From the moment born at Mesopotamia until this year 2019, Astrology has a few unchangeable opponents.
First opponent is Rome Empire and their Royal Politics during the Imperial period
Second opponent also locates in Rome Empire: Early Christian. Not only Early Christian Religion rejects Astrology, but also Judaism, Islamism religion. Just Catholic Church accepts Astrology’s one side and still reject the rest.
The third, which we are doing in this post, is natural Philosophers. However, it’s ancient Greece Philosophers, and more specific, it’s ancient Greek Philosophers Stoic.
Stoicism and Stoic Philosophy
Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BCWikipedia
Stoic comes from the Greek stōïkos, meaning “of the stoa [portico, or porch]”. This, in turn, refers to the Stoa Poikile, or “Painted Stoa,” in Athens, where the influential Stoic Zeno of Citium taught.[In laymen’s terms stoicism is sometimes referred to as “suffering in silence”, and the ethics associated with that
Stoicism has just a few central teachings:It sets out to remind us of how unpredictable the world can be.
How brief our moment of life is.
How to be steadfast, and strong, and in control of yourself.
And finally, the source of our dissatisfaction lies in our impulsive dependency on our reflexive senses rather than logic.
9 Stoic exercises:
1. Practice Misfortune
2. Train perception to avoid bad and good
3. It’s all Ephemeral
4. Taking a view from above
5. Meditate on your mortality
6. “Is this in my control?”
7. Journal
8. Practice negative visualization
9. Love everything that happens
Daily Stoic dot com
And below is a video summary about Stoicism:
Determinism-> Stoic determinism
Stoic philosophers practice in three major fields back then. Stoicism studies the ethic, formal logic, and physic.
All is matter in this world. By the development, all divides into small branches:
- Propositional logic aka Stoic logic
- Epistemology in the ethic. It studies about the mind and the body plus the relationship between
- Metaphysic
Wikipedia
Metaphysics is the study of the most general features of reality, such as existence, time, objects and their properties, wholes and their parts, events, processes and causation and the relationship between mind and body. Metaphysics includes cosmology, the study of the world in its entirety and ontology, the study of being.
- Physics
- Theology
- Cosmology
- Social philosophy
- and so on
Stoic philosophers has a strong belief in the determinism.
Determinism: A philosophical belief that everything in a person’s life is determined by forces beyond his control. The term comes from the Latin ‘determinare’
If they believe in determinism, they will therefore believe free will to be an illusion
In simple word, they believed that everything follows a natural course which human beings, according to their inherent nature, must follow.
One Stoic example about the fate from an ancient Greek Stoic philosopher.
The situation is you are sick. Just pretend you are normal sick like a cold and dizzy. It’s not something serious like cancer or other diseases.
The ancient Stoic Philosopher will say something like this.
If you are fated to be sick, visiting the doctor is meaning less.
If you are fated to recover from the sickness, you will recover without the doctor help.
Sound confused, right? 🙂 If you give a little time to think about two statements, you will see the Stoic philosophy.
Here is a little interpretation.
First statement: If you are fated to be sick, visiting the doctor is meaning less.
The first condition situation is you are sick. And the fate, aka the Universe Logo, determinate that you are so sick that you can’t recover from the sickness-> it means visiting the doctor is meaningless. -> why?
When you visit the doctor, he/she diagnoses your sickness-> might use some extra exams and scanning-> diagnose with the final sickness description-> prepare and order the medicines and the treatment.
You follow the doctor’s instruction-> however, after a while, it doesn’t effect and improve your health
In the conclusion with the first statement, visit the doctor is the unnecessary action. It costs your time, your money, your efforts-> and your situation hasn’t been improved yet.
With the second statement: If you are fated to recover from the sickness, you will recover without the doctor help.
With this second statement, the co-existing fate occurs. The first fate is you recover from the sickness-> so, no matter you visit or NOT visit the doctor, you will definitely recover based on the fate.
The co-existing fate is you are sick-> you worry about your health-> you book an appointment with doctor-> he/she collects some objectives about your sickness-> diagnose-> find the final diagnosed disease-> order and ask you to take medicines for the treatment-> you follow the doctor’s instruction-> you are recovered it.
The co-existing fate here is the series action you take the treatment medicines and recover from it because of the medicines. -> It means you are recovered from the sickness without the doctor is a fate. You are recovered from it with the doctor’s help is another fate. -> it’s just one or another fate occurs to you.
In the second statement, it likes two fates to meet each other.-> It becomes the inevitable-> you are recovered is the final result
However, ancient Astrologers don’t recognize that Stoic inevitable
Ancient Astrologers read an individual charts-> they see some potentials in different fields-> but, ancient Astrologers don’t state about each individual fate.
Modern Astrologers still don’t talk much about individual fate. They might interpret some prediction, divinations about that person future based on the natal chart plus the Stars movements.
This idea is different with Cicero, Horace, Pliny the Elder, Seneca and Tacitus -> therefore, as a fate, those Stoic philosophers reject the standard Astrology since ” Astrology is limited to recognising and adapting to the inevitable”
Summary all
One of the most important modern philosophers opposed to astrology was Theodor Adorno. He called astrology “metaphysics of the stupid guys” and wrote in a frequently cited article, that astrologers attempted to correlate the unrelated, disconnected spheres of social psychology and astronomy without establishing a rational basis for doing so
Honestly, after read Theodor Adorno statement, Gne has the idea like this. Gne knows, it’s not to be heard and don’t have much value since Gne is nobody and Theodor Adorno is a Great Man.
The Adorno idiom for Astrology “metaphysics of the stupid guys”-> it makes Gne thinks how big is his box? Is his box so big, so wide and so deep that he can’t be able to think outside of his box? Have ever Adorno think outside of his box? Did he switch his point of view and take a place under Astrology side? Did Adorno study Astrology to a certain level? Astrology doesn’t make sense to him-> so he makes the statement?
Gne reads somewhere: my religion vs your religion-> it ignites the war.
Stoic Philosophy has
Like natural selection of Darwin. You just adapt and develop what it’s good for you and reject/eliminate what doesn’t work in the situation.