A Guide to the Good Life Read online

  Readers will naturally be curious about what is involved in the practice of Stoicism. In ancient Greece and Rome, a would-be Stoic could have learned how to practice Stoicism by attending a Stoic school, but this is no longer possible.

  A modern would-be Stoic might, as an alternative, consult the works of the ancient Stoics, but what she will discover on attempting to do so is that many of these works—in particular, those of the Greek Stoics—have been lost. Furthermore, if she reads the works that have survived, she will discover that although they discuss Stoicism at length, they don’t offer a lesson plan, as it were, for novice Stoics. The challenge I faced in writing this book was to construct such a plan from clues scattered throughout Stoic writings.

  Although the remainder of this book provides detailed guidelines for would-be Stoics, let me describe here, in a preliminary fashion, some of the things we will want to do if we adopt Stoicism as our philosophy of life.

  We will reconsider our goals in living. In particular, we will take to heart the Stoic claim that many of the things we desire—most notably, fame and fortune—are not worth pursuing. We will instead turn our attention to the pursuit of tranquility and what the Stoics called virtue. We will discover that Stoic virtue has very little in common with what people today mean by the word. We will also discover that the tranquility the Stoics sought is not the kind of tranquility that might be brought on by the ingestion of a tranquilizer; it is not, in other words, a zombie-like state. It is instead a state marked by the absence of negative emotions such as anger, grief, anxiety, and fear, and the presence of positive emotions—in particular, joy.

  We will study the various psychological techniques developed by the Stoics for attaining and maintaining tranquility, and we will employ these techniques in daily living. We will, for example, take care to distinguish between things we can control and things we can’t, so that we will no longer worry about the things we can’t control and will instead focus our attention on the things we can control. We will also recognize how easy it is for other people to disturb our tranquility, and we will therefore practice Stoic strategies to prevent them from upsetting us.

  Finally, we will become a more thoughtful observer of our own life. We will watch ourselves as we go about our daily business and will later refl ect on what we saw, trying to identify the sources of distress in our life and thinking about how to avoid that distress.

  Practicing Stoicism will obviously take effort, but this is true of all genuine philosophies of life. Indeed, even “enlightened hedonism” takes effort. The enlightened hedonist’s grand goal in living is to maximize the pleasure he experiences in the course of a lifetime. To practice this philosophy of life, he will spend time discovering, exploring, and ranking sources of pleasure and investigating any untoward side effects they might have. The enlightened hedonist will then devise strategies for maximizing the amount of pleasure he experiences.

  (Unenlightened hedonism, in which a person thoughtlessly seeks short-term gratification, is not, I think, a coherent philosophy of life.)

  The effort required to practice Stoicism will probably be greater than that required to practice enlightened hedonism but less than that required to practice, say, Zen Buddhism. A Zen Buddhist will have to meditate, a practice that is both time-consuming and (in some of its forms) physically and mentally challenging. The practice of Stoicism, in contrast, doesn’t require us to set aside blocks of time in which to “do Stoicism.” It does require us periodically to refl ect on our life, but these periods of refl ection can generally be squeezed into odd moments of the day, such as when we are stuck in traffic or—this was Seneca’s recommendation—when we are lying in bed waiting for sleep to come.

  When assessing the “costs” associated with practicing Stoicism or any other philosophy of life, readers should realize that there are costs associated with not having a philosophy of life. I have already mentioned one such cost: the danger that you will spend your days pursuing valueless things and will therefore waste your life.

  Some readers might, at this point, wonder whether the practice of Stoicism is compatible with their religious beliefs. In the case of most religions, I think it is. Christians in particular will find that Stoic doctrines resonate with their religious views. They will, for example, share the Stoics’ desire to attain tranquility, although Christians might call it peace. They will appreciate Marcus Aurelius’s injunction to “love mankind.”8

  And when they encounter Epictetus’s observation that some things are up to us and some things are not, and that if we have any sense at all, we will focus our energies on the things that are up to us, Christians will be reminded of the “Serenity Prayer,” often attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

  Having said this, I should add that it is also possible for someone simultaneously to be an agnostic and a practicing Stoic.

  The remainder of this book is divided into four parts. In part 1, I describe the birth of philosophy. Although modern philosophers tend to spend their days debating esoteric topics, the primary goal of most ancient philosophers was to help ordinary people live better lives. Stoicism, as we shall see, was one of the most popular and successful of the ancient schools of philosophy.

  In parts 2 and 3, I explain what we must do in order to practice Stoicism. I start by describing the psychological techniques the Stoics developed to attain and subsequently maintain tranquility. I then describe Stoic advice on how best to deal with the stresses of everyday life: How, for example, should we respond when someone insults us? Although much has changed in the past two millennia, human psychology has changed little. This is why those of us living in the twenty-first century can benefit from the advice that philosophers such as Seneca offered to first-century Romans.

  Finally, in part 4 of this book, I defend Stoicism against various criticisms, and I reevaluate Stoic psychology in light of modern scientific findings. I end the book by relating the insights I have gained in my own practice of Stoicism.

  My fellow academics might have an interest in this book; they might, for example, be curious about my interpretation of various Stoic utterances. The audience I am most interested in reaching, though, is ordinary individuals who worry that they might be misliving. This includes those who have come to the realization that they lack a coherent philosophy of life and as a result are floundering in their daily activities: what they work to accomplish one day only undoes what they accomplished the day before. It also includes those who have a philosophy of life but worry that it is somehow defective.

  I wrote this book with the following question in mind: If the ancient Stoics had taken it upon themselves to write a guidebook for twenty-first-century individuals—a book that would tell us how to have a good life—what might that book have looked like? The pages that follow are my answer to this question.

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  P A R T O N E

  The Rise of Stoicism

  O N E

  Philosophy Takes an Interest in Life

  There have probably always been philosophers, in some sense of the word. They were those individuals who not only asked questions—such as Where did the world come from? Where did people come from? and Why are there rain-bows?—but more important, went on to ask follow-up questions. When told, for example, that the world was created by the gods, these proto-philosophers would have realized that this answer didn’t get to the bottom of things. They would have gone on to ask why the gods made the world, how they made it, and—most vexatiously to those trying to answer their questions—who made the gods.

  However and whenever it may have started, philosophical thinking took a giant leap forward in the sixth century bc. We find Pythagoras (570–500 bc) philosophizing in Italy; Thales (636–546 bc), Anaximander (641–547 bc), and Heracleitus (535–475 bc) in Greece; Confucius (551–479 bc) in China; and Buddha (563–483 bc) in India. It isn’t clear whether these individuals discovered philosophy independently of one another; nor is it clear which direction philosophical infl
uence flowed, if it indeed flowed.

  The Greek biographer Diogenes Laertius, from the vantage point of the third century ad, offered an eminently readable (but not entirely reliable) history of early philosophy. According to Diogenes, early Western philosophy had two separate branches.1 One branch—he calls it the Italian branch—began with Pythagoras. If we follow through the various successors of Pythagoras, we ultimately come to Epicurus, whose own school of philosophy was a major rival to the Stoic school. The other branch—Diogenes calls it the Ionian branch—started with Anaximander, who (intellectually, pedagogically) begat Anaximenes, who begat Anaxagoras, who begat Archelaus, who, finally, begat Socrates (469–399 bc).

  Socrates lived a remarkable life. He also died a remarkable death: He had been tried for corrupting the youth of Athens and other alleged misdeeds, found guilty by his fellow citizens, and sentenced to die by drinking poison hemlock. He could have avoided this punishment by throwing himself on the mercy of the court or by running away after the sentence had been handed down. His philosophical principles, though, would not let him do these things. After his death, Socrates’ many followers not only continued to do philosophy but attracted followers of their own. Plato, the best-known of his students, founded the school of philosophy known as the Academy, Aristippus founded the Cyrenaic school, Euclides founded the Megarian school, Phaedo founded the Elian school, and Antisthenes founded the Cynic school. What had been a trickle of philosophical activity before Socrates became, after his death, a veritable torrent.

  Why did this explosion of interest in philosophy take place?

  In part because Socrates changed the focus of philosophical inquiry. Before Socrates, philosophers were primarily interested in explaining the world around them and the phenomena of that world—in doing what we would now call science.

  Although Socrates studied science as a young man, he abandoned it to focus his attention on the human condition. As the Roman orator, politician, and philosopher Cicero put it, Socrates was “the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and set her in the cities of men and bring her also into their homes and compel her to ask questions about life and morality and things good and evil.”2 The classicist Francis MacDonald Cornford describes Socrates’ philosophical significance in similar terms: “Pre-Socratic philosophy begins . . . with the discovery of Nature; Socratic philosophy begins with the discovery of man’s soul.”3

  Why does Socrates remain an impressive figure twenty-four centuries after his death? It isn’t because of his philosophical discoveries; his philosophical conclusions, after all, were basi-cally negative: He showed us what we don’t know. Rather, it was the extent to which he allowed his way of life to be affected by his philosophical speculations. Indeed, according to the philosopher Luis E. Navia, “in [Socrates], perhaps more than in any other major philosopher, we come upon the example of a man who was able to integrate in his life theoretical and speculative concerns into the context of his daily activities.” Navia describes him as “a veritable paradigm of philosophical activity both in thought and in deed.”4

  Presumably, some of those drawn to Socrates were impressed primarily by his theorizing, while others were most impressed by his lifestyle. Plato belonged to the former group; in his Academy, Plato was more interested in exploring philosophical theory than in dispensing lifestyle advice. Antisthenes, in contrast, was most impressed with Socrates’ lifestyle; the Cynic school he founded eschewed philosophical theorizing and focused instead on advising people about what they must do to have a good life.

  It is as if Socrates, on his death, had fissioned into Plato and Antisthenes, with Plato inheriting Socrates’ interest in theory and Antisthenes inheriting his concern with living a good life. It would have been wonderful if these two sides of philosophy had flourished in subsequent millennia, inasmuch as people benefit from both philosophical theorizing and the application of philosophy to their own life. Unfortunately, although the theoretical side of philosophy has flourished, the practical side has withered away.

  Under a despotic government such as that of ancient Persia, the ability to write, read, and do arithmetic was important for government officials, but the ability to persuade others wasn’t. Officials needed only give orders, which those under their power would unhesitatingly obey. In Greece and Rome, however, the rise of democracy meant that those who were able to persuade others were most likely to have successful careers in politics or law. It was in part for this reason that affluent Greek and Roman parents, after a child’s secondary education was completed, sought teachers who could develop their child’s persuasive ability.

  These parents might have sought the services of a sophist, whose goal was to teach pupils to win arguments. To achieve this goal, sophists taught various techniques of persuasion, including both appeals to reason and appeals to emotion. In particular, they taught students that it was possible to argue for or against any proposition whatsoever. Along with developing pupils’ argumentative skills, sophists developed their speaking skills, so they could effectively communicate the arguments they devised.

  Alternatively, parents might have sought the services of a philosopher. Like sophists, philosophers taught persuasive techniques, but unlike sophists, they eschewed appeals to emotion. Also unlike sophists, philosophers thought that besides teaching their pupils how to persuade, they should teach them how to live well. Consequently, according to the historian H. I. Marrou, in their teaching they emphasized “the moral aspect of education, the development of the personality and the inner life.”5 In the course of doing this, many philosophers provided their pupils with a philosophy of life: They taught them what things in life were worth pursuing and how best to pursue them.

  Some of the parents who wanted a philosophical education for their child hired a philosopher to act as live-in tutor; Aristotle, for example, was hired by King Philip of Macedon to tutor Alexander, who subsequently became “the Great.” Parents who could not afford a private tutor would have sent their sons—but probably not their daughters—to a school of philosophy. After the death of Socrates, these schools became a prominent feature of Athenian culture, and when, in the second century bc, Rome came under the spell of Athenian culture, schools of philosophy started appearing in Rome as well.

  There are no longer schools of philosophy, and this is a shame. It is true that philosophy is still done within schools—more precisely, within the philosophy departments of universities—but the cultural role played by philosophy departments is quite unlike the role played by the ancient philosophical schools. For one thing, those who sign up for the philosophy classes offered by universities are rarely motivated to do so by a desire to acquire a philosophy of life; instead, they take classes because their advisor tells them that if they don’t, they can’t graduate. And if they do seek a philosophy of life, they would, in most universities, have a hard time finding a class that would offer them one.

  But even though schools of philosophy are a thing of the past, people are in as much need of a philosophy of life as they ever were. The question is, Where can they go to obtain one? If they go to the philosophy department of the local university, they will, as I have explained, probably be disappointed.

  What if they instead turn to their local church? Their pastor might tell them what they must do to be a good person, that is, what they must do to be morally upstanding. They might be instructed, for example, not to steal or tell lies or (in some religions) have an abortion. Their pastor will also probably explain what they must do to have a good afterlife: They should come to services regularly and pray and (in some religions) tithe. But their pastor will probably have relatively little to say on what they must do to have a good life. Indeed, most religions, after telling adherents what they must do to be morally upstanding and get into heaven, leave it to them to determine what things in life are and aren’t worth pursuing. These religions see nothing wrong with an adherent working hard so he can afford a huge mansion and an expensive sports car, as long as he do
esn’t break any laws doing so; nor do they see anything wrong with the adherent forsaking the mansion for a hut and forsaking the car for a bicycle.

  And if religions do offer adherents advice on what things in life are and aren’t worth pursuing, they tend to offer the advice in such a low-key manner that adherents might regard it as a suggestion rather than a directive about how to live and might therefore ignore the advice. This, one imagines, is why the adherents of the various religions, despite the differences in their religious beliefs, end up with the same impromptu philosophy of life, namely, a form of enlightened hedonism.

  Thus, although Lutherans, Baptists, Jews, Mormons, and Catholics hold different religious views, they are remarkably alike when encountered outside of church or synagogue. They hold similar jobs and have similar career ambitions. They live in similar homes, furnished in a similar manner. And they lust to the same degree for whatever consumer products are currently in vogue.

  It is clearly possible for a religion to require its adherents to adopt a particular philosophy of life. Consider, by way of illustration, the Hutterite religion, which teaches its adherents that one of the most valuable things in life is a sense of community.

  Hutterites are therefore forbidden to own private property, the rationale being that such ownership would give rise to feelings of envy, which in turn would disrupt the sense of community the Hutterites value. (We can, of course, question whether this is a sound philosophy of life.)

  Most religions, however, don’t require their adherents to adopt a particular philosophy of life. As long as adherents don’t harm others and don’t do things to anger God, they are free to live their life as they will. Indeed, if the Hutterite religion seems both extreme and exotic to most people, it is because they can’t imagine belonging to a religion that tells them how to live their life.