A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

by William B. Irvine

Why is it important to have such a philosophy? Because without one, there is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life.

According to Epicurus, for example, “Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man. For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is no profit in philosophy either, if it does not expel the suffering of the mind.”

according to the Stoic philosopher Seneca, about whom I will have much to say in this book, “He who studies with a philosopher should take away with him some one good thing every day: he should daily return home a sounder man, or on the way to become sounder.”

Although modern philosophers tend to spend their days debating esoteric topics, the primary goal of most ancient philosophers was to help ordinary people live better lives.

ZENO’S PHILOSOPHY had ethical, physical, and logical components. Those who studied Stoicism under him started with logic, moved on to physics, and ended with ethics.

Stoic logic showed an unprecedented degree of sophistication.

The Stoics’ interest in logic is a natural consequence of their belief that man’s distinguishing feature is his rationality. Logic is, after all, the study of the proper use of reasoning.

the Stoics thought there is nothing wrong with enjoying the good things life has to offer, as long as we are careful in the manner in which we enjoy them. In particular, we must be ready to give up the good things without regret if our circumstances should change.

Musonius also thought the practice of philosophy required one not to withdraw from the world, as the Epicureans advised, but to be a vigorous participant in public affairs. Musonius therefore taught his students how to retain their Stoic tranquility while participating.

it is entirely possible to practice Stoicism—and in particular, to employ Stoic strategies for attaining tranquility—without believing in Zeus or, for that matter, in divine creation.

We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire.

One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process: We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get.

They recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value—that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would. This technique—let us refer to it as negative visualization—was employed by the Stoics at least as far back as Chrysippus.

to someone who has not lost his capacity for joy, the world is a wonderful place. To such a person, glasses are amazing; to everyone else, a glass is just a glass, and it is half empty to boot.

Hedonic adaptation has the power to extinguish our enjoyment of the world.

To practice negative visualization, after all, is to contemplate the impermanence of the world around us.

Negative visualization, in other words, teaches us to embrace whatever life we happen to be living and to extract every bit of delight we can from it. But it simultaneously teaches us to prepare ourselves for changes that will deprive us of the things that delight us. It teaches us, in other words, to enjoy what we have without clinging to it.

but will experience pleasure of a different kind: As Epictetus observes, you will “be pleased and will praise yourself” for not eating it.

He attributes this technique to his teacher Sextius, who, at bedtime, would ask himself, “What ailment of yours have you cured today? What failing have you resisted? Where can you show improvement?”

Seneca’s conclusion: If you are going to publish, you must be willing to tolerate criticism.

“If people think you amount to something, distrust yourself.”

Seneca said it well: “To know how many are jealous of you, count your admirers.”

They thought that man is by nature a social animal and therefore that we have a duty to form and maintain relationships with other people,

As we make progress in our practice of Stoicism, we will become increasingly indifferent to other people’s opinions of us. We will not go through our life with the goal of gaining their approval or avoiding their disapproval, and because we are indifferent to their opinions, we will feel no sting when they insult us.

in retrospective negative visualization, we imagine never having had something that we have lost. By engaging in retrospective negative visualization, Seneca thinks, we can replace our feelings of regret at having lost something with feelings of thanks for once having had it.

Seneca suggests that besides being an effective response to an insult, humor can be used to prevent ourselves from becoming angry: “Laughter,” he says, “and a lot of it, is the right response to the things which drive us to tears!”

one imagines that Cato and Socrates, by using humor in response to an insult, not only deflected the insult but prevented themselves from getting angry at the person who had insulted them.

Stoicism does not require her to renounce wealth; it allows her to enjoy it and use it to the benefit of herself and those around her. It does, however, require her enjoyment to be thoughtful. She must keep firmly in mind that her wealth can be snatched from her; indeed, she should spend time preparing herself for the loss of it—by, for example, periodically practicing poverty.

By stubbornly doing what they took to be their social duty, even though it meant defying the powers that be, the Stoics made lots of political enemies. Of the four great Roman Stoics, only Marcus escaped banishment—but then again, he was the emperor.

We need, in other words, to learn how to enjoy things without feeling entitled to them and without clinging to them.

Henry David Thoreau, for example, doesn’t directly mention Stoicism or any of the great Stoics in Walden, his masterpiece, but to those who know what to look for, the Stoic influence is present. In his Journal, Thoreau is more forthcoming. He writes, for example, that “Zeno the Stoic stood in precisely the same relation to the world that I do now.”

Thoreau went to Walden Pond to conduct his famous two-year experiment in simple living in large part so that he could refine his philosophy of life and thereby avoid misliving: A primary motive in going to Walden, he tells us, was his fear that he would, “when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Thoreau appears to have experienced the joy the Stoics sought. Thus, we find Thoreau declaring that “surely joy is the condition of life.”9 And Thoreau’s Journal, says Richardson, “is filled with comments reflecting his gusto, his appetite for experience, the keenness of his senses, the sheer joy of being alive.”

THE STOICS HAD many important psychological insights. They realized, for example, that what makes insults painful is our interpretation of the insults rather than the insults themselves.

the Stoics did not advocate that we “bottle up” our emotions. They did advise us to take steps to prevent negative emotions and to overcome them when our attempts at prevention fail, but this is different from keeping them bottled up: If we prevent or overcome an emotion, there will be nothing to bottle.

invoke the kinds of arguments Seneca used in his consolations: “Is this what the person who died would want me to do? Of course not! She would want me to be happy! The best way to honor her memory is to leave off grieving and get on with life.”

The goal of the Stoics was therefore not to eliminate grief but to minimize it.

think people are less brittle and more resilient, emotionally speaking, than therapists give them credit for.

World War II. When the war broke out, psychologists worried that mental hospitals would swell with civilians unable to cope with the horrors of war. As it turned out, though, the Brits were quite capable of fending for themselves, emotionally speaking: There was no change in the incidence of mental illness.

It would be bad enough if grief counseling were simply ineffective. In some cases, though, such counseling seems to intensify and prolong people’s grief; in other words, it only makes things worse.

These authors add that they reject the doctrine, now commonly accepted, that “uninhibited emotional openness is essential to mental health.”

According to Seneca, “A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.” He therefore recommends that we “do away with complaint about past sufferings and with all language like this: ‘None has ever been worse off than I. What sufferings, what evils have I endured!’” After all, what point is there in “being unhappy, just because once you were unhappy?”

They were convinced that what stands between most of us and happiness is not our government or the society in which we live, but defects in our philosophy of life—or our failing to have a philosophy at all. It is true that our government and our society determine, to a considerable extent, our external circumstances, but the Stoics understood that there is at best a loose connection between our external circumstances and how happy we are.

the Stoics don’t think it is helpful for people to consider themselves victims of society—or victims of anything else, for that matter.

If you consider yourself a victim, you are not going to have a good life; if, however, you refuse to think of yourself as a victim—if you refuse to let your inner self be conquered by your external circumstances—you are likely to have a good life, no matter what turn your external circumstances take.

Others may have it in their power to affect how and even whether you live, but they do not, say the Stoics, have it in their power to ruin your life. Only you can ruin it, by failing to live in accordance with the correct values.

Many of us have been persuaded that happiness is something that someone else, a therapist or a politician, must confer on us. Stoicism rejects this notion. It teaches us that we are very much responsible for our happiness as well as our unhappiness. It also teaches us that it is only when we assume responsibility for our happiness that we will have a reasonable chance of gaining it.

One reason philosophers lost interest in Stoicism was their insight, in the first decades of the twentieth century, that many traditional philosophical puzzles arise because of our sloppy use of language. From this it followed that anyone wishing to solve philosophical puzzles should do so not by observing humanity (as the Stoics were likely to do) but by thinking very carefully about language and how we use it. And along with the increasing emphasis on linguistic analysis came a growing belief, on the part of professional philosophers, that it simply was not the business of philosophy to tell people how to live their life.

Fascinating. This is insightful, perhaps this is why i have for so long seen philosophy as pointless.

• We should become self-aware: We should observe ourselves as we go about our daily business, and we should periodically reflect on how we responded to the day’s events.

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• We should use our reasoning ability to overcome negative emotions. We should also use our reasoning ability to master our desires, to the extent that it is possible to do so. In particular, we should use reason to convince ourselves that things such as fame and fortune aren’t worth having—

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