Stoics are students not just of Stoic doctrine but of the process of learning how to practice it. They view the philosophy as an approach to daily life, not an intellectual edifice to be enjoyed from outside or visited from time to time. This chapter thus offers comments on what in the study of Stoicism is realistic and what isn’t, what helps and what doesn’t, and where to look for encouragement.
Stoicism offers some exercises for those trying to follow its advice – review of each day and where one made philosophical mistakes or did well; imagining oneself being watched by an idealized figure, and asking what the watcher would think and say; and meditating on the principles of Stoicism until they sink in. The Stoics also offer views about the value of solitude and of social life, comparing the ways that either can help or hinder progress in wisdom. Above all, they stress that progress in the philosophy is not made by knowing its precepts. It is made by assimilating them, and by thinking and acting accordingly.
Stoicism is, among other things, a regimen for training the mind. If that sounds too hard, the Stoic would say it is because we aren’t used to taking that task as seriously as we take the training of the body. Everyone knows that the path to becoming an accomplished athlete involves time and commitment. So does progress in Stoicism. Its methods are especially challenging because the mind is the trainer as well as the thing trained. It has to teach itself to do better. The Stoic looks at things from a point of view that differs from the automatic one, and seeks to resist the conventional reaction to whatever may happen. This all requires steady attention and energy, but it also gets easier with time.
We might think of Stoicism, as Seneca will suggest, as the equivalent of a demanding martial art. It takes practice. In return, the philosophy offers improvement in peace of mind, in fearlessness, in well-being, and in wisdom.
1. Review. The Stoics offer many techniques for improving the quality of one’s thinking. In other chapters we have seen some of them, such as changes in perspective or anticipation of the worst that might happen. But Stoicism also offers meta-techniques – that is, techniques for getting better at the techniques. One of them is to set philosophical goals and keep track of progress in reaching them.
If you wish not to be quick to anger, don’t feed your habit; don’t throw it fodder on which to grow. As a first step, keep quiet, and count the days on which you didn’t get angry. “I used to get angry every day, then every other day, then every third, then every fourth.” If you can quit for thirty days, make a sacrifice to God. For the habit is loosened at first, then totally destroyed.
A similar suggestion is nightly review of how the day went from a Stoic standpoint.
The mind should be summoned every day to render an accounting. Sextius used to do this. At the end of the day, when he had withdrawn to his nightly rest, he would interrogate his own mind: “Which of your wrongs did you correct today? Which fault did you resist? In what way are you better?” Anger will leave off and be more moderate, if it knows that it must each day come before a judge. Is there anything finer than this habit of searching through the entire day? … When the light has been removed and my wife, long aware of my habit, has become silent, I scan the whole of my day and retrace all my deeds and words.
Sextius was a Roman teacher of Stoic and Pythagorean philosophy who lived a generation before Seneca did. He founded a school in Rome that was later run by his son – the School of the Sextii – and that lasted from about 50 BC to 19 AD. We gather from Seneca’s letters that he attended the school when he was young (see Chapter 8, Section 3). Seneca kindly supplied a model of the daily accounting to oneself suggested above:
See that you don’t do that again; I’ll pardon you this time. In that discussion you spoke too aggressively. After this, don’t get into arguments with ignorant people. If they’ve never learned, they don’t want to learn. You criticized that one fellow more candidly than you should have; as a result you didn’t correct him, you just offended him. From here on, watch out – not so much that what you’re saying is true, but that the person you’re talking to can stand the truth.
This recommendation of daily review is sometimes described as Pythagorean.
The advice here given is on a par with a rule recommended by Pythagoras – to review, every night before going to sleep, what we have done during the day. To live at random, in the hurly-burly of business or pleasure, without ever reflecting upon the past – to go on, as it were, pulling cotton off the reel of life – is to have no clear idea of what we are about; and a man who lives in this state will have chaos in his emotions and certain confusion in his thoughts; as is soon manifest by the abrupt and fragmentary character of his conversation, which becomes a kind of mincemeat.
And the Stoics also will engage in a reverse sort of review: preparation for what is coming.
Begin the morning by saying to yourself: today I will meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, and the arrogant; with the deceitful, the envious, and the unsocial. All these things result from their not knowing what is good and what is evil. But I have seen the nature of the good – that it is beautiful; and the nature of evil, and that it is ugly; and the nature of him who does wrong, and that he is akin to me – not because he is from the same blood and seed, but because he partakes of the same mind and the same small bit of divinity. I cannot be injured by any of them, because no one can involve me in anything ugly except myself. And how can I be angry with my kin, or hateful towards them?
That passage may be studied with profit by academic administrators. Seneca had offered a similar suggestion:
The wise man is calm and even-handed in dealing with error; he is not the enemy of the mistaken, but corrects them; and as he goes forth each day he will think: “I will meet many who have given themselves over to wine, many who are lustful, many ungrateful, many greedy, many who are driven by the madness of ambition.” He will view all these things in as kindly a way as a physician views the sick.
2. Watching. Another Stoic exercise in adjusted perspective: adopting a doubleness of mind, and so observing oneself through the eyes of an imaginary other. Establishing an external point of view, and personifying it, is a way to see what you are doing more objectively and hold yourself to higher standards.
We must single out some good man, and have him always in view, so that we may live as if he were watching and do everything as if he saw it…. Choose the one whose life, whose speech, whose forthright countenance, all satisfy you; then show him always to yourself as your guardian and model. We need someone, I say, against whose example our own conduct can measure itself. You can’t straighten what’s crooked without a ruler.
It helps, no doubt, to have appointed a guardian for oneself, to have someone you can look to, someone you regard as taking part in your thoughts. The most noble thing, by far, is to live as if you were being seen by some good man who was always present, but I’m satisfied even with this – that you do whatever you do as if someone were watching. It’s when we’re alone that we are prompted to evil.
Epictetus described the dialogue one might have with such a watcher.
When you are going into the presence of some man in authority, remember that another is watching what is happening from above, and that it is not the man but the other you must satisfy. So the watcher inquires of you: “Exile, prison, bondage, death, disgrace – what did you call these in the lecture-hall?” “I called them ‘indifferent.’” “So now what do you call them? Have those things changed at all?” “No.” “Have you changed, then?” “No.” … Well then, go in confidently, remembering these things, and you’ll see what it means to be a young person who has studied, among those who have not studied. By the gods, I expect you’ll feel something like this: “Why do we make so many elaborate preparations for nothing? Is this what power means? The fancy entrance, the attendants, the bodyguards? Was it for this that I listened to so many lectures? These things were nothing, and I was preparing as if they were great.”
3. Meditation. Sometimes Stoicism is helped by just contemplating it, and by reading and writing. It is both a way of life and a way of thought. Rehearsal of accurate thinking is how one practices Stoicism and how one improves at it.
It is clear to you, Lucilius, I know, that no one can live happily or even tolerably without the study of wisdom. Wisdom, when achieved, produces a happy life; wisdom only begun still makes life bearable. But this idea must be strengthened and driven deeper by daily study; it is harder to stick to the resolutions you have already made than to make noble new ones.
Good maxims, if you keep them often in mind, will be just as beneficial as good examples. Pythagoras says that our minds are altered when we enter a temple, see the images of the gods close at hand, and await the utterance of some oracle. And who will deny that even the most ignorant may be powerfully struck by certain sayings? Statements such as these, concise but weighty: “Nothing to excess.” “No wealth can satisfy the covetous.” “You must expect others to treat you as you treat them.”
The character of those things you often think about will be the character of your understanding, for the mind is dyed by its thoughts. Dip it, therefore, in a succession of thoughts such as these: for instance, that where it is possible to live, it is also possible to live well.
I must die; so must I also die regretting something? I must be put in chains; must I also be wailing about something? I must be banished; does anyone prevent me from leaving with a smile, cheerful and easy-going? “Reveal your secrets.” I don’t speak; this much is up to me. “Then I will put you in chains.” Man, what are you saying? Me? You can chain my leg, but Zeus himself can’t overcome my will. “I’ll throw you in prison.” My poor body, you mean. “I’ll cut your head off.” When did I ever tell you that my neck was the only one that could not be severed? These are the things philosophers should think about, should write down daily, should use as exercise.
4. Places. The Stoics do not always take identical views of the places one goes and the company one keeps, and how choices about them bear on philosophical progress. Perhaps the answers depend on the details. Seneca acknowledged that some locations are more suitable than others for the development of wisdom.
Just as some clothes suit the wise and honest man better than others – and though he does not dislike any particular color, he thinks some of them inappropriate for one who has adopted the simple life – so there are places the wise man (or the one aiming at wisdom) will avoid, as not conducive to good living. Thus if he is contemplating a retreat he will never choose Canopus, though Canopus will not prevent anyone from being virtuous; and certainly not Baiæ, which has become a den of vice.
Canopus was a city of the coast of Egypt; Baiæ was a town in the southwest part of modern-day Italy (near Naples). Both were ancient resort areas famous for debauchery. Notwithstanding the challenge presented by such places, the usual attitude of the Stoics is skepticism about the importance of being in one place rather than another. They regard life as lived in the mind more than at any physical site, and view the appetite for new locations as arising from the same source as the appetite for other new things: our sensibilities are too dull to appreciate what is around us already.
“So when will I see Athens again, and the Acropolis?” Wretch, isn’t it enough for you, what you look at every day? Could you have anything better or greater to see than the sun, the moon, the stars, the whole world, the sea?
Compare Cicero’s remark:
Now, if we should be suddenly brought from a state of eternal darkness to see the light, how beautiful would the heavens seem! But our minds have become used to it from the daily practice and habituation of our eyes, nor do we take the trouble to search into the principles of what is always in view; as if the novelty, rather than the importance, of things ought to excite us to investigate their causes.
The Stoic is less interested in changes of scenery than in changes of the self, and regards the first as unlikely to be pleasing without the second.
How can the sight of new countries give you pleasure? Getting to know cities and places? That agitation of yours turns out to be useless. Do you want to know why your running away doesn’t help? You take yourself along. Your mental burden must be put down before any place will satisfy you.
Horace also gave expression to this idea: “they change their climate, not their disposition, who run beyond the sea.” (Horace, Epistles 1.11.) Emerson offered a well-known expression of it, too.
We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
And Plutarch used a similar example as an analogy to describe superficial changes of all kinds that don’t help us.
Like people at sea who are cowardly and seasick and think that they would get through this voyage more comfortably if they should transfer from their little boat to a ship, and then again from the ship to a man-of-war; but they accomplish nothing by the changes, since they carry their nausea and cowardice along with them; in the same way, changing one’s way of life for its opposite will not relieve the mind of the things that cause it grief and distress. These are ignorance of affairs, thoughtlessness, the inability (and the not knowing how) to make proper use of what is at hand. These are the defects which, like a storm at sea, torment rich and poor alike, that afflict the married as well as the unmarried; because of these, men avoid public life, then find their life of quiet unbearable; because of these, men seek advancement at court, by which, when they have gained it, they are immediately bored.
5. Solitude. The Stoics view solitude as having similarly mixed attractions. On the value of it:
Solitude, in itself, does not teach integrity, nor does the countryside give lessons in moderation; but those vices whose object is show and display will subside where no witness or onlooker remains. Who puts on the purple robe when he has no one to show it to? Who serves a single dinner on a golden plate? … No one is elegant just for their own benefit, or even for a few close friends; we set out the implements of our vices in proportion to the crowd there to see them. So it is: the stimulus of all our extravagance is the complicit admirer. You will cause us not to desire things if you keep us from showing them off. Ambition and luxury and lack of restraint all need a stage: you will heal them if you are kept from view.
On the needlessness of solitude:
They seek out retreats for themselves – places in the country, seashores, the mountains – and you too are accustomed to crave such things especially. All this is utterly amateurish, since it is possible to retreat into oneself any time you like.
On the risks of it:
They say that Crates – a disciple of that Stilpo I mentioned in an earlier letter – when he saw a young man walking by himself, asked him what he was doing there alone. “I am conversing with myself,” he said. To which Crates replied, “Watch out, I beg of you, and listen carefully: you are conversing with a bad man.”… No ignorant person should be left alone. That is when they make bad plans and create future troubles, either for others or for themselves; it’s when they organize their ignominious desires. Whatever the mind once concealed, whether from fear or from shame, it now reveals: it sharpens boldness, stimulates lust, goads anger.
Stilpo was a Greek philosopher born in the 4th century BC. As Seneca mentions, he was a teacher of Crates of Thebes, a member of the Cynic school; Stilpo and Crates, in turn, are both credited as teachers of Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism. All three are heroes to the Stoics.
6. Good and bad company. Stoicism regards us as here to work with others. So while Stoics are very alert to the hazards of social life (as we saw in Chapter 7 and will see again in a moment), they also consider relations with others important and place a high value on friendship. They are just selective about it.
Nothing gives the mind so much pleasure as fond and faithful friendship.
Associate with those who will improve you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for people learn while they teach.
Skilled wrestlers are trained by practice. A musician is inspired by one of equal proficiency. The wise man also needs to have his virtues exercised; thus in the same way that he stirs himself, he is stirred by another wise man.
On the dangers of bad company:
A man who frequently consorts with certain others, whether for conversation, for banquets, or just generally for good fellowship, must either become like them or else change them along his own lines. For if you put a charcoal that has gone out next to one that is burning, either the first will extinguish the second or the second will ignite the first. Since the danger is so great, we should enter very cautiously into social relations of this sort with laymen, and remember that it is impossible for the man who rubs up against someone covered with soot to avoid getting the benefit of some soot himself.
So until these wise thoughts have been fixed in you, and you have acquired some power to protect yourself, I advise you to be cautious about entering the arena with the uninitiated. Otherwise, whatever you have written down in the classroom will melt away day by day, like wax in the sun.
Seneca thought it especially important to be cautious in choosing those to whom we listen.
Just as those who have been to a concert carry away in their heads the tunes and the charm of the songs – and just as they get in the way of thinking, and won’t let you concentrate on serious things – so the talk of flatterers and those who praise depravity sticks in the ears long after it is heard. It is not easy to drive the agreeable sound out of your mind: it continues, and lasts, and comes back from time to time. You should therefore close your ears to evil sayings right from the start. Once they have gained an entrance and been admitted to our minds, they become more daring.
Seneca also suggested that the bad people we run across in life match potentials that exist inside us. The potentials are drawn out when we spend time with their representatives in the world.
Greed will cling to you so long as you are living with someone greedy and low; so will a swelled head, so long as you keep company with someone arrogant. You’ll never be free of cruelty if you’re sharing a tent with an executioner. The fellowship of adulterers will inflame your own lusts. If you want to be stripped of your vices, you must withdraw far from vicious exemplars. The greedy man, the seducer, the cruel one, the cheat – all capable of much harm, if they should be anywhere near you – are inside you.
7. Multitudes. A problem related to the company we keep is our relationship to the social world at large, as when one goes out in public. This is an important issue for the Stoic, because the philosophy calls for engagement with public affairs but also for resistance to popular judgments and contempt for them. The Stoic shouldn’t avoid the crowd, then, but has to maintain a careful relationship to it. Epictetus takes a benevolent view of massed humanity, comparing it to pleasing masses of farm animals.
If you find yourself in a crowd – say a contest, or a festival, or a holiday – try to enjoy it with the others. For what could be a more agreeable sight, if you love your fellow man, than a number of them? When we see herds of horses or oxen, we are pleased; when we see a fleet of many ships, we are delighted; when we see many men, who will find it distressing?
Seneca sought a moderate approach to the crowd. Sometimes this is found by alternation.
The two things must be combined and taken by turns: solitude and the multitude. The former will leave us with a longing for the society of others, the latter for our own, and one will be the remedy for the other. Solitude will cure our aversion to the crowd; the crowd, the boredom of solitude.
Seneca also suggested moderation when in the crowd. There he considered it best to find a middle way that allows participation in social life while neither succumbing to it nor hating it.
What do you think is going to happen to manners when they are under attack on all sides? You must either imitate or reject. Yet either way is to be avoided. Don’t become like the bad because there are many of them, nor hostile to the many because they are unlike you.
The bold course is to remain dry and sober when the crowd is drunk and vomiting. The alternative is more moderate: not holding yourself aloof and making yourself conspicuous – not mingling with the crowd, either – but doing the same things, just not in the same way.
8. The assimilation of teachings. Stoic philosophy is meant to be absorbed rather than admired.
Wool takes on certain colors at once, while others it will not absorb unless it has been repeatedly soaked in them and boiled. In the same way, there are other systems of thought that our minds, once they have understood them, can immediately put into practice. But the system of which I am speaking, unless it goes deep, and sits for a long time, and has not just tinged the mind but dyed it, does not fulfill its promises.
Students of Stoicism are therefore advised not to do a lot of talking about it. Learning should be shown, not said. Epictetus:
Never call yourself a philosopher, and don’t talk much among laymen about philosophical principles, but act according to them…. And if you should come upon a discussion among laymen about some philosophical principle, keep silent for the most part; for there is great danger that you will immediately vomit up what you have not digested. And when someone says to you that you know nothing, and you’re not stung by the taunt, know then that you are making headway. Sheep don’t throw up their grass to show the shepherd how much they have eaten; after digesting the grass inside, they bear wool and milk outside. So for you, too: don’t display your learning to the uninstructed: display the actions that result from the digestion of it.
Let our mind do this: let it hide all the things it has made use of, and exhibit only what it has produced. Even if you will bear some resemblance to someone you admire and whose influence lies deep within you, I want your resemblance to be that of a son, not a statue: a statue is a dead thing.
To illustrate this idea, Plutarch created a simile that has become well-known.
The mind is not like a bucket that requires filling, it is like wood that needs igniting – nothing more – to produce an impulse to discovery and a longing for the truth. Imagine that someone needing fire from his neighbors, and finding there a big blazing one, just stayed warming himself until the fire burned out. It’s the same if someone who comes to another man to get his thinking does not realize that he ought to strike some light of his own and kindle his own ideas, but – delighted by what he is hearing – just sits there enchanted.
9. Words. Similarly, Stoics are wary of too much attachment to words. They regard progress in philosophy as measured by thought and action, not by a knowledge of precepts.
If we don’t also put the right conceptions into practice, we’ll be nothing more than expositors of the opinions of others. Who among us right now is not able to discourse about good and evil, according to all the rules? “That among the things in existence, some are good, some bad, some indifferent; the good then are virtues, and things that participate in virtues; the bad are the opposites; the indifferent are wealth, health, reputation.” Then if there is a loud noise while we are speaking, or if someone there laughs at us, we are thrown off the track. Philosopher, where are those things you were just talking about?
The Stoics thus warn against the risk of being beguiled by verbal formulations.
That is why we give children maxims to learn by heart … because a child’s mind can grasp them, when it can’t yet handle more. But for a grown man, whose progress is definite, it is disgraceful to cling to gems of rhetoric, to prop himself up with the best-known and briefest sayings, to depend on his memory: for by now he should be relying on himself. He should make such maxims and not memorize them.
It is through speech and other such forms of instruction that one must progress toward perfection, and purify one’s will, and correct the faculty that makes use of impressions. And instruction in those principles calls for a certain style of presentation, and a certain vividness and variety in the way they are expressed. So some students become captivated by these things and remain stuck there – one a captive of style, another of syllogisms, another of ambiguities, another in some other roadside inn of the same kind, and there they remain and waste away, as if among the Sirens.
A wariness of words can also affect one’s taste for certain kinds of philosophizing. The Stoics highlighted in this book were impatient with theory that didn’t have a concrete payoff. But the right proportion of theory was a matter of debate not just between Stoics and others but between different Stoics. Early Stoicism sometimes had a reputation for clever paradoxes and conceptual refinements that the Romans did not find appealing. They thought the stakes of philosophy were too high for constant abstraction and excessive subtlety. Seneca ridiculed the idea of stirring people to heroic acts with syllogisms, including Stoic syllogisms.
It takes great weapons to slay great demons…. Those tiny darts of yours – are you hurling them even against death? Do you fend off a lion with a needle? They are sharp, these arguments you make; but there is nothing sharper than a blade of straw. Some things are made futile and useless by their very subtlety.
The mind is accustomed to amuse rather than to heal itself, to treat philosophy as a diversion when it is a remedy. I don’t know what difference there may be between “wisdom” and “being wise.” I do know that it makes no difference to me whether I know such things or not…. So why do you occupy me with the terminology of wisdom, rather than its results? Make me bolder, make me calmer, make me the equal of fortune, raise me above it.
In Seneca’s view, the project of philosophy is to help people with their most serious problems.
Do you want to know what philosophy has to offer to the human race? Advice. Death calls one man, poverty stings another, another is tormented by wealth – someone else’s or his own. This man shudders at misfortune, that one longs to escape from his own good fortune. This one, men mistreat; that one, the gods. Why are you devising those word games of yours? This is no time for playing around: you have been summoned to help the wretched. You have promised that you will carry aid to the shipwrecked, the captives, the sick, the needy, those whose heads are under the waiting axe. Where are you straying? What are you doing?
An allied suggestion attributed to Epictetus:
What does it matter to me, says Epictetus, whether the universe is composed of atoms or uncompounded substances, or of fire and earth? Is it not sufficient to know the true nature of good and evil, and the proper bounds of our desires and aversions, and also of our impulses to act and not to act; and by making use of these as rules to order the affairs of our life, to bid those things that are beyond us farewell? It may very well be that these latter things are not to be comprehended by the human mind; and even if one assumes that they are perfectly comprehensible, what profit comes from comprehending them?
10. Comparisons to physical development. Earlier chapters have noted the interest of the Stoics in a recurring pattern of error: the tendency to overvalue what we can see at the expense of what we can’t – money more than time, or the benefits of acquisition more than the hidden costs of it. Stoics look at philosophical progress the same way. If changing our habits of thought seems too hard, it is because we aren’t used to bringing the kind of commitment to the task that we do to more tangible goals. So our writers compare the challenges of philosophy to the effort and hardship commonly endured for the sake of lesser causes.
Armies have put up with deprivations of every kind; they have lived on the roots of plants, and have staved off hunger in ways too revolting to mention. All these things they have suffered for the sake of a kingdom – even more wonderful, for the sake of someone else’s kingdom! Who, then, will hesitate to put up with poverty in order to free his mind from madness?
The answer, of course, is that everyone will hesitate, but the Stoic position is that none should. A related line of argument compares the labor and training demanded by Stoicism with that needed for great physical achievements.
How many men train their bodies, and how few train their minds! What crowds flock to the wrestling show – it’s fake, strictly for entertainment – and what solitude surrounds the good arts! How featherbrained are the athletes whose muscles and shoulders we admire!
Indeed, training the mind ought to seem easier than training the body.
While the body requires many things to be healthy, the mind grows by itself, nourishes itself, trains itself. A great deal of food and drink is necessary for athletes, and a lot of oil, not to mention a lot of work, but you can achieve virtue without equipment and free of charge.
A favorite comparison for the Stoic is the training undertaken by acrobats. How much harder than this can Stoicism be?
Nothing is so difficult, so far out of reach, that the human mind cannot conquer it and make it familiar with constant practice; no emotions are so fierce and independent that they cannot be tamed by training. Whatever the mind commands itself, it obtains…. People have learned to run on tightropes; to carry enormous burdens, scarcely within human capacity to support; to dive to immense depths and stay underneath the water with no chance to breathe. There are a thousand other instances in which persistence surmounts every obstacle, showing that nothing is difficult if the mind orders itself to endure it.
Acrobats face their difficult tasks without concern and risk their very lives in performing them, some doing somersaults over upturned swords, some walking on ropes set at a great height, some flying through the air like birds, where one false move is death. And they do all these things for miserably small pay – while we will not endure hardship for the sake of complete happiness?
11. Dedication. One should make no mistake: to practice Stoicism takes dedication. The Stoics don’t view it as a hobby.
The study of philosophy is not to be postponed until you have leisure; everything else is to be neglected in order that we may attend to philosophy, for no amount of time is long enough for it, even though our lives be prolonged from childhood to the uttermost bounds of time allotted to man.
How can someone learn enough to oppose his vices, if he learns only in the time he can spare from his vices? None of us goes deep. We pluck only the tips: we think a little time spent on philosophy is enough, and more than enough, for men with things to do.
The last occupation of the preoccupied man is living – and there is nothing that is harder to learn. The world is filled with teachers of the other arts; boys learn some of them so well that even boys can teach them. Learning how to live takes a lifetime, and – what may surprise you more – it takes a lifetime to learn how to die.
12. Encouragement. As these last sections show, sometimes Stoics say their philosophy is hard; sometimes they say it is well within reach. They claim it takes a lifetime to learn but that one can make progress immediately. They are, in the end, demanding optimists. We have seen the demands; let us end with the optimism.
To tell the truth, even the work is not that great, if only – as I said – we get started molding and reforming the mind before its crookedness can harden. But I don’t despair even of hard cases. There is nothing that stubborn effort and close, persistent attention will not overcome. Oak can be straightened, however much it is bent. Heat unfolds curved beams; those that grew in other shapes are fashioned into whatever our uses require. How much more easily may the mind be shaped, pliable as it is, and more yielding than any liquid!
We suffer from diseases that are curable, and our very nature assists us – since we were born to follow the right path – if we are willing to be improved. Nor is the road to the virtues steep and rough, as some have thought: they are reached by a level path. I do not come to give you false advice. The way to the happy life is easy. Just take the first step, with good auspices and the help of the gods themselves. It is much more difficult to do what you are doing now.
So often I meet people who think that whatever they can’t do, can’t be done; who say that we are always talking of things greater than human nature can bear. But how much more favorable is my own estimation of them! They too can do these things, but they don’t want to. And besides, did these tasks ever fail anyone who tried to achieve them? Was there anyone to whom they did not seem easier in the doing? Our lack of confidence is not the result of difficulty. The difficulty comes from our lack of confidence.
The combat is great, the achievement divine; for empire, for freedom, for happiness, for peace.