리뷰: <스토아수업>

 

최근에 어찌어찌 하다 보니 라이언 홀리데이의 책 3권을 연달아 읽게 됐다. 이 책 <스토아 수업>외에 <돌파력>과 <에고라는 적>을 읽었다.

3권의 책이 모두 궤를 같이 하는데, 바로 이 책의 제목에서도 알 수 있는 스토아 철학의 삶에 대한 것이다.

그 중에서 이 책은 26명의 스토아 철학자들의 삶을 다루면서 스토아적인 삶을 위한 26가지의 항목(지혜, 비판정신, 열정 등)을 다룬다. 그러나 개인적으로는 소개할 26명의 철학자를 정해 놓고 적당히 항목들은 골라 배분한 느낌이다. 그 26가지 항목은 누구라도 받아들이고 지키려고 하는 항목이고, 26명의 철학자들은 동시에 여러 항목들을 대변하고 있기 때문이다.

내가 느끼는 이 책의 유용성은 일반 사람들은 알기 어려울 스토아 철학자들의 삶을 소개하는 것으로 충분하다고 생각된다. 그 이상의 의미를 생각할 필요는 없다. 다만, 아마존에 올라온 아래 리뷰처럼 그 실행 자체가 많이 미흡했을 수 있을 것 같다.

 

결론적으로 <돌파력>이나 <에고라는 적>을 읽지 않았다면 그 책을 먼저 읽기를 권하겠다. 그 후에 스토아 철학자에 대해 호기심이 생기면 읽어도 늦지 않을 책인데, 각 철학자에 할당된 페이지도 짧아서 가볍게 알아볼 목적이라면 권하겠다.

 

The Lives of the Stoics is the latest installment in Mr. Holiday’s popularization of the Stoic philosophy. It consists of 26 short “biographies” of major and minor Stoic figures. It is an ambitious project, but it is poorly executed in many ways.

1/ the author states that the purpose of the book is to inspire the reader to emulate the lives of the Stoics. “Strict scholarly accuracy” is not his concern. The result is a speculative biography about each figure, especially those about whom little written material survives. As any biographer will tell you, speculative biography is the least reliable and the most likely to lend itself to authorial invention and (mis)interpretation.

2/ the convention of giving each figure an epithet (e.g. Zeno the Prophet) is a little too contrived and frankly comes across as precious and forced. Not only is not accurate historically (Zeno was never called the Prophet, Seneca was never called the Striver), but it often fails miserably - specifically “Gaius Rubellius Plautus the Man Who Would Not Be King.” This literary contrivance sounds like a teenager’s fantasy WWE game.

3/ the author fails to be consistent in his use of political terms for the ancient world. He uses kings, rulers, tyrants, dictators, and emperors all interchangeably when describing the Roman Emperor (except when he talks about Marcus Aurelius, who, in his eyes, could do no wrong). This is just sloppy writing - the Romans were very clear about not having kings (during the Republic) and emperors were very different from kings.

4/ the author is dire need of a better editor. A common stylistic choice he employs is to break up a quotation with the redundant “he writes,” or “he said,” or some other rendition. For example, from page 32, “ ‘We might ask,’ Chryssipus pressed, ‘how could we live a life if it didn’t matter to us whether we were well or sick...”. He often then add his own commentary onto the quotation, which comes across as pedantic and condescending. “Indeed, how could we? Life would be chaos.”

5/ the author is in dire need of an editor, part two. The author spends so much time fleshing out each figure with suppositions and speculations that he repeats himself, and as a result, many of the figures appear to be the same because he is asking the same questions. I found myself re-writing many sentences in my head with fewer words, far too often. The constant sentence fragments. Single word sentences. Sloppy writing. Get my point? It made reading the book seem like a chore, rather than an exploration.

6/ it is no surprise that the author’s training as a marketer influences how he writes. He has the habit of qualifying everything he likes with “beautiful,” “great,” “beloved,” and “wonderful.” The result is this reader felt like he was being drowned in sugar. My eyes rolled more times than some of the Stoics were probably rolling in their graves.

7/ for an author who wrote a book called Ego is the Enemy, it is ironic that his author’s bio describes him as “one of the world’s foremost thinkers and writers on ancient philosophy and its place in everyday life.” Even more ironic given that his stated aim in the book is not “strict scholarly accuracy.”

A five-star idea with a one-star execution. Go elsewhere for an introduction to the stoics.