Lessons from the Stoics (2)

Here is a continuation from the last post (parts that I have marked in my copy of the book “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy” by William B Irvine):

21. “Around the world and throughout the millennia, those who have thought carefully about the workings of desire have recognized this – that the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have. This advice is easy to state and is doubtless true; the trick is in putting it into practice in our life. How, after all, can we convince ourselves to want the things we already have?

Chrysippus

22. “The Stoics thought they had an answer to this question. They recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value – that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would. This technique – let us refer to it as negative visualization – was employed by the Stoics at least as far back as Chrysippus. It is, I think, the single most valuable technique in the Stoics psychological tool kit.”

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 1 Lessons from the Stoics (2)

23. “Hedonic adaptation has the power to extinguish our enjoyment of the world. Because of adaptation, we take our life and what we have for granted rather than delighting in them. Negative visualization, though, is a powerful antidote to hedonic adaptation. By consciously thinking about the loss of what we have, we can regain our appreciation of it, and with this regained appreciation we can revitalize our capacity for joy.”

Epictetus

24. “Our most important choice in life, according to Epictetus, is whether to concern ourselves with things external to us or things internal. Most people choose the former because they think harms and benefits come from outside themselves. According to Epictetus, though, a philosopher – by which he means someone who has an understanding of Stoic philosophy – will do just the opposite. He will look “for all benefit and harm to come from himself.” In particular, he will give up the rewards the external world has to offer in order to gain “tranquillity, freedom, and calm”.”

25. “According to Seneca, a Stoic sage would explain the diﬀerence between the Stoic take

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 2 Lessons from the Stoics (2) on pleasure and that of the ordinary person: Whereas the ordinary person embraces pleasure, the sage enchains it; whereas the ordinary person thinks pleasure is the highest good, the sage doesn’t think it is even a good; and whereas the ordinary person does everything for the sake of pleasure, the sage does nothing.”

Marcus Aurelius

26. “Marcus advises us to examine each thing we do, determine our motives for doing it, and consider the value of whatever it was we were trying to accomplish. We should continually ask whether we are being governed by our reason or by something else. And when we determine that we are not being governed by our reason, we should ask what it is that governs us.”

27. “Indeed, Epictetus thinks the admiration of other people is a negative barometer of our progress as Stoics: “If people think you amount to something, distrust yourself.”

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 3 Lessons from the Stoics (2)

28. “Our primary function, the Stoics thought, is to be rational. To discover our secondary functions, we need only apply our reasoning ability. What we will discover is that we were designed to live among other people and interact with them in a manner that is mutually advantageous; we will discover, says Musonius, that “human nature is very much like that of bees.”

29. “Vices, Seneca warns, are contagious: They spread, quickly and unnoticed, from those who have them to those with whom they come into contact. Epictetus echoes this warning: Spend time with an unclean person, and we will become unclean as well.”

30. “If we are overly sensitive, we will be quick to anger. More generally, says Seneca, if we coddle ourselves, if we allow ourselves to be corrupted by pleasure, nothing will seem bearable to us, and the reason things will seem unbearable is not because they are hard but because we are soft.”

31. “What seems vitally important to us will seem unimportant to our grandchildren. Thus, when we feel ourselves getting angry about something, we should pause to consider its cosmic insigniﬁcance.”

32. “Epictetus encourages us to keep in mind that self-respect, trustworthiness, and high- mindedness are more valuable than wealth, meaning that if the only way to gain wealth is to give up these personal characteristics, we would be foolish to seek wealth.”

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 4 Lessons from the Stoics (2)

Lao Tzu

33. “Lao Tzu observed that “he who knows contentment is rich.”

34. “We need to keep in mind the diﬀerence between the Cynics and the Stoics. Cynicism requires its adherents to live in abject poverty; Stoicism does not. As Seneca reminds us, Stoic philosophy “calls for plain living, but not for penance”.”

35. “Such cases are tragic inasmuch as these people had it in their power – and, indeed, still have it in their power – to experience joy, but they either chose the wrong goals in living, or chose the right goals but adopted a defective strategy to attain those goals. This is the downside of failing to develop an eﬀective philosophy of life: you end up wasting the one life you have.”

36. “As we age, though, our feelings of lust and the state of distraction that accompanies them diminish. Some would argue that this is a bad thing, that it is yet another example of

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 5 Lessons from the Stoics (2) one of the pleasures of youth that is lost to us. But the Greek dramatist Sophocles oﬀered another viewpoint. When he had grown old and someone asked whether, despite his years, he could still make love to a woman, he replied, “I am very glad to have escaped from this, like a slave who has escaped from a mad and cruel master”.”

37. “Thus, if life should snatch one source of delight from them, Stoics will quickly ﬁnd another to take its place: Stoic enjoyment, unlike that of a connoisseur, is eminently transferable.”

Henri David Thoreau

38. “Thoreau went to Walden Pond to conduct his famous two-year experiment in simple living in large part so that he could reﬁne his philosophy of life and thereby avoid misliving: A primary motive in going to Walden, he tells us, was his fear that he would, “when I came to die, discover that I had not lived”.”

39. “According to Seneca, “A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is. He therefore recommends that we “do away with complaint about past suﬀerings and with all language like this: ‘None has ever been worse oﬀ than I’.”

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 6 Lessons from the Stoics (2)

40. “The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation. More precisely, they thought the ﬁrst step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances.”

41. “By taking part in the recital, in other words, I immunized myself against a fair amount of future anxiety. It is an immunization, though, that will wear oﬀ with the passage of time, and I will need to be reimmunized with another dose of butterﬂies.”