How To Be A Stoic: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living

"They’re not so different in some respects. Both are concerned with reflecting on the nature of what it is to be human and recognise that emotions can cloud our judgments in various ways and make us act irrationally. The Roman Stoic Seneca famously thought that anger was a form of temporary madness. Like Buddhism as described by Robert Wright, Stoicism in its modern form, as described by Massimo Pigliucci, is a philosophy for living. It allows us to step back from the moment, and, as a result of a higher awareness of what’s happening to us, act better and live a more fulfilled and, hopefully, happier life as a result. That’s the theory anyway. So what Massimo has done is immersed himself in ancient Stoicism, the philosophy that came out of Greece and was very dominant in Ancient Rome. Epictetus was a freed slave who was a very influential early Stoic philosopher. He starts with this fundamental belief, known as the ‘dichotomy of control’—that there is stuff which you can control and stuff that you can’t, and that the rational approach to life is just to focus on the stuff that you can control. You can’t do anything about the other stuff anyway, so don’t worry about it. If you put into practice that simple focus on what you have control over, your life will go much better. Much of the anxiety that people have about how they’re living or what they’ve done stems from worrying about things which they can’t affect. There’s a caricature of Stoicism as the philosophy that advocates a lack of emotion in our daily life. But the way Massimo characterises it—which he claims is based on the ancient Stoicism—is that it’s not that you don’t have emotions, but that you recognise the source of the emotions and reflect on them. Massimo is actually a Roman, he was brought up in Rome and learnt about Stoicism in school. He lives in New York now, but on a visit to Rome not long ago he had his wallet stolen on the subway there. He said that in his earlier life, he would have been livid. He was on his way out to a meal and he’d lost all his credit cards and all his cash through a moment of negligence. But, as somebody who’d committed to living as a Stoic, he used his Stoic powers to deal with the immediate feeling of anger and asked himself, ‘Well, what can I do, practically? Getting annoyed is not going to be of much use to me. I can control that. Inform the police, then go and have a nice meal with my friends.’ On a personal level, Stoicism allowed him to have a much better reaction to something that was outside his control. I should say that Massimo originally trained as a biologist, then converted to philosophy. I think he did completed PhDs, which is quite a feat. Academically, he is better known as a philosopher of science, but since he discovered Stoicism as a life philosophy, as something to live by, he has acquired a very large following online. It is Christian, but based on Stoic wisdom. It’s true that, as a practising Stoic, you may say, ‘Well, that’s completely outside my control,’ —and cut off an avenue that turned out to be fruitful. I suppose the question is whether you’re an optimistic Stoic and think, ‘I’ve got lots of control,’ or a pessimistic Stoic who thinks, ‘I’ve got very little control. We fantasise that we’re in control, but, often, things that happen turn out to be just luck that we attribute to our own agency. I think I’ve got control over my education, my work, and so on, but actually that’s largely determined by social factors way beyond my control, so I should just go wherever the wind blows me.’ So if you take that extreme pessimistic position, and then focus on the things you can control, that’s almost nothing, and you end up being very passive, as you say. But it could go the other way—if you think, ‘I’ve got lots of control, I can act Stoically towards everything, because it’s all part of my life’—then you might become something like an existentialist. The existentialists famously thought that we are responsible for almost everything that we are. It’s very hard to square with contemporary neuroscience, but Sartre famously said that you’re responsible for your own emotions. If you feel depressed, that is actually your choice, even though it doesn’t necessarily feel like a choice. So, yes, this kind of reasoning about the things we can control sounds simple, but it requires an accurate perception of the limits of human agency. So I agree, it’s not as simple as it sounds at first. But where Stoicism and new Stoicism has some practical benefits is it does give you plenty of psychological strategies for dealing with situations you are likely to encounter, many of them drawn from classical sources. Massimo is very good at communicating the insights of ancient thinkers about how to avoid anger, or how to deal with insults, or other such hazards of life. “The Roman Stoic Seneca famously thought that anger was a form of temporary madness” Perhaps the best example of someone using Stoic thought practically was James B Stockdale, who was an American fighter pilot, shot down over North Vietnam and put in the Hanoi Hilton. He was tortured and in solitary confinement for long periods, but he had studied Stoicism briefly earlier, and decided to put it into practice. He used it as a way of surviving, psychologically, absolutely brutal physical and mental torture. And it worked for him. He managed to come through and always attributed his resilience to his Stoicism. I can see that there is a range of psychological ploys that might well work for people faced with such extreme circumstances. What Massimo is claiming is larger than that, though. It’s that this is a good way of living, that we still have much to learn from ancient Stoicism. You can adopt a range of practices, a range of meditation techniques as well, derived from ancient thinking, and apply them to the completely different context of contemporary life now. The book is written in a very accessible way. It’s towards the self-help end of philosophy for sure, which is something I’m somewhat sceptical of. Pigliucci and Wright share a certain kind of optimism about the possibility of improving our lives individually and, by improving them individually, improving the world. They’ve even joked about forming a religion together. Robert Wright talks about how we feel about young children—that familiar scenario of a parent dropping a young child off at a nursery, and how anxiety-provoking that can be. That’s because we weren’t designed for that from an evolutionary perspective. As a mother or father, you feel that you should be with your young child. That’s exactly the kind of thing that getting a distance on through meditation should improve, he believes. Wright’s line would be that it is deep inside you, but you observe it from a point where you’re seeing it happening to you, but are not completely at one with it, as it were. It’s just something that’s coming from some part of you, and you don’t have to act on it. Maybe the degree of unpleasantness might dissolve. He gives the example of when he had a painful toothache, but meditation allowed him to reflect on the feelings, rather than simply be one with them."