Author: William E. Irvine
ISBN: 978-0195374612
By far the best book about Stoic philosophy, the philosophy of life I try to live by.
EXCERPTS
The Stoic philosophy of life may be old, but it merits the attention of any modern individual who wishes to have a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling — who wishes, that is, to have a good life.
The Stoics realized that a life plagued with negative emotions — including anger, anxiety, fear, grief, and envy — will not be a good life.
The goal of the Stoics was not to banish emotion from life but to banish negative emotions. [Problem: We can only define the positive as good as the opposite of the negative!]
According to Seneca, what Stoics seek to discover “is how the mind may always pursue a steady and favourable course, may be well - disposed towards itself, and may view its conditions with joy.” He also asserts that someone who practices Stoic principles “must, whether he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys.”
In my research on desire, I discovered nearly unanimous agreement among thoughtful people that we are unlikely to have a good and meaningful life unless we can overcome our insatiability. There was also agreement that one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.
The Stoic claim that many of the things we desire — most notably, fame and fortune — are not worth pursuing. We will instead turn our attention to the pursuit of tranquility and what the Stoics called virtue.
Practicing Stoicism will obviously take effort, but this is true of all genuine philosophies of life. Indeed, even “enlightened hedonism” takes effort. The enlightened hedonist’s grand goal in living is to maximize the pleasure he experiences in the course of a lifetime. To practice this philosophy of life, he will spend time discovering, exploring, and ranking sources of pleasure and investigating any untoward side effects they might have. The enlightened hedonist will then devise strategies for maximizing the amount of pleasure he experiences. (Unenlightened hedonism, in which a person thoughtlessly seeks short-term gratification, is not, I think, a coherent philosophy of life.)
The Stoics fell somewhere between the Cyrenaics and the Cynics: They thought people should enjoy the good things life has to offer, including friendship and wealth, but only if they did not cling to these good things. Indeed, they thought we should periodically interrupt our enjoyment of what life has to offer to spend time contemplating the loss of whatever it is we are enjoying.
Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.
He believed hunger to be the best appetizer, and because he waited until he was hungry or thirsty before he ate or drank, “he used to partake of a barley cake with greater pleasure than others did of the costliest of foods, and enjoyed a drink from a stream of running water more than others did their Thasian wine.”
The Stoics enjoyed whatever “good things” happened to be available, but even as they did so, they prepared themselves to give up the things in question.
To be virtuous is to live as we were designed to live; it is to live, as Zeno put it, in accordance with nature.
And for what function were people designed? We have certain instincts, as do all animals. We experience hunger; this is nature’s way of getting us to nourish ourselves. We also experience lust; this is nature’s way of getting us to reproduce. But we differ from other animals in one important respect: We have the ability to reason. From this we can conclude, Zeno would assert, that we were designed to be reasonable.
We should, for example, honor our parents, be agreeable to our friends, and be concerned with the interests of our countrymen.
Stoic tranquility was a psychological state marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy.
The most important of the Roman Stoics were Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.
He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand. Misfortune weighs most heavily, he says, on those who "expect nothing but good fortune".
We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.
The easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.
How can we convince ourselves to want the things we already have? THE STOICS recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value (negative visualization) — that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would.
Furthermore, there is a difference between contemplating something bad happening and worrying about it. Contemplation is an intellectual exercise, and it is possible for us to conduct such exercises without its affecting our emotions. It is possible, for example, for a meteorologist to spend her days contemplating tornadoes without subsequently living in dread of being killed by one. In similar fashion, it is possible for a Stoic to contemplate bad things that can happen without becoming anxiety-ridden as a result.
All we have is “on loan” from Fortune, which can reclaim it without our permission—indeed, without even advance notice. Thus, “we should love all of our dear ones …, but always with the thought that we have no promise that we may keep them forever—nay, no promise even that we may keep them for long.”
More generally, war, disease, and natural disasters are tragic, inasmuch as they take from us the things we value, but they also have the power to transform those who experience them. Before, these individuals might have been sleepwalking through life; now they are joyously, thankfully alive—as alive as they have felt in decades. Before, they might have been indifferent to the world around them; now they are alert to the world’s beauty.
To be able to be satisfied with little is not a failing, it is a blessing—if, at any rate, what you seek is satisfaction.
What, I would ask, could possibly be worth sacrificing satisfaction in order to obtain?
We need to keep firmly in mind that everything we value and the people we love will someday be lost to us. If nothing else, our own death will deprive us of them. More generally, we should keep in mind that any human activity that cannot be carried on indefinitely must have a final occurrence.
There will be—or already has been!—a last time in your life that you brush your teeth, cut your hair, drive a car, mow the lawn, or play hopscotch. There will be a last time you hear the sound of snow falling, watch the moon rise, smell popcorn, feel the warmth of a child falling asleep in your arms, or make love. You will someday eat your last meal, and soon thereafter you will take your last breath. [If that doesn't make you think, I doubt anything will.]
By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. We will no longer sleepwalk through our life.
A better strategy for getting what you want, he says, is to make it your goal to want only those things that are easy to obtain—and ideally to want only those things that you can be certain of obtaining.
If you refuse to enter contests that you are capable of losing, you will never lose a contest.
Some things are up to us and some are not up to us.
Suppose we get lucky, and after wanting something that is not up to us, we succeed in getting it. In this case, we will not end up feeling “thwarted, miserable, and upset,” but during the time we wanted the thing that is not up to us, we probably experienced a degree of anxiety: Since the thing is not up to us, there was a chance that we wouldn’t get it, and this probably worried us. Thus, wanting things that are not up to us will disrupt our tranquility, even if we end up getting them. In conclusion, whenever we desire something that is not up to us, our tranquility will likely be disturbed: If we don’t get what we want, we will be upset, and if we do get what we want, we will experience anxiety in the process of getting it.
This suggests that we should understand the phrase “some things aren’t up to us” in the second way: We should take it to mean that there are things over which we don’t have complete control. If we accept this interpretation, we will want to restate Epictetus’s dichotomy of control as follows: There are things over which we have complete control and things over which we don’t have complete control.
There are two ways we can fail to have complete control over something: We might have no control at all over it, or we might have some but not complete control.
What are the things over which we have complete control? In the passage quoted above, Epictetus says we have complete control over our opinions, impulses, desires, and aversions. [I cannot agree; we can choose what to do but not what to want!]
These examples suggest that Epictetus is wrong to include our impulses, desires, and aversions in the category of things over which we have complete control. They belong instead in the category of things over which we have some but not complete control, or, in some instances, in the category of things over which we have no control at all. But having said this, I should add that it is possible that something important has been lost in translation—that in speaking of impulses, desires, and aversions, Epictetus had in mind something different than we do. What then are the things over which we have complete control? To begin with, I think we have complete control over the goals we set for ourselves. I have complete control, for example, over whether my goal is to become the next pope, a millionaire, or a monk in a Trappist monastery.
Another thing I think we have complete control over is our values. We have complete control, for example, over whether we value fame and fortune, pleasure, or tranquility.
In particular, he will be careful to set internal rather than external goals. Thus, his goal in playing tennis will not be to win a match (something external, over which he has only partial control) but to play to the best of his ability in the match (something internal, over which he has complete control). By choosing this goal, he will spare himself frustration or disappointment should he lose the match: Since it was not his goal to win the match, he will not have failed to attain his goal, as long as he played his best. His tranquility will not be disrupted.
It might be possible for someone, by spending enough time practicing goal internalization, to develop the ability not to look beyond her internalized goals—in which case they would become her “real” goals.
According to Epictetus, we should keep firmly in mind that we are merely actors in a play written by someone else—more precisely, the Fates. We cannot choose our role in this play, but regardless of the role we are assigned, we must play it to the best of our ability.
We must learn to adapt ourselves to the environment into which fate has placed us and do our best to love the people with whom fate has surrounded us. We must learn to welcome whatever falls to our lot and persuade ourselves that whatever happens to us is for the best. Indeed, according to Marcus, a good man will welcome “every experience the looms of fate may weave for him.”
One of the things we’ve got, though, is this very moment, and we have an important choice with respect to it: We can either spend this moment wishing it could be different, or we can embrace this moment. If we habitually do the former, we will spend much of our life in a state of dissatisfaction; if we habitually do the latter, we will enjoy our life.
Instead of thinking about how our situation could be worse, we refuse to think about how it could be better. In behaving fatalistically with respect to the past and present, we refuse to compare our situation with alternative, preferable situations in which we might have found or might now find ourselves. By doing this, the Stoics think, we will make our current situation, whatever it may be, more tolerable. [Happiness is reality minus expectations.]
Stoic philosophy, while teaching us to be satisfied with whatever we’ve got, also counsels us to seek certain things in life. We should, for example, strive to become better people, to practice Stoicism in our daily life. And we should strive to do our social duty.
To engage in negative visualization is to contemplate the bad things that can happen to us. Seneca recommends an extension of this technique: Besides contemplating bad things happening, we should sometimes live as if they had happened. In particular, instead of merely thinking about what it would be like to lose our wealth, we should periodically “practice poverty”: We should, that is, content ourselves with “the scantiest and cheapest fare” and with “coarse and rough dress.”
To begin with, by undertaking acts of voluntary discomfort—by, for example, choosing to be cold and hungry when we could be warm and well fed—we harden ourselves against misfortunes that might befall us in the future. If all we know is comfort, we might be traumatized when we are forced to experience pain or discomfort, as we someday almost surely will. In other words, voluntary discomfort can be thought of as a kind of vaccine: By exposing ourselves to a small amount of a weakened virus now, we create in ourselves an immunity that will protect us from a debilitating illness in the future.
A second benefit of undertaking acts of voluntary discomfort comes not in the future but immediately. A person who periodically experiences minor discomforts will grow confident that he can withstand major discomforts as well, so the prospect of experiencing such discomforts at some future time will not, at present, be a source of anxiety for him.
A third benefit of undertaking acts of voluntary discomfort is that it helps us appreciate what we already have.
Besides periodically engaging in acts of voluntary discomfort, we should, say the Stoics, periodically forgo opportunities to experience pleasure.
Intense pleasures, when captured by us, become our captors, meaning that the more pleasures a man captures, “the more masters will he have to serve.”
The most important battle any person has to fight is the battle against pleasure.
What Stoics discover, though, is that willpower is like muscle power: The more they exercise their muscles, the stronger they get, and the more they exercise their will, the stronger it gets. Indeed, by practicing Stoic self-denial techniques over a long period, Stoics can transform themselves into individuals remarkable for their courage and self-control. They will be able to do things that others dread doing, and they will be able to refrain from doing things that others cannot resist doing. They will, as a result, be thoroughly in control of themselves. This self-control makes it far more likely that they will attain the goals of their philosophy of life, and this in turn dramatically increases their chances of living a good life.
We will discover, says Epictetus, that our feelings aren’t hurt when others tell us that we know nothing or that we are “mindless fools” about things external to us. We will shrug off their insults and slights. We will also shrug off any praise they might direct our way. Other signs of progress, says Epictetus, are the following: We will stop blaming, censuring, and praising others; we will stop boasting about ourselves and how much we know; and we will blame ourselves, not external circumstances, when our desires are thwarted. And because we have gained a degree of mastery over our desires, we will find that we have fewer of them than we did before; we will find, Epictetus says, that our “impulses toward everything are diminished.”
Another sign of progress in our practice of Stoicism is that our philosophy will consist of actions rather than words.
Throughout the millennia and across cultures, those who have thought carefully about desire have drawn the conclusion that spending our days working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is unlikely to bring us either happiness or tranquility.
There will be times when we must associate with annoying, misguided, or malicious people in order to work for common interests. We can, however, be selective about whom we befriend. The Stoics therefore recommend that we avoid befriending people whose values have been corrupted, for fear that their values will contaminate ours. We should instead seek, as friends, people who share our (proper Stoic) values and in particular, people who are doing a better job than we are of living in accordance with these values. And while enjoying the companionship of these individuals, we should work hard to learn what we can from them.
Seneca advises us to avoid people who are simply whiny, “who are melancholy and bewail everything, who find pleasure in every opportunity for complaint.” He justifies this avoidance by observing that a companion “who is always upset and bemoans everything is a foe to tranquility.”
One of their sting-elimination strategies is to pause, when insulted, to consider whether what the insulter said is true. If it is, there is little reason to be upset.
One particularly powerful sting-elimination strategy is to consider the source of an insult. If I respect the source, if I value his opinions, then his critical remarks shouldn’t upset me.
Suppose, however, that I don’t respect the source of an insult; indeed, suppose that I take him to be a thoroughly contemptible individual. Under such circumstances, rather than feeling hurt by his insults, I should feel relieved: If he disapproves of what I am doing, then what I am doing is doubtless the right thing to do. What should worry me is if this contemptible person approved of what I am doing. If I say anything at all in response to his insults, the most appropriate comment would be, “I’m relieved that you feel that way about me.”
Indeed, a Stoic sage, were one to exist, would probably take the insults of his fellow humans to be like the barking of a dog. When a dog barks, we might make a mental note that the dog in question appears to dislike us, but we would be utter fools to allow ourselves to become upset by this fact, to go through the rest of the day thinking, “Oh, dear! That dog doesn’t like me!”
One other important sting-elimination strategy, say the Stoics, is to keep in mind, when insulted, that we ourselves are the source of any sting that accompanies the insult. “Remember,” says Epictetus, “that what is insulting is not the person who abuses you or hits you, but the judgment about them that they are insulting.” As a result, he says, “another person will not do you harm unless you wish it; you will be harmed at just that time at which you take yourself to be harmed.” From this it follows that if we can convince ourselves that a person has done us no harm by insulting us, his insult will carry no sting.
Even if we succeed in removing the sting of an insult, we are left with the question of how best to respond to it.
One wonderful way, say the Stoics, is with humor. Of the kinds of humor we might use in response to an insult, self-deprecating humor can be particularly effective.
Epictetus also advocates the use of self-deprecating humor. Suppose, for example, you find out that someone has been saying bad things about you. Epictetus advises you to respond not by behaving defensively but by questioning his competence as an insulter; for example, you can comment that if the insulter knew you well enough to criticize you competently, he wouldn’t have pointed to the particular failings that he did but would instead have mentioned other, much worse failings. By laughing off an insult, we are implying that we don’t take the insulter and his insults seriously. To imply this, of course, is to insult the insulter without directly doing so. It is therefore a response that is likely to deeply frustrate the insulter. For this reason, a humorous reply to an insult can be far more effective than a counterinsult would be.
The problem replying to insults with humor is that doing so requires both wit and presence of mind. Many of us lack these traits. When insulted, we stand there dumbfounded: We know we have been insulted but don’t know what to do next. If a clever response comes to us, it comes hours later, when it is of little use to us.
The Stoics realized this and as a result advocated a second way to respond to insults: with no response at all. Instead of reacting to an insult, says Musonius, we should “calmly and quietly bear what has happened.”
Refusing to respond to an insult is, paradoxically, one of the most effective responses possible. For one thing, as Seneca points out, our nonresponse can be quite disconcerting to the insulter, who will wonder whether or not we understood his insult. Furthermore, we are robbing him of the pleasure of having upset us, and he is likely to be upset as a result.
The danger in responding to insults with humor or with no response at all is that some insulters are sufficiently slow-witted that they won’t realize that by refusing to respond to their insults with counterinsults, we are displaying disdain for what they think of us. Rather than being humiliated by our response, they might be encouraged by our jokes or silence, and they might start bombarding us with an endless stream of insults.
In normal, prospective negative visualization, we imagine losing something we currently possess; in retrospective negative visualization, we imagine never having had something that we have lost. By engaging in retrospective negative visualization, Seneca thinks, we can replace our feelings of regret at having lost something with feelings of thanks for once having had it.
Seneca then sets about using rational persuasion to cure Polybius of his excessive grief. For example, he argues that the brother whose death Polybius is grieving either would or wouldn’t want Polybius to be tortured with tears. If he would want Polybius to suffer, then he isn’t worthy of tears, so Polybius should stop crying; if he wouldn’t want Polybius to suffer, then it is incumbent on Polybius, if he loves and respects his brother, to stop crying.
Epictetus might respond to this criticism by pointing out that the advice that we respond to the grief of friends by grieving ourselves is as foolish as the advice that we help someone who has been poisoned by taking poison ourselves or help someone who has the flu by intentionally catching it from him. Grief is a negative emotion and therefore one that we should, to the extent possible, avoid experiencing. If a friend is grieving, our goal should be to help her overcome her grief (or rather, if we properly internalize our goals, it should be to do our best to help her overcome her grief). If we can accomplish this by moaning insincerely, then let us do so. For us to “catch” her grief, after all, won’t help her but will hurt us.
We need to keep in mind that just because things don’t turn out the way we want them to, it doesn’t follow that someone has done us an injustice. In particular, says Seneca, we need to remember that in some cases, the person at whom we are angry in fact helped us; in such cases, what angers us is that he didn’t help us even more.
What seems vitally important to us will seem unimportant to our grandchildren. Thus, when we feel ourselves getting angry about something, we should pause to consider its cosmic (in)significance.
People are unhappy, the Stoics argue, in large part because they are confused about what is valuable. Because of their confusion, they spend their days pursuing things that, rather than making them happy, make them anxious and miserable.
Stoics value their freedom, and they are therefore reluctant to do anything that will give others power over them. But if we seek social status, we give other people power over us: We have to do things calculated to make them admire us, and we have to refrain from doing things that will trigger their disfavor. Epictetus therefore advises us not to seek social status, since if we make it our goal to please others, we will no longer be free to please ourselves. We will, he says, have enslaved ourselves. If we wish to retain our freedom, says Epictetus, we must be careful, while dealing with other people, to be indifferent to what they think of us. Furthermore, we should be consistent in our indifference; we should, in other words, be as dismissive of their approval as we are of their disapproval. Indeed, Epictetus says that when others praise us, the proper response is to laugh at them. (But not out loud! Although Epictetus and the other Stoics think we should be indifferent to people’s opinions of us, they would advise us to conceal our indifference. After all, to tell someone else that you don’t care what he thinks is quite possibly the worst insult you can inflict.)
Marcus also offers some words of advice to those who value what many would take to be the ultimate form of fame: immortal fame. Such fame, Marcus says, is “an empty, hollow thing.” After all, think about how foolish it is to want to be remembered after we die. For one thing, since we are dead, we will not be able to enjoy our fame. For another, we are foolish to think that future generations will praise us, without even having met us, when we find it so difficult to praise our contemporaries, even though we meet them routinely.
In order to win the admiration of other people, we will have to adopt their values. More precisely, we will have to live a life that is successful according to their notion of success. (If we are living what they take to be an unsuccessful life, they will have no reason to admire us.) Consequently, before we try to win the admiration of these other people, we should stop to ask whether their notion of success is compatible with ours. More important, we should stop to ask whether these people, by pursuing whatever it is they value, are gaining the tranquility we seek. If they aren’t, we should be more than willing to forgo their admiration.
Many people are haunted by a fear that in some cases significantly constrains their freedom, namely, the fear of failure. There are, to be sure, failures that any sensible person will want to avoid—those failures, for example, that result in death or disfigurement. The failures that many people seek to avoid, though, will not cost them their life or health. The cost of failure is instead having to endure the open mockery, or maybe the silent pity, of those who learn of their failure. It is better, failure-averse people reason, not even to attempt an undertaking than to run the risk of public humiliation. Realize that many other people, including, quite possibly, your friends and relatives, want you to fail in your undertakings. They may not tell you this to your face, but this doesn’t mean that they aren’t silently rooting against you. People do this in part because your success makes them look bad and therefore makes them uncomfortable: If you can succeed, why can’t they? Consequently, if you attempt something daring they might ridicule you, predict disaster, and try to talk you out of pursuing your goal. If, despite their warnings, you make your attempt and succeed, they might finally congratulate you—or they might not.
Consider again the woman, whose goal is to write a novel. Suppose she tells her friends, relatives, and coworkers about her literary aspirations. Some of those she confides in will be genuinely encouraging. Others will respond to her announcement, though, with gleeful pessimism. They might predict that she will never finish the novel. (And to annoy her, they might, with clocklike regularity, ask how the novel is coming along.) If she finishes it, they might predict that she will never find a publisher for it. If she finds a publisher, they might predict that the novel will not sell well. And if it sells well, they might hold up her success as evidence of the low standards of the book-buying public. It is, of course, possible for this woman to win the approval of these naysayers: She need only abandon her dream of becoming a novelist. If she does this, the naysayers will recognize her as a kindred spirit and will welcome her with open arms. They will invite her to sit with them on a comfortable couch somewhere and join them in mocking those individuals, who pursue their dreams despite the possibility of failure. But is this really the company she wants to keep? Does she really want to abandon the pursuit of her dream in order to win these individuals' acceptance?
Ironically, by refusing to seek the admiration of other people, Stoics might succeed in gaining their (perhaps grudging) admiration. Many people, for example, will construe the Stoics’ indifference to public opinion as a sign of self-confidence: Only someone who really knows who she is—someone who, as they say, feels good about herself—would display this kind of indifference. These people might wish that they, too, could ignore what other people thought of them.
Besides valuing fame, people typically value wealth. These two values may seem independent, but a case can be made that the primary reason we seek wealth is that we seek fame. More precisely, we seek wealth because we realize that the material goods our wealth can buy us will win the admiration of other people and thereby confer on us a degree of fame. But if fame isn’t worth pursuing, and if our primary reason for seeking wealth is so we can gain fame, then wealth shouldn’t be worth pursuing either. And according to the Stoics, it isn’t.
When, as the result of being exposed to luxurious living, people become hard to please, a curious thing happens. Rather than mourning the loss of their ability to enjoy simple things, they take pride in their newly gained inability to enjoy anything but “the best.” The Stoics, however, would pity these individuals. They would point out that by undermining their ability to enjoy simple, easily obtainable things—bowls of macaroni and cheese, for example—these individuals have seriously impaired their ability to enjoy life.
What will a Stoic do if, despite not pursuing wealth, she finds herself well off? Stoicism does not require her to renounce wealth; it allows her to enjoy it and use it to the benefit of herself and those around her. It does, however, require her enjoyment to be thoughtful. She must keep firmly in mind that her wealth can be snatched from her; indeed, she should spend time preparing herself for the loss of it—by, for example, periodically practicing poverty. She must also keep in mind that unless she is careful, enjoyment of her wealth can undermine her character and her capacity to enjoy life. She will, for this reason, steer clear of a luxurious lifestyle.
To many modern individuals, such behavior is inexplicable. They feel this way in part because to them, nothing is worth dying for.
The Stoics would respond to such thinking by asking whether a life in which nothing is worth dying for can possibly be worth living.
More generally, having a philosophy of life, whether it be Stoicism or some other philosophy, can dramatically simplify everyday living. If you have a philosophy of life, decision making is relatively straightforward: When choosing between the options life offers, you simply choose the one most likely to help you attain the goals set forth by your philosophy of life. In the absence of a philosophy of life, though, even relatively simple choices can degenerate into meaning-of-life crises. It is, after all, hard to know what to choose when you aren’t really sure what you want. The most important reason for adopting a philosophy of life, though, is that if we lack one, there is a danger that we will mislive—that we will spend our life pursuing goals that aren’t worth attaining or will pursue worthwhile goals in a foolish manner and will therefore fail to attain them.
We need, in other words, to learn how to enjoy things without feeling entitled to them and without clinging to them.
“Recent findings suggest that reticence and suppression of feelings, far from compromising one’s psychological well-being, can be healthy and adaptive. For many temperaments, an excessive focus on introspection and self-disclosure is depressing. Victims of loss and tragedy differ widely in their reactions: Some benefit from therapeutic intervention; most do not and should not be coerced by mental health professionals into emotionally correct responses. Trauma and grief counselors have erred massively in this direction.” These authors add that they reject the doctrine, now commonly accepted, that “uninhibited emotional openness is essential to mental health.”
According to Seneca, “A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.”
Modern politics presents another obstacle to the acceptance of Stoicism. The world is full of politicians who tell us that if we are unhappy it isn’t our fault. To the contrary, our unhappiness is caused by something the government did to us or is failing to do for us. We citizens are encouraged, in our pursuit of happiness, to resort to politics rather than philosophy.
More significantly, we are encouraged to vote for the candidate who claims to possess the ability, by skillfully using the powers of government, to make us happy.
The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation. More precisely, they thought the first step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances. The second step in transforming a society is to change people’s external circumstances. The Stoics would add that if we fail to transform ourselves, then no matter how much we transform the society in which we live, we are unlikely to have a good life.
In the introduction to this book, I explained that philosophies of life have two components: They tell us what things in life are and aren’t worth pursuing, and they tell us how to gain the things that are worth having. The Stoics, as we have seen, thought tranquility was worth pursuing, and the tranquility they sought, it will be remembered, is a psychological state in which we experience few negative emotions, such as anxiety, grief, and fear, but an abundance of positive emotions, especially joy. The Stoics did not argue that tranquility was valuable; rather, they assumed that in the lives of most people its value would at some point become apparent.
We are social creatures; we will be miserable if we try to cut off contact with other people. Therefore, if what we seek is tranquility, we should form and maintain relations with others. In doing so, though, we should be careful about whom we befriend. We should also, to the extent possible, avoid people whose values are corrupt, for fear that their values will contaminate ours.
The Stoics pointed to two principal sources of human unhappiness—our insatiability and our tendency to worry about things beyond our control.
To conquer our insatiability, the Stoics advise us to engage in negative visualization. We should contemplate the impermanence of all things. We should imagine ourselves losing the things we most value, including possessions and loved ones. We should also imagine the loss of our own life. If we do this, we will come to appreciate the things we now have, and because we appreciate them, we will be less likely to form desires for other things. And besides simply imagining that things could be worse than they are, we should sometimes cause things to be worse than they are, we should sometimes cause things to be worse than they would otherwise be; Seneca advises us to “practice poverty,” and Musonius advises us voluntarily to forgo opportunities for pleasure and comfort.
To curb our tendency to worry about things beyond our control, the Stoics advise us to perform a kind of triage with respect to the elements of our life and sort them into those we have no control over, those we have complete control over, and those we have some but not complete control over. Having done this, we should not bother about things over which we have no control. Instead, we should spend some of our time dealing with things over which we have complete control, such as our goals and values, and spend most of our time dealing with things over which we have some but not complete control. If we do this, we will avoid experiencing much needless anxiety.
We have the abilities we do because possessing them enabled our evolutionary ancestors to survive and reproduce. From this it does not follow, though, that we must use these abilities to survive and reproduce. Indeed, thanks to our reasoning ability, we have it in our power to “misuse” our evolutionary inheritance.
In much the same way, there is no one philosophy of life that is ideal for everyone, and there are some philosophies of life that no one should adopt. Furthermore, in almost all cases, a person is better off to adopt a less than ideal philosophy of life than to try to live with no philosophy at all.
Readers wishing to sample Epictetus are encouraged to start with his Handbook (also known as his Manual or Encheiridion). It has the advantage of being short, easily obtainable, and philosophically accessible. In the world of philosophical literature, it stands out as a gem.
