One of the things that I find the most frustrating about reading ancient philosophy is the huge number of unsubstantiated claims that get thrown around. For example, the Stoics' belief in the gods. Where did they see them? What experience do they have with them? What they provide us with is a line of reasoning that seems, for some reason, strange, antiquated, irrelevant. I realized, however, that this is because I am being presented a world-view drastically different than any one which I could encounter today. Our most basic premises are not shared, and for this reason, it is very difficult to wrap my finger around the totality of what they're saying. Every sentence I read from the book floods my mind with a million objections that I need to suppress in order to focus and try to latch on to a world-view such as the Stoics', that says free-will is freedom of the attitude, or that nothing is something. These claims make no sense to me, and my head is screaming "no, no, no", but whenever I am able to forcibly silence my own thoughts, I can sometimes catch a glimpse of the thoughts of the Hellenistic philosophers.
This has led me to conclude that there are multiple (perhaps equally valid) ways to view the world, and existence. The issue is that many of them are mutually exclusive.
Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's really rather annoying that many of them presuppose the existence of God or assert any claim without facts or proof... then the cop-out claim is always, "Well it's self-evident." I feel ya.
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