Stoicism, Pop and Classical
While looking for possible texts related to Stoicism for an upcoming course, I was struck at how popular Stoicism has become. When I first became interested in this philosophy in the 1990s, there were only a couple of books packaging it for the general public; most of what I found was by academic philosophers, and mainly historians of philosophy at that. Now Stoicism is everywhere, with sports coaches and entrepreneurs endorsing it as the key to success — which is of course ironic given the Stoics’ contempt for success.
This phenomenon is worthy of a much longer treatment (in fact, I’m sure someone’s working on a thesis right now). What piqued my curiosity, though, is not what it is in Stoicism that has led to this resurgent popularity, but what has been left out. Stoicism is presented as a self-help philosophy or therapy, or as Tim Ferriss (who recently published an audio-book of Seneca’s letters) neatly puts it, a personal operating system. There’s plenty of good, practical advice quoted from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, but key elements of Stoicism are missing or downplayed. There is no Stoic metaphysics. The Stoic sage, perfectly rational and free from all disturbing emotions, has faded into the background. Zeus is nowhere to be seen. Even the Stoics’ famous indifference to pleasure and pain is soft-pedalled.
Hardcore Stoics will doubtless say that all this puts modern pop Stoicism outside the realm of real Stoicism. As a non-Stoic interested in Stoicism, though, I’m more interested in the fact that what has gone is largely the religious aspect of Stoicism. We think of Stoicism as a philosophy rather than a religion, but, like Buddhism, it’s really a hybrid philosophy-religion.
Before I try to justify this claim, I’d like to look at the core features of religion as I see it.
- A vision of how humans should be, including their relations with the universe and each other.
- A set of practices for achieving that vision (prayer, ritual, meditation, service etc.).
- A mythos that supports people in practising the above.
Of course religions have other typical features, but these are the defining ones.
The vision of Stoicism is the sage (sophos), who is completely rational and free from any disturbing emotion (pathos). Applied to human relations, the vision is the rational community described in Zeno’s lost work The Republic, which as far as we can tell is what would happen if Vulcans cross-bred with anarchists. The problem is that sages were regarded as extremely rare beasts. Although none of the famous Stoics would have considered themselves sages, we can say that in practice, the aim of a typical Stoic in ancient Greece or Rome was to live like these exemplary leaders: to cultivate virtue, to keep the passions well under control even we can’t eliminate them completely, and to be relatively indifferent to good fortune and hardship alike. At this level there is a large overlap between classical Stoicism and pop Stoicism; the main difference is that the ancients were liable to take Stoic teachings much further.
Again, there is considerable overlap in our second characteristic, practices intended to realise the vision. Surely much has been lost, but modern Stoics and quasi-Stoics do their best to recreate some of the mental exercises and lifestyle practices of the classical Stoics. This advice from Marcus Aurelius seems as relevant now as it was in the 2nd century:
Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness — all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.
The part which has been really lost in the last two millennia is the mythos. Most religious believers would not accept that their metaphysics exists to bolster their ethics, yet this is what it does in practice. If you refrain from killing a family member because God will send you to Hell, or because the Furies will pursue you throughout your life, or because your next life will be as some disagreeable creature, the result is the same. Whether a Buddhist meditates to avoid rebirth or a Taoist meditates in order to live forever, the meditations and their practical effects are very similar.
Contrary to what is often stated, the ancient Stoics concocted elaborate theoretical systems. In religious terms, they were pantheists who incorporated elements of monotheism and polytheism, seeing the universe as an indivisible whole, Zeus as its active, rational element, and the other gods of Greek and Roman religion as personifications of various natural forces. I know a few neo-Stoics who are also neo-pagans, but for the most part these beliefs have not survived any more than the four-element or geocentric theories the Stoics also subscribed to, simply because they perform no useful function these days. Stoics needed to reconcile the naive polytheism of their contemporaries with their own rationalist ethics, and this was a good way to do it.
Even the idea of the sage is as religious as it is philosophical, inviting comparison with similar figures in Taoism and Buddhism, and even Islamic and Christian mysticism. The point is not to set an attainable goal; it is to present an inspiring but impossible ideal. The idea is you get higher if you aim impossibly high than if you aim low. Of course this also has its problems, and black-or-white thinking (which I’d say was a typical though not a defining feature of religion) can demotivate as much as it motivates. If your end is unattainable, why strive for it?
As someone who’s read the Stoic classics and a fair amount of academic writing on Stoicism, I sometimes wince when I read pop-Stoic posts. But I don’t think the project is inherently bad. Classical Stoicism has some serious theoretical problems which make it very hard for modern philosophers, let alone bloggers to swallow. If what is valuable in Stoicism is its techniques of emotional control, then it’s no worse to take those techniques out of their mythical matrix than it is to practice yoga asanas without believing in Hindu gods.
