The Consolation of Stoicism
Or: Learning to Play the Hand Dealt to you
The Poverty of Philosophy
When I was a younger man, I discovered the joy of systematic thinking, and then the pure love of wisdom. In other words, I fell in love with philosophy, much to the chagrin of many people associated with me. In philosophy, I found a way to make sense of the world. In philosophy, I felt I could come to certain answers to many of the seemingly random questions that swirled around the world and plagued the minds of men: Questions such as “Do we have a soul and what happens to it after we die?” or “Why do somethings appear beautiful to one person and ugly to another?” Or more importantly, “What is justice?”
Clearly I missed the point. As I grew older, and became an professor, I put philosophy into all of my classes. But I generally lost patience with reading philosophy of other authors. There was always a nagging bit of anarchism in my study of thought: “What makes this philosopher worth my time?” I soon discovered that not all advice from other thinkers was welcomed or even very helpful to me. But more importantly, I discovered that there is a particular poverty within philosophy: Socrates never told us the answer to the question “What is Justice?” We never learned the definitive answer to the question “What is the best ordered society?” And aesthetics turns out to be a study of “preference” after all, though some will dress it up in rigorous clothing, saying “A beautiful thing has this dimension, and this proportion. Ugliness is a departure from that form.”
It was thoroughly unsatisfying, and I found that the more I thought I learned, the less I actually really knew. Of course, all “answers” led to more questions. Inevitably. And this searching, this digging, tended to annoy people I talked to. No answer anyone ever gave me was enough. My questioning of their answers seemed to be a condescending superiority on my part, when in fact I was merely trying out ideas that I didn’t necessarily endorse myself. Or, I was thinking while they were talking and each thing they said either raised new questions in my mind, or caused me to believe that my questions were not being understood.
It was truly frustrating.
The root of this was an unwillingness to live in the world as it is. I was under the impression that perfect was possible, and that if I just understood the mechanism of the world, and of humanity in it, I could figure out where things went wrong and work to perfect them. The inability to “fix” the world, or to fix the problems in my own life, such as watching my career dissolve due to changes in the market and the inherent rot in academia — a subject for another post — or watching my marriage fall apart due to money and other concerns, led to a crippling feeling of inability to do anything about anything. I was paralyzed with regard to my own circumstances.
And philosophy itself was no help. I learned that the “answers” that philosophy provided me about a correctly ordered society, or right action, or beauty in the world were messy and inconclusive. Philosophy said nothing about how I should deal with problems that I personally was facing. After all, how could it? It was not written for me, but for men more generally. While I argued that there is no such thing as a “personal philosophy” because there is no such thing as a “personal” form of “wisdom” to “love”, anymore than there is a such thing as a truth which is true for me alone but not anyone else, I also settled on the understanding that “personal philosophy” is more an individualized apprehension of the Truth, which says nothing about the Truth, and everything about the observer.
In other words, its entirely possible that everything these famous philosophers had written was a mere apprehension of the Truth, rather than the Truth itself: In other words, even the words of Socrates/Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Cicero, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Marx, Strauss, Arendt, and Hooks, were all opinion, by which I mean a belief predicated upon incomplete information.
How disappointing.
The Arrival of Stoicism
It is not so much that I discovered Stoic philosophy at this time. I had in fact long been exposed to it. And I had been exposed to philosophical currents that either borrowed from stoicism or ran parallel to it. I happen to find a lot of stoic philosophy in Quakerism, for example, and as this is a way I attempt to live in the world, I think that I should have arrived at Stoicism much sooner. There is also some parallels to stoic thought in Zen philosophy, but I don’t feel confident enough with Zen to expound on those.
It is probably more correct to say I was finally able to hear stoicism now. The founder of Stoicism, Zeno apparently said “My most profitable journey began the day I was shipwrecked and lost my entire fortune.” Similarly, I can think that at the depths of failure and hopelessness, I embarked on a similar journey. As for me, perhaps a year ago, I was sitting in a Taco Bell, on my lunch break, and I read a discussion on Seneca’s Stoicism. The phrase which caught me up was: “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it,” taken from his essay “De Brevitate Vitae”. (I have consistently misattributed this quote to Aurelius, but I intend to stop making this error.)
To summarize: the essay concerns itself with the judicious use of our time. There are people who complain how short life is. But it is because they waste their time, foolishly squandering their efforts on matters that they cannot change.
I was immediately reminded of the following scene in the movie 7 Years in Tibet, staring Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt, in an terribly affected accent, counsels the Dali Lama to take caution against the arrival of the Chinese. The Dali Lama says:
We have a saying in Tibet: If a problem can be solved there is no use worrying about it. If it can’t be solved, worrying will do no good.
Worrying about something you can change is a waste of your time. Instead of worrying, work to change it. And if you can’t change it, worrying is a waste of time, because it will lead to no change. So don’t worry.
I was moved by the words of Seneca immediately. And I decided to attempt to understand a philosophy whereby a man could infinitely extend his life by not fearing its end. I began to understand my impatience and frustration with things I had no control over as a waste of time.
It would be tempting, at this point, for a person to become a fatalist. What happens will happen regardless of what you do. But this is not the case. I began looking at stoicism over the last year and began trying to understand it. Trying to understand that it is not so much the things I can or cannot control which are the things I should concern myself. It is not a passive idea that the stoics put forward.
It is an active philosophy, a practical philosophy, which talks about living virtuously in the world regardless of what is going on in the world. As Marcus Aurelius said, “ Almost nothing material is needed for a happy life, for he who has understood existence.” It is the desire of indifferent things over the Good, which is virtue through wisdom and moderation, which is morally unacceptable.
Therefore, the wise man must learn how to put his sense of fear to the side, work on seeing things in the light of reason, and attempt to make the best play with the cards he is dealt. If he focuses on the things he does not have, or if he panics, or if he has his sights set on things which are ultimately inconsequential, he will not make wise decisions. Through practice and discipline, however, he may arrive at the ability to make the wisest decisions in any given situation, and thereby ensure that in the end, even death will hold no power over him, his life or his actions.
Death comes for us all. It is a waste of time to be obsessed with avoiding that fact. Understanding this removes death’s power over us.
Naturally, this is an incomplete and superficial treatment of stoicism. I am beginning my study of the philosophy and would have more to say had I adopted the philosophy as my “personal philosophy” 20 years ago as I should have. I am working to remedy this problem now.
A Recent Discussion with a Friend
I arrive now at a few days ago. I had a conversation with a friend about free will within a context of fate. This discussion was not about stoicism, per se, but stoic philosophy flowed like a subcurrent in the discussion.
My question was whether free will is actually free. In the discussion, I frustrated her: I believe that she thought I was challenging her ideas about free will and fate, or that I was having some sort of meta discussion that involved completely unrelated subjects, but which touched other very personal matters. In fact, I was merely trying to figure out whether she believed that free will was actually perfectly free, or that it was constrained by the bounds placed on us by fate. Eventually she gave up and demanded that if I wanted to know her beliefs about free will, I should read Marcus Aurelius, and I could ask him my questions.
So I decided to do just that. But before I acquired a copy of his Meditations, she suggested another book to me first. I think it is more of an introduction to Stoicism. It is called How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. I linked it here in case anyone desires to read it. I am currently into Chapter 4 in the audible version, and I am learning quite a lot from it. I won’t provide a commercial for the book or write a review for it, since I am not finished with it yet.
The reason I bring this up, however is because as I am listening to this Scottish guy expound upon Stoicism and the thinking and practice of the Philosopher King, I realize that the discussion I was having with my friend was really unproductive. In attempting to ascertain the free-ness of free will, I was slipping back in to the old ways of the young philosopher who believed that the answers could be found in philosophical inquiry, rather than understanding that the practice of philosophy was the tactic while the goal was moral virtue.
It is a waste of time to engage in the discussions about thinking for the sake of thinking. What difference does the constraint on choice make, when we are considering the question of what choice should a wise and virtuous Emperor make in a certain situation? The wise and virtuous make the most reasonable choice in any situation, selecting with a clear head and a mind aimed at virtue. As the author said in this book referenced above, “For the Stoic, if you imagined a scale with virtue on one side of the scale and all the gold coins or whatever on the other side, virtue should never be outweighed.”
In fact, then the only choice that a person should make is the one aimed at virtue, temperance, justice and wisdom — the question of freeness of the choice never enters into the consideration. Stoicism then becomes the how-to guide to Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics, which says that virtue is habitual practice of the Good, and ultimately, a virtuous man will be repelled by vicious action the same way an honest man is repelled by a corrupted man.
My insistence on the demonstration that free will was really free was a waste of both my and my friend’s time. The only thing that matters is Virtue, and the only correct choice in any situation, regardless of what it is, is the one which leads to Virtue, that being correctly described as moral excellence.
The Consolation of Stoicism, at last
I find a lot of consolation in this particular way of seeing the world, this way of living. Whether it is possible to do so in the modern world, I am not entirely sure. Whether it is possible to do it without being an Emperor of Rome, I am not entirely sure. But whether it is worth doing, the truth of that answer is the same for me as it is for Aurelius, Seneca and Zeno. It is absolutely worth the effort.
I seek therefore to play the cards I am dealt with a clear mind, pointed toward moral excellence. We are allowed to fail or be mistaken in the path, but with practice, our conscientious effort becomes habitual, and we naturally gravitate toward that thing which we should gravitate toward: that being a good life, governed by wisdom, justice, temperance and virtue.
And in the rediscovery of stoicism, which I had been originally exposed to, but paid no attention to in my impatience to change the world, I find that indeed, philosophy and the love of wisdom is not such a fruitless task after all. The world is not mine to change. My choice is how I live within the world. Do I live virtuously, and maybe become an example to another person who is looking for the same sort of consolation in a world that is entirely out of his control? Or do I provide the example of failure? Either way someone may learn something from me and my example. But in only one of those scenarios will I find happiness myself.
At the end, my life will be precisely as long as it is. There is really nothing I can do about that. I can choose how I want to spend the time between now and then, and this choice is entirely up to me. I can either spend my minutes, hours, days and years focusing on virtue or vice, wisdom or foolishness. If I pick the second, I will have wasted that time pursuing something that is bad for me.
In closing, I will post a famous scene from the movie “The Shawshank Redemption.” The Stoic philosophy even find itself expressed today, and we aren’t really cognizant of it, unless, you can hear it. Here is the scene:
