A Guide to the Good Life : The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (25 page)

O
NE FINAL
but quite significant obstacle to modern acceptance of Stoicism is the degree of self-control it requires. Do we detect in ourselves a lust for fame? According to the Stoics, we should extinguish this desire. Do we find ourselves longing for a mansion filled with fine furniture? We would do well, say the Stoics, to content ourselves with a simple lifestyle. And besides overcoming our longing for fame and fortune, the Stoics want us to set many of our other personal desires aside so we can do our duty to serve our fellow humans. They were, as we have seen, a duty-bound group; unlike many modern individuals, the Stoics were convinced that there was something in life bigger than themselves.

Many people, on hearing about the self-control Stoicism requires, will reject the philosophy. If you don’t have something you want, they reason, you will obviously be unhappy. Therefore, the best way to gain happiness is to get what you want, and the best way to get what you want is with a three-stage strategy: First, you take an inventory of the desires that lurk in your mind; second, you devise a plan for satisfying those desires; and third, you implement that plan. The Stoics, however, are suggesting that we do just the opposite of this. In some cases, they advise us to extinguish rather than fulfill our desires, and in other cases, they advise us to do things we don’t want to do, because it is our duty to do them. Stoicism, in other words, sounds like a sure-fire recipe for unhappiness.

Although the strategy of gaining happiness by working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is obvious and has been used by most people throughout recorded history and across cultures, it has an important defect, as thoughtful people throughout recorded history and across cultures have realized: For each desire we fulfill in accordance with this strategy, a new desire will pop into our head to take its place. This means that no matter how hard we work to satisfy our desires, we will be no closer to satisfaction than if we had fulfilled none of them. We will, in other words, remain dissatisfied.

A much better, albeit less obvious way to gain satisfaction is not by working to satisfy our desires but by working to master them. In particular, we need to take steps to slow down the desire-formation process within us. Rather than working to fulfill whatever desires we find in our head, we need to work at preventing certain desires from forming and eliminating many
of the desires that have formed. And rather than wanting new things, we need to work at wanting the things we already have.

This is what the Stoics advise us to do. It may be true that being a Stoic requires self-control and requires that we sacrifice in order to do our duty, but the Stoics would argue that we are more likely to achieve happiness—indeed, joy—by following this path than by spending our life, as most people do, working to fulfill whatever desires pop into our head.

Having said this, I should add that the word
sacrifice
, as I have just used it, is a bit misleading. The Stoics, while doing their social duty, will not think in terms of sacrifice. Ideally, they will, as a result of practicing Stoicism,
want
to do what their social duty requires them to do. If this sounds strange, think about the duties involved in parenting. Parents do lots of things for their children, but Stoic parents—and, I suspect, good parents in general—don’t think of parenting as a burdensome task requiring endless sacrifice; instead, they think about how wonderful it is that they have children and can make a positive difference in the lives of these children.

The Stoics, as I have suggested, are not alone in claiming that our best hope at gaining happiness is to live not a life of self-indulgence but a life of self-discipline and, to a degree, self-sacrifice. Similar claims have been made in other philosophies, including Epicureanism and Skepticism, as well as in numerous religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Taoism. The question isn’t, I think, whether self-disciplined and duty-bound people can have a happy, meaningful life; it is whether those who lack self-control and who are convinced that nothing is bigger than they are can have such a life.

I
N THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER
, I described the decline of Stoicism and tried to fathom the reason for its current moribund state. In this chapter, I will attempt to reanimate the doctrine. My goal in doing so is to make Stoicism more attractive to individuals who seek a philosophy of life.

In the introduction to this book, I explained that philosophies of life have two components: They tell us what things in life are and aren’t worth pursuing, and they tell us how to gain the things that are worth having. The Stoics, as we have seen, thought tranquility was worth pursuing, and the tranquility they sought, it will be remembered, is a psychological state in which we experience few negative emotions, such as anxiety, grief, and fear, but an abundance of positive emotions, especially joy. The Stoics did not argue that tranquility was valuable; rather, they assumed that in the lives of most people its value would at some point become apparent.

To develop and refine their strategy for attaining tranquility, the Stoics became keen observers of humanity. They sought to determine what sorts of things disrupt people’s tranquility,
how people can avoid having their tranquility disrupted by these things, and how they can quickly restore their tranquility when, despite their efforts, it is disrupted. On the basis of these investigations, the Stoics produced a body of advice for anyone seeking tranquility. Among their recommendations were the following:

• We should become self-aware: We should observe ourselves as we go about our daily business, and we should periodically reflect on how we responded to the day’s events. How did we respond to an insult? To the loss of a possession? To a stressful situation? Did we, in our responses, put Stoic psychological strategies to work?

• We should use our reasoning ability to overcome negative emotions. We should also use our reasoning ability to master our desires, to the extent that it is possible to do so. In particular, we should use reason to convince ourselves that things such as fame and fortune aren’t worth having—not, at any rate, if what we seek is tranquility—and therefore aren’t worth pursuing. Likewise, we should use our reasoning ability to convince ourselves that even though certain activities are pleasurable, engaging in those activities will disrupt our tranquility, and the tranquility lost will outweigh the pleasure gained.

• If, despite not having pursued wealth, we find ourselves wealthy, we should enjoy our affluence; it was the Cynics, not the Stoics, who advocated asceticism. But although we should enjoy wealth, we should not cling to it; indeed, even as we enjoy it, we should contemplate its loss.

• We are social creatures; we will be miserable if we try to cut off contact with other people. Therefore, if what we seek is tranquility, we should form and maintain relations with others. In doing so, though, we should be careful about whom we befriend. We should also, to the extent possible, avoid people whose values are corrupt, for fear that their values will contaminate ours.

• Other people are invariably annoying, though, so if we maintain relations with them, they will periodically upset our tranquility—if we let them. The Stoics spent a considerable amount of time devising techniques for taking the pain out of our relationships with other people. In particular, they came up with techniques for dealing with the insults of others and preventing them from angering us.

• The Stoics pointed to two principal sources of human unhappiness—our insatiability and our tendency to worry about things beyond our control—and they developed techniques for removing these sources of unhappiness from our life.

• To conquer our insatiability, the Stoics advise us to engage in negative visualization. We should contemplate the impermanence of all things. We should imagine ourselves losing the things we most value, including possessions and loved ones. We should also imagine the loss of our own life. If we do this, we will come to appreciate the things we now have, and because we appreciate them, we will be less likely to form desires for other things. And besides simply imagining that things could be worse than they are, we should sometimes cause things to be worse than they would otherwise be; Seneca
advises us to “practice poverty,” and Musonius advises us voluntarily to forgo opportunities for pleasure and comfort.

• To curb our tendency to worry about things beyond our control, the Stoics advise us to perform a kind of triage with respect to the elements of our life and sort them into those we have no control over, those we have complete control over, and those we have some but not complete control over. Having done this, we should not bother about things over which we have no control. Instead, we should spend some of our time dealing with things over which we have complete control, such as our goals and values, and spend most of our time dealing with things over which we have some but not complete control. If we do this, we will avoid experiencing much needless anxiety.

• When we spend time dealing with things over which we have some but not complete control, we should be careful to internalize our goals. My goal in playing tennis, for example, should be not to win the match but to play the best match possible.

• We should be fatalistic with respect to the external world: We should realize that what has happened to us in the past and what is happening to us at this very moment are beyond our control, so it is foolish to get upset about these things.

T
HE
S
TOICS COULD HAVE
given us a philosophy of life without explaining why it is a good philosophy. They could, in other words, have left adoption of their philosophy of life as a leap of faith, the way Zen Buddhists do with theirs. But being philosophers, they felt the need to prove that theirs was the
“correct” philosophy of life and that rival philosophies were somehow mistaken.

In their proof of Stoicism, the Stoics first observe that Zeus created us and in doing so made us different from the other animals by giving us reason. Because he cares about us, Zeus wanted to design us so that we would always be happy, but he lacked the power to do so. Instead, he did for us what he could: He gave us the means to make life not just endurable but enjoyable. More precisely, he designed for us a pattern of living that, if followed, would enable us to flourish. The Stoics used their reasoning ability to discover this pattern of living. They then designed a philosophy of life that, if followed, would enable us to live in accordance with this pattern—in accordance, as they put it, with nature—and thereby to flourish. In conclusion, if we live in accordance with Stoic principles, we will have the best life it is possible for a human to have. QED.

Adherents of most religions will, of course, reject this proof of Stoicism, inasmuch as they will reject the claim that it was Zeus who created us. Nevertheless, they might be willing to accept a slightly altered version of the proof, one that substitutes God for Zeus. They might thereby transform the Stoics’ proof into a proof that is compatible with their religion.

Consider, however, the predicament of modern Stoics who deny the existence of both Zeus and God, and therefore reject the claim that Zeus or God created man. Suppose these individuals believe instead that man came to exist through a process of evolution. In this case, man wouldn’t have been created for any purpose, meaning that it is impossible for us to discover the purpose of a human being so that we can, by
performing that purpose well, flourish. These individuals can, I think, resolve their predicament by abandoning the Stoic justification of Stoicism in favor of a justification that makes use of scientific discoveries that were unavailable to the Stoics. Let me explain how this can be done.

I
F SOMEONE ASKED ME
why Stoicism works, I would not tell a story about Zeus (or God). Instead, I would talk about evolutionary theory, according to which we humans came to exist as the result of an interesting series of biological accidents. I would then start talking about evolutionary psychology, according to which we humans, besides gaining a certain anatomy and physiology through evolutionary processes, gained certain psychological traits, such as a tendency to experience fear or anxiety under certain circumstances and a tendency to experience pleasure under other circumstances. I would explain that we evolved these tendencies not so that we could have a good life but so that we would be likely to survive and reproduce. I would add that unlike Zeus (or God), evolutionary processes are indifferent to whether we flourish; they are concerned only that we survive and reproduce. Indeed, an individual who is utterly miserable but manages, despite his misery, to survive and reproduce will play a greater role in evolutionary processes than a joyful individual who chooses not to reproduce.

I would, at this point, pause to make sure my listener understands how our evolutionary past contributes to our current psychological makeup. Why, for example, do we experience
pain? Not because the gods or God wanted us to experience it or thought we could somehow benefit from experiencing it, but because our evolutionary ancestors for whom (thanks to an evolutionary “experiment”) injuries were painful were much more likely to avoid such injuries—and therefore much more likely to survive and reproduce—than ancestors who were incapable of experiencing pain. Those who could experience pain were therefore more effective at transmitting their genes than those who couldn’t, and as a result we humans have inherited the ability to experience pain.

It is also because of evolutionary processes that we possess the ability to experience fear: Our evolutionary ancestors who feared lions were less likely to be eaten by one than those who were indifferent to them. Likewise, our tendency to experience anxiety and insatiability is a consequence of our evolutionary past. Our evolutionary ancestors who felt anxious about whether they had enough food were less likely to starve than those who didn’t worry about where their next meal was coming from. Similarly, our evolutionary ancestors who were never satisfied with what they had, who always wanted more food or better shelter, were more likely to survive and reproduce than those who were easily satisfied.