Nietzsche’s Devastating Critique of Stoicism in “Beyond Good and Evil”

One thing I have noticed during my short time writing and reading on Medium so far is that the philosophy of stoicism enjoys immense popularity among what one may call “Pop Philosophers”. Pop of course being short for popular- these writers produce myriad articles stating things like “6 Epic Stoic Rules to Make You Rich”, “9 Ways Marcus Aurelius Exercised Will Power”, “10 Stoic Principles for Self-Control”, etc. etc. ad infinitum and ad absurdum.

Philosophy, believe it or not, is not “self-help”. Sure, on a normative level of discourse philosophy can address questions of the “right way to live”, or some sort of guiding principles and ethics to live by. However, that is just one aspect of philosophy, and the majority of philosophy does not actually deal with normative level claims and dialectics, but rather operates on the meta-level, dealing with higher order questions of metaphysics and epistemology, more so than ethics.

In other words, philosophy is not so often preoccupied with what day-to-day actions may be “right” or “wrong”, but rather addresses the meta-level question: what does it mean for an action to be “right” or “wrong”? How do we arrive at knowledge of these categories? Are these categories objective or subjective? Are there moral facts? These are higher order questions, and in my…