Death, Prisons, and the Value of Others
Rob Colter on Stoicism as a Way of Life
Picture this. It’s the first time you’ve ever travelled overseas, to go to a work conference on the other side of the world. Your long haul flight goes well enough. But once you arrive, you start to get bad stomach pains. You make it to a preconference social event, but can’t stay too long. The pain is now coming in rising waves.
You find yourself laid out on the concrete outside, in acute agony, a circle of concerned passers-by around you. Some well-meaning Samaritans give you a lift back to your host’s place. But the pain doesn’t subside. You are vomiting too.
Next thing you know, your work holiday has morphed into an emergency ambulance ride to a foreign hospital. You are by now in the most extreme pain you’ve ever felt. Even so, an immediate diagnosis on arrival at the hospital proves impossible.
It is only after multiple procedures, and many hours, that an intestinal blockage, very serious, is diagnosed. It will only be some days later that surgery is undertaken.
Rob Colter is someone who does not need to picture this seeming travel nightmare as an imaginative exercise in Stoic premeditatio malorum. He has lived it. And he is thankful that, when this fate befell him, he also lived Stoicism as a way of life — not simply an intellectual exercise.
The way he told me the tale, indeed, Rob not only survived this experience, aided by precepts from the Stoics Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. It greatly expanded his sense of the value of life, and in particular, of the value of our relations with others.
I met Rob Colter via Zoom earlier this year, at his home in Laramie, Wyoming. I was interested in drawing him out about his history with Stoicism, which spans out from his own life experiences into work teaching the philosophy to convicted felons in the US prison system, as well as running Stoic retreats.
The following text, produced in dialogue with Rob, relates our conversation.
What was Rob’s introduction to Stoicism as a way of life?
Rob Colter is no stranger to the more academic, ‘theory-only’ approach to philosophizing. A Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wyoming, he received his PhD from Northwestern University in 2001, writing on ancient philosophy (mainly Plato and Aristotle) amongst such luminaries as Richard Kraut and Reginald Allen.
In his first teaching job, Rob was tasked with teaching an inter-disciplinary class on intellectual history, a kind of “great books” course. This included Epictetus. At that time, he recalls, Roman Stoicism struck him as a kind of ‘philosophical self-help’. Not very intellectually serious.
Around 2010, facing certain difficult family experiences, this all changed. Rob was teaching a course on “the Greek mind”, and actually reading Epictetus’ Enchiridion 1 — the famous text about the dichotomy of control basic to Modern Stoicism — when he had something like a Stoic epiphany.
Rob found himself, in front of the class, suddenly thinking: “you could actually use this as a guide to living”. As he put it:
I remember it vividly: it was in the middle of a class, in this kind of converted lab in a science building with fireproof countertops … It was almost like a Stoic “Pauline” moment, like Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. This was the moment when I understood that someone could actually do that, embrace the idea of the dichotomy of control. It was not just “Dr. Phil in Greek”.
Like many of us who have had similar moments with different Stoic texts, Rob begun at this time to look around online for others who might be able to relate. He participated, on his own, in Stoic Week in 2013, an experience he described as “amazing”.
Around the same time, given the opportunity of running a seminar program on anything he wanted, he also delivered a course on Stoicism. But this now included the practical component of the philosophy, not as an object of study only, but as something students were required to experiment with.
He taught the Stoic Week program in the course, and invited students to submit presentations about their experiences in trialling particular Stoic practices in their lives. They were asked to keep Stoic journals about their experiences. The students loved it.
The following year, Rob taught a course in the Honors college on “living well in a complex world.” In doing so, he drew on the work of Pierre Hadot on philosophy as a way of life, as well as weeks on ancient and modern thinkers about happiness and the good life, from Aristotle in antiquity to the positive psychologists.
Stoicism, as a philosophical way of life, had become an integral part of Rob’s teaching curriculum.
So, tell us about the Stoic retreats that you have been running? How did they begin, and what do they involve?
The idea of the Wyoming Stoic Camp was built around the notion of Stoic week. Surely, taking people away for a dedicated period of time to practice Stoicism, in harmony with nature, could enhance their experiences.
The Stoic camp is located in a youth Bible camp, high up in the Rockies: about 8–9000 feet in altitude. There are spectacular views up there, as well as wandering deer, elk, and even moose. Overnights often dip below freezing. It’s snowed almost every year, the camp being held (before covid) every May.
Participants are invited to talk about the philosophy, using a revised version of the Stoic week booklet, with a workbook. So specific Stoic exercises are tied to specific texts and readings. People read the ancient texts, Epictetus, Marcus and Seneca. There are scheduled morning and evening meditations. Attendees are encouraged to journal about their experiences.
The first camp hosted about a dozen people, drawn from Rob’s students. Based on its success, after year one, Rob opened it up. He started advertising on the Modern Stoicism site, on facebook, and sent fliers to Stoicon. As a result, he began to receive inquiries from all over the United States (the Stoicon that year was in New York). Since that time, he’s had attendees come from as far away as Europe. Before covid, each year the camp was attracting around twenty-five attendees.
What about your work using Stoicism in prisons? What does that involve, and how did it get started, for those interested in starting comparable initiatives elsewhere?
This experience with Stoicism has been especially rewarding. In late 2016, a colleague approached Rob, who had done a Masters in Philosophy. He was in IT now, but had connected with another colleague, and they had started to deliver classes into the Women’s prison facility at Wyoming, under the aegis of the Department of Corrections. Would Rob like in some way to be involved?
Rob’s response was to develop and modify the Stoic camp program. At first, he needed to convince the Department that this offering could fit into the “Wyoming Pathways from Prison” program. Next, he was asked to run a pilot course, which focused on journaling and memoir writing. This was an “enrichment” exercise for prisoners, wholly voluntary. Rob, with three graduate students, was sent to a minimum security prison, one which prisoners had to have earned their way into by good conduct.
There were two groups of students. The first contained older prisoners, about a dozen, in whose number there were at least 3–4 murderers. )In all classes he’s taught in prisons, Rob laughs, there’s been at least one prisoner convicted for homicide).
One man in that first class had got into a fight one night over a girl when he was 17, and shot someone. Another had been an enforcer for a drug cartel, and killed a man over a $6000 debt. Yet another would later be released, but reoffend, and take Rob’s class at a later date in a different facility.
The other group were inmates in the Youthful Offender program. They were 18–25 years old, and had committed nonviolent crimes. They took Rob’s class in preference to a kind of quasi-military boot camp.
The program starts with a bit of cultural intellectual history about who the Stoics were, and on ancient thought more widely. Then the class is tasked with literally opening up the Enchiridion by Epictetus, and they start reading the text, out loud. One person takes one paragraph, and then stops. Then the group discusses the passage, before they move on.
At the start, Rob was compelled to take the lead in many of the discussions. But over the course of the five days in which the class unfolded, he found that more and more the prisoners themselves were taking over responsibility for the dialogue and analysis. He could sit back. To see the level of peoples’ engagement and uptake rise was terrific.
As for the effects of the class, he’s heard from inmates, and from follow-ups on zoom with administrators, that they have a genuinely positive effect, at least for a while. Studying Stoicism together transforms the prisoners. It prompts them to share, talk about, and remind each other of the principles and opinions they have discussed.
Are there any specific stories you are able to share about prisoners’ responses to Stoicism, and how studying it has affected them?
One maximum security prisoner Rob describes as one of the ten best students he’s had in any context. He was in his twenties, having received 40 years for murder and attempted murder. There was a fight over a girl. Booze and drugs were involved.
This young man’s first essay for Rob was on the dichotomy of control. Prisoners were asked to apply this basic Stoic tenet to their own lives. This prisoner got to the idea that externals were indifferent, in the Stoic sense, on his own. (Rob has subsequently discussed this student’s work in the context of a public forum on Transformative Education in Prisons, which is linked on his website.
This prisoner was clearly better educated than other inmates. But although he was smart, Rob stresses, he never lorded it over the other students. During the classes, he would with great patience assist the other prisoners to understand the reading. And the experience of helping these others clearly helped him.
There was another prisoner, a hard nut, doing time maybe for murder, but certainly for a violent crime. Rob tells me that he looked every bit the hardcore gang-man, complete with neck and face tattoos. This prisoner came to every one of Rob’s classes in one course, but never spoke up until the last day.
Then, at the start of the class, one of this inmate’s colleagues came in, and addressed him, saying excitedly: “what happened, tell Rob!” Thus prompted, this giant finally spoke up.
He had had a chair in his minimum-security cell, a blue chair. He’d taken it from the prison library. The guards weren’t aware of it, otherwise he’d have lost it.
Anyway, the previous night, someone had taken the chair, presumably back to its rightful home. His cellmates were on pins and needles as to how he’d respond when he discovered this. The authorities were alerted, so there were extra prison guards on duty, in case he blew up.
So, at some point he comes in, and sees that the chair has been taken away. Instead of flying off the handle, however, the man stopped. Everyone around him was in suspended animation, anticipating a storm. Visibly, he was thinking through what he would do, and fighting with his impulses.
After a time, he quietly announced, echoing Epictetus: “It wasn’t mine to begin with, I’ve just given it back”. Then, he proceeded to sit down on the floor quietly …
Rob hasn’t been in the position to see incidents like this first hand. But others, including a prison warden in a Maximum Security Facility, has spoken on the Transformative Education panel about the difference in inmates, before and after the Stoic courses.
At a certain point, when the Department of Corrections asked Rob about expanding the teaching program, in fact, he was initially directed that they only wanted him to continue teaching the Stoicism.
But let’s turn back to your own near-death experience, which you have written about (including in Stoic forums). How in particular did Stoicism has help you in this extraordinary time?
Stoicism in this hour of need, far from his wife, family, and usual supports, was as Rob sees things a great, even indispensable help. Not Stoic theory, but specific precepts which he could apply to his fate right then.
Rob tells me that he kept saying to his own pain, in the words of Epictetus: “you are only an impression, and not at all what you appear to be.” And this helped make the seemingly unbearable pain more bearable.
Faced with the anxiety that he may not make it, Rob kept repeating to himself Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, X, 3:
Everything which happens either happens in such a way as you are formed by nature to bear it, or as you art not formed by nature to bear it. If, then, anything happens to you which you are formed by nature to bear it, do not complain … But if it happens in such a way as you are not formed by nature to bear it, do not complain …
Either he would die, or not die. He was however at that time almost utterly powerless to do anything about it. Yet, he found, with the Stoicism, that he was able to enter into a state of acceptance:
I’m here in a hospital with what seems to be competent care. I couldn’t be in a better place right now … It is disappointing not to be able to communicate readily with my wife and loved ones, but I am also powerless to change that right now, so this too can be borne …
According to New Zealand protocols (Rob was in fact in NZ), all of the noninvasive procedures to help Rob were tried first. But all of them failed. Eventually, surgery became an urgent need.
He remembers trading remarks with the anaesthesiologist before ‘going under’, who told him frankly that he might wake up with a colostomy bag, if things didn’t go well. “But if I don’t have the operation, I’m going to die”, Rob replied matter-of-factly.
Of all of this limit experience, however, Rob was keenest to describe the nine or so days after surgery, when he was recovering. He was sharing a room with a local farmer, who had jumped out of a tractor which was headed for a ravine, breaking several limbs in the act. The two men had surgery within an hour off each other.
And here’s the thing. We might suppose that a man who had just faced death, and who had five tubes sticking out of him, might at this time be thinking about everything he wanted to do, and how lucky he was, as an individual (or alternatively, how unlucky). But Rob was adamant: instead, what he found himself thinking about at this time was not about number one, but about others.
He was getting to know his neighbor, whose daughter would come in to paint his toenails. It was near Christmas, and on one occasion, Rob could hear music from a brass band playing festive music, which wafted gently in through the windows. “It was kind of beautiful”.
One of the nursing staff noticed his copy of Marcus Aurelius at the bedside, and Rob had a long conversation about it with her. She came back three afternoons in a row to talk Stoicism. When his wife called him one of these nine days, she commented with surprise that: “you sound happy.”
So, what is the message you’ve taken out of these extraordinary experiences, about life and about Stoicism as a way of life?
The best part of the experience, Rob reports, was how he found himself able to newly relate to others. Instead of dwelling everything his fate had prevented him from doing (speaking at the conference, travel, etc.), he felt himself newly able to get out of his own head, and better able (as he puts it, with characteristic modesty) “to be a decent human being”.
“Bear and forbear”, the component of Stoicism which is about self-control is important, Rob reflects. But too often, people can forget the other element of Stoicism, what we might call its “prosocial” element, or what the interviewer has called the often-neglected “warm stream” of Stoicism.
So, what is it that “lingers” from Rob’s experience facing death, in extreme pain, in a foreign hospital, but with Stoicism on his side? It is the sense that, by being able to think through his experience applying the Stoic principles, “my experience with other people became more salient and rich.” Stoic flourishing comes when the “bear and forbear” enables an expanded openness to others, and their value in the good life.
Finally, what are your favorite Stoic passages, if you can nominate any?
First, there is Epictetus’ Enchiridion I, which converted him to Stoicism. Then there is Meditations X, 3, which gave him such comfort in that hospital, far from home and any certainty about the future.
But Rob also nominated Meditations IV, 49 as a fragment from which he’s drawn strength:
Stand firm like a promontory, upon which the waves are always breaking. It not only keeps its place, but stills the fury of the waves. [Wretched am I, says one, that this has befallen me. Nay, say you, happy I, who, though this has befallen me, can still remain without sorrow, neither broken by the present, nor dreading the future …
The passage ends in this way:
And then, upon every occasion of sorrow, remember the maxim, that this event is not a misfortune, but the bearing it courageously is a great felicity.
