Happiness and Stoicism

On Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferriss, and Derren Brown

Every year, I teach a class that centers on happiness. I begin it with a simple question: “How many of you want to be happy?” And everyone always raises their hand.

I could start the class with the more appropriate philosophical question: “How many of you want to live a good life?” But I know better. The students would just stare at me with confusion.

This pedagogical tactic reveals an important point: “happiness” functions in English-language popular discourse as the term to talk about a core philosophical idea: the good life.

The Stoic answer to this question, that the good life consists in flourishing (eudaimonia), has seen a resurgent interest that is indicative of a cultural shift. Interestingly, it looks to be taking the place left open by the retreat of religious belief.

Holiday, Ferriss and Brown have made a greater impact on the public than nearly all the members of the American Philosophical Association have…

Tellingly, the resurgence is due, in no small measure, to the efforts of non-academics, especially Ryan Holiday, a marketing specialist, Tim Ferriss, a personal development specialist, and Derren Brown, a mentalist magician. Not surprisingly, the non-academic source of this resurgence has led some to criticize the adequacy of their revivals.

The challenge goes like this: Stoicism is a philosophical framework that only makes sense if one accepts all of it, especially their physical and metaphysical ideas about how the world works. The new revivals of Stoicism have largely ignored this framework and focused only on the ethical implications of the philosophy — the part that tells you how to live. That’s a problem because those suggestions don’t make any sense unless you also agree to the (questionable) physical and metaphysical components of the general Stoic framework. (See Resources at the bottom for the challenge link).

Now I’m a professional philosopher by trade who specializes in ethics, ancient Greek, and comparative philosophy. I actually think that the pre-Columbian Aztecs offer a more compelling guide to life than Stoicism … but I still think this challenge is unfair.

So I find myself in a place where I’ll defend those with whom I only partially agree for the sake of truth. Holiday, Ferriss and Brown are fine to continue to develop Stoicism as they have because the challenge turns on a faulty meta-ethical view about ethical claims are justified — that’s my main claim.

I note, incidentally, that insofar as Holiday, Ferriss and Brown have made a greater impact on the public than nearly all the members of the American Philosophical Association have, I also welcome their contributions. Let’s start by reviewing the crucial ideas at work.

How To Revive Ancient Wisdom

More specifically the basic idea behind my defence breaks down into two parts: the challenge is accurate about the history, inaccurate about the method of ethics.

In other words: yes, the Stoics did approach the topic of how to live as part of a larger framework. No, you don’t need to support their physical and metaphysical views to get to their ethical conclusions.

We can approach this by asking a broader question: are philosophical reconstructions in principle problematic? That’s hard to answer in the abstract, but it’s easier to answer if one looks at philosophical practice.

Any contemporary revival of an historical philosophical position is, to some degree, a reconstruction. Aristotle was sexist and defended slavery. John Locke was sexist and had a financial stake in businesses engaged in the slave trade. Immanuel Kant holds the ignoble distinction of being the first racist in our contemporary sense, since (according to a broadly accepted view) he is the first to have developed “race” in the way that we recognize today (see more in the resources below). Despite these flaws, all these thinkers developed frameworks of thought that can be reasonably reconstructed without those commitments, and that’s why there are still (many) contemporary defenders of each.

So reconstruction itself is not a problem. The challenge must then hold that it is the specific character of the New Stoic reconstruction that makes non-sense of the contemporary revivals.

The heart of the matter, for this specific challenge, turns on the Stoic practice of disciplined desire. It concerns knowing and living by an understanding of what is and what is not proper to want. Let me explain.

To lead a good life, for the Stoics, you need to recognize that some things are under our control, and some are not. You need to want to change those things that you can, not those that you cannot. The modern-day serenity prayer, written by Reinhold Niebuhr perhaps in 1934, summarizes the ideal:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

Ryan Holiday presents this as the first and most basic lesson in Stoic ethical wisdom. The point supports the Stoic understanding of courage and temperance as virtues. It also derives, for the Stoics, from their understanding of the world’s physical and metaphysical principles.

If those physical and metaphysical principles are false, then, it looks as though the ethical framework that the original Stoic philosophers (especially Chrysippus) developed from them doesn’t make sense either.

Without going into the details, I think that trying to revive that broader framework for ethical purposes is a bad idea. The Stoic ideas of physics are just going to be worse than our present-day physics. And Stoic metaphysical ideas, their position on what reality really is, are always going to be bogged down by opposing metaphysical views — that’s mostly the character of metaphysics as a discipline.

Is Stoicism sunk then?

No. Not even close.

Aristotle’s ethics was, for much of his revival in the English speaking world during the latter half of the twentieth century, thought to be similarly tied to his metaphysical views. But recent scholarship on his work has shown that (probably) Aristotle didn’t think of his ethical claims that way (see the Kraut and Berryman resources below). More importantly, no one is confined to approaching him that way.

How to Justify Ethical Claims

The contemporary practice of ethics is largely thought to follow a path of reflective equilibrium (the term is John Rawls’, but Aristotle’s method of “saving the phenomena” is relevantly similar). The rough idea is that ethical conclusions are achieved by a sort of triangulation process: you start out with your intuitions or “gut feelings” about a topic, then you test those out for consistency with logic, and for soundness with what is known scientifically.

By moving back and forth among your “intuitions” this way, you get as close to ethical truth as one can get. I’m particularly concerned that our “intuitions” in philosophy are constrained to “Western” culture, and that’s why I do comparative work. In fact, I think that all ethical philosophy that is done in ignorance of comparative work is nothing more than cultural apologetics, not philosophy. But leaving that point aside …

Why the New Stoicism is Just Fine

Hopefully, you see how this approach to ethics can make sense of the New Stoicism. The bar that the New Stoics need to cross is the following. Is the idea of having some things under your control, and other things not under your control intuitively plausible?

Well, some things look to be more under my control than other things: my choices definitely are, how out of shape I am is sort of under my control, and whether COVID will be raging in the Fall of 2020 in the US is largely not. So yes, the basic idea makes intuitive sense. Maybe it could be refined a little.

Alright, is it a logically consistent idea and does it cohere with scientific findings? Well, it’s not an incoherent idea logically, but some results from contemporary physics point towards a sort of determinism. Still, even if we’re determined, the compatibilist way of thinking about choices is still a viable possibility (I like Ronald Dworkin’s approach to this matter the best, just because he writes so darn well). So check, and check.

Well, I don’t think there’s anything else left to say on the matter then. The New Stoic revival is fine as far as it goes. I’d like to point out, though, that the larger adequacy of the project turns on its ability to address what is known from other cultures. This is a different kind of challenge, since the point at issue is whether our basic intuitions are culturally suspect, not whether Stoic physical ideas make Stoic ethical ideas inapplicable to our lives.

All three New Stoic revivalists have taken some steps in this comparative direction — and they’re all notably better about it than most professional philosophers. Holiday is undoubtedly the best in this regard (especially in Stillness is the Key).

I’ll just note that if they were to engage with Aztec philosophy more seriously, though, they’d find that especially their ideas of practical deliberation are rather too individualistic — but that’s a topic for another day.

For today, I think the New Stoics are just fine.

Resources

None of the following links has referral identification numbers (if I’ve missed one, let me know). I’m not getting paid anything from recommending these. I just want to give you something useful.

Aristotle on slavery and sexism is a well-known difficulty for contemporary revivals of his thought. The most rigorous of the defenses is likely Terence Irwin’s in Aristotle’s First Principles.

Aristotle on justifying ethical propositions is a topic of recent discussion. See Richard Kraut essay in The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Sylivia Berryman’s recent Aristotle on The Sources of Ethical Life is likely to be the gold standard for some decades to come.

Aztec Philosophy — Honestly, my short articles are the best introduction to Aztec ethics until my books come out. You can read “What the Aztecs Can Teach Us About Happiness and the Good Life” or “Aztec Moral Philosophy Didn’t Expect Anyone to Be A Saint.” Miguel Leon-Portilla wrote a book in the 1950s on Aztec philosophy, translated into English as Aztec Thought and Culture. Finally, my friend Jim Maffie has written the definitive work on Aztec metaphysics and cosmology in Aztec Philosophy.

Free Will and Compatibilism — Ronald Dworkin’s argument on free will and compatibilism in Justice for Hedgehogs isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it is readable and eloquent. And the project of the whole book is impressive philosophy, worth reading on its own.

Kant on Racism — This is a controversial topic for philosophers, of course. But a good place to start is Robert Bernasconi’s “Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up.”

Locke on Slavery — This is obviously a complex topic, so an accessible introduction is “Does Locke’s Entanglement with Slavery Undermine his Philosophy?”

Stoic Challenge — You can read Steven Gambardella’s thought-provoking challenge here: “The Problem with Stoicism.”

Stoic Philosophy — There are too many sources for this. I’ll just point out that Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key is the most global in its approach. Derren Brown’s Happy deserves a broader readership in the United States. The quickest, readable introduction can be found here on Medium with Donald J. Robertson “Stoicism as a Way of Life.” You can read Tim Ferri’s if you like also: “Stoicism 101: A Practical Guide for Entrepreneurs.” Finally, Massimo Pigliucci has produced a scholarly, and accessible introduction to Stoic philosophy in How to Be A Stoic.