An Aspect of War Worth Loving
Thinking on the marginal aspects of life leads to serenity
Stoicism is not a gentle philosophy. It was not invented to handle someone uttering a mean word or taking our parking spot. According to Epictetus, the school of the philosopher is the hospital: “you should not walk out of it in pleasure but in pain.”
It is designed to help us find serenity in the most severe hardships a human life can experience. It would have us ask: what is life? what is death? how do I live? how do I die? It is for this reason I believe that by focusing on the “marginal aspects” of life, that domain of human experience that can be difficult to think about, we can find a path to Stoic serenity – gratitude for everything that happens.
Ancient thinkers understood this truth and counseled us to be surprised by nothing. What then is it to be surprised by nothing? If taken literally, it might mean zeroing out our emotions and zombie walking our way through life, but if this were what nature intended, then our ancestors would have voluntarily ended their tenure on this earth tens of thousands of years ago to seek permanent nothingness. The enemy of the Comanches, however, didn’t curl into a ball and die when they thought about the scalping they might endure. Instead, they visualized the worst possible outcome, brightened their eyes, and sharpened their blades.
One of the many paths that lead to the marginal world is war, and there are those today who understand this world because their profession is to train for war. If they feel surprise, it’s only because they’re surprised about being surprised. One such group are the Norwegian version of the Navy SEALs called Marinejegers.
I was fortunate enough to train with several of these modern day Vikings since they deemed it wise to trade their battle axes for .300 Win Mags and joined my unit for several months of sniper training. One ethnographer wrote that “Marinejegers work with the marginal aspects of life the rest of society would rather not talk or know about: war, killing, violence, aggression, fear, hierarchy, and manhood – combined it is the role of the warrior.”1
I argue that this isn’t solely the role of the warrior. It is also the role of a thinker, a philosopher, and every man or woman who finds, almost against their will, a question brimming below the surface of their thoughts, “What then is it to be human?” The hospital that Epictetus referred to is the mind, and the discomfort that results when we pry open its locked doors and step into its darkened rooms is the pain. It is here where the learning begins.
I loved war. Not for war itself, but because its margins and extremes lead to equally extreme levels of gratitude. I loved the brutality that made collapsing in exhaustion on the desert floor beneath the Milky Way one of the greatest pleasures I have ever known. I loved the nobility of my brothers for their calm and self-command when under fire. I loved knowing that there was a group of men trying to kill me night and day which made every single action I took a matter of consequence to myself and those I cared for. I loved how the closeness of death made a dirty pomegranate shared with several others on the shores of a silty river a memory of almost mythical joy. I loved the crack of a bullet for teaching me how alive I was.
Now why would the marginal aspects of life – the most violent and hostile aspects of human experience – lead to a sense of gratitude? I believe it is, in part, because they show us how much worse things can be by contextualizing our miseries.
I have a life: it may therefore be taken. I have a body: it may therefore be broken. Can I be upset that I’m not immortal, that my body isn’t built of titanium, and that some bullet, or pipe, or twisted metal fragment might bring my ruin? How can I be, when nature didn’t design me with the lifespan of the gods or with a body of titanium? Expecting something outside of our control is a uniquely human sin. It is a gift beyond imagining that we have a body to begin with, and just as heat and pressure convert carbon into diamonds, we have been given a mind that can convert worst case scenarios into gratitude.
This perspective carries over into everyday matters as well.
For my part, however, it is easy to forget the marginal world, whose lessons seem to atrophy over time and must be conjured in the mind’s eye with deliberate effort. I have seen this same sort of forgetfulness in others who lose someone close to them and respond by treating those around them with a renewed compassion, only for this compassion to dissipate as the memory of death fades. I too begin to take things for granted, shaking my head at minor inconveniences. When this happens, I’ve found it useful to compare whatever I think is bothering me to the marginal world and ask, “Compared to the hell that so many who have come before us have endured, what is unbearable about any of this?”
What then if a maple tree is dislodged by a strong gust and canoes my car, or my roof, or one of my fig trees? Why would I shake my fist at the forks of lightning overhead, or curse the tree, the wind, or God, when I know it could be so much worse? What is rain? A gift. What is fever? A gift. What is waiting in line at the grocery store? A gift.
The Marinejegers accustom their emotions to the stress of close quarters combat before a firefight, not after. They visualize the marginal world before their country is under attack, not after. They learn to temper the mutinous voices of the inner discourse before the combat dive with its thirty eight degree water and pitch black planting of a limpet mine beneath an enemy ship, not after.
It follows then that it is when times are easy that we should take a moment to reflect on the marginal aspects of life so that we’re never caught off guard when they arise.
What then if a voice rises from the depths and says, “I don’t want to think about them. It’s uncomfortable.” Let us place this impression on the table and dismantle it as Epictetus would have us do. The external that strikes the mind in this case is discomfort. The value judgment that strikes it is bad. The impression is therefore: discomfort is bad. If we choose to submit to this impression, then we choose to bury our heads in the sand. Why not pressure test it to learn what it is? Is it actually bad? By what measure?
If Socrates and Seneca refused to think about the marginal world, would they have met their ends – the former with poison, the latter with a knife and a steam room – as men, or as wretches? More importantly, would they have lived as men, with all the intensity and wisdom and gratitude that such a life entails, or as vertical corpses biding their time, biting their nails, and cursing the spectacle of the cosmic string of causes and effects as it unfolds around them?
Discomfort is a mere judgment; it is a word; it is a thing that doesn’t exist unless we think it does. Why then let it blind us to the terms of our existence? It is within our control to take this impression out of our heads, hold it in our hands, and channel our inner Socrates by saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” This is what the Marinejeger does, what the philosopher does, and what all those who think on life, death, fear, and all the other elements of the marginal world do.
We can choose not to be surprised by anything that the string of causes and effects places in our paths. We can remember to what end our lives may come, that this moment of consciousness is a gift, and that those we love may not be here tomorrow.
Why not then spread our arms in this play we have been given a role in and lean into it? There is something savagely and innately pleasurable about this.
This is the serenity we may find within the marginal aspects of life.
Thank you for reading What then?
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See you for the next essay on Tuesday.
Tone Danielsen. Making Warriors in a Global Era. An Ethnographic Study of the Norwegian Naval Special Operations Commando, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books 2018
“Compared to the hell that so many who have come before us have endured, what is unbearable about any of this?”
Something I can make use of today. Great article Sam.
“Thinking on the marginal aspects of life leads to serenity”
Yes,absolutely. And the fear of fear leads to paralytic docility which opens the door for those who would control our every move. Stride on Stoics, we are the saviors of the human spirit!
Peace.