Why Stoicism fails when treated like self-help

Who's in the Video Massimo Pigliucci Massimo Pigliucci is the K. D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. He has written for publications such as The New York Times, The Washington[…] Go to Profile Part of the Series The Big Think Interview Explore series Why Stoicism fails when treated like self-help “It’s much better to try to understand how the world works and then act accordingly. Rather than trying to impose on the world the way we want to think or the way we preferred things to be.” ▸ 22 min — with Massimo Pigliucci Description Transcript Copy a link to the article entitled http://Why%20Stoicism%20fails%20when%20treated%20like%20self-help Share Why Stoicism fails when treated like self-help on Facebook Share Why Stoicism fails when treated like self-help on Twitter (X) Share Why Stoicism fails when treated like self-help on LinkedIn Sign up for Big Think on Substack The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free. Subscribe

Stoicism is often mistaken for emotional withdrawal or rigid self-control. What that misinterpretation gets wrong is that it actually centers the discipline of attention.

Massimo Pigliucci reframes this misconception, revealing how this philosophy can lead to a clearer sense of agency – if implemented correctly.

MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI: The Stoics, are nothing if not realists about life. They accept the world the way it actually is, not the way you would want it to be. The problem is, of course, that life sometimes is complicated, that are multiple choices. We have a tendency to want to simplify things and go for something that is stark, that is clear, that is obvious. That's just not the way the world works. And, according to the Stoics, it's much better to try to understand how the world works and then act accordingly. Rather than trying to impose on the world the way we want to think or the way we preferred things to be. I am Massimo Pigliucci. I am an evolutionary biologist

and a philosopher of science, and my latest book is called “Beyond Stoicism,” coauthored with Greg Lopez and Meredith Kunz.

- [Narrator] What is Stoicism?

- Stoicism is a philosophy of life that suggests that the best way to live a human life is to ask yourself what kind of a living organism human beings are. And the answer that the Stoics give to that question is that fundamentally we are highly social and capable of reason. We're that intelligent. It follows, according to them, that a good human life is one way you use reason in order to solve problems and you behave in a cooperative, pro-social fashion. One of the crucial insights of the Stoics is that we should focus on what is up to us, as the ancient Stoic Epictetus put it, and try to accept with equanimity what is not up to us. In other words, focus where your agency is active, where you are efficacious in doing things, and then accept whatever comes as it comes because you really don't have a choice. The Stoics are nothing if not realists about life. They try to understand how human life works and they try to live the best life possible. One of the things that we do understand from biology, psychology, is that we have limited time and energy to do things, both physical energy and emotional energy. And so if we insist on pursuing approaches that are likely not to work or they're not efficacious, you know, our agency doesn't really have any effect on it, then we are only making our life miserable. And in fact, we're trading off with other things that we should be doing. One of the interesting aspects of the particular brand of Stoicism, so to speak, that Epictetus articulated in the second century is this notion of role ethics. We all play different roles in life, many roles, in fact. And if we reflect on it for a minute, for instance, some of my roles include being somebody's son, being somebody's father, being somebody's husband, being a friend, being a teacher, being a colleague, being a citizen of a particular nation and of a particular city, and so on and so forth. All of these roles need to be handled essentially simultaneously. It's not like I can decide one day I'm gonna be just a colleague and nothing else. I am a colleague perhaps in this particular moment when I'm at work and I'm interacting with other people, but I'm at the same time also a husband, a father, a friend, et cetera, et cetera. And the idea here is that I need to conserve both physical, and emotional, mental energy so that I can do my best in all of these roles whenever it is that I need to do something about it. If I'm going to waste a lot of energy and time on a particular thing, especially something that for which my efforts are in fact not efficacious, then I'm really trading off with everything else. I am getting depressed, let's say, by just constantly reading the news about things that are not actionable, about things that I cannot do anything about. Well, the result of that is then I'm not useful to my family, I'm not useful to my friends. I'm not in fact useful to society in general and even to myself. So it's about conserving energy, setting priorities. This goes back to the the first discipline of Epictetus, the discipline of desire, setting goals. Depending on our values, we set goals and we set priorities. And doing so is crucial because otherwise we end up wasting a lot of time and then regretting it. And usually, when you get to the point of regret, especially near the end of your life, it's a little too late. Seneca points out in one of his letters to his friend Lucilius that too many people start reflecting on what they want to do and why near the end of their lives, when it's too late, when they're already done most of what they were going to do. Stoicism is one of the Greco-Roman philosophies that evolved during the Hellenistic period, and the goal is to live a eudaemonic life. Eudaemonia is a word that in Greek means, roughly speaking, a life worth living, a kind of life that you get to the end of it and you say, "Yeah, that was not wasted time." Now, different Hellenistic schools, like the Epicureans, for instance, or the Skeptics, had different answers to what constitutes a eudaemonic life. According to the Stoics, living a eudaemonic life means living intelligently, smartly, and socially. Because one of the fundamental aspects of Stoicism is that we should live a pro-social life, that is, a life where we interact with other people, because we are naturally a social organism, then the Stoics put a lot of emphasis on relationships with people, on our roles in society, what is it that is a good thing or not thing to do with respect to other people. In fact, they went so far as declaring themselves cosmopolitan. Being a cosmopolitan means being a member of the human cosmopolite, the human city, the universal human city. According to the Stoics, every human being on Earth is our brother and sister, and we should treat them accordingly. The ancient Stoic Epictetus, who lived at the beginning of the second century, laid out three fundamental disciplines for the study and practice of Stoicism. They're referred to normally as the discipline of desire, the discipline of action, and the discipline of assent, although I should warn you that the English terms are a little bit misleading compared to the original Greek. Desire, for instance, doesn't mean whatever I fancy at the moment. It means my values and also my disvalues, that is, the kinds of things that I think are important and good in life and the kind of things that are not important or bad in life. The discipline of desire teaches us to reevaluate critically our values, to reorient ourselves according to good values, to make deliberate decisions about what those values are and why. The second discipline, the discipline of action, has to do, as the name implies, with acting toward other people. We live in a society. We don't just subscribe to certain values, we enact those values every time that we do something or say something, especially to other people. So the discipline of action is about putting into practice our values when we interact in society at large with other human beings. Finally, the discipline of assent. Assent means of course agreement. But for Epictetus that means thinking carefully and rationally about the other two disciplines, about values and how to implement them. So the discipline of assent in a sense is about making all of this flow so nicely and so smoothly that we have in fact, according to the Stoics, a smoothly flowing life. The three disciplines are a way to implement Stoicism in practice, but Stoicism of course is a philosophy, so there's also a theory behind it. And in order to understand Stoic theory, we need to refer to the three areas of study that were typical in any Stoic curriculum. If you went to a Stoic school, let's say the school that was run by Epictetus in Northwestern Greece in the second century, you would actually study, before you get to the disciplines and how to live your life, you would study the three general areas that are pertinent to those disciplines. Now, there too, the English names are a little bit misleading. They are physics, ethics, and logic. But what they mean exactly is something a little bit different from modern English, and so we need to be careful here. Physics, for instance, comes from physis, which means nature. So when I say physics, don't think quantum mechanics, or general relativity, or things like that, think science in general, so a good understanding of how the world works. That's connected to the discipline of desire, that is, to the discipline that deals with our goals and priorities in life. Why? Because our goals and priorities in life depend on what kind of living organism we are. If we were a different kind, you know, a martian, or a dog, or a lion, we would have different priorities. So it's about understanding the world as it works. And the best way to understand the world as it is is through science. So you study science in order to investigate into your own goals and priorities. These days, ethics means mostly the study of right and wrong actions. But for the Stoics or for the ancient Greco-Romans in general, ethics had, again, a much broader meaning. It meant literally the study of how to live your life. So it's not just about whether a particular action is right or wrong, it's also about your motivations for carrying out a particular action. Are they good motivations or not good motivations? It's about your priorities in life, your goals, the way you relate to other people, and so on and so forth. The second discipline of action is connected with ethics. Action is about dealing with other people, ethics is about how to live a life. Since we're a social animal, the two are very closely related. We live a social life. We don't live on deserted islands. We don't do very well when we are on our own. We can survive perhaps on our own under certain circumstances, but we only thrive in a society. When I say logic, most people start thinking about logical puzzles, and paradoxes, and things like that. And that's fine, that is part of it. But logic according to the Stoics is in general the study of good thinking. So it includes also what we would today call cognitive science, the understanding of cognitive biases and the understanding of why people's thinking can go wrong one way or the other. So it's much broader than the technical field of logic. Assent. Assent is about refining our understanding and practice of the first two disciplines. In other words, it's about using good judgment, and therefore it's about logic. It's about understanding how human reasoning works and also how it can go wrong so that we avoid as much as possible mistakes and we're trying to think as much as we can in a rational, reasonable way, and then implement that kind of approach into daily life. One of the obvious questions that come up with Stoicism is does it work? Which, if you think about it, on the one hand, it's a little bit of a weird question because we're talking about a philosophy. We're not talking about, you know, a scientific approach to life as we understand it today. Very few people, for instance, would ask the question, well, does Christianity work or does Buddhism work? However, they might ask, do prayers work or does meditation work? In other words, the techniques associated with certain religions or philosophies. In those cases, it does make sense to ask yourself, well, does it work? Is it something that, quite independently of the theoretical part of the philosophy, does it actually have empirical evidence? So the same question can be asked reasonably about Stoicism. We have a series of lines of evidence that Stoic techniques, the Stoic approach to a good life, does in fact work. The first one is that Stoicism originated what is now known as cognitive behavioral therapy back in the 1960s. In New York, authors like Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis started to practice this type of psychotherapy, which today is one of the best evidence-based type of psychotherapies. And they started from Stoicism. They both read Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and other Stoics, and they thought, oh, these people were onto something here, that there is something that can work, that is very practical, that can actually help people. Of course, CBT as is known today went then through a series of changes and evolution over the last several decades. CBT is empirically based, that there is lots of studies, empirical studies, that show that it does work. So it's not the same as asking whether Stoicism work, but it's pretty close to asking whether Stoic techniques work because a lot of the techniques that the ancient Stoics designed and developed on the basis of their intuition about human psychology and human nature, it turns out, are actually efficacious. So that's one line of evidence that Stoicism in a sense works. There is also an increasing number of papers out there on cognitive science in general, not just cognitive behavioral therapy, but cognitive science in general, how the brain works, how human decision making is carried out, and so on and so forth. And my understanding is that much of that research is, if not in direct support of Stoic techniques, it certainly is compatible, highly compatible with it. For instance, modern psychologists and currently scientists have developed a theory of the relationship between reason and emotions that is very similar to the way in which the Stoics were thinking about the connection between reason and emotion. And then finally, there now begins to be direct studies about the efficacy of Stoic techniques. Stoicism is popular enough that psychologists have begun to look systematically into whether specifically Stoic techniques work or don't. For instance, one of my colleagues, Tim Lebon, who is a psychotherapist, has just published recently one of the first papers that shows at least preliminary evidence that, yes, indeed, Stoic techniques seem to have the kind of effects on behavior and on the way people think that the Stoics thought they should have. Stoicism is a philosophy of life. And that, if you think about it, it's a interesting concept. What is a philosophy of life in the first place? Do we need a philosophy of life? I encounter people that tell me that they don't need a philosophy of life, they just live their life. And I point out that that is a philosophy of life. There is no way to live a life without a philosophy. That philosophy might not be conscious, it may not be the result of deliberations that you did with yourself, you know, paying attention to what you're doing and why. But if I observe your behavior, if I see what your choices are, your priorities, your values, and so on and so forth, I can put 'em all together and say, "Okay, this person's philosophy of life is this. It's the result or it's whatever underpins their choices, their values, their priorities, and their behavior." So we all have a philosophy of life. If that's true, well, we might as well then be conscious of it, and be aware of it, and possibly, even occasionally at least, ask ourselves, well, is this a good philosophy of life or not? Do I need to change something? So one might be tempted then to go to the opposite extreme and say, "Oh, if I need a philosophy of life, I'm gonna pick one off the shelf. Here's Stoicism, I heard that it's a good thing. Let me pick Stoicism. From now on, I'm a Stoic, and that's it, end of the of the story." But that is also dangerous in a sense because now you are blindly following what somebody said 2,000 years ago or 2,300 years ago without necessarily thinking things through, without asking yourself, "Well, does this thing actually make sense? Does it fit the way I want to live my life? And if not, why not?" So there is, on the one hand, a danger of not being aware of one's own philosophy of life. There's also the opposite danger of sort of taking something off the shelf without questioning, without exercising one's own critical judgment about whether that thing actually makes sense, it's useful, works, et cetera. Well, then there is a third option. Some people say, "Oh, I'm gonna build my own philosophy of life out of bits and pieces from different choices. So I heard that Stoicism is useful, I'm gonna take something from Stoicism. I heard that Epicureanism is useful, I'm gonna take something from that. Some of my friends are Buddhists. Perhaps I could borrow something from Buddhists." That is certainly something that can be done. It's usually referred to as Eclecticism. But yet it's also got its own problems because you might end up with a mishmash of things that don't make any sense when they're brought together. There is a reason why these philosophies are internally coherent, and people have worked on them for thousands of years in order to make them internally coherent. For instance, although the Stoics themselves acknowledged that there is something useful in Epicureanism, and they actually incorporated aspects of Epicureanism into their philosophy, at the end of the day, one cannot be simultaneously a Stoic and an Epicurean. Why not? Because the most important value for a Stoic is one's own virtue, meaning one's own character. Pleasure is secondary. The most important value for an Epicurean is pleasure. One's character, one's virtues, are actually only instrumental to a life of pleasure. So at the end of the day, there may be situations where you had to choose. Is it gonna be pleasure or is it gonna be character? And if you choose one way you're an Epicurean, and if you choose another way you're a Stoic, whether you're aware of it or not. In my own case, I think of myself as mostly a Stoic, meaning that there are a number of things in Stoic philosophy as a whole that I think are very valuable, they're very well thought out, and I have adopted them as at least a provisional way of navigating my own life. But I am also very much attracted by another ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, Skepticism, which has to do with the notion that we're fallible. We don't know the truth with the capital T. At best, we can make reasonable guesses, probabilistic guesses, about what works or what doesn't work, what is true and what is not true. And we should therefore always be aware that no matter what we do, we may be mistaken. No matter what we think, we might be mistaken. So I temper my Stoicism with a little bit of Skepticism. And in fact, I temper my Stoic Skepticism with a little bit of something that is called philosophical pessimism. This is the notion that there are probably no grand narratives in the world. There is no universal plan. There is no end to history. There is no inevitable trajectory that we go either in our lives or as society as a whole. It's all about things happening here and now and there is no rhyme or reason to them. So I put all these things together into what to me feels like a reasonably coherent philosophy. It's not my invention, and yet at the same time, it's not exactly anything that you find specifically in any particular other author. One thing that I would suggest, for instance, is certainly read the original texts. But even that is not that simple because there are countless translations. And sometimes if you read the same book in different translations, it almost feels like a different book. There are versions of Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" that really feel like a different book from some other translations. So one needs to be careful. The more recent translations, the more modern translations, are better. Some of my favorite, for instance, are by a Classicist named Robin Waterfield, who has translated both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. The University of Chicago Press has made a huge edition of all of the writings of Seneca. Invest a little bit of money. After all, if we're talking about something that you wanna pursue as a philosophy of life, it's worth investing a few bucks to actually get it right or as right as possible. One of the advantages of these modern editions is that they have a lot of notes, and the notes will help you, will guide you, through understanding what exactly these people are saying because they're putting those notions in their philosophical, as well as historical context. But the other thing is, I hear often, people say, "Oh, I'm just going to read the story text. Forget all of these modern authors," including yours truly, "who are writing about Stoicism." I think that's a mistake. I mean, that may come across as a self-serving mistake since, as I said, I'm one of those authors. But nevertheless, I think it is a mistake. I myself took advantage of the writings of modern authors because again Stoicism is ancient. It's 2,300, almost 2,400 years old. It needs interpretation, it needs updates. And that interpretation, those updates, need to be done carefully by people who actually know what they're talking about. So, for instance, I would pick up a book by my friend and colleagues, Donald Robertson. Robertson is a cognitive behavioral therapist. That's his approach to Stoicism. Bill Irvine is a Classicist, and so is John Sellars. Those are some of the best modern Stoic authors that you can trust. These are people who actually know what they're talking about. And all of these authors have written very, very accessible books that can be used to dig deeper into Stoicism as a modern philosophy of life.

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