Thursday, October 9, 2014

Cicero's Six “Stoic Paradoxes”

  1. Virtue, or moral excellence, is the only good (conventional “goods” such as health, wealth and reputation fundamentally count as nothing with regard to living a good life)
  2. Virtue is completely sufficient for Happiness and fulfilment, a man who is virtuous lacks no requirement of the good life
  3. All forms of virtue are equal as are all forms of vice (in terms of the benefit or harm they do to the individual himself)
  4. Everyone who lacks perfect wisdom is insane (which basically means everyone alive; we’re all essentially mad)
  5. Only the wise man is really free and everyone else is enslaved (even when the wise man is imprisoned by a tyrant or sentenced to death like Socrates, he is still freer than everyone else, including his oppressors)
  6. Only the wise man is truly rich (even if, like Diogenes the Cynic, he owns nothing that he can’t carry in his knapsack)
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