Stoics avoid adversity in the ways that anyone of sense would. But sometimes it comes regardless, and then the Stoic goal is to see adversity rightly and not let one’s peace of mind be destroyed by its arrival. Indeed, the aim of the Stoic is something more: to accept reversal without shock and to make it grist for the creation of greater things. Nobody wants hardship in any particular case, but it is a necessary element in the formation of worthy people and worthy achievements that, in the long run, we do want. Stoics seek the value in whatever happens.
Adversity resembles death in this respect: it is both an external that we misjudge and a resource that might be put to use. On a Stoic view, we don’t like adversity – that’s mostly what it means for something to be adversity – for the same reason that we misjudge many other externals: we view them with psychological parochialism, defining size and value and better and worse in terms of our immediate wishes and convenience. Stepping away from the wishes and convenience allows adversity to be seen as it is – as often less monstrous than it looks when it first comes, as sometimes producing important benefits, and in any event as inevitable.
Stoicism offers a series of strategies for turning adversity to good. We cannot choose what happens to us, but we can choose how to react to it. So when a setback comes, Stoics interpret it as constructively as possible – as a chance to prove oneself, or to learn, or to build anew; and the value of any of these responses may be greater than the cost of the adversity. Stoics also have a modest opinion of their ability to predict future events, so they are slow to assume that an apparently unwelcome development will be for the worse in the long run. Finally, the Stoics have techniques for reducing the force of adversity by thinking in certain ways about it: looking at their own adversity from another’s point of view, anticipating it in advance, and understanding how acceptance of it, and adaptation to it, can help with its management.
1. Preferences. Since their philosophy has sometimes been misinterpreted on this point, we might begin by noting that the Stoics, while unafraid of adversity and ready to turn it to good use, prefer to avoid it.
“On your view,” he says, “a brave man will expose himself to dangers.” Not at all: he will not fear them, but he will avoid them. Caution suits him, not fear.
Why wouldn’t I prefer that war not break out? But if it should come, my hope is to nobly bear the wounds, the starvation, and all else that it must bring with it. I am not so mad as to want to be ill; but if I must be ill, my hope is that I do nothing immoderate or weak. It is not hardships that are desirable, but the courage by which to endure them.
All honorable means of protecting ourselves from harm are not only permitted but commendable. The chief function of constancy is to patiently endure those hardships that cannot be avoided.
The same goes for difficult people, encounters with whom may be considered a type of adversity. We can avoid them with dignity and without hatred or fear.
Suppose someone in the ring has scratched you with his fingernails and butt you with his head, thus causing you some hurt. We don’t mark him down as bad, we don’t take offense, we don’t suspect him later of plotting against us. We are merely on our guard – not treating him as an enemy or with suspicion, but with friendly avoidance. Something like this should be the rule in other parts of life. Let us disregard many things in those who are, as it were, our sparring-partners. For as I have said, it is possible to avoid them – without being suspicious, and without being hateful.
The friendly avoidance recommended by Marcus Aurelius is not high on the list of theoretical innovations made by the Stoics, but it rates well if one measures a teaching by how often it is of use.
2. Inevitability. The Stoic regards adversity as inseparable from existence, and so as best met with an accepting spirit.
The condition of life is that of a bathhouse, a crowd, a journey: some things are thrown at you, others just happen by accident. Life is not a dainty affair. You have started on a long road; inevitably you will stumble, you will knock into things, you will fall, you will grow weary, you will cry out “O, for Death!” – in other words, you will tell lies. You will forsake a companion in one place; you will bury one in another; elsewhere you will be afraid of one. It is through troubles of that sort that this rugged journey must be made.
Marcus Aurelius used a different analogy – a comparison between the mind that receives adversity and other parts of the body that accept and process what comes to them.
A healthy eye should see all there is to see, not say “I want to see green things” – for that is a sign that the eyes are diseased. And healthy hearing and a healthy sense of smell should be ready for all that there is to be heard and smelled…. So, too, a healthy mind should be ready for whatever may come to pass. The mind that says, “Let my children be safe,” and “Let everyone praise whatever I may do,” is an eye that seeks green things, or teeth that seek out only what is tender.
Montaigne offered yet another comparison: the variety of things that we experience, welcome and not, may be likened to the elements of music.
We must learn to put up with what we cannot avoid. Our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrary things – of diverse tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, sprightly and solemn. The musician who only loved some of them – what would he be able to do? He has to know how to make use of them all, and be able to mix them together. We must do the same with the good and the bad, which are of the same substance as our lives.
These views of adversity – as an unavoidable part of life, and inseparable from the good – have some other implications for how we think and talk. For one, Stoics don’t see the point of complaining about things that are inherent to human existence. Here we find the closest that philosophical Stoicism comes to the modern meaning of that word.
“This cucumber is bitter.” Throw it away. “There are brambles in the road.” Turn aside. That’s enough. Don’t go on to say, “Why are there such things in the world?” You would be ridiculed by any student of nature, just as you would be laughed at by the carpenter and the shoemaker if you criticized them because you saw shavings and trimmings from the things that they make in their workshops.
What madness to be dragged when one could follow! As much, I swear, as it is folly and ignorance of one’s lot to grieve because you lack something, or because something affects you adversely, or to be surprised and indignant at those things that happen to the good and the bad alike – I mean deaths, funerals, infirmities, and all the other accidents besetting human life. Whatever the ways of the universe may require us to suffer, let us take it up with high-mindedness. This is the oath by which we are bound: to bear with the human condition, and not to be disturbed by what we do not have the power to avoid.
Nor are Stoics much interested in blame.
It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is complete to blame neither another nor himself.
Stoics think the ills that come with life should be accepted by considering their potential in advance – before they happen to anyone in particular. They are, after all, potential hazards faced by everyone. We do not encounter the same misfortunes, but we often are equal in the risks to which we are subject as mortals.
Let us not wonder at any of those misfortunes to which we are born, and which no one should complain of, because they are the same for all. The same, I say: for even what a man has escaped, he might have suffered. An equal law, indeed, is not one that all experience, but one that is established for all. Let your mind treat this sense of equity as a rule, and let us pay without complaint the taxes that come with mortality.
It is unjust to complain that what may happen to anyone has happened to someone.
But the response of the Stoics to adversity involves more than a lack of blame and complaint. They seek to meet whatever they can’t avoid with a welcoming spirit.
Whatever happens, let your mind suppose it was bound to happen, and do not rail at nature.
Don’t insist that what happens should happen as you wish; wish that things happen as they actually happen. Then your life will go well.
Friedrich Nietzsche was not a Stoic, but his notion of amor fati (“love of one’s fate”) has often been associated with the idea just shown from Epictetus.
My formula for greatness in man is amor fati: the fact that a man wishes nothing to be different, either in front of him or behind him, or for all eternity. Not only must the necessary be borne, and on no account concealed – all idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity – but it must also be loved.
3. Hermes’ magic wand. Stoics view adversity, or developments contrary to one’s wishes, as misjudged in various ways we can now consider. Adversity is a raw material needed for building strong things. To adjust the comparison: an unwanted card has been dealt, or the dice have come up a certain way; the Stoic goal is to avoid even the feeling of “oh, no” wherever possible on these occasions, and to replace it with sentiments closer to “now what?” or “let’s see what can be done with this.” The work of life is to turn whatever happens to constructive ends. That is the most important Stoic idea about adversity, and a theme to which all of its authors contribute, often with metaphors. Epictetus adapted for Stoic use the caduceus, or wand, that Hermes was said to use to perform feats of magic. But the alchemy the Stoic has in mind turns adversity into advantage.
This is Hermes’ magic wand: touch it to anything you like, they say, and the wand will turn it to gold. Not so; bring anything you like, rather, and I’ll make it something good. Bring disease, bring death, bring poverty, bring insults, bring punishment for high crimes – all these things will be made beneficial by Hermes’ magic wand.
The obstacle in the path:
The mind turns around every hindrance to its activity and converts it to further its purpose. The impediment to action becomes part of the action; the obstacle in our way becomes the way forward.
The fire that consumes setbacks and burns more strongly:
The power within that rules us, when it is aligned with nature, is so made as to adapt itself easily to whatever happens and to whatever is possible. It needs no particular material; it advances its purpose as circumstance allows. Whatever is placed in its way it makes into material for itself, as when fire overcomes the things that are thrown onto it, by which a little flame would have been put out; the strong fire quickly appropriates and consumes anything heaped on top, and from this the flames rise still higher.
The sculptor who works with whatever materials are at hand:
Do you think that the wise man is burdened by evils? He makes use of them. It was not only from ivory that Phidias knew how to make statues; he made them also from bronze. If you had given him marble, or some still lesser material, he would have carved the best statue that could be made of it. So the wise man will display virtue amid riches if possible, but if not, in poverty; at home if he can, but if not, in exile; as a general if he can, but if not, as a soldier; in sound health if he can, but if not, then in weakness. Whatever fortune he is dealt, he will make of it something remarkable.
The animal tamer:
There are some animal tamers who compel even the wildest beasts, and the most terrifying, to submit to man. Not satisfied with eliminating their ferocity, they pacify them to the point that they might be roommates. The lion-master puts his hand in the animal’s mouth; the keeper kisses his tiger; the tiny Ethiopian commands the elephant to kneel down and walk the tightrope. In the same way, the sage is a skillful master of misfortune. Pain, want, disgrace, prison, exile are frightful anywhere – but when they come to the wise man, they are tamed.
Bees:
Those who are without skill and sense as to how they should live, like sick people whose bodies can endure neither heat nor cold, are elated by good fortune and depressed by adversity; and they are greatly disturbed by both, or rather by themselves in both, and not less in those circumstances called good…. But men of sense, just as bees extract honey from thyme, the most pungent and the driest of plants, often in like manner draw from the most unfavorable circumstances something which suits them and is useful.
More literal expressions of the point are of course possible as well.
By the aid of philosophy you will live not unpleasantly, for you will learn to extract pleasure from all places and things. Wealth will make you happy, because it will enable you to benefit many; and poverty, as you will then have few things to worry about; and glory, as it will make you honored; and obscurity, for you will then be safe from envy.
Seneca also notes the value of humor, a recurrent and underappreciated Stoic theme. Sometimes the force of unwanted events can be turned to good by viewing them with a sense of comedy.
In any sort of life you will find amusements, recreations and pleasures, if you are willing to make light of evils rather than treat them as hateful.
4. Equipment. The Stoics consider us equipped to manage whatever adversity life may devise for us.
Nothing happens to anyone that he is not formed by nature to bear.
Nature did not want us to be harassed. Whatever it requires of us, it has equipped us for.
Whatever happens to you, remember to turn to yourself and ask what power you have for dealing with it. If you see a good-looking boy or woman, you’ll find that the power for such things is self-control; if hard labor is at hand, you will find endurance; if abusive language, you will find patience. And if you make this a habit, the appearances of things will not carry you away with them.
5. Adversity as proving ground. Turning to more specific ways in which adversity may be converted to good: it may be a chance to prove oneself. Setbacks show what we are really capable of doing.
Fire tests gold, misfortune brave men.
Seneca’s way of expressing this idea – ignis aurum probat, miseria fortes viros – became well known, but the substance of it was a proverb of long standing. It appears also in Ecclus. 2:5, part of the Biblical Apocrypha.
In this connection our friend Demetrius comes to mind. An untroubled life, in which fortune makes no inroads, he calls “a dead sea.” To have nothing to stir you and rouse you to action, no attack by which to try the strength of your spirit, merely to lie in unshaken idleness – this is not to be tranquil; it is to be stranded in a windless calm.
In De Bello Gallico, Cæsar had once turned the phrase “malacia ac tranquillitas” (describing the sea); it meant “dead calm and stillness.” Seneca played on this by saying, at the end of this last passage, “this is not tranquillitas, this is malacia.” “Malacia” also had the meaning in Greek of moral softness. As for Demetrius, he was a Cynic philosopher and a friend of Seneca’s. There was no windless calm for him; he was banished from Rome with other philosophers in 71 AD.
Another analogy: we should welcome adversity in the same way we welcome an adversary in a game.
Without an adversary, virtue shrivels. We see how great and how powerful it really is, only when it shows by endurance what it is capable of. Be assured that good men should act likewise; they should not shrink from hardships and difficulties, nor complain against fate; we should make the best of whatever happens and turn it to good.
You are a great man; but how do I know it if fortune gives you no opportunity to show your worth? You have entered the Olympic games, but you are the only contestant; you gain the crown, not the victory. I congratulate you not as a brave man, but as I would someone who had obtained a consulship or prætorship: “You’re getting quite famous!” Likewise I might say to a good man, if no harder circumstance has given him the chance to show his strength of mind, “I judge you unfortunate because you have never been unfortunate: You have passed through life without an antagonist; no one will know what you can do, not even you yourself.”
To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next is, to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; and if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility.
6. Adversity as training. Adversity may be viewed as training, or as a chance to learn. No one is likely to accomplish anything great who doesn’t know how to work with setbacks. So the Stoic thinks we need to gain a certain ease about them – an ability to adapt. A misfortune can be viewed as part of that learning process.
It is the crisis that reveals the man. So when it arrives, remember that God, like a wrestling coach, has put you up against a rough young antagonist. Why, you ask? So that you can be an Olympic champion; for this cannot be achieved without sweat.
We should offer ourselves to Fortune so that, by our struggles with it, we may be hardened against it. Fortune will gradually make us an even match for itself. Constant contending with danger will instill a contempt for danger. In the same way the bodies of sailors are hardened by the beating of the sea, the hands of farmers are calloused, the arms of soldiers have the strength to throw their weapons, and the legs of a runner are nimble: we are strongest in what we have exercised. It is by suffering ills that the mind learns defiance of suffering.
We may regard the petty vexations of life that are constantly happening as designed to keep us in practice for bearing great misfortunes, so that we may not become completely enervated by a career of prosperity.
7. Adversity as privilege. Or adversity may be viewed as a kind of honor or good fortune because only some would be asked or able to rise to the occasion.
Toil summons the best men. The senate is often kept in session the whole day long, though all the while every worthless fellow is either enjoying his leisure at the recreation-ground, or lurking in a tavern, or wasting his time in some gathering. The same thing happens in the world at large. Good men work, spend and are spent, and they do so willingly. Fortune does not drag them; they follow it, and keep step.
“How unfortunate I am, that this has happened to me!” Not at all – rather, “How fortunate I am, that although this has happened to me I am still unhurt, neither broken by the present nor dreading what is to come.” For something of this sort might have happened to anyone, but not everyone would remain unhurt in spite of it…. Remember then, on each occasion that might lead you to grief, to make use of this idea: “This is no misfortune; to bear it nobly, rather, is good fortune.”
8. Humility in judgment. The Stoic does not easily conclude that any apparent reversal must be for the worse. Even apart from the methods just described for turning adversity into good, it is hard to tell where an apparently bad thing will lead. Events that seem terrible when they happen sometimes result in greater things later. This may be because the process of recovery produces a result that surpasses whatever was destroyed. Or it may be because the later events lead, even fortuitously, to a new and better result in some way that was hard to foresee. The general point: we usually take a short-term view of developments we don’t like, and are poor judges of what their ultimate consequences will be. Events that look bad should therefore be judged with humility and calm.
A man may be wise, he may do everything with precise judgment, he may attempt nothing beyond his powers … none of these desirable and precious things is of any use, unless you prepare yourself against the accidents of fate and their consequences, unless frequently and uncomplainingly and at every injury you will say, “the gods decreed otherwise!” Nay, by heaven! – let’s try for a braver, truer note, and one by which you may better sustain your spirit – say this, every time something happens otherwise than as you expected: “the gods decreed better!”
Destruction has often made room for greater prosperity. Many things have fallen in order that they might rise higher. Timagenes, no friend to the city’s happiness, used to say that fires at Rome troubled him for one reason only: he knew that better buildings would rise in place of those that had burned.
Timagenes was a Greek teacher of rhetoric who was captured and made a slave by the Romans, then later set free. He evidently found himself in conflict with Augustus, which caused him to flee Rome.
If you decide to try above all to have what is best for you, don’t be annoyed at difficult circumstances, but consider how many things have already happened to you in life, not as you wanted, but as was best for you.
Plutarch had a funny way of expressing this.
This then we should practice and work on first of all – like the man who threw a stone at his dog but missed and hit his stepmother. “Not so bad!” he said. For it is possible to change what we get out of things that do not go as we wish. Diogenes was driven into exile: “Not so bad!” – for it was after his banishment that he took up philosophy.
9. Point of view. As we have seen elsewhere, much of Stoicism amounts to the art of perspective – that is, of finding the most useful point of view from which to look at anything that happens. The Stoic learns to see things from angles more helpful than the self-centered one that we are prone to use without reflection. As another example, Stoics respond to their own adversities by asking what they think when the same things happen to others.
If your neighbor’s slave has broken his wine cup, it is common to say right away that “These things happen.” When your own cup is broken, your reaction should obviously be the same as when the neighbor’s cup was broken. Apply the same idea to more important things. Someone else’s child has died, or his wife: there is no one who wouldn’t say, “This is our human lot.” Yet when someone’s own child dies, right away it’s “Woe to me, how wretched I am!” We have to remember how we feel when we hear the same thing about others.
Remember how you judged similar mishaps when they happened to others, and consider how you were hardly moved, and even blamed them and brushed aside their complaints…. The opinions we have of another man’s cause are always more just than those that we have of our own.
Smith’s interpretation of the Stoic view:
We should view ourselves, not in the light in which our own selfish passions are apt to place us, but in the light in which any other citizen of the world would view us. What befalls ourselves we should regard as what befalls our neighbor, or, what comes to the same thing, as our neighbor regards what befalls us.
10. Anticipation. The Stoics recommend that we think ahead about adversity. Anticipating it can take away its terrors and reduce its force when it arrives.
The wise man gets used to future evils: what other men make bearable by long endurance, he makes bearable by long reflection. We sometimes hear the inexperienced say, “I didn’t know this was in store for me.” The wise man knows that everything is in store for him. Whatever happens, he says, “I knew.”
Other translations render the last phrase as “I knew it.” In the original, it’s just one word – sciebam (I knew) – and leaving it as shown seems to me better. But the reader might enjoy making the choice.
“What can happen to one can happen to any.” If a man will let this sink into his inmost heart, and if he will look on all the evils besetting other people, of which there is daily an immense supply, in this light – as if there is nothing to stop them from finding him, too – he will arm himself long before he is attacked. It is too late to equip the mind for the endurance of dangers after the dangers have come.
Military analogies:
In days of peace the soldier performs maneuvers, throws up earthworks with no enemy in sight, and is wearied by unnecessary toil, in order that he may be equal to that which is necessary. If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes. Such is the course those men have followed who, in their imitation of poverty, have every month left themselves almost destitute, that they might never recoil from what they had often rehearsed.
It is enough for me, when favored by fortune, to prepare myself for its disfavor; and while I am at ease, and so far as my imagination can stretch, to picture future evils to come – just as we use jousting and tournaments to accustom ourselves to war and imitate it in times of peace.
A famous anecdote of Anaxagoras was told by both Plutarch and Cicero.
It is possible not only to admire the disposition of Anaxagoras, which made him say at the death of his son, “I knew that he was mortal when I got him,” but also to imitate it and to apply it to all that fortune may bring: “I know that my wealth is ephemeral and insecure,” “I know that those who gave me power can take it away,” “I know my wife is excellent, but a woman, and that my friend is but a man, and by nature a changeable being, as Plato said.” Those who are prepared and have dispositions of this sort, when something unwanted but not unexpected happens, refuse to accept the “I would never have supposed,” the “I had hoped for other things,” and the “I never expected this.” They do away with the beatings and poundings of their hearts, as it were, and quiet down the madness and disturbance of their minds.
Anaxagoras was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, said to be the first to bring philosophy to Athens. Cicero, after telling the same story, comments:
There is no doubt but that all those things which are considered evils are the heavier from not being foreseen…. The excellence and divine nature of wisdom consists in taking a near view of, and gaining a thorough acquaintance with, all human affairs, in not being surprised when anything happens, and in thinking that there is no event that has not happened that may not happen.
Schopenhauer offered a theory to explain why foresight helps to blunt misfortune.
The main reason why misfortune falls less heavily upon us, if we have looked upon its occurrence as not impossible, and, as the saying is, prepared ourselves for it, may be this: if, before this misfortune comes, we have quietly thought over it as something which may or may not happen, the whole of its extent and range is known to us…. But if no preparation has been made to meet it, and it comes unexpectedly, the mind is in a state of terror for the moment and unable to measure the full extent of the calamity; it seems so far-reaching in its effects that the victim might well think there was no limit to them; in any case, its range is exaggerated. In the same way, darkness and uncertainty always increase the sense of danger.
The Stoic advice to anticipate misfortune may seem in conflict with the Stoic advice to avoid worrying about the future (see Chapter 9, Section 4). The advice is best reconciled by holding that the rehearsals recommended above do not entail worry. Just as Seneca recommends savoring good memories and not rehashing bad ones, the Stoics encourage the rehearsal of future evils but not anxiety about them.
Schopenhauer also had a supplementary recommendation: not just to imagine what might be coming, but to imagine that it already came.
There is some use in occasionally looking upon terrible misfortunes – such as might happen to us – as though they had actually happened, for then the trivial reverses which subsequently come in reality, are much easier to bear. It is a source of consolation to look back upon those great misfortunes which never happened.
11. Pain and opinion. The Stoics know that some kinds of distress can’t be entirely dissolved by how we think about them, but they say that our reactions are still strongly affected by our judgments – by the ways we talk to ourselves or are conditioned to respond. Pain is the most obvious example. You can’t reason your way out of the sensation of it. But the Stoics think that our minds still have much to do with how the sensation is experienced and how it affects us.
Don’t make your ills worse for yourself and burden yourself with complaints. Pain is slight if opinion adds nothing to it. If, on the contrary, you start to encourage yourself and say, “It’s nothing, or certainly very little; let’s hold out, it will soon leave off” – then in thinking it slight you will make it so.
For most pains, let this remark of Epicurus also come to your rescue – that pain is neither unbearable nor eternal if you consider its limits, and don’t add to it in your imagination.
I willingly grant that pain is the worst hardship of our existence; I am the man on earth who most hates pain and avoids it, probably because I am so unaccustomed to it, thank God. Still, it is up to us, if not to eliminate pain, then at least to lessen it with patience – and, even if the body is disturbed by it, to maintain our reason and our souls in sound condition.
Montaigne adds a little later: “It is with pain as with gemstones that look brighter or duller depending on the foil in which they are set; pain takes up only as much space as we allow to it.” The reader interested in more on this theme can refer back to Chapter 1, Section 3.
12. Adaptation. The Stoic understands, finally, that acceptance of adversity is helped by time – another case of what we might now call adaptation, or the good and bad effects of familiarity, which the Stoics understand well. Adaptation isn’t always beneficial. It can cause one to get used to bad things that ought to be fixed, or to good things that go unappreciated. (See Chapter 13, Section 1 for some more discussion.) But adaptation is unquestionably a great aid in making peace with adversities that cannot be helped. Most things that bother us when they arrive become more bearable once we are accustomed to them. The Stoic is mindful of this.
To those with no experience of it, a large part of any evil is its novelty. You can see this in the fact that, after getting used to them, they bear more bravely the things they once had regarded as harsh.
There is nothing for which nature deserves greater praise than this: knowing the hardships to which we were born, it invented habit as a salve to disasters; we quickly accustom ourselves to even the severest misfortunes. No one could withstand adversity if its persistence were felt with all the same force as its first blow.