Stoicism

The big questions

1. Is virtue the only thing that is good, and wealth, health and reputation merely useful?
2. What is genuinely up to us, and what follows if almost nothing is?
3. Are emotions judgements, and can we change them by changing what we believe?
4. If everything happens by fate, how can we be responsible for what we do?
5. When should we assent to an impression, and when should we withhold judgement?
6. Are we citizens of a city, or of the world?

An emperor at war on the Danube frontier, writing at night in Greek to no one but himself, begins one entry: “Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.” That is Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1, in George Long’s translation. He goes on to remind himself that such people act from ignorance of good and evil, that they cannot harm what is truly his, and that he was made to work with them, not against them. Stoicism is the philosophy that taught him to think this way.

A school in a porch

Stoicism takes its name from the Stoa Poikilē, the Painted Porch in Athens, where Zeno of Citium began teaching around 300 BCE. His successor Cleanthes was followed by Chrysippus, who gave the school its systematic form and was said to have written over seven hundred books, none of which survives whole. The Stoics divided philosophy into logic, physics and ethics, which they held to be inseparable, and compared the whole to an animal, an egg and a fertile field. The school passed through a middle period with Panaetius and Posidonius into Rome, where Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius wrote the works most people now read.

Most early Stoic writing is lost, so the school’s logic and physics come down to us in fragments and reports, while its Roman ethics survive in letters, lectures and notebooks. That is one reason Stoicism is often taken to be only an ethics. It was a complete philosophy.

Virtue and the indifferents

The core ethical claim is severe: virtue, the excellence of a rational character, is the only good, and vice the only evil. Health, wealth, reputation and even life are “indifferents”. Some are preferred, and a sensible person pursues them, but none can make a life good or bad. The goal is to live in agreement with nature, which for a rational being means living in agreement with reason. The perfectly wise person, the sage, is rarer than the phoenix, and everyone else is making progress or failing to.

The teaching most people know comes from Epictetus, a former slave who taught in Nicopolis, through the Enchiridion compiled by his student Arrian. In Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s translation it opens: “There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own.” Distress comes from treating the second kind of thing as if it were the first.

The passions as judgements

The Stoics held that emotions such as fear, grief, anger and craving are not forces that happen to us but judgements we make: that something present or coming is a real good or a real evil, and that it is right to be moved by it. Since those judgements are false, the passions can be removed by correcting them, and the wise person is free of them, a state the Stoics called apatheia. This is not numbness. They described good feelings, joy, caution and rational wishing, that rest on true judgements. Modern cognitive behavioural therapy, whose founders cited Epictetus, shares the idea that changing a belief can change a feeling.

Assent, knowledge and logic

Stoic epistemology turns on assent. Impressions present themselves to the mind, and we choose whether to assent to them. Some impressions, the Stoics argued, are “cognitive”: they come from what is so, in a way that could not come from what is not, and assenting to them is knowledge. The Academic sceptics Arcesilaus and Carneades attacked the claim that any impression is beyond error, and their long debate with the Stoics is one of the founding arguments of Western epistemology. It is also close to a question this site cares about: when a fluent, confident output arrives from a source you cannot inspect, what would justify assenting to it, and when is the wise course to withhold judgement? (See Your Chatbot Is Not a Witness.)

In logic, Chrysippus developed a logic of propositions, of “if”, “and” and “or”, rather than Aristotle’s logic of terms, with a small set of basic argument forms from which others were derived. It anticipated parts of modern propositional logic by more than two thousand years.

Fate, providence and the cosmopolis

Stoic physics describes a single material cosmos pervaded and ordered by reason (logos), which is also providence and fate: everything happens through an unbroken chain of causes. The Stoics nonetheless defended responsibility. Chrysippus compared a person to a cylinder pushed down a slope: the push starts it, but it rolls because of its own shape, and in the same way our actions follow from our own characters, which makes them ours. Because all human beings share in reason, the Stoics also held that each of us is a citizen of the world, a cosmopolitanism that shaped Roman law, early Christian thought and modern ideas of human rights.

Influence

Stoic ideas passed into Christian ethics, into the Neostoicism of Justus Lipsius in the sixteenth century, and into the moral psychology of thinkers from Descartes to Spinoza and Kant. In the twenty-first century they have had a popular revival as a practical philosophy for ordinary life, which keeps the ethics and the dichotomy of control and usually leaves out the physics and the logic.

How to start

Read the first ten sections of Epictetus’s Enchiridion, then Book II of the Meditations, then Seneca’s first letter to Lucilius, on the use of time; all three are free in the translations linked above. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on Stoicism covers the parts of the system that the Roman writers take for granted.