Stoic acceptance of suffering affirmed life’s injustice rather than denying it

Evidence

Perkins argues that Stoicism was a ruling ideology: “Epictitus’ emphasis on the internal, on self-mastery, and self-formation, as well as his denial of the importance of externals [such as suffering], would have served to divert the attention of his students and others like them away from attending to social or material conditions. His teaching supported the status quo, and any affirmation of the status quo acts to affirm an elite’s position. Stoic insistence that poverty and social position did not matter fitted into the elite agenda better than into an underprivileged one: as does the corresponding counsel that what did, in fact, matter was how well you did at being poor, imprisoned, or politically unpopular. This teaching, along with emphasis on control directed at the interior self, had significant relevance for the social body; it would work to restrain social as well as personal disturbances.” But this resort to the notion of false consciousness to explain political domination seems to me weak. In the first place Stoicism was an ethic intended for the elite rather than the masses. As such, it encouraged withdrawal from corrupt public life and inattention to social and material conditions. We may therefore question whether it was an ideology well suited to active involvement in imperial rule. … Perkins overlooks the fact that although a pessimistic acceptance of suffering as an ineradicable part of life—and a recommendation to adjust to it rather than seeking to change life—might well be mistaken, it is not in itself a denial that life is ultimately unjust. On the contrary, it is precisely because the world is viewed as unjust and filled with misfortune that Stoicism prescribes psychological remedies. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 422

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Asad here runs a genuinely subtle argument against dismissal-as-false-consciousness: that a doctrine counseling adjustment to an unjust world is not thereby complicit denial of the injustice itself. This is a reusable epistemic move — a distinction between ‘what a doctrine asserts’ and ‘what living by it does.’
• XREF: The critique of ‘false consciousness’ explanations of domination parallels the Frankfurt School thread in the vault (Adorno on ideology, Horkheimer on rackets) and bears on how Cooper’s governance-critical readings of religious accommodation should themselves be tested.