Think Like A Stoic: Notes

Lesson 1: How To Live Like A Stoic

Zeno's Shipwreck

More than 2,000 years ago, a Phoenician merchant named Zeno of Citium was on board a merchant ship sailing in the Aegean Sea near Athens. The ship encountered a powerful storm and sunk with all of its cargo and many men aboard. But Zeno survived, making it ashore and arriving at Athens.

Once he recovered from the shock of this experience, he went to a bookshop, where he listened to the Memorabilia being read aloud. This is a composition written by the Greek statesman and writer Xenophon about the famous Athenian philosopher Socrates.

Zeno was so fascinated that he resolved then and there to study philosophy. He turned to the bookseller and asked, “Where can I find a philosopher?” The bookseller looked out onto the street and said, “There goes one!” The philosopher in question was Crates of Thebes. And Zeno became his student.

After a few years of studying with a number of other teachers, Zeno felt ready to begin his own school of practical philosophy, which became known as Stoicism.

Virtue Ethics

While standard ethics is focused on answering questions about actions (e.g., "Is abortion right or wrong?" or "Is human cloning right or wrong?"), virtue ethics, by contrast, focuses on our character. It asks, "How can I become a better person?" (It focuses on the character traits and virtues that make a person good rather than evaluating isolated actions).

Aristotle practically invented the approach of virtue ethics as it is understood in the West today. He thought that a eudaimonic life—that is, a life worth living—is one in which we try to become the best humans we can be. But he also contended that such a life requires many things that are not under our control, such as wealth, education, health, and even beauty.

Epicurus, in contrast, thought that the most important things in life were the pursuit of simple pleasures and the avoidance of pain, both physical and emotional. So, the Epicurean life consists of spending a lot of time with friends, reading and debating, all while accompanied by food and wine[

Stoicism is another type of virtue ethics, alongside Aristotelianism and Epicureanism. Indeed, the Stoics were major rivals of the two, and of other schools throughout the Hellenistic period. This is an ancient philosophy born of the need of a Phoenician merchant who was trying to process losing all he had after barely surviving a shipwreck. A sound philosophy of life can change your outlook for the better, as it did for Zeno of Citium

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The Premise of Stoicism 

Stoic philosophy is founded on one crucial premise and relies on two fundamental pillars to provide practical guidance through one’s life.

The premise is to live according to nature.
The Stoics figured that if the problem we’re facing is how to live a life worth living, then we should take seriously what sort of animal human beings actually are (what is our nature). Two ideas, according to the Stoics, are so important that we might want to organize our entire existence around them:

We are capable of reason, and

We are inherently social animals.

A capacity for reason doesn’t mean that we are always reasonable, of course. And being social doesn’t mean we cannot live in isolation. Instead, it means that we thrive in a social group, pursuing projects that are made possible by the fact that we live in a society.

From these two observations, the Stoics concluded that a life well lived is one in which we deploy reason for the improvement of society. Living according to nature means using our brains, as imperfect as our brains are, to make life on this planet better for everyone, and therefore for ourselves.

The Four Cardinal Virtues

We can achieve living a life well lived by relying on the two pillars of Stoic philosophy: the four cardinal virtues and the dichotomy of control.

Improving society, according to the Stoics, isn’t something that can be done from the top down—by imposing some kind of utopia on people who might or might not like your view of how things should be run. Instead, the world changes one person at a time, from the bottom up. And the only person you can change is yourself.

This positive personal change comes about by constantly practicing four virtues, or habits. They are: 1) practical wisdom, 2) courage, 3) justice, and 4) temperance.

Practical wisdom tells us the difference between what we can and cannot change. 

Courage is not just physical but first and foremost moral—the courage to stand up and do the right thing. 

Justice tells us the right thing to do. 

Temperance is the notion that we should do things in the right measure, neither overreacting to situations nor failing to do enough to correct things

The Dichotomy of Control

(The dichotomy of control divides all things in life into two categories: Things within our control and Things outside our control.)

The second pillar of Stoic philosophy—the dichotomy of control—was famously summarized by the slave-turned-teacher Epictetus at the beginning of his manual for a good life, The Enchiridion. While we can influence our body, property, reputation, and office, ultimately, they’re not under our power. Even the healthiest body can be struck by disease or accident. Your property can be taken away from you for a number of reasons. And your reputation can be ruined through gossip and other people’s malicious intent.

What if your coworker is being harassed by the boss? Practical wisdom tells you that this is a situation where you can intervene. You might not be able to change your boss’s attitude, but you may be able to improve the culture at your workplace and comfort your coworker. Justice, then, lies in standing up to the boss. Courage is what gives you the strength to do it. And temperance keeps your response to the boss within reasonable and useful limits[search_files_v2:1].

In contrast, opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and other things of our own doing might be influenced by others, but they ultimately are our own responsibility. Other people might try to get you to change your judgments and opinions or make you adopt a different set of values, but the buck, so to speak, stops with you[search_files_v2:1].

If you take the dichotomy of control to heart, you’ll change your entire outlook on life. You’ll no longer concern yourself with the outcomes of your decisions but instead with their soundness. The outcome is not up to you, but the decision to do certain things rather than others certainly is. The Roman writer Cicero explained the Stoic position by considering an archer who is trying to hit a target. The archer can decide how assiduously to practice, which arrows and bow to select, and how to care for them. They also control their focus right up the moment they let go of the arrow. But once the arrow leaves the bow, nothing at all is under the archer’s control. A sudden gust of wind might deflect the best shot, or the target—say, an enemy soldier—might suddenly move. Hitting the target is what you’re after, so it’s what you pursue. But success or failure does not, in and of itself, make you a good or bad archer. This means that you should not attach your self-worth to the outcome but only to the attempt. Then, you will achieve what the ancients called ataraxia—the kind of inner tranquility that results from knowing you’ve done everything that was in your power to do

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Role Ethics

Another way to understand and practice Stoic philosophy is through what’s known as role ethics. The idea is that we all play a variety of roles in our lives—father, son, mother, daughter, boss, employee, and so forth—and that a life worth living involves balancing those roles in the most harmonious way possible

According to Epictetus, there are fundamentally three kinds of roles:

• our basic role as human beings and members of the human cosmopolis,
• roles that are given to us by circumstances, such as being someone’s daughter or son, and
• roles that we choose for ourselves, such as by having children or being someone’s friend.

The Stoics think that our role as a member of the human cosmopolis is the most important one. Ultimately, we need to work in concert to make sure that we provide a better present for all and a better future for coming generations. Within that broad guideline, we then need to balance all of our specific roles the best way possible. That will often entail compromises. How much of a compromise should you make, say, when you contemplate the simultaneous demands of your professional and family lives? This ties back to the cardinal virtues

The ancient Stoics had a trick to improving our character— the use of role models. They came up with a gallery of real and fictional role models whose virtues they used to straighten our crooked character. 

One of the most famous of these was Cato the Younger, who gave his life to oppose what he perceived as the tyranny of the Roman dictator Julius Caesar. Another was the mythical Odysseus, who endured 10 years of hardship and turned down the offer of immortality—twice—in order to come back home to his wife and son. And, of course, there is Socrates, whose philosophy inspired the Stoics, and whose death at the hands of the state made him the first martyr to the cause of wisdom.

Lesson 2: Stoicism From Heraclitus To Thoreau

To help situate Stoicism among its rivals and influencers, this lesson takes a look at the major Hellenistic schools of thought. It then examines Stoicism’s philosophical roots in Socrates and Heraclitus and its evolution through time.

THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD

Alexander the Great ruthlessly built the largest empire the Western world had ever seen by the
time he was 32. Then came the catastrophe that abruptly quashed his dreams: He died after a night and day of boozy partying with one of his admirals—or perhaps he was poisoned.

Regardless, the world that Alexander constructed with so much effort crumbled overnight. With no obvious or legitimate heir to replace him, a 40-year war erupted, all while Rome was asserting itself as a new power in the Mediterranean world.

In September of the year 31 BCE, a decisive naval confrontation took place at Actium, on the western coast of present-day Greece. This was between the forces of Caesar Octavian on one side and Mark Antony and Cleopatra on the other. Octavian won, ending the Roman civil war that had persisted since the death of Julius Caesar some 13 years earlier. Under the name of Caesar Augustus, Octavian became the first Roman emperor.

The timespan bracketed by the death of Alexander and the battle of Actium is known as the Hellenistic period. It saw the sudden flourishing of a number of philosophies, including Epicureanism, Cyrenaism, Cynicism, Peripateticism, Skepticism, and Stoicism. It may be no coincidence that the people of this era were interested in practical philosophy, given that their world had been turned upside down by events they had no hope of influencing, let alone controlling.

HELLENISTIC SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT

Lesson 3: The Stoic Garden: Physics, Ethics, Logic