Stoicism

Stoicism was founded around 300 BCE in Athens by Zeno of Citium (c. 334–262 BCE), a Phoenician merchant from Cyprus who, according to legend, was shipwrecked, wandered into a bookshop, read about Socrates, and asked where such men could be found. The bookseller pointed to the Cynic Crates passing by: “Follow that man.” Zeno studied with Cynics and Platonists, then taught in the Stoa Poikilē, the Painted Porch in the Athenian agora — whence “Stoics”.

The school was systematized by Chrysippus (c. 279–206 BCE), of whom it was said, “Without Chrysippus, there would be no Stoa.” He wrote some 700 books, all lost. In Rome, Stoicism became the philosophy of statesmen and emperors: Seneca, the freed slave Epictetus, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius — whose writings, unlike those of the Greek founders, survive and have never stopped being read.

The three parts of philosophy

The Stoics divided philosophy into logic, physics and ethics, comparing it to an egg (logic the shell, ethics the white, physics the yolk) or an orchard (logic the wall, physics the trees, ethics the fruit).

Physics: a rational cosmos

The universe is a single living organism, permeated by logos — divine reason, also called God, Zeus, nature, fate and providence — conceived as a fiery breath (pneuma). Everything happens by fate, an unbreakable chain of causes; yet this fate is rational and good. The cosmos undergoes eternal cycles, ending in a universal conflagration (ekpyrōsis) and beginning again, identically — an idea Friedrich Nietzsche echoed in the Eternal Recurrence.

Logic

The Stoics developed a sophisticated propositional logic (Chrysippus’s five “indemonstrables” — if p then q; p; therefore q, and so on) and a theory of knowledge based on “cognitive impressions” (phantasia katalēptikē) — impressions so clear that they compel assent.

Ethics: living according to nature

The goal (telos) is “to live in agreement with nature” — with our own rational nature and with the rational order of the cosmos. This is virtue, and virtue is the only good. Everything else — health, wealth, pleasure, reputation, life itself — is an indifferent (adiaphoron). Some indifferents are “preferred” (health over sickness) and it is rational to select them, but their presence or absence does not make a life good or bad.

What is up to us

The famous dichotomy, from the opening of Epictetus’s Handbook:

Some things are up to us and some are not. Up to us are opinion, impulse, desire, aversion — in a word, whatever is our own doing. Not up to us are body, property, reputation, office — in a word, whatever is not our own doing.

Happiness depends entirely on what is up to us. If we place our good in what is not up to us, we will be anxious, frustrated, envious, enslaved.

The passions

The Stoics taught that passions (pathē) — fear, desire, distress, excessive pleasure — are not blind forces but false judgments: the belief that some external thing is genuinely good or bad. Grief is the judgment that a great evil has befallen me; anger the judgment that I have been wronged and revenge is good. Since these judgments are false, the wise person is free of passions — apatheia, not apathy but freedom from disturbance. The sage still feels “good feelings” (eupatheiai) — joy, caution, rational wishing.

Practices

Stoicism was a way of life, with exercises:

• Premeditation of evils (praemeditatio malorum) — imagining losses in advance, so they do not take us by surprise.
• The view from above — seeing human affairs from the perspective of the cosmos.
• Evening review — Seneca examined his day each night.
• The dichotomy of control — asking of each trouble, “is this up to me?”
• Memento mori — remembering death.
• Voluntary discomfort — Seneca recommended living for a few days a month on the cheapest food in rough clothing: “Is this the condition that I feared?”

Cosmopolitanism

Since all humans share reason, all are citizens of one community — the cosmopolis. Diogenes the Cynic had called himself “a citizen of the world”; the Stoics made it a doctrine. Seneca wrote that slaves are human beings, “sprung from the same seed”. This universalism influenced Roman law, Christianity, and modern ideas of natural law and human rights.

Influence

Stoicism shaped early Christianity (Paul’s letters, Tertullian, Augustine’s debates), Renaissance “Neostoicism” (Justus Lipsius, Montaigne), Spinoza, Kant (duty, the good will), and the founders of the United States. In the twentieth century, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck built cognitive therapy on the Stoic insight that emotions follow judgments. James Stockdale, an American pilot held as a prisoner of war for seven years in Vietnam, credited Epictetus with his survival. Today “modern Stoicism” is a popular movement — sometimes thin, but rooted in a genuine ancient practice.

Critics

• Epicureans: pleasure, not virtue, is the good; Stoic fate is incompatible with freedom.
• Academic Sceptics (Carneades): no impression is so clear it cannot be false.
• Augustine: Stoic self-sufficiency is pride; the Stoic sage’s tranquility is incompatible with Christian compassion and grief.
• Modern critics: Stoicism can counsel passivity before injustice (“it’s not up to me”) and suppression of healthy emotion.

The Stoics and the Gītā

The parallels between Stoicism and the The Bhagavad Gītā are striking: act according to your role and duty (svadharma / one’s officium), without attachment to the fruits; the wise person is unmoved by pleasure and pain; the self is untouched by what happens to the body. Both arose in societies of soldiers and statesmen seeking inner freedom amid outer necessity.