WHAT IS STOICISM?
Zeno of Cyprus, the once wealthy merchant lost everything when he was shipwrecked in Athens around 300 BCE. Without much to do, he wandered into a book shop, became intrigued by reading about Socrates, and proceeded to seek out and study with the city’s noted philosophers. He originated the philosophy of Stoicism which teaches a person to deal with the flawed world using 4 cardinal values:
1) Practical wisdom - the ability to navigate complex situations in a logical, informed and calm manner
2) Temperance - the exercise of moderation in all aspects of life (not underdoing or overdoing something)
3) Justice - treating others with fairness even when they have done wrong
4) Courage - not just in extraordinary circumstances but facing daily challenges with clarity and integrity
Stoicism gets its name from Stoa Poikile
i. e. the public colonnade where Zeno and his students gathered for discussion. Thus it wasn’t a secluded place where the general people were unwelcome, rather the Stoics encouraged the general people to share their life stories.
Today a stoic is the name given to a person who stays calm in adversities. But the original philosophy was bigger than just this calmness. The Stoics believed that the universe has a certain rationale that it operates on. This rationale is called the logos. We may not always have control over the events happening in our lives, but we surely can control how we approach them.
The philosophy has been around for thousands of years. The Stoic teachings and wisdom are relevant even today. These were used by recent historical leaders like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Nelson Mandela. After Mandela was released from his 27 year long imprisonment, he even treated the White oppressors in his country justly and sought to reconcile the two races. He felt that seeking revenge for the past atrocities wouldn’t be logical.
He had been exposed to the great Stoic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius' journal called 'Meditations' when he was in jail.
The influence has also spread to current popular authors like Tim Ferris, Robert Greene and Ryan Holiday. It has also found a large community on the internet.
Stoicism says that it is impossible for us to remove all sorts of suffering from our lives. It doesn’t declare us helpless victims. Instead it says that there is dichotomy of control, meaning there is the external which is out of our control and there is the internal (our interpretation of the external) that we can control.
The philosophy asks us to be focused on the activities which we like doing and while doing them our entire presence should be in those activities alone. We shouldn’t expect the result to be in our favour. What comes beyond the performance of any task is not within our control and thus must not be looked at to know whether we are happy or not.
Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful in the world when he was the Roman emperor. He could have anything he desired. Yet he wrote,
"Almost nothing material is needed for a happy life for he who has understood existence . "
In 'Letters from a Stoic' , Roman statesman and one of the most renowned Stoic philosophers Seneca writes,
"Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but we had them. "
To develop courage, Stoics temporarily strip themselves of the things they ordinarily depend upon for comfort to prove to themselves that they can survive without the things they previously needed.
Finally Seneca 's words on the value of time :
“I advise you… to keep what is really yours; and you cannot begin too early. For, as our ancestors believed, it is too late to be frugal when you reach the bottom of the wine holder. Of that which remains at the bottom, the amount is slight and the quality is vile.”
It is now that we must find time & now that we must find happiness, if it is either that we are seeking, for if we do not focus the lens through which we see life right now, everything we see from this moment forward will remain out of focus. For a stoic the ability to find happiness in spite of what occurs around us is developed through character and perspective. We must realize that nothing is good or bad inherently, but only our judgements & interpretations of things can be good or bad.
