The following essay first appeared as the introduction to the second issue of The Side View Journal. The issue features 109 pages of material written by 10 different authors on topics including Stoicism, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, phenomenology, monastic practice, speculative philosophy, mathematics, and ecology. All proceeds from the journal sales are reinvested back into The Side View to help us produce more great essays and podcast episodes. We thank you for your support! You can purchase a copy of the issue here.

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Welcome to issue 2 of The Side View Journal.

You will find herein ten new essays from a wide array of scholars, practitioners, artists, and athletes. To help organize the work, this issue is divided into three sections, each one dealing with a theme related to TSV’s central mission of creating a resource library organized around the idea that attention is an art form. Readers familiar with TSV will know that our contributors view perception as a skill we can train through practice, and the writers in this issue reflect this understanding in a variety of ways.

Our first section, Stoicism in Practice and Worldview, takes up the theme of Stoicism in contexts ancient and modern, speculative and practical, and theological and scientific. The first contribution in this section, “Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as Stoic Askēsis” features the insights of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt and doctoral candidate Michael Tremblay, who offers his meditations on Stoicism and ascetic practice, especially as found in the martial arts. Readers will recognize that askēsis, meaning exercise or training, is a central concept for TSV, and Tremblay puts this concept to work using physical and mental examples of how askēsis enables such transformations, especially in the direction of cultivating virtue.

The remaining three essays in this section enact a dialogue around Stoic ideas of transcendence, theology, and science. This conversation, initiated first by Brittany Polat’s essay “On Stoic Transcendence,” offers the reader a glimpse into the varied worldview possibilities contained within contemporary and ancient Stoicism. In Polat’s essay, the notion of transcendence is maintained as an essential feature of Stoic philosophy. For Polat, transcendence occurs when we practice Stoicism to rise above our individual perspectives and interests. It is a transformation of our being in the world, and so also of how we see ourselves and our actions. Such a transformation, argues Polat, does not require that we invoke a transcendent god, an otherworldly realm, a set of Platonic ideals, or an incorporeal divinity. Transcendence in this sense is a real and practical achievement, one that can even afford us a sense of cosmic connection, but it is only a metaphor to say that Stoics “transcend” their world when they rise above it.

In response to Polat, Kai Whiting in his article “The Stoic God: A Call to Science or Faith?” argues that many of the ideals promoted within the Stoic worldview can only be secured by a corresponding belief in the Stoic god. While Whiting argues for the necessity of belief in the Stoic divinity, he is clear that for Stoics such a god is also coincident with the whole of the natural world itself. As the essence of nature, the Stoic god makes Stoicism a fully naturalistic worldview that is explicable in rational terms. As Whiting argues, Stoicism’s twin commitments to rationalism and the divinity of nature are resolved in the unifying causal structure that unites reason with nature, and links both with the god of which each element—divinity, humanity, and nature—is an expression.

Closing out this series of essays, Massimo Pigliucci takes a position best expressed by the title of his article, “The Stoic God Is Untenable in the Light of Modern Science.” Pigliucci engages with both Polat’s and Whiting’s essays, asking, why, given what scientists know today about the formation and evolution of the universe, do Stoics still engage in discussions of theology and metaphysics? After considering several different positions—Stoic pantheism, the cosmos as living organism, mechanism, panpsychism, and the argument from design—Pigliucci returns to his engagement with Polat and Whiting, suggesting that the ideals both writers seek from their respective Stoic practices can be secured (and their remnant metaphysical residue can be removed) without appeals to god or transcendence, even of Polat’s immanent, metaphorical variety.

The next section is titled Phenomenology and Elemental Philosophy to mark both the first-person nature of the essays and to acknowledge each writer’s entanglement with a specific elemental setting, including the desert (Heidi Gustafson), the forest (Laura Pustarfi), and the ocean (Jane Affleck). These are places with which each contributor has forged an intimate relation, a relation that becomes a locus of generative insight. Gustafson writes of aesthetic reception as a kind of skilled perceptual engagement with the land from which she transforms minerals into pigments and pigments into art. Her essay is at once a thoroughgoing description of her mineral foraging process as well as a meditation on the role of art and aesthetics in ritual, story, culture, and evolution.

In a similar way, Pustarfi offers a forest phenomenology. Along the way, she recounts how trees have played important roles, metaphorically and empirically, in the life and thought of several thinkers in the West, recalling how the image of the tree appears in the works of philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, and Deleuze and Guattari), scientists (Charles and Francis Darwin), and phenomenologists (Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty). Pustarfi builds upon and constructively critiques these images, showing that trees often show up in Western philosophy and science merely as a passive backdrop or material resource. Eschewing both these images, Pustarfi draws on contemporary research on plant intelligence, as well as her own phenomenological practice, to argue for the intrinsic value and intelligence of the arboreal world, offering some exercises and considerations we can put to use to encounter the forest in a deeper way.

Jane Affleck’s essay “Meditative Awareness and the Symbiotic Real” adds an oceanic dimension to Gustafson’s and Pustarfi’s more terrestrial aesthetics. In her essay, Affleck asks us to consider not the mineral or the tree, but the mollusk (the oyster, to be exact). Using an eclectic mix of source material—including Buddhist contemplative practice, a Lewis Carrol poem, the work of Tim Morton, and Indigenous philosophy, all set against the back drop of climate change—Affleck suggests her practices can help de-center a growing sense of ecological grief and anthropocentrism and may afford a greater awareness of our co-existential ties to the nonhuman world, in turn building an awakened sense of compassion and equanimity for ourselves, one another, and our ecosystems.

As the name implies, the last section in this issue, Experiments in Thinking, takes the reader on a journey through the edges of the mind and its possibilities. Drawing on the desert monasticism of the fourth century Christian monk Evagrius of Pontus, Jacob Given explores the relation between theoria and praktikē to show that theory is itself a kind of ascetic practice, and that monasticism, properly understood, aims at the right ordering of body, soul, and mind. To use Given’s own phrase, Evagrius offers us a mode of tactical desert empiricism, a demonology or set of contemplative maneuvers used by the monk to achieve restitution and a reorientation to a more virtuous and primordial condition.

In his essay “Why I am not a Physicalist” Peter Sjöstedt-H draws on Hempel’s Dilemma—namely, the idea that physicalist worldviews are anchored to a physics that will eventually be discarded in favor of a physics that is not yet knowable—to question the basis of physicalism itself. Sjöstedt-H notes four primary challenges to the physicalist worldview—Hempel’s Dilemma, irreducible mentality, the evolutionary argument, and problems with the causal closure principle—not to issue his own alternative metaphysics per se, but more simply to open up in our perception a new set of possibilities about what the world might be, once the standard physicalist assumption is dropped.

Matthew Pirkowski takes us through equally wide-ranging territory when he tries to understand the nature and ubiquity of our human suffering. Tracing examples from Buddhist sutras, Christian sermons, Russian literature, and existential philosophy, Pirkowski routes our understanding of suffering through an unexpected pathway: A fractal application of the German mathematician Emily Noether’s theorem of mathematical symmetries and conserved physical properties. Though this move may seem abstract at first, Pirkowski returns at the end of his essay to a reflection on the nature of subjective experience itself, showing how many of humanity’s deepest insights about the nature of suffering can be read as consilient with, or perhaps even expressions of, the reality described by the empirical and theoretical insights of the physical sciences.

In true TSV fashion, these essays span several disciplines, practices, orientations, and traditions, from Stoicism to aesthetics to phenomenology to monastic practice to speculative philosophy and mathematics. My hope is that together these essays will offer you the reader a few new tools and transfigurative encounters that you can use to transform your perception and experience of the world, perhaps even reshaping your own sense of what the world is and can be. I hope you enjoy reading them as much I did.