3. Supporting modern characters. This book sometimes offers passages from more recent writers who, as explained earlier, might be regarded as descendants of the Stoics. They can’t be called Stoics themselves because they parted company on too many questions. But they all read the Stoic philosophers and all expressed Stoic views on some of the topics in this book.
1 a. Montaigne (Michel Eyquem de Montaigne) (1533–1592) was a French lawyer, statesman, and philosopher. His essays, written over a 22-year period after he mostly withdrew from public life, popularized that format as a kind of literature. Their topics are wide-ranging and often personal. He provides a more extensive discussion of certain Stoic principles, and sometimes a more felicitous statement of them, than is found anywhere else. Montaigne was raised to speak Latin as his first language, and he retained a lifelong love of classical learning. At one point he was referred to as the French Seneca, and he openly acknowledged the debts he owed to Seneca and to Plutarch.When I transplant the reasoning and ideas of others into my own soil and mix them with mine, I deliberately conceal the names of the authors. I do this to rein in the temerity of those hasty criticisms thrown at every kind of writing, especially contemporary writings by living authors, and writings that use common language – language that invites anyone to be a critic, and that can make the conception and design of the book seem just as common. I want them to tweak Plutarch on my nose, and to burn themselves by insulting the Seneca in me.Montaigne, Of Books (1580)The truth of this assessment will be seen in the pages ahead.Montaigne also presents some challenges for our purposes because he was an endless fount of ideas, many of which were not Stoic. He was a skeptic, and so could not subscribe to the more theoretical claims the Stoics made. And some of his views changed over time; I will treat 1580 as the date of publication of his essays, but he wrote and revised them over two decades. So I have generally proceeded as explained earlier: by asking first whether a given claim is found in the ancient Stoic sources. If so, restatement or elaboration of it by Montaigne will sometimes be provided.b. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) was an English essayist, poet, critic, and producer of various other sorts of writings. He was author of the most celebrated and amusing of all English dictionaries, and subject of the most celebrated and amusing of all English biographies (Boswell’s Life of Johnson). Though Johnson has occasionally been described as a Stoic, that label is best avoided. It is not a fit to his writings as a whole, some of which disparage Stoicism. In Johnson’s writings on ethics, though, he agrees with the Stoics often and gives excellent form to many of their ideas. Johnson often wrote in a style that now seems grandiloquent; he liked to use fancy words. This makes his prose hard for most people now to enjoy in long stretches, but our doses of it will be modest.c. Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a Scottish philosopher and economist who was a close reader of the Stoics and much influenced by them, though his own philosophy departed from Stoicism in many ways. He critiques it in detail in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but agreed with the Stoics on some particulars.Smith was a contemporary of Samuel Johnson’s (and a professor of James Boswell’s at Glasgow University), but it is not clear whether they met. A well-circulated anecdote describes Smith and Johnson as encountering each other for their first and only time at a party in Scotland and briefly exchanging insults, but it has been challenged (alas) as a fabrication.d. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was a pessimistic German philosopher and essayist. He wrote about a large range of topics, many of them far from the concerns of this book, but touched on a number of our themes in essays he wrote late in his life. He, too, did not accept Stoicism in full; he made criticisms of it and did not believe happiness could be achieved through reason. But as with all the others mentioned here, he read the Stoics carefully and had much in common with them on subsidiary points. He is good to have around in a book like this, because his interpretations of Stoic ideas have a different and more modern intellectual flavor than that of our other writers.There will be appearances by some other writers as well, including Guillaume du Vair, a French contemporary of Montaigne’s. He attempted explicitly to reconcile Stoicism with Christianity (a movement sometimes known as neostoicism). His interpretations are of occasional interest, as are those of various others who appear too infrequently in the book to introduce here.
As this book is meant for a general audience, I have not used endnotes. When explanatory comments have seemed worth including, they appear directly in the text. They consist mostly of brief notes on ancient characters who are referenced by the Stoics or their friends. Part of the fun of our topic is the chance to touch and learn a bit about the classical world, inexhaustibly fascinating ancestor of our own.
Translations. This book contains many passages not originally written in English. Translations of all the original texts exist in the public domain; when those versions were found suitable for our purposes, I have not hesitated to use them. This book is especially indebted to many venerable translations in the Loeb Classical Library, and the translations of Schopenhauer done by T. Bailey Saunders. In most cases, however, the translations have been revised or redone entirely to bring them into clearer modern English that remains faithful to the originals. I wish to thank Michael Gagarin, Karl Galinsky, Andrew Kull, and Ashley Voeks – magnificent colleagues, all of them – for their talent and generosity in helping with that aspect of the project.
There is at times some sexism in how the Stoics expressed themselves that I have not expunged, as my aim has been to show what they said as accurately as can be managed. I hope the reader will look past that issue. While the political thinking of the Stoics is mostly beyond our scope, they were notable for welcoming women to the practice of their philosophy and favoring equality for them in other ways as well, sometimes to a degree that was radical for their times.
For comments on the manuscript, my thanks to the colleagues mentioned above and to Anya Bidwell, Chelsea Bingham, Daniel Cantor, Robert Chesney, Alexandra Delp, Anne Farnsworth, Janet Farnsworth, Sam Farnsworth, David Greenwald, Aaron Gregg, Harris Kerr, Lucy Lyford, Brian Perez-Daple, Reid Powers, William Powers, Ion Ratiu, Christopher Roberts, Ted Skillman, and Brendon Walsh. Responsibility for errors is mine. I also wish to thank Carl W. Scarbrough, the best in the business, for designing the inside of the book and the cover.
Introduction
This introduction provides a brief and rough summary of the ideas that follow in the rest of the book. None of this is necessary; it is just a convenience for the reader who likes to have an overview.
1 We appear to go through life reacting directly to events and all else in the world. That appearance is an illusion. We react to our judgments and opinions – to our thoughts about things, not to things themselves. We usually aren’t aware of this. Events come to us through lenses of judgment that are so familiar we forget we have them on. Stoics seek to become conscious of those judgments, to find the irrationality in them, and to choose them more carefully.This idea is foundational to Stoicism. Sometimes its truth can be seen by noticing that when we react to an event, we really are reacting to what we’ve said to ourselves about it. (Perhaps we can say something different.) But in other cases it’s harder to see the role of judgments in producing a reaction because they are so ingrained that we take them for granted. The Stoics investigate those reactions – the ones that feel inevitable – by comparing them to the very different reactions that others have to the same things when their conditioning is different (or to the different reactions that we have when our circumstances are different). The Stoics infer from all this that our way of reacting to anything depends, indeed, on thoughts we think and beliefs we hold, however deeply buried they might be. Since those beliefs and thoughts belong to us, they should be possible to change, and so ought to be subject to more rational scrutiny than they usually get. Our experience of the world is our own doing, not the world’s doing, and the Stoic means to take responsibility for it. (Chapter 1.)
2 We should stake our well-being on what we can control and let go of attachment to what we cannot. We generally