit of public opinion, or some other such poor motive."⁵