It's no accident that a roman emperor (tyrant, mass murderer, and courtier) is the premier famous stoic. Nor is it an accident that the next most famous case is that of British empire public schooling, british "stiff upper lip" stocisim.
(EDIT: Marcus Aurelius) himself was no stoic philosopher, he merely wrote diaries to himself in his late days -- diaries he wanted burned, not published. And these were rehresals of what his stoic teachers had taught him while he was being raised into the roman aristocracy. Without this context, its very easy to misread his diaries in the manner of some religious text, cherry picking "whatever sounds nice".
Its clear, under this view, how bitter and resentful many of these reflections were. He retreated to his diaries to "practice stoical thoughts" on those occasions where he was emotionally distributed. They are, mostly, rants. Rants against the court (eg., ignore the schemes of others, etc.); rants against the public (no matter if one is whipped, beaten, etc.); rants against how his prestige means little as a leader. Stocism here serves as a recipie to smooth one's injuries faced as a member of the elite, surrounded by vipers and with meaningless prestige.
Stoicism, under this light, is training for a ruthless sort of leadership. From the pov of The Leader, all adoration is fake, all prestige, and status. Your job is to pretend it matters because it matters to your followers. It's a deeply hollow, dissociative, nihilistic philosophy which dresses up the status quo as "God's plan" -- a rationalization of interest to the elite above all others.
Your perceptions of stoicism are so detatched from mine, I have to ask, what does stoicism mean to you? The wikipedia entry describes it like this:
"The Stoics believed that the practice of virtue is enough to achieve eudaimonia: a well-lived life. The Stoics identified the path to achieving it with a life spent practicing the four cardinal virtues in everyday life — prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice — as well as living in accordance with nature"
Which seems pretty close to how I understand it, and it seems a pretty reasonably approach to life.
But this wikipeida version seems very far from your description of "a deeply hollow, dissociative, nihilistic philosophy which dresses up the status quo as 'God's plan' -- a rationalization of interest to the elite above all others."
I adopt rather the opposite virutes. Imprudence, risk, throwing-your-self-at-a-wall-until-you-cant, intemperance (conflict, debate, disagreement, competition) and pragmatism (address what is rather than what should be).
Behind each of the stoic virutues is a psychological position to dettach, dissociate and live in a more abstracted conceptual space. This can be theraputic if you are in grief, etc.
Outside of that, personally I think: attach too much, risk more than you ought, and participate in the world ("dirty your hands") by making the best of it, rather than anything more abstract.
Professors of stocism like to make a virute of dying quiety -- this i think absurd. If the plane is falling from the sky, i envy the people screaming -- they have the right levels of attachemnt to their own lives.
> Behind each of the stoic virutues is a psychological position to dettach, dissociate and live in a more abstracted conceptual space.
Many proponents of Stoicism would disagree with this in rather strong terms, FWIW. If you go back to our earliest sources, Stoicism seems to be very much about living in the present moment and engaging with the world; it's just very careful about avoiding dysfunctional behaviors and the attitudes that would promote them.
The oft-referenced Stoic notion of avoiding the harmful "passions" is not so much about becoming completely detached from the world, and more about not acting outwardly in ways that turn out to be materially bad or dysfunctional. It's just that achieving this is harder than we might expect: the Stoics were well aware that our acting-out is often driven by inner attitudes and stances that can only be controlled effectively after quite a bit of time and inward effort, and complete control is more of an abstract ideal than something readily achievable.
I think your last example demonstrates the value of stoicism. In many cases, our untrained emotional response to life prevents us from achieving more or enjoying life. Instead of screaming, you could spend the time enjoying your loved ones for as long as possible. You could try to find a way to stop the plane from falling or work on bracing yourself to survive the impact.
Stoicism is a realizing that many of our instinctual and emotional and responses and actions do more harm than good. It may feel good to scream at someone we believe has wronged us, but it doesn't help them or us and doesn't correct the perceived wrong.
I suspect that screaming at a person who has done you wrong, in the vast majority of cases, has both the intended effect and a desirable one.
If you are in an elite position of leadership, and otherwise have more Machiavellian options, then you can always try to calculate revenge instead -- or forgive endlessly and be exploited.
I'd say in the majority of cases, for most adult people with some life experience, shouting when you want to shout is probably a healthy thing.
Though there are always cases of those who shout at the wrong people (displaced agression), or have to little life experience or no composure at all -- I dont think these are any where near the majority of cases. It's very rare. Though a perpetually (literally,) adolescent internet might make it seem so.
Almost no one ever shouts at me, though I'm very shoutable-at.
> I'd say in the majority of cases, for most adult people with some life experience, shouting when you want to shout is probably a healthy thing.
Sure, and that is totally fine.
But Stoic philosophy disagrees with that. Just as with many other fundamental questions about how to live life, there are different answers/points of view. You don't agree with the Stoic one, and you even offer some reasons why you think it may be harmful. That's entirely fine. The only problem is in your implicit assumption that Stoicism has failed to consider the perspective you have, and if it did, Stoics would abandon their approach to life. That's not true. While there may be Stoics whose individual lives would be improved by adopting your approach, Stoicism as a philosophy is not blind to the perspective you're offering. It just rejects it.
I agree. But you'll note one of my professed virtues is conflict, so I'm "participating in the world" by expressing a social emotion (contempt) towards a value system I disagree with in order to change the social environment. This makes me a political animal.
This is why I express my view in this way. If I wanted to be a stoic, or nearly equivalently a contemporary academic, I'd present some anemic "balanced view" in which you've no idea what my attitude is.
But as I'm not a stoic, I take it to be important to communicate my attitude as an act of social participation in the creating-maintaining of social values. In other words, I think on HN my contempt towards stocism itself has value here, since it invites the person reflecting on stocism to be less automatically respectful of it.
> I think on HN my contempt towards stocism itself has value here, since it invites the person reflecting on stocism to be less automatically respectful of it.
In case it's helpful to you, I'll point out that your effect on me was entirely the opposite. I'm not too positively inclined to stoicism, and I feel the Epicurean and Nietzschean critiques of it hold a lot of water. However, the tone of your top-level post made me instinctively defensive of the qualities of stoicism! I think that's because I perceived the tone of your top-level post as demonstrating something akin to what Nietzsche called ressentiment.
That's one of the effects of being particular -- being a particular person, with particular feelings -- the effects are particular. That's part of the point, part of the aim.
The received view of the tyrannical mass murderers of rome is hagiography, if a few "on my side in the debate" (or otherwise) think I'm being too harsh and want to undermine that a little: great! I would myself do the same if I heard myself speak, if my feelings on what was being said were that it needed moderating.
This interplay I vastly prefer than trying to "be the universal" myself -- disavow all felling, and suppose i can in a disinterested way be unpartisan to a view. This asks vastly too much of any individual, and is in the larger part, extremely (self-) deceptive.
Not everybody is as emotional as you based on your description, some of us naturally have more control over our state of mind, emotions generally, and don't live so reactively.
This allows us not only avoid those typical massive mistakes in life (addictions, bad but attractive partners, cheating, being miserable parents, generally bad emotional big-consequence choices and so on) but also steer us to more successful life paths than most of our peers, whatever that may mean in each case.
Your system works for you and makes you happy and content with your life and its direction? Great for you, but that path is yours only, no need to broaden it to all humanity.
How does your opinion matter than the parent’s opinion?
Even in an ideal scenario favorable to you it seems impossible for it to lead anywhere, after mutually negating each other, other than generating more noise on the internet.
It took me a while to to figure out why I find your position so disgusting. I think a lot of people perceive this contempt as intentional distortion, dishonest, socially hostile.
I dont think we need more stoking of conflict and contempt, but need more good faith and balanced information sharing. I don't think your have correctly modeled the effects of your approach.
I think you hit on it, but the total reason why is slightly different, and the key is in its trigger of your disgust mechanism:
Conflict does not need philosophical reinforcement because it is a major biological default. Using our higher abilities to reinforce these prerequisite (but not higher/good) positions triggers disgust because it leads to traumatic outcomes. That is why disgust exists: to cause us to avoid actions that lead to traumatic outcomes. Sometimes the arm of perception of our disgust reaction reaches further than our comprehension.
I think cooperation is, by far, the most ordinary case. Oppressive, normative, cooperation. This may not seems so online, which is a very unusual environment -- but the vast majority of people are conflict-avoidant.
You might say a war is conflict, but not really: the main mechanisms of war are cooperation.
Very rarely are interpersonal situations prone to disagreement.
The disgust here isn't about trauma, it's a healthy narcissm: the guy doesn't want to be deceived and thinks i'm being deceptive.
I don't think I'm being deceptive, because my heart is on my sleeve -- if I were being deceptive, I'd present an apparently objective analysis and give away little of my apparent feelings on the matter (cf. seemingly all mainstream news today).
I have a different ethic of transparency -- I want people to be emotionally and intellectually transparent. Pretending not to feel one way about an issue represses itself in a manupulated intellectual presentation of the matter -- the reader becomes mystified by the apparent disinterest of the speaker.
If there's one thing I hate with a great passion its false dispassion and intellectual manipulation. So I opt for emotional honesty as part of the package.
I think your statement was compatible-with/implicit-in mine: that conflict, being fundamental in some regimes (as is cooperation) but also high-friction, does not need philosophical reinforcement. If it is philosophical then it is reasoned, and reasoned, whether deceptively so or not, is higher function submitting to reinforcing older, lower.
I don’t disagree it is better to be emotionally transparent in many cases, but there are many cases where it isn’t, and where personal emotional responses can be counterproductive and/or misleading, producing their own sets of suboptimal outcomes.
The contents of people's replies (, votes) is a measure of my effect, so post-facto, no modelling is required.
I'm clearly aware of the existence of people who want an "objective (unemotive) presentation", and clearly aware of what effect emoting has on those people. I haven't failed to model it. On many issues I'm quick to suspend this expression, and engage in a more dispassionate way with a person who wants me to, if I see some value in it. But I'm loathe to give up expressing my feelings, because that is part of the purpose of expression.
I am only doing what you are here in this comment -- you express your contempt in much more extreme terms ("disgust") than I, in order that I may take your feelings into account.
Likewise, when appraising stoicism, I think there's value in others taking my feelings on the matter into account. If only as a means of a kind of reflexive emotional equilibrium modulated by surprise: there's too little contempt towards stocisim in my view, and in its absense, has grown a cult around figures like aurelius.
I've been to the cult meetings in which he is read in a religious manner, cherrypicked and deliberately misunderstood. I'm here out in the world you see, participating -- and I wish to reflect that in my thinking and feelings on the world.
Im not opposed to expressing ones feelings, or advocating for unemotive speech.
Im opposed intentionally seeking heightened conflict via deceit and misrepresentation. It is the political metagaming for effect and attention, an intentional manipulation of the emotional equilibrium.
If you are a true believer in what you say, that is one thing. If you are intentionally being hyperbolic, overexpressing emotion, or omitting facts you know to be true, then you are engaging in political rhetoric. This is adversarial, not collaborative.
When the well is sufficiently poisoned, there is no point in outside discourse, or even truth-seeking.
Rhetoric is a good way to make short term gains on a topic, if you have an edge. Long term it is negative sum, as your community falls apart.
I see that your sibling comment explains your position, and was insightful. I have no problem with radical self expression, or radical transparency. What I have a problem with is placing conflict and effect above truth and transparency. This is how I interpreted your comments above.
If I can speculate: your perspective seems to be at least a second, maybe third-order perspective, of someone in an atypical environment surrounded by would-be stoics, who are all participating in order to succeed in e.g. middle management. This corporate stoicism produces suboptimal product results because while stoicism is perhaps necessary and valuable to hold a position, as you noted it is fundamentally detached and dishonest.
But until someone lives in your version of the social environment, they cannot see the relative value of a return to “radical candor” and so you get rejections, both from people behind you in their profession into stoic corporatism and from those who make their living from behaving in accord with it and believe they are superior for it.
> I suspect that screaming at a person who has done you wrong, in the vast majority of cases, has both the intended effect and a desirable one.
Not usually. Just some examples:
Customer service people tend to be trained to de-escalate and send things up a level. Sometimes they call it "killing with kindness"; basically you repeat your stance with a smile on your face until the person going wild either calms down on their own or leaves. Either way, the person yelling does not get what they want. On the other hand, if you're charming to customer service people, a lot of times they'll bend the rules for you if they can, and if they can't -- well, you don't have to have on your conscience: "ruined the day of someone making minimum wage"
In long term relationships (say, work relationships or family relationships) this sort of excessive emotionality doesn't work either. In a job, you'll probably just get fired, or if you're the boss, people will avoid telling you things. Your family can't fire you, but they can set a boundary and stop dealing with you.
Basically, what I'm trying to get across is that uncorked rage is very rarely effective. It may work once or twice but it's a bad overall strategy.
If you don't want to be exploited, a controlled show of mild anger is a lot more effective. People who are not in control of their emotions can be easily exploited, but those who are in control of their emotions are not. I think you think there's this axis of Rage-a-holic <--------> Door-Mat, but the problem is both ends of those axes have people that aren't in control of their feelings. The door mat lacks control also, but in their case it presents as withdrawing from the world.
> If you are in an elite position of leadership, and otherwise have more Machiavellian options, then you can always try to calculate revenge instead -- or forgive endlessly and be exploited.
You're assuming that in most cases when people shout, they're being excessive.
I don't think that's true, at least "per capita". Maybe most shouting is done by the emotionally unstable, but most people arent emotionally unstable (as adults).
If an adult were shouting at me, I'd be greatful of it. I was slapped once, and I said thank you to the person who slapped me -- it told me I was being careless.
For people who arent evilly trying to manipulate you, like customer service -- expressing how you feel helps others know how you feel. I am, in many cases, grateful to know.
If I saw someone getting angry at a person in the customer-service-way, my instinct as an adult with life experience, is to treat that anger as symptomatic -- not evil. This is the danger in saying you shouldnt get angy: blaming the victim.
> Yikes dude
I wasnt endorsing that, I was saying, that's less healthy than just being angry.
There's definitely a cultural aspect, but at least among the people I tend to interact with, shouting is very much a last resort.
If you're at the point where the only way to make your point is by being louder than the other guy, then you're really just winning on intimidation rather than persuasiveness. If both people, or multiple people, are shouting, is anyone actually listening? And if not, what's the point of being so loud?
I see your example of being slapped and I mean, I guess it's good that you took that act in a positive way, but, to me if I'm being so closed off that I need to be slapped, I really need to evaluate how I'm acting.
> I wasnt endorsing that, I was saying, that's less healthy than just being angry.
Fair enough, I'm mostly saying yikes to the implied spectrum of [ scary powerful sociopath bent on revenge <------> complete doormat ]. I don't think anyone needs to concoct weird revenge fantasies to be taken seriously unless you work for the cartel or something, and in that case I'd recommend a career change.
Well now it sounds like you are disagreeing for it's own sake. There may be a name for what you describe, but it's not what is commonly understood as Stoicism.
And in my many years, I have never found shouting at another person to be a healthy thing.
> Professors of stocism like to make a virute of dying quiety -- this i think absurd. If the plane is falling from the sky, i envy the people screaming -- they have the right levels of attachemnt to their own lives.
Not to sound flippant, but that strikes me as absurd. You don't gain anything by that. You're going to be just as dead, but with a lot of suffering in your final moments that didn't need to happen. It's a pure negative thing, not a virtue.
That's all great and it sounds like stoicism isn't for you. But that doesn't mean that it's "a deeply hollow, dissociative, nihilistic philosophy which dresses up the status quo as 'God's plan' -- a rationalization of interest to the elite above all others."
Virtues like prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice can improve the lives of people of any part of society, not just the elites.
I was a staunch Stoic, and a hollow disassociative mess is exactly what I became.
Think of the end goal of the Stoic and what it takes to achieve it. At every misfortune, you rationalize and deny your natural emotions. If you do it well, you're an all understanding guru of life, sharing oneness with everything, and becoming nothing in particular.
We have to accept that we too are a part of nature and flawed imperfect beings who can be unreasonable, hate unnecessarily, be selfish without ultimate good reason, etc. It makes us the individuals that we are, and gives us the will to care and have something we intrinsically want to live for.
Perhaps as a peer comment is alluding to, this issue might simply be viewing things through an all-or-nothing lens.
In some ways I think this is similar to Thomas Jefferson and Christianity. He was drawn to the soundness of the values of Christianity as a system of moral and ethical behavior, but found the supernatural aspects of it unbelievable, and words of third parties as less relevant. So he simply cut them out and actually literally cut and pasted his own 'Bible' together, the Jefferson Bible. [1]
For self evident reasons he kept this as a personal project, but that was essentially 'his' Christianity. Beliefs and systems are what we make of them. Stoicism may shape one, but we can also shape it back in return, for otherwise it's certain to never truly fit.
That is totally fair, and I'd say what me and the other commenter here are doing is precisely that, arguing that Stoicism by itself, is not something to live by.
These are genuine questions, but please don't feel obligated to answer if you aren't comfortable. I'm fascinated to hear your story though.
Are you generally a pretty gung-ho person? Do you feel drawn to strive toward perfection?
Were you or are you previously religious with Christianity, Islam, or other world religion?
Do you view stoicism as an all-or-nothing thing? I.e. do you think a person applying stoicism in a light-weight or even casual manner is useful, or would you still recommend avoiding it?
Growing up I was a pretty reserved, depressed kid. Culturally Christian background but I was a pretty staunch agnostic. I am not a perfectionist when it comes to work, but I did always strive to be as rational as I could in how I approached life. It was very much naturally my coping mechanism.
If faced with being wronged, "They're just a biological machine, how could I be mad at a tree that grew the wrong way?", personal failures, "I am just a biological machine, this is just where I am at at the moment", "Whats it matter what I accomplish? Were all dead in the end anyway", faced with some accident, "Well something was bound to happen at some point. Its nothing unexpected that it happened now", a loss of love, "It happens to everybody, things just didn't coincide".
Its all very calming, and can make you resilient to what's going on, but I came to realize that what I am really doing is disassociating from every aspect of my life. Instead of feeling/processing my emotions, I was simply just not caring about any of it. I read Nietzche's Genealogy of Morals, and it was such a derailment from my natural philosophy, and yet it felt he was saying everything that I wanted personally. You're human, be angry if you're angry, be sad if you're sad, do what you want to be doing, have and enforce YOUR will for life.
Yes I agree this line of thinking is definitely needed and can be extremely helpful to someone with the opposite problems, but as with all things in life, its complicated and in truth there is a fine balance that's always difficult to know in advance.
Do you have any idea why stoicism (and rationalism) gets conflated with lack of passion and goals?
In my experience, both are tools to get what one wants, but it seems like a lot of people miss out on the instrumentality. Goal orientation is necessary to determine when emotional repression is appropriate.
That is the opposite of Stoic practice. I have never heard Stoics denying things. What does it mean to deny things that happen? Emotions are not in one's control. Whenever they come up, one would observe and act according to Stoic virtues. If one has failed to observe, then they reflect on the failure and intend to observe in the future.
>Whenever they come up, one would observe and act according to Stoic virtues.
I am talking about precisely this. If something happens that angers you or makes you sad, you can always stop and try to alter your natural reaction/thoughts to be more aligned with a more forgiving/serene/understanding nature.
What I am saying is if you do this really well, everything in life just becomes "it just is", and in turn becomes nothing at all
It does and it did in a world where I can actually be devoid and detatched from everything. But I got bored of being alone and it makes it hard to connect with anyone when youre living in your own world.
But I dunno sometimes I think all this thinking is useless cause you never really know what caused what
"If the plane is falling from the sky, i envy the people screaming -- they have the right levels of attachemnt to their own lives."
Instead of screaming, I would rather stoicly prepare and brace myself for the impact of the rough landing. I might die anyway, or I might survive because I managed to put the seat belt on and hard things away from my torso and head. But screaming will not increase my chances, rather the opposite.
> Behind each of the stoic virutues is a psychological position to dettach, dissociate and live in a more abstracted conceptual space. This can be theraputic if you are in grief, etc.
This is also great during the best of times. Happiness is as ephemeral as grief. Accepting that in many ways the vicissitudes of life are beyond your control is a positive thing. Exercising temperance and prudence, among other things, is far from being merely therapeutical.
> Outside of that, personally I think: attach too much, risk more than you ought, and participate in the world ("dirty your hands") by making the best of it, rather than anything more abstract.
You are describing hell. I actively avoid in my life people like that, for good reason.
This is a very interesting comment for me. I really dislike your virtues but agree with everything else and your general dislike of stoicism.
I think there might be a more middle way which doesn’t include impertinence, for example, as a value but still celebrates screaming as your plane is falling from the sky.
The reason I dislike your values is because at face value they imply a disregard for others. I think there is a way to deeply value both yourself and others. It’s possible you don’t imply that disregard for others that I get from the values you listed though.
You must be quite young to hold such beliefs. Whether you approve of stoicism or not, we all will die one day. Someone once said that to philosophize is to learn how to die. I hope you don't spend the last moments of your life screaming in anguish and fear.
>> Behind each of the stoic virutues is a psychological position to dettach, dissociate and live in a more abstracted conceptual space.
You and I have a very different understanding of stoicism. Stoicism's concept of attachment is much more closer to a Daoist/Buddhist one. They don't advocate renouncing the world in fact the opposite - how to live fully. Just that don't cling to things - especially the results as a lot of factors that affect it are not under our control and when things don't happen the way we were forcing them to happen, resentment and anger follows. This can be applied to work, relationship, parenting. It is quite practical.
It is fascinating that these two different cultures developed similar philosophies around the same time in history.
One needs to let go of the medieval/modern interpretation of stoicism which creates such resentment and approach it from a more eastern perspective.
Happiness is only one meta-value, and at the level of "what the right meta" is, I'm somewhere between a nihilist and an aristotleian-sort-of-biologist:
I only think that the people who are screaming when they are about to die are living like a healthy animal. And in the absence of any objective meta-values, it kinda seems like we might well just be what we are.
Denying's one's instincts is an interesting exercise, and no doubt improves self-control -- but it isnt "above being an animal" -- its, at best, a different way of being an animal. One I think, taken to a stocial extreme, seems an injury.
People who readily accept death (as, no doubt, I do) seem injured, and trying to get to this state seems like a kind of self-injury to me -- a means of poking out the eye because the brain doesnt like what it sees.
People screaming when a plane is crashing seem to have their eyes open.
A crashing plane has roughly two possibilities, screaming wildly seems like the least useful and least pleasant option for either:
- You are going down in a way that might be survivable - If you want to live, you want to shut up and prepare yourself and your peers as best you can. If you're completely prepared and have time to kill, see below as long as it doesn't impair being ready when the time comes.
- You are going down in a way that obviously isn't going to be survivable - Your remaining lifespan has been suddenly reduced to minutes or seconds and there's no solving it. The only choice you have left is how to spend that time. Accepting the hand you've been dealt quickly and doing the best you can with the choices available to you rather than panicking or raging about things out of your control, is....sensible. Taking a last view of the world out the window, listening to a favorite song, a conversation with a loved one or even a stranger, etc, all seem like far more satisfying ways to spend your final moments than screaming like it's going to do anything.
> I only think that the people who are screaming when they are about to die are living like a healthy animal.
I'm not much of a biologist, but there seem to be plenty of animals, especially more intelligent ones, that pretty much calm down and await death when they recognize they are not long for the world for reasons they can't control and have no hope of escaping. (age, illness, etc).
I think what youd ultimately agree with is that it's healthy to be aligned with your emotional, instinctual reactions.
Though I am not totally sure one cannot fully accept snd fully align their being with the absurdity of life - celebrating their life/death rather than wallowing in it.
There seems to be the notion in a lot of comments that Stoicism is about acting against one's nature or surpressing ones emotions.
For me, on the other hand, it was very freeing to encounter Stoicism, because I felt like it was okay that I didn't feel or react as strongly as people around me expected me to.
>I adopt rather the opposite virutes. Imprudence, risk, throwing-your-self-at-a-wall-until-you-cant, intemperance (conflict, debate, disagreement, competition) and pragmatism (address what is rather than what should be).
Pragmatism is a form of prudence. A lot of the other stuff you mention could vaguely be called fortitude.
>Outside of that, personally I think: attach too much, risk more than you ought, and participate in the world ("dirty your hands") by making the best of it, rather than anything more abstract.
This is a recipe for unhappiness. By definition, attaching too much will ultimately (and perhaps immediately) cause you grief. Risking more than what is prudent could lead you to disaster. (Quit your job, for example, and you could end up homeless! That might be a good time to start thinking stoically but a better one would be prior to making such a mistake.) Participating in the world and making the best of it is what stoicism calls for, but it questions what is worth your energy and how you should react to failure.
>Professors of stocism like to make a virute of dying quiety -- this i think absurd. If the plane is falling from the sky, i envy the people screaming -- they have the right levels of attachemnt to their own lives.
The classical Stoic discussion of death is more of a rhetorical device than a prescription for how to live. Nobody is out here saying you should treat your life as unimportant. But extreme fear of death is a thing that gives people anxiety, and sometimes interferes with them doing things that they ought to do.
I've read many Stoic quotes about making the most of life and not wasting time. That kind of stuff isn't suggestive of laying down to rot. I've never seen a Stoic praise excessive laziness.
> Professors of stocism like to make a virute of dying quiety -- this i think absurd. If the plane is falling from the sky, i envy the people screaming -- they have the right levels of attachemnt to their own lives.
Stoicism does not say that you should not have an attachment to your life, i.e. will to live.
Stoicism is a powerful tool to achieving long term objectives that require planning, commitment, and control. Not all objectives fall into this category.
What are your priorities? Would you consider yourself a hedonist?
So you don't like Buddhism either. Question for you though, if the opposite virtues are so much healthier, why did practices like Stoicism and Buddhism develop to help people cope with the difficult realities of life?
I think a gap between wikipedia and a polemic by somebody clearly fired up about a topic is not just reasonable, but productive. Wikipedia, by nature, gives the sense that all philosophical viewpoints are equally dispassionate and it minimizes the degree to which reasonable people can substantially disagree about the rightness or wrongness of various worldviews. That usually gets dumped in the Controversy section. This is fine for an encyclopedia, but not for a debate.
Of course, I also think that OP is being polemical and that means they're not interested in being charitable. I think their criticisms are interesting, but the original post linked here does a far better job at balancing a charitable read of stoicism with a critique of why it is appealing to the rich and powerful.
Roman Stoicism, of the sort practiced by Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, is vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy and tendentious sanctimony; Seneca’s insistence that virtue is detached from worldly goods is somewhat undermined by his corrupt exploitation of his station, for example. Stoicism qua stoicism was, like all Roman intellectual pursuits, originally Greek, and was based on an entire metaphysics of free-will determinism that the Romans pretty much ignored in favor of being able to pretend that they were upholding the supposed virtues of an imagined past (a favored pastime, see Tacitus and Cicero), even as they let their society slide ever further into corruption and tyranny. To be honest, Stoicism tells us a lot about the psychological and social character of the Romans, but didn’t really come into its own as an influential philosophy until its early modern rediscovery and the development of neo-Stoicist thought.
Philosophies are frameworks that help us make sense of the world. We can adopt them in ways that are maladjusted.
People with power often adopt stoic thinking as the nature of power comes with stresses that are difficult to manage. I’ve wielded power at a scale that was nothing like a president or ceo, but way beyond what the typical person experiences. It’s hard, and whatever you do, someone has a bad outcome in many cases.
Most people would characterize Marcus Aurelius or George Washington as wise rulers. They embraced stoicism. Yet Mussolini and Robespierre also identified as stoic-ish as well, and most people would objectively look at them with a harsher light.
FWIW: My experience with stoicism has been that it's mostly espoused by conservatives as justification for ignoring social justice or by people who perceive themselves to be "tough love" types as a way to dismiss other's suffering.
For that reason, although in theory I think that stoicism could be a useful philosophy, in practice I see it as a cudgel for those who benefit from the status quo.
This is sad because its thats not what Stoicism is actually about. The most prominent Stoic author today is Ryan Holiday and the guy is a staunch liberal. He's worth checking out if you want to see a sincere modern day interpretation of stoicism.
They despised material wealth and comfort. They also talked alot about Justice and doing what is inside your control to correct injustice was seen as a high virtue.
The next most famous stoic would then be Epictetus who influenced Marcus Aurelius and is cited in the Meditations.
> Epictetus (/ˌɛpɪkˈtiːtəs/, EH-pick-TEE-təss; Ancient Greek: Ἐπίκτητος, Epíktētos; c. 50 – c. 135 AD) was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was born into slavery at Hierapolis, Phrygia (present-day Pamukkale, in western Turkey) and lived in Rome until his banishment, when he went to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece, where he spent the rest of his life.
> Epictetus studied Stoic philosophy under Musonius Rufus and after manumission, his formal emancipation from slavery, he began to teach philosophy. Subject to the banishment of all philosophers from Rome by Emperor Domitian toward the end of the first century, Epictetus founded a school of philosophy in Nicopolis. Epictetus taught that philosophy is a way of life and not simply a theoretical discipline. To Epictetus, all external events are beyond our control; he argues that we should accept whatever happens calmly and dispassionately. However, he held that individuals are responsible for their own actions, which they can examine and control through rigorous self-discipline.
Stoicism was a philosophy that spanned slave to emperor in Rome.
I have read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Your description of how bitter and resentful they are is utterly bizarre, and bears no relation to the book that I read.
It would depend on the translation, and what you understood him to be doing. One of the ones I read recently was incredibly bastardized to seem more stoical, completely removing in cases his own asides.
These are diaries he wanted burned -- they were just exercises in writing for himself to clam himself down. He is writing to himself.
Go back and read a few sections and ask: "what happened to Marcus on this evening for him to go to his study and rebuke himself with this lesson?"
There's clearly a lot of bitterness there, and depression.
Are you ever going to achieve goodness? Ever going to be simple, whole, and naked—as plain to see as the body that contains you? Know what an affectionate and loving disposition would feel like? Ever be fulfilled, ever stop desiring—lusting and longing for people and things to enjoy? Or for more time to enjoy them? Or for some other place or country—“a more temperate clime”? Or for people easier to get along with? And instead be satisfied with what you have, and accept the present—all of it. And convince yourself that everything is the gift of the gods, ....
I mean this is a deeply mournful person with an excess of self-admonishment.
Why is he, somewhere alone in his room, writing these thoughts to himself? Why does he go on and on to admonish his failure to "Know what an affectionate and loving disposition would feel like" ?
Whatever the cause that evening, he's in great pain with it. He sees his life as a failure. Its harder to tell the inciding incident in this particular passage -- but for some, its clearly been some betrayl or insult or similar which makes him rail against people.
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Consider, just a little ways down:
> # 10.13 When you wake up, ask yourself:
Does it make any difference to you if other people blame you for doing what’s right?
It makes no difference.
Have you forgotten what the people who are so vociferous in praise or blame of others are like as they sleep and eat?
Forgotten their behavior, their fears, their desires, their thefts and depredations—not physical ones, but those committed by what should be highest in them? What creates, when it chooses, loyalty, humility, truth, order, well-being.
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Reading this I say to myself, "OK. Marcus, dear me. What cross are you matrying yourself on this time? What gossip has upset you this evening. Why now, each morning, do you have to remember that you're above the gossiping crowds "
All this suppression of the particular by talking about the abstract is all very telling. No one rants like this in their diaries without a provocation, he's too self-righteously high-minded to do anything other than rail against all humanity. A normal person would air their particular grievances -- and be much better for it.
I'm rewatching House MD. at the moment, it's very housian in its own way. Its not that he has been lied to, its that Lying is the Metaphyiscal Necessity of Life, and o woe is me, what suffering! Etc. All just a cheap misdirection for being hurt by someone.
I disagree with your characterization of these passages. These seem like questions a person reflects on, not self admonishment. For instance:
> > Are you ever going to achieve goodness? Ever going to be simple, whole, and naked—as plain to see as the body that contains you? Know what an affectionate and loving disposition would feel like? Ever be fulfilled, ever stop desiring—lusting and longing for people and things to enjoy? Or for more time to enjoy them? Or for some other place or country—“a more temperate clime”? Or for people easier to get along with? And instead be satisfied with what you have, and accept the present—all of it. And convince yourself that everything is the gift of the gods, ....
> I mean this is a deeply mournful person with an excess of self-admonishment.
To me this is just a person that's reflecting on how the state he desires is somewhat unobtainable. You could read it as admonishment if you really want to, but to me it's more noting that he has a goal he'll never obtain. It's a lot like buddhists reflecting on nirvana.
I think you're being unfair because these are translations, and a different culture. What he's writing doesn't particularly seem casual, but it doesn't reflect a person in deep despair as you seem to think. And even if he was like that inwardly, his outward actions were generally well regarded, so it's not like what he was doing was terrible. I just don't see how any of this reflects badly on stoicism or Marcus.
No offense, but given how you originally confused him for Mark Antony, I get the impression you're just trying to find any evidence that would characterize him in the way you want him to be characterized. I just don't think your summary of his personality really matches who the man actually was. He wasn't a tyrant, or someone deeply depressed. He was depressed occasionally, because he was human. And he probably had more downer entries than a normal person, because as an emperor he frequently had to make life and death decisions. I think he reflects a pretty healthy psyche.
The view that Aurelius was depressed is very widespread. I've read the whole meditations, in several translations, and parts in the original. I've translated part of the original in anger at what deceitful translations are being put out today, which delete half of what he says to make him sound more stoical.
Go read more of it. I just chose two parts at random to narrate my thinking in reading these passages again to provide some background here. I'm obviously not making my case on these quotes.
> It's a lot like buddhists reflecting on nirvana.
This is how its bastardized, but that's not there in the text. This is the emperor of rome, at the end of his life, in a state of depression writing a journal to himself. He's an old tyrant, a self-confessed self-righteous "schoolmaster" who goes around admonishing people, including himself.
He's not writing religious literature; this is not scripture -- he isnt starting or continuning a religion or a philosophy. He wanted the whole thing burned. This is a ahistorical cultish reinterpretation to fit an agenda.
Listen to the man himself (2 mins of scrolling through):
NB. Recall you means the man himself. He is talking to himself. This is not a published work of philosophy, there is no audience. He's admonishing himself.
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# 8.1 Another encouragement to humility: you can’t claim to have lived your life as a philosopher—not even your whole adulthood. You can see for yourself how far you are from philosophy. And so can many others. You’re tainted. It’s not so easy now—to have a reputation as a philosopher. And your position is an obstacle as well.
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# 8.9 Don’t be overheard complaining about life at court. Not even to yourself.
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# 8.21 Turn it inside out: What is it like? What is it like old? Or sick? Or selling itself on the streets?
They all die soon—praiser and praised, rememberer and remembered. Remembered in these parts or in a corner of them. Even there they don’t all agree with each other (or even with themselves).
And the whole earth a mere point in space.
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# 8.53 You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves. (Is it a sign of self-respect to regret nearly everything you do?)
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# 9.33 All that you see will soon have vanished, and those who see it vanish will vanish themselves, and the ones who reached old age have no advantage over the untimely dead.
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# 9.3
Or perhaps you need some tidy aphorism to tuck away in the back of your mind. Well, consider two things that should reconcile you to death: the nature of the things you’ll leave behind you, and the kind of people you’ll no longer be mixed up with. There’s no need to feel resentment toward them—in fact, you should look out for their well-being, and be gentle with them—but keep in mind that everything you believe is meaningless to those you leave behind. Because that’s all that could restrain us (if anything could)—the only thing that could make us want to stay here: the chance to live with those who share our vision. But now? Look how tiring it is—this cacophony we live in. Enough to make you say to death, “Come quickly. Before I start to forget myself, like them.”
---
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# 10.3 Everything that happens is either endurable or not.
If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining.
If it’s unendurable … then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.
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I know the man well enough. The idea that he's there a monk writing scripture is an absurdity. Just read what he says to himself. These are his private thoughts, he writes out to himself.
In 9.3 there he basically says, "i'll be glad to be dead and rid of these degenerates" ginned up with his usual self-righteousness -- an emperor of rome indeed.
They are phrased by his teachings as a child, by professional stoic philosophers. These were the manners and habits of thinking he was taught. And he here rehearses them alongside a vast amount of bitterness, and disappointment.
You completely misunderstood everything about Stoicism. It has nothing to do with God his plan or elites.
Stoicism in its essence is about living with accordance with nature by seeking virtue.
It is funny that you call Marcus Aurelius a tyrant while he is considered one of the five great emperors. During the Pax Romana golden age the empire lived in relative peace prosperity and progress. After the death of Aurelius the empire descended into chaos.
His reflections are profound not bitter or resentful. Majority of them are relatable today some 2000 years after...
I have no idea how you can read his meditations and come away with this conclusion. Where are you getting that “Your job is to pretend it matters because it matters to your followers”
Your take on this is wild to me, and while TFA as whole is somewhat more balanced, I'm pretty surprised at this whole train of thought. An emperor was a stoic, and so was a slave. Epictetus is only mentioned twice in passing in the article, but it does say that
> Some stoic authors were slaves themselves, like Epictetus author of the beautiful stoic handbook Enchiridion, and many stoic writings focus on providing therapies for armoring one’s inner self against such evils as physical pain, illness, losing friends, disgrace, and exile.
Seems like people from all walks of life thought maybe it was a useful point of view, and that it's universal because people from all walks of life have their own suffering to deal with.
I get that in an inevitably political world that's increasingly polarized, philosophy always becomes a sort of fashion show where it's not about what's being worn but who is wearing it lately. But this is really pretty silly. Stoicism predates silicon valley and will still be around after it's gone, and there is substance that goes far beyond "deeply hollow, dissociative, nihilistic".
If it sounds that way to you, I assume maybe you are just in a situation where you have someone that you kind of hate preaching it at you.. in which case adding some distance makes sense no matter what they are evangelizing. Quoting TFA again
> [stoicism] reminds me of the profession of wealth therapists who help the uber-wealthy stop feeling guilty about spending $2,000 on bed sheets or millions on a megayacht.
So there it is, that's what's really bothering the guy.
I'm glad they wrote several more comments. The first comment was intriguing, but the more the wrote the more wild it got. Especially the part about being connected to life like a person in a fall airplane.
I think they've mixed up Stoicism with some other philosophy entirely. They think Stoicism means feeling nothing, doing nothing. Almost like the Hindu concept of sanyasi.
My guess why Aurelius is considered as the face of stoicism is due to the fact he was an emperor/powerful man. I doubt that the twisted way in which stoicism is viewed today would benefit from selling it as a philosophy of Zeno, who was a foreigner.
What I mean by that is that stoicism in its modern iteration seems a brosphere/manosphere thing that will help you to become rich/powerful/successful/buy a lambo, while in reality, the stoics rejected material possessions and the entire philosophy was created by Zeno who lived an ascetic life, despite being wealthy.
I think it's just one of the few therapeutic skills that are generally offered to men and that genuinely considers the problems that men face.
The problems and issues that men face are largely ignored or downplayed compared with women and there's little offered to men in dealing with it. The traditional outlets like men-only clubs and spaces have been torn down in the name of equality. In that environment, literally anything at all that attempts to address the problems men face will become popular among men.
You're right but the parent poster was responding to the question of why Stoicism is so popular with men in the modern era. He didn't say it was inherent to the philosophy.
Well, for that specific question, I'd skip all the bro-nonsense and just note that Stoicism is at least superficially quite like the implicit life philosophy that many men acquire from their families and the culture, but organizes that into something more coherent and with a fairly long past. It provides a positive explanation of why something vaguely close to what you already do could be a good thing. The appeal of that seems fairly obvious to me.
Note that I don't seek to demean or reduce Stoicism to "what men do anyway". It is a much more carefully thought out philosophy of life than that would imply, and contains far more insight and potential than "keep doing what you already do". But the fact that it is somewhat adjacent to the pop-stoicism associated with masculinity doesn't hurt its accessibility.
Stoicism has nothing to do with men. It's not a male-exclusive philosophy. It's just a way to cope with life and the struggles in life. Stoicism is just being weaponized, often by misinterpretation, by "male-clubs".
It kind of became like a cult. "You need to be a Stoic in order to be successful". It's the same story all over, and a similar thing happens with every -ism, like minimalism where it transformed from being a philosophy of being happy with the things you have, into a philosophy where you need to identify yourself as minimalist by buying a bunch of crap that is labeled as "minimalist [whatever]".
> one of the few therapeutic skills that are generally offered to men and that genuinely considers the problems that men face.
These things are not OFFERED to men, they are available for the taking if one is so inclined. Your options do not depend on your gender, but many will reject them as if they do. Therapy? It's not just for sissies. If men are so tough, why do they need society to OFFER solutions to their problems?
If you read Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, he takes rather dim view of Marcus Aurelius, and specifically doubts the seriousness of his writings and ideas, considering them somewhat dubious.
Russell himself makes false and dubious claims in that book (for example, claims about Aristotle/Aristotelianism, which he hated). I don't regard him to be an especially reliable or objective expositor of philosophy or philosophical history, generally speaking.
> a roman emperor (tyrant, mass murderer, and courtier)
It's interesting to read up on the lives of famous ancients like Julius Caesar and Alexander. I know it was a different time, but the regular and casual war crimes and mass murders sticks in one's craw.
Not saying you're wrong, Julius Caesar committed more than his fair share of atrocities, but do you have a source?
Wikipedia says that Julius Caesar threatened his troops with decimation but didn't carry it out. I asked chatgpt about it and it said that Julius Caesar did order one, but then said no contemporary sources for this exist. It then claimed that Plutarch wrote that Julius Caesar made his troops draw lots, which certainly suggests he ordered a decimation, but I checked two English translations of Parallel Lives and neither of them contain any mention of this. I also asked the not to translate the original Greek, and that also doesn't mention it. The chatbot thinking it happened suggests that somebody has written that it did, but I can't figure out who and where.
You've done much more research into this than I have. I read about it in a biography of him (Caesar: life of a colossus by Goldsworthy), but you're probably right.
> the regular and casual war crimes and mass murders
It's phenomenal to read about these revered historical figures! They turn out be privileged thugs. We should be extremely reluctant to extol their virtues.
The best thing about the arc of history so far is that by and large it decentralized power (with some horrific exceptions)
God-kings / pharaohs / caesars -> a handful of feudalists -> millions of millionaires vs voters vs large governments all competing in a much less violent and more stable balance of power
> Marcus Aurelius himself was no stoic philosopher, he merely wrote diaries to himself in his late days - diaries he wanted burned, not published.
This is how I read "Meditations" - not as writings of a sage (as far as I know, he didn't consider himself one), but as "shower thoughts". Ironically, since these were private notes, they were likely more genuine than if they had been intended for publication. And more approachable, precisely because he was not a philosopher.
Roman emperors were, without exception, autocrats. Yet, he is considered one of the better ones.
Even if he didn't always live up to stoic ideals, he strived for them. This doesn't excuse his wrongdoings, but it suggests his writings can have value despite his flawed actions.
One thing that struck me, though, is how a philosophy promoting ideas like "things are good as they are" or "ignore spiteful people" works well when you're at the top. If you're a slave or poor, things might look quite different. Especially when spiteful people cannot be ignored - be it your master, your centurion, or an unfair competitor trying to frame you.
In my personal life, work and home, I am surrounded by people who are constantly in a state of distress, ranging from frustration to simmering rage, about things which are completely beyond their ability to change. I never see it do them any good, nor cause any constructive change for society. My personal understanding of stoicism is focus on changing the things I can change, and not spend my time being miserable about things I'm powerless to change. This gives me peace. My younger brothers spend all day ranting about the state of society, one from the right and the other from the left, and it has never done either of them any good. They have twice as much gray hair than me despite being years younger.
Then I go on the internet and read commentary like yours, making stoicism out to be some sort of rich conspiracy against the eternal revolution or something. I find this baffling. Of all the things to get yourself worked up about, people choosing a stoic mindset is definitely up there in fruitlessness. Nothing you can tell me would ever convince me to adopt the methods of my brothers, so what is the point of what you're doing?
(I confess I've never read any Marcus Aurelius, it seems like it would be very dry. Maybe I'm wrong, but my reading list is already very long and philosophy all gets bumped far down the list.)
> My personal understanding of stoicism is focus on changing the things I can change, and not spend my time being miserable about things I'm powerless to change.
This is the overriding principle I've come away with as well, and it has felt to me like one of the most simple and wise things I've heard.
I've read the Meditations -- in the Emperor's Handbook translation -- and they're nothing like GP is making them out to be.
In their original, unedited comment, they didn't even get Marcus Aurelius's name right, attributing the Meditations to Mark Antony.
Their take is such a wild and inaccurate mischaracterization of Stoicism that it's frankly not worth engaging with -- written absentmindedly while "listening to corporate policy announcements." Take it with a grain of salt.
Marcus Aurelius is a stoic, just look at some of his quotes, that is stoicism.
"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."
"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."
"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."
"When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ..."
I also find it odd how you came to this conclusion from his writings. However, I first studied Epictetus[0] (I prefer Discourses to the handbook), who inspired Aurelius--thus read Aurelius through the lens of Epictetus. Which is a very different take on Stoicism that has nothing to do with the adjective, stoic as some new aged takes seem to associate. There was also a link on here awhile back to some professors lecture on YouTube, but I can't remember it, that I thought had a really great take on Stoicism and Aurelius. (maybe someone will know it and post)
My short take on Stoicism is about being responsible for your actions, really owning them, plus the understanding needed to be able to do so. Which includes not giving your power of will to others; especially due to social constructs. Worshiping "leaders/authority" tends to make a person believe they are no longer responsible for themselves, the leader is now in ownership of that. There is a gained inner peace (thus joy and lightness) in owning your will. (Here is one of my favorite passages[1])
It's not about having no feeling or joy (being deeply hollow, dissociative, etc)--very much the opposite--or at least the Epictetus teaching. It's also not about giving up and not doing anything or caring, even though that is a lot of people's (wrong, imo) take. It's the opposite, enjoy what you can but don't be so distraught over the things you can not control that you cause self-harm or make it worse. You can not control a region wide wild fire burning your house down, but you can control your response--you can freak out and cause more distress to your family or you can comfort them and find ways to bring people together and rebuild. Your choice, just take responsibility for whatever you choose. That is Stoicism, not having a "stiff upper lip" and pushing through by being a tyrant by default. If you want to chose that okay, then that was what you thought was right for you, but own the consequences of those actions, that part is the Stoicism.
Real question, did you have GPT write this for you with some kind of anti-intellectual prompt, or did you actually type this out by hand?
Otherwise, it's a nice fan-fiction about the worst possible interpretation of stoicism, but has really not much to do with what the philosophy is about or what it can be positively applied for.
I'm surprised to see this at the top of the thread, because it's mostly utter nonsense, but it does sound emotionally appealing to a certain social group that believes it's trendy to invent new negative definitions for things they don't like or understand.
Looks like classical stoicism is competing with Nietzsche in "how much modern people can distort and/or misinterpret it". Not saying it's winning, but it's up there.
I don't see how the fact that his most famous work is his diary makes Marcus Aurelius not a philosopher. Is there some magic credential you need to be a philosopher? As far as I can tell, philosophers come from all over the place; slaves, clergy, clerks, etc. Since there wasn't an institution to get his philosophy degree in, I think we can give him a pass?
With regard to the other criticism that there are rough bits in his not-intended-to-be-published diary and not all of it holds up.. so what? You've never said something bitter and resentful in private that you wouldn't want broadcast to the world? If you have a diary, do you think it'd stand intense scrutiny 2000 years later? Being a stoic means embracing your imperfections, so, the fact that Marcus Aurelius was an imperfect man tells us nothing about stoicism.
FWIW Marcus Aurelius is considered one of the greatest (maybe the greatest?) Roman Emperors ever, and he was plucked from relative obscurity, so, while you can certainly criticize the institution you're picking on someone that navigated that level of power better than his peers.
I don’t know anyone who would say Marcus Aurelius was the greatest emperor. He was the last of the “Five Good Emperors”, which correctly implies that he was the one who dropped the ball on succession planning. He was a good emperor aside from that, but even out of the Five Good Emperors you could make a case for any of the other four ahead of him. And none of those guys come close to Augustus, Domitian, or Constantine.
That having been said, Marcus Aurelius was definitely one of the better emperors. Leagues ahead of guys like Nero or Caligula or Elagabalus or uh, Commodus (who was his son). It’s been said that the reign of Marcus Aurelius was the high point of the Roman Empire as a whole, but that’s a double edged statement about the emperor himself.
> He was a member of the Nerva–Antonine dynasty, the last of the rulers later known as the Five Good Emperors and the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an age of relative peace, calm, and stability for the Roman Empire lasting from 27 BC to 180 AD. He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161.
> ...
> The historian Herodian wrote:
> Alone of the emperors, he gave proof of his learning not by mere words or knowledge of philosophical doctrines but by his blameless character and temperate way of life.
> ...
> The number and severity of persecutions of Christians in various locations of the empire seemingly increased during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The extent to which the emperor himself directed, encouraged, or was aware of these persecutions is unclear and much debated by historians. The early Christian apologist Justin Martyr includes within his First Apology (written between 140 and 150) a letter from Marcus Aurelius to the Roman Senate (prior to his reign) describing a battlefield incident in which Marcus believed Christian prayer had saved his army from thirst when "water poured from heaven" after which, "immediately we recognized the presence of God." Marcus goes on to request the Senate desist from earlier courses of Christian persecution by Rome.
Marcus Aurelius was the last of the Five Good Emperors because he did not adopt a competent, non-biological son to take his place like the previous four. Instead, he set up Commodus as Caesar and his heir, despite his mental instability. That decision alone calls into question his Stoic resolve.
True, the other Good Emperors - Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius didn't set up their children as their successors. They each adopted someone who would be good at the job. But there was one difference between them and Marcus Aurelius - none of them had biological sons. Their adopted son would be their only heir.
Marcus Aurelius' decision can be criticised in hindsight because Commodus was terrible at his job. But I'm not sure I could have done differently in Marcus' shoes. Parents find it difficult to view their children objectively and feel the need to protect them. Even if he was aware of Commodus' faults he also knew this - if he adopted someone else and crowned him Emperor, then it would have led to civil war after his own death. Either Commodus and his other sons would kill the adopted son or vice versa. Having all of them alive and at large would be an unstable equilibrium that could only be solved with war.
Come on man, this guy ran an Empire pretty well for a couple of decades despite challenges like war and plague. Maybe he knew what he was doing. Give him the benefit of the doubt.
Pretty much all Roman emperors would be considered tyrants and mass murderers by the standards of modern western liberal democracies. Marcus Aurelius was a product of his time and hardly a hero to emulate. But despite their flaws we can learn some universal lessons from their surviving writings that still apply to modern life — including at least some elements of stoicism.
Modern western liberal democracies aren't without faults either. They've been involved in a few conflicts themselves, like Iraq and Israel/Palestine (whatever your view the situation is an ongoing mess not really helped by foreign influence). Or propping up illiberal rulers. There's the values liberal democracies espouse, and then there are the geopolitical realities of how they act.
my fav part of HN is how slavery and the CIA just don't exist
but stoicism is cool though if you rich and have a choice. if you're poor it's kind of forced on you because your choice is either be ok with the abuse or die
But be aware that most writings about him are roman, and hence state propaganda which glorify his actions. In order to see more clearly what his actions were, just imagine being their victim. He perpetrated a genocide against Germanic tribes in retribution.
It's very hard to be a morally good roman emperor -- you can be seen as good by either the plebs or the elite of roman society, but not by nearly anyone else, and almost never by both even in rome.
I don't think its any accident the elite of concequering empires adopted this mentality. Though, no doubt, there were originally honest/moral/good stoic-philosophers they did create a kind of "retreat from the world dissociation" which isn't in my view, itself good. It's therapeutic in some situations, typically in cases of grief/loss/extreme-attachement --- but outside of these cases, you want to associate and attach.
Perhaps there's some case for a little stocisim in the face of social media today, or in the kinds of "adversarial environments" which exploit your attachment -- such as leading an empire (cf. Machiavelli: leaders have to be rutheless). There's possibly an argument that twitter turns everyone into a viperous courterier looking to attack each other's reputation and attachemnt-bait.
On the scale of leaders: not being needlessly cruel, trying to consider the impacts of policies beyond the immediate, and dedicating your days to ruling rather than enjoying whatever pleasure you pick makes him one of the "good" ones. Maybe that's a low bar, but even today not all leaders clear it and certainly we can compare to Commodus who came immediately after and the sources for which are similarly patchy, to compare.
Let's just be clear. It's not just that a roman emperor is the premier famous stoic.
It's also that the Romans were instrumental in setting up Christianity and Judaism as exportable religions, after they completely destroyed Jerusalem in the Judaic wars.
Marcus Aurelius was very close with Judah ha Nasi (the Prince) and the Gamaliel family. Subsequent Roman emperors also helped boost the churches and make Christianity a religion that wasn't just for Jews.
Judaism and Christianity were based in Jerusalem. Afterwards, Judaism was based in Babylon (really old schools that had been established during the first exile of Jews, survived and became primary). Meanwhile, Christianity moved to Rome (which became primary over the main church in Jerusalem). It grew there until Constantine made it the official state religion 300 years later.
The Judaic wars is probably the reason why Jesus' own direct students and the Church he set up in Jerusalem (with his brother James and "Peter" as the "Rock on which the Church would be built" and also the "Apostle to the Gentiles") were marginalized (probably regarded as ebionites / judaizers).
Then Paul became the main "Apostle to the Gentiles" instead, even though he himself admits he never learned from Jesus' students, but argued with them instead (including Peter). He has a chip on his shoulder about these "super-apostles". In Acts 15 and 21, Paul is admonished by them and seems to relent, being given an official letter to distribute to gentile churches. But in his Galatians letter he claims that they added nothing to his message, except to remember the poor, something he was going to do anyway. Thomas Jefferson called Paul the "great corruptor of Christianity". Most of the New Testament is based on writings of Paul and his student Luke.
So in fact, Roman emperors picked and chose winners in the global religions that became Orthodox Judaism and Christianity.
According to Paul's letters, the main disagreement Paul had was over whether Gentiles should become Jewish converts, including being circumcised, instead of just being God-fearers, a category already recognized in Judaism as long as they abided the Noahide covenant. Paul didn't think becoming Jewish mattered, because Jesus would return soon and everything would be transformed, including those in Christ.
There isn't any indication as to whether James, Peter, John (the Three Pillars in Jerusalem) disagreed with Paul over his Christology or eschatological expectations (Jesus was probably an apocalyptic prophet like John the Baptist). Paul says Jesus first appeared to them, so they likely began believing God had raised him to heaven before Paul. Paul says he persecuted their movement at first, likely because he found it offensive. A risen crucified messiah would be offensive to a Pharisee.
Paul further says they had their gospel (literally good news) for Jews and he was sent to Gentiles, but again there isn't any indication over whether there were substantive disagreements beyond whether Gentiles needed to become Jewish. That and some people clearly questioned Paul's claim to apostleship, particularly in relationship to other apostles, especially in Jerusalem.
What developed after the destruction of the Temple with the proto-orthodox, Ebionites and Gnostic Christianity is not necessarily a reflection of Paul's conflict. Those were further developments.
Constantine gave Christians reprieve from persecution in 313 with the Edict of Milan.
In 380 it was Theodosius who made Christianity the state religion with the Edict of Thessalonica.
Negative assessment of Paul's influence on the development of Christianity predates Jefferson by many centuries, e.g. in the writings of ߵAbd al-Jabbār and Ibn Ḥazm. Muhammad himself believed that Christians had diverged from the truth about Jesus' identity and teachings, though he didn't criticize Paul specifically as far as I'm aware.
It's something of a theme, really, that shows up, seemingly independently, in the writings of those who "want" the core teachings of Jesus but are determined to identify an irreformable corruption that invalidates orthodox Christianity as such. Some identify that corruption with the influence of Paul, others find their smoking guns within the pre Nicene church, or post Nicene, and so on.
>It's no accident that a roman emperor (tyrant, mass murderer, and courtier) is the premier famous stoic
Marcus Aurelius wasn't just any Roman Emperor. He was considered one of the better ones, even called "The Last Good Emperor."
>Stoicism, under this light, is training for a ruthless sort of leadership. From the pov of The Leader, all adoration is fake, all prestige, and status. Your job is to pretend it matters because it matters to your followers. It's a deeply hollow, dissociative, nihilistic philosophy which dresses up the status quo as "God's plan" -- a rationalization of interest to the elite above all others.
This is so off-base I don't know where to start. Stoicism is not nihilistic. One of the major tenets of stoicism is to free your mind from trouble that is outside your control, or rather to correctly identify which things are and are not within your control. It's not supposed to turn you into an ascetic psychopath, it's supposed to foster healthy reflection on the true nature of life and your own situation. It is easier said than done, of course, but some people never even consider the possibility that their many anxious thoughts are entirely pointless and counterproductive.
I have read his diaries, though carelessly writing Mark Antony over Marcus Aurelius does undermine the point. -- Thanks, edited. I guess one shouldnt write HN comments while listening to corporate policy announcements.
It’s always funny to read people’s hot takes about stoicism because they seem to polarize into two mutually exclusive camps. In one camp, stoicism is a “hollow, dissociative, nihilist philosophy” for sociopathic emperors and in the other, it’s just cope for people without the power or agency to change anything in the world around them. If anything the bipolar nature of this criticism itself validates the broad applicability of Stoicism.
And actually it is an accident that Marcus Aurelius is the “premier famous stoic”, largely because, as you point out, his personal journal wasn’t actually burned as he requested. If you actually engage at even a marginally deeper level than social media slop—e.g. by taking an undergraduate survey course in ancient philosophy—you’ll learn that the premier Stoic was Epictetus, who was born into slavery.
It’s also a glib misreading of Marcus Aurelius to characterize his writings as “bitter rants”. Much of “Meditations” takes the form of an internal dialogue between the emperor’s base feelings (which are sometimes bitter and sometimes as simple as not being a morning person) and his intellect as it works to apply Stoic philosophy to his own life. If you’re not an emperor you might not relate to having to deal with surly and ungrateful supplicants or the need to remind yourself that you aren’t actually a living god, and if you’re also a morning person, Marcus Aurelius is probably completely wasted on you. But that’s not what Marcus Aurelius is for. If you want a practical Stoic handbook, read the Enchiridion.
(EDIT: Marcus Aurelius) himself was no stoic philosopher, he merely wrote diaries to himself in his late days -- diaries he wanted burned, not published. And these were rehresals of what his stoic teachers had taught him while he was being raised into the roman aristocracy. Without this context, its very easy to misread his diaries in the manner of some religious text, cherry picking "whatever sounds nice".
Its clear, under this view, how bitter and resentful many of these reflections were. He retreated to his diaries to "practice stoical thoughts" on those occasions where he was emotionally distributed. They are, mostly, rants. Rants against the court (eg., ignore the schemes of others, etc.); rants against the public (no matter if one is whipped, beaten, etc.); rants against how his prestige means little as a leader. Stocism here serves as a recipie to smooth one's injuries faced as a member of the elite, surrounded by vipers and with meaningless prestige.
Stoicism, under this light, is training for a ruthless sort of leadership. From the pov of The Leader, all adoration is fake, all prestige, and status. Your job is to pretend it matters because it matters to your followers. It's a deeply hollow, dissociative, nihilistic philosophy which dresses up the status quo as "God's plan" -- a rationalization of interest to the elite above all others.