The Practicing Stoic

Stoics become more aware not just of how our appetites affect our experience, but of how our choices affect our appetites. We allow ourselves to get hungry, or not; we tantalize ourselves with comparisons and other thoughts that stir desire, or we don't. The management of appetites - when and how to cultivate them, when and how not - is part of Stoic practice. (..) All this is an example of the reorientation the Stoics recommend in general: spending less energy on getting or avoiding things, and more on knowing why we want them (or don't) and how the way we think might affect this.

This chapter has introduced the most basic idea in the practice of Stoicism: that our reactions to all things are of our own making, even if they don't seem that way, and that we underrate our power to rid ourselves of the ones that serve us poorly.:

On the contrary, Stoicism is rewarding in part because it addresses some of the same questions about how to live that many religions do, and sometimes reaches similar conclusions, but it gets there by observation and reason alone. Or rather it can. The Stoics did have a theology, as I’ve said, but you may remove that pillar and the temple still stands; their analysis and advice hold up well enough without it.

I regard a practicing Stoic as someone who tries to remember the wisdom of the Stoics when dealing with life and thinking about thinking – one attracted to Stoicism not as a creed or theology but as valuable counsel and as a form of psychological hygiene. This book, in other words, is for those more interested in the practice of Stoicism than the theory of it.

The first principle of practical Stoicism is this: we don’t react to events; we react to our judgments about them, and the judgments are up to us.

The Stoic claim, in other words, is that our pleasures, griefs, desires and fears all involve three stages rather than two: not just an event and a reaction, but an event, then a judgment or opinion about it, and then a reaction (to the judgment or opinion). Our task is to notice the middle step, to understand its frequent irrationality, and to control it through the patient use of reason.

The work of dispelling it is hard because the mind is an unreliable narrator of where our reactions come from. It tells us that we respond to externals – to things out there, not to the mind itself. It has to learn to see and describe its own role more accurately. Stoicism means to help us think better about our thinking, to teach the mind to understand the mind, to make the fish more aware of the water.

But sometimes, to the contrary, it is easier than it sounds. You stop saying one thing to yourself and say another instead. Later you work on judgments less verbal in form. Squashing a noxious and conventional thought is a wholesome source of Stoic satisfaction, and an ability that improves with practice.

We waste our energy on things that aren't up to us, and are barely conscious of the things that are up to us. Stoicism is the effort to turn that around and to move one's center of gravity to a more useful location.

Generally the Stoics identify the good with the rightful use of reason, which in turn leads them to a life led for the benefit of the whole – that is, for others. More immediately it means avoiding vices such as greed, dishonesty, and excess. Those are viewed as errors that result from attachment to externals, and from treatment of externals as themselves good and evil.

Don't be elated by a superiority that belongs to another. If the horse in its elation were to say "I am beautiful, one could endure it. But when nok in your elation say, "I have a beautiful horse" be aware that you are elated by the good of the horse.

What then is yours? Your way of handling impressions. When you are handing them in accordance with nature, that's when to be elated. For then you will be elated about a good of your own.

(Epictetus, Enchiridion 6)

If you gape after externals, you will inevitably be forced up and down according to the will of your master. And who is your master? Whoever has power over the things you are trying to gain or avoid.

(Epictetus, Discourses 2.2.25)

So remember this above all, to strip away the disorder of things and to see what is in each of them: you will learn that nothing in them is frightening but the fear itself. What you see happening to boys, happens to us too (slightly bigger boys). Their friends - the ones they are accustomed to and play with - if they see them wearing masks, they are terrified. The mask needs to be removed not just from people but from things, and the true appearance of each restored.

(Seneca, Epistles 24.13-14)

As soon as an event happens, we are quick to assign it a meaning. It is tagged as good news or bad news, as a reason for excitement or outrage, and so on. Or we give it a place in a story that we tell ourselves, long-running or new. Then we react to those labels and narratives and imaginings. Stoicism regards this process as a trap.

Say nothing more to yourself than what first appearances report. Suppose it is reported that a certain person is saying terrible things about you.

This much is reported; but it is not reported that you have been hurt. I see that my child is sick. I see that much; but that he is in danger, I do not see.

So always stay with first appearances, and add nothing from within yourself – nothing happens to you. Or rather add something, but do it like someone who knows of all that happens in the world.

(Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.49)

The thought might occur to us, when eating fancy foods, that "this one is the corpse of a fish, this one the corpse of a bird or a pig"; or again, that "this fancy wine is the dribble of a bunch of grapes, and this purple robe is sheep hair dyed with shellfish blood"; or, about copulation, that “this is the rubbing of a little piece of entrail and, along with some convulsion, an excretion of mucus" Impressions like these are the ones that penetrate to the heart of things themselves and let us see what they really are. We should do the same in all areas of life, and, whenever things appear too highly valued, we should lay them bare in our minds, perceive their cheapness, and strip off the prestige they have traditionally been assigned.

(Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.13)

6. Knowing the difference. The first question that Stoics typically ask about any apparent problem or prospect is whether it is up to them. If not, they don't agonize about it, because it wouldn't help if they did. Stoics therefore are very attentive to the difference between things within and beyond their control.

Human life the Stoics appear to have considered as a game of great skill; in which, however, there was a mixture of chance, or of what is vulgarly understood to be chance.... If we placed our happiness in winning the stake, we placed it in what depended upon causes beyond our power, of our direction. We necessarily exposed ourselves to perpetual fear and uneasiness, and frequently to grievous and mortifying disappointments. If we placed it in playing well, in playing fairly, in playing wisely and skillfully; in the propriety of our own conduct in short; we placed it in what, and out by proper discipline, education, and attention, might be altogether in our own power, and under our own direction. Our happiness was perfectly secure, and beyond the reach of fortune.

(Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759)