Stoicism of the Self-help Shelf
Some years ago I was involved in a very serious Facebook thread discussing Zen Buddhism and meditation.
I made the point that meditation and mindfulness training are used by Westerners they way we use painkillers from the medicine cabinet. Nothing really changes in the life of the California Buddhist or Yogi as they rip the practice from its original context and put to work as a tool. They all participate in the same purposeless comfort-seeking struggle-game as everyone else.
I was soon set upon by a Rachel Maddow look-alike:
"Mindfulness makes people happy. You’re being a judgmental a-hole."
"It makes me happy to be mean to people in Facebook threads," I replied. "You don't seem okay with that happiness."
There lies the problem with all these preachers of happiness and comfort. If your highest standard is whatever makes people happy, you have to accept that mean people and serial killers find satisfaction in their trades.
That inconsistency is the real problem I was trying to point out with my a-hole ways.
Ripping ideas and practices out of their context is a risky move. A Zen Buddhist monk does not meditate to “feel good”. If you frame his practice as if he did — read any best-selling airport book that mentions “neuroscience” for examples — you’ve failed to understand what gives meaning to the practice for him.
And not only do you fail to understand. When you copy-cat what you think he’s doing, meditating for bliss, you’re playing Cargo Cult games for your own purposes.
Maybe that's what you want. But maybe you're missing something.
It isn’t only exotic Asian ideas like Buddhism that suffer. We Westerners do it with wisdom from our own heritage, too.
Consider the recent popularity of Stoicism on the self-help shelf. There’s a lot to like in Stoicism, like most all ancient writers. If you’re limiting your horizons to the modern popularizers, you might not realize what you’re getting into.
Nobody today can really be a Stoic. Read on and find out why.
In our always-on hyper-connected hyper-ironic culture, we’re well insulated from the lives and worldviews of our ancestors.
Even times as recent as the 1980s and 90s are strange and weird to Zoomers. Realize that this generational gap is chump-change next to the difference of outlook between anyone who has lived since the late 19th century in northern Europe and America, and the vast sweep of human history.
The peoples of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds saw themselves in terms that are frankly strange to our moderns sensibilities.
Although the Stoics differed from their rivals among the Aristotelian, Platonist, Cynic, Skeptic, and Epicurean schools, in the basics they are closer to each other than we are to any of them.
It’s not always easy to see this if you’re a dabbler. For starters, realize that none of the ancient texts was written in English. Shocking? Maybe, maybe not. Translating one language into another isn’t so simple as mapping one word to another. That assumes that we share a common field of concepts. For a large number of terms, this is true — English inherits a good many words from other languages.
But then you get the head-scratchers. What about terms that have no precise equivalent? That’s the problem we face when reading any pre-modern writer in a modern language. We’re not only bringing in a set of new words. We have to imagine ourselves stepping into a whole new fabric of life with its own texture.
The history of our words is an essential ingredient in their meaning.
For a concrete example, take the term “rationality”.
Although the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers are well-known for their interest in rationality, our word isn’t quite their word(s).
The English “rational” comes to us through old French and Anglo roots, which borrowed the Latin rationalis. The Roman word suggests accounting (as in the accountant who does your taxes), the proportion between numbers (from which we get ratio), and more familiar associations with theories, arguments, and thinking.
The Romans got their word from the older Greek λογοσ (logos). Logos also resonates with mathematical proportions and theoretical understanding. But it also has a sense connected with "word", as in speech, as well as "reasoned account", as one would give a definition or explanation using abstract thinking.
It isn’t by coincidence that λογοσ is the root term concerning both words/speech (as in “logophilia”) and logic (λογικός).
The point you’ll want to remember is that logos came in two flavors.
The word means, first, a power possessed by a creature, as in the human faculty of reason, captured in Aristotle’s well-known saying that “man is the animal possessing reason”.1
This is the sense of rationality most familiar today. To be rational is to demonstrate correctness of step-by-step procedures of reasoning. This is the ancestor of the computer and the algorithm, what Thomas Hobbes meant in the Leviathan when he identified thinking with reckoning.
But the logos also refers, second, to a cosmic order of meanings, a metaphysical principle of which visible nature is the expression. In the world of the Stoics, events were not the product of blind forces and atoms obeying pitiless laws. They were also symbols manifesting true purpose.
That’s what it meant to live according to reason, which, for human beings, is to live in accord with nature.
But from the renaissance on through the scientific revolution, the trend in modern thought is to dissolve such “primitive” understandings of human existence and the natural order.
The great leaps of modern science explain the physical universe without the hand of the Creator. Cosmologists today believe they can explain how the universe came into existence in strictly physical terms. All cause and effect.
As the mind split into the inner workings of ideas and the outer reality of things, so went reason.
Reason is not out there. Reason is something that our minds do.
That difference ought to have you perked up, reader.
None of these details make it into today's self-help Stoicism. The coherent world-picture and attitude of the ancient Stoic warps into platitudes that fit in an Instagram quote.
Stoicism has become a thin coat of philosophical deep-thinking painted over vulgar psychology.
Which leads to a question.
If you build your world-view around living according to reason, what is left when your concept of reason is sent through the meat-grinder?
If I say to you, “rationality is the highest and greatest virtue in life”, what do you make of that? What’s your practical take-away?
There’s a better than even chance that the modern reader’s attention will leap to abstract reasoning.
This book says to be rational. Rationality means using probability to adjust my beliefs according to evidence.
Today we associate reason and rationality with formal and technical methods. In the mouth of any Very Smart Boy, the word “rational” is synonymous with probability, statistics, and mathematical formulas.
Rationality is a psychological and subjective matter that concerns thinking about our beliefs. This isn’t a bad thing all by itself, though I do think that certain groups give this more importance than it deserves.
But the original Stoics were not saying that virtue and happiness are won through superior abstract thinking.
What’s the value of rationality when the logos turns into mere thinking?
Today’s Stoics ask us to embrace the virtues of rationality. Yet they are thoroughly modern, rejecting the meaning-filled vision of cosmic order for the nihilistic cosmology of science.
What’s so important about rationality?
Does that seem like a silly question?
If rationality is strictly about logical and mathematical puzzles, then it doesn’t concern what we care about.
That’s the punchline of modern theories of reason.
Reason can’t tell us what is worth caring about.
In the ancient world, reason was accordance with cosmic order. To live by reason is to live with a sense of what is good in a life. Some purposes are more worthy, more desirable, than others.
Today, reason is problem-solving. It can show you the way to your goals, but it can’t tell you what those goals ought to be.
Reason and goodness no longer co-exist.
Aristotle understood the difference between mere cleverness and genuine practical wisdom. The clever person uses intelligence to get whatever he wants. But only the wise knows what is worth wanting.
Our notions of reason, rationality, and intelligence deal with mere cleverness.
What is worth wanting, worth caring about, what is truly worthy in itself — not on the agenda.
Why does this matter if Stoicism is a helpful system?
The ancient Stoics believed in an order that blessed their reason with a higher purpose. The roads once led somewhere.
Today, every road leads off to the same infinite no-where. Any direction is as good as any other, every journey as pointless as another. Obey your reason and get there as fast as you want — there’s nothing but more nothing. Modern Stoicism might be a kind of comfort, a psychological coping strategy, but a life-doctrine it ain’t.
What do you mean by helpful?
Helpful toward what end?
For what purpose?
According to whom?
I opened this piece with an anecdote about the emptiness of the subjectivism which rules today. The highest value is “don’t judge”. But this is empty noise. Refusing to take a stand is taking a stand.
Today’s self-help Stoics happily borrow the psychological “life hacks” from ancient thinkers, but the throw out the attitude and image of the world that give them meaning.
It was one thing for Zeno of Citium to see the worth in enduring what comes with dispassionate calm when he could sincerely believe that his reason gave it meaning. To endure with indifference is to live as a man should, in accord with his nature. There is no higher reward, no higher happiness, than to live a life of virtue. All the pieces fit together—there is a puzzle for them to fit in.
Using Stoic ideals as “life hacks” to more efficiently live the lifestyle of a secular Western consumer, to facilitate “hustle and grind” and the pointless acquisition of status symbols, to “feel better” as you sit through the endless traffic of your daily commute to a job you hate, misses the point.
The lesson of Stoicism is not found inside your existing world-view.
Its value is found in transforming how you see your life and what is worthy in it.
We’ve circled around two different questions in this article.
Does modern Stoicism show us an authentic Stoicism? Are we seeing it for what it is, or are they turning a rich metaphysical and cosmological vision into rote psychology?
Does authentic Stoicism matter? Is that philosophy desirable for us?
I haven’t said much about the second thing so far, though I do have questions.
If the dispassionate calm of apatheia is the good end of a human life, achieved through virtue, then what makes it so? Why is this worth wanting?
We’ve covered one powerful reason why Stoicism isn’t entirely possible for us secular moderns. But forget about the etymology lesson for a minute. The real clincher against Stoicism as I see it is this pleasing hit of venom from Nietzsche:
What of it—embracing a statue in winter when one has become dull against the cold? What of it, if a statue embraces a statue!
Passion and pain have their own worth, though the Stoic denies them any positive value.
It’s difficult to agree with them. No doubt some feelings are distractions. Uncontrolled anger and crippling anxiety aren’t virtues for anyone. But I have reservations about the uncaring, indifferent life of apatheia. People and things matter to me, some more than others. I’ve enjoyed lifting weights my whole adult life, an activity hardly described as “absence of suffering”.2 I have attachments and emotions, and I would not be myself if I didn’t.
I hesitate to label my ego as my enemy. No doubt the greedy, vain narcissist inside each of us needs regular discipline. But the inner world is a rich and vast landscape, and like Western readings of Zen Buddhism, it’s too easy to take Stoic renunciation as a call to deny the self. There’s value in stepping away from conscious personality for moments here and there, but to seek total abandonment is a serious mistake.
Dispassionate living in indifference to the wax and wane of Fortune is a solid life-strategy when you live in times of uncertainty and upheaval. Life in late antiquity under the decadence of Imperial Rome certainly qualified. And I would be hardly the first to draw a parallel with the decadence of our own imperial order. Regardless of “what the data says”, it sure does seem like things are in a state of perpetual crisis. Little wonder that so many would find value in a doctrine of renunciation and self-sufficiency.
I sure won’t argue with anyone who responds this way. And I’ll even agree that the untroubled calmness of ataraxia is a healthy state of mind worth seeking, certainly compared to the neurotic state that many now live with.
But Aristotle, as in so many things, rings more true when he tells us that virtue, while necessary for a good life, is not sufficient. External goods, such as our health, are parts of flourishing. Virtue is not enough to thrive, and so our happiness is always subject to chance and fate.
Turning the wisdom and insight of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius into self-help soundbites loses the point and wisdom in their words.
Modernity always does this. We forget that we were not the first or only humans to walk this earth, and most of all that our ways of thinking and feeling are not perennial views of the human condition.
To really live the lessons of the historical Stoicism means giving up that Rat Race lifestyle of working to acquire more money, wealth, fame, status, prestige, whatever.
But the self-help world takes that as the default setting. As self-help its purpose is to help you more efficiently pursue the ends of money and fame already set for you since Day 0. You aren’t to think too hard about whether these are goals worth wanting.
This involves us in a dispute which won’t be solved with the “facts and logic” of cold reason. It is a dispute over what it means to live the good human life. Psychology and subjective rationality can’t talk in those terms.
Historical Stoicism meant to knock you off your square and make you rethink the entire point and purpose of your being. Marcus Aurelius didn't drop all of those quotable quotes to make you more efficient at being a corporate drone, help you pull babes, or scale your SaaS to $100MM in ARR.
There is invaluable wisdom and insight contained in the works of the ancient Stoic authors.
I have my disagreements with Stoic doctrine, but like all of the classical schools, it invites us to question whether our ways of living and our assumed goals are really what we want, really worth seeking.
Granting that, Stoicism is an untenable world-view for most of us today. For similar reasons, Stoicism is not a practical way of life for most of us today. Living by what is left of rationality, the subjectivized nub of mere reckoning, is infeasible and unlikely for real humans. Dispassionate virtue is not the sole good thing in a human life, even if we could square it with nature (an idea which has become as warped as reason).
The most important lessons from the Stoics aren’t so much what they say, but in the world-view that they articulate. That’s 180 degrees opposite from what the self-help gurus take away.
Thanks for reading.
-Matt
P.S. Don’t forget to share.
The original Greek is zoion logon ekhon, literally “animal having logos”. Aristotle’s meaning has to do as much with having a language, including all of the understanding that involves, as being able to think clearly according to abstract laws of thought.
It’s too easy to reply, “but you find pleasure in the discomfort”. Another Stoic reply is “you endure the pain of lifting so that you can enjoy a healthy, pain-free life later”. True enough. The point here is that the passion and the pain of exercise are valuable in themselves, not only for the benefits that they bring about.