The Wisdom of Stoicism

Stoicism was a philosophy invented by leading minds in Ancient Greece and Rome to help us cope with agonising periods of our lives, especially those created by the selfishness and insanity of dictators and demagogues.

Here are some of their most significant sayings, which retain a power to console us and lend perspective to this day.

“Be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.”

Marcus Aurelius

For the Stoics, life is a tempest whose onslaughts are relentless and pitiless, and over which we have little control. We can no more change our outer fate than alter the weather. However, what we can change is our attitude to this fate and here the Stoics recommended that we adopt an imperturbable posture, based on an awareness that we can ultimately deal with the very worst that life could throw at us. Outside, there may be a maelstrom, but so long as we have properly strengthened our character through philosophical exercise, we can endure.

“Rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck… All human possibilities should be before our eyes.”

Seneca

The Stoics believed that regularly reflecting on the bad things that might befall us is a way of strengthening ourselves against anxiety, for what we examine rationally close up tends to be less frightening than what we merely apprehend vaguely from a distance. They liked to perform what they called a praemeditatio malorum (‘premeditation on evil’), a process wherein one imagines all the potential disasters that might befall us, not to depress us, but to help us prepare for setbacks in good time. We shouldn’t hope for the best, but arm ourselves for the worst, steeling ourselves to cope with dark possibilities. The Stoic assumption is that we are far better able to endure bad things than we think, so long as we are ready for them. 

“He who is feared will also end up fearful. No one can arouse terror and also have peace of mind.”

Seneca

Seneca had been the tutor to the future Emperor Nero, a byword for cruelty and untrammelled viciousness. So he well understood the follies of the powerful and liked to remind them that true security can never be won by terrifying or humiliating others. That is the way to make enemies and also, to arouse one’s own guilty conscience.  Seneca insists that to treat others with compassion and respect is therefore not just morally right, it serves our self-interest as well. Tyrants will be forever troubled by the thought that those they punish or frighten will exact some form of vengeance; it is only the benevolent and patient who will be able to sleep easily at night.

“True good fortune is not to need good fortune.”

Seneca

The Stoics set themselves resolutely against what the Romans called ‘Fortune’. Most Romans worshipped the Goddess of Fortune, asking her for gifts and favours (a long life, a happy marriage). But the Stoics rebelled against the fickleness of Fortune and wished their followers to achieve contentment of mind without depending on her whims and unjust distributions of ‘luck’. They urged us to construct our happiness on things invulnerable to the ebbs and flows of fortune: for example, on the contemplation of philosophy, on an indifference to reputation and jobs, and on serene friendships with other Stoic minds. 

“Nowhere you can go should be more peaceful— and more free of interruptions—than your own soul.”

Marcus Aurelius

The Stoics accepted that they could not control the whole world. In this sense, they despaired of traditional politics or warfare. They believed that true serenity could only be discovered through working on one’s own mind – a far more realistic aim than rendering government rational or making a fortune. Calm was the fruit of a process of introspection that closely resembled what we would now call psychotherapy: in the presence of an intelligent friend or on our own, we should sift through the contents of our minds and correct and disable the worst of our panic. We should understand how often fears have nothing to do with facts.

“Nothing happens to anyone that he can’t endure.”

Marcus Aurelius

It is often said that the purpose of Stoicism is to help us become more resilient. Yet it would be more accurate to say that it helps us to recognise the reserves of resilience we already possess. Though we often feel weak and fragile in anticipation of problems, and fear being unable to cope, the truth is that each of us is fitted, by what the Stoics called nature, with extraordinary ways of enduring difficulties. We could cope with having only one leg, with being exiled, with losing our employment – and even ultimately with having to die (people do it every day…). We should take courage from our innate ability to persevere, no matter how great our trials.

“’My brother ought not to have treated me so.’ True: but he must see to that. However he may treat me, I must deal rightly by him. This is what lies with me, what no one else can hinder.”

Epictetus

Again and again, Stoicism advises us to worry about what we can control and forgive or let go of phenomena outside our reach. Stoicism’s core insight is that, ultimately, each of us has power only over ourselves. So there is no use in complaining about the behaviour of others, since we generally can’t alter this one iota. All we can affect is our own behaviour. Each of us has the duty to lead a virtuous life, regardless of the actions or reactions of others around us. What they do shouldn’t concern us: it is what we do that matters.

“If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.”

 Seneca

A Stoic sees existence as an endless cycle of crises – illness, conflict, financial hardship, mental breakdown, bereavement, and eventually death. There is nothing malign about this – indeed, it is the will of the logos, the organising principle of the universe. It is simply the way things are. Therefore, we should live our lives in preparation for a coming crisis: training ourselves to be calm and unflinching in the face of inevitable trials. Philosophy is the name we give to practicing and thinking through the worst – before the tempest actually hits.

“Never be keen to please the crowd.”

Quintus Sextius

There is a strain of solipsism within Stoicism – an insistence on the self as the focal point of a virtuous, meaningful life. A fundamental error that most people make, in this view, is to live according to the whims of others: whims we can neither adequately comprehend or control, and which will tend to abnegate our true desires, purpose and potential. Our life should be lived on our own terms – according to our own principles and beliefs – not anyone else’s. Living in a very crowded and chaotic Roman world, the Stoics argued for a refreshing degree of inner independence and indifference to the voices of public opinion.

“Do you know what makes people greedy for the future? It is when they haven’t yet found themselves.”

Seneca

The Stoics did not place huge emphasis on trying to living a long time; they held that a life in which we have understood what really counts can be meaningful even if it is relatively short. We shouldn’t measure a life by the hours it contains; rather by the wisdom, love and intelligence with which these hours have been spent. We are not, in the end, ever really very short of time. What we’re truly short of is affection, open-heartedness, kindness and tolerance. We’re short of the ability to create peak experiences in which we are sufficiently unfrightened, approachable, and responsive. We may have a lot to mourn, but it isn’t necessarily the imminence of death, it may more be the difficulty of living with courage and sensitivity. The challenge of our lives is to learn to live deeply rather than broadly.

“Very little is needed to make a happy life.”

Marcus Aurelius

Such a sentiment might seem ironic and untrue, coming as it did from a philosopher who was (remarkably) simultaneously the Emperor of Rome, yet Marcus Aurelius’s example is all the more edifying because it would have been so easy for him to live in the decadent ways of his predecessors. Instead, he sincerely devoted himself to the tenets of Stoicism: he had no interest in worldly wealth, he worked on quelling his anxieties, he paid little attention to vanity and idle gossip, he regularly meditated on the contents of his own mind (even during military campaigns) – and he slept in bare and unpretentious quarters. It is hard enough to be wise as an ordinary person; power and money give madness yet more opportunities. The Stoics are especially impressive because so many of their leading adherents were powerful, but remained wise and modest inside.

“The short cut to wealth is through the contempt of wealth.”

Seneca

The Stoics proposed that wealth is always relative to desire: whenever we have what we want, we can be counted as rich, and whenever we feel lacking, we must qualify as poor – whatever the actual sum of money we happen to have. There are therefore two ways to make someone ‘rich’: we can increase their income or decrease their extent of their desires. The Stoics argued for the latter approach, training themselves to see how many material longings are – when we examine them closely – vain and disconnected from true fulfilment.  The Stoics went on to propose that a boundless appetite for money is frequently a symptom of an anxious mind, striving to achieve through wealth a sense of security that can in fact only be gained through self-examination and friendship.

“The wise do not put a wrong construction upon everything.’

Seneca

One of the most fundamental paths to calm is the power to hold on, even in very challenging situations, to a distinction between what someone does – and what they meant to do. But unfortunately, we’re seldom very good at perceiving what motives happen really to be involved in the incidents that hurt us. We are easily and wildly mistaken. We are often a little paranoid. We see intention where there was none and escalate and confront when no strenuous or agitated responses are warranted. In a bid to calm us, the Stoics emphasised the extent to which most people who frustrate us do so unintentionally. It’s bad enough that we should be annoyed, we should not assume that people are – on top of it all – irritating us on purpose.

“What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself. That is indeed a great benefit. You may say that such a man is a friend to all mankind.’ 

Seneca

The less we like ourselves, the more we appear in our own eyes as really rather plausible targets for mockery and harm. Why would a drill have started up outside, just as we were settling down to work? Why would the call center operator be taking so long to find our details? Because there is – logically enough – a plot against us. When we carry an excess of self-disgust around with us, operating just below the radar of conscious awareness, we’ll constantly seek confirmation that we really are the worthless people we take ourselves to be. That’s why the Stoics emphasised the need to like ourselves more in order to interpret the world with greater benevolence.

“When he was dying, Alexander of Macedon’s end differed not a jot from his stable-boy’s. Either both were received into the same generative principle of the universe, or both alike were dispersed into atoms.“

Marcus Aurelius

The Roman world which the Stoics navigated was deeply stratified and unequal; yet for the Stoics (as for the Christians who followed them) there is much more that connects than separates us. We all suffer, are all exposed to accident and must all die. It is on the recognition of these sort of shared vulnerabilities that friendship can be based – and flourish even between social classes. There is a relaxing dimension to the idea of our fundamental equality. Marcus Aurelius, though Emperor, liked to remind himself that his life was – from a suitable distance – utterly ordinary and unremarkable. Ironically, we remember and respect him today not for having been a mighty ruler but from having revealed his humanity in his writings.

“How important it is to say to oneself ‘This purple vestment is some sheep’s hair moistened in the blood of some shellfish.‘”

Marcus Aurelius

In Ancient Rome, only high up military generals and Emperors were allowed to wear the supreme symbol of power and significance: a purple toga. Marcus Aurelius was keen never to let such power go to his head and so liked to remind himself of the vanity of all earthly things. It calmed him down before important speeches in the senate or imperial occasions in his palace to think of how absurd we humans are, when viewed obliquely through a non-human lens. We might follow him in calming down in front of scary and ‘impressive’ people by imagining them sitting on the toilet. And if we are ever in danger of taking sex too seriously, Marcus Aurelius is on hand to remind us: ‘When it comes to sexual intercourse, we must say, “This is the rubbing together of membranes, accompanied by the spasmodic ejaculation of a sticky liquid.’

“When Zeno received news of a shipwreck and heard that all his luggage had been sunk, he said, ‘Fortune bids me to be a less encumbered philosopher.’“

Seneca

To be ‘Stoic’ still to this day indicates a capacity to take disasters calmly. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was famously level-headed in the face of reversals – and the anecdote of how well he behaved when he lost his luggage was well-known to all students of Stoicism. The wise will learn to identify what is necessary and too-late-to-change and resign themselves to reality at speed, rather than kicking it against it in fury. They aren’t the ones to shout at airports when they hear of a delay or worse. We may be powerless to alter certain events,  but we remain free to choose our attitude towards them, and it is in our spontaneous acceptance of necessity that we find our distinctive Stoic freedom.

“Winter brings on cold weather; and we must shiver. Summer returns, with its heat and we must sweat. Unseasonable weather upsets the health, and we must fall ill… We cannot change this order of things…it is to this law of nature that our souls must adjust themselves, this they should follow, this they should obey… That which you cannot reform, it is best to endure.“

Seneca

The Stoics spoke a lot about the ‘laws of nature’, to which they felt we had to submit far more often and far more graciously than we tend to. By ‘nature’, the Stoics understood everything that exceeds us. In natural phenomena lie reminders of all that we are powerless to change: the weather, but also oceans, glaciers, cliffs, stars – these deeply impressed the Stoics as examples of things that transcend our strengths. In the human world, we may grow to believe that we can always alter our destinies, and hope and worry accordingly. However, it is apparent from the heedless pounding of the oceans or the flight of comets across the night sky that there are forces entirely indifferent to and far more significant than us. The Stoics loved Nature for giving us elegant lessons in humility.

“What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.”

Seneca

The Stoics often combined a highly serious tone with a note of dark humour, as in this quietly hilarious aphorism by Seneca. The greatest solace for moments of suffering, say the Stoics, is to adopt a broader perspective on one’s disappointments. It is in the end not specific hardships that we should regret, but the whole business of being alive: that we are members of a fragile species condemned to lead tragic lives curtailed by fate and pain. This is the essence of melancholy wisdom: a recognition that suffering is not particular, but universal, and that our own tears fall into oceans of pre-existing woe.

“We never anticipate evils before they actually arrive, but, imagining that we ourselves are exempt and are travelling a less exposed path, we refuse to be taught by the mishaps of others that such are the lot of all. So many funerals pass our doors, yet we never dwell on death. So many deaths are untimely, yet we make plans for our own infants: how they will don the toga, serve in the army, and succeed to their father’s property.”

Seneca

A dangerous naivety is embedded in our views of normality. We are prone to believe, for example, that it is normal that our children will not expire suddenly before their twenty-fifth birthdays, that we will live to see our grandchildren, that an earthquake won’t promptly shatter our belongings, that we won’t be disgraced, that our best friend won’t be killed by a tile blown off a roof in high wind… But this is normality only when we sentimentally restrict the evidence. With the aperture fully open on reality, we are faced with a far broader range of normal things. We should cease to formulate our sense of reality merely on the basis of probability. Any accident to which a human has been subject, however rare, however distant in time, should be incorporated into our dark vision. As Seneca adds: “You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.’ But do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen?”                                    

“All of us are inconsiderate and thoughtless, all of us are unreliable, querulous, ambitious… All of us are bad. Whatever he blames in another, each will find in his own heart… So we should be more indulgent towards one another. We are bad men living among bad men; and only one thing can calm us – we must agree to go easy on one another.”

Seneca

Confronted with the bad behaviour of others, we can feel unhelpfully righteous. To break this mindset, Seneca urged us to extend empathy to more than just those who commit exactly our errors. We might indeed be incapable of certain blunders, but we should stretch examples to other frailties. The punctual might learn to forgive the unpunctual by thinking of, for instance, the cowardice they exhibited at the close of a relationship. To appease our intolerance of the shortcomings of others, we should modestly accept that we are never ourselves far from committing faults of comparable or greater gravity. As Seneca concludes: ‘We have all sinned.’

“The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can… He always reflects concerning the quality, and not the quantity, of his life. As soon as there are numerous events in his life that give him trouble and disturb his peace of mind, he sets himself free. And this privilege is his, not only when the crisis is upon him, but as soon as Fortune seems to be maltreating him; then he looks about carefully and sees whether he ought, or ought not, to end his life on that account… It is not a question of dying earlier or later, but of dying well or ill. And dying well means escape from the danger of living ill.”

Seneca

Surprisingly, the Stoics did not condemn suicide out of hand. Seneca was not advocating random or thoughtless exits; he was attempting to give us more courage in the face of anxiety by reminding us that it is always within our remit, when we have genuinely tried everything and rationally had enough, to choose a path out of our troubles. He was seeking to strip willed death of its associations with pathology and to render it instead an option that the wise always know is there as a backstop. It doesn’t even need to be a grim spectre; the Stoics emphasised that death could be a moment to celebrate what had gone well in a life, to thank friends and to appreciate the beautiful and good sides of the world. The idea was to see death as a door through which we knew we had the right and the capacity to walk through when it felt necessary.

“We cannot complain of life; it keeps no one against his will. Humanity is well situated, because no man is unhappy except by his own fault. Live, if you so desire; if not, you may return to the place whence you came… If you would pierce your heart, a gaping wound is not necessary – a lancet will open the way to that great freedom, and tranquillity can be purchased at the cost of a pin-prick.”

Seneca

The whole point of Stoic philosophy is to help us reach a point where we are not held hostage by the infinite cruelties of Fortune. The wise person tries to get to a stage where the indignities that Fortune may impose don’t constantly terrify and crush them and where they have a feeling of being able to dodge Fortune’s blows when they need to. This explains the primordial position of death within the Stoic thesis – and why the wise can fairly meditate on their capacity to leave their own lives at a moment of their choosing. The Stoics were among the most intelligent, kindly, wise and gentle people who have ever lived. However alien some of their views may sound, we would do well to extend sympathy to why they held them – and what relief they would have found in them on their most challenging days.