Stoicism and the Art of Happiness: Practical wisdom for everyday life

I care only for what is my own, what is not subject to hindrance, what is by nature free. This, which is the true nature of the good, I have; but let everything else be as God has granted, it makes no difference to me. (Epictetus, Discourses, 4.13)

All that is in accord with you is in accord with me, O World! Nothing which occurs at the right time for you comes too soon or too late for me. All that your seasons produce, O Nature, is fruit for me. It is from you that all things come; all things are within you, and all things move towards you. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.23)

Self-assessment: Stoic attitudes and the discipline of desire

Before reading this chapter, rate how strongly you agree with the following statements, using the five-point (1–5) scale below, and then re-rate your attitudes once you’ve read and digested the contents.

1. Strongly disagree, 2. Disagree, 3. Neither agree nor disagree, 4. Agree, 5. Strongly agree

1 ‘All things are determined by strict causal necessity, including my own actions.’

2 ‘When we ground our attention in the ‘here and now’, and take things one step at a time, hardships often becomes easier to endure.’

3 ‘Rather than seeking for events beyond our control to happen as we wish, we should wish them to happen as they do.’

What is the discipline of desire?

Why should we ‘accept’ whatever befalls us in life and what did the Stoics mean by this? What’s the difference between this and just ‘giving up’ and resigning ourselves passively to bad things? These questions are addressed by the first of Epictetus’ three Stoic disciplines, the discipline of desire (orexis) and aversion (ekklisis). It might also be described as the discipline or therapy of the ‘passions’ because it involves the prevention or remedy of unhealthy desires and irrational fears. We’ll often refer to it therefore as the ‘discipline of desire’ or ‘therapy of the passions’.

According to Epictetus, the goal of this discipline is not to be frustrated in our desires nor to fall into what we would avoid, our aversions, and this is achieved by learning to embrace our fate with equanimity. This philosophical attitude towards events is encapsulated in one of the Stoic Handbook’s most striking and important maxims:

Seek not for events to happen as you wish but rather wish for events to happen as they do and your life will go smoothly. (Encheiridion, 8)

This passage seems to be alluding to the serenely ‘smooth flowing’ life that Zeno originally defined as the goal of Stoicism, which is one sense of ‘living in agreement with Nature’. The discipline of desire is therefore particularly associated with the achievement of serenity, which means overcoming emotional suffering (apatheia). This Stoic discipline, in particular, appears closely related to Cynicism, with its emphasis on self-mastery.

Hadot interprets it as the virtue of living in harmony with the whole of Nature, through Stoic acceptance. Marcus says that the discipline has to do with Epictetus’ advice to abstain completely from desires and fear none of the things that are not ‘up to us’, or within our control. It seems sure to be related, therefore, to Epictetus’ famous slogan ‘endure and renounce’. He meant that novice Stoics should begin by training themselves each day:

1 To endure what they irrationally fear, or find aversive, with courage and perseverance.

2 To renounce, or abstain from, what they irrationally crave, through discretion and self-discipline.

The majority of people crave sensory pleasure, health, wealth, reputation, and other ‘indifferent’ things, which they naively judge to be intrinsically ‘good’ and necessary for Happiness. They fear and avoid their opposites: physical pain and discomfort, sickness, poverty and ridicule. The desire for wealth and fear of death are sometimes portrayed as the most important passions to overcome. Seneca puts this in striking language when he says the promise of philosophy is that the glitter of gold shall no more dazzle our eyes than the flash of a sword, and that we may thereby ‘trample with great courage on what all men desire and fear’ (Letters, 48).

As we’ve seen, the Cynics adopted a very austere lifestyle, voluntarily embracing complete poverty, and extreme physical hardship. Although, the Stoics thought this was admirable, perhaps even a ‘short-cut to virtue’, they felt it wasn’t necessary or appropriate for most people. They were also concerned that some Cynic practices become problematic when done for show, and so Epictetus counsels his students to conceal certain aspects of their training, where possible, from others. From the Stoic perspective, moreover, we don’t need to actually renounce all ‘indifferent’ things completely, just as long as we remain emotionally detached from them.

Epictetus doesn’t mean therefore that we should torture ourselves. It’s more that if we want to live wisely, we need to strengthen our self-control, by training ourselves, in a reasonable manner, to endure hardship and renounce pleasures that are unhealthy or to which we’re overly-attached. However, some Stoics, such as Seneca, do recommend that we periodically practise living as simply as possible and enduring a tougher lifestyle, sleeping on a camping mat, drinking only water, and eating only the most basic food, to build our endurance and self-control. He advises his Stoic student to spend three to four days or more a month living as if impoverished, reducing things to ‘a real straw mattress and soldier’s blanket and hard rough bread’ (Letters, 18). In the ancient world, of course, many people lived like that already, and soldiers on campaign presumably endured such conditions. If that still sounds self-punitive, consider that for modern Stoics, simply engaging in physical exercise, sticking to a healthy diet, or going camping for a week in a tent, might provide fairly ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ ways of developing endurance and abstinence.

Epictetus also stresses that this first discipline is the most important for new students of Stoicism because it deals with the passions, which cause turmoil when we perceive ourselves to have suffered a misfortune because our desires or aversions conflict with our fate. We can’t think clearly when in the grip of violent desires or emotions so, of course, practical philosophy has to begin with a kind of therapy of the passions, to prepare the ground for training in Ethics and subsequently Logic.

Students in Epictetus’ school were therefore advised to set aside the other two disciplines until they’d made progress with the discipline of desire. As noted earlier, this echoes the philosophical career of Zeno who began as a Cynic, focused almost exclusively on gaining self-mastery. The fact we’re troubled and life doesn’t go smoothly, because of our upsetting desires and emotions, is a warning sign that we haven’t completely digested the basic doctrine of Stoic Ethics: that virtue is the only true good and what is not ‘up to us’ is ultimately indifferent. As long as I have the sense that things are going against me, that I’m failing to get what I desire or getting things I’m averse to, that shows that I’m enslaved to my passions and still barely a novice. The Sage, by contrast, has perfect freedom because he only desires what is within his control, and so he’s never thwarted, and his life goes smoothly.

Hadot called the goal of this preliminary discipline ‘amor fati’, meaning loving acceptance of your fate – a phrase he borrows from the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche wrote the famous maxim: ‘From the military school of life – what does not kill me can only make me stronger’, which also sounds a lot like a description that fits the Stoic discipline of desire. To live in harmony with one’s fate in this way is to cease being alienated from Nature as a whole, and to become a true ‘Citizen of the Cosmos’.

Someone who follows the discipline of desire, therefore, and accepts the role life has assigned him is ‘no longer a stranger in his homeland’ but rather ‘a man worthy of the world which has created him’ (Meditations, 12.1). Whether we realize it or not, we are all living out the lives fated for us, either willingly or unwillingly. Zeno illustrated this with a striking metaphor: the wise man is like a dog tethered to a cart, running alongside and smoothly keeping pace with it, whereas a foolish man is like a dog that struggles against the leash but finds himself dragged alongside the cart anyway. Seneca likewise said that Zeus is like a general and mankind his army, we must follow his lead whether we like it or not, but ‘it is a bad soldier who follows his commander grumbling and groaning’ (Letters, 108).

Another metaphor attributed to Chrysippus was that human life is like the foot of someone walking through mud, presumably barefoot or in open sandals. If the foot had a mind of its own and understood its function in life then it would willingly accept its fate, voluntarily plunging itself again and again towards the muddy ground, smoothly and without hesitation. Finally, the famous Hymn to Zeus written by Cleanthes said: ‘The willing are led by fate, the reluctant dragged’. Epictetus encouraged his students to contemplate the words of this prayer regularly. However, this philosophical acceptance does not mean passive resignation, and a Stoic who finds herself in an abusive relationship would not be expected to put up with it. We’ll learn more about the Stoic discipline of action later but, in a nutshell, Stoics would naturally ‘prefer’ to leave abusive or unhealthy situations, and take appropriate action to protect themselves, because their future is uncertain. However, once something unpleasant has actually happened, wisdom consists in accepting the reality of events, without frustrating ourselves by wishing the past could be different.

As we’ll see, the ‘discipline of desire’, or ‘therapy of the passions’, is intimately related to Stoic Physics. At first, this might seem odd, but there are many examples of contemplative exercises in the Stoic literature, which are apparently based on natural philosophy and theology and yet play an important role in shaping our desires and aversions. Indeed the discipline of desire may have encompassed several important psychological exercises, related to Stoic Physics:

1 Focusing attention on the ‘here and now’ as the locus of our control and therefore of the chief good.

2 ‘Physical definition’ of external events and the ‘method of division’ or analysis into elements.

3 Accepting events as determined by causal necessity or fate, or

alternatively greeting them with rational joy as being the Will of God.

4 ‘The view from above’ and related cosmological meditations.

5 Contemplation of the homogeneity (‘sameness’) and impermanence of all external things.

6 Perhaps also contemplation of the ‘eternal recurrence’ of all things, as found in Nietzsche.

We’ll return to some of these exercises later, because they are related to more complex cosmological exercises. However, in this chapter, we’ll focus the key Stoic practices of contemplating the ‘here and now’ and practising amor fati by willingly accepting one’s fate as determined by causal necessity.

Case study: Zeno’s Shipwreck

Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was a Phoenician merchant from the port of Citium in Cyprus. When he was aged thirty, so the story goes, he was travelling from Phoenicia to the Greek port of Piraeus with a cargo of highly-valuable purple dye (porphura), made from the murex sea snail, when he was shipwrecked, and lost all of his wealth. He wound up in Athens where he became a follower of the famous Cynic Crates and spent the next twenty years studying under some of the leading philosophers of the period. Rather than seeing his loss as a catastrophe, therefore, we’re told he said ‘It is well done of thee, Fortune, thus to drive me to philosophy’ and even joked: ‘I have had a good voyage this time, now that I have been shipwrecked’(Lives, 7.4-5). For the Stoics, moral wisdom of the kind sought by Socrates and Zeno is priceless, and incomparably more valuable than even the greatest fortune.

Some ancient authors disputed this story but, whether it’s historically accurate or not, what matters is perhaps the example it provides of an absolute ‘love of wisdom’ and the corresponding attitude of philosophical indifference to loss or external ‘misfortune’. The Cynics lived somewhat like beggars so it’s possible that having lost a fortune at sea, Zeno found it natural to adopt their simple life, devoid of any possessions except a staff, a cloak, and a knapsack for food. As the Cynics used to say, poverty may be a better teacher of philosophy than books or lectures.

Henceforth, the metaphor of a ship on troubled seas was commonly employed in Stoic literature to symbolize the challenge of facing adversity in life. For example, alluding to a seemingly ruinous shipwreck like the one suffered by Zeno, Epictetus says to his students that they should train themselves to respond to impressions such as, ‘Your ship is lost’ by simply stating ‘Your ship is lost’ in a matter-of-fact way without adding any value judgement or complaining that life's not fair. Even if the metaphorical ‘waves’ of fortune can sweep away our body and all our possessions, they can never overcome and shipwreck the ruling faculty of our mind, the seat of wisdom and virtue, unless we allow them to do so.

Key idea: Freewill and determinism (compatibilism)

Cicero says the Stoics did not mean anything remotely superstitious by the term ‘fate’ but rather a concept in natural philosophy or ‘Physics’. Stoic ‘fate’ is basically the sequence or chain of causation, which produces everything in the universe: ‘nothing has happened which was not going to be, and likewise nothing is going to be of which Nature does not contain causes working to bring that very thing about’ (On Divination, 1.125–6). In fact, like most modern philosophers, the Stoics were technically philosophical ‘compatibilists’. They believed that all events in life are rigidly determined by a ‘string of causes’, going back to the start of the universe, but that this is totally compatible with the facts of human freedom.

This might seem puzzling to many people, the popular assumption being that freewill and determinism are incompatible but it's argued that this is based on a misunderstanding. When we speak about someone having ‘freedom’ in daily life we normally just mean that nothing obstructs them from acting in accord with their own desires. There’s arguably no logical inconsistency between that everyday notion of ‘freedom’ and the belief that our character and desires are themselves determined by prior causes.

It’s only when we go further and try to claim that we should be not only ‘free to’ act but ‘free from’ prior causes that we introduce the problematic and arguably incoherent notion of metaphysical freewill, which is something the Stoics would reject. The type of ‘freedom’ the Stoics were concerned with is the type that comes from practical discipline, or developing sufficient endurance and restraint to overcome domination by our irrational passions.

Try it now: Dwelling in the ‘here and now’

We’ll be looking at other exercises later that work with ‘mindfulness’ and attention to the ‘here and now’ in more depth. However, for now, just begin experimenting with greater attention to the present moment in the following ways:

✽ Throughout the day, practise bringing your attention back to the present moment, rather than allowing it to wander off into daydreams, rumination about the past, or worry about the future.

✽ If you have to think about something else, that’s okay, but try to keep one eye on the present moment, by noticing how you’re using your body and mind – try to be aware of each second that passes.

✽ If it helps, imagine that you’re seeing the world for the first time, or that this is your last day of life, and concentrate your attention on how you actually think and act, from moment to moment.

✽ Remind yourself that the past and future are ‘indifferent’ to you, and that the supreme good, and eudaimonia, can only exist within you, right now, in the present moment.

Start by making the effort to spend more of your day being aware of the ‘here and now’, particularly your own thoughts and actions. Evaluate this process, though. What are the ‘pros and cons’ of doing this? How could you make more of the advantages and deal with or prevent any perceived disadvantages?

Remember this: The ‘Lazy Argument’

The majority of people respond to the Stoic theory of determinism –the idea that absolutely everything in life necessarily happens as it does – by saying ‘What’s the point doing anything then, if everything is determined?’ Chrysippus dismissed this as a crude logical fallacy called ‘The Lazy Argument’ (argos logos) because it both justifies being lazy and, arguably, involves lazy thinking. Events are not determined to happen in a particular way, regardless of what you do, but rather along with what you do. Your own thoughts and actions are necessitated as part of the whole ‘string of causes’ that forms the universe. The outcome of events still often depends on your actions, though.

Things are only ‘fated’ as a consequence of the causes that precede them, in the way a match would be bound to ignite when you strike it, if nothing prevents that happening. The Stoics mean that fate works ‘through’ us, so that even if there are things in life that seem to require great effort on our part to achieve, whether or not we make the effort is fated along with the outcome. You’re reading these words, according to the Stoics, because causal necessity has brought you to this specific point.

What happens next will depend, in part, on what you choose to do next because you are a tiny but essential cog in the vast machinery of the universe. However, your choices themselves are the consequences of a massive string of causation, set in motion countless billions of years before you were even born, at the beginning of the universe.

Contemplating the ‘here and now’

In his scholarly analysis of the Meditations, Hadot refers to a scene in the film The Dead Poets Society (1989) where Robin Williams’ character, a teacher of English literature, makes his students closely observe an old photograph showing a group of the school’s former pupils, long-since deceased (Hadot, 1998, p. 171). He asks one of them to read aloud the poem ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’ (1648) by Robert Herrick, which was inspired by the philosophical themes of transience and mortality in ancient Roman poetry:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today,

Tomorrow will be dying.

He compares this to the saying Carpe diem (‘Seize the day!’), a quote from Horace, a Roman poet who drew upon both Stoicism and Epicureanism. The contemplation of deceased generations and the transience of one’s own life was a psychological strategy commonly employed by Hellenistic philosophers and poets to encourage us to value the present moment or ‘here and now’. Marcus Aurelius, for instance, tells himself to picture the court of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, with all of his generals and advisors, and contemplate how long they have all been equally dead and gone.

This emphasis on the ‘here and now’ was an important psychological exercise in Stoicism, particularly in Marcus’ Meditations. It relates to all three Stoic disciplines as only our current judgements, desires, and actions, are truly ‘up to us’ at any given moment.

Everything other than its own activity is indifferent to the faculty of thought. Everything that is its own activity, however, is within its power. Moreover, even among these latter activities the faculty of thought concerns itself only about the present; for even its past or future activities are now indifferent to it. (Meditations, 6.32)

However, the concept of the ‘here and now’ seems to be especially linked to Stoic Physics and our relationship with Nature. Two obvious benefits follow from the Stoic focus on the present moment:

1 Hardships become more bearable, being reduced to a succession of fleeting moments, making it easier to accept our fate.

2 Greater mindfulness is brought to the (virtuous or vicious) quality of our own current actions.

Marcus explicitly describes this first method, saying: ‘remind yourself that it is not the future nor the past, which weighs upon you, but always the present and this present will seem smaller to you if you circumscribe it by defining and isolating it’ (Meditations, 8.36). That’s a bit like saying: ‘I just need to get through this one moment at a time.’ By focusing on what’s present to us rather than worrying about the future, we can take things step by step, and overcome obstacles that might otherwise seem overwhelming.

The Stoic strategy of seeing the present moment in isolation, in this way, appears to be closely related to another technique, which Hadot called ‘Physical Definition’. This involves cultivating the calm detachment of a natural philosopher or scientist. We are to practise describing an object or event purely in terms of its objective qualities, stripped of any emotive rhetoric or value judgements, to arrive at an ‘objective representation’ (phantasia katalêptikê). (We discuss this elsewhere in relation to the ‘discipline of judgement’.) However, especially in the writings of Marcus Aurelius, this may also involve a kind of method of division, which I call 'Depreciation by Analysis'. The event being broken down and calmly dissected into its individual components or aspects.

This is another important respect in which Stoic Physics evolved into a sort of psychological therapy. For example, Marcus notes that if we dissect a seductive dance or piece of music into its individual components, in this spirit of objective analysis, it loses its power to charm our minds. When we find ourselves overwhelmed by worry or rumination we should, likewise, face individual aspects of events one at a time, viewing them more objectively. This resembles the attitude of an ancient natural philosopher or the rational detachment and objectivity prized by modern scientists. Indeed, we should head immediately for the parts of any process, except virtue and other goods, and divide them up until we get to the point where we can look down on things in a detached manner.

The second benefit of grounding one’s attention in the present moment is that it intensifies the experience of self-awareness. Otherwise, we tend to become carried away by our thoughts about the past or future, and lose touch with the present moment. Seneca describes this in an extraordinary passage, in which he astutely observes that most human suffering relates to rumination about the past or worry about the future, and that nobody confines his concern to the present moment.

Wild beasts run away from dangers when they see them.

Once they have escaped, they are free of anxiety. But we are tormented by both the future and the past. (Letters, 5)

For Stoics, the good can only exist in the ‘here and now’ because that’s where our voluntary actions originate. Yet everything in life conspires to make our thoughts wander from their own source. The more this happens the less mindful and more mindless we become. The majority of people try to seek Happiness in a roundabout way, by means of external things they hope to obtain in the future. By contrast, Stoics try to focus attention on becoming good right now, in the present moment, because that is the direct and only route to eudaimonia. By grounding our attention in the here and now, undistracted by the past or future, we can properly confront the challenge of accepting ‘indifferent’ things with equanimity, while cultivating wisdom and justice in our actions. Stoic therapy of the passions therefore requires continual and intense attention to our moment-by-moment experience.

Key idea: The ‘here and now’

Ancient Stoicism was very explicitly a here and now philosophy, although many people today associate this notion more with Oriental philosophies, particularly Buddhism. (The English expression ‘here and now’ actually comes from a Latin figure of speech: hic et nunc.) Living centred in the present moment is a practice emphasized throughout Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. For Stoics, the past and future are ‘indifferent’ because they’re not under our control, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ can only truly reside in the present moment. We humans surpass other animals in our ability, through language and reason, to recall the past or plan for the future. However, doing so leads us to neglect the seat of our volition in the present moment, where virtue potentially originates.

Stoics therefore train themselves to focus attention on the present moment, often by reminding themselves that they could potentially die the following day and should therefore ‘seize the day’ and seek to flourish and attain Happiness in the ‘here and now’. In other words, the most important thing in the universe is situated within you, right here in the present moment.

Try it now: Divide and conquer

Try using this exercise with several different situations to see if you can alter your emotional response by dissecting things into their component parts, splitting your experience up, and viewing it in a more detached way.

1 Close your eyes and spend a few minutes picturing a recent situation in which you felt strong desires or emotions, which you judge it would be rational and healthy to change.

2 Take time to describe events to yourself verbally, without any value judgements, inferences or emotive language; instead, imagine you’re like a scientist making notes on what you can observe about the situation, from a detached and impartial perspective.

3 Divide the situation into its component parts and try to think of them one by one, separately from each other, breaking things down into their individual elements; for example, the smell of some food, the different ingredients on the plate, the colours, etc.

4 Consider each of these elements in turn, apart from the others, and ask yourself in response to each one: ‘Does this really justify those feelings?’

5 Focus on accepting each element as ‘indifferent’, completely irrelevant with regard to eudaimonia.

If the individual components of a situation taken one at a time, independently of one another, are bearable, then why should you be overwhelmed by them taken together? Continue to practise Depreciation by Analysis in this way, breaking things down further if necessary, until it becomes more familiar and habitual to do so.

Remember this: The stoic concept of freedom

It was a famous Stoic ‘paradox’ that the Sage is believed to be absolutely free, even when imprisoned or exiled by a powerful tyrant. This was often put to the test because ancient philosophers were quite frequently imprisoned, exiled or even executed! The freedom of the truly wise man consists in following his own rational nature, by doing what is within his control in accord with wisdom and virtue. His mind is like a blazing fire, which consumes anything cast into it. Every obstacle to his actions just becomes an opportunity for him to exhibit magnanimity and the other virtues. He only wants to live wisely, adapting to events in a manner harmonious with reason, and nothing can prevent him from doing this. What stands in the way becomes the way. Just another opportunity to exercise virtue, which is all he really wants to do in life.

According to the Stoics therefore a man is free if his desires are not thwarted. However, if we only desire what is within our control, then we can never be frustrated, and our freedom is guaranteed regardless of circumstances. By contrast, if we desire things which are potentially outside our control, then we become slaves to fortune and to our passions. Perhaps worse, if someone else controls what we desire, then we effectively become enslaved to that person. The Stoics liked to discuss examples of wise men defying tyrants. The majority of people can be controlled by tyrants who may be able to threaten their lives or seize their property, the things they desire to keep. However, the perfect Sage views these as ‘indifferent’, and so the tyrant can lay his hands on nothing that the Sage desires, nor expose him to anything he fears.

Loving your fate and joyful acceptance

Epictetus actually describes a three-stage process to his students, which relates to the discipline of desire. He begins by emphasizing the need for Stoics to train themselves rigorously to adhere to their principles, having certain phrases constantly ready-to-hand day and night. These should be written down, read over, analysed and discussed, until they have been memorized and understood. We should then rehearse all the possible catastrophes that can befall us in life, things the majority of people fear, and prepare for them in advance.

Then, if one of those things happens which are called ‘undesirable’, immediately the thought that it was not unexpected will be the first thing to lighten the burden. For in every case it is a great help to be able to say, ‘I knew the son whom I had begotten was mortal.’ [A famous saying, attributed to Xenophon.] For that is what you will say, and likewise, ‘I knew that I was mortal’, ‘I knew that I was vulnerable to exile’, ‘I knew that I might be sent off to prison.’ (Discourses, 3.24)

We discuss the importance Stoics place on anticipating these things at length in the chapter on ‘premeditation of adversity’ but for now let’s consider what Epictetus tells his students they should do when the anticipated event actually happens. There are three steps he recommends:

1 Tell yourself that you have already anticipated that this particular misfortune might happen to you, e.g. ‘I knew that my son was mortal.’

2 Remind yourself that what is not up to you is therefore ‘indifferent’ with regard to eudaimonia, e.g., ‘This is external therefore it does not truly harm me.’

3 Epictetus says the third step is the ‘most decisive’: Tell yourself that it was therefore sent to you as fated by Nature or the Will of God and determined by the string of causes that constitutes the whole, e.g, ‘If this is the will of Nature then so be it.’

The Stoics undoubtedly emphasize the goal of cultivating ‘indifference to indifferent things’ and yet they also talk about greeting all external events with piety or even joy – which seems like a puzzling contradiction. Hadot explains this as follows:

Since such an [external] event does not depend upon me, in itself it is indifferent, and we might therefore expect the Stoic to greet it with indifference. Indifference, however, does not mean coldness. On the contrary: since such an event is the expression of the love which the Whole has for itself, and since it is useful for and willed by the Whole, we too must want and love it. In this way, my will shall identify itself with the divine Will which has willed this event to happen. To be indifferent to indifferent things – that is, to things which do not depend on me – in fact means to make no difference between them: it means to love them equally, just as Nature or the Whole produces them with equal love. (Hadot, 1998, p. 142)

Marcus speaks of the need to ‘find satisfaction’ in the external events that befall us, that we should ‘greet them joyfully’, ‘accept them with pleasure’, ‘love’ them and ‘will’ them to happen as determined by our fate. We can compare this to Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati, meaning ‘love of fate’.

My formula for what is great in mankind is amor fati: not to wish for anything other than that which is; whether behind, ahead, or for all eternity. Not just to put up with the inevitable – much less to hide it from oneself, for all idealism is lying to oneself in the face of the necessary – but to love it. (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 10)

Nietzsche said this attitude of amor fati was closely-related to another practise resembling Stoic Physics, the contemplation of the All or the ‘view from above’:

Everything that is necessary, when seen from above and from the perspective of the vast economy of the whole, is in itself equally useful. We must not only put up with it, but love it. […] Amor fati: that is my innermost nature. (Nietzsche contra Wagner, Epilogue)

Elsewhere he said that by making ourselves completely satisfied with anything at all, even one instant, we thereby say ‘Yes’ to the whole of existence and to ourselves, we accept and affirm the whole of eternity in a single timeless action. This perhaps resembles a cryptic remark attributed to Chrysippus: ‘If one has wisdom for one instant, he will be no less happy than he who possesses it for all eternity’ (in Plutarch, On Common Conceptions, 8.1062a).

Key idea: Nietzsche’s amor fati

Pierre Hadot borrows the Latin term amor fati, meaning love of one’s fate, from the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a professor of classical philology, the study of language, and he probably coined this expression himself. Although, the Stoics don’t appear to have used the phrase, Hadot felt it captured their philosophical attitude towards life extremely well.

Of course, Nietzsche’s philosophy is not the same as Stoicism, although we’ll mention a few other similarities in due course. The concept of amor fati encapsulates the Stoic attitude of acceptance fundamental to the discipline of desire. The Sage has a sense of natural ‘piety’ or reverence towards the universe as a whole and, although he does what he judges appropriate in any given situation, sometimes requiring great courage or self-discipline, he nevertheless accepts the outcome with complete equanimity. It seems absurd to say that the Sage would joyfully accept even the death of his child. However, it would probably be more accurate to say that he experiences a kind of joyful acceptance of life as a whole, even if it includes individual events that the majority of people would judge to be ‘bad’ or even ‘catastrophic’.

Try it now: Stoic acceptance exercises

Take a few minutes to try to practise radical acceptance by willing things to be as they actually are, rather than as you might wish them to be. It may well be rational and healthy to prefer things to be a certain way in the future, fate permitting. However, you can’t change the distant past or even what’s just happened. You can only try to influence the future, to an uncertain degree, by changing your current thoughts and actions. So focus on accepting that the past cannot be changed anymore and that the future may not be as you’d have preferred. Try the following thought-experiments:

1 Imagine that the universe has been designed to present you with challenges, from time to time, perhaps as if they are a form of therapy prescribed by Zeus, so that you can progress towards Happiness by accepting them and responding appropriately, in accord with virtue.

2 Similarly, imagine that you unconsciously chose and created your own fate, in its entirety, to help yourself learn and grow as an individual.

3 Contemplate the idea that events, and your response to them, could not have been otherwise, but were strictly determined by the laws of Nature to be exactly as they were; as the Stoics put it, we don’t pity infants’ inability to speak because we see it as natural, and there’s likewise no more point being upset about misfortune, necessitated by fate, than being depressed because you don’t have wings like a bird.

4 Tell yourself that nothing in life matters, ultimately, except your current voluntary response to events which, by definition, you can choose at any time; accept everything else, everything bodily or external, as being ‘indifferent’, absolutely trivial, compared to your ability to rise above them ‘magnanimously’, which begins with this very attitude of acceptance itself.

Try to find other ways in which you can help yourself rehearse an attitude of philosophical acceptance and practise this regularly throughout the day.

Remember this: Acceptance is not resignation

The majority of people confuse acceptance with resignation. The ancient Stoics were not at all ‘doormats’, though. Their mythical role-model was Hercules, who overcame the ‘Twelve Labours’ with legendary courage and endurance. Zeno’s follower King Antigonus of Macedonia was one of the most powerful military leaders of the period, and Zeno’s favourite student, Persaeus, gave his life defending his rule. Cato became a Roman hero, particularly to the late Stoics, after he marched the shattered remains of the Republican army through the deserts of Africa to make their last stand at Utica against the tyrant Julius Caesar’s advancing legions. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius was arguably the most powerful military and political leader of his lifetime and led his armies repeatedly into battle to protect Rome against barbarian incursions. Stoic literature is packed with references to other heroic men of action. In fact, Stoics are committed to taking ‘appropriate action’ in the world, as we’ll see when we come to discuss the ‘discipline of action’.

Focus Points

The main points to remember from this chapter are:

✽ The discipline of desire and aversion is particularly related to the Stoic therapy of the passions, and the acceptance of things outside of our control as our fate and part of Nature as a whole.

✽ Contemplation of the ‘here and now’ is an integral part of Stoic practice, particularly in relation to the discipline of desire.

✽ Amor fati, or willing and even joyful acceptance of your fate is also a fundamental element in Stoic practice.

Next Step

Having discussed the irrational ‘passions’, in the next chapter we’ll look in more detail at Stoic attitudes towards healthy feelings of love and friendship. The social dimension of Stoicism was said by Epictetus to explain why Stoics are not simply hard-hearted or insensitive like stone or iron, presumably because it’s based on the fundamental concept of ‘natural affection’, the basis of Stoic philanthropy.