Sidelining The Stoic Sage

For being a legendary or ideal person, the Stoic sage (or if you prefer “wise person”) gets brought up a lot in discussion within Stoic communities, and is referenced to in contemporary literature, presentations videos, and podcasts on Stoicism. I’m going to make a proposal here that some will doubtless find provocative and controversial, and perhaps a few will think downright foolish. We should sideline the notion of the Stoic sage. Suggesting that doesn’t mean I’m advocating anything like getting rid of the idea altogether. We don’t have to go through classic Stoic texts and excise any references to, or discussions about, the wise person. We don’t need to prohibit people from talking, or asking, or puzzling about the sage. But perhaps it would be a good idea in the present, at least for a number of people, not to concern ourselves much (or perhaps even at all) with this notion.

Let me give a preliminary explanation why. Or rather, two preliminary explanations, both derived from my own experience and observations.

I can say as someone who has been studying and practicing, producing resources on, and teaching about Stoicism for quite some time that by contrast to a number of other core Stoic conceptions, I haven’t found that of the sage to be of much use or even significance to me. It ends up being more of a historical curiosity that the classic Stoics had a well-articulated but quite paradoxical orthodox position on the sage and associated matters (virtue, progress, etc.), one which Epictetus seems largely uninterested in and which Seneca feels compelled to explore and defend but also seems to depart from in some respects. I understand what we might call the standard Stoic position on the sage well enough, but unless I’m explaining it to other people, it’s not something I feel a need to think much about.

Maybe I’m a significant outlier in that respect. There are matters that many people within the worldwide Stoic community seem quite invested in, which I just don’t care all that much about or find useful for me. I don’t typically journal. I don’t gather up and memorize quotes. Rather than do daily practices (with occasional exceptions), I just keep on rereading Stoic texts, reflecting upon them, and applying ideas from Stoic texts when needed. I can honestly say that I can’t recall ever needing to apply the notion of the Stoic sage in my own practice of Stoicism, and I seem to be doing just fine without it. I’m willing to bet there’s plenty of other people who don’t find it necessary and would benefit from turning their time and thought to more useful and productive ideas from Stoic philosophy.

Going beyond that, though, I’ve seen a number of people for whom the Stoic conception of the wise person wasn’t just something superfluous, but something distracting, even in some cases a sort of stumbling block, an impediment to focusing attention on other more useful concepts and to making progress. The sage has come up over and over again, like the proverbial bad penny, in both in-person and online meeting groups, workshops, classes, discussions, online forums and communities, with people expressing a variety of concerns, confusions, and worries about this idea.  Questions about who the Stoic sage is or might be, what their characteristics are, how one can possibly reach that level, even whether they would truly be “happy upon the torture rack” or not, come up regularly. The topic just by itself tends to produce a variety of negative emotional responses in some, including anxiousness, frustration, and despair.

Start adding to the bare idea of the sage as “the ideal wise person” all the things that get reported about what Stoics thought about the sage in the summaries of Stoic doctrine we have from Diogenes Laertius and Arius Didymus, in authors such as Cicero, Plutarch, and Sextus Empiricus, and arising in portions of Seneca’s works, and relative newcomers to Stoicism often get themselves rather fixated on problematic aspects of Stoic sagehood. We’ll look at those a bit more closely a later. Suffice it to say that the interconnections between what we can call the “official doctrines” of sagehood, virtue and vice, the emotions, right actions and progress (or lack thereof) do really throw up obstacles to focusing on study and practice for a number of people. Those strike me as unnecessary obstacles. So setting aside the Stoic sage and all the preoccupations that seem to go along with that idea for many, may be a rather prudent tack to take.

I’ll mention briefly, as a bit of a side-note, that the notion of the sage was far from just a Stoic one. Other schools of ancient philosophy reference the sage. There are mentions already in Plato’s works, and the Platonist tradition certainly aims at developing wisdom. Epicurus himself seems to have been regarded as not just a wise person but even a “savior” (sōtēr) by his followers. There were also the legendary “seven sages,” the exact listing of which varies from author to author. Members of the hedonist Cyrenaic school founded by Aristippus developed their own conceptions of the sage, from Diogenes Laertius’s report in his discussion in book 2, sections 90-99.

One thing that we can say about the Cyrenaic school’s treatment of the wise person is that by comparison to others, it sounds rather more modest in scope. They thought, for example, that the claim that wise people live pleasantly and foolish people painfully is only true for the most part, that even foolish people could have some of the virtues, and that even the sage will feel pain and fear, for example. The Stoics, by contrast, might be said to have a “maximal conception” of the sage, setting the bar extremely high in their descriptions of this legendary being. Just looking at a few things Arius Didymus tells us in his Epitome of Stoic Ethics (in 5b8-12) drives this home.

The sage possesses all of the virtues or good characteristics a human being can have. These include the four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, courage, and temperance) and presumably every one of their subordinate virtues. The sage also possesses other traits, being sensible, dialectical, convivial, and erotic (in the right ways). Everything this person does, they do well. Their actions are not just in accordance with duty (kathēkonta) but genuinely right actions (kathorthomata). Even when it comes to activities of expertise (epitēdeumata), like “fondness of music,” the only person who really has these is the sage. They are also the best (or maybe the only) prophet, poet, orator, dialectician, and critic.

That’s already a lot! There’s a flip side though to the “official doctrine.” All of us poor slobs are not sages, and as such, we are not in some middle state between sagehood and virtue on the one side, and foolishness and vice on the other. If we’re not wise, we’re foolish, and since we’re not virtuous, we’re vicious. There’s no middle ground, at least in theory. All bad people are equally bad. All fools are equally foolish. There’s no continual or measurable progress from moral or intellectual badness to goodness. In fact, nearly all of humanity is quite simply deficient, insofar as they aren’t sages.

Who are these Stoic sages then? What person or persons can we single out as providing a model we can aspire to and follow? That’s where it gets even more sticky, again, if we go by the official classic Stoic views. There are potential candidates. Socrates, for one, or Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school. Epictetus mentions both of them as engaging in tasks assigned to them by God, adding in Diogenes the Cynic as well  (3.21). Does he identify them as “sages” though? Perhaps one might read that into his work, but in fact, he doesn’t do that. Cicero and Seneca both praise Cato the Younger considerably, and one might propose him as a candidate for Stoic sagehood, not least since Seneca does say in On Constancy that the gods gave him to us as an exemplar of the wise person (2.2). It appears from various testimonies that none of the Stoic scholarchs claimed the status of the sage, and we can also say that of Stoic authors whose works we possess, namely Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. In fact, three of them clearly deny that condition of themselves.

Given all this, it is understandable that the subject of the sage could prove a rather bothersome one to people who are interested in Stoicism and want to make progress in study and practice of that philosophy in the present. Getting to that level of wisdom and virtue doesn’t just seem difficult or unlikely for the average person, or even for that matter for an extraordinary one. The prospect seems instead entirely unattainable. And for a lot of people, realizing that can provoke negative emotions, like anxiety, frustration, and despair. Too much focus on the fact that we aren’t sages, and will likely never be sages, can render Stoicism a rather discouraging doctrine, or alternately provoke an obsessive perfectionism in some.

There are other potential bad consequences to focusing too much on the Stoic sage. It might plausibly place some of the imprudent at the mercy of the many unscrupulous grifters, influencers, and snake-oil salesmen that view a watered-down Stoicism as a means to exploit the unwary, offering them shortcuts to and mistaken visions of sagehood. More often, in my view, worrying too much about all of these vexing questions about the sage can suck up the time, thought, and effort that one could devote to all sorts of other important topics in Stoic philosophy, where one could actually make some real headway over time.

Now to be fair, there are quite a few people who I’ve interacted with over the years who do see some positive value to the Stoic conception of the sage. The advantages or useful points they have brought up fall under five main headings, I’d say, though I think these do overlap to some extent:

• The idea of the sage, while unrealizable, does offer some general ideal to orient oneself and work towards;
• The sage can provide a  “role model” that one can look to or rely upon, or even be inspired by;
• When one gets into difficulties, one can consider how the Stoic sage (or someone one takes to be a sage, like Epictetus) would understand and deal with the situation;
• One can engage in a practice of “contemplating the sage,” that is deliberately thinking about the Stoic sage and their qualities;
• One can also engage in another practice of “imagining being viewed by the sage,” as one considers one’s choices, words, actions, and the like.

Perhaps there are some other useful aspects to giving some time and space to the legendary figure of the sage for practicing Stoics in the present. I’m happy to read what other suggestions people may provide.

I will also say that, if a person who is earnestly studying and practicing Stoicism finds that thinking about the Stoic conception of the sage provides more positives than negatives to them, helping them on their way instead of hindering them, then by all means they should engage with that notion as much as they like.

For quite a few people, however, the sage understood through what we have of the classic Stoic take on the matter winds up being an obstacle, a stumbling-block, a hindrance. And so I think it would be good for them to just sideline the sage, to not concern themselves with that set of doctrines, and to redirect their focus to the many other parts of Stoic philosophy that could be much more fruitful for them. I would also advocate, again not as anything like an imperative, but as (hopefully) prudent counsel, that when we are discussing Stoicism together in groups, workshops, communities, or the like, whenever questions or assertions about the sage come up, we should sideline them and focus instead on more pressing and useful matters. That can be done in diplomatic and respectful ways, which to me seems like a good exercise of what measure of prudence and justice we have developed.