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| Photo from Shutterstock |
By John Sellars, The Conversation
What have the Romans ever done for us? Well, obviously the roads
– the roads go without saying. How about guidance for how to live in
the 21st century? That seems less likely, but in fact the last few years
have seen a flurry of interest in the work of three Roman Stoic
philosophers who offered just that. They were Seneca, tutor to the
Emperor Nero; Epictetus, a former slave; and Marcus Aurelius, himself
emperor.
Modern books drawing on their ideas and repackaged as guidance for how to live well today include A Guide to the Good Life by William Irvine, Stoicism and the Art of Happiness by Donald Robertson, The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, and How to Be a Stoic
by Massimo Pigliucci. What all these books share is the conviction that
people can benefit by going back and looking at the ideas of these
Roman Stoics. There’s even an annual week dedicated to Stoicism.
Stoicism holds that the key to a good, happy life is the
cultivation of an excellent mental state, which the Stoics identified
with virtue and being rational. The ideal life is one that is in harmony
with Nature, of which we are all part, and an attitude of calm
indifference towards external events. It began in Greece, and was
founded around 300BC by Zeno, who used teach at the site of the Painted
Stoa in Athens, hence the name Stoicism. The works of the early Stoics
are for the most part lost, so it is the Roman Stoics who have been most
influential over the centuries, and continue to be today.
Control How You Think
So, what were the ideas? Two foundational principles can both be found in the Handbook, a short work summarising the ideas
of Epictetus. The first is that some things are within our control and
some are not, and that much of our unhappiness is caused by thinking
that we can control things that, in fact, we can’t.
What can we control? Epictetus argues that we actually control
very little. We don’t control what happens to us, we can’t control what
the people around us say or do, and we can’t even fully control our own
bodies, which get damaged and sick and ultimately die without regard for
our preferences. The only thing that we really control is how we think
about things, the judgements we make about things.
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| You control how you react. Photo from rudall30/Shutterstock |
This leads us to the second foundational principle from
Epictetus: it’s not things that upset us, but how we think about things.
Stuff happens. We then make judgements about what happens. If we judge
that something really bad has happened, then we might get upset, sad, or
angry, depending on what it is. If we judge that something bad is
likely to happen then we might get scared or fearful. All these emotions
are the product of the judgements we make. Things in themselves are
value neutral, for what might seem terrible to us might be a matter of
indifference to someone else, or even welcomed by others. It’s the
judgements we make that introduce value into the picture, and it’s those
value judgements that generate our emotional responses.
The good Stoic news is that these value judgements are the one
thing over which we have complete control. Things happen, none of which
are inherently good or bad, and it’s within our power to decide how we
value them. The paradox of Stoicism, as Epictetus formulates it, is that
we have almost no control over anything, yet at the same time we have
potentially complete control over our happiness.
Train Your Mind
At first glance, this might seem to understate the very real
challenges that people face in their daily lives. How can just thinking
differently help someone who is struggling to put food on their table,
for instance? The Stoics didn’t shy away from this. They fully
acknowledged that life can be hard sometimes.
Seneca knew this all too well: he suffered exile, multiple
bereavements, and was ultimately forced to commit suicide by Nero. He
also knew that it was all too easy to say “I’m not going to let these
external things disturb me” but quite another to follow through and not
be disturbed oneself.
So the Stoics developed a whole series of practical exercises
designed to help train people to incorporate Stoic ideas into their
daily lives. Seneca recommended taking stock at the end of each day,
noting when you become irritated by something trivial, or act angrily in
response to someone who perhaps didn’t deserve it, and so on. By noting
his mistakes, he hoped to do better the next day.
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| Marcus Aurelius writing his Meditations. Author provided. |
Marcus Aurelius had another strategy, reminding himself each
morning that he was probably going to encounter a lot of angry,
stressed, impatient, ungrateful people during the coming day. By
reflecting on this in advance, the hope was that he would be less likely
to respond in kind. But he also reflected on the fact that none of
these people would be like this intentionally. They were the victims of
their own mistaken judgements.
Here we get another paradox: no one chooses to be unhappy,
stressed, angry, miserable, and yet these are in fact all the product of
our judgements, the one thing within our control.
Accept What Happens
Another Stoic strategy is to remind ourselves of our relative
unimportance. The world does not revolve around us. Aurelius regularly
reflected in his Meditations
on the vastness of the universe and the infinity of time stretching
into the past and future, in order to put his own short life into wider
context.
Our lives are but moments when placed within this cosmic
perspective. Given this, why should we expect the universe to deliver
whatever it is that we might happen to want? On the contrary, it would
be absurd to expect it to conform to our will.
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| Take a cosmic perspective. Photo from AstroStar/Shutterstock |
As Epictetus put it, if you expect the universe to deliver what
you want, you are going to be disappointed, but if you embrace whatever
the universe gives, then life will be a whole lot smoother. Again, this
is easier said than done, but more and more people are taking note of
this Stoic advice and working hard to incorporate it into their daily
lives.
John Sellars is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway.
