How to Be a Stoic

By
Massimo Pigliucci
February 2, 2015 3:25 am
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/how-to-be-a-stoic/

Tucker Nichols

In every culture we know of, whether it be secular or religious, cosmopolitan or tribal, the
question of how to live is central. How should we handle lifes challenges and
vicissitudes? How should we conduct ourselves in the world and treat others? And the
ultimate question: how do we best prepare to die?
For my part, Ive recently become a Stoic. I do not mean that I have started keeping a
stiff upper lip and suppressing my emotions. As much as I love the Star Trek character
of Mr. Spock (which Gene Roddenberry actually modeled after his mistaken
understanding of Stoicism), those are two of a number of misconceptions about what it
means to be a Stoic. In reality, practicing Stoicism is not really that different from, say,
practicing Buddhism (or even certain forms of modern Christianity): it is a mix of
reflecting on theoretical precepts, reading inspirational texts, and engaging in meditation,
mindfulness, and the like.

Stoicism is the philosophical root of a number of evidence-based psychological therapies,

including Victor Frankls logotherapy and C.B.T.
Im not alone. Thousands of people, for instance, participated in the third annual Stoic
Week, a worldwide philosophy event cum social science experiment organized by a team
at the University of Exeter, in England. The goal of Stoic Week is twofold: on the one
hand, to get people to learn about Stoicism and how it can be relevant to their lives; on
the other hand, to collect systematic data to see whether practicing Stoicism actually does
make a difference to peoples lives.
Stoicism was born in Hellenistic Greece, very much as a practical philosophy, one that
became popular during the Roman Empire, and that vied over centuries for cultural
dominance with the other Greek schools. Eventually, Christianity emerged, and actually
incorporated a number of concepts and even practices of Stoicism. Even today, the
famous Serenity Prayer recited at Alcoholic Anonymous meetings is an incarnation of a
Stoic principle enunciated by Epictetus: What, then, is to be done? To make the best of
what is in our power, and take the rest as it naturally happens. (Discourses)
I arrived at Stoicism, not on my way to Damascus, but through a combination of cultural
happenstance and deliberate philosophical choice. First, I was raised in Rome, and I have
considered Stoicism part of my cultural heritage ever since I studied ancient Greek and
Roman history and philosophy in high school. This is no different, I take it, from so many
people who (at the least initially) fall into Buddhism or Catholicism because they happen
to be raised in a particular cultural milieu.
In addition, as a scientist and philosopher by profession, I always try to figure out more
coherent ways to understand the world (science) and better choices for living my life
(philosophy). I have for many years been attracted to virtue ethics a core of Stoic
philosophy as a way to think about morality and a life worth living. I have also
recently passed the half century mark, one of those arbitrary points in human life that
nonetheless somehow prompt people to engage in broader reflections on who they are
and what they are doing.
Lastly, Stoicism speaks directly to a lifelong preoccupation Ive harbored that is present
in nearly all forms of religion and philosophical practice the inevitability of death and
how to prepare for it. The original Stoics devoted a great deal of effort and writing to
what Seneca famously referred to as the ultimate test of character and principle. We are
dying every day, he wrote to his friend Marcia in consolation for the loss of her son.
Because of this confluence of factors, I decided to take a serious look at Stoicism as a
comprehensive philosophy, to devote at least a year to its study and its practice.
Meditation, mindfulness and focus on virtue make up the core of Stoic practice.
Is Stoicisms reputation as a useful practical philosophy justified? While the preliminary
results from the Exeter experiment are tentative (more sophisticated experimental
protocols and larger sample sizes would clearly be needed), they are promising.

Participants in Stoic Week reported a 9 percent increase in positive emotions, an 11

percent decrease in negative emotions and a 14 percent improvement in life satisfaction
after one week of practice (they also did longer term followups, which confirmed the
initial results for people who kept practicing). People also seem to think that Stoicism
makes them more virtuous: 56 percent of participants gave Stoic practice a high mark in
that regard.
This is not entirely surprising, given that Stoicism is the philosophical root of a number
of evidence-based psychological therapies, including Victor Frankls logotherapy and the
increasingly diverse family of practices that go under the general rubric of cognitive
behavioral therapy (C.B.T.).
It is worth keeping in mind that the people who elected to participate in Stoic Week are a
highly self-selected sample (and, probably, so are the people who choose C.B.T. over,
say, Freudian or Jungian psychoanalysis), so a cautious and a healthy degree of
skepticism is certainly warranted.
Nonetheless, I think it is worth considering what it means to be a Stoic in the 21st
century. It doesnt involve handling a turbulent empire as Marcus Aurelius had to do, or
having to deal with the dangerous madness of a Nero, with the fatal consequences that
Seneca experienced. Rather, my modest but regular practice includes a number of
standard Stoic spiritual exercises.
I begin the day by retreating in a quiet corner of my apartment to meditate. Stoic
meditation consists in rehearsing the challenges of the day ahead, thinking about which of
the four cardinal virtues (courage, equanimity, self-control and wisdom) one may be
called on to employ and how.
I also engage in an exercise called Hierocles circle, imagining myself as part of a
growing circle of concern that includes my family and friends, my neighbors, my fellow
citizens, humanity as a whole, all the way up to Nature itself.
I then pass to the premeditatio malorum, a type of visualization in which one imagines
some sort of catastrophe happening to oneself (such as losing ones job), and learns to see
it as a dispreferred indifferent, meaning that it would be better if it didnt happen, but
that it would nonetheless not affect ones worth and moral value. This one is not for
everybody: novices may find this last exercise emotionally disturbing, especially if it
involves visualizing ones own death, as sometimes it does. Nonetheless, it is very similar
to an analogous practice in C.B.T. meant to ally ones fears of particular objects or events.
Finally, I pick a Stoic saying from my growing collection (saved on a spreadsheet on
DropBox and available to share), read it to myself a few times and absorb it as best as I
can. The whole routine takes about ten minutes or so.
Throughout the rest of the day, my Stoic practice is mostly about mindfulness, which
means to remind myself that I not only I live hic et nunc, in the here and now, where I

must pay attention to whatever it is I am doing, but, more importantly, that pretty much
every decision I make has a moral dimension, and needs to be approached with proper
care and thoughtfulness. For me this often includes how to properly and respectfully treat
students and colleagues, or how to shop for food and other items in the most ethically
minded way possible (there are apps for that, naturally).
Finally, my daily practice ends with an evening meditation, which consists in writing in a
diary (definitely not meant for publication!) my thoughts about the day, the challenges I
faced, and how I handled them. I ask myself, as Seneca put it in On Anger: What bad
habit have you put right today? Which fault did you take a stand against? In what respect
are you better?
Stoicism, of course, may not appeal to or work for everyone. It is a rather demanding
philosophy of life, where your moral character is pretty much stipulated to be the only
truly worthy thing to cultivate in life (though health, education, and even wealth are
considered to be preferred indifferents). Then again, it does have a lot of points of
contact with other philosophies, as well as religions: Buddhism, Christianity, and I
think even modern secular movements such as secular humanism or ethical culture.
There is something very appealing for me as a non religious person in the idea of an
ecumenical philosophy, one that can share goals and at the least some general attitudes
with other major ethical traditions across the world.
There are also challenges that remain unresolved. The original Stoicism was a
comprehensive philosophy that included not just a particular view of ethics, but also a
metaphysics, a take on natural science, and specific approaches to logic and epistemology
(i.e., a theory of knowledge). Many of the particular notions of the ancient Stoics have
ceded place to modern science and philosophy, and need to be updated.
Take, for instance, the Stoic concept of Logos, the rational principle that governs the
universe. For the Stoics, this was the manifestation of a divine creative mind, a notion I
certainly cannot subscribe to as a modern secular philosopher and scientist. But I am on
board with the idea that the universe is organized according to rational-mathematical
principles (otherwise we could not understand it scientifically), and I share the Stoic
belief in universal cause and effect, which in turn has profound implications for the way
Stoics look at both our place in the cosmos and our conduct of everyday life.
Given all this, I am willing to invest some time into exploring just how much one can
recover of the original Stoic spirit, update it with modern knowledge, and still reasonably
call it Stoicism (or, more properly, neo-Stoicism). If it turns out that it cant be done, I
will at least have learned much from the search.
In the end, of course, Stoicism is simply another path some people can try out in order to
develop a more or less coherent view of the world, of who they are, and of how they fit in
the broader scheme of things.
The need for this sort of insight seems to be universal.

Massimo Pigliucci is a professor of philosophy at the City College of New York. He edits
the Scientia Salon webzine and produces the Rationally Speaking podcast. His latest
book, co-edited with Maarten Boudry, is Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering
the Demarcation Problem.
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues
both timely and timeless.
https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/
The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers and other thinkers
on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley. He
teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York.