The Wise Man is Joyful: Stoicism as Therapeutic Method – by Ramon Elani

“When I am battered by ambition, avarice, temerity, and superstition, and have other such enemies of life within me, shall I go dreaming about the revolutions of the earth?”^[1] – Montaigne

In the summer and fall of 2023, I experienced despair for the first time in my life. I’m thankful that I was able to live for 41 years before being confronted by a true existential crisis, but I must say that when it finally hit, I found myself utterly unprepared. Between climate change, nuclear war, and AI apocalypse, the inevitable extinction of humanity appeared to be rapidly approaching. My children would have no future and everything I had done in my life so far was for nothing. There was nothing I could do to prevent these things and the idea that they would come to pass was unbearable. For weeks, as soon as I woke up in the morning I was overwhelmed by feelings of hopelessness and for most of the day all I could do was lie on the couch. Joy, it seemed, had vanished from the world. The things that make me happiest in the world, my wife and children, my books, my friends, could not bring me out of my depression.

I would have previously thought myself an unlikely candidate for such feelings. My first two books were focused on the idea that not only was the modern world as we know it destined to collapse but that this collapse would restore balance to a humanity that was painfully out of harmony with the cosmos. In everything I had ever written, the end of the world was an event I eagerly awaited. I had spent more than a decade of my life building up an elaborate philosophical and spiritual scaffolding for such ideas. Friedrich Nietzsche, W.B. Yeats, Carl Jung, D.H. Lawrence, Martin Heidegger and other romantics and primitivists had persuaded me that reason and rationality had infected humanity with the illusion of control and a hatred for the passionate vitality of life. Following their lead over many years, I had developed a complex and ostensibly compelling philosophy of the irrational, the unconscious, the bodily, and the mystical. Dreams, passions, subterranean intuitions and impulses had become the central ideas that occupied my mind.

In the depths of my depression, one thing I found right away was that the ideas that I believed in did not offer me a way out. If feelings and emotions were taken as being fundamentally more true than rational thoughts, what was I supposed to do with this feeling of tragic despair? I would have previously said that such feelings were completely appropriate responses to the catastrophe of the modern world. And that’s all very well and good but where does it leave me as a living, breathing person acting in the world? I had reached a point in my thinking that posited a wistful, backward-looking nostalgia as the only suitable existential posture, and I had suddenly found that this posture was no longer sufficient to make life endurable.

One day late last year I was unenthusiastically staring at my bookshelves. Burkhardt, De Maistre, Spengler, Guenon. Miserable books written by miserable men. Somehow it had always escaped me that all my favorite authors led bitter, lonely lives, and I had never wondered why. In my own mood of despair, the idea of reading such pessimistic works inspired feelings of revulsion and repugnance. I absently picked up a book that I had loved since I was a teenager but rarely thought about: the essays of Michel de Montaigne. The light, calm, forgiving, gentle, firm, rational, human voice that emerged from those pages pierced me to my core. He had faith in reason, even though he saw its limits and knew that fate dictated much of human existence. He believed in a loving god but was skeptical of ritual and superstition. His life was full of joy and gratitude despite living through the horrors of the Wars of Religion, losing four of his five children, and watching half the population of Bordeaux die during his tenure as mayor. With honesty and clarity, he looked directly into the face of the worst human cruelty and ignorance, and yet he preserved his equanimity and love.

As I read Montaigne with a renewed sense of attention and delight, I discovered that much of what is best in that endlessly delightful man actually belonged to the ancient philosophers whom he loved so dearly. Indeed, virtuous and honest as he was, Montaigne was quite explicit about his intellectual debts: “I make others say what I cannot say so well… I want them to give Plutarch a filip on my nose and get burned insulting Seneca in me. I have to hide my weakness under these great authorities.”^[2] The more I read Montaigne, the more I wanted to know the authors through which he so often spoke. And this is how I came to Stoicism.

I wish I could say that I had never heard of Stoicism before this time. The truth is that I had a degree in Classics and was quite familiar with its philosophy. I am now embarrassed to say that I had long since dismissed it utterly. Stoicism, I believed, was a life-denying philosophy that taught precisely the kind of neurotic intellectualism that was responsible for emptying the modern world of its meaning. I associated Stoicism with puritanical asceticism and a hatred of pleasure and the body. I am very pleased to be able to now say that such a characterization of Stoicism is really only possible for one who does not understand it. The Stoics did not deny emotion, they taught a method of confronting negative emotions in such a way that some of their power is diminished. The Stoics did not flee from pleasure or reject the body, they taught that pleasure should be enjoyed as a consequence of virtue and right reason, not at the cost of our virtue and happiness. What I have since discovered, for which I will be eternally grateful, is that the only meaning that exists for humanity lies in the freedom we possess to make moral choices and in our ability to act for the benefit of others so that I am now able to say, like Socrates “It is because I am convinced of its truth that I am ready, with your help, to inquire into the nature of virtue.”^[3]

The most important realization that I had during this period is that wisdom and philosophy are meant to be therapeutic. As Pierre Hadot writes in his seminal Philosophy as a Way of Life, “philosophy then appears in its original aspect: not as a theoretical construct, but as a method for training people to live and to look at the world in a new way. It is an attempt to transform mankind.”^[4] Hadot argues that philosophy was not meant to be merely an engagement with ideas or texts but rather a total conversion of the self, which “raises the individual from an inauthentic condition of life, darkened by unconsciousness and harassed by worry, to an authentic state of life, in which he attains self-consciousness, an exact vision of the world, inner peace, and freedom.”

I had spent my life devoted to intellectual pursuits. As a child my only ambition was to become a professor. I had achieved a PhD, and published two books and dozens of essays. I had studied Hegel and Derrida. And I had never encountered the idea that the project of living well or being happy were in any way related to philosophy. My philosophy professors would have scoffed at the idea. If anything, I would probably have said that the more one understands, the less likely it is that they will be happy. As a matter of fact, this is one of the assumptions of my previous belief system: the condition of mankind qua reasoning being is an essentially miserable one. The only happiness available to us, I had thought, is through (artificially) acquiring the ignorance of the primitive, the fool, the madman, or the animal. Suddenly, the vast edifice of my former beliefs collapsed and I realized, as Seneca writes, that “There is no peace and quiet except that which reason has contrived.”^[5] The worldview of the idealized melancholy barbarian, the superstitious primitive, and the intoxicated mystic is a psychologically traumatic one, in which the individual is under constant threat from hostile cosmic entities. The romantic Nietzschean perspective is not merely tragic, it is foolish, ignorant, childish. Ultimately, it is laughable and pathetic. It is based on a failure to understand. I want to live a good and happy life, and I will no longer accept that a wisdom that does not lead to a good and happy life qualifies as true wisdom.

Slowly but surely I began to emerge from my despair as, in the words of Plutarch, “I acquired the proud consciousness that it is possible for reason to conquer.”^[6] I discovered the enormous power that comes to us when we start to believe that we can actually exert some influence on our own thoughts and feelings. Just because I have the thought that humanity is doomed, doesn’t mean I need to believe it. And just because I have the thought that I’m going to have a heart attack, and my wife and children will be helpless without me, doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen. As Seneca puts it: “The possibility of suffering makes us as unhappy as the suffering.”^[7] The wisdom of the Stoics teaches us that the mind can be conditioned by habits of thought, which we can control. The thought is ultimately the problem, not the thing the thought refers to. The thing itself if or when it actually occurs is generally dealt with easily enough. Seneca again: “It is according to opinion that we suffer. A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.”^[8] The same event can very easily become a crisis for one person and a trifle for another.

I read the epistles and moral essays of Seneca, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the Discourses and Handbook of Epictetus. Alongside these I read Cicero, Plutarch, and the superb contemporary scholarship of Pierre Hadot. As I read these words of wisdom I found myself laughing and smiling, a sure sign of encountering truth. Wisdom that comes with a scowl is not to be trusted.

Through these readings I found myself becoming more comfortable with the world around me, humanity, and my self. My relationships toward each became a subject of contemplation and practice. Towards the world at large, what the ancients termed ‘physics’, I learned to develop acceptance and contentment, not to desire it to be other. The modern world is filled with beauty and endless miracles. I would no longer yearn for the unspoiled innocence of the past. In fact, as Seneca points out, innocence gained through ignorance is no virtue:

It was by reason of their ignorance of things that the men of those days [the Golden Age] were innocent; and it makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin. Justice was unknown to them, unknown prudence, unknown also self-control and bravery; but their rude life possessed certain qualities akin to all these virtues. Virtue is not vouchsafed to a soul unless that soul has been trained and taught, and by unremitting practice brought to perfection. For the attainment of this boon, but not in the possession of it, were we born; and even in the best of men, before you refine them by instruction, there is but the stuff of virtue, not virtue itself.^[9]

The fact that ancient man was unsullied by cellphones, industrially processed food, and social media does not make him better than us. In fact, through our ability to choose not to allow such things to degrade us, we can demonstrate ourselves to be his moral superior. As Seneca writes elsewhere, such an ability to choose to be virtuous places us above the gods themselves, who are created without the capacity to sin. We can choose to desire that things were otherwise than they are or we can choose to desire that which has been allotted to us with dignity and gratitude.

Towards my fellow humans, in the realm of ‘ethics,’ I learned that happiness comes not from cutting myself off from the cruel and ignorant masses but from recognizing, as Terence did, that nothing human can be foreign to me. The sort of disgust that I had always felt toward humanity and its stupidity was misplaced, I realized. How do I behave? Am I kind? Am I patient? Am I not ignorant and stupid? Even if I do manage to achieve virtue in my life, does that mean I should treat those who do not with contempt? Epictetus writes

With regard to those who are different from him, he will be patient, gentle, delicate, and forgiving, as he would toward someone in a state of ignorance, who missed the mark when it came to the most important things. He will not be harsh to anyone, for he will have perfectly understood Plato’s words: ‘Every soul is deprived of the truth against its will.’^[10]

I began to desire to benefit others and to allow my actions to be motivated by kindness and patience. Why else have we been given by nature the ability to forbear, if not to practice it with our fellow humans? In the words of Marcus Aurelius, one of the kindest men who ever lived: “People were made for one another; so either instruct them or put up with them.”^[11] We cannot separate ourselves from humanity and to the extent that we succeed in doing so, we harm ourselves. Epictetus puts it succinctly: “When he is isolated, man will no longer be a man”.^[12] The most beautiful sentiments of Christianity, in fact, proclaiming the brotherhood of man are echoed in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. We can choose to recognize the common humanity of all people despite their ignorance, and do what we can to help and forgive them or we can choose to isolate ourselves from them to our own detriment.

Most importantly of all, towards my own thoughts, that is to say “logic,” I learned to distinguish between what is true or false and to only accept thoughts that are true and objective. In the first place, we don’t know what is going to happen. In the second place, how we define what happens can go a long way towards determining how we experience it. The future is unknown; whatever narratives I construct about the inevitability of future events cannot be true thoughts but only fearful stories. The following is a list of objective statements:

“There is suffering and war and horror in the world.”

“There is happiness and peace and beauty in the world.”

“The climate is warming due to anthropogenic activity.”

“Many people are working to mitigate the consequences of a warming climate.”

“There are potentially dangerous aspects of new technologies.”

“There are enormous potential benefits from new technologies.”

We encounter ourselves and the world through representations. Over the sense impressions that spontaneously provoke these representations, we have no control. Over the quality of the representations, however, we have total control. Whether we confront the world anxiously or calmly is a result of the extent to which we choose to exercise this control. There is a war in Ukraine. I cannot control the fact that this has occurred. The meaning that I give to this fact, however, is entirely up to me. I can choose to make a source of crippling fear and anxiety or not. Epictetus gives us a great example of what this exercise might look like:

“So-and-so’s son is dead.

What happened?

His son is dead.

Nothing else?

Not a thing.

So-and so’s ship sank.

What happened?

His ship sank.

So-and-so was carted off to prison.

What happened?

He was carted off to prison.

But if we now add to this “He has had bad luck,” then each of us is adding this observation on his own account.”^[13]

Let’s carry this exercise to the furthest possible extent, in the context of my former existential fears. This statement is objective: “humanity will go extinct, either in the near future or the far future.” Any value (bad, sad, tragic, unbearable, depressing, pessimistic, heart-breaking, etc) I add to this statement is purely subjective. We can choose to evaluate the quality of our thoughts before giving our assent to them, or we can choose to allow our thoughts to control us.

I now no longer worry as much about the grand narratives of the human drama as I did a year ago. I am now much more focused on whether I am kind, gentle, patient, virtuous, moderate, honest, and helpful. Just because we cannot control everything does not mean that we cannot control anything. Wisdom ultimately consists in being able to distinguish one from the other. It is hard not to be overwhelmed by the recognition that we are tiny, insignificant beings that are powerlessly swept along by forces beyond us, but Pierre Hadot reminds us that this is not the whole story:

To be sure, our body and our vital breath are swept along by this flux, and both our representations of things which are received into the body and our vital breath belong to this flux, because they are produced by causes outside of us. Yet the self becomes aware of the fact that, thanks to its freedom of judgment–which also implies freedom of desire and of the will–it stands apart from this flux.^[14]

In the modern era, the Western conception of self has increasingly come to represent an isolated fragment that collapses in on itself in the absence of any meaningful sense of greater context. Stoicism, however, shows us a path forward, in which the self is able to recognize, through its own capacity for moral choice, its participation in a universal logos.

^[1] Montaigne, I, 26 “Education of Children”

^[2] Ibid, II, 10 “Of Books”

^[3] Plato, Meno, 81e.

^[4] Hadot 107

^[5] Seneca, Letter, 56.6.

^[6] Plutarch, On Controlling Anger 3.

^[7] Seneca, Letter, 13.4.

^[8] Seneca, Letter, 78.14.

^[9] Seneca, Letter, 90.46.

^[10] Epictetus, Discourses, II, 22, 36.

^[11] Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VIII, 59.

^[12] Epictetus, Discourses, II, 5, 26.

^[13] Epictetus, Discourses, III, 8, 4-5.

^[14] Hadot 118

Ramon Elani received his BA in Classics from the University of Massachusetts and his PhD in English Literature from the University of Connecticut. He lives in a small cottage in rural New England, where he raises goats and homeschools his children.