Post #93: The Way of the Stoics

15 Feb. 2024

“We are what we think.

With our thoughts we make the world.

‘Look how he abused me and beat me,

How he threw me down and robbed me.’

Think such thoughts and you live in hate.

Abandon such thoughts, and you live in love.

In this world hate never yet dispelled hate

Only love dispels hate.

This is the law,

Ancient and inexhaustible.”

—Dhammapada 1.1–5 (translated by Thomas Byrom)

     The Stoical outlook on the world lends itself quite readily to condensation into a few handy philosophical formulae; yet to appraise it in this tidy manner would risk doing a serious injustice to its purposes. The Stoics taught not a method of argumentation or a manner of discovery, but a way of life so eminently practical that it might serve even a Roman emperor as a suitable framework for his daily reflections about the rights and wrongs of his doings and attitudes at the head of a mighty empire. Hence what we know as the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (hereafter Med.), which in the Greek are more plainly entitled “To Himself” and in the original required no title—because they were nothing more (and nothing less) than everyday exercises in self-appraisal, spiritual exhortations, and most importantly, untiring self-reminders about principles and precepts that Marcus had long accepted, but that he, like all of us, was apt to forget in the furious heat and grind of life’s daily battles, big and small.

     Rather than approach the Stoics from the side of their tenets, we might best appreciate the particular texture and flavor of their teaching by starting with the great promise made to its adherents: namely that there is a way of living, in principle accessible to anyone and everyone, whereby one’s true serenity and dignity can be assured quite irrespective of adverse outward circumstances, and independently of what other human beings may or may not be doing, including any and all mischief for which they are so painfully known. It is an extraordinary vision, perhaps difficult to take quite at face value; but it was taught to great effect by a former slave who knew something of human abysses (Epictetus); it was practiced rather credibly at the very heights of power and responsibility (by Marcus Aurelius); and it served in more recent times to sustain a high-profile American POW in Vietnam during seven years of recurrent torture and prolonged solitary confinement adding up to several years in total (James Stockdale).*

     The starting point for putting the Stoical teaching into practice is something that much impressed Marcus when he first heard it from the oracle at Caieta (Med. 1.17.9): “It’s up to you.” We do not know what the emperor had asked, or whether the priests were perhaps bunting an untoward ball that the emperor was throwing their way; all we know is that Marcus appears to have taken their reply in the most comprehensive sense possible, as a constant reminder that under the terms of the philosophy he had accepted, it really was, at all times and with no reservations whatsoever, up to the individual to make his life either noble and worthy, or else not and pay the price.

     The key to this astounding proposition is a change of perspective, from the ordinary human one that is preoccupied with what the Stoics consider the externals (and incidentals) of life, inwards to its true essentials. As Epictetus explains at the outset of his Enchiridion (hereafter Ench.), to become a philosopher in the Stoical meaning of the word is to draw a most rigorous line between two domains: the inner one we control and the outer one we do not, and then to look and adhere with all our will and determination exclusively to the first.

     Let it be said clearly that nearly everything in our ordinary ideas about the world, including our usual social arrangements and indeed the very organization of our senses, conspires against such a change in the direction of our thinking. That is why the task that the Stoics set themselves comes down, again and again,  to “making the right use of one’s impressions,” that is, to remembering at all times how the very way we naturally perceive things misleads us on the most basic of facts, as the Stoics conceive them.

     The challenge, then, is as fundamental as it is formidable, never-ending and never easy. But the prize to be won is correspondingly great: placidity with whatever vicissitudes fortune may hold in store, without grumbling or complaint, and  indeed without cause for either! For if one could not find a way to become truly contented with life as it is, the Stoics insisted, then how could one not end up blaming and resenting the very gods for one’s hardships and miseries (Ench. 31.1–2)? This the Stoic will never do, consent to, or condone, not because he is so adept at swallowing his gripes and gall, but because he recognizes no valid cause for it. His life, if he can hold true to the Stoical line, never will give him anything to complain about, by the standards of his creed; nor can anything be beyond his control in its essentials. It is all up to you, all the time. A daunting demand to make of oneself, certainly, but grand and lofty in its ambition, and profoundly dignified in its acceptance of total responsibility not for how things turn out, but for what you make of them.

     To help accomplish the radical reversal in perspective that the Stoics’ turn requires, they offer the convert a number of practical reflections designed to guide the mind to more fruitful tracks. First and foremost, for the Stoics as for the Buddhists, there is the ever-transient and ephemeral nature of things, change being the one true constant in life (Med. 2.3, 2.12, 2.17). All is in flux, as Heraclitus proclaimed with no less emphasis than the Buddha. Another core exercise, likewise shared with the Buddhists, demands cultivating a habit of dispassionate and methodical analysis of the true being of things (Med. 3.11)—thus deep contemplation of how glass is made to break one day, and living things are made to die (Ench. 3). Contrary to how things may appear to us, neither our most cherished possessions nor our loves, nor even our very bodies and lives really belong to us; they are borrowed from time and need to be returned, without demurring, upon demand. We are pilgrims in this world, put up for a few days and nights at this or that hostel; to imagine ourselves the owners of our rooms even, let alone the proprietors of the building or the land, is pure fancy on our part, nothing more, for the Stoics (Ench. 11).

     Instead of thinking of your existence in isolation, counsel the Stoics (and not they alone), consider its relation to the whole, and how subservient your part must necessarily be to the big picture. It may feel as if the world were revolving around you: a prime example of how our sensory apparatus deceives us, by our own contrivance or with our complicity, even while we know full-well how illusory and self-deluding our outlook really is. While we imagine ourselves the sole authors of our own existences, the Stoics recall us sternly to reason: it is not for you to write your own role in the great drama, though you may get to pen a few lines; your job is to play your assigned part well (Ench. 17) and to find as much delight as you can in your thread of destiny, appreciating with gratitude how artfully it is woven into the whole. (To Jim Stockdale even his Vietcong torturer appeared not a devil, but another human being playing his assigned part, “a good soldier who never overstepped his line of duty.”**) As for death, the Stoics view it as another one of the basic facts of our existence about which our senses mislead us terribly, telling us that it is a great evil, to be dreaded above all others, when it is merely a reunion with nature, possibly a place of reward, but certainly nothing to be feared at the conclusion of a well-lived life.

     In all these common quandaries of life, the Stoics say, the practitioner will be presented, again and again, with a choice between two “handles” (Ench. 43): one that makes it possible to lift and bear life’s burdens, via the Stoical perspective; and another, via judgement by the ordinary sense-driven standards of loss and gain, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, obscurity and fame, that will make one’s lot appear quite intolerable. (A riff on the Eight Vicissitudes of the Buddhists, without their remedies applied.) Yet, to those who follow the teachings of the Stoics faithfully enough, they promise that even obstacles encountered along the way will become calls for the corresponding virtues and thus get transformed into opportunities for further training and growth (Ench. 10, Med. 31.11). The very weeds in the mind that one discovers on the Path, Shunryu Suzuki likewise notes in his Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (pp. 20–21 in the 2011 Shambala edition), become something to be grateful for because eventually they will enrich your practice. The noxious creepers get converted into fertilizer, one might say. If you leave the Way or the Path or the Stoical discipline behind, however, in favor of living instead by the more ordinary worldly categories of failure and success, you will find yourself all the days of your life jerked about like a mere puppet by the strings (Med. 2.3, 6.16).

     The hold of the specious good things in life is just too tenacious for you to let go? Very well, then think of the often inordinate price at which we must commonly purchase what we so covet and crave—the fancy possessions and positions, the prizes and honors and manifold distinctions that make our human world go round. Consider not only the dollars and cents on the official receipt (a tally already dispiriting enough, think only of what your car is really costing you), but the countless hours spent in toil, the troubles taken, the sweat and tears shed, the attentions and flatteries paid to the undeserving, the endless worries and pains endured, the petty slights and not so petty humiliations suffered. Reflecting thus, if you must do without the prizes, should you not be consoled that at least you have been spared the corresponding pains and troubles (Ench. 25)?

     You may protest that you paid the price all right, but still you went without the reward, unjustly. Then you must have been involved in a game of chance (see #87), and you should know that by the rules of such undertakings, you can lay no claim to the pot unless luck goes your way. And it didn’t. Not so, you protest, not so! You were shamelessly deceived or tricked, cheated out of your indisputable due, or otherwise wronged. Very well, then, it’s time to remind yourself that human affairs are run by ignorant beings who cannot see things the way they should, and who behave badly without knowing what they are doing. You are committing an injustice yourself if you expect them to behave better than they are capable of: olive trees can only bear olives, not sweeter fruit that you enjoy more (Med. 4.6, 5.17 & 28, 6.27; Ench. 14.1 & 42). If you were not yourself making the grievous mistake, quite willingly and against what should be your better judgment, of attaching yourself to things controlled by others, then you would not now need to regret their absence or loss so much, nor suffer the intolerable pangs of feeling injured. It is really the harvest of your own misplaced expectations that you are reaping, the Stoics would say, much more than those of anyone else’s ill-doings!

     I know how much this can sound like a bad joke from a more ordinary worldly perspective; it can sound so to me as well. Nonetheless, even if the Stoics’ line of argument may seem a little strained, even borderline crazy, there is undeniable method to their madness. I admit freely that I find myself quite incapable of living by such a high-minded logic; it is not to me, however, that anyone should be looking when trying to decide how seriously to take the Stoical option. I am no more than a messenger pointing out the eminently respectable antecedents of this tradition, and the shining examples on record of a Stoical fortitude that I can only dream of as I am blown about by every gust on the windswept plains of the Eight Vicissitudes. However many posers and pretenders there may be, on the Stoical circuit as on any other (most of them perhaps sincere in their mistaken belief that they qualify as real Stoics), a precious few are, quite undeniably, the real thing—the Stockdales of the world, and not all of them in uniform either.

     The Stoics would presumably tell me, not in anger but with compassion, that I am not in fact unable, but rather unwilling to abide by their discipline. They may be right, in some ultimate sense, except that I cannot find within myself the perfect inward freedom that they posit, and therefore I do not feel at liberty to be more willing than I am. Just where that willing comes from, and who or what (if anything) is behind it, I no longer even pretend to understand, as my ears are ringing with the Buddhist diagnosis that there is actually nothing enduring behind any of the passing show, only a series of “empty” momentary mind-matter constellations so far as the eye can see, inside or outside. That too goes well beyond my comprehension, needless to say (thus #30 on my difficulties with Self-No-Self). Ordinary freedom I can still make sense of, more or less, but not to anywhere near the extent that I would need to become nearly as existentially willing and able as the Stoics would have me be.

     In sum, the extraordinary freedom and responsibility that the Stoical outlook assigns to all of us, not with respect to outward things as various schools of wish-fulfillment like to claim in our day (think “The Secret”), but inwardly and therefore far more inalienably, may be daunting even to contemplate, let alone to live by consistently. By the same token, one might marvel at the very existence of a creed by whose tenets it might be possible to eschew the usual distractions and temptations, and to align oneself so perfectly with Nature and her laws that one might live with unshakable contentment, expecting nothing and fearing nothing, and no power on earth will be able to stop you or get in your way, whatever may happen (Med. 3.12).

     Whether the great promise of the Stoics holds true, or to what extent, is a question not to be answered on paper or screen, but to be tried, tested, and trod out on the rough pavement of everyday life. The Stoics certainly have their work cut out for them: theirs is a disciplines more than destinations, and a highly (not to say exceedingly) demanding one at that. Then again, if life lived on ordinary terms were easy, such teachings offering us prospects of something better could hardly arise and be taken seriously. That is to say, it seems we have our work cut out for us whatever we do in life, either by way of disciplined effort, or else by the bills with which we get presented when we relax our efforts unduly. Just having a good time with no major strings attached does not, alas, seem to be an option East of Eden, however much we may wish for a permanent vacation from our toilsome condition. Who knows, perhaps we are mistaken in that wish itself and our redemption comes, if there is any to be hoped for, not from slackening the pace, but from our very labors more wisely directed towards the best goals we are capable of.

*To acquaint yourself with Stoical thinking from the ground up, I would recommend starting with Epictetus’s Enchiridion; then proceed to his elaborations in the Discourses (Robert Dobbin’s translations of both texts, published under Epictetus: Discourses and Selected Writings by Penguin Classics, are particularly readable). Season the mix with practically any section of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, translated most accessibly as The Emperor’s Handbook by the brothers Hicks (Scribner 2002), and also available in an elegant reading by Water Covell that brings the classic rendition by George Long admirably to life in a cautiously modernized version (Jimcin Recordings 2007, available on Audible).

     Seneca’s extant collection of Epistles, a thicker volume, makes for an excellent supplement. The classic selection and translation by Robin Campbell for Penguin (Letters from a Stoic), first published in 1969, was itself completed in a Stoical manner (“at intervals of leisure in the bush”) while Campbell was serving as a magistrate in newly independent Zambia. Richard Mott Gummere’s more scholarly translation from a hundred years ago is available most economically from Dover; for a more recent edition aimed at the academic set, see the 2015 volume in the University of Chicago Press’s ongoing Complete Works of Seneca project, entitled Letters on Ethics.

     James Stockdale’s description of his ordeal and the lessons he garnered was published as Courage under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior by the Hoover Institution (Stanford University) in 1993.

**As Stockdale explained in a talk at the Marine Amphibious Warfare School, Quantico, Virginia, 18 April 1995. In the opening paragraph of Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (Scribe 2003), the mood is altogether less high-minded, but the narrator still insists on the imperative importance of exercising his last freedom, that of not hating his tormentors: “It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.”