How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life

by Massimo Pigliucci

In reality, Stoicism is not about suppressing or hiding emotion—rather, it is about acknowledging our emotions, reflecting on what causes them, and redirecting them for our own good.

One of the key tenets of Stoicism is that we ought to recognize, and take seriously, the difference between what we can and cannot master.

Stoicism was very much a philosophy of social engagement and encouraged love for all humankind and Nature as well.

While sympathetic to the idea that lack of religious affiliation should be just as acceptable a choice in life as any religious one, and strongly supportive of the constitutional separation of church and state in the United States and elsewhere, I have also grown increasingly dissatisfied with (make that downright irritated by) the intolerant anger of the so-called New Atheists, represented by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, among others.

By contrast, in Stoicism I have found a rational, science-friendly philosophy that includes a metaphysics with a spiritual dimension, is explicitly open to revision, and, most importantly, is eminently practical. The Stoics accepted the scientific principle of universal causality: everything has a cause, and everything in the universe unfolds according to natural processes. There is no room for spooky transcendental stuff.

But they also believed that the universe is structured according to what they called the Logos, which can be interpreted as either God or simply what is sometimes termed “Einstein’s god”: the simple, indubitable fact that Nature is understandable by reason.

Life, for the Stoics, is an ongoing project, and death, its logical, natural end point, is nothing special in and of itself and nothing that we should particularly fear.

Stoicism is the philosophical root of a number of evidence-based psychological therapies, including Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy and Albert Ellis’s rational emotive behavior therapy. Of Ellis it has been said that “no individual—not even Freud himself—has had a greater impact on modern psychotherapy.”

Frankl was a neurologist and psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust and wrote the best-selling book Man’s Search for Meaning. His moving and inspiring story of resilience can be read as a contemporary example of Stoicism in practice.

Another compelling account of Stoicism is provided by Vice Admiral James Stockdale in his memoir In Love and War. Stockdale famously credited Stoicism (and in particular his readings of Epictetus) for his survival under prolonged horrid conditions in a Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp.

Also owing a significant debt to Stoicism is the increasingly diverse family of practices that goes under the general rubric of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which was initially deployed to treat depression and now is more widely applied to a variety of mental conditions.

Stoicism, like any life philosophy, may not appeal to or work for everyone. It is rather demanding, stipulating that moral character is the only truly worthy thing to cultivate; health, education, and even wealth are considered “preferred indifferents” (although Stoics don’t advocate asceticism, and many of them historically enjoyed the good things in life).

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.

Zeno did follow Crates and became his student. One of the first things he learned from his new teacher was to practice not being ashamed of things of which there is nothing to be ashamed.

While initially his followers were, predictably enough, called Zenonians, 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.

After Cleanthes, Zeno’s pupil and the second head of the Stoa, came another pivotal figure in the history of our philosophical movement: Chrysippus of Soli, who was a long-distance runner before he turned to philosophy.

The early Stoics were heavily influenced by previous philosophical schools and thinkers, in particular by Socrates and by the Cynics, but also by the Academics (followers of Plato)

Each of these schools was “eudaimonic”—that is, their objective was to figure out the best way of living a human life. Some emphasized virtue (the Peripatetics, the Cynics, and the Stoics), and others pleasure (the Epicureans, the Cyrenaics) while still others were more interested in metaphysics (the Academics) or in the limits of human knowledge (the Skeptics). All, however, aimed at the same goal: a flourishing existence.

This went on for a while, until in 155 BCE something very important happened to ancient philosophy: the heads of the Stoa (Diogenes of Babylon), the Academy, and the Peripatetic school were chosen as ambassadors to represent Athens in political negotiations with Rome.

the philosophers gave packed lectures in the capital, shocking the rather conservative Roman establishment and igniting an interest in philosophy among the Romans for the first time.

Then, during the years 88–86 BCE, two philosophers, the Peripatetic Athenion and the Epicurean Aristion, briefly in turn gained absolute power in Athens. (Imagine that: a philosopher turned dictator!) However, they made the strategically fatal mistake of siding with King Mithridates against the Romans, an alliance that eventually led to the sack of Athens. The episode spelled the end of that venerable city as the philosophical capital of the ancient world, as major exponents of all schools moved to quieter places, including Rhodes, Alexandria, and especially Rome itself. It was a pivotal moment in the history of Western philosophy. This transitional, second period of Stoic history is referred to as the “middle Stoa.”

Eventually, the Roman Republic—after the death of Julius Caesar and the ascent to power of Octavian Augustus—gave way to the Empire. Stoicism thrived as a major school during this time, known as the “late Stoa.”

By the time Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 312 CE, Stoicism was in decline, as were a number of other schools of thought. Eventually, the Byzantine emperor Justinian closed the Academy in 529 CE, thus ending the ancient Greco-Roman philosophical tradition altogether.

The idea of Stoicism, however, survived in the writings of the many historical figures who were influenced by it (including those who were sometimes critical of it), among them some of the Early Church Fathers, Augustine, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, Erasmus, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Montesquieu, and Spinoza. Modern Existentialism and even neo-orthodox Protestant theology have also been influenced by Stoicism. In the twentieth century, Stoicism saw a resurgence after the Second World War, when, as we have seen, it inspired Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, Albert Ellis’s rational emotive behavior therapy, and the broad family of cognitive behavioral therapies.

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).

(The Stoics believed in God, though theirs was a material God immanent in the cosmos.)

The Stoics used several metaphors to get their point across. One of the most incisive is that of a garden, introduced by Chrysippus, who said that the fruits of the garden represent the ethics. To get good fruits we must nurture the plants with fine nutrients: the soil of the garden, then, is the physics, providing our understanding of the world in which we live. Moreover, our “garden” needs to be fenced off from unwanted and destructive influences, or it will be taken over by weeds and nothing good will grow in it: the fence is the logic, keeping bad reasoning out of the way.

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).

Shantideva, an eighth-century Buddhist scholar, similarly wrote: “If there’s a remedy when trouble strikes / What reason is there for dejection? / And if there is no help for it / What use is there in being glum?”

One of Epictetus’s crucial points is that we have a strange tendency to worry about, and concentrate our energies on, precisely those things we cannot control.

On the contrary, the Stoics say, we should pay attention to the parameters in life’s equation that we do control or influence: making sure that we have embarked on a voyage we really want to make, and for good reasons; spending some time researching the best crew (airline) for our ship (plane); and making related preparations. 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.

As a biologist specializing precisely in the study of nature versus nurture, I cannot stress enough just how much our habits are shaped by the early interaction between our genes and the environment of our infancy and childhood.

No, your confidence lies in knowing that you did whatever was in your power to do, because that, and only that, is under your control.

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.

Rather, they were wise enough to make the distinction between their internal goals, over which they had control, and the external outcome, which they could influence but not control. As the Serenity Prayer says, it is the hallmark of a mature and wise person to realize that difference.

I keep another famous story of Stoic equanimity in mind whenever I find myself in difficult circumstances—which, luckily for me, are usually far less challenging than those faced by the protagonist of the story. Paconius Agrippinus was a first-century Stoic whose father had been put to death by the emperor Tiberius, allegedly for treason. In the year 67 ce, Agrippinus faced the same accusation (probably also

unjustified) from another emperor, Nero. Epictetus recounts what unfolded: “News was brought him, ‘Your trial is on in the Senate!’ ‘Good luck to it, but the fifth hour is come’—this was the hour when he used to take his exercise and have a cold bath—‘let us go and take exercise.’ When he had taken his exercise they came and told him, ‘You are condemned.’ ‘Exile or death?’ he as...

this is precisely the power of Stoicism: the internalization of the basic truth that we can control our behaviors but not their outcomes—let alone the outcomes of other people’s behaviors—leads to the calm acceptance of whatever happens, secure in the knowledge that we have done our best given the circumstances.

Thrasea Paetus, was also accused by Nero’s sycophants and was not so lucky. He was given the liberum mortis arbitrium, a free choice of death, as the Romans euphemistically put it: he was ordered to commit suicide. Accordingly, he turned to his dining companions and calmly excused himself, retired to his bedroom, and invited the quaestor who had brought the emperor’s order to witness while he slit his veins. He then awaited his death while conversing with his friend Demetrius, a philosopher of the rival school of the Cynics, about the nature of the soul.

In the first place, the principal and most important thing, on the very threshold so to speak, is that when you are attached to a thing, not a thing which cannot be taken away but anything like a water jug, or a crystal cup, you should bear in mind what it is, that you may not be disturbed when it is broken. So should it be with persons; if you kiss your child, or brother, or friend… you must remind yourself that you love a mortal, and that nothing that you love is your very

own; it is given you for the moment, not for ever nor inseparably, but like a fig or a bunch of grapes at the appointed season of the year, and if you long for it in winter you are a fool. 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.

(Marcus’s personal physician was Galen, one of the most famous doctors of antiquity.)

Understanding this is not just a way to maintain sanity when a loved one dies, or a dear friend leaves for another country. (Exile was common then, just as moving for economic reasons or to escape violence and turmoil is now.) Facing this reality also reminds us to enjoy the company and love of our fellow humans as much as possible while we can, trying hard not to take them for granted, because it is certain that one day we and they will be gone and the only right “season” for appreciating them will have passed. We always live hic et nunc—here and now.

I was reminded of just how easy it is to manipulate people emotionally, playing on their fears and anger. It reinforced for me the Stoic idea that such emotions should never be given assent, but always kept in check in favor of developing more positive attitudes—such as, in this case, by trying to rationally understand why events were unfolding as they were and where the country was headed as a consequence.

The difference between Aristotle and the Stoics may seem subtle, but it is crucial: 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.

So, for instance, leaves of a certain shape are more suited to life in the desert, where there is plenty of light but little water, while differently shaped leaves are better adapted to life on the floor of the rain forest, where water is abundant but light is scarce. In other words, these characteristics affect the two things that really matter—biologically speaking—for any living being on the planet: its survival and, even more crucially, its ability to reproduce. Finally, there is a correlation between the characteristics of parents and

their offspring, because some traits are passed from generation to generation.

are they arguing that something is good because it is natural, never mind that a good number of natural things are actually quite bad for us?