The [Necessary] Reformation of Stoicism

(this is an excerpt from the pre-edit draft of my upcoming book, "Stoicism for Practical Humans" releasing Thanksgiving Day 2022)

Few ideas can be good ideas irrespective of the time, place, or situation within which they are presented. Philosophies are suites of ideas, they are carefully thought through and compiled guides for living. What happens, then, when a philosophy founded in 300BCE experiences a period of renaissance more than 2300 years later?

Can that philosophy, Stoicism in our case, and its suite of ideas, remain good ideas if left as they were over 2300 years ago? I argue that they cannot. I further argue that no philosophy can remain unchanged and maintain its utility or practicality as time marches on and our understanding of the world, and ourselves, marches along with it.

Consider the following:

I think it’s fair to think of any religion also as a philosophy, and it’s certainly not difficult to identify ancient religious practices that do, and would upon imagining their reintroduction into modern society, make most all of us recoil in disgust. Imagine the practice of demonic exorcism being performed on someone with Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder in the 15th century—absolutely a terrible thought. Imagine a modern world where science and medicine had no impact on the philosophies of today’s surviving religions. Imagine if civilized societies were still practicing demonic exorcisms as the primary method for treating various psychoses.

When our philosophies, or religions for that matter, fail to provide adequate answers to important questions about morality, behavior, and purpose, they must be either updated or abandoned. Stoicism has had a renaissance in recent decades, as I’ve said, but what it is in need of now is a reformation. However, any such reformation would face strong opposition from various traditionalists (from academics to practitioners of traditional Stoicism). These opponents would sternly assert that any deviation from traditional or classical Stoicism is a perversion of Stoicism and, while I would word it differently, I would call it a modernization of Stoicism, I agree.

What I present in this book is not a re-defining of classical Stoicism because, again, I agree that any attempt to do that would be a perversion of classical Stoicism. To attempt to do so would be like a biblical revisionist attempting to rewrite the Old Testament. You can’t just change a philosophy and call it the same thing and so, then, a new name is needed. We’ll get to that in a little while.

First, I would prefer to cut off at the pass any detractors who would suggest that Stoicism was never meant to be changed. I’ll do that by using their love of traditional texts against them:

“Is any man afraid of change? What can take place without change? What then is more pleasing or more suitable to the universal nature? And can you take a hot bath unless the wood for the fire undergoes a change? And can you be nourished unless the food undergoes a change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without change? Do you not see then that for yourself also to change is just the same, and equally necessary for the universal nature?” — The Meditations, Book 7 Meditation 17, Marcus Aurelius (translated by George Long, 1862)

While Aurelius is certainly not the only person whose opinion matters on this point, he absolutely carries with him the bona fides necessary to opine on change—and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an ancient Stoic who wouldn’t argue the same: that change is part of nature and thus must be accepted and not fought against for reasons of ego when it appears to us.

MORAL PROGRESS NECESSITATES CHANGE

Epictetus, one of the fathers of Stoicism, was a slave. Slaves abounded in ancient Greece and Rome and slavery was the norm, at one point or another, across most every culture and on every continent right up until 1948 when the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which abolished slavery internationally). Most Western philosophies, if not all, were conceived of prior to this declaration. This has ramifications.

Any philosophy conceived of during a time when owning people wasn’t just normative, but, going back far enough, considered to be somehow virtuous, must needs require updating as our human concept of right and wrong, moral and immoral, has matured. To put this another way: there is a modern problem baked into any philosophy that never spoke out against forced human servitude (or any other yet-to-be-identified moral failing of the past), and that problem will sit there, like a landmine, until such a time that people care enough to look for it, dig it up, and disarm it. Stoicism is one of these philosophies.

This isn’t to suggest that the ancient Stoics were monsters of their age, quite the opposite in fact. Stoics felt strongly that slaves should be treated humanely. Seneca, for example, wrote the following on how to treat slaves:

“Treat your slave with compassion, even with courtesy; admit him to your conversation, your planning, your society.”

Marcus, in his Meditations, says a bit as well:

“Consider how you stand in relation to your slaves, and how we were born to help one another.”

The Stoics certainly viewed slaves as deserving of humane treatment, there’s plenty of testament to this in various texts, but they stopped short of speaking out about the morality holding slaves in the first place. Of course, like any ancient person, you can be morally progressive by the standards of your day but, give it enough time, get far enough into the future before looking back at the human beings of the past, and it’s impossible to have ever been morally progressive enough. That’s just how it works. It’s not anyone’s moral failing, it doesn’t suggest the good men and women of yesteryear were in fact not good, it simply highlights the fact that all people are products of their time and, as such, no matter how good they were, they all have a limited amount of runway before modernity views them as actually quite horrific. Eventually it will be my turn, and then it will be your’s.

This proves it, then: our morality is ever changing, and so the philosophies that inform our morality must be fluid.

STOIC COSMOLOGY IS OUTMODED

The Stoics were not atheists, but they were an odd kind of theistic for, during a time of rampant pantheism, the Stoics were kind of monotheistic. They didn’t believe in a single god the way Christians would come to, but they believed in a single divine influence: the Logos.

Stoic Cosmology suggests that everything that exists is either matter, which I’ll trust you don’t need a definition for, or Logos, the divine and acting Reason of the Universe. This Logos would use what was called Pneuma, or “the breath of life”, to organize the Universe rationally. The Pneuma had three forms: life force, soul, and tension.

Pneuma as state or tension: in this form Pneuma is a lot like the Yin and Yang in Chinese Cosmology. It is keeping things together, like trees and stones, but also like the balance of a human being. Physical things and their relationships to one another.

Pneuma as life force: in this form Pneuma allows things to grow. Plants, fungi, etc. This form of Pneuma is what we think of when we think of all that is nature.

Pneuma as soul: the most concentrated, rare, and powerful form of Pneuma. This form of Pneuma animates animals (including humans).

I’m an atheist, so the idea of a conscious cosmos, while not exactly theism, is the kind of new age spiritual concept that’s a bit too Depak Chopra “cosmic consciousness” for me to take seriously. In fact, reading about Pneuma and Logos, when I first approached Stoicism, was very nearly enough to put me off the philosophy forever. Fortunately, I pressed through it. What I found was that the cosmology of Stoicism, of Hellenistic Period Greeks who, compared to the humans of modernity, knew almost nothing of science, was not needed in order to execute on the ultimate aims of Stoicism.

Imagine that a man discovered special mushrooms that, when mixed with a few other ingredients, cured numerous illnesses. Further imagine that he discovered these cures because he ardently believed in a cosmological view of existence that was complete nonsense. Do these cures lose their utility when the cosmological view of the universe that lead to their discovery is proven to be false? Of course not. It has always been possible to be right for the wrong reasons (because a person can be right without being epistemically correct). That is to say, you can guess the right answer without any knowledge of why that’s the right answer.

While the first Stoics may have fleshed out their philosophical principles based on an understanding of the cosmos worked, which was both fantastical and false, they still managed to create a Philosophy with such utility and insight that its wisdom hasn’t just survived the ravages of time, it has proliferated across nations, governments, educational institutions, and religions in spite of its founders’ archaic and outmoded understanding of science, psychology, and the world in general.

The practical principles for living which Stoicism provides are incredibly useful to any modern individuals whom would seek to implement Stoicism into their lives—and that is true regardless of whether or not those individuals believe in Pneuma or Logos. The Stoics, in my opinion, were right about the value of their values, but they were right for the wrong reasons.

If you want to be a Traditional Stoic, if you want to emulate the life of a Hellenistic Period Greek, then yes, you must accept and adopt the Cosmology that comes prepackaged with this Philosophy. However, if you’re trying to live like a Stoic who has learned things with the passing of thousands of years—a modern Stoic—then the Cosmology of Stoicism is entirely irrelevant to the benefits of Stoicism.

REFORMATION OR BUST

I believe, ardently, that every philosophy must be updated over time as we learn more about human beings and more about the world around us and beyond us. Further, when science proves certain things to be true, false, likely true, or likely false, the parts of any philosophy which contradicts those findings must be abandoned in order for that philosophy to remain tenable and in alignment with what we know to be true or false about the world we live in. If any such updating is so disruptive to a philosophy that said philosophy can no longer maintain its practical utility, then it is time to erect a burial mound and lay that philosophy to rest. Forever.

Philosophy is the only tool we humans have to answer the question, “How can I live a good and just life—and how can I live it well?” We cannot, outside of academia for the sake of historical knowledge and records keeping, cling to archaic ways of answering this question simply for the sake of honoring the past. The way to live well in 3,000 years ago may have been the way to live well 3,000 years ago, but it is, necessarily, not the way to live well today. If we agree that the world is changing, and if we agree that a changed world brings new questions and moral dilemmas, then we must also agree that the answer to questions about how to live well cannot, ever, be a static ones.