Response to "Stoicism is Not Enough"

This post is a response to the piece "Stoicism is Not Enough.” The author presents a common enough point of view that I think the response is of general interest.

My understanding of Stoicism is significantly different from the one described. In particular, it seems to me that he selected a few aspects of it while ignoring several others that fundamentally alter the overall effect, even of those aspects he focuses on. The sources he seems to be reacting to, Stoicism as described by "Silicon Valley types," sometimes do much the same thing (but for different reasons), but this is not an accurate depiction of Stoic thought.

Late Stoics divided Stoicism into three "topics" or "disciplines": desire (sometimes "desire and aversion"), action, and assent. These correspond to the early and middle Stoic cardinal virtues of courage and temperance, justice, and wisdom. (The "cardinal virtues" are not original to Stoics, but were embraced by them.) This distortion of the philosophy arises when people focus all of their attention on the discipline of desire, while ignoring both that of action and that of assent, corresponding to focusing of becoming courageous and temperate (self-disciplined) while remaining foolish and unjust. The Stoics would have rejected this as even achieving courage or temperance: the Stoics and others in the Socratic tradition put it, fearlessness without justice is not courage, but only audacity.

If a reader is only looking at Epictetus, and only causally, this misunderstanding is understandable, because Epictetus puts a lot of emphasis on the discipline of assent. He explains why: in his opinion, his students are generally so overtaken with fear and so unable to control their immediate desires that training in justice is often futile.

From the essay:

It [building a better world] demands cooperation with others, which demands cultivating much more than just willpower. Great empires, communities, and societies are not solo undertakings, they cannot be achieved by inner work.

...

Too strong a stoicism, like any individualist philosophy, scales poorly.

Stoicism, properly understood, is not an individualist philosophy. While "inner work" is a strong focus of Stoicism, the point of this inner work is to become virtuous, and is a prerequisite to effective cooperation. Again and again, Marcus Aurelius emphasizes that we are "social animals", that "we are made by nature for mutual assistance, like the feet, the hands, the eyelids, the upper and lower rows of teeth" (2.1), that we are emanations of the universe as a whole (2.3,4), that we are like branches of a tree (9.8):

A branch cut off from its adjacent branch must necessarily be severed from the whole tree. Even so a man, parted from any fellow-man, has fallen away from the whole social community. Now a branch is cut off by some external agency; but a man by his own action separates himself from his neighbor—by hatred and aversion, unaware that he has thus torn himself away from the universal polity. Yet there is always given us the good gift of Zeus, who founded the great community, whereby it is in our power to be reingrafted on our kind, and to become once more, natural parts completing the whole.

An essential element of Stoic psychological theory was οἰκείωσις (oikeiosis), the idea that as a person matures, the sense of self extends not just to their own persons, but their families, communities, counties, and ultimately the community of all rational beings. This isn't some kind of add-on to Stoic ethics, but an essential element of it. They repeatedly identified virtue with acting according to nature, and the word for "nature" did not correspond to the English word well, but rather was a form of the Greek word for growth -- it referred to healthy maturation. So, the theory of how a person matures ideally is really essential to ethics.

From the essay:

So I disagree with Marcus (“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it”). I think earnest distress is often worthwhile — shrugging off the misfortunes of the world, in aggregate, ensures a poorer world.

It is only by "shrugging off" one's potential personal misfortunes that it becomes possible to take the personal risks needed to make the world a better place, and sometimes even basic functions in society. For example, in Epictetus's Discourses 1.11, he criticizes the man not because he had affection for his daughter, but because he was so attached to his daughter that he couldn't stand to be at her sick bed, and left her to go distract himself! In general, though, Epictetus is more focused on more grandiose threats, for example acting justly in the face of threats of execution. The reason why indifference to externals is important to Stoics is not comfort, or even resilience for its own sake, but rather to enable a person to be just (which is not an external, but something truly good).

The central element of Stoic ethics is that virtue is the only good. There are two different Greek words translated into English as "virtue:” ἀρετή (literally excellence, in context excellence of character) and τὸ καλόν (literally "the beautiful," in context referring to moral beauty). The Stoics asserted that the two amounted to the same thing. In stories of people they presented as role-models, it was always people acting according to their conscience, with indifference to the consequences to their own selves.

I find another issue broadly across much of stoicism: it is a strictly defensive philosophy.

I think it is, if anything, the opposite of defensive. The whole point of learning to be indifferent to externals is so we can act heroically in the service of humanity without being hindered by defensiveness (of our comfort, health, reputation, etc).

If you are not open to pondering the moods of the world, or of the seasons of your own life, because you are intent on letting nothing affect you, I think you are closing off much of what can be found to inspire wonder, or what is to be sacred in the world. This is not an easy argument to make to a stoic, because if they do not believe it, it cannot be seen, but from the outside that’s the very problem. Such a philosophy prevents wonder.

Not only does Stoicism not prevent such wonder, it is founded on it. Although the picture of what "God" is is rather different than that of most modern religions, much Stoic writing is deeply religious, and a lot of the focus is on attitude (religious reverence) rather than details of theology. From, for example, Seneca's Letter 41:

If ever you have come upon a grove that is full of ancient trees which have grown to an unusual height, shutting out a view of the sky by a veil of pleached and intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, and your marvel at the thick unbroken shade in the midst of the open spaces, will prove to you the presence of deity. Or if a cave, made by the deep crumbling of the rocks, holds up a mountain on its arch, a place not built with hands but hollowed out into such spaciousness by natural causes, your soul will be deeply moved by a certain intimation of the existence of God. We worship the sources of mighty rivers; we erect altars at places where great streams burst suddenly from hidden sources; we adore springs of hot water as divine, and consecrate certain pools because of their dark waters or their immeasurable depth. 4. If you see a man who is unterrified in the midst of dangers, untouched by desires, happy in adversity, peaceful amid the storm, who looks down upon men from a higher plane, and views the gods on a footing of equality, will not a feeling of reverence for him steal over you? Will you not say: "This quality is too great and too lofty to be regarded as resembling this petty body in which it dwells? A divine power has descended upon that man." 5. When a soul rises superior to other souls, when it is under control, when it passes through every experience as if it were of small account, when it smiles at our fears and at our prayers, it is stirred by a force from heaven. A thing like this cannot stand upright unless it be propped by the divine. Therefore, a greater part of it abides in that place from whence it came down to earth. Just as the rays of the sun do indeed touch the earth, but still abide at the source from which they are sent; even so the great and hallowed soul, which has come down in order that we may have a nearer knowledge of divinity, does indeed associate with us, but still cleaves to its origin; on that source it depends, thither it turns its gaze and strives to go, and it concerns itself with our doings only as a being superior to ourselves.

The connection here between reverence and ethics is even closer than it might at first appear from this passage: remember that the central pillar of Stoic ethics, the virtuous, amounts to the same thing as the beautiful (κάλος). In modern conceptions of theology and ethics it seems weird to say that beauty proves the existence of God. We have all sorts of assumptions about what a God must be -- omnipotent, omniscient, the creator of the universe, etc., but if you look at different cultures, religions, and mythologies, the only thing that all deities seem to have in common is that those that believe them to be gods think that they are appropriate objects of human reverence. If you have an ethics that declares beauty to be the only good, then the overwhelming reverential beauty of nature should indeed seem like proof. It doesn't prove everything we (or even the Stoics) assumed about God -- not that God is intelligent or aware, for example -- but still a god.

A similar connection between virtue and reverence is attributed to the Stoics at greater length in Cicero's Tusculan Disputations book 5 (chapter 24 in the linked to translated, 5.68-72 in more modern editions).

From the blog post:

I think the proper response to such a world is to approach it with the cautious gratitude that gave us the gods, and other objects and forces of reverence and ritual.

The Stoics would indeed have disagreed, but in a way opposite of that the essay assumes: they thought we should approach the world with whole-hearted, incautious gratitude, admiration, reverence, and wonder.

Instead of developing nerves of steel, we will flourish more when we learn to lure back our sense of wonder in the world, our environments, and each other. But this means we must afford those things their own respect: enough to admit they are bad when they are bad, and to honor what we find beautiful. We must refuse to desecrate our world out of convenience or carelessness, and we must build better environments for each other.

The Stoics would have agreed with most but not all of it -- the sense of wonder and the beautiful is central to Stoicism, and our need to be careful about how we treat the world is essential as well. Epictetus, for example, addresses this explicitly in Discourse 2.5, which starts "Materials are indifferent, but the use which we make of them is not a matter of indifference."

The way in which they would object is that they would deny that things are ever bad. Such an attitude, they thought, is not merely foolish, but impious. This is not the same thing, however, as declining for fight for one thing rather than another. Rather, we should meet challenges the way an athlete meets an opponent -- not as something evil, but rather as a way to test their strength.

It is in this participation with the things beyond ourselves that we might learn to inhabit communities again.

The Stoics advocacy of participation in things beyond ourselves -- of full participation in our communities -- was one of the major disagreements between the Stoics and the Epicureans, who advocated withdrawing from society.

Again and again, Marcus Aurelius emphasizes that all our actions should be just and for social benefit (eg 8.7, 7.54, 9.4, 9.6, and many others). There are many more examples for Seneca and others in this reddit r/Stoicism FAQ question.