Justin's posts discussing Stoic philosophy

Other Friendly
21

From Matthew Van Natta’s The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism:

Whenever you’re faced with a challenging person, try to recall the following thoughts from Meditations 7:26, in which Marcus Aurelius says:

“When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you’ll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger. Your sense of good and evil may be the same as theirs, in which case you have to excuse them. Or your sense of good and evil may differ from theirs. In which case they’re misguided and deserve your compassion. Is that so hard?”

22

From Matthew Van Natta’s The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism :

When someone talks about you behind your back, how do you respond? Many people would expect a defense along with a counterattack; neither response follows Stoic teachings. You defend yourself when attacked, but words said by another—particularly when out of earshot—fall into the indifferent category. Another person’s opinion of you cannot tarnish your virtue. And you attacking another person’s reputation equates to an unvirtuous act.

(emphasis added)

Atlas Shrugged

He stood listening like a scientist studying a subject of no personal relevance whatever. There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, non-property, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another.

(emphasis added)

23

“When you do a thing because you have determined that it ought to be done, never avoid being seen doing it, even if the opinion of the multitude is going to condemn you. For if your action is wrong, then avoid doing it altogether, but if it is right, why do you fear those who will rebuke you wrongly?”

—Epictetus, Enchiridion 35 (as quoted in Matthew Van Natta’s The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism)

24

From How To Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius by Donald Robinson:

Wisdom, in all these forms, mainly requires understanding the difference between good, bad, and indifferent things. Virtue is good and vice is bad, but everything else is indifferent. Indeed, as we’ve seen, the Stoics followed the Cynics in maintaining the hard line that virtue is the only true good. However, Zeno went on to distinguish between indifferent things that are “preferred,” “dispreferred,” or completely indifferent. Put crudely, external things do have some value, but they’re not worth getting upset over—it’s a different kind of value. One way Stoics explained this was by saying that if we could put virtue on one side of a set of scales, it wouldn’t matter how many gold coins or other indifferent things piled up on the opposing side—it should never tip the balance. Nevertheless, some external things are preferable to others, and wisdom consists precisely in our ability to make these sorts of value judgments. Life is preferable to death, wealth is preferable to poverty, health is preferable to sickness, friends are preferable to enemies, and so on.

I don’t quite like the terminology “indifferent” but I do think that making a categorical distinction between being the value of being virtuous/moral/good and the value of other things makes sense.

As Socrates had put it earlier, such external advantages in life are good only if we use them wisely. However, if something can be used for either good or evil, it cannot truly be good in itself, so it should be classed as “indifferent” or neutral.

People can use their reason, to a degree in the service of evil acts (if they’re operating according to a bad idea that they don’t error correct). So should reason be an indifferent? That does not sound right to me.

The Stoics would say that things like health, wealth, and reputation are, at most, advantages or opportunities rather than being good in themselves. Social, material, and physical advantages actually give foolish individuals more opportunity to do harm to themselves and others. Look at lottery winners. Those who squander their sudden wealth often end up more miserable than they could have imagined.

Right.

People often have what they regard as bad habits or indulgences. Sometimes people let these get out of control even in a normal situation, but people often limit their bad habits/indulgences to something that their lifestyle can tolerate (getting a bit drunk on the weekend, non-ruinous gambling, occasional recreational drug use). But if there is a big lifestyle change that’s not the result of them actually improving their ideas but is instead due to them e.g. winning the lottery, then they may indulge more and make their lives worse. And then when they blow all their money, they have worse habits/lifestyle PLUS the regret of having wasted a bunch of money.

When handled badly, external advantages like wealth do more harm than good. The Stoics would go further: the wise and good man may flourish even when faced with sickness, poverty, and enemies. The true goal of life for Stoics isn’t to acquire as many external advantages as possible but to use whatever befalls us wisely, whether it be sickness or health, wealth or poverty, friends or enemies. The Stoic Sage, or wise man, needs nothing but uses everything well; the fool believes himself to “need” countless things, but he uses them all badly.

I liked the juxtaposition in that last sentence.

Most important of all, the pursuit of these preferred indifferent things must never be done at the expense of virtue. For instance, wisdom may tell us that wealth is generally preferable to debt, but valuing money more highly than justice is a vice. In order to explain the supreme value placed on wisdom and virtue, the Stoics compared reason, our “ruling faculty,” to a king in relation to his court. Everyone in court is situated somewhere or other on the hierarchy of importance. However, the king is uniquely important because he’s the one who assigns everyone else at court a role in the hierarchy. As mentioned earlier, the Stoics call reason, the king in this metaphor, our “ruling faculty” ( hegemonikon ). It’s human nature to desire certain things in life, such as sex and food. Reason allows us to step back and question whether what we desire is actually going to be good for us or not. Wisdom itself is uniquely valuable because it allows us to judge the value of external things—it’s the source of everything else’s value. How therefore does it profit a man, the Stoics might say, if he gains the whole world but loses his wisdom and virtue?

From Francisco’s Money Speech from Atlas Shrugged:

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth—the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

I think a Stoic could appreciate this!

25

Hmm. In the Understanding Objectivism book, Lecture 10, Peikoff says:

The rationalist, as we’ve seen, is typically opposed to emotions. He regards them as a bad element of human nature, so he typically counsels repression. And usually this is tied in with a supernaturalist viewpoint: There are two worlds and two sides of human nature reflecting these two worlds, and your emotions are hooked up with the bad world—namely, this physical world. So repression for the rationalist is like a form of asceticism; it’s a form of beating down the low, materialistic, worldly element within you. Since you have that element and can’t get around it, ethics is a permanent struggle against temptation. Recall the famous quote (as I remember it) from Paul, “The good that I would I don’t do, and the evil that I don’t want to do I do do,” and that’s very poorly put—he put it much better*—but the idea is that he’s in chronic temptation, where his mind tells him to do something but his passions pull him in the opposite direction, so if only he could obliterate them or tame them in some way, he’d be happy. And the Stoics went so far as to say that non-emotion was the standard of the good; apathy, nonfeeling was their term for virtue—kill this evil element.

This characterization of Stoicism does not seem accurate based on what I have been reading. For example, take this section from How To Think Like A Roman Emperor:

Another popular misconception today is that Stoics are unemotional . The ancient Stoics themselves consistently denied this, saying that their ideal was not to be like a man of iron or to have a heart of stone. In fact, they distinguished between three types of emotion: good, bad, and indifferent. They had names for many different types of good passion ( eupatheiai ), a term encompassing both desires and emotions, which they grouped under three broad headings:

  1. A profound sense of joy or gladness and peace of mind, which comes from living with wisdom and virtue

  2. A healthy feeling of aversion to vice, like a sense of conscience, honor, dignity, or integrity

  3. The desire to help both ourselves and others, through friendship, kindness, and goodwill

They also believed that we have many irrational desires and emotions, like fear, anger, craving, and certain forms of pleasure that are bad for us. Stoics did not believe that unhealthy emotions should be suppressed; rather, they should be replaced by healthy ones. However, these healthy emotions aren’t entirely under our control, and we’re not always guaranteed to experience them, so we shouldn’t confuse them with virtue, the goal of life. For Stoics, they’re like an added bonus.

They also taught that our initial automatic feelings are to be viewed as natural and indifferent . These include things like being startled or irritated, blushing, turning pale, tensing up, shaking, sweating, or stammering. They are natural reflex reactions, our first reactions before we escalate them into full-blown passions. We share these primitive precursors to emotion with some non-human animals, and so the Stoics view them with indifference, as neither good nor bad. Indeed, Seneca, as we’ll see, noted the paradox that before we can exhibit the virtues of courage and moderation, we need to have at least some trace of fear and desire to overcome.

Even the Stoic wise man, therefore, may tremble in the face of danger. What matters is what he does next. He exhibits courage and self-control precisely by accepting these feelings, rising above them, and asserting his capacity for reason. He’s not entranced by the siren song of pleasure or afraid of the sting of pain. Some pains have the potential to make us stronger, and some pleasures to harm us. What matters is the use we make of these experiences, and for that we need wisdom. The wise man will endure pain and discomfort, such as undergoing surgery or engaging in strenuous physical exercise, if it’s healthy for his body and, more important, if it’s healthy for his character. He’ll likewise forgo pleasures like eating junk food, indulging in drugs or alcohol, or oversleeping if they are unhealthy for his body or bad for his character. Everything comes back to the exercise of reason and the goal of living wisely.

26

I enjoyed How to Think Like a Roman Emperor a great deal. The chapters integrate some discussion of Marcus Aurelius’ life, Stoic ideas, and practical tips to improve your emotions and life. It’s an interesting, fun, serious, and practical book. I recommend it.

The author is a psychotherapist who studied philosophically academically but was dissatisfied with the modern treatment of it (similar to another Stoic author, William Irvine). He discovered Stoicism and liked it because it connected philosophy to life in a meaningful way (as opposed to just being some disconnected academic stuff). He also discovered that there are connections between Stoicism and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The intellectual history of CBT apparently involves people being inspired by Stoic ideas and trying to incorporate them into psychotherapy, which is something I wasn’t aware of:

As I began to devour the literature on Stoicism, I noticed that the form of modern psychotherapy most akin to it was rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT), the main precursor to CBT, first developed by Albert Ellis in the 1950s. Ellis and Aaron T. Beck, the other main pioneer of CBT, had both cited Stoic philosophy as the inspiration for their respective approaches. For instance, Beck and his colleagues had written in The Cognitive Therapy of Depression , “The philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic philosophers.”3 Indeed, CBT and Stoicism have some fundamental psychological assumptions in common, particularly the “cognitive theory of emotion,” which holds that our emotions are mainly determined by our beliefs. Anxiety largely consists of the belief, for example, that “something bad is going to happen,” according to Beck. From shared premises, moreover, Stoicism and CBT were bound to arrive at similar conclusions about what sort of psychological techniques might be helpful to people suffering from anxiety, anger, depression, and other problems.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Think-Like-Roman-Emperor/dp/1250621437/ref=sr_1_3?qid=1638931611&refinements=p_27%3ADonald+J.+Robertson&s=books&sr=1-3&text=Donald+J.+Robertson

27

Quote from chapter 3 of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor that I liked:

Marcus reminded himself of a pithy saying from Heraclitus: “We ought not to act and speak as if we were asleep.”28 We need to make an effort to awaken our self-awareness, in other words. Following this daily routine, in a sense, helps us to do that by acting like a mentor to ourselves.

Marcus frequently examines his own character and actions, perhaps posing the sort of questions a Stoic mentor might have asked. He asks himself, in different situations, “What use am I now making of my soul?”29 He probed his own mind, scrutinizing the fundamental values he was taking for granted. “Whose soul do I now have?” he would ask. “Am I behaving like a child, a tyrant, a sheep, a wolf, or am I fulfilling my true potential as a rational being? For what purpose am I currently using my mind? Am I being foolish? Am I alienated from other people? Am I letting myself be dragged off course by fear and desire? What passions are there right now in my mind?” You might also ask yourself, “How’s this actually working out?” Sometimes it’s necessary to interrupt the things you’re doing out of habit so that you can ask yourself whether they’re actually healthy or unhealthy for you in the long run.

28

Some practical advice on how to clarify your values from How to Think Like a Roman Emperor:

This sort of Socratic questioning forms part of an approach called “values clarification,” which has been around since the 1970s but has recently gone through a resurgence of popularity among therapists and researchers.30 By deeply reflecting on our values each day and attempting to describe them concisely, we can develop a clearer sense of direction in life. You might do this by posing questions to yourself such as:

• What’s ultimately the most important thing in life to you?

• What do you really want your life to stand for or represent?

• What do you want to be remembered for after you’re dead?

• What sort of person do you most want to be in life?

• What sort of character do you want to have?

• What would you want written on your tombstone?

29

This section had a big impact on me. After reading this, whenever I suffered, I always found some reprieve realising that it could only ever hurt so much. That no matter what went wrong or how much I lost I’d still be there ready to start building again afterwards. I think my current understanding of suffering (that it’s a conflict of ideas that, though potentially very confused and tangled and hard to understand, it can be understood and it can be fixed) and a resultant much more calm acceptance and problem solving attitude to suffering grew from that.

I came across Stoicism after Rand, and I don’t know if I’d have received it as well if I hadn’t read at least The Fountainhead first. It helped understand it to have the idea of a character (Roark) who acts in a way that fits with a Stoic mind.

1 Like