It’s been more than four years since I interviewed you about Stoicism, and since then quite a few new books have been published on the subject. why do you think stoicism is proving so popular?
It’s hard to say for sure, of course. someone should do a sociology thesis on this! I guess it has to do with a combination of factors.
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First of all, Stoicism is a strong philosophy of life, analogous to, for example, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. so it’s no surprise that at a time when mainstream religion is losing its appeal, people are turning to secular or at least theologically neutral approaches to living the good life.
Secondly, Stoicism originated and became popular, way back in the Hellenistic period, at a time of upheaval, when society was changing dramatically and people felt they had no control over what was happening. happening. This is the situation we are experiencing now, in the second decade of the 21st century. Although our focus is currently on a pandemic, we must not forget that we still face the prospect of climate breakdown, are under constant threat of nuclear armageddon, and continue to experience dramatic political upheaval and civil unrest. people need some kind of ethical compass to live and maybe even thrive through this kind of thing.
Third, despite all the negative comments we can spout about social media, it makes it so much easier to discover new ideas and especially share them with others. the main stoic interest group on facebook now has over 82,000 members, and other similar groups have sprung up for people interested in practicing stoicism locally (italy, france, portugal, brazil, india, etc.), or for those wishing to look for particular aspects or applications of philosophy (stoicism and military stoicism, politically progressive, and of course stoic quotes!).
Ultimately, there has been the deliberate and concerted effort of a relatively small number of people, largely amalgamated around two organizations: Modern Stoicism and the Stoic Brotherhood. the first group organizes the annual stoic week and stoicon events, and has been fostering a series of smaller local “stoicon-x” gatherings; the second is aimed at helping people create local “stoas”, connecting in person, as much as currently possible due to covid of course.
Are there any new books on Stoicism that you find particularly interesting?
yeah, the last few years have seemed like quite a few new entries! i would start by mentioning how to think like a roman emperor by donald robertson, a philosophical biography of marcus aurelius, which uses key moments in the emperor’s life to introduce readers to the principles and practice of stoicism, updated based on the author’s experience as a cognitive behavioral therapist.
Then there is William Irvine’s Stoic Challenge, which uses a crucial tool in Stoicism, what modern psychologists call the framing effect, to change the way we think about setbacks. When something happens that isn’t according to your plans, like, you know, being stuck at home for months due to a pandemic, reframe the situation in your mind as a challenge thrown at you by the universe. track how well you respond to the challenge, including using a self-assessment rubric, and when you feel the challenge is over, give yourself a thorough assessment. there is very good empirical evidence that this actually helps significantly.
A third book I’d like to mention is Lectures in Stoicism by John Sellars, written by one of the leading scholars of ancient and modern Stoic philosophy. It is brief and organized around seven basic and very useful concepts: the philosopher as a doctor, what we control, the problem of emotions, facing adversity, our place in nature, life and death, and how to live together.
You’ve also published a couple of books dealing with Stoic topics. What are they and how would you describe your books?
yeah, I’ve been pretty active too. After my first book, How to Be a Stoic, I co-wrote with Gregory Lopez A Handbook for New Stoics (British Title: Living Like a Stoic), which is quite a unique entry in the modern canon. presents 52 exercises for practicing Stoicism, which people can sample to tailor their practice to their specific needs. it is a practical book, meant to be written, and the exercises are grouped according to the three “disciplines” of the second-century Stoic epictetus: desire (i.e., how to reorient our priorities), action (i.e., how to deal with other people) and assent (i.e. how to improve our judgment).
and speaking of epictetus, my latest book will be out in the uk on 9/17, titled the stoic guide to a happy life (american title: a field guide to a happy life), and it’s a complete rewrite from one of the most important texts of ancient stoicism, the enchiridion (or manual) of epictetus. the idea is that stoicism is now 23 centuries old, and that just as modern christians or buddhists don’t necessarily stick to the original version of their philosophies, stoics need to bring things up to date for the 21st century, taking into account progress incurred in the meantime by science and philosophy.
so yes, stoicism is becoming more popular and seems to be here to stay. and I think that’s a good thing. this particular philosophy may not be for everyone, and it’s certainly not the only way to live a good life. but one of the most rewarding things that has happened to me since I started writing about it is the constant stream of testimonials about the fact that it really helps people. just as it happened in athens around the year 300 a. c., when zeno of citium started things.
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Stoicism, unlike much contemporary philosophy, places great emphasis on living well: the person who studies Stoicism, if sincere, will also practice it. I know you are both a theoretician and a practitioner. Could you tell us a bit about how you came to Stoicism?
We’ll come back to the theoretical part because I’m definitely not a scholar of ancient philosophy, so I’m not a theorist in that sense, but I’m interested in Stoicism as a theory and practice for today’s world. how did i get to that? It was a long and winding road. A few years ago I went through a mid-life crisis and switched from my first academic career as an evolutionary biologist to becoming a philosopher. within philosophy, I am mainly interested in the philosophy of science, but you cannot switch to philosophy and start studying it seriously and limit yourself to your own technical field of specialization; at least you can, but I don’t think you should.
I started reading more broadly and, coming into philosophy in the second half of my life, I had a lot to catch up on. I started reading about ethics. I read Kant and Mill, and analyzed modern ethics in terms of deontology and utilitarianism in all its forms. I found those ways of understanding ethics deficient. they are wonderful authors, but it didn’t click with me. Then I remembered studying philosophy in high school: I grew up in Italy, where three years of history of philosophy are required. I remembered reading about the ancient Greeks and Romans, and had vague recollections that these people had a very different conception of ethics.
The first stop there was obviously Aristotle. I rediscovered virtue ethics, and that really appealed to me right away. Then I went beyond Aristotle and read what little is available about Epicureanism and some of the other Hellenistic schools of virtue ethics. all this interested me because it clearly embodied a much broader conception of ethics. most contemporary ethics focuses on answering narrower questions like: “is this action right or wrong?” and “under what circumstances is it allowed or not allowed?”
“for the ancients, ethics was the study of how to live a good life”
The ancients had a much broader conception of ethics. ethics, for them, was the study of how to live a good life. that’s what really attracted me. after reading aristotle, i went on to explore other post-socratic philosophers. of course i also went back and read the platonic dialogues to see the source of all this. then i found out about an event taking place in the uk called stoic week; I remembered the stoicism of studying it in high school. in fact, i grew up with that tradition because stoicism was the dominant philosophy in ancient rome, and i studied roman history in school.
I had a vague idea that it was the attitude Mr. Spock adopts in Star Trek: going through life with a stiff upper lip, or something. so the first time i heard about the stoic week i thought, ‘that’s weird’, and i didn’t pay much attention to it. I read an article about that. the following year the same thing happened, and in the meantime of course I kept reading about virtue ethics. I eventually said to myself, ‘you know, maybe it’s time to take a second look at Stoicism and see what these people are really doing.’ why did they choose to celebrate Stoic week instead of Epicurean week, Aristotelian week or whatever? then i got hooked.
as soon as i read the modern stoicism blog on the university of exeter site i started exploring on my own and all of a sudden things started to click and fit together and the puzzle was coming together. that’s how i started. the first book i read after this renewed interest in stoicism was epictetus’s speeches.
That’s your first choice of books. Epictetus, famous, was a slave in his early life, wasn’t he?
yes. she was a very interesting figure. he was a slave, born in hierapolis, which is modern pamukkale in turkey, which was a greek city at the time and became a roman colony in the late 1st or early 2nd century. he was born a slave and was mistreated when he was young: his master, whether through carelessness or malice, broke his leg, and as a result he was crippled all his life. Then, around the age of 15, he was bought by a much better teacher, who turned out to be Nero’s personal secretary.
epictetus was taken to rome and for a time lived at the court of nero. then nero became more deranged both in life and in the way he conducted the empire’s business, and eventually that led to revolt. Nero committed suicide, well actually Nero failed his suicide attempt and it was his secretary, Epictetus’s master, who helped him in the end, so he was the one who killed Nero.
“Domitian expelled all the philosophers from Rome and sent them into exile”
As a result of these events, Epictetus began to have his own almost independent life in Rome. He eventually became a freedman, which was not unusual for brilliant slaves in ancient Rome. Meanwhile, under the tutelage of his second teacher, he began to read and learn about philosophy, and became a student of Musonius Rufus. musonius was an important stoic philosopher in ancient rome. epictetus studied with him for several years and eventually began teaching on his own.
Meanwhile, various political events took place in Rome: there was one emperor after another. one was domitian, who was a bit unhinged and didn’t particularly like philosophers – all this talk about virtue and how you should do things instead of how you actually do things, i guess i didn’t agree with him. Domitian expelled all the philosophers from Rome and sent them into exile.
really? she had never heard that.
yes, this is something few people hear about. when we think of rome we think of the persecution of christians, but in reality the philosophers, and in particular the stoics, were persecuted by various roman emperors because they really didn’t like this constant reminder that you should be doing better than you are making. . several philosophers were executed and others exiled. Musonius Rufus, teacher of Epictetus, was exiled twice. Epictetus was also exiled by Domitian. he went to northwestern greece to a place called nicopolis and there he established his new school. he was around 40 years old at the time. he later he was called to rome, but he refused to leave. He lived in Nicopolis until the ripe old age of 80, which for the time was remarkable.
presumably, that’s the equivalent of 200 today.
yes. it was really amazing. He continued to teach and built up a reputation whereby quite wealthy people sent his sons to Nicopolis to study under Epictetus and one of the later emperors, Hadrian, became a good friend of his. Hadrian was impressed by Epictetus and went to visit him, they met several times and became friends. Epictetus, at the end of his life, took a wife his own age, apparently so that she could help him raise a son fathered by a friend of Epictetus. The child was destined to be exposed, which was the Roman euphemism for being left to fend for itself in the elements, and likely to die.
“Epictetus was a slave who became an outstanding philosopher and teacher, and became a friend of the emperors”
Epictetus was an interesting life: a slave who becomes an outstanding philosopher and teacher, who befriends emperors and is expelled by other emperors: it’s fascinating. Epictetus wrote no book; he was a teacher, in the same vein as socrates, who made an effort not to write down his ideas. the two books we have on epictetus are called the discourses, and the enchiridion—’enchiridion’ means ‘manual’.
Both the speeches and the manual were prepared by one of the most brilliant students of Epictetus, Arian. arian was probably around 23 years old when he did this. after a few years as a student of Epictetus, he became a historian and writer in his own right. He wrote the definitive account of Alexander the Great’s expedition. arian was well known in the ancient world.
Do many of your works survive?
some of his works survive. he collected eight volumes of the speeches, basically these are his handwritten notes from epictetus’ lectures. of those eight books, unfortunately only four remain. the other four were lost somewhere during the middle ages. The Enchiridion, the manual, is the short version that Arian put together by collecting the best bits of the speeches. so that’s all we have of epictetus today: the four surviving volumes of the speeches and then the enchiridion, which is very short.
What is the main thesis of the speeches? why is it so interesting?
It’s interesting because it guides you on how to live your life from a Stoic perspective. the chapter titles are topics that Epictetus discussed with his students, and these topics were often very practical. there is very little theoretical philosophy in Epictetus. he was not interested in metaphysics. in fact, he explicitly told his students that whatever the nature of the world is, it makes no difference to human life. if the universe is made of atoms, or if it’s made of something else, those are interesting questions but they won’t affect your life. in that sense he is an unusual stoic because most of the stoics were into system building, especially the early ones: the greek stoics before philosophy moved to rome, they made important contributions to logic, they wrote a lot about metaphysics. Epictetus focused on ethics, which is the third Stoic concern.
so he’s metaphysically agnostic?
That’s right. he says that what turns out to be turns out to be. there are people interested in those things and they’ll figure it out, but really when you have to deal with your daily life and the challenges that it brings, that’s not going to be particularly helpful.
Am I correct that many of the Stoics based their ethics on metaphysics, so metaphysics actually shaped ethics?
yes. that’s an interesting question. the early Stoics thought there were three areas of philosophical inquiry. what they called “physics” is what we would describe today as a combination of metaphysics and natural sciences. their “logic” we would still call logic today, but for them it included epistemology, cognitive science, and psychology. and then there was ‘ethics’, which was the study of how to live your life. his idea was that to figure out how to live your life, you needed to understand how the universe works and what your place in it was, that would be ‘physics’, and you also needed to understand how human beings reason and fail to reason well; that’s where the ‘logic’ came in.
now epictetus didn’t necessarily reject this, he just said that there were many different alternatives, many different ways of doing or understanding physics and understanding logic that would support the same way of living your life. So, in modern terms, we would say that Epictetus thought that physics and logic were relevant at some level to ethics, but underdetermine it. It’s not like you need to know all the details about how the world works to figure out how to live your life.
is that almost a mandate not to get angry with metaphysical questions at the expense of living well?
correct. exactly. in fact, Epictetus says precisely this in several places in the speeches. there are a couple of places, for example, where he says we can have interesting discussions about metaphysics or logic, but those discussions have to do with specific ethical issues. if you’re just missing the mark on logic, then you’re doing something different that isn’t particularly interesting or particularly relevant to living your life.
“some things are in your control and some things are not in your control”
In general terms, the speeches are about how to live your life: they present the basic principles of Stoicism over and over again, from different angles and exploring the consequences in different contexts. Arguably the most basic, which Epictetus insists on several times, and is also how the enchiridion begins, is his famous dichotomy of control: he says, some things are under your control and other things are not under your control. then list the types of things that are under your control and those that are not: the things under your control are your behavior, your decisions, your rational thought processes; the things that are not under your control are all externalities: your health, your wealth, your education, your stature in life, your reputation. It’s not that you can’t influence things that aren’t under your control, of course you can. he explicitly says so. but they are not completely under your control. you can only try to be healthy and rich and educated and have a good life in the sense of externalities but, you know, shit happens, so to speak, that’s not a direct quote, and stoicism in large part, esp epictetus stoicism, it’s about how to deal with a situation where shit really happens. what do you do then? How do you react in life when things don’t go your way? The dichotomy of control is crucial in Stoicism, particularly in the philosophy of Epictetus.
When I started reading Stoic works, I started taking furious notes and highlighting things and then went back to quotes one after another. I just want to read you one that is right at the beginning of the speeches, volume 1, chapter 1.32, it is an example of the dichotomy of control, but it is also an example of something that immediately endeared me to epictetus: his sense of humor. he has a very wicked sense of humor, a very interesting sense of humor. here is the quote: I have to die. if it’s now, then now I’m dying; if later, well now I’ll have my lunch, since lunch time has come – and dying I’ll attend later. when I read that I laughed. ok, sure, death is inevitable. coming now? if it’s now, I’m ready, come on, let’s do it, because everyone has to die; but if not now, then I’m going to do other things, and of course when death comes, it’s not under your control, so just accept it, whenever.
It could be under your control if you kill yourself, right?
yes. Suicide is a big problem for the Stoics, and for Epictetus in particular. Epictetus referred to it as “the open door”. he tells his students several times not to take it lightly: suicide for the Stoics was a serious matter and he didn’t say jump out the window at the first problem; But, he says, if you find yourself in a situation where there really is no way out and life really becomes unbearable, or very painful, or you find that you can no longer contribute to society in any meaningful way, then the door is open. open, you can leave of your own free will. he also adds, which I think is crucial to understanding the whole thing, that it’s the fact that the door is open that gives meaning to what you do. the reason you can keep going, fighting and living your life, and trying to do the best you can, is precisely because you know that if it becomes unbearable, you have another option.
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I can see why epictetus is so attractive. he led a fascinating life and presented a very interesting practical philosophy. but what about this caricature of stoicism that the way you achieve independence from life’s contingencies is to somehow excise your emotions?
that is, as you say, a caricature of stoicism; but it’s very common, and it’s not going away any time soon. The second book I recommend, A Guide to the Good Life by William Irvine, deals with this in some detail. There are several chapters in which Irvine elaborates on these ideas about the Stoics and the emotions. The basic idea is this: yes, the Stoics have that reputation, but if you look at what they wrote and the way they actually behaved in life, they were far from emotionless.
We have excellent accounts of the lives of the ancient Stoics: We know a great deal about the Greek Stoics, from Zeno, the founder of philosophy, to Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers, including several mini-biographies of Stoics; And of course we also know a lot about Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Musonius Rufus and others. we know what these people did and how they practiced their philosophies. There is nothing in any of these biographies or in any of their writing to suggest that they behaved in a similar way to Spock and repressed their emotions in order to think rationally about things. what they did, and they were very explicit about it, was to recognize that there are different types of human emotions.
“Epictetus referred to suicide as “the open door””
the first emotional reaction you have to something, they called it impression. So, for example, let’s say you’re walking down the street alone at night and you hear a sound that doesn’t feel right. your first impression, your first reaction might be fear, and the Stoics said there’s nothing you can do about it. there are natural reactions, and you cannot and should not, in fact, repress them. but what you should do, if possible, is examine them, step back for a second and say, ‘why am I afraid? Is there really something to fear, or not?’ If there is something to fear, a real danger, by all means face the danger; but many times the first impression is misleading. if you get angry, for example, with something, think: ‘why am I angry here? am I being insulted? what is an insult what is this person who is insulting me trying to tell me? Is there any truth in what he says? Should I even pay attention to an insult to begin with? why am I reacting this way? the goal was to examine your emotion and gradually manage or eliminate the negative and destructive ones. The obvious example of a destructive emotion, particularly in Seneca’s writing, was anger. Seneca calls it a “temporary madness.” if you do things in anger, there’s a good chance you’ll do things you’ll regret.
even if you have anger and outrage at injustice?
I’m so glad you brought that up because outrage at injustice, feelings of injustice, are positive emotions. the stoics believed that good character is made by the practice of four fundamental virtues, we call them the cardinal virtues. one of those virtues is justice, and yes, you have to cultivate a sense of justice because it is a positive emotion. the contrast between anger and justice is exactly this: that anger will cloud your judgment, even if it is justifiable anger, even if there is a good reason to be angry about something. if you react only based on anger, it is very likely that you will make wrong decisions or act rashly; but on the other hand, there are situations where you do want to cultivate a sense of outrage, a sense that justice is being violated, and you want to do something about it, and that’s a positive emotion, that’s something the Stoics would definitely say . you should.
william irvine’s book is part of the recent revival of stoicism. i’m amazed that there was this big movement in philosophy to reinstate virtue ethics, starting in the 1950s with elizabeth anscombe and several others who said we’d gotten caught up in an impoverished view of what ethics is, so let’s go back to antiquity. Greeks, and in particular Aristotle.
But I’m surprised that virtue ethicists, while they have theorized about virtue, don’t necessarily strive to be more virtuous. it is not obvious that there is a school of neo-Aristotelian people who practically try to be more virtuous. The really interesting thing about Stoicism is that in its modern form, there are a large number of people who try to practice Stoicism with a view to becoming better people. I may be doing virtue theory an injustice here, but I haven’t been aware of an increase in the number of virtuous people as a result of this philosophical study, but there are definitely people behaving stoically now.
I think what you’re referring to is this separation between academic philosophy and practical philosophy. there was a series of studies a few years ago showing that academic moral philosophers are actually no more moral than the average academic.
They are less moral when judged by a conventional set of criteria. Eric Schwitzgebel did that research.
so there is strong empirical evidence that this is the case. the answer of many academic philosophers has been: ‘what did you expect?’, but that is like a mathematician, say, or an economist, who is caught mishandling his bank account and personal finances, and who responds when questioned about this incompetence: ‘I’m interested in theory here, not practice’.
my answer would be: well, maybe you should be interested in the practice, up to a point. I find that kind of study very disturbing. like i said before, i came to philosophy late in life, aside from my early fight in high school, and i love the field. I am very happy that I have changed and I am very interested in what I am doing, but it is disturbing when you hear things like that, especially the rationalization. you’d expect someone to think it’s time to do something about it.
“It is a kind of philosophical judo, what Bill practices”
One of the things I find interesting about modern Stoic authors is that those people really try to live their lives that way. they’re not just writing about it; they are not just theorizing about it; they really practice it. Bill Irvine has become an expert, a virtuoso I’d say, at dealing with insults, which is something Stoics get a lot of. let me give you an example: one day he was in his department and he ran into a colleague who said ‘oh bill, hello, i was thinking of quoting one of your articles in my book’, and bill was thinking, ‘oh that’s interesting , I’m glad one of my colleagues thinks my work is worth citing’. but the colleague immediately added ‘yeah, I’m trying to decide if his work is just wrong or downright evil’. obviously that’s not a compliment. the way bill responded was straight from epictetus: he almost quoted epictetus word for word. he said: ‘oh well, that’s because you only read one of my articles: if you read the others, you’d see that i’m really bad’. so he turned things around; that’s exactly what epictetus did.
There is an anecdote in the speeches where someone, one of his students, tells him: ‘I heard so-and-so speaking ill of you’ and Epictetus’ response is: ‘well, that’s because he doesn’t know me well, because of otherwise I would be saying much, much worse things.’
It’s like a kind of martial art: if you imagine someone in judo moving in a certain direction, you help them keep going a little bit and trip them up in the process.
exactly, it’s a kind of philosophical judo, what bill practices. As a result, he tells me, he has been a much happier person, because a lot of things that were stressful for him, like his colleagues not thinking well of his work, now just overwhelm him, and even amuse him. now, that comes with a caveat, because every time i tell this kind of story, the objection is, ‘ah, but that way you run the risk of not really learning from criticism’. That’s not the point. the point is to ignore the insult, not the criticism. so the smart stoic would react with humor or just ignore the insult, but then he’d come back and think, ‘why did my colleague object to that article? What can I learn from that reaction?’
epictetus is very specific about this, that you should do this, that you should look at the problem with a calm eye; but what you should not do is react to the insult, because reacting to an insult is something that is under your control. the insult itself is not, but how you react is up to you. you can take a step back and say, “well this guy is trying to hurt me, I’m not going to leave him, I’m just going to walk away.”
or he could just walk away completely…suggested that bill is much happier as a stoic, but is that the purpose of stoicism, individual happiness? Is that the primary motivation for this type of behavior?
excellent question. So, here’s the thing, the reason why there was a change between Greek Stoicism and Roman Stoicism. Briefly, from a historical perspective: Stoicism began in Athens in the year 300, or 301 BC. c. in a school established by zeno. He prospered in Athens until the Athenians made what turned out to be a fundamental political mistake by siding with Mithridates against the Romans. As a result, the Roman general Sulla marched on Athens and laid siege to the city, destroying both Mithridates and many of the Greeks. Now, after that event, we are talking about the 1st century BC here, there was no relevant school of philosophy left in Athens. the philosophers are gone.
This is known as the diaspora of ancient philosophy: philosophers from different schools went to different places. some of them went to alexandria, some of them went to rhodes, many of them went to rome, including most of the stoics we meet later. this is known as the Early Stoa, which is the Greek version, and then the Late Stoa, which is the Roman version; there is also the middle stoa, which is the transition period.
they went to rome, which was basically the enemy’s headquarters. were they like prisoners?
no, they left of their own free will. They realized that the heyday of Athens was over and the new power was Rome. so the reason i’m telling you this is because it goes back to your question about the purpose of stoicism, is it to live a happy life. for the early Stoics, the emphasis was on what the Greeks called the eudaimonic life. the eudaimonic life, which is often translated as “the happy life”, doesn’t really translate very well, it’s more like “the flourishing life”. for the Stoics in particular, the eudaimonic life was a moral life. it was the kind of life where you’re on your deathbed, you look back and say, ‘yeah, that was worth it: there’s not much to be ashamed of, that was a life well lived, not just in feeling that I prospered in terms of material possessions, but above all I was a good person.’
so that puts the emphasis on the virtues. externalities, practical goods and the like, are fine. there’s nothing in stoicism that says you can’t pursue wealth, health, education, and all that sort of thing. there was nothing wrong with material possessions, as long as you never traded them for virtue. so if, in order to acquire or attain health, wealth, or education, you did something that was morally questionable, morally wrong, then you would be doing the wrong thing from a Stoic perspective. that was the opinion of the early Stoics.
“there is nothing in stoicism that says you can’t pursue wealth, health and education”
Later Stoics, such as Rome-based Epictetus, added a second component to this. they retained this fundamental idea that it’s about practicing virtue, it’s about having a good moral life, but they also added what they call apatheia, which of course is the Greek root of the English word ‘apathy’, and yet it doesn’t have nothing to do with it. they did not advise apathy. what they advised was apatheia. the best way to translate this word is as “magnanimity” or “great soul”. so the idea was that you achieved tranquility in life, you achieved what the Epicureans, who were rivals of the Stoics, called ataraxia or mental tranquility, if you developed a magnanimous attitude towards the world. That’s why I gave you the example of the way Bill Irvine responds to insults. Bill’s response to insults is magnanimous. if someone insults him he uses humor to deflect the insult, and thus achieves inner calm.
By the way, that strategy of turning insults into humor could result in a broken nose in certain contexts.
yes. it’s funny that you say that. Epictetus says exactly this in speeches, he says: ‘I used to go around answering people with humor and then I broke my nose’ and adds: ‘— then I don’t do it anymore, I just leave. ‘
we’ve been talking about the roman stoics, by far the most famous stoic work is the meditations of marcus aurelius, which is your third book of choice.
This is probably the most famous book written by a Stoic. It has been in print for as long as printing presses existed. By the way, the same can be said about Epictetus’ enchiridion, although Epictetus is much less well known than Marcus.
you could study philosophy at a high level without studying epictetus. you could do two or three degrees in philosophy and never hear his name mentioned; in fact, I think I did.
This is a recent, 20th century phenomenon. Until the 19th century, Epictetus was one of the most prominent philosophers studied. You’ll find references to it everywhere: Descartes, Spinoza, many of the major philosophers you can think of were influenced by the Stoics and particularly Epictetus and Seneca, and the Enchiridion was used as a training manual in Christian monasteries all in between. ages.
going back to marcus’ musings, that book was never intended for publication. initially the meditations had no title and during the middle ages they were known by the title to me because it was the personal diary of the roman emperor.
that’s a better title.
yes, it’s a better title, I agree. it later became known as the Meditations, but was actually his personal philosophical journal. Marcus Aurelius had studied philosophy as a young man and in particular Stoicism. he had a great stoic for a teacher who gave him a copy of the speeches of epictetus. the influence of epictetus can be seen in the meditations. The Meditations consists of twelve short books. if you read them, you will see that there is a lot of redundancy there. it goes back over and over to the same themes, and repeats the same kind of concept over and over again. it is not so good to read cover to cover for this reason. Marcus wrote this over the course of a few years when he was on the German border fighting the Marcomanni revolt against Rome.
“Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world at the time, but his wife cheated on him and his advisers were treacherous”
the reason the musings have endured is because you really get a very clear sense of an interesting man struggling with his own limitations as well as the environment around him. Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world at the time, and yet he was not only dealing with major events like revolts throughout the Roman Empire, but also with his wife cheating on him and some of his advisers who they were treacherous. however, the first book of the meditations opens with a long list of people he thanks. it is an exercise in gratitude that is a basic stoic practice: you have to remember the people you are grateful to because they are important in your life. the first person he thanks is his grandfather: “from my grandfather verus I learned good customs and the government of my emperor”, and then he goes on to thank his mother, his teachers, his brother, etc. If you’re reading this for the first time, you really don’t expect it. but then, considering that he is the most powerful person in the world writing this, and in his own personal diary, not made to be shown to other people, he begins by thanking the people who have had a good impact on him. life: it is a very humiliating exercise.
Often, people say that the meditations seem preachy, and that is true to a certain extent, but they forget that they are preaching to themselves. you’re not telling other people that this is what you should and shouldn’t do; he says to himself, he reproaches himself. for example, he says, this is one of my favorite quotes from the meditations, from book two, chapter one: start the morning by saying to yourself, i will meet the busybody, the ungrateful, the arrogant, the liar, the envious, unsocial . all these things happen to them because of their ignorance of what is good and bad… nor can I be harmed by any of them, because no one can fix me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my relative, nor hate him this really seemed to me deep. many people around the emperor would have wanted favors, and many were treacherous; but he says: ‘remember, they do this because they don’t know any better. they don’t have the benefit of your education, they don’t have the benefit of your self-reflection, so they do it out of ignorance, ignorance of what’s good for them or what’s good to do: ignorance of virtue’ and then he continues, ‘but no I can be hurt by them, and I can’t hate them either because they are my fellow human beings, I am as imperfect as they are: I lose my temper too, I also do things that I may regret or am not proud of, and we are all in the same together ship”. I find these very realistic observations of human nature and the way that Marcus deals with it very refreshing, and at the same time really very insightful.
But isn’t this an incredibly lofty ideal to live up to? the way you described marcus aurelius, he’s trying to tell himself that he’s not going to be bothered by these people, but you feel, reading between the lines, that he probably will.
That’s an interesting point about Stoicism: is it an impossible ideal? there, I think, a good comparison can be made between Stoicism and Christianity. Even though Christianity, early Christianity, adopted quite a lot of Stoicism, the early Christians rejected Epicurus for his emphasis on pleasure—that is why even today the word ‘epicurean’ is almost an insult: simply because Christians rejected it for complete this worldview, and we have inherited the Christian disdain for Epicurus. But Christians did learn Stoicism, not only from Epictetus’s enchiridion, but also Saint Paul knew of Seneca’s brother, Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus, and thus was aware of Stoic writing.
that’s really fascinating.
There was even a medieval forgery of an alleged correspondence between Seneca and Paul. You can find reactions to Stoicism in all the major Christian church fathers, beginning with Augustine as well, and then all the way to Thomas Aquinas. now the reason i bring this up, in answer to your question, is because there is a good and interesting distinction between christianity and the stoic approach. For Christians, if you think about it, they have their role model, Jesus, who is, by definition, an impossible role model to emulate: he is a god. I can aspire to behave as much as possible like him, but I will never quite achieve it because he is an immortal and I am not the son of god. I just can’t be perfect, and that of course is part of the Christian doctrine of repentance for your sins.
For the Stoics, on the other hand, they have a similar figure, a role model they aspire to and they call him the ‘wise man’. the sage represents an ideal to aspire to, but is an achievable role model. the sage is a human being. it is difficult, but not impossible, to emulate the sage. the stoics are clear that there have not been many sages throughout history, but there have been some, and they point out some examples, the most obvious being socrates, who was not a stoic because he was before the school. Many of the Stoics referred to Socrates as a sage. There were other examples, too: Cato the Younger, for example, who was a famous political opponent of Julius Caesar during the Roman Republic; Seneca refers to him as a sage and a role model. the stoics also had fictional role models, ancient heroes and demigods like hercules.
they may not have considered them fictitious…
That’s debatable, though it’s a good point. it’s hard to imagine that Seneca really took the stories about the Olympian gods seriously.
well, it’s also hard to imagine people doing that in the contemporary world, but they do.
true, but the basic point is that even when the stoics refer to the demigods, if you look at the story of hercules, for example, the actual ancient myth, it doesn’t end well: on the one hand, hercules ends up dying a death horrible. he makes mistakes, he is a human figure, he is someone you can relate to but who is constantly striving to do better: he is constantly striving to do the right thing. this is the Stoic idea of a sage, who has some affinities with Buddhism. Buddha supposedly attained enlightenment in his lifetime. in the Buddhist tradition that is not easy. it is not something that everyone can do; however, the fact that he, as a man, has attained enlightenment shows that it can be achieved. in stoicism you have an ideal model and, yes, most of us will not reach it, but it is an achievable model. Seneca addresses this explicitly in his letter to a friend ‘on the firmness of the sage’ where he writes: ‘do not think that we mean by this only an unattainable ideal, only a theoretical thing. we believe that there are people who are actually wise, and those are our role models, and we try to do what they did.”
since you mentioned seneca, maybe we should skip to book four? this is described as letters to lucilio. were they literally letters?
they were literally letters. The reason I chose this book is because a large number of Seneca’s writings have survived, more than any other Stoics. Seneca was a playwright: he wrote tragedies and even influenced shakespeare. he also wrote long essays and epistles, many epistles. there is a particular collection of epistles, usually called moral epistles or letters to Lucilius. This book consists of more than one hundred letters. many of them are short, just a few pages. We know that Seneca wrote them late in his life, during the last two or three years before Nero “invited” him to commit suicide after falling out of favor with the emperor. They are written for his friend Lucilius, who was probably a real person living in Sicily at the time.
but they were written to be published, right?
yes, they were.
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So, in that respect, this book is very different from the meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
yes. Unlike the meditations, these were not intended just as personal correspondence. they were personal correspondence, but when scholars look at the way the text is structured, they are convinced that they were intended for publication. many people, not just Seneca, wrote letters intended both for personal letters to friends or acquaintances, and for wider circulation. the moral epistles are in a way seneca’s philosophical testament because they convey his mature thought. Of course, he did not know that he was about to die prematurely, but he was already an old man, he was in his sixties, he knew that he would not live much longer and he was frank about it.
Seneca is often criticized, even by modern Stoics, as a somewhat ambiguous figure because, despite being a self-proclaimed Stoic, he was preaching virtue at the same time he oversaw Nero’s first five years in power. It was during those years that Nero went berserk: he killed his mother, several of his wives, and his stepbrother.
So Seneca had dirty hands?
exactly. not only because he was there, but because he was nero’s main adviser, and in a couple of cases he wrote public letters defending some of nero’s actions. on top of that, he was filthy rich. he was a senator and owned land throughout the roman empire. as I mentioned earlier, there is nothing inherently wrong with that for a Stoic. Stoics are not cynics (in the old sense), so they are not against wealth. but one can argue, as Seneca himself does, that too much wealth becomes obscene because you focus on externalities at the expense of virtue. if you can use your wealth for good, you’re fine from a stoic perspective, there’s nothing wrong with that; but if you keep accumulating wealth for no reason, you’re definitely not a good stoic.
“throughout the renaissance, for example, Seneca was thought to be close to being a secular saint”
These are some of the reasons why Seneca is criticized even by modern Stoics. There are two recent Seneca biographies that take that kind of attitude toward the man. but there is more to say. first of all, this is all highly debatable, since we don’t really have much independent historical evidence about his life; and second, it is a very recent development in the way we view Seneca. throughout the renaissance, for example, seneca was thought to be close to being a secular saint because he tried to do the best he could in the impossible situation of having to deal with nero, and because in the end he did the right thing, committing suicide, in part to save some of his property for his family. if he had refused to kill himself, he would have been killed anyway, and his family would have lost his property.
so it was a pretty practical decision.
It was a practical decision, but on behalf of others. I’m talking to you from Rome, where I’m on sabbatical, and I’m writing a book on how to be a Stoic, to be published next year by Basic Books. one of the things i do the reason i’m here in rome other than my family is here and it’s a good place to visit is because i wanted to be somewhere that inspires me i’m literally right next to the colosseum and of the Roman forum. whenever I need a break, like after our conversation today, I’ll go down and walk the forum.
One of the things I did while I was here was visit the domus aurea. this was the huge villa that nero had built as it turns out it is not for him but mainly for public gatherings and diplomatic purposes. he had never seen the domus aurea because when he lived in rome, it was underground. in recent years, archaeologists here in rome have opened it up. it is right in front of the colosseum, but it is several meters underground. you can visit now, but you have to make an appointment, and there is a good guide from the ministry of cultural property, who guides you for an hour or so. so i did this, and the woman who was leading the tour, of course, talked a lot about nero, and she also talked a lot about seneca. She was surprised that her opinion of Seneca, which she says reflects the angle taken by many Italian historians and archaeologists, was so much more positive than anything she had read in English-language literature.
The reason for this is interesting. She said that if you examine the historical records, Seneca did a good job in the first five years of Nero’s reign. The first five years of Nero’s reign were very good for Rome and the empire precisely because, she argued, Seneca and a colleague of hers who was the head of the Praetorian Guard managed to advise Nero and restrain him to some extent. It would have been much worse without Seneca’s advice. When Seneca saw that Nero was going too far and was definitely going off the rails, Seneca tried several times to retreat. she said: ‘this is it. I can not do this anymore. I can’t with nero, I can’t do any better. so I prefer to retire outside Rome in my own villa”. he used some of his great wealth to try to bribe nero into letting him retire by offering two-thirds of his land to the emperor. Now I don’t know exactly how much money we’re talking about, but it would have been a substantial offer. nero rejected it.
presumably, nero could have taken ownership if he wanted it anyway.
exactly. Nero refused and tried to keep Seneca in his retinue. Seneca eventually managed to achieve a kind of partial retirement anyway. He began to spend more time away from Rome, and it was then that he wrote the epistles to Lucilius.
and these are very practical pieces: they contain practical advice on how to deal with situations where your emotions can lead you astray.
That’s right. if you look only at the titles of the cards, that’s revealing, titles like: ‘on true and false friendship’. this was a crucial stoic principle, the idea that you really should surround yourself with good people, ideally people who are better than you, because that’s the way you learn, that’s the way you challenge yourself.
That’s easier for some of us than others.
I know, right. then there is: ‘on the terrors of death’. death was a constant Stoic theme. Seneca famously said that “we die every day of our lives”, by which he meant that our whole life is a preparation for the final test: how to handle death.
When you said that we die every day, did you mean that we die because we sleep? Or do we die because we are afraid of death, or something else?
not. Seneca meant that each day that passes brings us one step closer to the end of our lives. For the Stoics, what makes our life worth living is precisely the fact that it is finite, and it is something we must be aware of.
so, actually, the translation could be better: ‘are we dying every day’?
Exactly, and in fact that’s the title of one of the two recent biographies I mentioned of Seneca: Dying Every Day. then there’s an essay on old age, for example, on how to grow old gracefully and deal with it if you’re lucky enough to live to experience it.
So you think it’s lucky to experience that? From what I’ve seen, many people are unlucky enough to live to old age.
That’s right, it depends on how you look at it, on your attitude. there are so many topics that seneca covers. another one I like is called, ‘on festivals and fasts’. Seneca was not fond of Roman games and festivals: he thought they made a lot of noise and confusion. he uses that starting point as a way of advising his lucilio’s friend, and thus his audience in general, about moderation. he writes, for example, that it’s good to fast from time to time, because these moderate self-deprivation exercises, a day or two without eating, remind you that you can deal with not eating. if in fact one of these days, as a result of externalities or adversity, you really do find yourself starving, you will be psychologically prepared. you know you can handle it, within physiological limits.
that’s one benefit, but the other, and this is something bill irvine also emphasizes in one of the other books I mentioned, is that the psychological effect of these self-deprivation exercises is that when you get out of them you enjoy them much more of what you have: self-deprivation reminds you how good it is to even eat something simple. You don’t have to go for a gourmet meal, you don’t have to go for a really sophisticated cuisine, you can appreciate a good bread or a good wine and recognize that this is an incredibly pleasant experience.
but if you continue with that style of thinking, you might end up getting someone to put you in the water for a while, so you realize how lucky you are to be able to breathe.
that would be forcing it. I think the Romans definitely wouldn’t go that far. Seneca and the other Stoics are very careful to remind you that you don’t do these things to punish yourself, which, again, some of the late medieval Christians did.
by self-flagellation and the like.
yes. there is nothing like self-flagellation in Stoicism. in fact, one of the four stoic virtues is temperance, self-control, so that you do everything in moderation, including, of course, these stoic self-deprivation exercises. One of my favorite exercises that comes directly from the writings of Seneca and ancient Roman tradition is the idea of taking a hot shower and then, for the last few seconds, leaving it completely cold. this impacts your system.
“the psychological effect of these self-deprivation exercises is that when you come out of them you enjoy what you have much more”
The Romans did this regularly. they went to the thermal baths, starting with a hot sauna; then they entered hot water, what they called a calidarium; and then they jumped into what they called the frigidarium, which was a pool of very, very cold water. this cold shock has a number of effects. First of all, interestingly enough, there is modern research showing that this actually has physical benefits – it helps boost your immune system and the like. obviously the Romans didn’t know that. beyond that, it reminds you that you can deal with this kind of thing. a hot shower is a luxury. most people throughout most of history didn’t have hot showers, didn’t have hot baths.
This is an interesting aspect of Stoicism because some people think that many elements of the British public school system, the private school system, were modeled on Stoicism: a certain amount of deprivation, quite a lot of cold showers, cold baths, early careers in the morning and so on, built character. for some people, however, this type of forced deprivation has been quite damaging psychologically.
That’s a good point. think of it this way. What you describe seems to me a perversion of the Stoic idea. One of the things I learned early on, reading both the ancient Stoics and the modern Stoics, is that Stoicism shouldn’t be something you force on other people. it comes from within. it is your own discipline. you shouldn’t be walking around with a metaphorical or real stick hitting people and saying, “you’re not virtuous enough.”
seriously, then you shouldn’t proselytize for stoicism?
there is no tradition of proselytizing for stoicism. the old ones just opened schools and competed with other schools. It was a time in ancient Rome where philosophy was everywhere: Stoicism had to compete with Epicureanism, with Cynicism, with the Platonic Academy, with the Peripatetics, followers of Aristotle, etc. there was an open market for philosophical ideas and, to a certain extent, people simply gravitated towards one school or another depending on the fame of the teacher or the attractiveness of the teaching.
in athens, cleantes (the second leader of the stoa) was apparently a good philosopher, but not a particularly attractive teacher and by the end of his career, the number of students was significantly reduced. then chrysippus, a charismatic figure, took over and the students returned. the idea is that you should live your life as a stoic and lead by example, without going around telling people: “hey, I’m a stoic, look at me, come and join us!”
Did the Stoics believe it was just a route to a good life, or was it the only way to get there?
I think the ancient Stoics believed it was the only way. you can see that by the fact that they spent a certain amount of time, not a lot, but a certain amount of time, arguing against other schools.
Cicero was not a Stoic; rather he was a platonic and academic skeptic. but he was very sympathetic to Stoicism. he presents Stoicism in a good light. If you read Cicero, and if you read Epictetus himself, it’s clear that many Stoics believed they had the best way, if not the only way, certainly the best way to achieve eudaimonia. Instead, in the letters to Lucilius, Seneca acknowledges that good ideas for living can come from a variety of sources. In the early letters, time and time again he ends with what he calls a gift to Lucilius, and it’s always a quote from someone else, a quote from Epicurus, or whoever. at a certain point he felt that he had to justify doing this. then he says: ‘my dear lucilius, you may be wondering why i am quoting our competitor’; his response in Latin is ‘quod verum est meum est’ which means ‘what is true is mine’. As he himself said: “From time to time I wander into the field of enemies and pay attention to what they say, and if there is something good, I will use it.”
let’s move on to your final choice, a new stoicism by lawrence becker. this is a more academic book than your other options.
lawrence becker is a retired philosophy professor. The first time I encountered a new Stoicism was in the context of a book discussion group in New York. it is quite a difficult book to read in some respects; If you don’t have some background in philosophy, you probably won’t get everything you should, although Becker himself is aware of this. the book is structured so that at the end of each chapter there’s a comment, and the comment is very technical and it’s where he goes back to the original sources and says things like, ‘I made this point in the chapter because it’s relevant to these other thinkers, these other appointments’. It’s very academic in that sense. but the main sections of each chapter can be read, can be understood by someone with little or no experience in philosophy.
“becker wants to explore how much Stoicism can be updated to be compatible with modern science, with modern philosophy”
A slightly odd feature of the book is that when he writes about Stoics, he does so in the first person plural. so he says ‘we’ do certain things, or this is something that happened to ‘us’. he reminds the reader that he is a Stoic, not just a scholar of Stoic philosophy. the reason it is called a new stoicism is because unlike, say, the buddhist tradition, or even the christian tradition, stoicism was interrupted by the fall of the roman empire. The golden years of Stoic philosophy were five centuries, more or less, from 300 B.C. c. until the second century. The last great Stoic was Marcus Aurelius. Stoicism as a philosophy stayed in the roman empire for a bit longer, but finally, the byzantine emperor justinian closed down the last philosophical school and basically imposed christianity on everyone. that was the end of all Hellenistic philosophy, not just Stoicism. for many centuries there was no school of stoicism, no practice, no theory.
Becker’s point is that there is a revival of Stoicism in modern times, that there are people interested in Stoicism as a theory and especially as a practice. Becker is interested in updating Stoic philosophy for today. now we have sophisticated cognitive science, logic and so on, and he wants to explore how much Stoicism can be updated to be compatible with modern science, with modern philosophy, and still be called Stoicism.
And is there a core of Stoic belief, Stoic teaching, that can flourish today?
Your answer, of course, is “yes”, and I tend to agree. updates a number of aspects of Stoic philosophy. so let me give you just one example to give you an idea: remember we started this conversation talking about the epictetus control dichotomy: some things depend on me; some things do not depend on me. Now, Epictetus and the ancient Stoics had a somewhat optimistic view of what is up to us, because, of course, much of modern cognitive science tells us that much of human thought is not conscious, and that many times we engage in rationalizing things rather than proper rational thinking.
most of the time, I suspect.
exactly. Becker takes this into account, saying, “Look, we have to understand that even the control dichotomy needs to be revisited and updated, since it turns out there are fewer things that are completely under our control.” the most extreme view that I’ve seen coming from cognitive science, which is the idea that conscious thought is completely an illusion, it’s about rationalizations, then stoicism would collapse.
So do most of our analyzes of what we’re doing in life. there isn’t much point in ethics after that, just to take an example.
yes, and not only that, but science itself would be threatened, because then it could turn the tables and say, ‘oh, you cognitive scientists think you’re the only ones who don’t rationalize’ and all damn thing collapses. Becker doesn’t go that far, thankfully. me neither. his idea is that it is necessary to take the findings of cognitive science seriously, update some things and have a more modest vision of human rationality; But as long as there is a core of rationality about him, as long as it is possible for human beings to think rationally and engage in the kind of reflective exercises that Epictetus was teaching his students, then an updated version of Stoicism is both possible and desirable. that’s the kind of project becker is involved in.
“larry baker and james stockdale show the extent to which a human being can fight each other”
I also want to say something about becker himself as a man. I met him through a mutual friend, and this mutual friend told me stories about Larry that put everything into a different perspective for me. Before I met him, I thought of him as the author of an academic book on Stoicism. well, it turns out that larry got polio when he was young, and it paralyzed him, and for three years he was in rehab. he completely lost the use of both legs and arms. then, over time, he regained some use of his legs, though never of his arms or hands; and then for several years he has been living in a wheelchair. Despite this, he had a successful career as a university professor and graded his students’ papers by writing with his foot. in fact, apparently his handwriting with his feet was much clearer than my friends’. Becker was dedicated to his students and his career and did not let his physical problems get in the way of him. To me, this made it clear that he had lived the philosophy of Stoicism: talk about having no control over external circumstances! when i met him i did a long interview with him which is available on my website, and we discussed his experience in life and how he relates to his stoicism.
I have read an account of James Stockdale, who survived torture and solitary confinement during the Vietnam War after his plane was shot down without breaking down by stoic techniques, based on his memories of studying Epictetus. I can understand why this is a useful philosophy for resisting adversity because it might give you focus and strength to discard external obstacles, but in everyday life, do we really need it?
yes, I think so. people like larry baker and james stockdale are obviously fascinating because they show you how much a human being can deal with. but most of our lives present us with challenges, even minor challenges, for which I think Stoicism is perfectly appropriate. Let me give you an example, I have a very good friend, who is both a practicing Stoic and a practicing Buddhist. He says that stoicism has helped him cope with moderate inconveniences, like getting on the subway in the morning to go to work in New York City and having to deal with unpleasant behavior from some people. He told me: ‘It used to be that I got irritated, it used to be that I started my day miserably because someone was doing something nasty on the subway, but once I started practicing these things and resetting my mental expectations, I just saw these things as the kind of behavior that doesn’t really affect me.’
so these are psychological tricks, right? Is it really philosophy more at that time?
well, it is in this sense. One of the reasons Stoicism has made a comeback in modern times is because these “tricks” are useful. Some of them have been elaborated into complete psychotherapeutic approaches, such as Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy; cognitive behavior therapy; Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy of Albert Ellis, et al. all these therapies have traces of stoicism. Both Ellis and Frankl read the Stoics and used their ideas as a starting point. so in a sense, yes, it’s a psychological bag of tricks, but the reason it’s a philosophy is because this bag of tricks is put into a more general context and framework, and this is the idea that the good life is the moral life, and that the moral life is one in which the four fundamental virtues are practiced: temperance, justice, courage and wisdom.
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