from

A Guide to the Good Life——The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

written by William B. Irvine

Oxford University Press 2009

What do you want out of life? You might answer this question  by saying that you want a caring spouse, a good job, and a nice house, but these are really just some of the things you want inlife. In asking what you want out of life, I am asking the question in its broadest sense. I am asking not for the goals you form as you go about your daily activities but for your grand goal in living. In other words, of the things in life you might pursue, which is the thing you believe to be most valuable?

Many people will have trouble naming this goal. They know what they want minute by minute or even decade by decade during their life, but they have never paused to consider their grand goal in living. It is perhaps understandable that they haven’t. Our culture doesn’t encourage people to think about such things; indeed, it provides them with an endless stream of distractions so they won’t ever have to. But a grand goal in living is the first component of a philosophy of life.

This means that if you lack a grand goal in living, you lack a coherent philosophy of life.Why is it important to have such a philosophy? Because without one, there is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life. There is, in other words, a danger that when you are on your deathbed, you will look back and realize that you wasted your one chance at living. Instead of spending your life pursuing something genuinely valuable, you squandered it because you allowed yourself to be distracted by the various baubles life has to offer.

Suppose you can identify your grand goal in living. Suppose, too, that you can explain why this goal is worth attaining. Even then, there is a danger that you will mislive. In particular, if you lack an effective strategy for attaining your goal, it is unlikely that you will attain it. Thus, the second component of a philosophy of life is a strategy for attaining your grand goal in living.

This strategy will specify what you must do, as you go about your daily activities, to maximize your chances of gaining the thing in life that you take to be ultimately valuable.If we want to take steps to avoid wasting our wealth, we can easily find experts to help us. Looking in the phone book, we will find any number of certified financial planners. These individuals can help us clarify our financial goals: How much, for example, should we be saving for retirement? And having clarified these goals, they can advise us on how to achieve them.

Suppose, however, that we want to take steps to avoid wasting not our wealth but our life. We might seek an expert to guide us: a philosopher of life. This individual would help us think about our goals in living and about which of these goals are in fact worth pursuing. She would remind us that because goals can come into conflict, we need to decide which of our goals should take precedence when confl icts arise. She will therefore help us sort through our goals and place them into a hierarchy. The goal at the pinnacle of this hierarchy will be what I have called our grand goal in living: It is the goal that we should be unwilling to sacrifi ce to attain other goals. And after helping us select this goal, a philosopher of life will help us devise a strategy for attaining it.

The obvious place to look for aphilosopher of life is in the philosophy department of the local university. Visiting the faculty offices there, we will fi nd philosophers specializing in metaphysics, logic, politics, science, religion, and ethics. We might also find philosophers specializing in the philosophy of sport, the philosophy of feminism, and even the philosophy of philosophy. But unless we are at an unusual university, we will find no philosophers of life in the sense I have in mind.

It hasn’t always been this way. Many ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, for example, not only thought philosophies of life were worth contemplating but thought the raison d’être of philosophy was to develop them. These philosophers typically had an interest in other areas of philosophy as well—in logic, for example—but only because they thought pursuing that interest would help them develop a philosophy of life.

Furthermore, these ancient philosophers did not keep their discoveries to themselves or share them only with their fellow philosophers. Rather, they formed schools and welcomed as their pupils anyone wishing to acquire a philosophy of life. Different schools offered different advice on what people must do in order to have a good life. Antisthenes, a pupil of Socrates,founded the Cynic school of philosophy, which advocated an ascetic lifestyle. Aristippus, another pupil of Socrates, founded the Cyrenaic school, which advocated a hedonistic lifestyle. In between these extremes, we fi nd, among many other schools, the Epicurean school, the Skeptic school, and, of most interest to us here, the Stoic school, founded by Zeno of Citium.

The philosophers associated with these schools were unapologetic about their interest in philosophies of life. According to Epicurus, for example, “Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man. For just as there is no profi t in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is no profi t in philosophy either, if it does not expel the suffering of the mind.”And according to the Stoic philosopher Seneca, about whom I will have much to say in this book, “He who studies with a philosopher should take away with him some one good thing every day: he should daily return home a sounder man, or on the way to become sounder.”

This book is written for those seeking a philosophy of life. In the pages that follow, I focus my attention on a philosophy that I have found useful and that I suspect many readers will also

fi nd useful. It is the philosophy of the ancient Stoics. The Stoic

philosophy of life may be old, but it merits the attention of any

modern individual who wishes to have a life that is both mean-

ingful and fulfi lling—who wishes, that is, to have a good life.

In other words, this book offers advice on how people

should live. More precisely, I will act as a conduit for the advice

offered by Stoic philosophers two thousand years ago. This  is something my fellow philosophers are generally loath to

do, but then again, their interest in philosophy is primarily

“academic”; their research, that is to say, is primarily theoret-

ical or historical. My interest in Stoicism, by way of contrast, is

resolutely practical: My goal is to put this philosophy to work

in my life and to encourage others to put it to work in theirs.

The ancient Stoics, I think, would have encouraged both sorts

of endeavor, but they also would have insisted that the primary

reason to study Stoicism is so we can put it into practice.

Another thing to realize is that although Stoicism is a philos-

ophy, it has a signifi cant psychological component. The Stoics

realized that a life plagued with negative emotions—including

anger, anxiety, fear, grief, and envy—will not be a good life.

They therefore became acute observers of the workings of

the human mind and as a result became some of the most

insightful psychologists of the ancient world. They went on

to develop techniques for preventing the onset of negative

emotions and for extinguishing them when attempts at preven-

tion failed. Even those readers who are leery of philosophical

speculation should take an interest in these techniques. Who

among us, after all, would not like to reduce the number of

negative emotions experienced in daily living?

Although I have been studying philosophy for all my adult

life, I was, until recently, woefully ignorant of Stoicism. My

teachers in college and graduate school never asked me to

read the Stoics, and although I am an avid reader, I saw no

need to read them on my own. More generally, I saw no need

to ponder a philosophy of life. I instead felt comfortable with  what is, for almost everyone, the default philosophy of life: to 

spend one’s days seeking an interesting mix of affl uence, social

status, and pleasure. My philosophy of life, in other words,

was what might charitably be called an enlightened form of

hedonism.

In my fi fth decade of life, though, events conspired to intro-

duce me to Stoicism. The fi rst of these was the 1998 publica-

tion by the author Tom Wolfe of A Man in Full. In this novel,

one character accidentally discovers the Stoic philosopher

Epictetus and then starts spouting his philosophy. I found this

to be simultaneously intriguing and puzzling.

Two years later I started doing research for a book about

desire. As part of this research, I examined the advice that has

been given over the millennia on mastering desire. I started

out by seeing what religions, including Christianity, Hinduism,

Taoism, Sufism, and Buddhism (and in particular, Zen

Buddhism), had to say about desire. I went on to examine the

advice on mastering desire offered by philosophers but found

that only a relative handful of them had offered such advice.

Prominent among those who had were the Hellenistic philoso-

phers: the Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics.

In conducting my research on desire, I had an ulterior

motive. I had long been intrigued by Zen Buddhism and imag-

ined that on taking a closer look at it in connection with my

research, I would become a full-fl edged convert. But what

I found, much to my surprise, was that Stoicism and Zen have

certain things in common. They both, for example, stress the

importance of contemplating the transitory nature of the

world around us and the importance of mastering desire, to  the extent that it is possible to do so. They also advise us to

pursue tranquility and give us advice on how to attain and

maintain it. Furthermore, I came to realize that Stoicism was

better suited to my analytical nature than Buddhism was. As

a result, I found myself, much to my amazement, toying with

the idea of becoming, instead of a practicing Zen Buddhist, a

practicing Stoic.

Before I began my research on desire, Stoicism had been, for

me, a nonstarter as a philosophy of life, but as I read the Stoics,

I discovered that almost everything I thought I knew about

them was wrong. To begin with, I knew that the dictionary

defi nes a stoic as “one who is seemingly indifferent to or unaf-

fected by joy, grief, pleasure, or pain.”3

I therefore expected

that the uppercase-S Stoics would be lowercase-s stoical—that

they would be emotionally repressed individuals. I discovered,

though, that the goal of the Stoics was not to banish emotion

from life but to banish negative emotions.

When I read the works of the Stoics, I encountered indi-

viduals who were cheerful and optimistic about life (even

though they made it a point to spend time thinking about all

the bad things that could happen to them) and who were fully

capable of enjoying life’s pleasures (while at the same time

being careful not to be enslaved by those pleasures). I also

encountered, much to my surprise, individuals who valued

joy; indeed, according to Seneca, what Stoics seek to discover

“is how the mind may always pursue a steady and favourable

course, may be well-disposed towards itself, and may view its

conditions with joy.”4

He also asserts that someone who prac-

tices Stoic principles “must, whether he wills or not, necessarily  be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep

and issues from deep within, since he fi nds delight in his own

resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys.”5

Along similar lines, the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus tells

us that if we live in accordance with Stoic principles, “a cheerful

disposition and secure joy” will automatically follow.6

Rather than being passive individuals who were grimly

resigned to being on the receiving end of the world’s abuse

and injustice, the Stoics were fully engaged in life and worked

hard to make the world a better place. Consider, for example,

Cato the Younger. (Although he did not contribute to the liter-

ature of Stoicism, Cato was a practicing Stoic; indeed, Seneca

refers to him as the perfect Stoic.)7

His Stoicism did not prevent

Cato from fi ghting bravely to restore the Roman republic.

Likewise, Seneca seems to have been remarkably energetic:

Besides being a philosopher, he was a successful playwright,

an advisor to an emperor, and the fi rst-century equivalent of

an investment banker. And Marcus Aurelius, besides being a

philosopher, was a Roman emperor—indeed, arguably one

of the greatest Roman emperors. As I read about the Stoics,

I found myself fi lled with admiration for them. They were

courageous, temperate, reasonable, and self-disciplined—traits

I would like to possess. They also thought it important for us to

fulfi ll our obligations and to help our fellow humans—values

I happen to share.

In my research on desire, I discovered nearly unanimous

agreement among thoughtful people that we are unlikely to

have a good and meaningful life unless we can overcome our

insatiability. There was also agreement that one wonderful  way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade

ourselves to want the things we already have. This seemed to

be an important insight, but it left open the question of how,

exactly, we could accomplish this. The Stoics, I was delighted to

discover, had an answer to this question. They developed a fairly

simple technique that, if practiced, can make us glad, if only for

a time, to be the person we are, living the life we happen to be

living, almost regardless of what that life might be.

The more I studied the Stoics, the more I found myself

drawn to their philosophy. But when I tried to share with

others my newfound enthusiasm for Stoicism, I quickly discov-

ered that I had not been alone in misconceiving the philosophy.

Friends, relatives, and even my colleagues at the university

seemed to think the Stoics were individuals whose goal was to

suppress all emotion and who therefore led grim and passive

lives. It dawned on me that the Stoics were the victims of a

bum rap, one that I myself had only recently helped promote.

This realization alone might have been suffi cient to moti-

vate me to write a book about the Stoics—a book that would

set the record straight—but as it happens, I came to have a

second motivation even stronger than this. After learning about

Stoicism, I started, in a low-key, experimental fashion, giving it

a try as my philosophy of life. The experiment has thus far been

suffi ciently successful that I feel compelled to report my fi nd-

ings to the world at large, in the belief that others might benefi t

from studying the Stoics and adopting their philosophy of life.

Readers will naturally be curious about what is involved

in the practice of Stoicism. In ancient Greece and Rome, a  would-be Stoic could have learned how to practice Stoicism

by attending a Stoic school, but this is no longer possible.

A modern would-be Stoic might, as an alternative, consult

the works of the ancient Stoics, but what she will discover on

attempting to do so is that many of these works—in partic-

ular, those of the Greek Stoics—have been lost. Furthermore,

if she reads the works that have survived, she will discover that

although they discuss Stoicism at length, they don’t offer a

lesson plan, as it were, for novice Stoics. The challenge I faced

in writing this book was to construct such a plan from clues

scattered throughout Stoic writings.

Although the remainder of this book provides detailed

guidelines for would-be Stoics, let me describe here, in a

preliminary fashion, some of the things we will want to do if

we adopt Stoicism as our philosophy of life.

We will reconsider our goals in living. In particular, we will

take to heart the Stoic claim that many of the things we desire—

most notably, fame and fortune—are not worth pursuing. We

will instead turn our attention to the pursuit of tranquility and

what the Stoics called virtue. We will discover that Stoic virtue

has very little in common with what people today mean by

the word. We will also discover that the tranquility the Stoics

sought is not the kind of tranquility that might be brought on

by the ingestion of a tranquilizer; it is not, in other words, a

zombie-like state. It is instead a state marked by the absence of

negative emotions such as anger, grief, anxiety, and fear, and

the presence of positive emotions—in particular, joy.

We will study the various psychological techniques devel-

oped by the Stoics for attaining and maintaining tranquility,  and we will employ these techniques in daily living. We will,

for example, take care to distinguish between things we can

control and things we can’t, so that we will no longer worry

about the things we can’t control and will instead focus our

attention on the things we can control. We will also recognize

how easy it is for other people to disturb our tranquility, and

we will therefore practice Stoic strategies to prevent them

from upsetting us.

Finally, we will become a more thoughtful observer of our

own life. We will watch ourselves as we go about our daily

business and will later refl ect on what we saw, trying to iden-

tify the sources of distress in our life and thinking about how

to avoid that distress.

Practicing Stoicism will obviously take effort, but this is

true of all genuine philosophies of life. Indeed, even “enlight-

ened hedonism” takes effort. The enlightened hedonist’s grand

goal in living is to maximize the pleasure he experiences in

the course of a lifetime. To practice this philosophy of life,

he will spend time discovering, exploring, and ranking sources

of pleasure and investigating any untoward side effects they

might have. The enlightened hedonist will then devise strate-

gies for maximizing the amount of pleasure he experiences.

(Unenlightened hedonism, in which a person thoughtlessly

seeks short-term gratifi cation, is not, I think, a coherent philos-

ophy of life.)

The effort required to practice Stoicism will probably be

greater than that required to practice enlightened hedonism

but less than that required to practice, say, Zen Buddhism  A Zen Buddhist will have to meditate, a practice that is both

time-consuming and (in some of its forms) physically and

mentally challenging. The practice of Stoicism, in contrast,

doesn’t require us to set aside blocks of time in which to “do

Stoicism.” It does require us periodically to refl ect on our life,

but these periods of refl ection can generally be squeezed into

odd moments of the day, such as when we are stuck in traffi c

or—this was Seneca’s recommendation—when we are lying in

bed waiting for sleep to come.

When assessing the “costs” associated with practicing

Stoicism or any other philosophy of life, readers should realize

that there are costs associated with not having a philosophy of

life. I have already mentioned one such cost: the danger that

you will spend your days pursuing valueless things and will

therefore waste your life.

Some readers might, at this point, wonder whether the

practice of Stoicism is compatible with their religious beliefs.

In the case of most religions, I think it is. Christians in partic-

ular will fi nd that Stoic doctrines resonate with their religious

views. They will, for example, share the Stoics’ desire to attain

tranquility, although Christians might call it peace. They will

appreciate Marcus Aurelius’s injunction to “love mankind.”8

And when they encounter Epictetus’s observation that some

things are up to us and some things are not, and that if we

have any sense at all, we will focus our energies on the things

that are up to us, Christians will be reminded of the “Serenity

Prayer,” often attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

Having said this, I should add that it is also possible for some-

one simultaneously to be an agnostic and a practicing Stoic. The remainder of this book is divided into four parts. In part

1, I describe the birth of philosophy. Although modern philos-

ophers tend to spend their days debating esoteric topics, the

primary goal of most ancient philosophers was to help ordi-

nary people live better lives. Stoicism, as we shall see, was one

of the most popular and successful of the ancient schools of

philosophy.

In parts 2 and 3, I explain what we must do in order to prac-

tice Stoicism. I start by describing the psychological techniques

the Stoics developed to attain and subsequently maintain tran-

quility. I then describe Stoic advice on how best to deal with the

stresses of everyday life: How, for example, should we respond

when someone insults us? Although much has changed in the

past two millennia, human psychology has changed little. This

is why those of us living in the twenty-fi rst century can benefi t

from the advice that philosophers such as Seneca offered to

fi rst-century Romans.

Finally, in part 4 of this book, I defend Stoicism against various

criticisms, and I reevaluate Stoic psychology in light of modern

scientifi c fi ndings. I end the book by relating the insights I have

gained in my own practice of Stoicism.

My fellow academics might have an interest in this book;

they might, for example, be curious about my interpretation of

various Stoic utterances. The audience I am most interested in

reaching, though, is ordinary individuals who worry that they

might be misliving. This includes those who have come to the

realization that they lack a coherent philosophy of life and as a

result are fl oundering in their daily activities: what they work

to accomplish one day only undoes what they accomplished  the day before. It also includes those who have a philosophy of

life but worry that it is somehow defective.

I wrote this book with the following question in mind: If

the ancient Stoics had taken it upon themselves to write a

guidebook for twenty-fi rst-century individuals—a book that

would tell us how to have a good life—what might that book

have looked like? The pages that follow are my answer to this

question.