A Guide to the Good Life Read online

  A Guide to the Good Life : The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

  William B. Irvine

  2009

  Oxford University Press, Inc.,

  In memory of Charlie Doyle,

  who taught me to keep my head in the boat even when I’m not rowing.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments xi

  Introduction: A Plan for Living 1

  PA RT O N E

  THE RISE OF STOICISM

  O N E

  Philosophy Takes an Interest in Life 17

  T WO

  The First Stoics 29

  T H R E E

  Roman Stoicism 44

  PA RT T WO

  STOIC PSYCHOLOGICAL TECHNIQUES

  F O U R

  Negative Visualization: What’s the Worst That Can Happen? 65

  F I V E

  The Dichotomy of Control: On Becoming Invincible 85

  S I X

  Fatalism: Letting Go of the Past . . . and the Present 102

  S E V E N

  Self-Denial: On Dealing with the Dark Side of Pleasure 110

  E I G H T

  Meditation: Watching Ourselves Practice Stoicism 119

  viii Contents

  PA RT T H R E E

  STOIC ADVICE

  N I N E

  Duty: On Loving Mankind 127

  T E N

  Social Relations: On Dealing with Other People 134

  E L E V E N

  Insults: On Putting Up with Put-Downs 142

  T W E LV E

  Grief: On Vanquishing Tears with Reason 153

  T H I RT E E N

  Anger: On Overcoming Anti-Joy 159

  F O U RT E E N

  Personal Values: On Seeking Fame 166

  F I F T E E N

  Personal Values: On Luxurious Living 173

  S I X T E E N

  Exile: On Surviving a Change of Place 183

  S E V E N T E E N

  Old Age: On Being Banished to a Nursing Home 188

  E I G H T E E N

  Dying: On a Good End to a Good Life 197

  N I N E T E E N

  On Becoming a Stoic: Start Now and Prepare to Be Mocked 202

  PART F O U R

  STOICISM FOR MODERN LIVES

  T W E N T Y

  The Decline of Stoicism 209

  T W E N T Y- O N E

  Stoicism Reconsidered 226

  T W E N T Y- T WO

  Practicing Stoicism 250

  Contents ix

  A Stoic Reading Program 281

  Works Cited 297

  Notes 285

  Acknowledgments

  It takes more than an author to make a book. Allow me, therefore, to thank some of those who contributed to the realization of this work.

  Thanks, to begin with, to Wright State University for providing the professional development leave during which the bulk of this book was written. Thanks also to my department for allowing me to teach, in the fall of 2005, a course on Hellenistic philosophy in which I was able to try out an early version of this book.

  Thanks to those who (in most cases unwittingly) played a significant role in my “program of voluntary discomfort,” including Jim McCutcheon of McCutcheon Music, Debbie Stirsman of Inner Dance Yoga Center, and my buddies at Greater Dayton Rowing Association, with a special thanks going to those who had the courage to row one seat behind me: Judy Dryer, Chris Luhn, and Michael McCarty. Thanks also to Michael for helping me explore the world of discomfort provided by the erg and for making valuable suggestions concerning the terminology used in chapter 7.

  Thanks to Cynthia King, who read and commented on my manuscript. Thanks also to Bill King, who, although unwilling to admit allegiance to the Stoic credo, has nevertheless been an inspiration to this Stoic.

  Thanks to numerous anonymous readers who helped me sharpen the argument of this book. Thanks also to Cybele Tom at Oxford University Press for being such a patient and persevering literary midwife.

  The biggest thanks, though, goes to my wife, Jamie, for giving me the time and especially the space in which to write this book.

  Introduction

  A Plan for Living

  What do you want out of life? You might answer this question by saying that you want a caring spouse, a good job, and a nice house, but these are really just some of the things you want in life. In asking what you want out of life, I am asking the question in its broadest sense. I am asking not for the goals you form as you go about your daily activities but for your grand goal in living. In other words, of the things in life you might pursue, which is the thing you believe to be most valuable?

  Many people will have trouble naming this goal. They know what they want minute by minute or even decade by decade during their life, but they have never paused to consider their grand goal in living. It is perhaps understandable that they haven’t. Our culture doesn’t encourage people to think about such things; indeed, it provides them with an endless stream of distractions so they won’t ever have to. But a grand goal in living is the first component of a philosophy of life.

  This means that if you lack a grand goal in living, you lack a coherent philosophy of life.

  Why is it important to have such a philosophy? Because without one, there is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life.

  There is, in other words, a danger that when you are on your deathbed, you will look back and realize that you wasted your one chance at living. Instead of spending your life pursuing something genuinely valuable, you squandered it because you allowed yourself to be distracted by the various baubles life has to offer.

  Suppose you can identify your grand goal in living. Suppose, too, that you can explain why this goal is worth attaining. Even then, there is a danger that you will mislive. In particular, if you lack an effective strategy for attaining your goal, it is unlikely that you will attain it. Thus, the second component of a philosophy of life is a strategy for attaining your grand goal in living.

  This strategy will specify what you must do, as you go about your daily activities, to maximize your chances of gaining the thing in life that you take to be ultimately valuable.

  If we want to take steps to avoid wasting our wealth, we can easily find experts to help us. Looking in the phone book, we will find any number of certified financial planners. These individuals can help us clarify our financial goals: How much, for example, should we be saving for retirement? And having clarified these goals, they can advise us on how to achieve them.

  Suppose, however, that we want to take steps to avoid wasting not our wealth but our life. We might seek an expert to guide us: a philosopher of life. This individual would help us think about our goals in living and about which of these goals are in fact worth pursuing. She would remind us that because goals can come into conflict, we need to decide which of our goals should take precedence when conflicts arise. She will therefore help us sort through our goals and place them into a hierarchy. The goal at the pinnacle of this hierarchy will be what I have called our grand goal in living: It is the goal that we should be unwilling to sacrifice to attain other goals. And after helping us select this goal, a philosopher of life will help us devise a strategy for attaining it.

  The obvious place to look for a philosopher of life is in the philosophy department of the local university. Visiting the faculty offices there, we will find philosophers specializing in metaphysics, logic, politics, science, religion, and ethics. We might also find philosophers specializing in the philosophy of sport, the philosophy of feminism, and even the philosophy of philosophy. But unless we are at an unusual univers
ity, we will find no philosophers of life in the sense I have in mind.

  It hasn’t always been this way. Many ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, for example, not only thought philosophies of life were worth contemplating but thought the raison d’être of philosophy was to develop them. These philosophers typically had an interest in other areas of philosophy as well— in logic, for example—but only because they thought pursuing that interest would help them develop a philosophy of life.

  Furthermore, these ancient philosophers did not keep their discoveries to themselves or share them only with their fellow philosophers. Rather, they formed schools and welcomed as their pupils anyone wishing to acquire a philosophy of life.

  Different schools offered different advice on what people must do in order to have a good life. Antisthenes, a pupil of Socrates, founded the Cynic school of philosophy, which advocated an ascetic lifestyle. Aristippus, another pupil of Socrates, founded the Cyrenaic school, which advocated a hedonistic lifestyle. In between these extremes, we find, among many other schools, the Epicurean school, the Skeptic school, and, of most interest to us here, the Stoic school, founded by Zeno of Citium.

  The philosophers associated with these schools were unapologetic about their interest in philosophies of life.

  According to Epicurus, for example, “Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man. For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is no profit in philosophy either, if it does not expel the suffering of the mind.”1 And according to the Stoic philosopher Seneca, about whom I will have much to say in this book, “He who studies with a philosopher should take away with him some one good thing every day: he should daily return home a sounder man, or on the way to become sounder.”2

  This book is written for those seeking a philosophy of life. In the pages that follow, I focus my attention on a philosophy that I have found useful and that I suspect many readers will also find useful. It is the philosophy of the ancient Stoics. The Stoic philosophy of life may be old, but it merits the attention of any modern individual who wishes to have a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling—who wishes, that is, to have a good life.

  In other words, this book offers advice on how people should live. More precisely, I will act as a conduit for the advice offered by Stoic philosophers two thousand years ago. This is something my fellow philosophers are generally loath to do, but then again, their interest in philosophy is primarily “academic”; their research, that is to say, is primarily theoretical or historical. My interest in Stoicism, by way of contrast, is resolutely practical: My goal is to put this philosophy to work in my life and to encourage others to put it to work in theirs.

  The ancient Stoics, I think, would have encouraged both sorts of endeavor, but they also would have insisted that the primary reason to study Stoicism is so we can put it into practice.

  Another thing to realize is that although Stoicism is a philosophy, it has a significant psychological component. The Stoics realized that a life plagued with negative emotions—including anger, anxiety, fear, grief, and envy—will not be a good life.

  They therefore became acute observers of the workings of the human mind and as a result became some of the most insightful psychologists of the ancient world. They went on to develop techniques for preventing the onset of negative emotions and for extinguishing them when attempts at prevention failed. Even those readers who are leery of philosophical speculation should take an interest in these techniques. Who among us, after all, would not like to reduce the number of negative emotions experienced in daily living?

  Although I have been studying philosophy for all my adult life, I was, until recently, woefully ignorant of Stoicism. My teachers in college and graduate school never asked me to read the Stoics, and although I am an avid reader, I saw no need to read them on my own. More generally, I saw no need to ponder a philosophy of life. I instead felt comfortable with what is, for almost everyone, the default philosophy of life: to spend one’s days seeking an interesting mix of affluence, social status, and pleasure. My philosophy of life, in other words, was what might charitably be called an enlightened form of hedonism.

  In my fifth decade of life, though, events conspired to introduce me to Stoicism. The first of these was the 1998 publication by the author Tom Wolfe of A Man in Full. In this novel, one character accidentally discovers the Stoic philosopher Epictetus and then starts spouting his philosophy. I found this to be simultaneously intriguing and puzzling.

  Two years later I started doing research for a book about desire. As part of this research, I examined the advice that has been given over the millennia on mastering desire. I started out by seeing what religions, including Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism, Sufism, and Buddhism (and in particular, Zen Buddhism), had to say about desire. I went on to examine the advice on mastering desire offered by philosophers but found that only a relative handful of them had offered such advice.

  Prominent among those who had were the Hellenistic philosophers: the Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics.

  In conducting my research on desire, I had an ulterior motive. I had long been intrigued by Zen Buddhism and imagined that on taking a closer look at it in connection with my research, I would become a full-fledged convert. But what I found, much to my surprise, was that Stoicism and Zen have certain things in common. They both, for example, stress the importance of contemplating the transitory nature of the world around us and the importance of mastering desire, to the extent that it is possible to do so. They also advise us to pursue tranquility and give us advice on how to attain and maintain it. Furthermore, I came to realize that Stoicism was better suited to my analytical nature than Buddhism was. As a result, I found myself, much to my amazement, toying with the idea of becoming, instead of a practicing Zen Buddhist, a practicing Stoic.

  Before I began my research on desire, Stoicism had been, for me, a nonstarter as a philosophy of life, but as I read the Stoics, I discovered that almost everything I thought I knew about them was wrong. To begin with, I knew that the dictionary defines a stoic as “one who is seemingly indifferent to or unaf-fected by joy, grief, pleasure, or pain.”3 I therefore expected that the uppercase-S Stoics would be lowercase-s stoical—that they would be emotionally repressed individuals. I discovered, though, that the goal of the Stoics was not to banish emotion from life but to banish negative emotions.

  When I read the works of the Stoics, I encountered individuals who were cheerful and optimistic about life (even though they made it a point to spend time thinking about all the bad things that could happen to them) and who were fully capable of enjoying life’s pleasures (while at the same time being careful not to be enslaved by those pleasures). I also encountered, much to my surprise, individuals who valued joy; indeed, according to Seneca, what Stoics seek to discover “is how the mind may always pursue a steady and favourable course, may be well-disposed towards itself, and may view its conditions with joy.”4 He also asserts that someone who practices Stoic principles “must, whether he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys.”5

  Along similar lines, the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus tells us that if we live in accordance with Stoic principles, “a cheerful disposition and secure joy” will automatically follow.6

  Rather than being passive individuals who were grimly resigned to being on the receiving end of the world’s abuse and injustice, the Stoics were fully engaged in life and worked hard to make the world a better place. Consider, for example, Cato the Younger. (Although he did not contribute to the literature of Stoicism, Cato was a practicing Stoic; indeed, Seneca refers to him as the perfect Stoic.)7 His Stoicism did not prevent Cato from fighting bravely to restore the Roman republic.

  Likewise, Seneca seems to have been remarkably energetic: Besides being a philosopher,
he was a successful playwright, an advisor to an emperor, and the first-century equivalent of an investment banker. And Marcus Aurelius, besides being a philosopher, was a Roman emperor—indeed, arguably one of the greatest Roman emperors. As I read about the Stoics, I found myself filled with admiration for them. They were courageous, temperate, reasonable, and self-disciplined—traits I would like to possess. They also thought it important for us to fulfill our obligations and to help our fellow humans—values I happen to share.

  In my research on desire, I discovered nearly unanimous agreement among thoughtful people that we are unlikely to have a good and meaningful life unless we can overcome our insatiability. There was also agreement that one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have. This seemed to be an important insight, but it left open the question of how, exactly, we could accomplish this. The Stoics, I was delighted to discover, had an answer to this question. They developed a fairly simple technique that, if practiced, can make us glad, if only for a time, to be the person we are, living the life we happen to be living, almost regardless of what that life might be.

  The more I studied the Stoics, the more I found myself drawn to their philosophy. But when I tried to share with others my newfound enthusiasm for Stoicism, I quickly discovered that I had not been alone in misconceiving the philosophy.

  Friends, relatives, and even my colleagues at the university seemed to think the Stoics were individuals whose goal was to suppress all emotion and who therefore led grim and passive lives. It dawned on me that the Stoics were the victims of a bum rap, one that I myself had only recently helped promote.

  This realization alone might have been sufficient to motivate me to write a book about the Stoics—a book that would set the record straight—but as it happens, I came to have a second motivation even stronger than this. After learning about Stoicism, I started, in a low-key, experimental fashion, giving it a try as my philosophy of life. The experiment has thus far been sufficiently successful that I feel compelled to report my findings to the world at large, in the belief that others might benefit from studying the Stoics and adopting their philosophy of life.