The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual

by Ward Farnsworth

Plutarch had a funny way of expressing this. This then we should practice and work on first of all – like the man who threw a stone at his dog but missed and hit his stepmother. “Not so bad!” he said. For it is possible to change what we get out of things that do not go as we wish. Diogenes was driven into exile: “Not so bad!” – for it was after his banishment that he took up philosophy. Plutarch, On Tranquility of Mind 6 (467c) 9. Point of view. As we have seen elsewhere, much of Stoicism amounts to the art of perspective – that is, of finding the most useful point of view from which to look at anything that happens. The Stoic learns to see things from angles more helpful than the self-centered one that we are prone to use without reflection. As another example, Stoics respond to their own adversities by asking what they think when the same things happen to others. If your neighbor’s slave has broken his wine cup, it is common to say right away that “These things happen.” When your own cup is broken, your reaction should obviously be the same as when the neighbor’s cup was broken. Apply the same idea to more important things. Someone else’s child has died, or his wife: there is no one who wouldn’t say, “This is our human lot.” Yet when someone’s own child dies, right away it’s “Woe to me, how wretched I am!” We have to remember how we feel when we hear the same thing about others. Epictetus, Enchiridion 26