I was unable to attend the 'Stoicon' event in New York in October 2016 but here is a rough first draft of what would have been my talk. This is now also posted on the Stoicism Today - Modern Stoicism blog.
There is an Australian podcast you can find online with the title ‘Philosophy Can Ruin Your Life’. The motivation behind the deliberately provocative title is, I assume, to challenge the way in which some people have tried to co-opt philosophy into what is sometimes called ‘the happiness industry’. There are all sorts of ways in which philosophy might make people miserable. Ignorance, so the saying goes, is bliss; people regularly concoct fictitious narratives and explanations to make themselves feel better about their lives and their place within the world. By contrast, philosophical truths, to the extent we might find any at all, may turn out to be far from comforting.
There is an Australian podcast you can find online with the title ‘Philosophy Can Ruin Your Life’. The motivation behind the deliberately provocative title is, I assume, to challenge the way in which some people have tried to co-opt philosophy into what is sometimes called ‘the happiness industry’. There are all sorts of ways in which philosophy might make people miserable. Ignorance, so the saying goes, is bliss; people regularly concoct fictitious narratives and explanations to make themselves feel better about their lives and their place within the world. By contrast, philosophical truths, to the extent we might find any at all, may turn out to be far from comforting.
Many
people interested or involved in the popular revival of Stoicism will say that
Stoicism can help us to lead better and happier lives. At first glance that
might lead us to think that the current revival of interest in Stoicism is part
of ‘the happiness industry’. For the dissatisfied, disillusioned, or depressed
who have searched in vain for something to lift their spirits, perhaps Stoicism
is the next thing to try that might help overcome their gloom and restore their
joie du vivre. If we talk about
Stoicism as a form of therapy or as having therapeutic elements within it this
can certainly contribute to this impression: Stoicism offers therapy, but
therapy for what? It seems natural to assume that the answer is therapy for
unhappiness. Thus Stoicism looks like it has happiness as its main concern. Indeed,
the ancient Stoics aimed at eudaimonia
which is usually translated as ‘happiness’.
What
I want to do is to challenge or at least to qualify that view. Stoicism will
not make you happy – at least not in the sense that ‘happiness’ is often used
in the culture of modern self-help. It is not about thinking in a certain way
in order to have a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.
Let
me say straight away that I do not mean to attack or to reject anything that
anyone else is planning to say. Stoicism is
a philosophy that is guided by the idea that people want to live well, to have
what Zeno the founder called ‘a smooth flow of life’, and Stoicism thinks it
can help people to reach that goal. And Stoicism is explicitly therapeutic, in
both its early Athenian and later Roman versions. The point that I want to
stress is that Stoicism is not merely a therapy aimed at making people feel
better; it is also and indeed primarily a philosophy. As a philosophy it is
committed to trying to understand the world and it makes a whole series of
truth claims about the world. Whatever positive impact it might be able to have
on the quality of someone’s life will be dependent upon those claims it makes
about the world and our place in it.
In
order to develop this further we might consider a popular critical image of
Stoicism: a Stoic is someone who is powerless in the real world and so pretends
that his or her happiness is something completely internal and within their own
control. Got no money? Easy, just say that money is unnecessary for a good life
and the problem is solved. According to a long line of modern critics of
Stoicism from Hegel onwards, the Stoic is someone who lies themselves out of
reality in order to feel happy in otherwise unpleasant circumstances. It is an
example of what Nietzsche called a ‘slave morality’, ultimately grounded in
powerlessness and an inability to face up to some hard truths about life.
I
think that image of Stoicism is unfair to say the least. But not only do I
think it is unfair, I think it is the polar opposite of what we actually find
in Stoic authors such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Rather than try to lie
their way out of facing up to reality, I think that a central theme in the work
of both these Roman Stoics is to force us to confront some hard and often
uncomfortable truths about the way the world works. Let me try to flesh this
out with some examples.
There
is a notorious passage in Epictetus in which he says that each night when we
kiss our children or loved ones before going to sleep we should remind ourselves
that they are merely mortal: ‘what harm is there in your saying beneath your
breath as you’re kissing your child, “Tomorrow you’ll die”?’ (Discourses 3.24.88; cf. Meditations 11.34). In another passage
he compares the loss of a child to the breaking of a jug: ‘If you’re fond of a
jug, say, “This is a jug that I’m fond of,” and then, if it gets broken, you
won’t be upset. If you kiss your child or your wife, say to yourself that it is
a human being that you’re kissing; and then, if one of them should die, you won’t
be upset’ (Handbook 3). Critics of
Stoicism have jumped on these passages as examples of how cold and unfeeling
Stoicism is, and many admirers have found them uncomfortable and have tried to
explain them away. Instead I think we ought to take these passages very
seriously. What is Epictetus trying to do here? He is certainly not – as some
critics have rightly pointed out – saying anything that looks like it might
make us feel happy. So what is he doing? He is simply trying to get us to face
up to some hard truths. We are all mortal. Our loved ones are all mortal. They
will all die. Our children will die. Many of us in the developed West do not
fear that our children might die in their sleep each time we put them to bed,
but in antiquity and indeed in many other parts of the world today this was and
is a far more real possibility. And of course this does still happen in the
developed world, often without any obvious explanation, to families who have
had the full benefits of modern medicine. All our children will die. If we are
lucky they will die after we do, but either way they are going to die.
This
is a hard truth – perhaps one of the hardest truths – about the way the world
works and it is one that Epictetus wants us to confront. And he wants us to
confront it now so that should such a terrible thing actually befall us we
might be in some way prepared to cope with it. It is an example of an ancient
practice used by the Stoics known as premeditation of future evils, which
suggests that we reflect on unpleasant things that might happen in the future
so that we can be better mentally prepared to cope with them if they do happen.
It is perhaps the most extreme case of such premeditation because of course it
goes without saying that there can be few things worse than having to bury one’s
own child.
Why
does Epictetus want us to confront head on this hardest of truths? If we are
looking for happiness this seems like the very last thing we ought be thinking
about. (Ancient hedonists explicitly rejected the practice of premeditation of
future evils because they thought it would only increase our pain.) The answer
is simple: Epictetus is not a happiness coach, he is a philosopher, and as a
philosopher he wants to understand the world as it really is, and then work out
how best to cope with and live in it. Rather than lie his way out of reality,
as some critics of Stoicism have suggested, Epictetus wants to stare it in the
face, and he is proposing that we need to do the same if we are to learn to
live well within it.
But
Epictetus is not quite as brutal as all this suggests. There is a consolatory
element at work here too. Yes we are all mortal and so are our loved ones but
that ought not to lead us into nihilist despair about the meaninglessness of
human existence. Instead we ought to try to understand this fact within the
wider context of Nature as a whole. We ought to try to understand our mortality
as but one fact among many about what it means to be a living being, an animal,
a biological entity that has a life cycle. And we ought to try to understand
ourselves as biological organisms within the wider context of the processes of
Nature as a whole. In short we ought to become physicists in the ancient sense
of the word, meaning students of Nature. By thinking about death – even the
seemingly unbearable death of one’s own child – within the much wider context
of a series of natural and inevitable processes of birth and decay that
permeate all aspects of the cosmos, from microbes to galaxies, we might be able
to gain some consolation that this is simply part of a much larger natural
order of things. Epictetus’s point in his seemingly harsh remark is that just
as it is in the nature of earthenware jugs to smash so it is in the nature of
people to die.
Let
me now turn to an example from Marcus Aurelius. Marcus has also attracted a
good number of modern critics, some of whom have characterized his Meditations as pessimistic and
melancholic, and one scholar went so far as to suggest that his strange visions
of the world must have been the product of opium addiction. The sort of thing
these critics have in mind runs throughout the Meditations and there are many examples. Let me focus on just one:
When you have savouries and fine dishes set before
you, you will gain an idea of their nature if you tell yourself that this is
the corpse of a fish, and that a corpse of a bird or a pig; or again, that fine
Falernian wine is merely grape-juice, and this purple robe some sheep’s wool
dipped in the blood of a shellfish; and as for sexual intercourse, it is the
friction of a piece of gut and, following a sort of convulsion, the expulsion
of some mucus. (Meditations 6.13)
To
some critics this sounds like someone deeply melancholic who can no longer
enjoy the basic pleasures of life. The last comment about sex is, like Epictetus’s
remarks on infant death, often put to one side as something probably best not
to talk about. But Marcus is making an important point, and if it makes us feel
a bit uncomfortable then that might be all the more reason to face it head on.
The hard truth that Marcus wants to insist on is that all the things that we
invest with so much value and significance are ultimately no more than lumps of
base matter in motion. So again we are being invited to adopt a physicist’s
perspective on the objects of everyday life. The passage I have just quoted
continues:
Thoughts such as these reach through to the things
themselves and strike to the heart of them, allowing us to see them as they
truly are. So follow this practice throughout your life, and where things seem
most worthy of your approval, lay them naked, and see how cheap they are, and
strip them of the pretences of which they are so vain. (ibid.)
Elsewhere
Marcus suggests that there are two fundamental ideas that we ought to keep
ready to hand: first, that mental disturbances are the product not of things themselves
but of our judgements about things, and second, that nothing is stable and
everything passes, subject to continual change. He then summarizes these two
principles as concisely as possible, presumably in order to help him remember
them: ho kosmos alloiôsis, ho bios hupolêpsis,
which we might translate expansively as ‘the cosmos is in continual change; the
concerns of human life are the product of opinion’ (Meditations 4.3.4).
Both
Marcus and Epictetus think that seeing things through this physicists’
perspective can be therapeutically beneficial, but the reason why they think
this is beneficial is because they think it is true. You don’t think about
these things in order to feel happy – indeed how on earth could reflecting on
the death of our loved ones make us feel happy –; instead you think about these
things because they express important but sometimes uncomfortable truths about
the world. As philosophers, Epictetus and Marcus retain a deep commitment to
truth no matter how focused they might sometimes seem to be on more practical
concerns over theoretical questions.
What
are the consequences of all this for people today who are interested in drawing
on Stoicism in their daily lives? I think there are a couple that I would like
to mention.
The
first is that it is difficult to disentangle completely Stoic ethics from the
physics. Both Epictetus and Marcus implicitly presuppose a whole range of
claims about how the world is in their practical advice. In antiquity there
were some who thought that questions about Nature were irrelevant to thinking
about how best to live. Cicero expresses this view in his Republic, crediting it to Socrates, who was an important role model
for the Stoics. Others such as the Epicurean Lucretius insisted on the study of
Nature when thinking about how to live well, adding that the main reason to
study Nature was for the therapeutic benefit it might offer. The Stoic view
shares that Epicurean idea that the pursuit of a good life requires at least
some understanding of Nature, although I suspect they would also be less
instrumentalist than Lucretius and insist on the intrinsic value of studying
Nature as well as its contribution to living a good life.
The
second consequence is that if we are going to take seriously the idea of living
a Stoic life then we might find ourselves having to commit to a number of ideas
that might not be easily reconciled with our existing worldview. Of course one
might still take bits and pieces of Stoic advice, as many people have over the
centuries, but if we want to take Stoicism seriously as a philosophy that
offers some sort of guidance for how to live it may challenge and sometime
require relinquishing some of our existing beliefs. If we want to think about
Stoic philosophy as a way of life then we need to get to grips with a lot more
than just a few practical exercises; we also need to think about some of the
bigger claims that the Stoics make about the nature of the world. I am not suggesting
we have to become true believers of the entirety of ancient Stoic physical
theory; we don’t have to take as fact the claim that every 10,000 years or so
the entire cosmos is consumed by flames and then reborn (although proponents of
‘big crunch’ theory might not have a problem with this). Indeed we ought not to
become true believers of anything for, as I have been stressing, this is
philosophy, not religion. Marcus Aurelius is an interesting case in point: in
his version of Stoicism – and I think probably every ancient Stoic had their
own subtly different version – he is happy to entertain the possibility that
Epicurean physics of atoms and void might be true instead of the Stoic idea
that all of Nature is a unified organism, but the one principle he insists on
as fundamental is the one I mentioned earlier, namely that everything is
ultimately matter in a process of continual change. That is not something to
believe because it might make us feel better; it is something to believe because
it is true. Part of learning to live well within the world involves
understanding what it is and how it works.