Dealing with your last point first, ethnicity and ethnocentrism are in Nature. Slavery is not.
But slaves were typically from out-group ethnicities and were of out-group economic class by practical definition - thereby providing a good example of liberalism as I am using the term: the stoics would have a liberal disposition to people outside of their group classification - whether these people are treated as outside of their classification for the matter of ethnicity or for their economic status, the stoic prescription that they be treated as one in nature with themselves undermines, i.e., liberalizes, the border between them and people who are in what might start out as out-groups.
The issue is quite simple for me. Stoicism is, or should be understood as, psychological comportment before pain and suffering, yes, but also before "the good things", including love. I have written often of the consuming nature of Life, and our psychological immersion in its passing parade of things for the attention.
Well, your valuation of "psychological comportment" is not exactly wrong and while I am not certain that you fully realize this, it is a part of a first principle of what it means to be any kind of individual person - that is to be coherent - that means being consistent despite the arbitrary prompts and inclinations of nature in its empirical flux as it were.
Thus, you tell an autobiographical story of what it means to be a man.
Most of us agree that those are good qualities for a man but we also recognize that it is possible to take this too far to the point of being insensible and unresponsive to practical necessity.
Nevertheless, it is certainly true that we must be coherent. And that would mean to be liberated from mere facticity to some extent, so that we are not beholden to the flux and whims of every "feeling" that we have. In the coherence afforded and wrested from arbitrary inclination is facilitated our first principle of identity - in this case, narrative "manliness" - enabling us to establish a means of identity, accountability and warrant.
What is even more interesting in our context, is that the same principle applies to a race: in order to have an coherence, accountability, coordination and warrant, it must have some narrative liberation from mere facticity.
As you consciously incorporate this fact of post modernity - the hermetic turn - into your ontology project, it will have to legs instead of languishing in the arbitrary vicissitudes of hyper relativism in its Cartesian fall-out.
That is, in being conscious of the need to apply this component of not yielding to the "passing parade of things for attention" in regard to both individual psychology and to the group (race, English people, etc), you see why the post modern, hermeneutic turn has been conceived and why it is necessary.
I have no idea why Francis Bacon painted and re-painted "Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X":
![Image](https://majorityrights.com/uploads/Study_after_Velazquezs_Portrait_of_Pope_Innocent_X.jpg?r=1457371611)
The context of our discussion might suggest that Bacon sought to capture features of character that go beyond what is perceptible in moment; he may have sought to represent the emotive over and again in order to liberate the viewer from the merely perceptible facts of the Pope in a moment and to convey connections to essences of character that extend beyond the arbitrary perceptions of the mere empirical moment - particularly where stoic perception of facts would not be coherent but rather thick headed and incoherent, insufficiently sensible in its response, in fact lacking in appropriate response in service to maintain the overall coherent pattern against the impact of the arbitrary or what might well be the antagonism of an outsider - Not to be apprehended: as another one just like us in the whole of nature; having motives quite in harmony with our well being; as we are simply one with nature too; nature above our relative racial interests.
... but it is useful in trying to communicate this universal condition of ordinary waking consciousness - essentially, how we ordinarily are at all times.
That is, it may awaken us to a liberation from mere facticity and the taken for grantedness of that rather lame, uninspiring, paralytic bias as it would be, left by itself
Here there is no human freedom, in its real existential sense.
Agreed.
Here there is only the estranging susceptibility to, and engrossment in, psychological externalia.
Yes, it would lack the narrative coherence of character - viz. autobiography.
We have ceased to be the active cognitive element (dasein).
Yes.
Stoicism as comportment is not "the turn" to consciousness, but is behaving as if we are conscious beings;
Well, yes, ok, and that is better said in terms of coherence but you are the one who is big on "consciousness" anyway.
and therefore it is very close indeed to a mass movement of awakening
I guess that we would say that you are after an individual narrative which coincides with a group narrative that compels a people for its resonance with their identity and warrant to thus take coherent mass movement on their own behalf.
- especially given that, as I have said repeatedly, all the people cannot become conscious beings. Becoming such is momentary, rare, and for the individual ... the new elite, perhaps.
Consciousness has always struck me as momentary anyway, and I don't know why you value it quite so much. It seems to me that you have over valued it, in the way that the "Getalt psychologists" did (the Jewish ones, anyway).
Looking as I do through this strange, real filter, I can see nothing of like value in the little we know of Epicureanism
.
I would chalk that up to either the contrariness that you enjoy sporting with or to the fact that you may not realize that while there is not much remaining of the original texts of Epicurus, there is a good amount known from the descended school of thought - enough to say that it would be ridiculous to say that there is
nothing of value. It is a profound part of our history as empiricists, as rational people who are averse to superstition, customs and traditions imposed by fiat of ignorant and dishonest tyrants and masses. The Epicureans invented the word "atom" in order to trace everything to facts to go by ("atom" being the smallest physical unit of which the universe was composed); and you are functioning very much in a manner downstream from their wellspring - in someways bad, but in many ways good.
You seem to be saying that it is an exercise of the intellect.
No, what I am saying is that - contemplation of the good life - is what the school at the time held to be the highest pleasure, but that we could take the idea of hierarchicization of pleasures and change it to a hierarchic valuation of sensible pursuits (dasein) within requirements of social systemic maintenance and advancement (midtdasein) such that the philosophical governance of one's self and people would be of the highest order of enjoyment.
But that, should we be interested in being and authenticity, will lead to less, certainly, than a decent understanding of evolutionary theory; which is nowhere near enough.
Having and pursuing a decent understanding of evolutionary theory would be part and parcel of "the highest order of pleasure."
You would be a very fine neo-Epicurean.