If you want to feel nice, be nice

There’s lots to engage with in the letters by Greg, Meredith, and Massimo. In the first place I certainly agree with Greg that the motivation behind Stoicism is not merely to feel nice. Indeed, I think the principal reason the Stoics had for wanting to avoid negative emotional disturbances is not that they are unpleasant to experience – even if they are – but because they are based on mistaken value judgements. The problem is with getting things wrong.  

I’d also concur with Greg that removing these negative emotions is not the final goal but simply the first step. The reason why this is the first step is because it involves clearing all the rubbish out of the way, so to speak, so that one is then able to think clearly and rationally about how one ought to act and what wants to do. 

I mentioned in a previous post that perhaps some of the issues that keep cropping up in modern discussions of Stoicism arise from an excessive reliance on Epictetus, who gives us among other things what we might call the psychotherapeutic side of Stoicism. If we want to go beyond that and highlight the importance of virtuous behaviour perhaps we ought to be attending to other sources as well or instead. I have in mind Cicero, and in particular Cicero’s On Duties. I would recommend this to Meredith and everyone else as an introductory guide to living a Stoic life squarely focused not on try how to feel better but on doing the right thing. 

The parallel that Massimo draws with Buddhism and mindfulness is also very helpful. I would be inclined to say – perhaps controversially – that there are no Stoic techniques, there’s just the philosophy. Most of the things people tend to call Stoic techniques are not really that at all. 

When a group of us formed the first Modern Stoicism team (though it wasn’t called that at the beginning) and started to develop Stoic Week, the one question we had to face – and that I really struggled with at the time – was ‘what are we going to ask people to do?’ As far as I was concerned back then, the idea of ‘Stoic practice’ made little sense. As a philosophy, Stoicism is concerned with what and how you think, which ideally will impact how you live, but specific Stoic practices? What are they? 

We quickly scrabbled around trying to find things for people to do. Seneca famously talked about evening reflection, so we grabbed that. But there’s nothing distinctively Stoic about it and indeed it was a Pythagorean practice that Seneca adopted, and so not Stoic at all. Seneca doesn’t explicitly say that he wrote anything down, but famously Marcus Aurelius did in his notebooks, so the two things were quickly conjoined and ‘Stoic journalling’ was born. Yet there’s nothing especially Stoic about that, apart from the fact that Marcus did it. It would be a bit like suggesting that because Plato used to like to go for early morning walks (if he did), that this is a core Platonist practice. Just because Seneca or Marcus did something, doesn’t make it Stoic. For something to be distinctively Stoic it must in some way reflect core Stoic ideas. 

Pierre Hadot’s account of spiritual exercises has been influential here too. But most of these are indeed about how we think, not actual practices that we do. Many of the things he identifies are not particularly Stoic either, which is unsurprising given that his concern was with ancient philosophy as a whole. As just one example, the ‘view from above’ seems to be a mental exercise that Marcus did, but it was also widely used in the Platonic tradition and in fact Marcus’s use of it has been pointed to as an example of a Platonic element in his thought, and then used as part of an argument attacking his status as a serious Stoic. So this isn’t especially Stoic either. 

People have also grasped at Epictetus’ ‘three disciplines’ as something that might be turned into a modern Stoic practice but this features in just one paragraph of his Discourses and in his Handbook, ch. 52, he gives us a completely different set of three disciplines (as I have commented on here)! Hardly a core Stoic idea. 

Let me come back to Massimo’s distinction between a) core Buddhist values and b) the practice of mindfulness extracted from its original context. The thing is, while I know what core Stoic values are, I’m not sure there are any genuinely Stoic practices that can be extracted and put to work on their own. In that sense, what Massimo calls ‘Stoic life hacks’ often really aren’t Stoic at all, not just because they have been separated from the philosophy, but because they were never Stoic in any substantive way in the first place. In that sense they are not even Stoic life hacks, but merely general life hacks. 

The problem I’ve encountered a number of times is that when some people first encounter Stoicism and are curious about it, the first thing they want to know is what they are supposed to do. They want things to do, physical things, and often they like – or perhaps feel they need – a routine. So if you tell them to take a cold shower in the morning, meditate for 10 minutes at lunch time, and write in a journal in the evening, they go away happy. If you tell them to rethink the fundamental values that govern their entire lives, they stare blankly, dumbfounded. Some people just want to feel a bit better; they don’t want to re-assess the deeper reasons why they are not feeling great in the first place. 

Let me bring this back to Greg and Meredith’s comments. Central to Stoic thinking is the idea that we are social beings and that our wellbeing is intimately tied up with the wellbeing of things larger than ourselves. All the key Stoic texts insist that the fundamental guiding principle ought to be to act for the common good. We see this throughout Cicero’s accounts, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus. If we want to feel better this is what we ought to do. In this I think there’s an instructive parallel with Aristotle’s ethics. He argues that although we ought not to aim for pleasure, nevertheless a good virtuous life will be pleasurable. Pleasure is the welcome byproduct of acting virtuously. It is quite right and proper to feel good about doing the right thing. Although the Stoics might resist the word ‘pleasure’ here, I think the same broad point applies. If you want to feel better, act better. If you want to feel nice, be nice!