To Be a Stoic or "Philosophy and My Good Life, Part 1"

When I was much younger, I was infatuated with the ancient Stoics.

Best known for their dispassionate natures, as a dead school, their primary contribution to the culture these days is the word "stoic" and all its derivatives.

But my infatuation with their thought had very little do do with their philosophical position on human emotions. It was their cosmology that attracted me more than anything else, and, for the brief period that I seriously saw the world through a stoic lense, I was intensely happy.

Stoic thought seemed (and at times still seems) intuitively plausible to me on a variety of levels. The stoics observed that the universe is governed by rational laws and concluded from this that everything in the universee is governed by the rational principle. Since rationality always aims at some good end, it follows that the universe is a teleological universe, itself aiming at some good end, and that every event which occurs in the universe helps to bring the universe closer to this final goal. The stoic universe, in this sense, is a deterministic universe and there is very little that human beings have control over.

It is important, however, that people are distinguished from all other things in the universe by their share in the rational principle. That is, human beings, unlike all other things in the universe, are rational beings - a status that grants them certain and absolute control over a very limited number of things, namely, their internal states.

Both of these things - universal teleology and exceptionally limited human control - have a variety of different implications. Two of the most important are the folding of ethics into rationality and the reduction of human agency to an externally impotent and internally omnipotent duality. The stoics reduce free will to an internal question of radical assent or radical dissent and maintain that this is a substantial notion of what it means to be free. All human misery is caused by the choice to dissent from the rationally ordained teleological nature of the universe. Unfortunately for those who dissent, while such dissent is meaningful, it is also useless.

What is interesting about this is that, from a stoic perspective, human happiness becomes a matter of how the human character is constituted, since our character is the only thing we have any control over. For the stoics, to be happy is to be rational; to be rational is to be ethical, and to be ethical is to be happy.

Eventually, of course, my love affair with the stoics ended, primarily because in stoic cosmology, all actions aim towards the good despite themselves. Feeding a starving six year-old aims at the good just as much as punching him in the face and kicking him in the nuts does.

I think, however, that my rejection of stoicism on this point may have been too radical because the overall good end of the universal teleology, according to stoicism, doesn't fall within the proper circle of man's concern - though he may take some comfort from the fact that all human evils eventually work toward some good end. The only thing that falls within the proper circle of man's concern is the constitution of his own character.

There are other problems with stoicism of course - it radically impoverishes our notion of the human good, for example, by making our actions within the external world provisional rather than substantial.

I do think, however, that at least a provisional return to my stoic leanings might be in the wings, simply because of its emphasis on personal responsibility to oneself, if nothing else.