This part of the book, as a kind of afterword, consists of three brief discussions. Each involves an attack made on Stoicism and a response to it.
1. Heartlessness. Our first criticism comes in response to this advice from Epictetus:
When you see someone weeping in sorrow, either because his child goes abroad or his property is lost, don’t let yourself get carried away by the impression that he is suffering because of those external things. Hold this thought in mind: “what afflicts him is not what has happened, because it wouldn’t affect someone else the same way; what afflicts him is his opinion about it.” So far as words go, don’t hesitate to sympathize with him, or even to groan with him if he groans. But take care not to groan inside as well.
That passage provoked this response from Joseph Addison much later:
As the Stoic philosophers discard all passions in general, they will not allow a wise man so much as to pity the afflictions of another. If thou seest thy friend in trouble, says Epictetus, thou mayst put on a look of sorrow, and condole with him, but take care that thy sorrow be not real…. For my own part, I am of opinion, compassion does not only refine and civilize human nature, but has something in it more pleasing and agreeable than what can be met with in such an indolent happiness, such an indifference to mankind as that in which the Stoics placed their wisdom.
Addison’s claim epitomizes a standard criticism of the Stoics – that their philosophy is heartless and at odds with compassion. The accomplished Stoic, if such a person ever did exist, might offer words of consolation but would feel nothing (it is said) for anyone else. The Stoic cannot care about others, or about the world, because that is a form of attachment to externals.
This is all a misunderstanding. The Stoics do not condemn feeling. In important ways they endorse it. Stoics value compassion, detest indolence, and are committed to service to mankind – the opposite of what Addison thinks they want. But the Stoic would unhook these commitments from inner distress over any given case. For why stop with that case? There is cause for such distress in every direction, and meanwhile it distracts from the big picture and from anything constructive one might do about it. So yes, the Stoics consider feelings of pity unhelpful to anyone; but their aim is to do the same things without such pity that others would do on account of it. This is explained in Chapter 11, Section 5. (Sometimes the Stoics suggest having a kind of pity for one’s adversaries, but it wouldn’t involve distress. See Chapter 7, Section 13.) Epictetus’s way of putting the point might sound a bit harsh, but his conclusion isn’t much different in substance from this gentler line from Epicurus:
Let us share our friends’ suffering not with grief but with thoughtful understanding.
Still, I would prefer not to defend the Stoics by saying that Addison didn’t read enough of them. There is plenty to refute him in what the Romans said, but diligent searching might find language elsewhere that gives support to some variation on his case. We at least have seen that Stoicism need not entail any of his conclusions. Instead of dwelling further on comparisons of one quotation to another, I would rather use his criticism as a chance to think further about the place of feeling and compassion in Stoicism, or anyway in the variety of it this book offers.
As discussed in Chapter 9, what the Stoics wish to avoid are emotions or other states that interfere with the ability to see the world accurately – states of feeling, in other words, that get in the way of reason and arise from (or create) attachment to externals. Stoics have no difficulty with states that do not have those sources and effects. As a temporary convenience, I proposed in Chapter 9 to refer to the good or unobjectionable states as feelings as distinct from emotions. The difference between feeling and emotion is important – or the difference, however it might better be worded, between those states that oust reason and those that are no threat to it and so do not trouble the Stoics. It matters because states of feeling, as so defined, may well be necessary to motivate compassion and otherwise contribute to admirable character. Emotion probably isn’t.
Let’s consider more closely the intended effect of Stoicism on the inner life of the student, and especially on the emotions, by comparing it to the effects of time. Start with the case that Addison describes: a friend stricken by terrible loss. Suppose you lived a life long enough to experience such grieving friends 1,000 times, and imagine your likely reaction when approached by the next friend – number 1,001. Not everyone reacts to repeated experience the same way, so take the most appealing scenario. Your attitude might resemble that of a doctor – a very good one, let’s say – who has had a long career of working with dying patients and their families. In the best doctor of that sort we would find kindness, warmth, and compassion. There would be feeling. But emotion would be unlikely. You would sympathize but you would not go through mourning of your own. You would have seen it all too many times for that.
So far these speculations involve no Stoicism. They are just observations about the way that long experience might affect the sensibilities of anyone. But the result of this thought experiment, if accepted, is a state of mind about the same as what the Stoics seek. The resemblance is natural. Time and experience are the teachers of life. They gradually bring about wisdom. Adam Smith said it this way:
Time, the great and universal comforter, gradually composes the weak man to the same degree of tranquility which a regard to his own dignity and manhood teaches the wise man to assume in the beginning.
My claim here is the converse. If the Stoic says we are fettered to externals, or vice, or emotion, it may be as accurate to say we are fettered to our inexperience. Only the novice is inflated and grasping and fearful; but we are all novices. Life is regrettably short because it does not allow us enough trials to become as wise as we would wish. Stoic philosophy is a compensation – a substitute for time, or simulation of it. Stoicism means to offer the wisdom while skipping the repetition; it tries to get by contemplation some of the lessons, immunities, and other features of character we would acquire naturally if we lived long enough. The “wise man” of the Stoics thus resembles one who has had long experience of life – far longer, perhaps, than anyone is able to have in fact. Stoicism is the philosophy of a thousand trials.
The connection between Stoicism and the consequences of time can be extended. Think of the effect that repetition has on other emotions. What is frightening at first usually becomes nothing, or loses force, with long enough exposure. The source of the fear doesn’t change; the mind does. Or imagine making a fortune and losing it a thousand times over, or loving and grieving a thousand times. You might not stop caring about these things, and might not want to. But you would probably gain a sense of equanimity about them and meet them with a certain detachment – with feeling but with reason, and thus without emotion. Little would likely be left of greed and vanity, either, after so much gain and loss. Experience is humbling. Instead you might have other types of joy – the calm kind that comes from appreciation and understanding.
To return to the point: the absence of emotion prescribed by the Stoics in response to a thing is also what we would expect naturally from long enough exposure to it. Feeling and compassion can survive and even grow with long repetition and experience. Emotion does not. The sifting between emotion and feeling that comes naturally with experience resembles what the Stoic aims to achieve by the practice of philosophy.
Connecting the Stoic disposition to the quality of character that arises from long experience is productive in several ways. First, it helps make the Stoic ideal less otherworldly. The long-experience view allows Stoicism to be viewed as an extension of the life we know – an effort to go farther down the road of being human, not to affect godliness in the way that we will see criticized by Dryden later in this chapter. Stoicism tries to give us what we would gain with more difficulty, but naturally enough, if we had more time.
Second, the experience-based view makes the goals of Stoicism more familiar and easier to understand. Everyone has had small experiences of inurement by experience and the difference between feeling and emotion that can result. We don’t need a dozen lifetimes to get the idea of it. One can compare the first experience of grief with the tenth, or the first encounter with an amusement with the fiftieth, or the first kiss with the hundredth. These experiences need not lose their meaning or be had without feeling. We might say instead, in the most attractive case, that the feelings at stake mature and change. But even then such events do eventually lose their emotional charge and become no threat to reason. There are cases in which emotional inurement is harder to come by, of course. I only mean to say that the process of it, and the qualities of the Stoic “wise man,” are familiar enough to most people on a modest scale.
Third, the long-experience view of Stoicism clarifies the Stoic ideal as admirable. In the personality formed by many trials we find the qualities of the finished Stoic represented in an attractive way. There is nothing ugly in the type of character produced by long experience, or at least nothing necessarily so. It can be unattractive; sometimes experience jades us and dulls our capacities. But there is nobility in it when joined with compassion. Stoicism demands this. It seeks to create not just the mind matured by many trials, but the best version of it – the doctor who has learned with the passage of much time to care well and energetically for the patient, not the doctor who is bored.
Fourth, viewing Stoicism as similar to long experience can help to solve some conundrums. Sometimes the general principles of the philosophy can seem tricky to apply to particular facts. Stoics discourage the emotion of anger, but what if you are the victim of some grotesque injustice? Isn’t it then right to be angry – and maybe even important, since the anger will motivate efforts to stop the injustice from happening again? One can reason through that kind of problem with precepts that this book has discussed. You might say that the Stoic cares about justice and doesn’t need anger to motivate a reply to a violation of it, etc. (See Chapter 9, Section 12.) But our current idea offers a shortcut. If you want to react to injustice like a Stoic, react like someone who knows it by long experience – not someone who has adapted to injustice and no longer cares, but perhaps someone whose life’s work is the correction of it. Those sorts of people, in my own experience, tend to meet injustice with feeling but little emotion. Their equilibrium isn’t upset by a fresh case of wrongdoing. They deal with it too often to respond that way. They are resolute, tough, and active in style; and (to return to our question) when the injustice afflicts someone else, they are highly compassionate. They have, for these purposes, become natural Stoics. The best lawyers can be like this.
We can end this part of the discussion by reversing our earlier thought experiment. You are grieving and can be consoled by either of two friends: one for whom your calamity is a new experience, and who is full of emotion about it on seeing your grief; or one who has seen it a thousand times, and so has warm and caring feeling but not emotion. I would take the second, but at any rate see no basis for admiring the first one more. The second one is the Stoic.
That is enough about heartlessness. By way of addendum, though, I wish to spend a few more words on the relationship between Stoicism and experience; for the discussion a moment ago mentioned some tradeoffs that deserve further comment. If experience erodes emotion, some might consider the erosion a loss, and then dread repetition precisely because emotions don’t survive it. One can think of cases where those who have been through an experience many times may seem less wise with respect to it. They can’t see it freshly; they barely notice it; they don’t appreciate it. They have been corrupted by adaptation.
It might be fairest to say there are different types of wisdom, or sensibilities helpful on different occasions. There is the sensibility of the veteran who has seen it (whatever it is) too many times to be emotional but has other advantages: perspective, good judgment, and the ease and warmth that arise from long familiarity and knowledge. Those are great virtues. They are central to Stoicism. But they aren’t the only ones, and aren’t always the ones most wanted even by a Stoic. There is also the sensibility of the newcomer to a subject – one who has the advantages of the amateur, such as appreciation of what is at hand.
These claims about the effects of experience and inexperience can be restated in terms referenced earlier in the book. The Stoic seeks the most useful perspective on all occasions. I have emphasized here that, with respect to emotion and adversity, Stoics want the kind of wisdom that we associate with long experience. But in certain settings they seek, in effect, the attitude of the newcomer. A reminder from Chapter 12, Sec. 4:
“When then shall I see Athens again and the Acropolis?” Wretch, are you not content with what you see daily? Have you anything better or greater to see than the sun, the moon, the stars, the whole earth, the sea?
From Chapter 5, Sec. 8:
Don’t imagine having things that you don’t have. Rather, pick the best of the things that you do have and think of how much you would want them if you didn’t have them.
In effect we can distinguish two kinds of mistakes. We fail to appreciate some things because they are too familiar. We overreact to others because they aren’t familiar enough. In the first case we suffer because we can’t see old things as a first-timer would. In the second we suffer because can’t see new things as a long-timer would. The Stoic is more concerned with the second kind of mistake than the first, but understands them both and tries to move from one point of view to another as appropriate to the situation.
One can revisit many topics in this book and reinterpret them according to how much repetition (of a hypothetical kind) would be found in the ideal mindset for dealing with them. Acceptance and satisfaction, and therefore detachment from desire, can often be furthered by the newcomer’s perspective – by learning to see familiar things as if they weren’t familiar, and to touch them without callouses on our fingers. That same perspective can help us see that a convention is idiotic or unjust in ways too familiar to be commonly perceived. Emotion and adversity (and sometimes desires, too) call for the opposite view – that is, for an attitude toward the subjects of those states that would be found in someone with long experience of them. When considering whatever one loves or hates – when considering any reaction to anything – it is instructive to ask how much of it is owed to the number of times one has encountered the subject, whether it be many or few.
Stoicism should not be overestimated. Reflection cannot produce all the qualities of character and feeling that long experience does, nor can it reverse them, which may be harder still. But Stoicism should not be underestimated, either, because reflection can help with some of this. The point may be seen in settings that do not involve emotion as well as in those that do. When one has studied novelty and thought about it for a sufficiently long time that it loses charm and is less likely to cause you to do foolish things, that is Stoicism, and it is to the good. (Or replace “novelty” with “luxury” or “status” – all the same.) The alternative is to be taken in by novelty again and again until it is finally drained of its charm by many hard lessons about its unimportance, maybe late in life. The sage saves the trouble.
2. Impossibility.
The ruggedness of a Stoic is only a silly affectation of being a god, – to wind himself up by pulleys to an insensibility of suffering, and, at the same time, to give the lie to his own experience, by saying he suffers not, what he knows he feels. True philosophy is certainly of a more pliant nature, and more accommodated to human use…. A wise man will never attempt an impossibility; and such it is to strain himself beyond the nature of his being, either to become a deity, by being above suffering, or to debase himself into a stock or stone, by pretending not to feel it.
Dryden offers another familiar critique of Stoicism: that its teachings are impossible to carry out. To repeat the point that provokes the criticism, the Stoics say we should try to control what is up to us and avoid attachment to what is not. Our judgments, and our reactions to events, are up to us; the events themselves aren’t. Stoics sometimes express the idea by depicting a “wise man” (or sapiens) who, by use of these principles, is free from desires and fears. No such wise man has ever been identified, and some dismiss Stoicism on this account as a philosophy that doesn’t work.
As in the previous section of this chapter, we can use the criticism as a chance to think about a larger question it raises – here, about whether Stoicism might be valuable even if its teachings cannot be perfectly followed. But as before, a word should be said, first, about what the Stoic teachings really require. Stoics suffer and do not pretend otherwise, though they don’t see any point in carrying on about it. What they try to do is understand the role of their own minds in the creation of their suffering, and then use that knowledge to reduce it. But the good Stoic, or in any event the type discussed in this book, takes a clear-eyed view of the human condition. Someone who likes Dryden’s criticism should also like this passage about reacting to the death of a loved one:
I well know that there are those whose wisdom is harsh rather than brave, who deny that the wise man will ever grieve. But these people, it seems to me, can never have run into this sort of misfortune; if they had, Fortune would have knocked their proud philosophy out of them and forced them to admit the truth even against their will.
This might sound like just the sort of thing that should be said against the Stoics – a blast of realism that exposes the unworkable character of their philosophy. But in fact those are the words of Seneca, as found in Ch. 9, Sec. 6 of this book, where he offers a much more realistic vision than the one Dryden attacks. His words help correct the caricature of Stoicism as a theory that asks the impossible, or of the Stoic as someone who pretends not to feel anything. The reader who has arrived at this point in the book after reading the rest will already know that the Stoics were wiser than that.
Or at least some of them were. The passage from Seneca also shows, in fairness, that Stoicism doesn’t always mean the same thing. The people he criticized there were probably other Stoics, and no doubt other Stoics would in turn have criticized him. As Seneca himself put it, “We Stoics are not subjects of a despot: each of us lays claim to his own freedom.” (Epistles 33.4) The Stoic view of the emotions is very involved if one tries to view it as a whole and include what we know of the views of the Greeks. It is not done justice by this book (or by Dryden). Seneca’s views above, and in Chapter 9, can indeed be viewed as lapses from Stoicism if the philosophy is defined in certain ways. As noted in the preface, I prefer to view the set of ideas in this book as a version of Stoicism rather than a mix of authentic and heretical claims. But the preface also noted my lack of excitement about such arguments, so for now I will just say that the framework offered by this book is not very open to Dryden’s complaint.
Still, let’s now acknowledge the truth in his criticism. A perfectly Stoic existence, even if it need not mean what Dryden thought, is no doubt impossible. It would presumably amount to never being attached to externals and to living a life of continuous virtue. The greatest Stoic teachers were the first to say that they hadn’t managed this, though it was not their style to say it couldn’t be done by anyone. The Stoics do urge their students and themselves to try to reach the Stoic ideal, and sometimes talk as though it is possible. They merely add that it has never been done in fact, or almost never.
Nor would I advise you that you should neither follow (nor take as a follower) anyone but a wise man. For where will you find that man – the one we have been seeking for so many centuries? In place of the best, let it be the least bad!
There is no reason for you to say, Serenus, as your habit is, that this wise man of ours is nowhere to be found. He is not a fiction of us Stoics, a sort of phantom glory of human nature, nor is he a mere conception, the mighty semblance of a thing unreal; but a man such as we describe, we have displayed and will display again – though perhaps only seldom, and at intervals of many lifetimes for each example.
The Stoic that Seneca has in mind as an example is Stilpo, a Greek philosopher who had lived three hundred years earlier and left no writings; he in turn was a teacher of Zeno of Citium. The most famous basis for the assessment of Stilpo is an anecdote in which he loses his wife and children when his country is sacked, yet emerges calmly and says “I have all my goods with me.” If Stilpo had been present in later Rome, he probably would have resembled Epictetus or some such figure, and would have joined him in denying his own perfection. And of course he would have been right. Anyone can seem perfect when we don’t know too much about them. That is why the Stoic models, on the rare occasions when they offer them, are always from past generations.
Epictetus himself did not think a finished Stoic was any easier to find.
Show me a Stoic, if you have one. Where, how? … As we call a statue “Phidian” which has been fashioned according to the art of Phidias, in the same way, show me someone fashioned according to the doctrines which you prattle. Show me someone who is sick and happy, in danger and happy, dying and happy, exiled and happy, disgraced and happy. Show him – by the gods, I want to see a Stoic! So you don’t have a completed one ready to show me – then show me the work in progress, the one leaning in that direction. Do me this kindness, don’t begrudge an old man the sight of this spectacle, which up till now I have never seen!
So there are no perfect Stoics. This would be an important point if the “wise man,” or sage, were a status one must reach or else fail entirely. The early Greek Stoics have sometimes been cited, fairly or otherwise, as taking something like that position. But the Romans did not, and sensibly so, for what would be the point of a philosophy (if ever there were one) that offers nothing without achievement of the impossible? The wise man of the Stoics is best considered a point of reference that is helpful even if out of reach. It is a convenient way to illustrate the meaning of perfect wisdom: imagine how someone in possession of it would think and act. That was Kant’s view of the idea.
The wise man of the Stoics is an ideal, that is to say, a human being existing only in thought and in complete conformity with the idea of wisdom. As the idea provides a rule, so the ideal serves as an archetype for the perfect and complete determination of the copy. Thus the conduct of this wise and divine man serves us as a standard of action, with which we may compare and judge ourselves, which may help us to reform ourselves, although the perfection it demands can never be attained by us.
Kant’s view is consistent with what the late Stoics said. We can compare it to Seneca’s distinction between the ideals of Stoicism and the aims of it that are usually achievable. He understood the value of an ideal that might not be reachable.
It is necessary that we set up the highest good as the end toward which we struggle, and which our every deed and action has in view – just as sailors have to set their course by some constellation.
When speaking of actual progress in Stoicism, Seneca put students into three classes. The first and second have freedom from emotions and externals but differ in how securely they have made those gains. Then there is the third class, which seems to be as far as most can be expected to get.
The third class has got past many vices, and serious ones, but not past all of them. They have escaped avarice, but still feel anger. They are no longer troubled by lust, but still by ambition. They no longer covet, but they still fear. And even in their fear they are sufficiently resolute against certain things but give way to others. They despise death but dread pain. Let us reflect a moment on this last point. Things will be going well for us if we make it into this group. It takes great good fortune in terms of natural gifts, great and unceasing application to study, to attain the second level; but even this third condition is not to be despised. Think what a host of evils you see around you; see how no crime goes uncommitted, how far wickedness advances every day, how much wrongdoing occurs both in public and in private. You will see that we’re doing pretty well if we’re not among the worst.
By sometimes talking as though everyone should conform to the Stoic ideal, the Stoics no doubt set themselves up for some ridicule and received their share. We nevertheless should interpret Stoicism in a way that makes the best sense of it that fairly can be found. This includes choosing between the sometimes inconsistent teachings of the Stoics in ways that now enable the philosophy to best serve its purpose. The purpose of Stoicism is to help those who study it see the truth more accurately and engage in wiser thinking and living, not to reach an end point or else be judged to have wasted their time. The “wise man” is a help to that project. It is best understood as a pole star – a source of direction, not a destination.
3. Hypocrisy.
From the testimony of friends as well as of foes, from the confessions of Epictetus and Seneca, as well as from the sneers of Lucian and the fierce invectives of Juvenal, it is plain that these teachers of virtue had all the vices of their neighbors, with the additional vice of hypocrisy.
Some critics have claimed, with Macaulay, that Stoicism is a school of hypocrisy. Stoics claim to be free from vanity and greed and fear (the critic says), and they exhort others to join them, but are as immersed in those vices as anyone else. They advocate for virtue but are not virtuous.
Stoicism’s reputation for hypocrisy arises mostly from its association with Seneca, and considering his case will be a way to address the issue generally. Seneca was a controversial player in the political life of his times. As noted in the preface, he served as a tutor and advisor to Nero, an emperor with an ugly reputation, and Seneca may have aided him in various immoral undertakings; Seneca’s situation was, at the least, morally complex. Critics also are uneasy about Seneca’s money. Seneca wrote that “No one is worthy of the gods except he who has disdained riches,” yet he himself was immensely wealthy – the owner of many slaves, and evidently of villas in Italy, Egypt, and Spain. It is said, too, that he lent money to the colonial Britons that they did not want, then later recalled the loans abruptly and to ruinous effect.
I think it is more constructive to consider the example of Marcus Aurelius, a fellow Stoic whose reputation as a man and as a statesman is very favorable. But since Seneca has been the subject of so much discussion and suspicion, let me offer some comments on the use of him to disparage Stoicism, and on the problem of Stoic hypocrisy in general.
a. A great deal has been written about Seneca over the past 2,000 years, some of it sympathetic and some not. It is too extensive to be captured in this space. Most of what anyone thinks they know about him, though, is derived from the histories of Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio, along with fragmentary comments from Seneca’s contemporaries. The most prominent account of Seneca left from his lifetime was that of a bitter enemy, Publius Suillius Rufus, recounted in the Annals of Tacticus (13.42); but Suillius is described by Tacitus as highly disreputable in his own right.
Seneca himself left behind only his philosophical writings and plays. Beyond those works we know little of what he ever said to Nero (though see the interesting item at the end of Chapter 9, Section 10) or of how he thought about the harrowing ethical position he seems to have occupied. Sometimes good people work for bad ones. Seneca might have done it for the sake of the public, or for lesser reasons; he might have made Nero worse than he otherwise would have been, or better; he might have had a hand in trying to kill Nero, or maybe not (Nero certainly thought that he did). All of this ends in speculation, now and for the ancient historians. Seneca had been dead fifty years when Tacitus wrote his Annals. (Suetonius, who also wrote about Seneca, was a contemporary of Tacitus.) Cassius Dio wrote nearly a century later.
In view of the thin record, the grounds for skepticism about most judgments of Seneca are plain enough. For the sake of comparison, it has been aptly suggested that we imagine a figure from our own times being remembered and evaluated 2,000 years from now on the basis of contemporary accounts by an enemy and later writings of two or three historians who haven’t been born yet. The historians don’t have any recordings of the figure himself or access to more than a few people who ever saw or met him. By modern standards they have only a tiny set of records in written form. We have trouble understanding public figures from recent times who are studied by historians and psychologists without those disadvantages. Our wariness should greatly increase when we look into the distant past. All comments about Seneca’s motives, inner life, and private conduct should be accompanied by an asterisk and notation that our odds of getting these things right cannot be very impressive.
Despite these limitations, there has been long and plentiful surmise about the sort of person Seneca was, much of it censorious and bearing no asterisk. Commentators have debated what he must have thought about his emperor, what he must have thought when he wrote his letters, what he must have thought when he killed himself. These speculations are unobjectionable if not taken too seriously. But judgments of hypocrisy require a detailed intimacy with the facts and characters involved that I do not think anyone can have now with respect to Seneca.
b. Then again, what difference would it make if we could? A bad man can write a good book. Seneca wasn’t a religious figure trying to inspire by example. He was a philosopher trying to convince by reason. True, he does say that philosophers should be judged by how they live rather than what they say, so maybe he fails when judged by his own measure (or maybe he doesn’t – see point 1 above); but the measure itself is ill-chosen. What a philosopher or psychologist writes should be judged on its merits. This is especially true of writings such as Seneca’s, which mean to offer a useful way of thinking. It helps or it doesn’t.
c. For all that, reconsider what Seneca actually said. It is too easy to fasten on to severe things he wrote without the qualifications that usually came afterwards. A moment ago I quoted a line from him about disdaining wealth. But now consider the longer passage from which it came, which also appeared in Chapter 6:
No one is worthy of the gods except he who has disdained riches. I do not forbid you to possess them, but I want to bring you to the point at which you possess them without fear. There is only one way to achieve this: by persuading yourself that you can live happily without them, and by regarding them always as about to depart.
This reflects Seneca’s approach to Stoicism generally. It is a philosophy of detachment from pleasures and aversions, not extermination of them. This is valuable to understand for its own sake, since otherwise the Stoics might seem to ask the ridiculous: no preferences or enjoyments allowed. It is also valuable to understand when judging claims that Stoics are hypocrites because some of them had money but said that nobody should. There admittedly can be something odd or distasteful when a philosopher argues for the unimportance of riches while surrounded by them. But if one insists on comparing what Seneca said to what he did, what he said should be remembered carefully. Maybe he managed the kind of detachment from his wealth that he advocates; maybe he gave large amounts of it away. Juvenal’s Fifth Satire, written in the generation after Seneca died, mentions the generosity of Seneca as if everyone knew about it, and epigrams of Martial from the same era contain a similar reference. But again, what relationship Seneca had to his money is, in the end, something at which we can only guess.
Next, and relatedly, Seneca did not claim to be a particularly accomplished Stoic. His many criticisms of conventional behavior seem to have been directed largely at himself.
I’m not so shameless as to undertake to heal others while sick myself. It is rather as if we were lying in the same hospital room; I’m talking with you about our common illness, and sharing remedies. So listen to me as though I were talking to myself. I’m letting you into my private place, and am examining myself, using you as a foil.
Seneca sometimes showed exasperation with the complaints we are now considering, which were made during his life as well as later.
“You speak one way, you live another.” You creatures most spiteful, hostile to all the best men! This is the same taunt they threw at Plato, at Epicurus, at Zeno: for all of them were teaching not how they themselves lived, but how they ought to live. I am speaking of virtue, not of myself, and when I denounce vices, I denounce my own first of all. As soon as I can, I’ll live as I should.
That last attitude is characteristic of Stoics. This book has shown many times over that their philosophy is founded on humility. Anyone who crows about being a Stoic isn’t; progress in Stoicism may be measured in part by one’s awareness of failure at it. A kindred offering from Marcus Aurelius:
This thought too will help you avoid empty self-esteem: you can no longer have lived your whole life, or even your life since youth, as a philosopher. Rather it has become obvious to many others, as well as to yourself, that you are far removed from philosophy. You have become confused, and getting a reputation as a philosopher is no longer easy for you; your position in life is also at war with it. If you have seen how matters truly lie, get rid of thoughts about how you will seem to others. Be satisfied if you can live out the rest of your life, whatever remains of it, with what wisdom your nature provides.
d. Putting aside Seneca, the claim of hypocrisy also misunderstands what Stoicism is for in the lives of most of those with an interest in it. The claim views Stoicism as if it were a creed to which its adherents try to make converts, or that they use as a basis for judgment of others. That would leave the Stoic open to criticism for preaching one thing but doing another. Such a vision arises understandably enough from the writings in this book. In order to teach their ideas to others, the Stoics had to offer them as instructions. But the practice of Stoicism has nothing to do with telling others how to act or saying anything else that might be contradicted by what one does. Stoicism, at least for most who now study it, is a set of tools for thought, and a way of using them, with which some find they can help themselves. It is something to do, not something to say.
e. A productive last question one might ask about Stoicism is: compared to what? Suppose – plausibly, I think – that typical students of Stoicism advance only slightly toward its goals. They end up with a little less anxiety over what they can’t control, and a little more patience with irritation, indignity, and misfortune; a bit more resistance to convention in their thinking, and somewhat less desire or fear directed at things undeserving of either, and so forth. In other words, they make some modest progress. There are those who get more than that from the philosophy, and some get less, but imagine that this much were a common result. Those are paltry gains compared to the attainment of sagehood, but considerable compared to a baseline without them. They are considerable, too, compared to the results of other kinds of philosophical study (how much more does any philosophy do for its students?). It would be foolish to regard small improvements with contempt when it is so rare to find any other kind. So if Stoics seek great things but get only part way there, the discrepancy should not cause them to be thought of as hypocrites. They aimed high, fell short, and did well.