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December 22, 2019
Our experience of the world is our own doing, not the world’s doing, and the Stoic means to take responsibility for it.
We should stake our well-being on what we can control and let go of attachment to what we cannot. We generally can’t control events, or the opinions or behavior of others, or whatever else is outside ourselves. The Stoic thus considers money, fame, misfortunes and the like to be “externals” and regards them with detachment.
In sum, it is against Stoic policy to worry about things that you can’t control. What we can control, and should care about, are our own judgments and actions.
Stoics gain skill at viewing life from perspectives that encourage humility and virtue and that dissolve the misjudgments we live by.
Temple of Apollo at Delphi: know thyself; nothing in excess. The Stoics turn those maxims into a detailed philosophical practice.
Stoicism also offers a strong affirmative vision of what life is for: the pursuit of virtue. Living virtuously means living by reason, and the Stoics regard reason as calling for honesty, kindness, humility, and devotion to the greater good.
JUDGMENT
The first principle of practical Stoicism is this: we don’t react to events; we react to our judgments about them, and the judgments are up to us.
If any external thing causes you distress, it is not the thing itself that troubles you, but your own judgment about it. And this you have the power to eliminate now. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.47
The Stoic claim, in other words, is that our pleasures, griefs, desires and fears all involve three stages rather than two: not just an event and a reaction, but an event, then a judgment or opinion about it, and then a reaction (to the judgment or opinion). Our task is to notice the middle step, to understand its frequent irrationality, and to control it through the patient use of reason.
We may consider it the Stoic goal, in any event, to become conscious of our judgments and take control of them as far as we can.
Men are disturbed not by the things that happen but by their opinions about those things.
HAMLET: … There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2, 2
Take away your opinion about it, and “I have been harmed” is taken away. Take away “I have been harmed,” and the harm is taken away. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.7
Some of our reactions, when viewed in a dispassionate mood, seem obviously to be the results of our own sensitivities.
Next, the Stoics suggest that we think of others who react more strongly than we do to an event or any other provocation. From our vantage point, those others look hypersensitive. But we seem different to ourselves – not hypersensitive – only because we take our own sensitivities for granted. When everyone shares a weakness, it no longer looks like a weakness. It looks like the state of nature.
Once we take in a custom or habit, the judgments they produce feel as though they are strictly our own, not anything that was implanted and could be different. The spell of familiarity must be broken, and this is best done by looking at the great range of responses to the same things that have come to seem natural to people in different conditions.
It takes greatness of mind to judge great matters; otherwise they will seem to have defects that in truth belong to us. In the same way, certain objects that are perfectly straight will, when sunk in water, appear to the onlooker as bent or broken off. It is not so much what you see but how you see it that matters. When it comes to perceiving reality, our minds are in a fog. Seneca, Epistles 71.24
EXTERNALS
A great share of Stoicism amounts to the study of externals: what they are, how we misjudge them, and the ways that they tend to enslave us. An “external” can be defined as something outside ourselves or outside our power.
First, a principal aim of the Stoic is to regard externals without attachment. This has consequences, first, for the decisions and developments that one spends energy fussing about.
An attachment is different because it makes your happiness depend on the object of it.
There is only one road to happiness – let this rule be at hand morning, noon, and night: stay detached from things that are not up to you. Epictetus, Discourses 4.4.39
What do we admire? Externals. What do we spend our energies on? Externals. Is it any wonder, then, that we are in fear and distress? How else could it be, when we regard the events that are coming as evil? We can’t fail to be afraid, we can’t fail to be distressed. Then we say, “Lord God, let me not be distressed.” Moron, don’t you have hands? Didn’t God make them for you? So are you going to sit down and pray that your nose will stop running? Better to wipe your nose and stop praying. What, then – has he given you nothing to help with your situation? Hasn’t he given you endurance, hasn’t he
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Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and if they will not adapt to me, I adapt to them. Montaigne, Of Presumption (1580)
Chapter Three PERSPECTIVE
1. Time. We measure time by how much of it we have. A normal lifespan seems a long increment because it is the most that anyone knows of firsthand.
2. Space. The importance of our place is likewise determined, for us, by the scale we experience as we move through it: what we can see, where we can go.
3. Perishability. The scale of time and space makes all human doings seem small. To this the Stoic adds that such doings are also highly perishable: all human works, and for that matter all works of nature, soon change and are gone.
4. Applications to mortality. The perspectives encouraged by the Stoics are a countermeasure against many deceptions, vices, and misjudgments, including the fear of death.
5. Reduction. We turn to a different Stoic use of perspective – of the microscope, perhaps, rather than the telescope. Chapter 2 looked at some Stoic methods for demystifying externals: viewing them literally or reducing them to smaller elements, thus making it easier to take them lightly.
6. Repetition. Another Stoic maneuver of perspective observes the sameness of things that seem novel, thereby draining them of their power to provoke attachment.
8. Implications. We arrive at the conclusion of Seneca: We believe these affairs of ours are great because we are small. Seneca, Natural Questions III, 1 Pref. 15
