To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school . . . it is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
You now join the ranks of Marcus Aurelius, Cato, Seneca, Thomas Jefferson, James Stockdale, Epictetus, Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington, and many others.
All these men explicitly practiced and studied Stoicism—we know this for a fact. They were not academics, but men of action. Marcus Aurelius was emperor of the most powerful empire in the history of the world. Cato, the moral example for many philosophers, never wrote down a word but defended the Roman republic with Stoic bravery until his defiant death. Even Epictetus, the lecturer, had no cushy tenure—he was a former slave.
Frederick the Great was said to ride with the works of the Stoics in his saddlebags because they could, in his words, “sustain you in misfortune.” Montaigne, the politician and essayist, had a line from Epictetus carved into the beam above the study in which he spent most of his time. George Washington was introduced to Stoicism by his neighbors at age seventeen, then he put on a play about Cato to inspire his men in that dark winter at Valley Forge.
When Thomas Jefferson died, he had a copy of Seneca on his nightstand. The economist Adam Smith’s theories on the interconnectedness of the world—capitalism—were significantly influenced by the Stoicism he’d studied as a schoolboy under a teacher who’d translated the works of Marcus Aurelius. Eugène Delacroix, the renowned French Romantic artist (known best for his painting Liberty Leading the People) was an ardent Stoic, referring to it as his “consoling religion.” Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave who challenged an emperor, read and was deeply influenced by the works of Epictetus. The political thinker John Stuart Mill wrote of Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism in his famous treatise On Liberty, calling it “the highest ethical product of the ancient mind.”
The writer Ambrose Bierce, decorated Civil War veteran and contemporary of Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken, used to recommend Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus to aspiring writers who wrote to him, saying they’d teach them “how to be a worthy guest at the table of the gods.” Theodore Roosevelt, after his presidency, spent eight months exploring (and nearly dying in) the unknown jungles of the Amazon, and of the eight books he brought on the journey, two were Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and Epictetus’s Enchiridion.
Beatrice Webb, the English social reformer who invented the concept of collective bargaining, recalled the Meditations fondly in her memoirs as a “manual of devotion.” The Percys, the famous Southern political, writing, and planting dynasty (LeRoy Percy, United States senator; William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee; and Walker Percy, The Moviegoer) who saved thousands of lives during the flood of 1927, were well-known adherents to the works of the Stoics, because, as one of them wrote, “when all is lost, it stands fast.”
In 1908, the banker, industrialist, and senator Robert Hale Ives Goddard donated an equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius to Brown University. Eighty or so years after Goddard’s donation, the Soviet poet, dissident, and political prisoner Joseph Brodsky wrote in his famous essay on the original version of that same statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome that “if Meditations is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins.” Like Brodsky, James Stockdale spent time imprisoned against his will—seven and a half years in a Vietcong prison camp, to be exact. And as he parachuted from his plane, Stockdale said to himself “I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”
Today, Bill Clinton rereads Marcus Aurelius every single year. Wen Jiabao, the former prime minister of China, claims that Meditations is one of two books he travels with and has read it more than one hundred times over the course of his life. Bestselling author and investor Tim Ferriss refers to Stoicism as his “operating system”—and, in the tradition of those who came before him, has successfully driven its adoption throughout Silicon Valley.
You might not see yourself as a “philosopher,” but then again, neither did most of these men and women. By every definition that counts, however, they were. And now you are, too. You are a person of action. And the thread of Stoicism runs through your life just as it did through theirs—just as it has for all of history, sometimes explicitly, sometimes not.
The essence of philosophy is action—in making good on the ability to turn the obstacle upside down with our minds. Understanding our problems for what’s within them and their greater context. To see things philosophically and act accordingly.
As I tried to show in this book, countless others have embodied the best practices of Stoicism and philosophy without even knowing it. These individuals weren’t writers or lecturers, they were doers—like you.
Over the centuries though, this kind of wisdom has been taken from us, co-opted and deliberately obscured by selfish, sheltered academics. They deprived us of philosophy’s true use: as an operating system for the difficulties and hardships of life.
Philosophy was never what happened in the classroom. It was a set of lessons from the battlefield of life.
The Latin translation for the title of Enchiridion—Epictetus’s famous work—means “close at hand,” or as some have said, “in your hands.” That’s what the philosophy was meant for: to be in your hands, to be an extension of you. Not something you read once and put up on a shelf. It was meant, as Marcus once wrote, to make us boxers instead of fencers—to wield our weaponry, we simply need to close our fists.
Hopefully, in some small way, this book has translated those lessons and armed you with them.
Now you are a philosopher and a person of action. And that is not a contradiction.