For several years now, Stoicism has been enjoying something of a revival. I’m not talking about lower-case stiff-upper-lip stoicism but the proper upper-case philosophical variety, as established by the likes of Chrysippus, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and the wonderfully named Musonius Rufus. Popular books by Ryan Holiday, Massimo Pigliucci and Nancy Sherman, among others, have popularised the idea that Stoic philosophy offers a timeless guide to life that is as powerful today as it was in the ancient world.
I’ve never been convinced. Like David Hume and Michael Ignatieff in his recent book On Consolation, I can see the attraction of Stoicism but I also see the need to resist them. It seems to me that although the Stoics are worth reading and many of their aphorisms deserve their lives as inspirational memes and decorations for mugs, as a system it just doesn’t add up. At their worst, modern Stoics behave like Nietzsche’s ‘plundering troops’ who ‘take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole’. To put it more politely, they cherry-pick the useful parts of Stoic writings and find ingenious ways to interpret the apparently unpalatable bits about virtue – living according to reason – being the only thing that matters. For example, they easily dismiss accusations that they believe love and friendship, doesn’t at all, glossing over the fact that for Stoics they shouldn’t matter very much. (My better half Antonia Macaro makes this case more subtly and sympathetically in her book More than Happiness, essential reading for people attracted to Buddhism and Stoicism but not sure how much they need to buy into.)
I mind less when people accept that they are indeed updating Stoicism and remaking it for a new era. But many modern Stoics claim that their founding thinkers never really believed any of this stuff about cutting the ties of human attachment in the first place and it’s a kind of slander to say they did. We are told that the Stoics weren’t against emotion at all. There’s a lot of potential for scholarly niceties here. But however you read them it’s clear they’re against the vast majority of emotion. So, yes, Seneca knew that we couldn’t eliminate emotion completely, writing to his bereaved friend, ‘That you should not mourn at all I shall hardly dare to insist.’ But he clearly thought it would be better if we could just avoid grief altogether, as he continued, ‘And yet I know that it is the better way.’ And there’s only so much room for interpretation in sayings like Epictetus’s ‘If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.’
One aspect of this debate that bothers me is that some Stoics tend to react to these criticisms with a kind of tribal loyalty. Being a Stoic has become a form of identity for some and so they feel that to criticise Stoicism is to criticise them. This reminds me that we should always try to avoid identifying too closely with our beliefs. We hold them because we believe they are true but if they turn out not to be, we should be willing to relinquish them without feeling the we are giving up a major part of ourselves. This isn’t easy because I think any deeply-held belief does become a part of ourselves. We can’t avoid this, but we can avoid over-identification.
I’ve got a bit bored following and sometimes taking part in arguments about what Stoicism really entails. That’s why I was delighted to hear Amy Olberding’s Royal Institute of Philosophy talk on early Confucian ideas about managing emotions. Olberding outlined an alternative to Stoicism which also shone a light on its fundamental problems. (She didn’t address Stoicism directly in her talk but we went back to it several times in the discussion.)
Olberding highlighted how the Stoic ideal is invulnerability. To live a good life you have to reduce your dependence on ‘externals’, the things that are out of yours control, which includes the people you love. The only things of true value are ‘internals’, which is basically your own virtue, cultivated by living according to logos, the rational principle which governs the universe.
For Confucians this is fundamentally wrong. Olberding explained how the whole internal/external distinction would not make sense to them. In Confucian thought, human beings are relational beings. We are who we are because of our relations to others: family members, fellow citizens, even the natural world. So how can these people be ‘externals’?
The Stoic disdain for externals and their desire to become self-sufficient and invulnerable can therefore be seen as an early manifestation of the atomistic individualism which would come to dominate Western thought. It never completely submerged our relational natures: how could it when it is just true that we are who we are because of culture and other people? But the individual became foregrounded, the relational reduced to background. That’s why reminders of our relational nature stand out, such as John Donne’s ‘No man is an island, Entire of itself,’ and ‘send not to know for whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.’
I found myself wondering whether the contemporary appeal of Stoicism is precisely because it dovetails so well with our ideology of individuality and self-sufficiency. If so, then the argument about how much emotion the Stoics allow us to feel isn’t the nub of the problem. It’s that they have fundamentally the wrong ideal. To seek invulnerability is to seek to maximise your independence from others, and that is to undermine a key aspect of what it is to be human.
It also seems incontrovertible that the Stoics considered many emotions as just bad and that we should reduce them as much as possible. This is where a second idea in Olberding’s talk was helpful. Her title, ‘Getting Good at Bad Emotions’ contrasts with Stoic goal of getting rid of bad emotions, or at least as many as possible.
Olberding’s key point was that many negative emotions reflect our finer values. She focused on disappointment. When we are disappointed with people our expectations and hopes are both dashed. What we believed to be true of other people turns out to be false in ways which thwart our best hopes for how we want the world and people in it to be. But it is ethically valuable to have those beliefs and hopes, desirable to be well-disposed to others.
So when we are disappointed, we have to get good at managing that and not slip into outrage or cynicism. We need to avoid retracting our general disposition to want to think well of others and entertain doubts about whether our disappointment is really warranted. Are we expecting too much? Do others have good reasons for what they’ve done that we just haven’t understood? We need to avoid slipping into the dangerous mindset of the ‘superiority of the seer’ which views ‘others’ as inferior. And we should avoid a pre-emptive pessimism that forecloses doubt about our own rightness and which identifies disappointment with naïveté or stupidity.
The contrast with Stoics is striking here. The Stoic prescription is to actually encourage us to nurture dispositions which from a Confucian point of view are ethically harmful. As Marcus Aurelius wrote, ‘When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly.’ That will certainly save you from disappointment but it hardly encourages a positive attitude to other people and it can certainly foster feelings of superiority.
Olberding has the all-too rare ability keep her keen eye on what really matters in a philosophical debate and I was reminded that her book The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy is on my endless thread list. I found her talk useful because it cut through scholastic debates about which emotions Stoics allowed, how much and so often and so forth. It showed how there is something fundamentally wrong in the ideal of the good life which it proposes and that ‘bad’ emotions are too intertwined with good things for us to want to focus on getting rid of them. ‘Getting better at bad emotions’ is the way to go.
New at JulianBaggini.com
My Guardian op-ed headlined ‘Animal lovers? Actually, Britain is a nation of sentimental hypocrites’ got a lot of responses, not all of them thoughtful. People’s capacity to misread is very, well, disappointing. I obviously wasn’t saying that it’s sentimental to object to a cat being kicked. The problem I discussed was about the selectivity of our concern for animal welfare.
Two episodes of the microphilosophy podcast have gone up since last week. ‘Existentialism Today’ features Kate Kirkpatrick and Jonathan Webber talking mainly about Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. ‘Learning from Asian Philosophy’ features Bryan van Norden and Jin Y. Park doing what it says on the tin. If you get your podcasts via Apple, note that the old feed which is not updating comes up top on searches. Please switch to this one.
The next online Cafe Philosophique discussion will be on Sunday March 13, at 8pm UK time. These are exclusively for supporters but as I have said before, at £5 per month, that’s less than the price of a ticket to similar events I did during the pandemic.
A reminder that if you buy books online, you can avoid the monster that must not be named and by through my affiliate shop which gives 10% to independent bookshops and 10% to me.
On my radar
I’m continuing to chair the Royal Institute of Philosophy London Lecture series online, most Thursday evenings until late March. Next up is the engaging Chike Jeffers whose title is ‘What Counts as a Collective Gift? Culture & Value in Du Bois’ The Gift of Black Folk’. I’m aware that Du Bois is a major thinker that most philosopher simply haven’t engaged with at all, so I’m expecting to learn a lot. You can watch all talks from the series afterwards on YouTube but we really like a live audience to ask questions and create a sense of event.
Philosophers seem to be all over BBC Radio For at the moment. Following Lea Ypi and Nina Power, the inimitable Barry Smith had a five-part series on The Art and Science of blending. It may not sound obviously philosophical but it has its moments and the non-philosophy is fascinating anyway. (Incidentally, the programme was produced by another philosophy, David Edmonds.)
I found this Guardian article on what it’s like to grow up in an age of ubiquitous online porn deeply depressing. The pull-quote got my attention: ‘I thought if you weren’t into hardcore stuff – hair pulling, spanking – you must be boring in bed. So I pretended to like them.’ What’s encouraging is that more people seem to be questioning whether our received notions of sexual freedom are really up to the job. I’ve written before (see here and here) about how it should be possible to do this without wanting to go back to the old sexual morality but many people still seem to think it’s a choice between where we are now and where we were then. Louise Perry is very good on this and I recommend this podcast interview with her.
That’s it for this week. Until next time, if nothing prevents, thanks for your interest.