The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual

by Ward Farnsworth

you are bothered, it must be because you care: a judgment. Instead you could decide not to care, and that would be the end of the insult for you.

The events don’t force you to think any of this; only you can do it.

always feel as though we react to things in the world; in fact we react to things in ourselves.

Yes, pain is pain: a sensation that exists no matter what we think about it. But how much bother it causes, how much attention we pay to it, what it means to us – these are judgments, and all ours to determine.

Some reactions may belong to us and yet not quite be up to us.

But fortunately, and importantly, Stoicism doesn’t care what our tastes are, and doesn’t call for reversal of our aversions and desires. It calls for detachment from them.

They look at the different ways that people react to the same events in different circumstances, times, and places. What some people fear (and can’t imagine not fearing),

It is produced by what the Stoics call our judgments, or opinions.

Men are disturbed not by the things that happen but by their opinions about those things.

Each of us is as well or badly off as we believe. The happy are those who think they are, not those who are thought to be

HAMLET: … There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

to treat how we talk to ourselves as a choice. If distress is caused by our thoughts about things rather than

You stop saying one thing to yourself and say another instead. Later you work on judgments less verbal in form.

We can choose to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be troubled by it; for things themselves have no power of their own to affect our judgments.

you are fortunate, you know this will not last long; or if you are unfortunate, you know that you aren’t really, if you don’t think you are.

When pleasures have corrupted both mind and body, nothing seems to be tolerable – not because the suffering is hard, but because the sufferer is soft.

What is it, then, that doesn’t offend your eyes in public but upsets them at home – other than your opinion, which

These things are not essentially difficult. It is we who are soft and slack.

Things are not that difficult or painful in themselves. Our weakness and cowardice make them so.

Or think about those who react less strongly than you do to something. If you see them putting up with things that you can’t, it makes your reaction seem more clearly to be your own doing.

Convention and habituation have a remarkable power to affect our judgments.

Still, it might seem surprising to describe the appetite for food as a “judgment” in the Stoic sense, because we feel it as a physical fact.

First, our appetites often are up to us

spending less energy on getting or avoiding things, and more on knowing why we want them (or don’t) and how the way we think might affect this.

A food that looks delicious can become impossible to enjoy, and cause physical revulsion, if you hear something disgusting about how it was prepared.

is not so much what you see but how you see it that matters.

An “external” can be defined as something outside ourselves or outside our power.

If Stoics are distinguished by one policy as an everyday matter, it is a refusal to worry about things beyond their control or to otherwise get worked up about them. Detachment also means not letting happiness depend on getting

Imagine wanting one thing more than another and not getting it, but not being too upset as a result.

The Stoic tries to see things as they are.

There are things up to us and things not up to us.

Things not up to us are our bodies, possessions, reputations, offices, or, in short, whatever is not our own doing.

stay detached from things that are not up to you.

“Why are you distressed? Rest assured, it’s up to you.”

So are you going to sit down and pray that your nose will stop running? Better to wipe your nose and stop praying.

An aside for those who share my interest in the etymology of insults: “moron” comes from Greek, where the word (transliterated into English) was “mōros.”

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and if they will not adapt to me, I adapt to them.

Those are viewed as errors that result from attachment to externals,

“Is health good, and disease evil?” No, you can do better than that. “What then?” To use health well is good, to use it badly is evil.

This position allows Seneca an answer to the old question of why bad things happen to good people: they don’t. Genuinely bad things occur only in the mind, and the mind of the good person is free from

Marcus Aurelius turned that idea around and made it a test: nothing is good or evil if it can happen as easily to a good person as a bad one.

Someone attached to externals is enslaved to whoever controls them; Stoic philosophy thus is a way to liberation. Epictetus

Slave, he will act as he sees fit. Why do you care about other people’s business?

One who is content to sit by the fireplace, and who knows how to manage a household without falling into quarrels and lawsuits, is as free as a Duke of Venice.

you will learn that nothing in them is frightening but the fear itself.

It is tagged as good news or bad news, as a reason for excitement or outrage, and so on. Or we give it a place in a story that we tell ourselves, long-running or new. Then we react to those labels and narratives and imaginings.

So the Stoics say that our thinking should be slowed down, and imagination should be viewed with distrust – not imagination in its creative capacity, but imagination as “the enemy of men, the father of all terrors,” as Joseph Conrad once called it.

Say nothing more to yourself than what first appearances report.

This much is reported; but it is not reported that you have been hurt.

So always stay with first appearances, and add nothing from within yourself –...