THE ANCIENT ART OF STOIC JOY
BY WILLIAM IRVINE
(Below you can find my selected takeaways (not meant to be a summary) from William Irvine’s book “A guide to the good life”. Quotes are often edited for readability when context seems required, also bolded to help give structure to the notes. Skim and stop on the bold paragraphs that catch your interest. You can get the full book here.).
The Stoics pointed to two principal sources of human unhappiness—our insatiability and our tendency to worry about things beyond our control.
When asked what he had learned from philosophy, Diogenes replied, “To be prepared for every fortune.” Whatever philosophy of life a person ends up adopting, she will probably have a better life than if she tried to live—as many people do—without a coherent philosophy of life.
He believed hunger to be the best appetizer, and because he waited until he was hungry or thirsty before he ate or drank, “he used to partake of a barley cake with greater pleasure than others did of the costliest of foods, and enjoyed a drink from a stream of running water more than others did their Thasian wine.”
Stoic ethics is concerned not with moral right and wrong but with having a “good spirit,” that is, with living a good, happy life or with what is sometimes called moral wisdom. As the philosopher Lawrence C. Becker puts it, “Its central, organizing concern is about what we ought to do or be to live well—to flourish.”
To be virtuous is to live as we were designed to live; it is to live, as Zeno put it, in accordance with nature. Virtuous individual is one who performs well the function for which humans were designed. The Stoics would add that if we do this, we will have a good life.
Stoic tranquility was a psychological state marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy. One benefit of attaining virtue is that we will thereupon experience tranquility.
Someone who is not tranquil—someone, that is, who is distracted by negative emotions such as anger or grief—might find it difficult to do what his reason tells him to do: His emotions will triumph over his intellect.
The easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have. This advice is easy to state and is doubtless true; the trick is in putting it into practice in our life. How, after all, can we convince ourselves to want the things we already have? The stoics thought they had an answer to this question. They recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value—that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would. This technique—let us refer to it as negative visualization—was employed by the Stoics at least as far back as Chrysippus. It is, I think, the single most valuable technique in the Stoics’ psychological tool kit.
When we say good-bye to a friend, we should silently remind ourselves that this might be our final parting. If we do this, we will be less likely to take our friends for granted, and as a result, we will probably derive far more pleasure from friendships than we otherwise would.
To live each day as if it were his last. Indeed, Seneca takes things even further than this: We should live as if this very moment were our last. Most of us are “living the dream”—living, that is, the dream we once had for ourselves.
Projective visualization will make us appreciate the relative insignificance of the bad things that happen to us and will therefore prevent them from disrupting our tranquility. To practice negative visualization, after all, is to contemplate the impermanence of the world around us. We must take care to be “the user, but not the slave, of the gifts of Fortune.”
You will become invincible if you refuse to enter contests that you are capable of losing.
Whenever we desire something that is not up to us, our tranquility will likely be disturbed: If we don’t get what we want, we will be upset, and if we do get what we want, we will experience anxiety in the process of getting it.
The reward for choosing our goals and values properly can be enormous. Marcus thinks the key to having a good life is to value things that are genuinely valuable and be indifferent to things that lack value. He adds that because we have it in our power to assign value to things, we have it in our power to live a good life. More generally, Marcus thinks that by forming opinions properly—by assigning things their correct value—we can avoid much suffering, grief, and anxiety and can thereby achieve the tranquility the Stoics seek.
Careful to set internal rather than external goals. The goals we consciously set for ourselves can have a dramatic impact on our subsequent emotional state. If we set playing our best in a match as our goal, we arguably don’t lessen our chances of winning the match, but we do lessen our chances of being upset by the outcome of the match. To set as our goal playing to the best of our ability has an upside—reduced emotional anguish in the future—with little or no downside.
Their goal was not to change the world, but to do their best to bring about certain changes. Even if their efforts proved to be ineffectual, they could nevertheless rest easy knowing that they had accomplished their goal: They had done what they could do. (Remember that) Marcus Aurelius, when he wasn’t philosophizing, was hard at work ruling the Roman Empire.
Concern myself with whether my wife loves me, even though this is something over which I have some but not complete control. But when I do concern myself with this, my goal should not be the external goal of making her love me; no matter how hard I try, I could fail to achieve this goal and would as a result be quite upset. Instead, my goal should be an internal goal: to behave, to the best of my ability, in a lovable manner.
My goal with respect to my boss should be to do my job to the best of my ability. These are goals I can achieve no matter how my wife and my boss subsequently react to my efforts. By internalizing his goals in daily life, the Stoic is able to preserve his tranquility while dealing with things over which he has only partial control.
We can spend our days wishing our circumstances were different, but if we allow ourselves to do this, we will spend our days in a state of dissatisfaction. Alternatively, if we can learn to want whatever it is we already have, we won’t have to work to fulfill our desires in order to gain satisfaction; they will already have been fulfilled. We must learn to adapt ourselves to the environment into which fate has placed us and do our best to love the people with whom fate has surrounded us.
Be “attentive to all the advantages that adorn life.” We might, as a result, get married and have children. We might also form and enjoy friendships. Few people, Musonius would have us believe, are happier than the person who has both a loving spouse and devoted children.
Practice poverty: besides contemplating bad things happening, we should sometimes live as if they had happened. In particular, instead of merely thinking about what it would be like to lose our wealth, we should periodically “practice poverty”. We work hard to obtain something because we are convinced that we would be miserable without it. The problem is that we can live perfectly well without some of these things, but we won’t know which they are if we don’t try living without them. We can greatly enhance our appreciation of any meal by waiting until we are hungry before we eat it and greatly enhance our appreciation of any beverage by waiting until we are thirsty before we drink. “Chastity comes with time to spare, lechery has never a moment.”
Progress as a Stoic: we will come to regard ourselves not as a friend whose every desire must be satisfied but “as an enemy lying in wait.” He takes his progress to be adequate as long as “every day I reduce the number of my vices, and blame my mistakes.” (Note: process instead of outcome orientation). At bedtime, would ask himself, “What ailment of yours have you cured today? What failing have you resisted? Where can you show improvement?”
In all I do, I must have as my goal “the service and harmony of all.” If you are going to publish, you must be willing to tolerate criticism.
A Stoic will be oblivious to the services he does for others, as oblivious as a grapevine is when it yields a cluster of grapes to a vintner. He will not pause to boast about the service he has performed but will move on to perform his next service, the way the grape vine moves on to bear more grapes. Thus, Marcus advises us to perform with resoluteness the duties we humans were created to perform. Nothing else, he says, should distract us.
Form “a certain character and pattern” for ourselves when we are alone. Then, when we associate with other people, we should remain true to who we are.
On conversation. People tend to talk about certain things; back in Epictetus’s time, he says, they talked about gladiators, horse races, athletes, eating and drinking—and, most of all, about other people. (Note: this has not changed in our times!)
The people who annoy us cannot help doing so. It is therefore inevitable that some people will be annoying; indeed, to expect otherwise, Marcus says, is like expecting a fig tree not to yield its juice. Thus, if we find ourselves shocked or surprised that a boor behaves boorishly, we have only ourselves to blame: We should have known better. Our annoyance at what he does will almost invariably be more detrimental to us than whatever it is he is doing.
The biggest risk to us in our dealings with annoying people is that they will make us hate them, a hatred that will be injurious to us. Therefore, we need to work to make sure men do not succeed in destroying our charitable feelings toward them.
If the insult is true, there is little reason to be upset: One of their sting-elimination strategies is to pause, when insulted, to consider whether what the insulter said is true. If it is, there is little reason to be upset. Suppose, for example, that someone mocks us for being bald when we in fact are bald: “Why is it an insult,” Seneca asks, “to be told what is self-evident?”
Suppose that I take him to be a thoroughly contemptible individual. Under such circumstances, rather than feeling hurt by his insults, I should feel relieved: If he disapproves of what I am doing, then what I am doing is doubtless the right thing to do. What should worry me is if this contemptible person approved of what I am doing. If I say anything at all in response to his insults, the most appropriate comment would be, “I’m relieved that you feel that way about me.”
Retrospective negative visualization. In normal, prospective negative visualization, we imagine losing something we currently possess; in retrospective negative visualization, we imagine never having had something that we have lost. Marcia should, says Seneca, think about how much worse off she would be today if she had never been able to enjoy his company.
Damage done by anger is enormous: “No plague has cost the human race more.”
The reason things will seem unbearable is not because they are hard but because we are soft. Seneca therefore recommends that we take steps to ensure that we never get too comfortable.
People are unhappy in large part because they are confused about what is valuable. Because of their confusion, they spend their days pursuing things that, rather than making them happy, make them anxious and miserable. Epictetus adds that you are both greedy and stupid if you expect a place at the banquet table without having paid this price. You would have been much better off, Epictetus thinks, if you had been indifferent to social status.
Stoics value their freedom, and they are therefore reluctant to do anything that will give others power over them. But if we seek social status, we give other people power over us. Particularly foolish for us to seek the approval of people whose values we reject. Instead of thinking about future fame, Marcus says, we would do well to concern ourselves with our present situation; we should, he advises, “make the best of today.”
One way to overcome this obsession, the Stoics think, is to realize that in order to win the admiration of other people, we will have to adopt their values. More precisely, we will have to live a life that is successful according to their notion of success.
We should stop to ask whether these people, by pursuing whatever it is they value, are gaining the tranquility we seek. If they aren’t, we should be more than willing to forgo their admiration.
On wealth. It is folly “to think that it is the amount of money and not the state of mind that matters!” Although wealth can procure for us physical luxuries and various pleasures of the senses, it can never bring us contentment or banish our grief. Not needing wealth is more valuable than wealth itself.
On luxury: Rather than mourning the loss of their ability to enjoy simple things, they take pride in their newly gained inability to enjoy anything but “the best.” Rather than living to eat—rather than spending our life pursuing the pleasure to be derived from food—we should eat to live. People who achieve luxurious lifestyles are rarely satisfied: Experiencing luxury only whets their appetite for even more luxury.
If we take to heart the advice of the Stoics and forgo luxurious living, we will find that our needs are easily met, for as Seneca reminds us, life’s necessities are cheap and easily obtainable.
Even though he does not pursue wealth, a Stoic might nevertheless acquire it. A Stoic will, after all, do what she can to make herself useful to her fellow humans. And thanks to her practice of Stoicism, she will be self-disciplined and single-minded, traits that will help her accomplish the tasks she sets for herself. As a result, she might be quite effective in helping others, and they might reward her for doing so. It is possible, in other words, for the practice of Stoicism to be financially rewarding. She is likely to retain a large portion of her income and might thereby become wealthy. It is indeed ironic: A Stoic who disparages wealth might become wealthier than those individuals whose principal goal is its acquisition.
She will be careful to regard his riches as his slave, not as his master. If, instead of seeking fame, we overcame our craving for the admiration of others; instead of knocking ourselves out trying to become popular, we worked to maintain and improve our relationships with those we knew to be true friends.
Stoics will do their best to enjoy things that can’t be taken from them, most notably their character. If life should snatch one source of delight from them, Stoics will quickly find another to take its place: Stoic enjoyment, unlike that of a connoisseur, is eminently transferable. Along these lines, remember that when Seneca and Musonius were banished to islands, rather than succumbing to depression, they set about studying their new environment.
On transforming society. They thought the first step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances. The second step in transforming a society is to change people’s external circumstances.
If what we seek is tranquility, we should form and maintain relations with others. In doing so, though, we should be careful about whom we befriend. We should also, to the extent possible, avoid people whose values are corrupt, for fear that their values will contaminate ours.
Unless I am an unusual person, my biggest tests in life lie ahead.
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