The Problem with Stoicism

It’s a pet peeve of mine that Stoicism is constantly referred to as a “practical philosophy”. The implied message in this label, sometimes more explicitly expressed by its contemporary adherents, is that it’s opposed to the supposedly inconsequential and nonsense parlour games of other kinds of philosophy.

Stoicism has seen a marked rise in popularity in recent years thanks largely to its promotion within popular psychology and business literature. In a blog post called “Stoicism 101: A Beginner’s Guide for Entrepreneurs”, the self-help author Timothy Ferriss wrote:

“Fortunately, there are a few philosophical systems designed to produce dramatic real-world effects without the nonsense. Unfortunately, they get punished because they lack the ambiguity required for weeks of lectures and expensive textbooks.”*

His guest blogger was the former CMO of American Apparel, Ryan Holiday. Holiday has been the greatest populariser of Stoicism as a practical philosophy “for entrepreneurs” since the publication of his Daily Stoic, a compendium of Stoic quotations, in 2016. Holiday wrote:

“[Stoicism] doesn’t concern itself with complicated theories about the world, but with helping us overcome destructive emotions and act on what can be acted upon. Just like an entrepreneur, it’s built for action, not endless debate.”*

It’s great that Holiday and Ferriss are giving the Stoics so much publicity in the modern age, but their perception of its utility is based on a major oversight. Holiday overlooks the fact that Stoic ethics are based on a Stoic cosmology, that is, a - er - complicated theory about the world.

The particular Roman brand of Stoicism that contemporary popularisers love so much — the philosophies of Seneca (the Roman aristocrat and tutor/speechwriter of Nero), Marcus Aurelius (a later Roman emperor, who is among the five “good emperors”) and Epictetus (the Greek slave turned philosophical teacher), form an ethical system that simply would not exist without the cosmological foundations of earlier Greek Stoicism.

The very basic tenet of Stoic ethics follows the idea that you cannot control external circumstances, but you can control your own thoughts and emotions. In the stoical sense, this isn’t simply that “shit happens”. The Stoics truly believed in determinism — that all events in the universe are predetermined, and human beings have no power over the course of events. The ethics of Stoicism follow logically from that premise.

Chrysippus, the head of the Athenian Stoic school at around 230 BC, who laid out the system of Stoicism as we know it, wrote:

“…all effects owe their existence to prior causes. And if this is so, all things happen by fate. It follows therefore that whatever happens, happens by fate.”

Events simply happen in an unchanging chain of causes. Since he believed everything to be fated, Chrysippus also believed in divination. The future can be read in, say, tarot cards or the palm of a hand, because the order of the tarot cards or the lines in the palm are inextricably linked to events to come.

Seneca, being a later stoic, shared Chrysippus’ cosmology to the extent that he (like Chrysippus) believed fate, nature and God to be the same thing. Even joy and sorrow, Seneca wrote, “is predetermined”.

So all those Seneca quotations that become pithy motivational statements on social media and in self-help books were written from the basis of a cosmology - a complex theory of everything - that was handed down by the earlier Stoics like Chrysippus.

How Should I Live?

Stoicism’s cosmological foundations are simply providing the answer to the question “how should I live?” because as a “complicated theory about the world” it forms the basis on which decisions can be made and attitudes formed.

Practically all philosophies are “practical” in this respect. Let’s take two much-maligned “difficult” philosophers: Jean-Paul Sartre and Immanuel Kant. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism also attempts to answer the question “how should I live?”, as does Immanuel Kant’s ultra-complex thesis laid out in his dense “critiques”.

Before you attempt to answer the question “how should I live?” you must first take a stab at forming an understanding of the world in as much depth and detail as you can stomach. Most people rest on common assumptions, some seek understanding from philosophical history.

Having developed systems, much as the Stoics did in ancient Greece, Kant and Sartre went on to develop ethical treatises: Sartre found virtue in authenticity of action.

Kant gave us the “Categorical Imperative” of virtue. This is a “deontological” (rule-based) ethical position often confused with, but quite distinct from, the age-old “Golden Rule”. Kant’s Categorical Imperative was that we should act in a way that ought to be a law for everybody.

Both Kant and Sartre made a case for human freedom. Both saw consciousness as the source of our freedom (Sartre saw consciousness as a “nothingness”, Kant saw consciousness as “transcendental idealism”. Yes — I know — both sound complicated, but these ideas can be explained for those who can be bothered to learn them).

Both Sartre and Kant saw human consciousness as something exceptional in nature, the very source of our free will. Stoicism sees consciousness as a spectator as fate blindly unfolds around and through us, freedom lies only in our take on things (the question the Stoics wrestled with was to what extent we are determined).

What would be disturbing to most people — even those who admire Seneca’s maxims — is the passivity of Seneca’s Stoicism: the idea that you can do nothing to effect real change in the world, only to your circumstances as you perceive them.

Wild Beasts and Great Leaps

This is perhaps why (and I’m being speculative now) Stoicism was so popular in the late Roman world. It was an empire that became increasingly cruel to those it ruled over while disparity of wealth widened at an increasing rate.

While Roman aristocrats philosophised in their perfumed and covered sedan chairs, pregnant women were thrown to wild beasts in amphitheatres to the roar of cheering crowds.

Perhaps Stoicism is the right kind of “quiet” philosophy for times just like now, when the rich are getting exponentially richer and the institutions of democracy are attacked from all sides. Stoicism feels right when the world seems to be going wrong.

Kant’s and Sartre’s particular philosophies caught the public imagination at times of “great leaps” in human well-being.

Existentialism flourished in post-war Europe when the old Western empires crumbled. We saw great housing and healthcare projects rolled out while science took great leaps: in genetics, quantum physics and computational science.

Kant’s philosophy took hold as the enlightenment lit up in Western Europe. The fields of law, parliamentary rule, science and economics as we know them sprang up from the intellectual hotbed of protestant Europe. Kant, who was a late starter, wrote of “waking from my dogmatic slumber” before he wrote his Critique of Pure Reason.

Digital technology and individualist capitalism has made our intellectual institutions more positivist and instrumentalist than ever. It seems even Stoicism itself can fall victim to a mechanical appraisal of its merits that can distort or ignore its core concepts.

Maybe the modern proponents of stoicism will say, “well, we’re taking the best part of stoicism — the part about being resilient to misfortune and so on. There’s no need for the other stuff.”

“Stoic” is of course both an adjective and a noun. The small “s” adjective is something like what the English call the “stiff upper lip”, that is, taking what fate throws at you with equanimity.

Well, who could disagree with the small “s” adjective? What these modern writers really mean is that they are taking the colloquial meaning of “stoic”, an attitude to life, to stand for “Stoicism”, a school of philosophy that attempts to explain life.

Well, fine. But let’s do away with this notion of “practical philosophy” then. Because all philosophy is practical and to perpetuate a mere attitude as a philosophy is a dangerous thing.

Thank you for reading.

• Timophy Ferris and Ryan Holiday, Stoicism 101: A Practical Guide for Entrepreneurs https://tim.blog/2009/04/13/stoicism-101-a-practical-guide-for-entrepreneurs/