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October 21 - December 17, 2017
Stoicism is eminently democratic, cutting across social classes: whether you are rich or poor, healthy or sick, educated or ignorant, it makes no difference to your ability to live a moral life and thus achieve what the Stoics called ataraxia, or tranquillity of mind.
To a Stoic, it ultimately does not matter if we think the Logos is God or Nature, as long as we recognize that a decent human life is about the cultivation of one’s character and concern for other people (and even for Nature itself) and is best enjoyed by way of a proper—but not fanatical—detachment from mere worldly goods.
Stoicism began in Athens, Greece, around the year 300 BCE. Zeno, a Phoenician merchant and native of Citium (modern-day Cyprus)
eventually they began to be referred to as “Stoics,” because they met under the Stoa Poikile, or painted porch, a public place in the center of the city.
That framework is the idea that in order to live a good (in the sense of eudaimonic) life, one has to understand two things: the nature of the world (and by extension, one’s place in it) and the nature of human reasoning (including when it fails, as it so often does).
These are often referred to as the three Stoic disciplines: desire, action, and assent.
Two of the four Stoic virtues are pertinent to regulating desire: courage (to face facts and act accordingly) and temperance (to rein in our desires and make them commensurate with what is achievable).
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.
“We act very much as if we were on a voyage. What can I do? I can choose out the helmsman, the sailors, the day, the moment. Then a storm arises. What do I care? I have fulfilled my task: another has now to act, the helmsman.
If the weather is bad for sailing, we sit distracted and keep looking continually and ask, ‘What wind is blowing?’ ‘The north wind.’ What have we to do with that? ‘When will the west wind blow?’ When it so chooses, good sir.”
One of the first lessons from Stoicism, then, is to focus our attention and efforts where we have the most power and then let the universe run as it will. This will save us both a lot of energy and a lot of worry.
That is why Cicero concluded that “the actual hitting of the mark [is] to be chosen but not to be desired,”
The normal reaction might be regret, for perhaps not having done everything possible when your daughter was younger, despite the fact that you can’t really think of what else you might have done.
Epictetus tells us that regret is a waste of our emotional energy. We cannot change the past—it is outside of our control. We can, and should, learn from it, but the only situations we can do something about are those happening here and now.
So too if you long for your son or your friend, when it is not given you to have him, know that you are longing for a fig in winter time.
From Aristotle’s insight that we are by nature both social and reasoning, the Stoics derived the notion that human life is about the application of reason to social living.
Aristotle thought that contemplation is the highest purpose of human life, because our unique function in the animal world is our ability to think. As you might imagine, this purpose might make for a rather insular existence, so the Stoics shifted the emphasis very much toward the social, essentially arguing that the point of life for human beings is to use reason to build the best society that it is humanly possible to build.
we ought not to behave like beasts or sheep because doing so negates our very humanity, presumably the most precious (and natural!) thing we have. Perhaps you can begin to see why “following nature” has nothing to do with tree-hugging.
“the nature of the rational animal, that he can attain nothing good for himself, unless he contributes some service to the community. So it turns out that to do everything for his own sake is not unsocial.”
But it is another second-century Stoic philosopher, Hierocles, who perhaps best synthesized the school’s thinking on these matters in his Elements of Ethics,
cosmopolitanism, which literally means “being a citizen of the world.”
Material things are indifferent, but how we handle them is not indifferent. —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, II.5
it is the hallmark of a wise person to be able to navigate a complex situation otherwise characterized by no easily identifiable, optimal course of action.
When it comes to food, responsible people favor what is easy to obtain over what is difficult, what involves no trouble over what does, and what is available over what isn’t.”
Stoicism is about developing the tools to deal as effectively as humanly possible with the ensuing conflicts, does not demand perfection, and does not provide specific answers: those are for fools (Epictetus’s word) who think the world is black and white, good versus evil, where it is always possible to clearly tell the good guys from the bad guys. That is not the world we live in, and to pretend otherwise is more than a bit dangerous and not at all wise.
by all means go ahead and avoid pain and experience joy in your life—but not when doing so imperils your integrity. Better to endure pain in an honorable manner than to seek joy in a shameful one.
you need to be part of the lucky elite or you won’t have a good life. This outlook puts most people on the perennially losing side of things, condemning them to the pursuit of material goods because they mistakenly think that their happiness and worth depend on acquiring them. Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill: you keep running, but you ain’t goin’ nowhere.
The Stoic compromise—their lexicographic contrast between the virtues and the preferred indifferents, coupled with their treatment of the two as hierarchically ordered, incommensurable classes of goods—brilliantly overcomes the problem, retaining the best of both (philosophical) worlds.
What then is the nature of God? Is it flesh? God forbid. Land? God forbid. Fame? God forbid. It is intelligence, knowledge, right reason. In these then and nowhere else seek the true nature of the good. —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, II.8
Epictetus was arguably the most religious Stoic on record, he certainly didn’t think that God should concern Himself with every minutia pertaining to human affairs (much less with Ichneumonid insects, had he known about them), as is clear from his quip about the audaciousness of someone pretending that the whole universe should be rearranged so that his leg will not hurt.
Their preferred word for it was Logos, which can be interpreted as the Word of God (as the Christians who inherited a lot of Stoic philosophy did), or as a kind of Providence embedded in the very fabric of the universe, or even more simply as the rather straightforward observation that the cosmos can be understood rationally, regardless of how it came to be.
“You have embarked, made the voyage, and come to shore; get out. If indeed to another life, there is no want of gods, not even there. But if to a state without sensation, you will cease to be held by pains and pleasures.”
“Either there is a fatal necessity and invincible order, or a kind Providence, or a confusion without a purpose and without a director. If then there is an invincible necessity, why do you resist? But if there is a Providence that allows itself to be propitiated, make yourself worthy of the help of the divinity. But if there is a confusion without a governor, be content that in such a tempest you have yourself a certain ruling intelligence.” It hardly gets more ecumenical than this!
Of one thing beware, O man: see what is the price at which you sell your will. If you do nothing else, do not sell your will cheap. —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, I.2
Practical wisdom allows us to make decisions that improve our eudaimonia, the (ethically) good life. Courage can be physical, but more broadly refers to the moral aspect—for instance, the ability to act well under challenging circumstances, as Priscus and Malala did. Temperance makes it possible for us to control our desires and actions so that we don’t yield to excesses. Justice, for Socrates and the Stoics, refers not to an abstract theory of how society should be run, but rather to the practice of treating other human beings with dignity and fairness.
One crucial feature of the Stoic (and Socratic) conception of virtue is that the different virtues cannot be practiced independently: one cannot be both intemperate and courageous, in the Stoic-Socratic meaning of the term. Although it makes perfect sense for us to say that, for instance, an individual has shown courage in battle and yet regularly drinks to excess or is ill-tempered, for the Stoics that person would not be virtuous, because virtue is an all-or-nothing package. I never said Stoic philosophy isn’t demanding.
They found a rather surprising amount of congruence among all of these religious-philosophical traditions and identified a set of six “core” virtues: Courage: Emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal; examples include bravery, perseverance, and authenticity (honesty). Justice: Civic strengths that underlie healthy community life; examples include fairness, leadership, and citizenship or teamwork. Humanity: Interpersonal strengths that involve “tending and befriending” others; examples include love and kindness.
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As for transcendence, the Stoic Logos entails a sense of perspective about our relationship with the cosmos and our place in it. Here is one of my favorite examples, a meditation that Marcus Aurelius reminded himself to engage in regularly: “The Pythagoreans bid us in the morning look to the heavens that we may be reminded of those bodies that continually do the same things and in the same manner perform their work, and also be reminded of their purity and nudity. For there is no veil over a star.” I love the poetry of that last sentence, and I have been doing the early morning meditation from
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Both public figures and every single one of us need to cultivate virtue and character, but we also need to remain vigilant in order not to derail the ship we command, be it an entire country or our own private lives, as even an apparently inconsequential, momentary distraction can be disastrous.
And above all, we need to be cognizant of what our integrity is worth: if we decide to sell it, it shouldn’t be for cheap. It is hard to read those words and not think about political scandals and corruption, but perhaps the cleanup should start closer to home, with our own behavior, our own too-often-unacknowledged propensity to compromise principles for the sake of convenience, our lack of courage when it is called for, our mostly theoretical sense of justice, our often flaunted temperance, and our own manifestly very limited wisdom in managing whatever life happens to throw at us.
For if one shows this, a man will retire from his error of himself; but as long as you do not succeed in showing this, you need not wonder if he persists in his error, for he acts because he has an impression that he is right. —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, II.26
‘for no soul is robbed of the truth with its own consent,’ as Plato says, but the false seemed to him true.”
Arendt wrote a series of highly controversial articles for the magazine about the trial, and these were eventually collected and published in her landmark book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
In the Euthydemus dialogue, Plato has Socrates say, “Wisdom alone, is the good for man, ignorance the only evil,”
Cognitive dissonance is a very uncomfortable psychological state that occurs when someone becomes aware of the conflict between two judgments that he holds to be equally true.
Still, I worry about the same sort of thing that critics of Hannah Arendt worried about: isn’t the idea of evil being banal, of amathia, dangerously close to an excuse for horrific behavior? Doesn’t it, at the very least, encourage us to respond passively to “evil”?
The wrongdoer does not understand that he is doing harm to himself first and foremost, because he suffers from amathia, lack of knowledge of what is truly good for himself. And what is good for him is the same thing that is good for all human beings, according to the Stoics: applying reason to improve social living.
