I’ve spent nearly a year developing a true-to-Stoic-theory journaling curriculum for individuals serious about becoming the people they want to be — and, specifically, those who believe Stoicism can help them get there.

It’s a year-long, and it costs $96 (it is NOT a recurring subscription). Here’s what it included:

• A Stoic instruction and a journaling prompt every week (on your schedule), 52 in total

• A 300 page journal. Fully customized and provided at not additional cost

• Access to our online webapp that acts as the prompt delivery mechanism and a community of fellow journalers. I built this platform myself. This is not some cheap white-labeled third-party — it is a purpose built solution, specifically to provide this curriculum to you

• Monthly, live group calls where we (myself and whatever students decide to attend that month) discuss previous prompts, Stoic theory, the contemporary practice of Stoicism, and anything specifically related to their lives that they’d like advice or guidance with

This is NOT for the casually interested.

As I say in the title of this article (or memo, I suppose it is more like a memo), this program will change your life. It will change the quality of your character for the better, and it will get you closer to the version of you that you know you want to be, if you pick up your pen or pencil and engage with it wholeheartedly and with purpose.

Learn more about my Stoic journaling program, and how to enroll, by clicking the button below.

Stoicism is a philosophy that requires of its practitioners a disposition for patience and careful thinking — and, not dissimilar from the dog and the cart, if we come to Stoicism an impatient and thoughtless man or woman, we will be dragged along by the philosophy and made patient and thoughtful in the end.

There are, despite this truth, a lot of aspects to Stoicism that attract impatient people to it — one does not need to desire to become truly Stoic in order to desire to attain some of the byproducts of Stoic philosophy.

Strength, for example, is something most people desire — whether they interpret strength to mean emotional resilience, physical power, or social influence and standing. In this article I want to focus in on physical strength because it is clear, as you can see from the image below, that many people believe a true Stoic is, necessarily, a physically imposing and powerful being — with physiques to rival Zeus.

In this article, then, I’m going to talk about what is the “perfect Stoic body,” and how you may well already possess it (even though you may also look nothing like a CrossFit Games Champion).

Can physically disabled individuals still be Stoics?

This question should cause anyone who reads it to cringe immediately — it is a heinously stupid question, the answer to which is a very obvious yes. Yet, despite the cringe and the obviousness of the answer, when individuals claiming to be Stoic have “dad bods” or are “fat” or “too skinny and weak,” a not-insignificant number of so-called “Stoics” insist that if such individuals were “real” Stoics, they’d take on much stronger physical appearances.

First, a physically disabled person absolutely can go to the gym; but their workout routines will (likely) take on a modified form that accommodates their physical disability.

Second, we’d be right, at least in theory, to give some sort of leeway to the physically disabled person because physical disablement manifests in real world limitations and it is both kind and responsible to recognise that when forming expectations of, not just disabled individuals but, anyone.

Lastly, a “fat” person is not necessarily a lazy person. They may well be an individual who doesn’t prioritise their health (which doesn’t make them lazy), but they might instead have a host of medical and circumstantial variables present in their lives that make certain degrees of “fitness” or “health” practically unachievable.

What a person looks like, tells us nothing of their “Stoic-ness.”

A Stoic is not a Stoic because of their body

The measure of a Stoic hasn’t ever extended beyond their rational faculty. All the things that make Stoics Stoics live in their minds. The aim of Stoicism is the acquisition of perfect moral knowledge — of “Areté;” or “Virtue” if you prefer. The sage has perfect moral knowledge, that’s what makes the sage a sage.

Indeed, the possession of perfect moral knowledge will have an effect on the physical body because the sage will make only moral choices concerning their health. However, what makes a choice moral is the context surrounding it and context is never the same for any two people, let alone all people, and this is even true for the sage (and every sage).

Role Ethics come into heavy play here

Rule number one of Stoic Role Ethics: no role can contradict another role.

Rule number two: there are some roles we can elect to take on, and some which are assigned to us. Roles assigned to us (either by society or Nature, for example) can include parent, employee, tax-payer, human being, son, daughter, et cetera. Some roles that are assigned to us are able to be unassigned by us, such as employee or resident of Canada (because we can change jobs and move countries), while others cannot (we cannot un-assign ourselves from being a father, mother, daughter, son, or human being, for example).

Rule number three: If any role is contradicting or conflicting with any other role, we are either not fulfilling it justly/appropriately, or we’ve take on a role that we never should have.

Rule number four: there are only so many roles we can take on as individuals, and thus we must learn to limit the number of roles we seek to assume lest we over-extend ourselves and wind up fulfilling all of our roles poorly and unjustly.

What does all this mean for the “Stoic” body?

The Stoic body is any body resulting from the Just and appropriate balance of roles

Caring for our bodies is a Stoic choice, there is no arguing with that — it is a role (caregiver to our husks) that is assigned to us by Nature, and one we cannot walk away from without compromising our pursuit of moral excellence (for what does it say of a person’s character who ignores their health?).

However, caring exists on a fairly broad spectrum and we need not be on the most extreme end of it to be caring “appropriately” for our body. Instead, we need to be at the place on the spectrum that enables balance with our other roles.

To be clear: “appropriate” isn’t some dogmatic standard. Instead, it is a reasoned-to-be-so variable-in-flux which has a complex network of relationships (both inverse and not) with all our other roles.

This means the body which results from 7 days of relentless CrossFit training every week is only a “Stoic body” if the owner of that body is not allowing their commitment to fitness to cause imbalance elsewhere in their array of roles. If we’re prioritising leg day over attending our kid’s school play, do we have a Stoic body or a vicious one?

What this also means is that the body which results from 2 days a week of moderate jogging on a treadmill at the local gym is also a “Stoic body” if that level commitment to physical fitness and health is the one that maintains “role balance.”

The perfect Stoic body is necessarily dynamic in form

Three Stoic sages, all with “Stoic bodies”

If “Stoic body” were a phrase in the dictionary, there would be no picture next to it. My body is a Stoic body, and so is yours, and her’s, and his… but only if we’ve given the contextually appropriate level of attention and care to it in balance with all the other things we must give contextually appropriate attention and care to.

It’s that simple.

I’m good at correcting misconceptions.

In truth, the central role of my job as a philosopher of Stoicism and, especially, as a communicator of Stoicism, is to correct misconceptions.

So that’s the function of this publication now. Not long essays on obscure topics, but corrections to misconceptions I find on social media. I think this is a far more useful thing. More enjoyable too.

Let’s kick things off with a little murder

There are a lot of “Stoicism influencers" on Bluesky. New platforms usually see a large influx of these sorts of accounts in the first year and then they die off as their creators learn the content doesn’t play particuarly well when it’s just overly hashtagged quote porn.

But in this case, I took umbrage with the quote because it wasn’t relevant to Stoicism and it wasn’t something, technically, that Seneca, himself, said at all.

Instead, it's from a tragedy he wrote (Seneca was a great tragic playwright; see Gioia's "Seneca: The Madness of Hercules"). The play was called "The Trojan Women” (or just, “Troades”).

In the play, this quote ("mercy often means giving death, not life" or in some translations "Often it is mercy to kill, not to preserve life") is spoken by Andromache.

The context is deeply tragic: Andromache is facing the terrible dilemma regarding her young son Astyanax's fate. She has hidden him in Hector's tomb to protect him from the Greeks, who have decreed he must die.

When Ulysses (Odysseus) comes to take the boy away, Andromache experiences an agonizing internal conflict and briefly considers whether death might actually be more merciful for her son than the alternative—a life of slavery and humiliation as a captive, especially given his royal heritage as Hector's son.

In this moment of despair, she utters this line, reflecting the idea that sometimes death is preferable to a life of suffering and indignity.

This sort of missing context is a problem…

If you’re a “Stoic bro” and you see something like this, you might think,

“Yeah man! Even the Stoics know that sometimes it’s better to kill your enemy than show them mercy cause sometimes death is mercy. Now let’s go be mean to people because sometimes being mean is actually the kind thing to do, bro.”

Or, if you’re someone who thinks Stoicism is a problematic philosophy that no one ought to be practicing, you might think,

“Here’s another Stoic, glorifying death. More hypermasculine bullshit. Stoicism celebrates mercy killing.”

Neither of these takeaways provide could PR for the philosophy of Stoicism.

Given context, though, it could still be considered Stoic in spirit…

Nothing about this means an Ancient Stoic wouldn't have thought that death was sometimes more merciful than life, but they probably wouldn't have included that in the canon of their philosophy since it wouldn't be mercy or suffering they'd be concerned with it would be about the moral and just choice.

In one of his famous letters, Seneca could have said, "It is sometimes the Good choice to die rather than live" (he didn't say that, but he could of) — in fact, Seneca did commit suicide at the behest of Nero! though, it's not entirely clear whether this was a just choice or not.

The central tenant of Stoicism is Virtue (moral character) — not mercy or death since context would change the just (as in justness) measure of either.

Thanks for reading,
Tanner

According to, what seems like, 99% of the social internet, Stoicism is either a psychological magic trick for making oneself not worry or care about all manner of negative goings on in the world, a toolbox of hustle culture productivity hacks for Silicon-Valley-esque entrepreneurs, or a fundamentally flawed ancient philosophy that provides the fuel of justification for the fire of the so-called “red pill masculinity movement.”

Do any of those interpretations or understandings of Stoicism stand up to even minor scrutiny though? Let us turn to the voices of a few ancients to find out…

Musonius Rufus, an ancient Stoic whose Fragments make up a not-insignificant portion of all the primary sources we have on Stoic philosophy, didn’t just believe women should participate in philosophy (and Stoicism in particular) but that it ought to be as primary a focus of their existence as it ought to be for men.

There’s also Athenaeus of Naucratis, a rhetorician and grammarian, who tells us,

Finally there’s Zeno, the founder of Stoicism (these are combined from two separate statements),

These three ancient Stoic philosophers contradict all three of pop culture’s misconceptions about Stoicism. Instead, the suggest that both women and men are meant to pursue Virtue, that love—revered as the ruling deity of the Stoic’s ideal Republic—and active concern for others are central to Stoic practice, and that a major part of Stoicism is aligning oneself with the nature of the Universe.

For those who believe they understand Stoicism, but found themselves raising an eyebrow at any point during the last few paragraphs, their reaction to this strong contradiction should be motivating. If you caught yourself thinking, Wait—this isn’t Stoicism, I have news for you: it absolutely is Stoicism, and I wrote this article, specifically, with you in mind.

What is Stoicism?

Stoicism is an ancient Greek philosophy (and Virtue Ethics framework) that says the entire point of a human being’s life is to acquire a specific kind of knowledge: Virtue. Virtue, defined by the Stoics as perfect moral knowledge or moral excellence, is the key to aligning oneself with nature and the Cosmos.

For the ancient Stoics, the Cosmos was a providential living entity (of which were/are a part), but I will talk about it, instead, as nothing more than a self-sustaining system – a self-sustaining system so stable and reliable that there’s an appearance of logical design to it.

All living things, as far as we know, act in accordance with this so-called “logic” of the Cosmos (the Logos) without actively choosing to do so. Grass grows, planets orbit, cows moo, stars are born and die, dung beetles roll dung, and trees do what trees do. The balance of energy in the Cosmos remains ever the same and the system, reliably, keeps on keeping on.

Then there are human beings…

The Ancient Stoics reasoned that a human being couldn’t be in alignment with Nature without possessing Virtue because, as “the rational animal”, human beings have a unique kind of control over themselves. Human beings can freely choose and, if human beings can freely choose, that means they are able to choose to act out of alignment with Nature.

Since, according to Aristotle (and the Stoics), one only does what one believes to be the right thing to do, one acting out of accordance with Nature isn’t the result of some amorphous notion of one’s base moral quality – it’s not that some people are good while other are bad and that’s their unchangeable nature – it is, instead, a problem of ignorance.

Perfect moral knowledge – Virtue – is required for one to come into sync with the “divine” or “providential” logic of the Cosmos. Thus Stoicism is a philosophy that guides human beings along their path to moral excellence through the incremental improvement of both their character and their comprehension of Virtue.

Yet, even with this being the case, here we are, in the 21st Century, with a widespread and persistent misunderstanding of “Stoicism” that doesn’t just get it wrong, but that cheapens it, disgraces it, and warps it into something of a mind virus that is having an especially negative impact on young men by encouraging them to turn away from a truly Stoic lifestyle and toward one of malaise and nihilistic hedonism or isolationism.

Some of pop culture’s most common misunderstandings about Stoicism

Indifference

Stoics don’t practice indifference. Instead, we view things which are incapable of forcing us to make immoral (vicious) choices as indifferent things.

Poverty doesn’t force us to make immoral or unjust choices.

We also view things which are incapable of ensuring we make moral (virtuous) choices as indifferent things.

Wealth doesn’t ensure we’ll make moral or just choices.

The only thing capable of making our choices for us is us, therefore the only non-indifferent things that exist are our choices since our choices are what habituate and mould our character.

The source of this misunderstanding, in contemporary society anyway, is the pluralisation of the word indifferent (indifferents), which sounds exactly like the word “indifference.”

Stoicism is for men only

This is incorrect. Stoicism is the pursuit of perfect moral knowledge, thus it cannot be a gender-exclusive philosophy. It is manly to be virtuous, to possess perfect moral knowledge and a just character, but it is also womanly (the manliest man is a virtuous man; and the womanliest woman a virtuous woman).

The source of this misunderstanding is the word Virtue, which contains the Latin root vir- meaning “man” and denoting things related to masculinity and manliness.

However, Stoicism is a Greek philosophy and the Greeks certainly didn’t write their philosophies in Latin. Virtue is simply the closest Latin equivalent to the Greek word “Areté” – which means “excellence.” It (Areté) was also, to put an ironic nail in the coffin of this “men only” nonsense, a concept represented by a major Greek goddess by the same name (Areté).

The idea that a woman would be unable to pursue a thing represented by a woman is, flatly, untenable.

Stoics don’t care about things they cannot control

Stoics must care deeply about things they cannot control.

A Stoic can’t control whether their mother or father survives a battle with cancer, but it wouldn’t speak well of that Stoic’s understanding of moral excellence (and thus their moral character as a whole) if they didn’t care at all about their mother or father surviving a battle with cancer.

The truth is that a morally just individual must care about everything they become aware of in order to give it the appropriate amount of attention necessary to reason out an appropriate moral response to it.

A genocide in a far-off country that is not our own? It might not be every Stoic’s moral responsibility to bring an end to it, but it would absolutely be every Stoic’s moral responsibility to ask what their moral responsibility (to it) was and to then reason to a morally appropriate answer.

Stoic Ethics decry, in no uncertain terms, “not my people, not my problem” as an appropriate justification for inaction. In fact, in most cases, Stoic Ethics would decry inaction entirely.

Stoics prioritise themselves before and above others

Stoics do not prioritise care in a unidirectional manner. Stoic Oikeiôsis (which refers to the process of appropriating as one’s own what is appropriate for one to care about) is a theory of moral development, not prioritisation of care.

As children, we are immediately aware that it is appropriate to care about our well-being and survival. As we grow, this awareness expands to include our family. Then it expands to our neighbourhood, our city, our state, country, and, eventually, the whole world.

The fully care-actualised – or wholly “Oikeiôtic” – individual, understands that it is morally appropriate to care for the well-being of everything (albeit in an appropriate manner, which is up to our rational faculty – we must reason to what is “appropriate”).

Stoics repress their emotions

Stoics don’t repress their emotions, they endeavour to prevent their emotions from justifying vicious choosing (which is emotional management, not repression).

In Stoicism, the word “justice” doesn’t refer to legal justice, it refers to the “just treatment of others” where “just” means “fair.” The fair thing to do is, by Stoic definition, the just thing to do – and that means what is just is not necessarily what is legal or what has legal precedence.

If we, as Stoics, are not careful when assenting to our initial impressions and unproven understandings about reality, we risk justifying unjust/vicious choices and actions.

If, for example, we catch someone stealing bread and immediately assent to the impression that this is both something worthy of being angry about and that the action of stealing bread is unjust no matter the context, we risk locking someone in prison for what might well be an unjust (because it is contextually unfair) reason. Is it just to punish a homeless person for needing to eat?

I’m not saying it is or isn’t, I’m saying the reason we Stoics attempt to keep a lid on our knee-jerk emotions is so we have the time and presence of mind required to responsibly reason these sorts of things out.

Why does any of this matter?

I don’t care if academics get Stoicism wrong. Stoic academics have pedantic arguments about highly specific and nuanced details and then write competing hundred-page papers that call into question the legitimacy of a four-decade-old translation of some obscure Ancient Greek word and, in the end, both abstracts are close enough to the right answer that it doesn’t practically matter much (to “Main Street” people, I mean).

What I do care about is when the Stoicism communicators get it wrong.

÷jl Communicators are who people listen to – very few people outside of other academics listen to academics (just ask them, they’ll tell you the same).

Take Bill Nye and Neil DeGrasse Tyson for instance.

No one knew who Neil DeGrasse Tyson was until he stepped (functionally) into the role of Science Communicator, but Bill Nye has been a household name for near 40-years. And while Tyson has no doubt done more to advance the scientific frontier, Nye has done far more to develop young minds toward an interest in Science.

Similarly, Ryan Holiday and Donald Robertson have done more to make people aware of Stoicism than John Sellars or A. A. Long (most people have no idea who John Sellars or A. A. Long are, whereas Ryan and Donald are widely known New York Times and Amazon Best Sellers).

In the age of viral social media influencers (whose primary aims are, most usually, monetisation), the number of unvetted, unidentified, unqualified, and uninformed communicators of Stoicism (and countless other specialised matters of interest) has increased by orders of magnitude. Most concerning? The better one is at marketing the more effective a communicator one is (be they right or wrong, informed or ignorant), and marketing is a far easier field to become proficient in than, say, Ancient Greek Philosophy, Economics, or Psychology. Which means it’s easier to become a terribly uninformed influential communicator than to become a great one – which means most influential communicators are terribly uninformed.

Getting Stoicism right matters because the right version of it is immensely helpful and highly capable of turning lives around for the better – while getting it wrong strengthens the influence, and emboldens the efforts, of characters like Andrew Tate (someone who, sickeningly, claims to be Stoic).

Why would someone adopt Stoicism as a life philosophy?

In the most dramatic terms: to become a perfect moral being who is nothing but a boon to the wellbeing of their family, society, the planet, and the Cosmos.

In the more practical terms: to spend a life committed to becoming an evermore caring, helpful, and beneficial part of the world for the brief time they are alive and able to do and be so.

If that’s not what one wants to do, then one isn’t interested in Stoicism… and one needs to stop pretending otherwise.

If you’d like to learn more about Stoicism, consider tuning into the Practical Stoicism podcast, or purchasing Tanner Campbell and Kai Whiting’s book, “What is Stoicism? A Brief and Accessible Overview” available in digital and print formats everywhere books are sold.

I’ll start by saying that the asking of this question shouldn’t be triggering to you. Trump is (now, again) the leader of America, and a Stoic ought always to be willing (and wanting and waiting) to consider the moral uprightness of their nation’s leadership.

In this week’s edition I won’t be judging the sitting President’s past or present actions, nor will I be making predictions about his future actions. Instead, I will try to help you gain clarity on what you ought to be doing as a citizen of the Cosmopolis and America while under the authority of this new government (understanding, of course, that not all my readers are American).

Remember that Trump is an indifferent, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t matter.

No man, nor woman, nor any external has the power to control how we choose — this power resides exclusively with us and our rational faculty.

Everything but our choice(s) is an indifferent thing^[1] .

However, Stoics cannot be indifferent about indifferent things.

Indeed, all indifferents that we encounter (or become otherwise aware of), must be considered.

The way we consider indifferent things is a direct reflection of the progress we’ve made on our journey toward moral excellence.

Our rational consideration of Trump (or anything or anyone) is the nexus at which we exercise our understanding of Virtue.

As Stoics, we absolutely should not take the path of least resistance when choosing how we to respond to Trump and his reelection — love him or hate him.

To abandon our roles in pursuit of passions is both unjust and inappropriate.

Our passions concerning Trump — our elation, or our rage — must not overtake our ability to think clearly in identifying what is morally Just and Appropriate (as far as our behaviors, actions, responses, and reactions are concerned).

If we’re angry, our urge may be to lean into that anger to express it at all costs.

If we’re elated, our urge may be to give a free pass to our new President and look the other way no matter what he chooses to do with it.

The former is undirected, self-indulgent venting of rage — a useless exercise — while the latter is blind allegiance and moral dissociation (disengagement).

These are neither Just nor Appropriate ways of conducting ourselves as Stoics.

We are, first and foremost human beings. This means one of our duties, so long as we’re Stoics, is to care for, benefit, and work together with other human beings. This is central to Stoic ethical theory, and Marcus Aurelius speaks plainly about it in Meditations 2.1 (and a handful of other meditations) when he says:

We will sometimes disagree with what is best for the Cosmopolis, there can be no doubt of that, but our political squabblings should never cloud the fact that our aim (as Stoics) isn’t to be politically dominant (or to, for lack of a better term, “win”). Instead, it is, in no small part, to be in service to the greater good and to help one another, for this is what is in alignment with Nature.

So, then, in our consideration of Trump (as well as of his cabinet and the present dominant Republican leadership in Washington) we must ask ourselves one question above all others: Does Trump (et al) behave in a way that suggests a solemn commitment to the betterment of the whole of the Cosmopolis?

Once we answer that question, we ask a second: what is the morally appropriate course of action my philosophy (Stoicism) reasons me to, given the answer to the first question?

Whatever the answer is, that’s what we do.

Thanks for reading.

^[1]  For the purposes of our discussion, anyway. We don’t need to “well actually” ourselves into the deepest depths of Stoic physics and ontology. Something is an indifferent if it lacks the ability to hinder or aid our pursuit of Virtue. Broadly speaking, the only thing capable of doing this is our rational faculty — how we think and choose.

The irony of what follows is that I’m presently in the process of developing my own journaling program — complete with journal, writing prompts, and monthly calls: Journaling isn’t any more Stoic than boxing, horseback riding, swimming, or any other activity you’d endeavor to make a routine part of your life.

Of course, this doesn’t stop countless $toicism influencers from trying to sell us any number of journaling products that they insist will, for example, help us to “become more Stoic in 2025”.

Stoicism as a philosophy isn’t any single action (like journaling). It is a lifelong commitment to the pursuit of Virtue

We already know, as Stoics, that Virtue is the only good because it is the only thing that is always good, all the time, and with no contextual exceptions.

Journaling, on the other hand, is an indifferent activity that can be either preferred or dispreferred.

If we have the free time during our day to journal, and we feel doing so improves us in some marked way, then we could consider journaling as a preferred indifferent.

If, however, we believe that journaling is what Stoics must do to be decent Stoics, we’re suggesting that journaling is always preferred which would make it always good.

But this would force us to declare that Virtue is not the only good, which would break Stoicism. We’d all have to become Aristotelians instead.

It would also require that we accept, as an objective fact, that one could not be Stoic unless they journaled (which is entirely stupid).

Thank goodness, then, that journaling isn’t always preferred and that it can very easily (and suddenly) become dispreferred.

Here’s an example of how journaling could be dispreferred in a Stoic practice:

Imagine I get a bee in my bonnet for journaling and assent to the impression that journaling is a requirement of Stoicism. So sure of this am I that I begin ignoring my other role-based responsibilities (such as picking my kid up after school, or making dinner for my family, or showing up to work on time) so I can make time for journaling.

In this scenario, journaling will have become a vice — an impediment to my pursuit of Virtue — which would immediately and necessarily make it dispreferred.

So there’s no argument, journaling isn’t “Stoic.”

But it’s not “un-Stoic” either.

Stoicism is about appropriate reason and behaviour

Journaling might be part of any given Stoic’s practice, but not because journaling is Stoic.

Any activity that we justly reason to be appropriate in our pursuit of Virtue is “conditionally Stoic” — meaning it is Stoic for specifically us in our specific context specifically because it aids our pursuit; that it is aligned with our practice of our philosophy.

Do we feel that keeping a daily or weekly journal will help us pursue Virtue?

Or do we think we have to be like Marcus Aurelius, who kept a journal, in order to be properly Stoic?

If it is the case that we believe journaling will help, that’s great, but it’s not the end of the reasoning we must do to ensure that the choice to start journaling is an appropriate one.

We’ll also need to figure out if we have time to journal and, if not, whether we can make time for journaling without abandoning our other role-based duties and responsibilities (there’s nothing wrong with journaling, but there’s definitely something wrong with journaling at all costs!).

We’d also need to figure out whether the way we’re journaling is a way that moves us toward a better character and, thus, Virtue. Writing about our day in a “dear diary” fashion isn’t really doing much more than giving us a place to vent (which, of course, has its own benefits but isn’t helpful to a philosophical practice — at least, not directly).

To journal Stoically is to journal introspectively, to speak to our own “soul” and examine whether the way we’re behaving and thinking is strengthening and improving it or not — and if not, what questions or thoughts we could pose to ourselves to change that!

Do you still want to add journaling to your Stoic practice?

As I mentioned, I’m developing a journaling program right now. If you’d like to be made aware of it when it launches (which could be in a month or a year), click here and add your name to the notifications list.

If you’re already journaling, think about what I’ve shared here today and ask yourself at least these two questions:

1. Am I journaling for the right reasons?

2. Is the way I’m journaling aid my pursuit of Virtue?

Thanks for reading and, by the way, happy New Year to you.

It’s rare I get to introduce a Stoicism “colleague” on this blog, and even rarer that I’d get to plug their new book at the same time. While neither of these are the point of this week’s edition, it’s appropriate for me to do both at some point along the way. This week I’m asking (and answering) what might be a contentious question: Did Epictetus believe in a personal (interfering) and plotting (that is to say, planning and/or intentional) God? Is the Stoic God the sort of god that has done things with us in mind (as a species of animal and as individuals) and is also involved in a personal relationship with us the way that Christians say they are in a personal relationship with Christ or their God?

Why such a heavy lift this week?

On Bluesky, which is a social network you can think of as Twitter v2.0, I reposted a contemporary theologian’s post and added some of my own thoughts:

Every time I point this out I get blocked, but it’s not my intention to take the mickey out of anyone.

Instead, it’s part of my job to correct pop culture inaccuracies concerning Stoicism.

Stoicism is NOT compatible with Christianity.

The two have conflicting notions of God.

#StoicismLiteracy

— Tanner Campbell (@tannerocampbell.bsky.social)
3:30 PM • Dec 19, 2024

Within that thread I added,

Orthodox Stoicism views God as a wholly impersonal, wholly natural phenomenon that doesn’t predate the cosmos but, in my own words, is emergent from it. A Logic that is the result of a sustained system. A system we are part of (we are part of the “body” of this God).

— Tanner Campbell (@tannerocampbell.bsky.social)
3:30 PM • Dec 19, 2024

To which the contemporary Stoic philosopher, co-author of the soon to be released “Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and other Ancient Philosophers”, and founder of The Stoic Fellowship, Greg Lopez , replied:

Since you state that the Stoic god is wholly impersonal, I presume you take Epictetus' language about Zeus having intentions toward humans (e.g., Dis. 1.1.12, 1.19.9, 1.19.13) as being wholly metaphorical?

Also, blocked and reported. 😜

— Greg Lopez (@greglopez.me)
4:26 PM • Dec 19, 2024

These portions of Discourses are long, and I’m not going to post them all here. Instead, I’m going to take two selections from them to illustrate what I believe to be true: that Epictetus was using metaphorical and socially placative language in his discourses.

That’s something I don’t believe anyone has ever suggested of Epictetus of in the past, but I’m going to here.

Epictetus was a teacher who charged tuition, just like any other teacher in Rome

We don’t know how much Epictetus charged his Students, but we do know he was well-sought-after and that means, had he wanted to, he could have charged a lot. Although it is likely not the case that, if he charged a lot, he kept the money for himself — if, that is, we are to believe Simplicius (a 6th Century Neoplatonist philosopher) when he wrote:

Since Epictetus was not a Cynic and beds are certainly preferred indifferents, I tend to think comments like this about Epictetus (or any ancient Stoic) rise to the level of hyperbolic self-indulgent fanboying. I imagine it would make for a funny “never meet your heroes moment” if we scooped Simplicius up in a time machine, took him back to the life of Epictetus, and found the venerable old Stoic living in a modest home on a comfortable bed.

Epictetus wasn’t Diogenes, and Stoicism isn’t Cynicism, so I have a hard time believing 70-year old Epictetus was sleeping on stone floor with naught but a straw mat. Who would he be trying to impress? And why would he feel he had to do it? Nothing in the Stoic canon says we can’t have nice things — unless those nice things get in the way of our pursuit of Virtue. Which means if Epictetus slept on a straw mat in alleyway, he was the kind of man whose pursuit of Virtue was vulnerable to… furniture.

That doesn’t make a lot of sense. At least, not to me.

It’s probably the case the Epictetus lived in a modest house, and used whatever he charged for tuition to keep his school open and to pay his rent. If there was surplus (and I think it’s fair to assume there could have been), I’d have no trouble believing the suggestion that he donated the rest of his money to others as way of supporting the Cosmopolis and fulfilling his Oikeiotic roles as a member of it.

So he charged to teach. When you’re charging to teach you’re automatically ostracizing some would-be students.

Zeno taught for donations in the public market (so they say), Epictetus taught only those who could afford his fees. I’m not implying he charged an arm and a leg, or that he was wrong for charging (or that he was somehow less Stoic for charging), I’m only saying that charging meant only certain people could afford to learn from him.

Everyone in Ancient Rome would have wanted their sons to learn philosophy, to be wise, to be taught by the renown slave-turned-famous-phiolosopher Epictetus, but, if we’re honest and practical about it, who would have actually ponied up the dough (or even been able to) to pay for something as highfalutin as expert Stoic Philosophy classes?

Epictetus taught in Koine Greek, so to attend you’d have need to understand that language and everyday Roman’s wouldn’t have had any need for that. Maybe international merchants, maybe nobles and their children, maybe military families, but not the farmer, not the shopkeeper, not the regular everyday average Roman.

I believe Epictetus taught mostly “rich kids” — and I don’t necessarily mean that disparagingly.

This is foundational to why I think Epictetus used metaphorical and placative language in his lectures.

It would have been important to Epictetus to get through to his students something that made a difference

If you’re the son of a nobility, a senator, a military general, or a successful businessman, think about how your father would want you to use philosophy — why they would want you to have an education that included philosophy and to what ends they would believe it would serve you.

Think also about how you, as this son, would feel about being made to learn philosophy from one of the most notoriously grumpy philosophers of the time.

I believe that most of the students who attended Epictetus’s school either (A) didn’t want to be there or (B) were there to get out of the education what could be gotten out of it inasmuch that it could further their broader, non-philosophical ambitions.

Epictetus, no doubt, wanted to teach great minds who wanted to pursue Virtue in earnest, but I would bet all the gold in Scrooge McDuck’s money bin that the bulk of who he got to teach were those who wanted to leverage Stoicism as a career hack.

Sound familiar?

No doubt, Epictetus would have understood this. He would have known these people were never going to become sages and that they had no real earnest interest in doing so. Still, he would have realized he could have an impact of some kind — and, no doubt, he wanted to.

I believe this is why he spoke in the way he did. He had no desire to get bogged down in the mire of explaining the difference between Zeus-as-a-lighting-bolt-hurling-shape-shifter-who-lived-on-a-mountain and Zeus-as-the-logic-inherent-in-the-self-sustaining-system-of-the-Cosmos.

So, sure, it’s “Zeus”, because to expect a bunch of young men with compromised motives for being in his class in the first place to have the attention span, wherewithal, or desire to unlearn themselves from the cultural zeitgeist of gods and such at the time would have been unrealistic and pie in the sky.

So when Epictetus says something like:

Yes, he’s talking about Zeus as a being who issues decrees, and who is the designer and assigner of our fates, but I think he’s saying that in lieu of being able to say something a lot more esoteric, which might be…

Epictetus wasn’t a sage, and when we hold him up as some perfect embodiment of Stoicism, and when we fool ourselves into thinking we even understand what a perfect embodiment of Stoicism would be in the first place, we’re less able to be practical about what he was like and how imperfect and flawed he probably was.

Perhaps my thoughts on Epictetus’s teaching style are not accurate, perhaps they’re far off base… but I’ll tell you what isn’t: we didn’t know him, he’s been dead for nearly 2000 years, and what we know for certain about him probably would be enough to write a one page biography that wasn’t conjecture, hearsay, or references to people who lived many years after he was dead and never knew him.

Whoever he was, however he thought when he thought to himself, whatever he was really like, we’ll never know…

I just doubt he slept on a straw mat and believed in the mythical Zeus.

Thanks for reading.

I received an email from reader Helen last week. Helen was asking for clarity on a range of principles and ideas in Stoicism. I responded via email but realised after she replied to my reply with a request for even more clarity, that the information I was providing would probably make a good standalone edition of Practical Stoicism in Print. This month, then, we’ll work through Helen’s questions one at a time and see if doing so provides all of us with a better understanding of Stoicism in general.

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Helen’s questions were, and I’m rephrasing them a bit as Helen’s email wasn’t written with the knowledge that I would ask to share them publicly (hope I’ve reworded these well, Helen!):

1. If Nature is Virtuous, and everything it does is virtuous, and human beings are both a product of and a part of Nature, how can any human behaviour not be both in alignment with Nature and, thus, virtuous?
   

2. Is acting in accordance with our own personal nature (small “n”), virtuous when doing so would seem to encourage vicious behaviour?
   

3. How do we determine what is in accordance with our own nature?

These are heavy questions and, as a result, I have no doubt this month’s editions will be extra interesting. Thanks, Helen. Prepare your rational faculty, prokoptòn!

“If Nature is Virtuous (and humans are a product of Nature) how can any human behaviour be vicious?”

Nature (capital “N”) is the “God” of Stoicism.

God (for the Stoics) is synonymous with the Universe, the Cosmos, and, sometimes, the Logos.

The Stoic God is not a being, it doesn’t listen to prayers, it doesn’t have a church or a chosen people, and it doesn’t want your donations. The Stoic God is wholly natural and is, physically, the totality of all things.

Every rock, every star, every human being, every episode of the Simpsons, every accidental fart in every cramped elevator, every apple pie your grandmother ever baked, every embarrassing thing your parents ever did, all of this is a part of the Stoic God.

Beyond that, the Stoic God is the phenomenon set into motion at the birth of the Universe which we call the causal chain.

The Stoic God is also the stability and seemingly rational design of the (seemingly homeostatic — or, at least, homeostatic enough) system we all reliably exist within and depend on every day.

Lastly, the Stoic God is what the Stoics would have called, “Fate” (the things that happen).

All of that completely not-supernatural stuff, are various aspects and/or parts of the Stoic God.

Helen’s question forces me to take an axe to any potential woo-woo supernaturalism surrounding the Stoic concept of God

While there is nothing supernatural about the Stoic God, more spiritually inclined contemporary Stoics have a tendency to talk about it in a very “on the bubble” sort of way. To the extent that it’s not too difficult to get the idea that the Stoic God is some sort of cosmic thinking, planning, plotting, benevolent space mind/soul that has a particular concern for humans. But this is wrong.

The Stoic God is not an entity with plans. I’ve written out this before and am reminding you of it now because of what I will write next.

Nature is insurmountable… it’s also infallible

If the laws of Nature (and/or nature) don’t allow for something, then that something cannot be made manifest through sheer will (nor any other force).

Nothing that can’t happen, won’t.

Everything that can happen, might.

Anything that will happen, won’t be known until it has happened.

Anything that has happened, cannot be undone.

These are the self-evident truths that gave rise to the popularized (not Stoic canon) saying “Amor Fati” – or, love thy fate. Though, in truth, this is just cool-sounding (probably dogleg in origin) Latin shorthand for accepting both the limitations and realities imposed by Nature and persisting in our pursuit of moral goodness anyway.

Nature is capable of giving rise to all manner of unvirtuous things – but probably only if you’re being too human-centric in your understanding and framing of Virtue.

What do I mean by that?

There’s a moment in an interview, and older interview, with Stephen Fry where Fry talks about the cruelness of the Abrahamic God by explaining the lifecycle of a rather nasty parasite:

It would be, and is, very difficult to parse the concept of a supernatural God who:

1. Created the entire Universe just to create human beings

2. Is solely concerned with the well-being and behavior of those human beings, but who also

3. Created cancer, AIDS, cholera, and a whole host of other things that one might say are incredibly cruel devices for testing one’s faith

And faith in what, exactly? Well, here, in the Abrahamic tradition: a supernatural God who, all things being equal, seems petty, capricious, and insecure.

But what if the Abrahamic faith traditions were just trying to personalise the Stoic views of God, Nature, and the acceptance of Fate? What if the Stoic God was too abstract for most people to understand and incorporate into their behaviour and life?

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The Stoics didn’t feel that their “God” (the Cosmos/Nature) could do no wrong so much as they felt God could do nothing illogical.

Is it though?

Once we stop using human well-being as the yardstick by which we measure what is morally appropriate and logically sound (of “God” to do), it’s a lot less difficult to understand how and why they felt and thought this.

Understanding God as supernatural and human-centric makes belief in God difficult.

Understanding God as natural and whole-system-centric makes disbelief in God really quite difficult.

The Ancient Stoics didn’t believe that the Cosmos favoured them in any way (though some Traditional Stoics will argue with this, citing second-hand accounts by critics of Stoicism as their primary proof). Instead, I think the Ancient Stoics believed that the logical nature of the Universe meant that everything within it had a chance to embody its full potential — even though they did not believe that everything would, unfailingly, embody its full potential.

“Full potential” looks different for everything that exists.

Rocks have a “full potential”, planets too, and trees and mushrooms, I’d wager, but none of us humans are capable of knowing what those full potentials are or whether they’ll be reached by those things. We only know that those things are free to exist and that such existence means, at least, an opportunity to flourish (completely) in their own way.

“In their own way” means “according to their nature” (small “n”).

Everything that exists has a nature, whether that’s a rock, a mushroom, or a human being. Lowercase “n” nature, in this case, refers, at least partially, to that “full potential” I mentioned a moment ago.

There’s a natural expression that comes out of things that, in most cases, isn’t a choice.

A tree doesn’t choose to do tree things; it just does tree things. But perhaps parasites do parasite things, and that tree (doing tree things) can’t flourish as a result of parasites doing parasite things to its leaves and root system. The tree doesn’t flourish, but the parasite does. Both had the opportunity, only one was able to realise it.

This isn’t “God’s will”, it’s the reality that comes to exist in a Universe where everything has an opportunity to live up to its potential.

Humans, however, do seem very different

Humans, prior to a certain point in our evolution, probably did spend all their time just “human-ing.”

Eventually, however, and it probably had something to do with the increasing number of neurons in our brains as we evolved (we have 16 billion presently, and the next most-neuron-rich brain is the Chimpanzee’s with 8 billion), we gained a seemingly unique ability: the ability to choose to act in ways other than how our base nature compelled us.

Now there was what we felt compelled by our base nature to do, and also countless other options that we could elect to choose to do that were not in our base nature to do.

This leads to a worthwhile question, one that Helen is asking without (I think) knowing she’s asking it: are humans an aberration of Nature? Have we, through a “mistake” of Nature, escaped the confines of “human nature” (base nature) and become like Agent Smith or Neo in The Matrix?

No, we’re not an aberration of Nature

If I’m right about that, then humans reaching such a state is both not unnatural (and so not an aberration of Nature) and part of what degree of flourishing “made sense” for humans at the time such opportunity presented itself.

Not an accident, nor a divine decree from some alien space Jesus, only what happened when the opportunity for it to happen, within the context of the causal chain, came to pass.

As a consequence of this, let’s call it our “degree of thinking power”, human nature changed.

At the “dawn of man”, human nature was one way.

At the dawn of someday, some many thousands of years later, human nature was not the same. It was changed.

A human living in accordance with their evolutionarily outmoded (base) nature today, is actively choosing not to embrace their evolved nature – and to avoid living in accordance with what we know to be our new nature is to avoid living in accordance with Nature.

However, that active choice might, in reality, be a passive one.

Role models and teachers are among those who first inform a person ignorant of “XYZ”, that “XYZ” both exists and is worth considering as an idea.

A human being living in accordance with their evolutionarily outmoded nature may choose otherwise once a role model, teacher, or someone else has presented the idea and value of living in accordance with one’s evolved nature

This is why I do what I do, which some people might think of as a form of non-ecclesiastic proselytizing. I’m the Stoic version of a Jehova Witness knocking on your door to ask, “Would you like to hear the Good word of Zeno today?”

I’m trying to be funny, but, in a way, I suppose it’s true.

We Stoics have an idea about the best way to live and conduct ourselves – and it’s absolutely a preferred indifferent that everyone might get on the same page as us, but what would it say about our character if we didn’t share the philosophy we believe might save the world from ignorance and vice?

Where we differ from the missionaries and proselytizers of organized religion, is that there’s no punishment or reward for our “conversions” – just the opportunity to talk about Stoicism in useful ways when we feel doing so is in alignment with our pursuit of Virtue (in fact, this publication is an example of my answer to “what is appropriate for me to do as someone who wants more people to consider Stoicism as a life philosophy?”).

To wrap up this first of Helen’s questions, here’s a quick review:

• Nature is insurmountable and infallible

• Base nature is human nature only if the human is unaware of their evolved nature – but since ignorance is vice, the expression of base nature is vicious regardless of whether or not the human is unaware of their evolved nature

• Alignment with our evolved nature is alignment with Nature

Thanks for reading this week, I hope it wasn’t too heavy and that it provided you with some clarity on the topic. For the next few weeks, I’ll answer an additional question from Helen in each new edition.

Thanks again for reading. Take care.

Navigating the balance between striving for excellence and mentally exhausting ourselves can be challenging. In this week's edition, I'll be answering a question from a listener of the podcast, Graham, who shares his struggle with anxiety as it relates to the perceived pressures of maintaining a Stoic practice. He wonders how to reconcile his high standards with the inevitable frustrations that come when he falls short, and whether this pursuit of perfection might be a double-edged sword.

Graham, a member of my podcast community, asked the following:

What Graham is confronting is common. Very common.

Graham is struggling with something every contemporary Stoic either struggles with or has struggled with in the past: the ease in conflating “Stoicism done well” with sagehood.

How do we know if we’ve done Stoicism well, today for example?

The answer isn’t “if we’ve done it perfectly.” 

Instead, it’s “if we know we tried our best to do it perfectly.”

The only way to do Stoicism perfectly is to be a sage. Are we sages?

We’re not, of course, and we know this.

Knowing this means we must also know that it’s an unreasonable and inappropriate expectation (to have of ourselves) that anyone should get Stoicism perfectly right before attaining sagehood.

Yet here so many of us are, judging our practice as “poor” or “not good enough” because we’ve not done it perfectly – even though we know, as we’ve just read, that we are not capable of doing it perfectly because we are not sages.

Imagine we decided to start getting in shape after years of ignoring our health.

We arrive at the gym on our first day of this new effort, and we give it our best shot.

We’re miserable afterward, of course, and absolutely haggard.

When we get home, we start judging ourselves for how poor our form was on the bench, while squatting, while doing overhead rows, while running on the treadmill for the first time in ten years, and every other exercise we performed.

No, we couldn’t have – and no we aren’t; even though, yes, technically, we are.

It’s not possible to start anything new and do it perfectly the first time (outside of flukes or savants). So, of course, in a way, we’re shit at every new thing we try doing. But us being shit is exactly what is appropriate given our present point in the journey.

Expertise and mastery take thousands of hours of practice.

If we did anything perfectly the first time, it would mean we already had the knowledge and experience necessary to do it – but how could we have this expertise and knowledge if we’ve never done the task before?

The entire proposition is illogical, which makes it un-Stoic.

We cannot master anything immediately; mastery takes time. A lot of time. For some things, it takes nearly our entire lives.

So how do we know if we’re doing Stoicism well?

I answered it at the outset, and the answer hasn’t changed.

Do we know that we gave it exactly the amount of effort we were capable of giving it? Not that we could have given it if we were more capable, but that we gave it what we were, at our present stage, capable of giving it?

Is the answer yes?

Then we’ve done Stoicism well today.

Is the answer no?

Congratulations, we’re no worse off than we would have been had the answer been yes. Because in the case of both answers, we’re still not a sage; we’re still making progress, and still falling short like every non-sage does every day of their lives.

It is morally appropriate, both normative and Just, to be less than perfect until we’re perfect.

Caveat: That doesn’t mean we can murder someone tomorrow and say, “Hey, I’m just not perfect yet!” because you do have to try – that’s the one requirement of Stoicism: that we make an honest effort.

And yes, Graham, absolutely 100% Stoicism does require you to be critical of yourself, but not in a negative judgment capacity! Instead, in an accurate assessment capacity.

Assess yourself honestly, and accept an honest performance.

Try harder tomorrow if you can.

If you can’t, then the way you act and choose will necessarily be the only way you (presently) know how to act and choose… and that’s A-OKAY. Progress, not perfection. Practice, not sagehood.

Thanks for reading.

In this week’s edition, we’re going to spend some time talking about toilets. Why? Why would I subject my readership to any length of discussion on the single greatest achievement of indoor plumbing’s (nearly) 500 years on the job? Well, because a reader has asked a question and, in order to answer that question, I must talk about toilets.

That’s just how it’s gotta be. Here’s that question:

This question also requires me to tiptoe through the tulips of a family drama without hurting anyone’s feelings or seeming like I support one side (of the family) over the other. I won’t mince words, but I am going to chop them finely and carefully.

Traditional Stoicism™️ and Modern Stoicism™️

Within the category of “People who identify as Stoics” there exist a few subcategories that these self-described Stoics use to differentiate themselves from one another. The largest of these subcategories are “Traditional” and “Modern”.

The single strongest indicator of which of these subcategories someone will self-select into is, what I will call, theological tolerance.

Atheists and non-spiritual agnostic types (those who, in concerns to their own worldview, are theologically intolerant) will almost always self-select into the Modern Stoicism camp.

Religious and spiritually “open-to-the-idea-of-a-higher-power” types (those who, in concerns to their own worldview, are theologically tolerant) will almost always self-select into the Traditional Stoicism camp.

It is the individual Stoic’s relationship with “the G-word” (and what it represents, to them) that seems most responsible for the existence of these subcategories within contemporary Stoic practice in the first place.

But what does this have to do with Joran’s question?

Joran’s question is about belief in (the Stoic conception of) God and why it is I’ve suggested in the past that such belief is required for Stoicism to “make sense”. I’ve suggested this because the following order of events is true:

1. Stoics developed their logic model (an improvement on propositional logic)

2. Stoics used their logic model to make a logically sound argument for “god”

3. Stoics used their understanding of the god they reasoned themselves to in order to develop their ethical model (and understanding of morality)

If we cut out the Ancient Stoic’s conception of god, we’re left without a direct or congruent justification for choosing to support (let alone adopt) their ethical model and moral framing. You can see the challenge, I’m sure.

I, myself, am conflicted as to whether or not this is true (that one must believe in the Stoic god to be an actual Stoic) even though I’ve said it is true in the past.

My mind seems to change its approach to the whole thing depending on who I’m talking to.

If I think a person can listen critically and take the time to truly understand what the Stoics meant by “god” (and that they didn’t mean God like a supernatural cosmic father figure that cares what we eat and wear, or who we sleep with) then I’ll suggest belief in the Stoic god is necessary.

On the other hand, if I don’t think they’ll listen or take the time to understand, I’ll tell them belief in the Stoic God is entirely unnecessary.

It’s difficult to explain why I do this, but it has something to do with belief in god not being the point of Stoicism and not wanting to put it in the way of anyone looking to build a Stoic practice.

I think I can best attempt to explain my reasoning with… toilets.

Toilets and absolute definitions

Diogenes once threw a live, completely plucked, chicken at the feet of Plato and said, “Here is your man, Plato!”

This was in response to Plato’s (and his academy’s) proposed definition of a human being. A human, Plato posited, was a featherless biped. Diogenes, King of the Lulz, was quick to see the hole in that definition and mock it with a naked yardbird. In response, the definition was modified to a featherless biped with flat nails.

At no point in time was it the case that Plato and Diogenes, nor anyone else on Earth, were unable to tell a human apart from a bird or anything else. The defining of human beings in this manner, with this degree of rigor, is not a practice of practicability nor is it of any functional use to everyday people (because everyone knows a human being when they see one). This entire exercise implies that if we can’t define a human being in the way Plato was attempting to, that we must not truly understand what a human being is. While this might be true at the highest echelon of specificity and technicality, it is the sort of truth that very few people need to care about (or want to care about).

Do you know what a toilet is? Of course you do.

I wonder though, could you tell me why a urinal isn’t a toilet? And, just to make it interesting, could you imagine a little Diogenes on your shoulder as you attempted to do so?

You: “You can’t poop in a urinal.”
Diogenes: “Oh yeah?”

You: “Toilets have lids!”
Diogenes: “So if a toilet has no lid, it’s no longer a toilet?”

You: “Urinals are used standing upright.”
Diogenes: “Can I not use a toilet while standing upright?”

You: “Urinals are attached to the wall!”
Diogenes: “Aren’t toilets also attached to the wall?”

You: “Toilets are attached to the floor.”
Diogenes: “But what about portable toilets?”

The outcome of this endless back and forth would be Diogenes nailing a bucket to the wall and saying, “There is your urinal, Steve!” Then he’d take that same bucket off the wall, set it on the floor, and say, “…and here is your toilet!”

I’m not saying we couldn’t perfectly define a urinal in a way that was entirely distinct from the definition of a toilet, I’m saying there’s no practical need to do this — everyone already knows the difference; everyone already knows what each of these things are intended for.

What does this have to do with Stoicism’s family feud?

Traditional Stoicism is a toilet, and Modern Stoicism is a urinal. Modern Stoicism isn’t Traditional Stoicism (just as a urinal isn’t a toilet), and neither camp would disagree with my assessment that they are different from one another — that neither are the same as the other.

Toilets and urinals, however, are similar enough to share a taxonomic category: sanitary fixtures.

I would like to suggest that the same is true of Traditional and Modern Stoicism, and that the taxonomic category they share is Stoicism — and, above that, Virtue Ethics Philosophies.

If this is true, then there are at least two ways to be a Stoic and at least two schools of Stoicism that are as valid an expression of the philosophy as the other.

The feud between Traditional and Modern camps is probably just elitism and egoism masquerading as something relevant to Stoic philosophy when, in fact, it’s just an excuse to argue and assert knowledge and authority (and build thriving Facebook communities, of course).

The point of Stoicism isn’t belief in God, as I said, it’s the pursuit of Virtue within a certain philosophical tradition. That “certain philosophical tradition” doesn’t come down to whether or not a person can justify their support and adoption of the philosophy, it comes down to whether they practice the philosophy to its intended ends and in its intended manner.

If we’re doing this… we’re doing Stoicism.

Besides, if what we’re trying to do is justify the evolution of our philosophy’s ethical positions we need only to understand the Stoic God in an academic sense. We don’t need to believe in the Ancient Stoic’s conception of God unless we want to, because there are other ways to justify the moral goodness of Stoic ethical positions and approaches.

And finally, the Stoic God is really just what the Stoics called the causal chain resulting from the birth of the Cosmos, and the totality of matter and forces in those Cosmos. The zaniest thing they said about God (the Cosmos) was only that it was inherently rational — which I’ve argued before is one way to think of any stable system (whether it’s the universe or our own physical bodies) and not a very big leap of faith.

Anyway, Joran, thanks for the question. This one has been a bit of a romp, but I hope it’s still been helpful to you. You don’t need to believe in the Stoic “God” in order to practice Stoicism, but you do need to accept the Stoic’s reasoning if you want to understand Stoicism academically as a subject of interest and historical relevance.

Thanks for reading.

Vladimir, a listener hailing from, I assume, Russia, has they submitted the following topic request a few weeks ago (originally in Russian):

This week, I’ll be exploring why exactly the examination of impressions is important – I would say critical – to our personal Stoic practice. Impressions are tied to Prosochē, Prosochē is the act of paying attention to what we’re thinking and feeling, and so I think I could also say that impressions, and the examination of them, are probably the single most important aspect of Stoicism – but I’m sure a great number of people would argue me on that (because this is the internet).

Before starting, a gentle reminder that there’s a weekly podcast associated with this newsletter, and which goes by the same moniker, “Practical Stoicism”. You can find it anywhere you listen to podcasts and my hope is that, if you don’t already listen, that you will consider checking it out. Simply search your podcast listening app of choice for “Practical Stoicism”.

Let’s start off by defining what an impression is, exactly

When stimuli activates our minds – such as when we hear a noise from around the corner, smell scents of fresh baking coming from the kitchen, or are provided with information by our local news channel – we immediately, without choosing to do so, begin forming notions concerning those stimuli. Those notions are what we call impressions.

The reason Stoics are meant to spend so much time examining their impressions is because they (the impressions) have a high probability of being factually inaccurate. A factually inaccurate impression (if internalized and adopted as truth) represents a significant threat to a Stoic’s aim of developing a virtuous character.

Yeah, but why?

Let’s imagine we smell fresh baking coming from the kitchen. We’re certain it is our grandmother’s apple pie. She’s in the kitchen, it’s the holidays, she loves to bake, and so the impression that our grandmother is cooking apple pie is not an unreasonable one. But is it a true one? What if it were actually the case that our grandmother had simply lit an apple pie scented Yankee Candle?

We don’t bother to go and check, we just “assent” to our impression (that is, commit to an impression being true) and grin ear to ear because we cannot wait to have some of apple pie tonight after dinner.

Imagine further that, at that very moment, our phone rings. It’s our sibling (or other loved one) who is also in town for the holidays. We pick up the phone, and, during the ensuing conversation, mention that Grandma is making an apple pie. The person on the phone is also excited by this, and tells us they’ll pick up some vanilla ice cream and head over later in the day.

Long story made short: our sibling shows up, ice cream in hand, raptured in joyous anticipation of the delicious apple pie they’re sure they’re about to be enjoying, only to find out, when grandma asks, “what’s with the ice cream?” that the only thing on the dessert menu is a candle and, now, vanilla ice cream.

Yummy.

Such a situation, of course, isn’t serious

No one is hurt by this silly series of miscommunications and assumptions which read like a poorly written sitcom episode — but what if it were something a bit more serious? What if it were a murder investigation? Suspected marital impropriety? Or something with much more serious consequences than a misunderstanding about dessert?

In these more serious scenarios, it ought to be obvious why it’s important to be sure about what you believe, why it’s important to carefully examine all the notions you’re forming about the information you have access to, and to ask yourself which ones are deserving of your assent.

Let’s consider our regional political landscape (and don’t worry, there’s no need to choose sides here, the example can be made without any polarization).

Perhaps we’ve been told something by a politician we find favorable, something we believe because we trust this politician. What if they’re lying, though? What if they lie a lot? What if our entire understanding of reality (as it pertains to the socio-political reality we’ve internalized and assented to as being “true”) is wildly out of sync with the facts?

What would that mean?

It would mean we’d have lost the ability to make morally just choices in concerns to some things.

How could we, for example, make a morally just choice about “Issue A” or “Person B” or “Policy C” if, fundamentally, our understanding about what was true of these things (or people, or policies) was incorrect?

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When we outsource the forming of our opinions and beliefs to others (or when we’re careless about forming them ourselves), what hope do we have of moving closer to Virtue? What we believe to be true about the world around us is fundamental to whether we’re enabled to navigate that world justly and morally appropriately.

It is, of course, impossible to ensure that all our assented-to impressions are, in the end, determined to be morally just – but there’s important nuance to add here.

There are a couple ways of looking how to determine whether a choice was/is “morally just”. The first might be considered the non-consequential way, and the second the consequential way. The latter way would be to look at the consequences of the choice and to work backwards from there: if the consequence of the choice are unjust, then the choice was unjust.

The non-consequential way works in the other direction. If the choice can be considered to have been morally just at the time of its making, then the consequences are irrelevant in concerns to the choice’s justness as well as the moral uprightness of the chooser.

Stoicism falls into the latter category – non-consequential ethical theory.

We cannot tell the future, so if the future were to be what determined our moral justness, there’d be no way for anyone to ensure their moral justness in the present.

Stoicism asks us to look at the facts, to whatever extent can uncover and understand them, and then decide whether or not that landscape of understanding is understood well enough to say, “I’ve considered this enough, looked into this enough, to feel that assenting to Impression XYZ is morally just and, regardless of the outcome, I can feel confident in the choice I made because I know it was made carefully and considerately.”

As I said in the previous edition, it’s not about being right, it’s about the choice being morally justifiable and reasonable at the point of its choosing.

So, Vladimir, the importance of impressions is that they are the raw material of our internalized beliefs.

Without impressions we could never work to form beliefs about the world. Impressions are to morality what clay is to pottery. They don’t shape our views, we shape them into views by examining them carefully and deciding which of them ought to be included in the “vase of virtue” (😂) we’re trying to construct.

The better clay we choose, and the more carefully we mould it, the better quality vase we end up with.

Hope that helps, Vladimir.

Thanks for reading.

This week’s edition is the result of a reader responding to last week’s call for questions and writing suggestions. This reader wrote:

This is a fantastically practical question, and I’m going to answer it next. Before that though, I humbly request that if you’re not yet a listener of the podcast, and you like listening to podcasts, that you consider subscribing to mine, “Practical Stoicism”, on either Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thanks.

When we know enough vs. when our assents are appropriate

Let’s imagine our friend is late for dinner. We’re standing outside the restaurant, it’s ten minutes past our original reservation, and we can’t be sat until our entire party is present.

What are some impressions we might have swirling around in our head?

None of these yet-to-be-assented-to impressions are bad to be having, they’re just a byproduct of your stream of consciousness. You’re going to think things you can’t control all the time. The measure of a Stoic, at least on this front, is not whether they are presented with a bunch of wild impressions by their mind. Rather, the measure is how they choose which impressions to assent to and then internalize as truth or belief.

We may not be able to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, why our friend is late, but we can reason ourselves to assenting to the impression that is most reasonable to assent to based on what we know.

If no impression seems reasonable, then we can hold off on assent altogether and say,

It’s not about choosing the “correct” impression, it’s about choosing only to believe what is morally (and rationally) defensible such that, when asked why we chose what we chose, we can provide a solid explanation for the choice we made. It’s not important that we’re right — it’s important that we’re morally Just and appropriate in our choices.

Imagine you’re out for a walk, after dark, in a big city

You turn a corner to find a man holding a woman at knifepoint. The man hasn’t noticed you. You reason that you’re witnessing an injustice, and, further, that this is an injustice you are capable of preventing (from going further) and ethically obligated to act to prevent from going further.

You stealthily approach the assailant, grapple with him, manage to get the knife away from him and, in a “heat of the moment” bid to put space between him and you, you push him away. He stumbles back into the road where he is promptly clipped by a passing vehicle.

He’s not killed, but his arm has been broken and he’s clearly in a lot of pain.

You turn to the woman, expecting her to be relieved, but she looks more scared now than she did before. Scared of you.

Suddenly, from across the road, a few men come running and shouting to the aid of the wounded assailant.

As the surreal nature of this response begins to sink in, you realize that you’ve attacked an actor in the middle of a scene being filmed by a small independent film crew.

The law will almost certainly find that pushing an innocent actor into the street, resulting in his near death and a broken arm, was not “the right thing to do”. However, was it, in your estimation, the Just thing to do based on what you knew at the time you chose to take the actions you did?

Was it Just to, seeing what you saw, assent to the impression that someone needed help and to believe that you had a duty, as you were both present and capable, to provide that help?

We’re not trying to do the “right thing” as Stoics. Instead, we’re only ever trying to do the Just thing. If we have sufficient evidence to assent to an impression of Just action, and we assent to it, only to find out later that unknowable unknown unknowns were at play, is the Justness of our choice diminished at all? Have we done anything vicious?

The Stoics would say no, so long as we did our due diligence in our reasoning before choosing and taking action.

The Ancient stoics had a less extreme example than the one I just provided, to make this same point

If someone offered a Stoic sage a wax apple that was so brilliantly constructed that it was indistinguishable from a real apple, and that sage assented to the impression that the apple was real, and took a big waxy bite of it, would that make the sage a phony sage?

No, of course not.

If someone deceives us, we’re not to be blamed for being ignorant of the deceit (unless, of course, this person has deceived us before and we are well aware of their trickster character and we choose to exclude that knowledge from our thinking processes). Just like if someone opens the front door of our house, enters while we’re not home, and steals all our stuff, we’re not to blame for leaving the door unlocked – they’re to blame for being vicious thieves!

If someone endeavors to trick us, whether or not they are successful, that’s a reflection of their character not ours.

Where’s the line, though?

We cannot decide, “meh, we can’t ever know everything about anything, so let’s never choose any action and never be useful to anyone ever.”

This is deeply unStoic, as it posits that the value-measure of choice and action are their outcomes instead of the Justness of a choice, action, or series of choices. It is neither Just nor Courageous to withdraw our participation from the Cosmopolis simply because we’re bound to make mistakes. Instead, this is unjust and cowardly.

We also cannot decide, “we must always make a choice to act, we must always do something. It doesn’t matter if all the choices seem unjust or illogical, action must be taken in order for us to be worthwhile citizens of the Cosmopolis. Even if it’s a ‘lesser of two evils’ sort of thing, we must choose one. Silence is violence”

This is also deeply unStoic, because it posits that the value-measure of choice and action are the act of choosing and process of action themselves. It is neither Just nor Temperate to choose or act simply for the sake of choice and action. Instead, it is unjust and self-indulgent.

So, where’s the line?

There’s not a static answer that I can give you here. No one can – not even Zeno could! There is just this one guideline:

We cannot be afraid of abstaining from assent, nor of time revealing that a different choice would have resulted in a more preferable outcome. The latter will prevent us from ever choosing or acting, while the former will ensure that we frequently risk acting unjustly.

Instead, we must look at what we know and ask the following two questions (in this order):

1. Does the information I possess about this situation enable me to assent to any of my impressions reasonably and justly? If no, abstain from assenting to any impression and be confident that doing so is both a Just and appropriate choice to make. If yes, however, then ask yourself this next question:
   

2. Is the impression I’m assenting to defensible on the front of moral appropriateness? In other words, is the impression appropriately Just and logically sound based on the information available to you at the time? You might reason yourself to assenting to an unjust and unsound impression that is immoral and inappropriate - so, watch yourself carefully.

If you have (what you honestly deem to be) sufficient information, and if the choices you are making lean in the direction of the Good and not the Bad, then your choice will be Just no matter the outcomes.

Our moral goodness isn’t determined by others, it is determined by us. No one else knows anything about how we make our choices, they only know how to armchair quarterback our choices (and actions) once they have the gift of hindsight.

Ignore the peanut gallery. Think for yourself, and think well.

Thanks for reading.

We’d love it not to be the case, but life will never be stress-free. We’re not sages, and so, stress, while it is certain to ebb and flow, will always be a factor in our lives. Stress from work, stress from relationships, stress from challenges and struggles – there is no completely escaping it. In this week’s edition, I’ll be talking about how I frame, manage, and address stress in order to minimize the negative impact it is capable of having on my (imperfect) character.

Framing: stress is an opportunity to practice our philosophy

Every choice that we make requires us to engage our rational faculty to reason. The engagement of our rational faculty is how we “do” Stoicism. Remember what a Stoic practice is: it’s the pursuit of Virtue through the careful use of our minds to determine what is morally just and appropriate.

From the moment we ask ourselves, “Should I consider this? Yes or no?” to “I’m considering this” and then “I’ve considered this, and these are the impressions I’m assenting to after doing so,” we’re doing Stoicism.

When we are confronted with stress, just like when we are confronted with anything that requires us to engage our rational faculty, we are provided an opportunity to practice the philosophy we are students of.

This framing doesn’t “solve” stress, it only enables us to regard stress in a more practical and useful way than we otherwise might. We’re not oppressed by stress, we’re not trying to survive it, we’re, instead, engaging with our stress rationally to make sense of it and to form impressions about it that can lead to resolution of it.

Management: stress isn’t a light switch, it’s more like a pendulum

Epictetus is somewhat famously known for saying, essentially,

I shouldn’t have placed that in quotes because I’m paraphrasing (wildly) from memory. What Epictetus said was certainly phrased (very) differently but was, in spirit, precisely the same: you can’t read your way to Virtue.

Why am I bringing this up?

Because the theory of Stoicism, when we rely on it solely, can get in the way of effectual practice. Case in point: stress is like a light switch, for the sage; for the ideal Stoic. For the sage, stress (negative stress anyway – unhealthy stress) doesn’t exist. The moment someone becomes a sage, switch! No more stress.

Theoretically, sagehood is achievable (and, theoretically, stress is like a light switch).

However, as I’ve said many times, sagehood cannot be proven empirically (by ourselves or by others). The sage should only be seen as an ideal to work toward – as a reminder that there is always room for improvement. If we hold firmly to the belief sagehood is both an achievable state and the point of our practice, it becomes far too easy to create unreasonable, unfair, and thus unjust expectations of ourselves.

The point of our practice cannot be sagehood since sagehood is an empirically unprovable state (it’s impossible to falsify its attainment). Likewise, the point of combatting our stress cannot be the elimination of stress if the elimination of stress isn’t possible.

It’s not combat, it’s a dance – it’s not a light switch, it’s a pendulum.

When the pendulum of stress swings towards us, we must habituate certain maneuvers that enable us to receive it gently and move with it in a way that both slows its speed and reduces the force it hits us with. Eventually, it comes to a gentle stop and we must then let it go, allowing it to swing away from us – prepared for its inevitable return.

So, what does the execution of all this abstract thinking look like? How do we receive stress gently, dance with it, and then send it away for a while?

Addressing stress: pay attention, be prepared with a plan, execute the plan, revise the plan, repeat

We’re accepting stress as inevitable, as an opportunity to practice our philosophy, and as a thing we must learn to dance with, not endeavor to destroy. How do we put all this abstract thinking into action, though?

First: Pay attention, know your triggers, and foresee what you can

You know what stresses you out, or you learn what does as you go along. Pay attention well enough and long enough to identify these things and write them down. For many, top stressors include money, job stability, and family dynamics. Once you’ve identified them, try to suss out what tends to signal their coming.

For example, if family get-togethers stress us out, the harbinger of them is likely to be either (A) the holidays or (B) some well-meaning family member’s impromptu suggestion that “we haven’t all been together in a while, maybe we should plan a trip this summer.” Learning to identify these signs and signals of a coming stressful event can allow us to mentally prepare ourselves for them well before they arrive.

Once we can see stress coming, we can prepare ourselves to catch it, cradle its impact, and dance with it.

Second: be prepared with strategies that enable you to dance with stress, not do battle with it

After choosing to use family get-togethers as our example, it’s easy to joke that our strategy ought to be lots of alcohol. While I admit I’ve used this strategy in the past, and no doubt many of us will from time to time in the future, alcohol clouds our judgment and reduces our grip on the rational faculty. So, jokes aside, alcohol isn’t an appropriate strategy for coping with stress.

What is?

Giving ourselves time to properly assess reality and assent to impressions about people and their eccentricities that are appropriate and reasonable.

Imagine we have an “Uncle Terry”, and that he’s a racist. By taking time to properly assess our expectations of him, we give ourselves time to prepare for how we will choose to “dance” with his triggering personality.

You already know the strategy I’m outlining by a fancy Latin-sounding name: Premeditatio Malorum (the premeditation of evils). While not uniquely Stoic (which I’ve talked about before), this technique is, perhaps, the foundation of any Stoic strategy for prepping oneself to endure a stressful event or period of time.

Everything that we have the ability to choose exists within our mind. That means any control we’re attempting to exert over our thinking, our emotional or physical states, or the world around us, happens in our hegemonikon; our rational faculty. This is, truly, our only tool when it comes to figuring out how to navigate stress. It should come as no surprise then that the only thing we can do to endure stress as we dance with it, is to prepare our minds to be in the presence of stress (and then think through how we will be when in its presence).

This is the opposite of replaying a past event in our heads, as we talk to ourselves in the shower, saying, “Oh, yeah, that’s what I should have said!” or “Why did I let them get the better of me? I could have just brushed it off and ignored it.”

This is the behavior of those who don’t look for harbingers or heralds (of stressful events) and don’t prepare their minds accordingly ahead of time.

We don’t want to be those sorts of people anymore.

Third: Execute.

Do the premeditation. Effort to keep those premeditations in mind and, when the stressful event comes, say to yourself,

We’ve already played the scenario out, we already know the reality of it, we’ve already assented to an impression of it. All that’s left to do is stand our ground in support of that impression. We regard Uncle Terry, in real life, the way we’ve regarded his visage in our premeditation. We’ve trained for this.

Fourth: watch the aftermath, and take notes. Where did your execution fail?

Uncle Terry may have said something that really got to us. With an hour left to our family get-together, we turn to Uncle Terry and call him an asshole, throw our drink in his face, and storm out of the house in a huff. We prepared, but not well enough.

The Stoics would say we had this reaction for two reasons:

1. We hadn’t made peace with the fact that there are things we cannot choose. This upsets us because we don’t want people to act like Uncle Terry. When they do, we become angry that we can’t stop other people from behaving in ways we don’t want them to. This is a foolish reason to be angry.

2. We chose to regard a dispreferred indifferent in a way that required us to abandon our pursuit of Virtue. Uncle Terry’s words have no power over us or anyone else, and yet we choose to act like madmen in response to them – we choose to give up our temperance (for example) to express indignation.

No one is perfect, except the sage, so this will always be us. We won’t get it right, perfectly, ever. We can, however, get it better by continuing the effort and not quitting just because it’s a “forever job.”

Take actual notes on how you messed up, and roll that new knowledge into your strategy for next time.

No strategies for navigating stress should be off-limits if we deem them (honestly) as appropriate

I’m going to provide you with a very personal, very recent, anecdote.

I’ve recently become a father. My son, Cailean, is now 6-months old. In 2020, I was diagnosed with adult ADHD.

What many people don’t know about ADHD is the impact it has on one’s “Executive Function” which includes the ability to manage emotional responses.

The forgetfulness, the half-finished projects, the cutesy stuff that makes it into memes and TikTok videos, those things are real, but the real hell of the condition is how hard it is to get a hold of yourself and to choose to do the things you know you ought to be doing.

Many self-proclaimed Stoics will tell you that certain approaches to certain problems are “unStoic.”

For example, such people might say it’s unStoic to be on anti-depression medication because, “if you were a real Stoic,” you’d know not to be depressed.

These people are, in the kindest terms, ill-informed.

Stoicism doesn’t cure depression, ADHD, Autism, migraines, stress (as we’ve seen), or any other physical condition – Stoicism is simply a philosophical approach to living that gives you a blueprint and some tools so that you can navigate your life in a certain way. The philosophy may result in increased resilience to certain maladies, certainly I believe that’s true, but it doesn’t make us bulletproof. As I’ve said, it’s just a framework for living.

I mentioned my son because his crying triggered a lot of angry emotions in me during the first 3-months of his life. It’s hard to describe why, or what it felt like, but I would become so angry, at him, for doing nothing more than what a baby is naturally expected to do: cry.

I was up against a wall with it. I knew I shouldn’t feel angry, I knew I shouldn’t have been storming out of a room, leaving my crying child alone with my wife for her to deal with, in response to this completely natural thing, but I couldn’t choose otherwise. My mind was angry, and I couldn’t “Stoicism” myself out of it – not until the crying stopped. My ADHD was getting in the way of me behaving in the way I knew was the appropriate way to behave.

After doing some research, I discovered that this isn’t an uncommon reaction for new parents, that there are some hormonal changes (in men and women) that happen at this stage in an individual’s life (when they become a parent), and that crying, in particular, can invoke a very powerful fight or flight response that frequently manifests as rage. It is especially strong in those with ADHD because of certain audio processing issues that arise from diminished control over our Executive Function.

“Never shake a baby!”

You’ve probably heard this public service announcement before. If you have, you probably thought, as I did, “Who the hell would shake a baby? What kind of psychos are having children?”

The nurse at the hospital where Cailean was born even gave my wife and me a speech about it before we brought the little guy home from the hospital – we both thought it was so strange. We both said the same thing, “Do they think we’re crazy?”

Turns out, that public service announcement is a thing because of how overwhelmingly common what I was experiencing actually is. People get angry, overwhelmed, they’re sleep-deprived, they’re emotional, they just want the noise to stop, and they wind up shaking their kids.

Thankfully, I didn’t.

Thankfully, I applied the strategies I listed above to reason myself to a choice and course of action that lead me to overcoming the issue – one that solved the anger and frustration entirely: muting earplugs.

Turns out the combination of frequency and volume was the trigger for my emotional state. By blocking out a little of the volume and a lot of the frequency, I became “crying baby proof” overnight.

Some people, the sort I mentioned before, would say, “oh, you needed earplugs? That must be because you don’t know how to be a real Stoic. A real Stoic could just “virtue” themselves to a proper mental state.”

But, as I would hope we all understand by now, it is our choices, not outcomes, that make us Stoic or not. Is it morally appropriate to choose to purchase special earplugs to become a more patient father, or is it morally appropriate to continue to be a less patient one because “real Stoics don’t need help”?

I know you know the answer — or, at least I hope you do.

Don’t let others dictate whether the strategies that work for you are morally appropriate and just strategies — instead, make your choices and judge your strategies yourself. Only you know whether you’ve done the right thing or not, only you have access to your hegemonikon.

Use your mind, it’s the only way to find the way

While our mind, itself, won’t be the thing that directly addresses the stress in our lives (see my earplugs), it is the only tool we have to think through identifying and implementing the devices, strategies, mechanisms, etc that we will employ in successfully navigating stress in our lives.

Everything we do springs from the mind. Start there, and you’ll find your way forward.

Thanks for reading.

One thing that always sells, or so they tell me, is sex. So, in an attempt to sell you this free publication, I’m writing about sex this week. Not the mechanics of it, thank goodness, but whether or not sex is mostly taboo in Stoicism.

Before I continue, I’d like to ask a favor of you.

At the end of this edition you’ll be greeted with the ability to send me your writing suggestions — and I’d really appreciate it if you sent me some. Coming up with ideas every week isn’t easy, and your ideas will help!

Are Stoic’s meant to abstain from sex?

Let’s start with a few quotes from a Roman Stoic called Musonius Rufus.

I warn you, before you read them, you might find them off-putting. If you do, I insist you read them anyway — and thoroughly. Don’t merely skim.

Musonius says a lot of things here that most contemporary readers would find problematic — let’s call them out quickly:

1. There seems to be a somewhat arbitrary focus on the amount of sex one is having, and another, separate, focus on the enjoyment of sex for sex’s own sake.
   

2. That sex outside of marriage is wrong and, separately, that any sex (whether within marriage or not) is only lawful (by which Musonius means naturally lawful; as in “in alignment with nature”) when it is done with the specific intention of having children.
   

3. That homosexuality is “monstrous” and against nature.
   

4. That sex with, for lack of a friendlier word, prostitutes is a moral wrong.
   

5. That no one with self-restraint (temperance) would even think of having sex with a “free woman” who was “apart from marriage” (this means freed female slaves).

Let’s also identify the things which most contemporary readers would agree with:

1. We shouldn’t be secretly juggling multiple lovers and/or having affairs.
   

2. We shouldn’t endeavour to turn people from their spouses in order to bed them.
   

3. We shouldn’t be sexually subjugating our staff (“maidservants”) or co-workers.

Musonius is a cultural Roman, while the philosophy he professes to be teaching is not. Stoicism is a Greek philosophy, not a Roman one. In the discourses of Musonius, we can make out an attitude toward (and concerning) sex that we would be unable to make out in the texts of Stoicism’s Greek founder and various Scholarchs.

Consider this from Zeno of Citium:

Zeno and Musonius couldn’t have had more different views on the purpose, role, or execution of sex. Musonius had a very “sex is sacred” outlook that required sex to happen only within the confines of marriage, and only with very specific ends in mind. The enjoyability of sex, for Musonius, seems to have been little more than a pleasant byproduct and certainly not, in any way, important or the reason people should have sex.

Zeno, on the other hand, viewed sex as an expression of friendship & love, and, as a result, of a virtuous character.

Zeno also supported the idea of free love, and positively regarded sexual preferences which were non-hetero or non-normative (homosexuality, of course, but also love of prostitutes). It is also well-recorded that Zeno rarely kept the company of women (wink wink, nudge nudge) and that his favourite student was also his closest lover (Persaeus of Citium, a man).

Musonius, a Roman Stoic living more than 300 years after Stoicism’s founding, would have us believe that Stoics see sex, strictly, as a marital duty between men and women — a duty that should only be carried out with the intention of propagating the human species.

Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, would have us believe that Stoics see sex as an expression of natural love and friendship — not a duty, but as an indifferent pursuit that, when carried out for reasons of love and friendship, could be a virtuous act regardless of who it was with.

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What’s the right way to parse these contradicting views from Greek and Roman Stoics? And how should contemporary Stoics view sex?

Before answering these questions, we must all be clear on one thing (at least): the differences between Rome and Greece (as countries) do not matter much here.

Undoubtedly, cultural and societal norms play a part in shaping the personalities and outlooks of the individuals subjected to them. To say that Roman-ness had no impact on Musonius’s thinking (or that of any other Roman Stoic), would be dishonest. Equally dishonest would be to say that Greek-ness had no impact on Zeno’s thinking. However, Stoics worked hard to ensure their thinking wasn’t dimmed by their social and geographic influences.

The root of these contradictions, then, cannot be, merely, that Rome is Rome and Greece is Greece (as has been said by many people, before, about, specifically, the differences in each country’s views on sex and intimacy).

Instead, they must come down to a fundamental difference in just one thing…

Greek Stoics understood nature (and “natural law”) differently than their Roman counterparts.

I don’t feel the Ancient Roman Stoics (and I’m talking about the proper Roman philosophers and teachers of Stoicism) were particularly “good” teachers (or students) of Stoicism if the Stoicism they believed themselves to be adhering to (and propagating through their teaching) was Zeno’s Stoicism.

I think Roman Stoicism was a malformed, and thus different version of the philosophical tradition it believed it was perpetuating.

Zeno’s “Republic”, his formal challenge to Plato’s identically titled work, put forward his own idea of “the perfect republic” — and that republic was lawless. Lawless, as all citizens and leaders would be sages in this perfect republic, because there’d be no reason for laws or institutions of moral enforcement.

Zeno’s Stoicism, then, mirrored Zeno’s view of the natural world.

In the natural world, every creature abides by the Logos of the Cosmos — by Nature (capital “N”) — and by its own nature (lowercase “n”). The non-human, animal citizens of a forest do not require something like a Supreme Court Justice, nor do they need the institution of marriage or some moral code that tells them when sex is appropriate. Animals (non-human ones) simply live in accordance.

Stoics aim to do this — to live in accordance with Nature.

A Stoic’s choices are made with the intention that those choices be in alignment with Nature, nature, human nature, and their individual nature.

That’s four different “natures” a Stoic is trying to live in accordance with!

What’s the answer, then? How are Stoics meant to think about sex and engage in sexual activity?

We’ve got to work from the bottom up (no puns intended) 🫠 

Individual nature > human nature > nature > Nature.

We cannot, as Stoics, deny either our individual or human natures. Our individual nature is comprised of where we live, what we gravitate toward, things we enjoy, natural skills we are born with, our inclinations, and things like this. In regards to sex, then, we are allowed a preference in who we pursue, when we’d like to have sex with those people (assuming mutual consent, of course), and the manner in which that sex is had (again, assuming mutual consent).

We should then consider “human nature.”

Human nature, according to the Greek Stoics, requires not that our sexual activities be “for specific ends” (like bringing about children) or “within only certain context” (like marriage), but that it be an action undertaken with love, friendship, and service to the Cosmopolis in mind. Of course, every individual Stoic is free to reason through the “how” of these requirements on their own and no other Stoic can judge the “Stoicness” of their reasoning as no Stoic can know the hegemonikon of any other Stoic.

Next we consider “nature.”

What is natural for human sex? If we look to nature we can find sex for pleasure (such as among dolphins and chimpanzees), and we can find non-hetero sex for pleasure and/or love (such as among penguins, elephants, and giraffes). Certainly we cannot find many examples I could come up with, but, the only restrictions I could see Zeno applying would be those that restricted sexual activities which actively and directly hurt others, were undertaken out of hate, or which somehow brought ruin to the Cosmopolis — and I think your sexual proclivities would have to be pretty wild in order to “bring ruin.”

Lastly, we must consider Nature (the Cosmos, God).

If we think it’d be a real challenge to bring ruin to the Cosmopolis with the goings on of our naughty bits, imagine the challenge in dreaming up the sort of sex required to work against reality at the cosmic level — it would have to actively work against the causal chain.

And that, I’m sorry to say, as much as saying so might be dashing to bits the hopes of those among us dreaming of a sexual prowess capable of producing a, to quote Marven the Martian, “Earth-shattering kaboom”, is impossible.

So, the final word is…

Actually, yes.

No matter the who, what, where, why, and/or how of your sexual activities, so long as they align with what you reason to be human nature, your own nature, and nature — and so long as it’s not hurting the Cosmopolis or ripping the Cosmos apart at the seams — it’s a-okay as far as Greek Stoicism is concerned.

As for Roman Stoicism? Well, Roman Stoicism seems to want us to understand “moral” sex as being, strictly, heterosexual sex occurring within the institution of marriage and which is only undertaken for the sake of reproduction.

Your choice is up to you, but one thing is not up to you: how others choose to regard and frame their idea of morally acceptable sex.

Regardless of your flavour of Stoicism (Roman or Greek), at least one thing remains the same: getting upset about (or morally indignant about) that which we cannot choose is vicious and, therefore, un-Stoic. If your reasoning is just — which only you can determine, ultimately — then you’re good. 

Thanks for reading.

In this week’s edition I’m going to discuss the “stoic” vs “Stoic” dichotomy. Stoic, capital “S”, being the philosophy, and stoic, lowercase “s”, being a feigned disposition of emotional detachment.

Please pay close attention to the use of capitalization throughout what follows (I will regularly remind you of it, just in case).

What it means to be stoic (lowercase “s”)

To be “stoic” (lowercase “s”) is to possess a battery of psychological “skills” that make the compartmentalization of duty from emotions easier than would otherwise be possible without these skills.

To be this kind of stoic is, depending on the context, not a categorically bad thing

For example, consider someone in a leadership position on the frontlines of a bloody and brutal war.

Having the ability to separate one’s emotional response (to the carnage surrounding them) from the logical responses required to find a strategic way forward that ends a specific battle or, at least, minimizes casualties on their side, is, unquestionably, an ability of great preference.

To frame the “stoic” mentality to useful, though, we need not imagine only the most dire and extreme of scenarios.

Anyone who finds themselves in a scenario where action is needed, under pain of harm to others especially, can easily understand (and, no doubt, already understood) the value of this compartmentalizing mentality.

We all, to some extent, exhibit this sort of “stoicism” in our daily lives.

I practice it, as a new parent, when, after spending two hours getting my infant child ready to travel, and being dangerously close to missing our train, he suddenly — whilst we are (finally) crossing the the threshold of our front door to set out toward our destination — giggles, shits his pants, and then starts screaming like a Hogwarts Mandrake.

In a moment like that (and, if you’re a parent, are laughing right now because you’ve been in exactly such a moment) an emotional response isn’t the required one — let alone the most useful one.

The sort required is, instead, a reaction of calm, efficacious, and focused action.

What matters in this hypothetical moment isn’t the expression of the frustration we feel but, instead, the responsible care of our child (who is too young to choose when to defecate, and deserves none of our anger directed them) and a “roll with the punches” attitude so that we might still have an opportunity to avoid both rescheduling our trip and screaming at our innocent child.

Lowercase “s” stoicism isn’t really a thing

When we attach the -ism suffix to a word, we’re suggesting (of it) a sort of, and this perhaps not the best word but, grandness. Take a look a this snapshot of the definition from MW:

The -ism we append to capital “S” Stoicism is the sort in 3b (and please be assured that I just stopped writing this edition, mid-sentence, to email the editors of this dictionary to tell them that the “s” in this definition ought to be capitalized, as lowercase “s” stoicism does not have a system or class of principles — you see what I have to put up with? It’s like pushing a cement truck up a hill some days 😭 ).

The -ism we append to lowercase “s” stoicism, however, is more like 1a’s.

And, now that I’m a bit hopped up on fighting the “English-industrial complex” 🤣, I would argue “stoicism” isn’t actually a word so much as it is a non-word resulting from a centuries-long misunderstanding of Stoicism — but I’m going to take a deep breath and try to get over my “pedant’s rage.”

Somewhere along the way, though, what we, now, sometimes call “stoicism” (but which is more like the suppression of emotions for the sake of not getting “hysterical” at inappropriate times), became associated with the philosophy of Stoicism and, as a result, the two are, it seems, forever linked.

This (entirely wrong) concept of “stoicism” is, for better or worse, at this point, real enough, at least for us to be discussing it at great length.

And this “real enough stoicism” can bring great benefit to us, as described in the bloody and brutal war example earlier in this edition.

Then why is “stoicism” a problem?

Why would anyone take issue with lowercase “s” stoicism” if this sort of stoicism is still practical and helpful in navigating one’s life?

I’ll get to that a little later on. First…

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What it means to be a Stoic (capital “S”)

To be a Stoic is to be a practitioner of an Ancient Greek philosophy which is, all at once:

1. A virtue ethics framework

2. A cosmological theory informed by the observation of nature and a logical framework, which is item number…

3. A framework for logical thinking

If someone is a Stoic, it means they have a fully-fleshed out, long-vetted philosophy guiding how, why, and to what ends they ought to strive to live.

A Stoic is attempting to attain Virtue, defined as the knowledge of how to live excellently, and sometimes short-handed as Eudaemonia — which is all just short-handing for possessing perfect moral knowledge concerning their own choices.

One consequence of this aim, which is fueled both by Stoic physics (the cosmological theory I mentioned a moment ago) and logic, is an approach to Ethics which necessitates the view that no single moral choice can ever be always moral nor always immoral.

Instead, every choice we make must be well-reasoned in order that it be moral within the subjectively understood context surrounding our choosing of it.

That means “stoic” (lowercase “s”) can, given specifically qualified context, be in alignment with Stoicism.

It also means that “stoic” (lowercase “s”) can, given specifically qualified context, be absolutely out of alignment with Stoicism. It is when this is the case that (lowercase “s”) stoicism becomes a wolf in sheep’s clothing, so to speak.

When someone believes stoicism is always in alignment with Stoicism, they have everything the need to feel validated and justified in their un-Stoic choices (and behavior) because they (incorrectly) believe they are following the principles of a brilliant ancient philosophy that everyone else just doesn’t understand… which leads to comments like:

Zeus help me.

When a “stoic” attitude is un-Stoic

Dark Zeno?

Earlier, I proposed the following question:

You should now know the answer: because the choice to be stoic (lowercase “s”) can sometimes be the morally incorrect choice and therefore, since Stoicism (capital “S”) aims to help us make only morally correct choices, be completely out of alignment with Stoicism.

When is it out of alignment? I can’t tell you.

Not because I’m trying to keep a secret, or because I’m only pretending to know in order seem smart, wordly, and sage-like, but because I’m not you.

I will never have your context, and thus can never know, empirically, whether the choices you make are morally correct give your context, your roles, and your individual nature.

However, it’s easy to imagine such a scenario where a “stoic” disposition would be morally wrong

Imagine our most cherished loved one has died, and we’re attending their wake.

This loved one was loved by many, including countless others whom we also consider cherished loved ones. These others are presently discussing and remembering our recently departed loved one, many are crying while sharing emotional stories, and many want us to share a memory of the deceased too.

This is an invitation of solidarity, from people we love.

We’re grieving, there’s a welling-up of emotion in our chest, and we’re going to start crying if we participate in this conversation — but we don’t want to cry because we “identify as Stoic”, and “Stoics don’t let their emotions get the best of them.”

To avoid the tears, and exert our power and control over emotions, we think of something to distract ourselves. We think of baseball, of scary spiders, of our high school bully, and then we stand up and leave the room before losing our composure.

These thoughts stave off the tears, and now we’re away from the emotional stimuli of those other people.

“Thank goodness,” we think, “I’ve successfully practiced Stoicism! I’m advancing as a Prokoptôn!”

But so many un-Stoic things transpired in that example.

First, we’ve identified crying as being a moral bad – and not crying as being a moral good. But crying has no moral value without the context — and what is the context of our example scenario?

Well, that’s the second un-Stoic thing: the context includes a wake, in the company of close friends who are mourning, and who are looking to us, in solidarity, to share in their grief as a means of overcoming it.

Our choice was to abandon them, to leave them to processing their grief without our help or involvement – and not because we felt we couldn’t be useful, and not because we felt there was no grief to feel, or that we didn’t feel any ourselves, but because we valued a warped definition of Stoicism more than we valued the loving action of mourning with our loved ones.

What does it say about the moral character of a person who chooses to walk away from an opportunity to be there for a loved one (let alone a group of loved ones) simply because they don’t want to be seen crying?

At the very least, it suggests that person doesn’t understand the foundational precepts and aims of Stoicism — at the very most it says they are choosing a Vice over Virtue; that they are consciously choosing to turn from the path of the Prokoptôn.

Stoicism doesn’t say, “don’t cry.” Instead, it says…

“Work to acquire the knowledge of perfect moral reason, and, along the way, do your best to model what you think that knowledge might encourage you to do.”

So, is it okay for Stoics to cry? You tell me.

Show me what you’ve learned.

Thanks for reading.

Stoic physics and ontological theory aren’t often discussed in (mainstream) contemporary Stoic communities, which is a shame because they are really interesting and present a lot of clever ideas that are fun to turn over in the mind. The focus of this week’s edition will be on the nature of stuff that exists (and other very real stuff that doesn’t) 🤔

The Stoics were Materialists, which means they believed everything which existed had a material form — that is to say, “was a body” (a body being something can act, or be acted upon).

However, the Stoics took Materialism to a level it had never (as far as I know) been taken: to the level of ontological theory.

Everything being a body seems easy to dismiss, right?

Our thoughts aren’t a body, are they? Our words? The virtues themselves? Ideals like honor and courage, these things aren’t bodies… are they? And what about empty space and voids? How can these things be bodies?

Well, let’s see. How about we start with the void, with nothingness?

G’mork, servant of The Nothing in Michael Ende’s “The Neverending Story.” Not the nothingness I’m talking about, but an opportunity of warm nostalgia cannot be passed up.

The Stoics say that the void doesn’t exist, but that it is both real and something.

But how could these brilliant ancient thinkers, whose wisdom cannot be denied, utter such a seemingly nonsensical and contradictory statement as, “X doesn’t exist, but it is something real?”

The reason is, first, that the phrase isn’t nonsensical at all because, second, the Stoics were really good at asking the sort of questions that required others (and themselves) to question their understanding of certain words (and whether those understandings were, in fact, limited and lacking).

One such question was an early version of, “If we’re standing at the edge of existence, and we extend out our hand to reach beyond that edge, where could it go?”

This wasn’t how they worded it but, because they believed the Universe started out as a tiny condensed ball of energy, which then expanded outwardly, they felt certain that beyond the border of “existence” there necessarily had to be something — and that this something must be real.

If I can reach into what I perceive to be nothingness, nothingness must, at the very least, be something real even if it doesn’t “exist” (which it couldn’t, for the Stoics, as it doesn’t have a body).

“Something” is a taxonomic category of “realness.”

There are subcategories of such realness: corporeals and non-corporeals.

Corporeals are real, exist, and have bodies.

Non-corporeals are real, do not exist but subsist, and do not have bodies.

The void, then, is a something which does not exist, which does subsist, which has no body, and which is real.

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Our understanding of “real”, “exist”, “something”, and “nothing” aren’t as specific (or useful) as they used to be

What I have loved about the Stoics for as long as I’ve been studying their philosophy, is their use of words — how important words (like good or bad, for example), meant, to them, in their time, absolutely not what they mean to us now. This is, undoubtedly, the most considerable stumbling block when attempting to understand the philosophy of Stoicism.

However, once we know that definitions cannot be taken for granted — that modern definitions are rarely the endall beall of almost any word — we open ourselves up to being blown away by just how fiercely intelligent these ancient thinkers were.

Let’s pause for a quick review:

1. A Something, must either be a Corporeal or an Incorporeal

2. If a Something is a Corporeal, it has a body, it is real, and it exists

3. If a Something is an Incorporeal, it has no body, it is real, and it does not exist

4. If a Something is neither a Corporeal or an Incorporeal, then it a Not-Something, it does not exist, and it is real.

The taxonomic category of “Existing,” isn’t the only category of “Real.”

The genius of understanding these words in these ways, if it’s not obvious, is that doing so provides the ability to qualify something as “real” without having to hold it in our hands.

This is a critically important ability for a philosophy which claims, for example, that Justice is real while also claiming that only bodies exist because Justice doesn’t have a body and so doesn’t exist. It would be a real problem for Stoic ethics if “to not exist” also meant “to not be real.”

Imagine you’re a shipwrecked nobody, an immigrant merchant from Citium, who washes up on the shores of Athens penniless and with no prospects, who is also (likely) unable to return to their country because of the mountain of losses they’ve just suffered (as a result of the shipwreck and the loss of its valuable cargo). Now imagine you decide to become a philosopher, at the ripe old age of 30, and, eventually, grow into such a competent one that you’re able to go toe-to-toe with Plato!

What an absolutely wild journey our “little Phoenician” (Zeno’s nickname) had during his lifetime — and what a thing to admire and be in awe of, as well.

A Not-Something does not exist, nor subsist, has no body, is not a Corporeal or Incorporeal, but, somehow, is still “real” 🤯

These things are things like limitations, concepts, and interpretations. Lucky for you, Not-Somethings bend my brain too far for me to unpack them competently here.

Instead, I want to turn things over to you to think on. I’d also like to encourage you purchase John Sellar’s book (linked here) and give it a read yourselves. It’s a bit pricey, such is the way of academic presses, but it’s a worthwhile investment (and no, that’s not an affiliate link, I’m recommending it because I think you’ll enjoy reading it).

That’s it for this week.

As always, use the poll below to let me know how you felt about this edition and (if you like) to share your longer form thoughts.

Thanks for reading. Take care.

Let me start by saying: if you’re an atheist, I still feel you’re still going to enjoy this edition. I’ll spend a few characters explaining, by way of a personal anecdote, why I think so.

Some years ago, I was probably in my early 30s, I first learned that “gnostic” wasn’t just a fancy way of saying “I’m not open to being proven wrong about my beliefs re: truth” (as opposed to agnostic, which is the opposite), but that it was also, itself, a religion. The religion of The Gnostics.

I had never heard of “The Gnostics”, so I Googled them. I wound up at a course provided by Great Courses Plus (no, this isn’t a sponsorship) on The Gnostics.

What I found was absolutely amazing. Not because I thought it was true (I didn’t), but because this was the very first time I had encountered the intricate details of a religion that wasn’t in the Abrahamic tradition.

To give you a taste:

The Gnostics believed that the God of our universe is actually a false God called “Yaldabaoth” (I’ve probably misspelled that). He is the offspring of a pair of entities (one male, one female), many of which, combined, form the mind and body of the true god (whose name may be lost to time or, more likely, I just don’t remember).

These two entities created Yaldabaoth without the approval of all the other entities (of which there are many), and, as a result of this, the “real” god is on a mission of sorts to, and this is an awkward word, disassemble Yaldabaoth and return him to the body of his pairs, and thus the body of the true god.

The accusation of the Gnostics, is that the Christians had been tricked by Yaldabaoth and are, essentially, in service to a heretic false god who is, as it turns out, truly evil as well.

I may be misremembering a lot of these details, in fact I’m sure I am, but you can see why this totally unfamiliar take on creation would have been interesting to me — it’s very novel, I suppose.

If you’re an atheist reading this edition, I want you to assume that you’ll take the same sort of novel enjoyment away from this primer on the Stoic God.

What the Stoic God is not

Definitely not this…

The Stoic God is not a being, nor does it have a gender. This God does not hear prayers, dictate moral law, speak to prophets, have “chosen people”, or a house of worship. The Stoic God is also without awareness of itself and is, as a result, entirely devoid of intention, purpose, and meaning.

Now, that last sentence will upset some traditional Stoics that read this publication and have told me, personally, how much they appreciate my knowledge and understanding of Stoicism.

I do intend to explain exactly what I mean when I say that the Stoic God is devoid of those things — and I will.

However, I’m not going to do it just yet because it will derail the read for everyone else.

If you’re a traditional Stoic reading this, please stick with me until the end and I promise you’ll get clarification.

Lasty, the Stoic God is not an entity with a plan.

The Stoic God, being entirely unaware of itself, has no ability to plan, and has certainly not planned the future. The Stoic God is not the creator of a fatalistic existence (at least not entirely, and at least not intentionally).

(something about how things are what they are because they are, not because of a reason… similar to evolution or conicidences.)

What the Stoic God is

Yeah, more like this. Not a being, but a system of laws within which we exist and abide

The Stoic God is a system, conceptualized as an animal or complex organism, and variously referred to as both “the universe” and Nature (capital “N”, always).

The Stoic God (that system), is the progenitor of everything — not just humans, not just turtles, not just scorpions, rocks, flowers, blades of grass, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity, but everything.

It is also, for the Stoics, above all else, an inherently (and, as I’ll soon try to explain, necessarily) logical entity that is responsible for the setting in motion of a causal chain that will continue until Ekpyrosis (or, to be less Greek about it, the fiery destruction and collapse of the the Universe) and which cannot be, to use an unnecessarily dramatic word, escaped.

Some important details of the Stoic God

First and foremost is that the Stoic God has both a mind and a body.

The body is the Universe and everything in it. You are part of the body of God, as am I, as is the seat within which you are presently sitting or the floor upon which you are presently standing. Everything, in fact, is part of the body of the Stoic God.

If a human being has fingers and toes, ears and legs, arms and buttcheeks, and all these things are part of a human body, then a Universe has stars and planets, moons and oceans, humans and squids, and all those things are part of a Universe’s body.

The mind of the Stoic God is less easy to comprehend, because of course it is.

It might best be thought of as the less physical, but, in my opinion, more important parts of the Universe. Gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, magnetic fields, et cetera. The Stoics wouldn’t have understood these things scientifically — or, really, much at all — so these are not the names they gave to these less physical, but absolutely critical, parts.

Instead, the Stoics came up with the Pneuma and the Logos.

Had they access to the tools and knowledge we have today, they would have Still conceptualized the Universe as God, but they very likely would not have named its parts the way the did, or imagined the effects of those parts in quite the same way.

The Pneuma and the Logos can be thought of, today, as variables for things that the Stoics couldn’t possibly have sorted out through reason alone.

However, and importantly, this is absolutely not how the ancient Stoics thought of them in their time.

The Pneuma was the “Divine Breath”, while the Logos was “Divine Reason” and the “Active Principle”.

How these two things interacted is, if not hotly debated in academic circles and comment sections the world over, at least abstract and hard to define exactly. What I can be sure of is that the Logos and the Pneuma, through their interactions, determined the form physical matter takes — and the degree to which that physical matter is imbued with a “portion” or a “share” of Divine Reason.

Everything in the Universe is part of the Universe and so, because Divine Reason exists throughout the entire Universe, everything in the Universe has some concentration of Divine Reason in it and, therefore, depending on that thing’s ability to do so, is capable of fully realizing and embodying its share of Divine Reason and, thus, align itself with the whole of the cosmos — with God.

“Aligning” with the Stoic God

If you’ve made it this far, be glad you did because this bit is the deepest root of Stoic ethical theory. To misunderstand this bit is to be doomed to misunderstand all of Stoicism.

The concentration of Logos in a thing (be that thing a mineral, plant, animal, or something else), is determined by the state of tension, in that thing, between the Pneuma and, well, the Pneuma. Rather than attempt to explain (because I would fail miserably) how the Pneuma can create tension all on its own, I’ll try an analogy.

Since the Pneuma is “the Divine Breath”, we might think of this tension (which the Greeks called “tonos”) as “held breath” or, better yet, “contained breath” — I’m not saying the ancient Stoics thought of it this way, but describing it this way might be useful (to me) in explaining it.

Let’s imagine the physical object in question is a turtle 🐢 

Turtles have a certain capacity for containing pneuma. Since the Divine Breath (the Breath of God, we could call it) necessarily contains Divine Reason, this “Contained Pneuma” is, itself, a container for a certain amount of Reason.

This isn’t a great analogy because it’s not the volume of the contained Pneuma that defines the amount of Logos in it, but I think it’s good enough for my purposes in this edition.

Humans are not turtles, so our capacity for containing Pneuma, naturally, would be different — and it would seem, we humans, have a uniquely high capacity for containing Pneuma and, thus, in this analogy anyway, Divine Reason.

Stoicism is a philosophy for humans, as far as the Stoics were concerned, not just because humans are the only animals on Earth capable of understanding Stoic philosophy but also because human beings are the only animals on Earth in need of Stoic philosophy.

But why?

Because every other thing in the Universe, as far as the Stoics reason, whether those things are eagles, salmons, holiday fruit cakes, celestial bodies, or Zeno’s pet ferret (which is not canon, I’m only making a joke… and, of course, desperately wishing Zeno really did have a pet ferret), everything aligns with Nature (capital “N”) without choosing to do so.

Humans, on the other hand, having so much contained Pneuma and leverageable Logos, have the (seemingly) unique ability to choose to act out of alignment with Divine Reason.

This, for Stoics, is a serious problem.

To have the ability to ignore the share of Divine Reason apportioned to us, and to choose to act out of alignment with Nature as a result, is to become something like an abscess on the body of God — a wrench in the works, a fly in the ointment, a pen in the washing machine! To be out of alignment with the inherent logic of the universe is to doom oneself to a life of suffering.

If only there was a philosophy aimed at helping people understand just how big a problem this is, and which encouraged its students set out on the life-long process of, first, figuring out what it looks like to be a human living in alignment with Nature (God), and then, to start attempting to live that way.

This is why the Stoic God is “required reading” for anyone looking to understand Stoic Ethics: the Stoic God was, in the formation and ongoing development of Stoicism, the sole justification for all Stoic ethical positions. It is the presupposition that enables every conclusion reached by the Ethics branch of the philosophy.

So why isn’t the Stoic God aware of itself?

I promised an explanation, here it is :

Natural Selection, and so also the theory of Evolution, (oh boy, where am I going with this?) is often misunderstood. I’ll try to outline what I mean:

Imagine a dung beetle gives birth to two baby dung beetles. One of those babies has an extra leg. This extra leg is due to a mutation, something entirely unexpected and, for all intents and purposes, random.

If that extra leg provides a survival advantage, which it absolutely is not guaranteed to do, then chances are high that our extra-legged dung beetle will reproduce. When it reproduces, it will pass its genetic mutation on to its off-spring. Not every one of its children will present with the same extra leg, but some will — and every single one will carry the mutation, whether it presents or not.

As more and more generations go by, and the number of extra-legged dung beetles increases, slowly the extra-legged dung beetles begin to outnumber the normatively-legged ones. A little bit more time and there’s only the extra-legged ones. The mutation is no longer a mutation, it’s the normative body of all dung beetles.

Millions of years later, when we observe how this random extra leg is the only thing that makes rolling dung balls away fast enough to avoid being eaten by predators possible for the dung beetle, we either think:

A. That the dung beetle responded to its environment and somehow willed its way to growing an extra leg or

B. That God designed the dung beetle with an extra leg so it could be perfectly fit for its environment.

But neither of these things are true.

Animals do not grow long necks, in the case of Giraffes, for example, to reach tall trees. Instead, animals with long necks can reach the fruit of tall trees and, therefore, have a survival advantage over those animals who do not have long necks or who cannot reach the fruit of tall trees.

Giraffes exist today not because they chose to grow long necks, but because their having long necks enabled them to eat otherwise unreachable food resources during difficult times — which enabled them to survive for the, roughly, 800,000 years they existed before anatomically modern humans showed up and, undoubtedly, upon seeing them, said, “wow, imagine an animal designed just to eat fruits from tall trees.”

The Stoic God, that is to say The Universe, is the same as the giraffe.

The Stoic God does did not give rise to logic and reason by design or choice.

Logic and Reason are simply the result of the anomaly which created the Universe. They aren’t here by design, but they are here.

The Stoic God, then, isn’t a being that can be aware of itself. Instead, it is a system that we benefit by being part of — the God is just the name we’ve given to that system, because, if anything could fairly be thought of as “God”, it is the system that enables our existence.

These are, very much, my words. While I’m confident the Ancient Stoics didn’t view their “God” as a being, I’m equally confident that they probably didn’t have this specific understanding of it.

Ancient Stoicism was founded in 300BCE, and we cannot expect that any man or woman, no matter how incredibly intelligent, insightful, or wise they were, to have had access to the scientific knowledge required to “figure out” the nature of existence (we do not even possess it today, over 2,000 years later).

Lack of this knowledge would require either (A) a lot of blatantly incorrect assumptions or (B) a lot of "this stands to reason, so while we can’t prove it impericaly, it is sound logically, so let us believe it until someone can argue differently and force us to change our arguments” type of conclusions.

I very much believe that, had the Stoic school remained “in session” from its founding to now (instead of being, basically, dead from 200AD to ~1970AD, that the leaders of that school would have arrived at an understanding of the Stoic God very much in line with the one I’ve shared in this section.

To sum up

The Stoic God isn’t something one worships, or pays homage to — nor is it a self-aware entity that has plan it designed with the future of everything in mind.

Instead, the Stoic God is the name we give to the system that enables our existence. That system is stable, has a set of rules and conditions that we (as a result of being their beneficiaries) can easily understand as logical and that some will choose to understand as an intentionally designed Giraffe instead of as an anomaly that just as easily could have never happened.

It’s not important that you believe in the Stoic God, but it is important that you understand it supports the ethics of their philosophy and is the reason Virtue is the only good.

Thanks for reading.

Life can get hectic, fast, often, and out of nowhere. It is during such times that our commitment to whatever philosophy we subscribe, is truly tested. Do we have the courage of our convictions? Can we practice what we preach?

In this week’s edition we’re going to talk about the Stoic exercise of “taking the view from above” — also known as the Cosmic viewpoint. Before that, though, you might be interested in knowing that a new episode of the Practical Stoicism podcast is out today. If you don’t already listen, consider checking it out. It is unique content, not a repurposing of the content here. I feel certain you’ll like it if you give it a try.

Right. Let’s get started.

The Cosmic Viewpoint

Imagine you’re married. Imagine, further, that your spouse has just asked for a divorce. Finally, imagine you have two younger children who are going to be caught up in all that this divorce will entail.

In addition to these slices of life-altering life, you’re performance at work has been underwhelming lately (or so your boss tells you) and you’re nervous about the future of your career, and, just to make it extra stressful, tonight, mere hours after learning that your marriage will be ending, all the in-laws are coming over for Christmas dinner.

Oh, didn’t I say? All this is happening on Christmas Day.

I think even the “sage-iest” of sages would pop like the mango pearls in their bubble tea under such mounting and serious pressure.

You’ve perhaps heard that a “Stoic” way to respond to such stress is to adopt the so-called “cosmic viewpoint.”

The idea being that some relief can be found by remembering that, in the grandest of grand schemes, the goings on in our lives don’t amount to much more than, to quote my father, “a fart in a windstorm”.

Wonderfully down-to-earth fellow, my father.

This is him, by the way ⬇️

He’s not mad, this is just how he poses when I tell him I’m going to take his photo. I think we all hope we can hold our middle fingers up with this kind of disinterested bravado when we’re 80 🙄

But maybe the Cosmic Viewpoint isn’t what we think it is

I don’t know that the point of Marcus’s words here were to encourage us (or himself — remember, Meditations was a journal) to reduce the mattering or importance of our struggles to laughable unimportant nonsense. It doesn’t seem like a particularly Stoic thing to do (with the circles of concern in mind) to attempt to reduce the mattering of something in this way.

I think, rather, that the Cosmic Viewpoint is meant to encourage us to see our struggles as part of the rational execution of time — rational as it is arising within a rational, Logos-centric, Cosmos.

Not because it is “god’s plan”, that’s not what I’m suggesting, but because, given the Stoic’s ideas of fate of determinism, anything which happens happens because it must (not for a reason, but because it could have happened no other way given the conditions leading up to it).

So we’re adopting the Cosmic viewpoint to remember that this, whatever this is, is a part of something intrinsically rational.

This, no doubt, will make the Cosmic viewpoint far less palatable to some of us — and for at least one obvious reason:

How could [these terrible things that are happening to us] be rational or logical?

Anyone who has ever criticized Abraham’s Yahweh will hear, in any such suggestion, a strong echo of the Christian advice that we see everything as part of god’s graceful plan — that we should place our trust in him because he always has our best interests in mind.

This is, of course, something that all of us, atheist, theist, or otherwise, can confidently agree is a pretty difficult thing to hear when we are (or someone we care for and love is) suffering.

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Our proximity to a struggle isn’t the measure of its mattering (to us, or anyone else)

In the Circles of Concern, the self/mind is more distal to friends than it is to family, but does that reduction in proximity have any influence on the degree to which the suffering of a friend matters?

No.

What it does have influence over (or, rather, what it reminds us we have to figure out) is how we ought to go about expressing that care, as concern, within the hyper-personal context of having many things to concern ourselves with and a truly limited amount of time with which to express that concern.

No matter how distal our problems are from the “Cosmos circle”, they cannot be said not to matter — so the point of the Cosmic Viewpoint cannot be to reframe our concerns as being insignificant, unimportant, or, ultimately, silly. Such advice would be useless and, in most cases, even if unintentionally so, cruel.

How to properly utilize the Cosmic Viewpoint

The Cosmic Viewpoint is a reminder of a few things:

1. That we are part of a very, very large whole

2. That our struggles, and specifically how we cope with them, must be framed with the knowledge of appropriate concern given our place within that whole

3. That our struggles (whatever they may be) have arrived as part of a sequence of events that could not have been otherwise, cannot be changed, and, since they directly involve us, present a nexus at which we must choose our way forward, and

4. That, as with everything, time will eventually rob these concerns of urgency and rob us of the opportunity to navigate them justly

I believe that this is the proper use of the Cosmic Viewpoint and that, having utilized it in this way, one returns to one’s struggles not with some vague new feeling of not caring as much (in the style of Ron Livingston’s character in Office Space), but, instead, with a refreshed motivation and vigor to navigate their struggles justly and appropriately.

Like Peter Gibbons, but completely different.

Thanks for reading, enjoy the rest of your week, and I’ll see you next time.

-Tanner

One of the great joys of becoming a more-in-earnest practitioner of Stoicism, has been what it has done to my politics.

Hold on there, Prokoptôn! Don’t assent unjustly! 

I’m not going to espouse any personal political views.

This is going to be a nice, calm, relatively brief reflection on the impact adopting a lifestyle in-alignment with the philosophy of Stoicism has had on me.

Adopting Stoicism as a life philosophy has resulted in both more political frustration and compassion across the entirety of the political spectrum. I suspect many of you will find resonance with the thoughts that follow. Or, at least, I hope you do.

Let’s start with frustration

I find myself regularly frustrated with the ideas of political parties which are not my own.

I find myself equally frustrated with the ideas of the political party which is my own.

It is the word “equally” that I want to draw your attention to, because it didn’t used to be the case.

It used to be the case that I was jubilantly giddy over every idea and position represented by my party, and abrasively chidding toward every idea and position represented by those parties that were not my own.

Now, a few years into having fully adopted the philosophy of Stoicism as something that borders on a spiritual practice (which, while absolutely not a religion, Stoicism can come very near to when internalised as a blueprint for living), I find myself recoiling from most every idea and position represented or put forth by any political party including my own. And, it would seem, I experience this feeling in equal measure toward the general goings on of each and every party.

And the compassion?

My frustration manifests differently, now, than it did before.

Before Stoicism, my frustration felt very much like anger, rage, or self-righteous indignation.

Now, though, it feels something more like sympathy and confusion.

It used to be the case that when political candidate X, from party Y, said Z (where Z represents an ignorant, cruel, or incompetent thing), I would take to the streets (figuratively) to rant and rave about it.

Or maybe I’d put hours of week into writing some scathing, entirely un-asked-for opinion piece for my own blog or some small political publication that needed more content of a certain kind in order to improve their domain authority or Google rankings.

But now, I take such things in stride. Turning them over in my head and thinking, “I suppose I could see why they think that.” or “Maybe if my experiences were different, I would think the same thing” or “That’s objectively incorrect, and is clearly being used to manipulate people… but is the problem really the idea, or is it that no one is offering a compassionate counter argument that that addresses the concerns that enable such lies to be adopted with no resistance?

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What do I think is behind these shifts in regard?

Once I accepted that a person only chooses what they’ve reasoned to be right (even when/if their reasoning was poor), it became difficult to regard those individuals as being guilty of anything uniquely heinous.

If it is true, as Socrates and, of course, the Stoics believed, that human beings only choose to do what they believe to be right, then all that every crooked politician, vexing fellow citizen, abrasive celebrity or online personality, or drama-inducing family member is actually guilty of is… ignorance of moral wisdom.

To put it Stoic terms, the absence of Virtue.

But, none of us are sages. So, doesn’t this apply to everyone?

This is a powerful retardant to our moral grandstanding that Stoicism promises to provide every practitioner of Stoicism with eventually — a perspective-shifting epiphany, really.

We’re all suffering from the same ailment, (even if to varying degrees of severity in terms of dispreferred impact): ignorance of how to be morally just in all our choices.

When the politician we love to hate (whoever that is for each of us) says the thing we love to hate most (whatever that is for each of us), what they are expressing is the result of what they’ve come to believe is the right thing for them to choose to say. And, this is the important part: it exposes what end results they have reasoned to be right to endeavour towards.

If a politician has chosen to lie, they fully understand that lying is “wrong”, in the sense that people aren’t supposed to lie, but they’ve also fully concluded that to lie in this particular instance is the “right” thing to do because it will lead to the outcome that they have further reasoned to be “right” to pursue.

Perhaps that outcome is something we might, privately, feel is an honorable one to pursue (like a peace treaty for some long-drawn-out conflict somewhere in the world or at home), but it could just as easily be something we’d feel less warm and fuzzy about — like personal enrichment (such as bribery money or other stereotypical forms of corruption). No matter the outcome, the choice is always driven by what the individual has come to understand to be “right”, contextually, for them.

In the case of political leaders and individuals in power, this is difficult to make peace with (mostly because their choices have such broad and far-reaching impact), but for individuals (like our neighbors, family members, and would-be friends), this train of thought ought to find us asking, “why am I treating a person as prone to moral error as I am, as if they were this intentionally cruel entity that knew exactly that they were being evil and cruel?”

And once I found myself asking that question, I started to wonder what the way forward really was (from a political and social perspective).

The answer wasn’t anger. Instead, it was something more like… compassion — and a feeling of responsibility to work with others to get to the bottom of what was closer to “right” than either of us had been able to get to on our own.

Thanks for reading.

Many who come to Stoicism expect that it’s something like the philosophical equivalent of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude — a place (and way) to be alright on your own, unaffected by anyone and everyone else, and to become silently disciplined.

None of that is true.

Stoicism will, however, produce in you, once you’ve practiced it long enough, the ability to continue to pursue Virtue despite loneliness, despite the behaviour of others, despite all of the goings on in your life, and despite anything that is external to your own mind.

But there’s a considerable difference between the ability to endure loneliness while continuing to pursue Virtue, and the incorrect belief that one should pursue solitude as a means of attaining Virtue.

It’s difficult to word this, and no doubt I will fail to say it eloquently, but society is to Stoicism what a conduit is to electrical current. Without a conduit, electricity can’t get anywhere — and without society, Stoicism can’t be practiced.

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A quick thought experiment

Imagine you’re driving down the road. It’s raining out, and it seems a big storm is brewing. As you go along, you notice someone sitting in a car off to the side of the road with their hazard lights on. They seem to have broken down. You get the impression the driver is a parent or caregiver as you can see a couple of kids in the backseat. You also notice the tires of their vehicle don’t look flat. You think, maybe, that the battery could be dead. You assent to the impression that this could be the case, and you remember that you have jumper cables in your truck.

What does Stoicism require of us in such a scenario?

The answer is, as always, it depends on the context of our life as an individual.

However, part of the answer will always be: engage your rational faculty to determine an appropriate choice re: your evolvement.

Anytime we encounter something where we have the ability to choose whether or not we want to get involved, we Stoics must reason through to the choice we make.

It’s not required that we stop and offer the stranded individual a jump, but it is required that we reason through whether or not we should in a way which is reflective of an individual seriously pursuing Virtue.

Extend this requirement to anything and everything which prompts us to choose a position, an action, a thought, or even our words, and we’ll realize that Stoicism is as much a philosophy of social involvement and engagement as it as one of pursuing knowledge.

Anyone pursuing Virtue must always be determining the right way to choose, and anyone who has attained Virtue is always choose rightly.

Not getting involved can sometimes be the right choice, but it’s extremely unlikely that it will always be the right choice. You may not choose to stop and help the family stranded on the side of the road, but you’d need to provide just reasoning for why you made that choice.

This next part is going to seem exhausting, but no one said Stoicism was easy.

We’ve just learned that Stoicism requires us to, in our attempt to always choose rightly, always think about how to choose every time we choose anything. If that’s true, nothing which ever crosses our radar can be ignored.

If we hear about it, we must analyze it, and choose how to think, feel about, and regard it — and, sometimes, what to do about it.

If a homeless guy on the street asks us for change, we cannot say “his well-being is an indifferent to me, I can ignore him.” Instead, we must ask whether giving him change is morally appropriate.

Perhaps we have only $5000 to our name. Perhaps our mortgage payment is due tomorrow, our kids need money for new textbooks next week, our partner is using some of that money to go to physical therapy on Friday, and we’ve got to pay off the credit card debt we racked up last month for an expensive and unexpected car repair. Maybe there’s just too little left to justify charity in this specific moment given all our specific context and role-related duties.

Or maybe we’ve seen this homeless guy getting drunk and harrassing people in the evening on many previous nights, and we suspect that if we give him money he’s going to choose to use it to similar ends.

Or maybe we’ve got a spare $100 that isn’t spoken for and that we were going to use to take our wife and kid to the movies tonight. Maybe there’s a few dollars in there to give to someone who is down on their luck, or maybe we can pop into a store real quick and buy them a sandwich.

It’s not about the choices we ultimately make. Instead, it’s about how we reason ourselves to making them.

Any choice we make without reasoning, or that we make carelessly, is antithetical to a Stoic’s ultimate aim.

So, if we see it, hear about it, or become otherwise aware of it, we have to reason through it.

Using the poll below, I’d like you to respond to the following question:

When did you recently succeed in working through an choice you felt was approaching Virtue?

And also, when did you recently fail at doing the same?

Just vote how you felt about this edition, and then use the additional thoughts box (after you click) to add your answers.

Thanks for reading.