‘Begin each day by telling yourself: today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil’.
You’re probably already a stoic in some way. It’s part of our culture. Influenced by Socrates and emerging in Ancient Greece in the 3rd century BC, it’s one of the foundations of Christianity, is maybe the first psychology, it contributed to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, guided a Roman Emperor, and has become increasingly popular in recent years, through events like Stoicon, Annual Stoic Week, and a flurry of new popular books and articles.
Could it really be a guide to the best possible life?
This introduction to Stoicism will mix two things: what the Stoics of Ancient Greece and Rome actually said – the original doctrines – and how this might be interpreted and be useful today.
Stoicism tries to answer the question of what philosophy is.
Epictetus writes that, ‘Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for humans, otherwise it would be admitting something that lies beyond its proper subject matter. For just as wood is the material of the carpenter, bronze that of the statuary, so each individual’s own life is the material of the art of living’.
What is fundamental for all of us is to work towards and discover how to live life in the best possible way – to stop making faulty judgments or to avoid being the slave of negative emotions and thoughts, to be virtuous and tranquil.
Stoicism then is about understanding and changing your entire approach to life.
There were a number of notable stoics. The first stoic was Zeno (333-261 BC), and the stoic school was made popular by Chrysippus after Zeno’s death.
Unfortunately, most of what the Ancient Greek stoics said has been lost, and what we know of Stoicism we know from the Romans – Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius in particular.
I’m going to concentrate less on figures, though, and more on ideas.
The default way of thinking for many people is probably something akin to hedonism: that life is best approached by maximising pleasure, whether in the short term or the long term. This is Epicureanism, a school that was around at the same time as the Stoics
Another school, the Cynics, argued that because desire leads to a longing and a pain, and things desired can’t always be had, then the only way to live a happy life is to not desire anything and live an ascetic lifestyle.
The Stoics argued that both were misguided.
According to Seneca, what the Stoics seek is, ‘how the mind may always pursue a steady and favourable course, may be well-disposed towards itself, and may view its conditions with joy’.
The Greek stoics divided Stoicism into three parts: logic, physics, and ethics.
None of these terms, though, meant what they do today.
Logic was formal logic, but also rhetoric, language, poetry.
Physics mostly meant the study of God and the world – essentially how things work.
They also broke all of this into two parts: theory and practice.
Philosophy, importantly, needed to be both studied and practiced, learned and executed. Exercises, reflection, and self-improvement were fundamental.
For Epictetus, studying logic, physics, and ethics were all necessary to living a good life.
He wrote that we should study ethics because, ‘That concerning the impulse to act and not to act, and, generally, appropriate behaviour; so that he may act in an orderly manner and after due consideration, and not carelessly’.
We should study logic because it is, ‘concerned with freedom from deception and hasty judgement’ and therefore acting in error.
For this introduction though I’m going to focus on the ethical part of the system, and hopefully this will demonstrate why the other two parts are necessary.
In other words, Stoic ethics is the central and most influential component, both for the Romans and for us today.
For the Greeks, the words ethics and virtue have slightly different meanings than they do now. Ethics is concerned not with what is explicitly right or wrong, but on cultivating a ‘good spirit’, to live a good or ‘excellent’ life and cultivate moral wisdom.
And all the Greek schools of thought agreed that to live a good life was to be virtuous.
But this, again, had a slightly different meaning.
For the Greeks, to be virtuous is to live according to nature. Our nature, the nature of the world, the nature of others – it’s to live as was intended for us.
Why?
Zeno divided things in the world into three categories:
- Things that are good for us
- Things that are bad for us
- Things that we are indifferent to
But it’s hard to find things that are universally and unerringly good for us.
Take food. It is sometimes good, but it is not always good, it’s sometimes bad for us or unhealthy or consumed as a result of greed. We can eat too much, we eat the wrong things.
So it must fall into the category of indifferents.
The same applies to drink, sex, work, company.
In fact, the only thing that can always be universally good is our rationality.
Our rationality can tell us when food is good and when it’s bad.
We can use it to live according to nature and virtue – and the only sole guide to this, the only absolute good, is our rationality.
Now, it’s obviously rational to eat food sometimes. If it is in front of us and we are hungry our rational impulse is to eat it.
But as a concept, an idea, we have to be indifferent to it. We could take it or leave it.
Virtue and rationality are the only things up to us, they are internal to us. Everything else is not, and so to crave and need these other things is irrational; the only way to tranquillity is to be indifferent to them – to accept when they come and not dwell on them when they don’t.
In other words, to expect the external world to be good all of the time is to be irrational – and to have an emotional reaction over something external to us and not in our control is also irrational.
Take this cake.
I should, according to Epictetus, be indifferent towards it. I should not crave it, be excited by it, or be angry that I can’t have it.
But can we enjoy it? Yes!
Marcus Aurelius wrote that, ‘You must consider the activity which is possible for you to carry out in conformity with your own nature as a delight – and that is always possible for you’.
And Diogenes tells us that: ‘They say that there are three good emotions (eupatheiai): joy (charan), caution (eulabeian) and wishing (boulēsin). Joy, the counterpart of pleasure, is rational elation; caution, the counterpart of fear, is rational avoidance, for though the sage will never feel fear he will still use caution. And they make wishing the counterpart of desire, inasmuch as it is rational appetency’.
If I can rationally justify having this cake – if I’ve abstained for a long time, or need sugar, or it’s someone’s birthday and it brings everyone joy – then I can have it and should enjoy it.
For the Stoics rationality is akin to the soul – the only thing we have control over, and that makes us who we are.
For our soul to align with the world and its demands is the only true and universal good.
Quick emotions – especially negative emotions – and uncritical desires are irrational because they’re in conflict with the external world, which is ordered in a natural way and out of our control.
Marcus Aurelius wrote that: ‘You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgement, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite’.
In his book A Guide to the Good Life, William Irvine outlines a number of psychological techniques the Stoics used.
As we’ve seen, to be virtuous is live according to nature and it is natural that misfortune is everywhere. Everything is perishable, we want and need things we can’t have, friends and family get ill and die. The world is in a state of impermanence. What is is destined not to be.
To expect fortune at all times then is irrational – it is not living in accordance with nature.
We also become unappreciative of the things, like friends and family, that we do have in our lives. We can become ungrateful, wish we had more, and be difficult to please.
The Stoics argue we can come to accept the worst and be more appreciative of what we have through what Irvine calls negative visualisation.
To live according to nature, which can deal us a bad hand at any moment, we should be prepared – we should imagine the worst happening.
We should imagine that the food we’re about to eat, the shelter over our head, the person we love, all of these things – even our own lives – could be gone tomorrow.
Fortune, fate, the natural order of things, will lead to things happening to us outside of our control, so in order to live virtuously, we must accept them.
Not only this, in order to acknowledge these difficulties, according to Seneca we should occasionally live as though they’ve happened.
We should endure cold weather and forgo food occasionally. We should practice self control.
Imagining and sometimes living the worst will lead us to be more appreciative of what we do have, rather than always wanting more.
Epictetus wrote that, ‘It is impossible that happiness, and yearning for what is not present, should ever be united’.
Some things are out of hands and not in our control and so we must concentrate on the things that are.
Epictetus’ handbook begins by telling us that, ‘Some things are up to us [eph’ hêmin] and some things are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions–in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our own doing’.
We must distinguish between things in our control – internals – and things outside of our control – externals.
To worry about and hope we can influence things outside of our control is irrational and contrary to nature and virtue.
There is a problem though.
There are things in our control – some choices – and things outside of our control – such as the weather. But there are also things that we have some control over – like a tennis match, for example.
Irvine calls this the trichotomy of control, and even the things we have some control over can be broken down into the parts we can control and parts we can’t.
In the tennis match, we have no control over whether we win or lose, but we do have control over our concentration, our swings, our training.
This is what is called internalising your goals.
At work we can separate the job at hand from the concern about whether our boss thinks it’s good work.
It involves living in the present and concentrating solely on the things we think are rational in the moment.
Finally, to be prepared to live according to nature, we should reflect on Stoicism itself. This is why Marcus Aurelius wrote his meditations.
We must cultivate our rational minds.
We should think about, or write down, the things outside of our control that have annoyed us, or the things we took for granted. We should decide what we should negatively visualise to appreciate things more. We should imagine the unfortunate things that will likely happen to us before we start a task. Think about what we’ve taken for granted or when we let our desires get the better of us.
I talk a lot on this channel about the fallacy of the mind-body dualism, the impossibility of detaching yourself from your emotions, and your environment. And while this is of course true, there is also obviously a way in which we are able to separate ourselves from those things, even if it’s temporary, or limited, or an illusion. Stuart Hall said that, ‘this experience of, as it were, experiencing oneself as both subject and object, of encountering oneself from the outside, as another – an other – sort of person next door, is uncanny’.
Stoicism is a good way to begin to cultivate a better framework for experiencing yourself, your own life, your own attitudes and goals.
And I think what attracts me is that it’s flexible – it doesn’t mean resigning yourself to a stoic pessimism, but thinking more effectively about what’s in your control and what’s not.
I was always worried Stoicism is too cynical – that it’s about tidying your room and not changing the world.
But you do have control over changing the world too – you have control over how effectively you speak, how well thought out your ideas are, where you want to direct your efforts.
And I think that overall, thinking about the way your own mind functions, and having models to improve its disposition, a framework for recalibrating its perspective, is something that in a secular world, or a world that devalues the humanities, is sadly lacking.
Sources
William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
John Sellars, Stoicism
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy
Brad Inwood, Stoicism: A Very Short Introduction
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Epictetus, Handbook and Discourses
