The Practicing Stoic. Ward Farnsworth

without complaint. Our subject is something else and more; philosophical Stoics don’t do much complaining, but for them that is a small point. (A Stoic would probably be glad to complain if it helped anything.) “Stoic” also is sometimes thought to mean grim, which is likewise inaccurate. A Stoic is more likely to be distinguished by mild humor in the face of things regarded as grim by others. Or some imagine that Stoics seek to remove themselves from the world – that it is a philosophy of retreat into oneself. Again, the opposite is true. Stoics are supposed to involve themselves in public affairs. The result of all this confusion is a minor nuisance for the student of our subject: most people don’t know what Stoicism is, but they don’t know that they don’t know.Stoicism got its name because Zeno of Citium (c. 334–c. 262 BC), the founder of the school, did his teaching in a public colonnade or porch (“stoa”) overlooking the Agora of Athens. Stoicism was known on this account as the Philosophy of the Porch, as opposed to the Philosophy of the Garden (that of Epicurus), or the Philosophy of the Academy (that of Plato), or the Philosophy of the Lyceum (that of Aristotle), with each name referring to the place where the teachings of the school were imparted. So if “Stoicism” sounds too forbidding because of the word’s popular meaning, you could try telling your family that you are studying the philosophy of the porch. They might like that. More probably, readers who take an interest in our subject will also have to get used to explaining that when they refer to Stoicism, they mean the old kind.

      3 Many books about the Stoics have been written already. I should say a word about why another one seemed worthwhile, and what this book does that others don’t.Stoicism has come to us largely through the works of three philosophers who lived in the first two centuries AD: Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Seneca and Marcus Aurelius were Romans; Epictetus was Greek, but he, too, lived and taught for part of his life in Rome. The works they left behind tend to be miscellaneous in character. Often they consist of notes written without much order, or sorted in ways no longer meaningful to most readers. Nor are their writings cross-referenced. As a result, what any one of the Stoics taught about a given subject, let alone what they all said, cannot easily be found in one place. Seneca’s comments on a topic might be spread over three letters and an essay; the same issue might be addressed at the start and end of the discourses attributed to Epictetus, or at a few different places in the journals of Marcus Aurelius. This arrangement can have its advantages (sometimes unsystematic is better), but it is inconvenient for the student of Stoic thought who wants to see it as a whole, or to gain a sense of one writer’s views, or the views of all of them, on a particular topic.This book is a response to the state of affairs just set forth. It has three main features. First, it seeks to organize the ideas of the Stoics in a logical manner that might be described as progressive. Foundational principles come first, then their applications. I’ve tried to put the applications into a sequence that builds naturally, and, where relevant, that follows their growth in complexity. This approach is roughly reflected in the order of the chapters, in the order of the headings within each chapter, and in the order of the discussions under each heading. Those who don’t care about the progression can roam around at random; the chapters are self-contained, so you don’t need to read one to understand the next. But having a framework may still make the relationships between different parts of the philosophy easier to see.Second, the book aims to draw together the most important points that the different Stoics made about each subject and each division of it. Sometimes they spoke to different aspects of an issue; Seneca addresses one part of it, Epictetus takes another. In other cases the same topic was discussed by all the Stoics. In that event it is interesting to compare what they said and how they said it. The format lets them talk to each other.Third, this book mostly presents the teachings of the Stoics in their own words – or, more precisely, in the translated words of the writers who stated them best. The introduction that comes after this preface, and then the introductions to each chapter, provide summaries for those who want them, and the first chapter contains more exposition than the others because it is the beginning. But the reader can skip all this with no harm done. Those who prefer restatements of Stoicism have other books to read, including some fine recent entries. The goal of this one is to concisely present what the Stoics themselves said. There is a distinct pleasure to be had, for those with a taste for it, in receiving these lessons from their original sources. An observation about our world that seems sharp and accurate gains a different kind of force when we see it expressed twenty centuries ago. The truth improves with age.

      4 Carving up long works into excerpts, as is done here, necessarily means a sacrifice of context. Isolated sentences from a letter that Seneca sent to Lucilius can’t capture the larger purpose for which his point was offered, for example, let alone the full thrust of the letter or the place of it in the series that Seneca wrote. Nuances inevitably are lost. More generally, selecting and editing and arranging the words of different writers can’t help but affect the way the reader takes their meaning. The same is true of the book’s organization. It presents Stoicism under a series of headings meant to be intuitive – for us. It is not the organization that any of the Greeks or Romans would have used (in any event, none did).In short, the choices this book makes about what to include, and in what order, amount to an interpretation of Stoicism. That will be plain enough to anyone familiar with the primary sources. I emphasize the point for the sake of those who are not. My hope is that readers who like what follows and haven’t yet read the originals will do that next.

      5 This book means to offer a short course on Stoicism taught principally by the Stoics. In the living version of the class that I now and again imagine, though, we might have guest speakers as well. Montaigne, for instance, would make a lively visitor. So we also will hear from him and some others who might be regarded as intellectual descendants of the Stoics because they were strongly and visibly influenced by them. The descendants typically depart from Stoicism on certain matters of theory but agree on points more germane to this book. They give memorable expression to Stoic tenets and offer variations on them; sometimes they pilfer them outright. Their writings are instructive to read for their own sake, and because they let us see Stoicism as a tradition of thought that has lived beyond its classical origins.We sometimes will hear as well from Greek and Roman writers who were not Stoics themselves but agreed with them in ways that will interest us. It is usually the same story: philosophers of nearby schools dispute the answers to questions about the purpose of life or the nature of the universe or comparably large matters; but they have some of the same views on more immediate questions, such as how to think about money or fame or hardship or death. They converge as they descend.In sum, this book treats Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius as canonical sources. If they said it, I’ve been prepared to include it here and to regard it as a Stoic teaching, whether or not it follows from anything the Greeks are thought to have said earlier. (More on this in a moment.) And once a proposition is so identified, the book will frequently pause to show how other writers – cousins or descendants of the Stoics – have expressed the same point, or illustrated it, or elaborated on it.The book preserves some redundancies in the writings of the Stoics and eliminates others. If different writers are shown to have said similar things, it is because their agreement is of interest. If one writer is shown to have made the same point in different ways, it is because each restatement offers a detail of possible value to the student of the idea. But those who find that they have had enough of a theme can move on to the next without penalty.

      6 Stoicism originated in Ancient Greece. This book nevertheless gives little attention to the early Greek Stoics. It might seem unjust as well as unfortunate to leave out Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, and other charter members of the school while including the later writers just mentioned. The difficulty is that only fragments from the Greeks have survived; while there are texts from Galen, Cicero, Plutarch, and others that talk about what the early Stoics said, we have no extended works in which they speak for themselves. The secondhand accounts we do have are enough to allow scholars to piece together many of the earliest Stoic ideas. But the results don’t fit well in a book of this type.The approach this book takes instead, in which the late Stoics are treated as canonical, is open to objection. Stoicism might better be defined by the oldest and most consistent precepts of the philosophy that we can make out, rather than by the views of writers who came later and who have sometimes been accused of heterodoxy. In the late Stoic writings we do find some departures from what the Greeks seem to have said, or tension with it, or digressions from it. Not everything a Stoic says is Stoicism, on this view, and some of the entries in this