Why I am not a Modern Stoic

Years ago, I was at Raven Used Books in Cambridge, MA. It was 2015, I think, the year the store had moved from JFK to Church St. The old location had been a glorified basement packed with used books and – amazingly – spare copies from various university presses. The new location looked like a traditional bookstore: shining wood floors, plenty of room to wander and browse, soft lighting dangling from the city. I had just moved to Connecticut, but I was back for a weekend to visit some friends, and we’d decided to check out the new Raven location.

While looking at the philosophy section, a middle-aged man with a dour expression joined me at the shelves. He couldn’t seem to find what he was looking for. When an employee walked by, he took a chance and asked: ‘Do you have a copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius?’

This was the year after Ryan Holiday published The Obstacle is the Way, a work of Modern Stoicism.¹ He would go on to publish a slew of similar books: Discipline is Destiny, Ego is the Enemy, etc. Massimo Pigliucci would publish How to Be a Stoic in 2017. Donald Robertson would release How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, about Marcus Aurelius, in 2019. In 2015, though, the Stoicism resurgence was still not fully realized; all of that was to come. This middle-aged man at Raven Books was a trendsetter.

Source: Google Ngram

I do not think it is strange that Modern Stoicism proved to be so popular. Many philosophers throughout history have drawn inspiration from the Stoics. Baruch Spinoza’s ethics and political philosophy have been fruitfully compared to the Stoics by scholars such as Wolfson and DeBrabander. In a review of DeBrabander’s book on Spinoza and the Stoics, though, Theo Verbeek notes that ‘over the centuries Stoicism has proved to be a very attractive partner for many other traditions’ — a point that will be very important in this essay. Many philosophers, working in radically disparate traditions and frameworks, have been able to find some points of fruitful contact with the Stoics.

This extends even to American Transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in ‘Self-Reliance,’ opines that young men are told that if they fail early in life, they are ruined. But Emerson says that these young men need to learn that this is not how life really works — you have not one chance, but a hundred chances. You must throw yourself at various problems and find a way to persevere. He concludes this passage with a brief meditation on Stoicism:

Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank and revere him, — and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history

Tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves — this is, I think, the lesson that draws so many to Stoicism today. It is too easy to feel as if you are being tossed about by the world, that you have no control. And in some ways, the Stoics agree! But they say: you always have some sphere of control. Occupy yourself with that sphere and you will be happy. All else can be ignored.

This sounds a lot like the movement I’ve been calling Modern Stoicism. It is wildly popular, selling millions of books and gaining millions of views online, and in some ways it resembles what Emerson is doing in his essay. Emerson isn’t concerned with the metaphysical and dialectical framework which gave rise to Stoic ethics, which made those ethics make sense. Neither is Modern Stoicism.

Modern Stoicism – taken as a whole, beyond the writings of any figures named in this essay – has become a very silly project. The proliferation of AI-generated Stoic bodybuilders telling you that you need to grind, the way that any source of wisdom is quickly rebranded as ‘Stoic’ because that word is clickable, the total disinterest in questions of how the world works (what Stoics would have called physics) or how our minds work (which could have been called logic) — all of this adds up to a strange mishmash views, trends, and tendencies that, while initially compelling, don’t hold up to scrutiny.

The more academic defenders of Modern Stoicism are usually quick to insist that the sort of Stoicism content you find online – let’s call it Stoic Slop – isn’t ‘real’ Stoicism. Stoicism has very little to do with adopting a grindset, becoming wealthy, finding a way to become more attractive to women. Stoic Slop takes all the goods of the world, all the things people already value, and finds a way to make it seem noble by invoking the name of the Stoics. And so, I do think that the more academic Modern Stoics have a good point here.

But implicitly, they are saying something. That isn’t real Stoicism…but what I’m talking about is. And here I think that we have a problem. Because the Modern Stoicism, so far as I can tell from the books I’ve read, is a radically different philosophy than ancient Stoicism. It is so distinct that I would argue that it needs to always be qualified with a prefix, like Neo-Stoicism or Modern Stoicism, or else we run the risk of ignoring the very real differences between it and its ancient inspiration.

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The founder of Stoicism is a figure known as Zeno of Citium. Most of what we know about Zeno comes from a third-century text called Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers. Zeno’s philosophical career doesn’t begin in earnest until he loses his livelihood in a shipwreck, but the origins of it can be traced to a visit to the Oracle of Delphi. He asked the oracle how he could live the best life, and the oracle told him to “take on the complexion of the dead.” Zeno took this to mean that he should read ancient authors. After surviving a shipwreck, Zeno traveled to Athens – really the center of the philosophical world – and wanted to find a teacher like Socrates. The only problem is that Socrates had been dead for over 100 years at that point. But Zeno did find a teacher — the Cynic philosopher Crates. And so Zeno begins to study philosophy.

Like many other ancient philosophers, Zeno founded a school. This school would meet under a particular porch, a stoa, from which the movement’s name is derived. Eventually, Cleanthes would succeed Zeno as head of the Stoa, and he would later be followed by Chrysippus, perhaps the most important of the early Stoics. We have almost none of Chryssipus’ writing except in fragments, but through the writings of other ancient authors we do know that Chryssipus is the philosopher responsible for systematizing Stoicism, making it into a comprehensive philosophy for life, the universe, and everything.

Part of this systemization was the division of philosophy into three domains: physics, logic, and ethics. Diogenes Laertius, author of Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers, describes the Stoic view of philosophy like a field: the wall around the field is logic, the land and trees are physics, and the the fruit of the field is ethics.

Stoic metaphysics is corporealist: in other words, everything that exists has a body. Even the soul has a body; I do not mean here that a soul has a body in the sense that a Christian might now mean it, where the immaterial soul ‘has’ its physical body to which it is joined. The claim here is that the soul has a body of its own.

But the most crucial element of Stoic physics is its teaching about the universe as a whole. The universe is governed by God. This is, again, quite different from the Christian meaning of this. Rather, ‘the Stoic God is…immanent throughout the cosmos and directs its development down to the smallest detail,’ we read in a recent entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. That article continues:

This makes cosmic nature and all its parts inherently governed by a rational force. God and divine actions are not, like the gods of Greek Mythology, random and unpredictable. It is rather orderly, rational, and providential.

The Stoics saw themselves as inhabiting a orderly, rational, and providential cosmos. The goal of Stoic logic was to understand this orderly, rational, and providential cosmos and, thus, to understand one’s place in it.

It would be a mistake to present Stoicism as totally monolithic. It was, and in some ways still is, a living system — responding to the Academics, and especially the skeptics, later Stoics would revise their teachings. This is the normal course of philosophical progress, and it is a credit, not a detriment, to Stoicism that its leaders and practitioners did not dogmatically insist on the truth of the teachings handed down to them. But as we will see, this flexibility can also make it difficult to say whether or not a principle, or a new movement, is ‘really’ Stoicism.

At the root of the problem is something contemporary philosophers like to call the problem of vagueness. Upon reflection, we find that many things in the world do not have clear-cut boundaries; it is impossible to recognize the point where, say, the physical stuff that makes up Kilimanjaro ends and the plains around it begins. Any precise point will be hopelessly arbitrary. But from this we do not conclude that Kilimanjaro extends all across the entire physical universe, or even the continent of Africa. We cannot determine the precise boundaries of Kilimanjaro, or any physical thing, but we know that it must end somewhere.

The same can be said for philosophical systems. Some will insist on a strict identification of a system with all and only the teachings of its founder. This provides us with a convenient way of delineating between systems, but it has the unfortunate consequence of saying that there were no Stoics beyonds Zeno, no Kantians beyond Kant, and so on. We lose the ability to talk about systems as they move and progress through time. Stoicism, as a teaching that moved and progressed through time, needs a more flexible meta-framework for us to understand it. But this comes with a cost: determining the precise boundaries of Stoicism is likely impossible.

But let’s go back to the issue of providence in Stoicism — and we’ll do that by looking at how Marcus Aurelius depends on this in some parts of the Meditations.

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When Robin Waterfield introduces the Meditations, he writes:

Marcus was certainly familiar with aspects of physics and logic, enough to ground and give a Stoic flavor to his ethics, but it is also clear that he was not very interested in them in themselves. He was more interested in their implications for the daily practice of self-improvement. There are no extended discussions of logical or physical matters in Meditations, as there occasionally are of ethical matters. You can believe in the perfection of the universe, say, and the importance of that for you personally, without holding a theory about how exactly it came to be so. You trust the greater intellects that have handed down the idea.

There are two important take-aways from this passage.

First, we see that by the time Stoicism has filtered through the Roman empire, to the point where the emperor of Rome could be a student of this philosophy, there has been a shift in emphasis. The ethical dimension of Stoicism is given priority, and we see this throughout the Meditations. Marcus is primarily interested in Stoicism for its therapeutic dimensions. He is looking for ways to take the wisdom of the tradition and apply it to his own life, and so much of the writing in the Meditations is concerned with the practical upshot of Stoicism for Marcus in his particular time, place, and role.

But it would be a mistake to say that Marcus is not interested in the physics and logic and Stoicism. He still takes it to be a critical part of this philosophy. The shift is one of approach, not of doctrine. Glossing Waterfield: Marcus endorses the perfection of the universe but does not critically examine this belief. He takes it on the authority of the ‘greater intellects that have handed down the idea.’

We see this in the second notebook, particular §3. At the end of that section, Marcus chastises himself to ‘get over [his] thirst for books,’ which I take to be an expression of Waterfield’s claim that he is content to accept certain doctrines on authority. The doctrine in question is the doctrine of the providence of the universe:

The gods’ works are filled with providence; the works of fortune aren’t independent of nature or of the interlacing and intertwining of things under the direction of providence. It is the source of everything, including necessity and the well-being of the universe, the whole of which you are a part. What is good for every part of nature is what is supplied by the nature of the whole and what preserves the whole; and what preserves the whole is the changing of the compounds no less than the changing of the physical elements. Be content with these doctrines; make them your constant guiding principles.

What is good for every part of nature is what is supplied by the nature of the whole and what preserves the whole, Marcus writes. Elsewhere – for instance in §6.54 – Marcus will say that something which is not good for the whole cannot be good for the parts; the example he uses in that particular passage is the well-being of a beehive. And in §10.36, he revisits this line of thought:

In a good death, the soul slips easily out of the body, and that should be how you withdraw from them too. After all, it was nature that bound and joined you to them, and is now breaking the connection. It’s true that I’m being separated from people who are, in a sense, my relatives, but I leave without resisting and without needing to be forced, because death too is one of the things that is in accord with nature.

Death is one of those events which we pre-critically assume will be bad. It is piece of commonsense – remarkably consistent throughout history – that death is bad, particularly for the one who dies.² Seneca says that dying is a duty, and Marcus does not seem to reject the idea. But he needs some way to make sense of why death is not bad. And this seems to be his reasoning:

1. The universe is providentially ordered. Everything that happens is for the benefit of the whole.

2. Death is a natural process, part of the ordinary working of the universe.

3. Therefore, it is good, as it works for the benefit of the whole.

This reasoning, of course, is only implicit in the passage. But this is what motivates the conclusion, especially in light of the final remark that ‘death…is in accord with nature.’ For Marcus, something being natural seems to be more than just ‘as it is.’ For something to be natural is for it to be in accord with the providence of the universe.

Recall the first passage that we cited in this section, where Marcus writes that ‘what preserves the whole is the changing of the compounds no less than the changing of the physical elements.’ The well-being of the universe necessitates that the elements and compounds which make up the universe change; one of the ways that these elements and compounds change is through death. This is a natural process – that is, not a denial or rejection of the natural order of things – and so it cannot be bad. In fact, it must be good. Other forms of bodily harm would likely be included in this explanation. Sickness, injury, maiming — all of these events, we can say very broadly, happen for a reason. The reason is the preservation of the whole.

While Marcus may not be critically examining the Stoic doctrine of providence, he is more than happy to appeal to it in his therapeutic reasoning. What we find again and again in the Meditations is someone who is teaching himself to trust the universe, to trust that all things work out for the good. This is what makes it easy for him to endure hardships, even the inevitability of death.

I think we’ve arrived at the critical point, now. Classical Stoicism, even in its shifting forms throughout history, relied on a doctrine of providence as a source of comfort. Enduring hardships became easier because one could always adopt the ‘point of view of the universe’ as a reminder that the ills that would befall you as an individual were merely apparent; individual harms, as a whole, were illusory, and when one could adopt the point of view of the universe, one would see that they actually worked for the benefit of the whole.

The question, then, is this: what happens to Stoicism when you abandon this view?

Well, we’ve seen what happens. What I have just described is Modern Stoicism. It is Stoicism without a doctrine of providence — either because this is seen as unnecessary, inconsistent with the scientific picture of the universe, or simply an historical curiosity.

Speaking with Massimo Pigliucci, who generously agreed to be interviewed for my YouTube channel several years ago, he told me that this was his takeaway from Stoicism: that he would need to learn to endure whatever happened. This may be a wise and practical takeaway of Stoicism in the modern age, but it is a very different takeaway than the one offered by the full Stoic worldview.

My contention is that classical Stoicism did not only offer a plan for enduring hardships; it also offered a source of solace for its practitioners. Even if one could not see how some hardship was, in fact, good, one could take comfort in knowing that the universe was operating in such a way that all things were good — and what is good for the whole must be good for the parts.

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I can imagine a number of objections at this point:

1. Belief in providence is a false belief. Thus, it is good that Modern Stoics do not endorse it. Any Stoicism worth having must be one that does not rely on false metaphysical views.

2. Belief in providence was never critical to the main ethical dimensions of Stoicism. Thus, Modern Stoicism can reject this belief while maintaining most of, if not all, of the ethical lessons of Stoicism — and those lessons do, in fact, help you live a better life.

Let’s grant the main claim of (1) for a moment and assume that there is nothing like universal providence. If that’s right, then I agree that we should reject it — I believe that we should strive to only have true beliefs, after all. But the objection as I have characterized it says significantly more than just ‘Providence is false, so let’s reject belief.’ Implicitly, this objection ventures into something like (2): that Stoic ethics is worth preserving even when you give up on providence.

And that’s simply not true. While particular Stoic lessons, like focusing on what you can control, will still be valuable,³ the main Stoic upshot (that only virtue matters, and that all else falls under ‘preferred indifferents’) seems unsupported. After all, virtue is understood as acting in accord with nature, and we have justification for the goodness of virtue, then, because we believe that nature is given to us by the universe which works toward the good. While I believe talk of virtue is salvageable even if one rejects the Stoic view of the cosmos, I think the main difficulty is in believing that nothing else matters. We can only endorse this, I submit, if we believe that what actually matters is the fact that universe is working toward the good. And then, we’re back to the doctrine of providence.

It does, in fact, matter if someone is suffering; it does, in fact, matter if one has access to some sources of pleasure; it does, in fact, matter when a loved one dies. Having some material goods, having loving relationships, having bodily health — all of these contribute to living a good life. And suddenly, we’re out of the realm of hard-nosed Stoicism.

In fact, we’re significantly closer to the picture of the good life that is given to us in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

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There is another option, of course, one which I’ll only briefly mention. I was talking with Joseph Folley last week, and this very issue came up. The conclusion we both tentatively reached was that the Stoic emphasis on accepting things as they are, but absent a belief in the providence of the universe, may lead you in a more Nietzschean direction. For Nietzsche, it is critically important that one accept fate — not a fate dictated by the gods or the rational mind of the universe, but fate understood simply as things happen.

Nietzsche writes of this in a passage in The Gay Science:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

If faced with this demon, we are forced to make a choice: we can gnash our teeth, or we can simply accept that the universe will eternally recur, with us experiencing this same life over and over. Accepting is the stronger path. But this ‘the heaviest weight’ — there is no solace found here.

Nietzsche believed that only he saw how radical the death of God really was. In a world where God has become ‘literally unbelievable,’ traditional morality would collapse. Those who think that traditional morality will remain intact after the death of God have not appreciated just how radical this metaphysical transformation is. And more and more, I think Nietzsche is correct about a general point: one’s metaphysical picture of the world will radically transform what one considers to be right action. Perhaps this, then, is the critical error of Modern Stoicism: that they are willing to accept the death of providence (where providence has become ‘literally unbelievable’) but are not willing to consider that this is going to radically transform the ethical life.

Without the metaphysics of classical Stoicism, we’re forced to look for new ethical guides. Maybe the question is: do we pick Aristotle or Nietzsche?

1. As will become clear later, I take Modern Stoicism to be the contemporary appropriation of Stoic ethics without assuming – and sometimes explicitly rejecting – the standard Stoic logic and physics.

2. Socrates does not believe this, but he takes this to be a consequence of his philosophy. Since the soul is immortal, we know that death is not the end, and the well-being of our souls if infinitely more important than the well-being of our bodies. His denial of the badness of death is a rejection of the commonsense view.

3. Though I do not believe in Epictetus’ particular division of what is up to us and what is beyond our control. Epictetus seems to think that we can control our emotions at any time. Simply put, I think that is a false empirical claim.