A Guide to the Good Life

by William Braxton Irvine

  For the ultimate proof that we have made progress as Stoics, though, we will have to wait until we are faced with death. It is only then, says Seneca, that we will know whether our Stoicism has been genuine.9 When we measure our progress as Stoics, we might find that it is slower than we had hoped or expected. The Stoics, though, would be the first to admit that people can’t perfect their Stoicism overnight. Indeed, even if we practice Stoicism all our life, we are unlikely to perfect it; there will always be room for improvement. Along these lines, Seneca tells us that his goal in practicing Stoicism is not to become a sage; instead, he takes his progress to be adequate as long as “every day I reduce the number of my vices, and blame my mistakes.”10

  The Stoics understood that they would encounter setbacks in their practice of Stoicism. Thus, Epictetus, after telling his students what they must do to practice Stoicism, went on to tell them what they should do when they failed to follow his advice.11 He expected, in other words, that novice Stoics would routinely backslide. Along similar lines, Marcus recommends that when our practice falls short of Stoic precepts, we should not become despondent and certainly should not give up our attempts to practice Stoicism; instead, we should return to the attack and realize that if we can do the right thing, Stoically speaking, most of the time, we are doing pretty well for ourselves.12

  Let me offer one last thought on making progress as a Stoic.

  Marcus spent his adult life practicing Stoicism, and even though he had a temperament well suited to it, he found that he would hit low points, during which his Stoicism seemed incapable of providing him the tranquility he sought. In the Meditations, he offers advice on what to do at such junctures: Continue to practice Stoicism, “even when success looks hopeless.”13

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  P A R T T H R E E

  Stoic Advice

  N I N E

  Duty

  On Loving Mankind

  As we have seen, the Stoics advise us to seek tranquility. They realized, however, that this recommendation is not, by itself, very helpful, so they went on to offer guidance on how best to attain tranquility. They advise us, to begin with, to practice the psychological techniques described in part 2 of this book.

  They also offer advice on specific aspects of daily living. They counsel us, for example, not to seek fame and fortune, since doing so will likely disrupt our tranquility. They warn us to be careful in choosing our associates; other people, after all, have the power to shatter our tranquility—if we let them. They go on to offer advice on how to deal with insults, anger, grief, exile, old age, and even on the circumstances under which we should have sex.

  Let us now turn our attention to the Stoics’ advice on daily living, beginning, in this chapter and the next, with their advice on forming and maintaining social relations.

  On ex amining our life, we will find that other people are the source of some of the greatest delights life has to offer, including love and friendship. But we will also discover that they are the cause of most of the negative emotions we experience. Strangers upset us when they cut us off in traffic.

  Relatives trouble us with their problems. Our boss might ruin our day by insulting us, and the incompetence of our coworkers might cause us stress by increasing our workload.

  Our friends might neglect to invite us to a party and thereby cause us to feel slighted.Even when other people don’t do anything to us, they can disrupt our tranquility. We typically want others—friends, relatives, neighbors, coworkers, and even complete strangers—to think well of us. We therefore spend time and energy trying to wear the right clothes, drive the right car, live in the right house in the right neighborhood, and so forth. These efforts, however, are accompanied by a degree of anxiety: We fear that we will make the wrong choices and that other people will therefore think poorly of us.

  Notice, too, that to afford socially desirable clothes, cars, and houses, we have to work for a living and will probably experience anxiety in connection with our job. And even if, through our efforts, we succeed in gaining the admiration of others, our tranquility is likely to be upset by the feelings of envy that other, less successful people direct toward us. Seneca said it well: “To know how many are jealous of you, count your admirers.”1 In addition, we will have to deal with the envy that we feel toward those who have enjoyed even greater success than we have.

  Because the Stoics valued tranquility and because they appreciated the power other people have to disrupt our tranquility, we might expect them to have lived as hermits and to advise us to do the same, but the Stoics did no such thing. They thought that man is by nature a social animal and therefore that we have a duty to form and maintain relationships with other people, despite the trouble they might cause us.

  In the Meditations, Marcus explains the nature of this social duty. The gods, he says, created us for a reason—created us, as he puts it, “for some duty.” In the same way that the function of a fig tree is to do a fig tree’s work, the function of a dog is to do a dog’s work, and the function of a bee is to do a bee’s work, the function of a man is to do man’s work—to perform, that is, the function for which the gods created us.2

  What, then, is the function of man? 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. A bee is not able to live alone: it perishes when isolated.”3 We will likewise discover that, as Marcus puts it, “fellowship is the purpose behind our creation.” Thus, a person who performs well the function of man will be both rational and social.4

  To fulfill my social duty—to do my duty to my kind— I must feel a concern for all mankind. I must remember that we humans were created for one another, that we were born, says Marcus, to work together the way our hands or eyelids do. Therefore, in all I do, I must have as my goal “the service and harmony of all.” More precisely, “I am bound to do good to my fellow-creatures and bear with them.”5

  And when I do my social duty, says Marcus, I should do so quietly and efficiently. Ideally, a Stoic will be oblivious to the services he does for others, as oblivious as a grapevine is when it yields a cluster of grapes to a vintner. He will not pause to boast about the service he has performed but will move on to perform his next service, the way the grape vine moves on to bear more grapes. Thus, Marcus advises us to perform with resoluteness the duties we humans were created to perform. Nothing else, he says, should distract us.

  Indeed, when we awaken in the morning, rather than lazily lying in bed, we should tell ourselves that we must get up to do the proper work of man, the work we were created to perform.6

  Marcus, it should be clear, rejects the notion of doing our social duty in a selective manner. In particular, we cannot simply avoid dealing with annoying people, even though doing so would make our own life easier. Nor can we capitulate to these annoying people to avoid discord. Instead, Marcus declares, we should confront them and work for the common welfare. Indeed, we should “show true love” to the people with whom destiny has surrounded us.7

  It is striking that Marcus would give such advice. Stoics differ in which aspect of the practice of Stoicism they find to be most challenging. Some might find it hardest, for example, to stop dwelling on the past; others might find it hardest to overcome their lust for fame and fortune. The biggest obstacle to Marcus’s practice of Stoicism, though, appears to have been his rather intense dislike of humanity.

  Indeed, throughout the Meditations, Marcus makes it abun-dantly clear how little he thinks of his fellow man. Earlier, I quoted his advice that we begin each day by reminding ourselves how annoying the people we encounter are going to be—reminding ourselves, that is, of their interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill will, and selfishness. If this assessment of humanity sounds harsh, we
don’t need to look hard to find even harsher assessments. Even the most agreeable of our associates, Marcus says, is difficult to deal with. He remarks that when someone says he wants to be perfectly straightforward with us, we should be on the lookout for a concealed dagger.8

  Elsewhere, Marcus suggests that when we know our death is at hand, we can ease our anguish on leaving this world by taking a moment to reflect on all the annoying people we will no longer have to deal with when we are gone. We should also, he says, reflect on the fact that when we die, many of the companions we worked so hard to serve will be delighted by our passing. His disgust for his fellow humans is nicely summarized in the following passage: “Eating, sleeping, copulating, excreting, and the like; what a crew they are!”9

  What is significant is that despite these feelings of disgust, Marcus did not turn his back on his fellow humans. He could, for example, have had a much easier life if he had delegated his imperial responsibilities to subordinates or if he had simply let things slide, but his sense of duty prevailed; indeed, he gained a reputation for “the unwearied zeal with which he discharged the duties of his great position.”10 And all the while, he worked hard not merely to form and maintain relations with other people but to love them.

  M o d e r n r e a d e r s will naturally wonder how Marcus was able to accomplish this feat, how he was able to overcome his disgust for his fellow humans and work on their behalf. Part of the reason we marvel at Marcus’s accomplishment is that we have a different notion of duty than he did. What motivates most of us to do our duty is the fear that we will be punished—perhaps by God, our government, or our employer—if we don’t. What motivated Marcus to do his duty, though, was not fear of punishment but the prospect of a reward. The reward in question is not the thanks of those we help; Marcus says that he no more expects thanks for the services he performs than a horse expects thanks for the races it runs.

  Nor does he seek the admiration of other people or even their sympathy.11 To the contrary, the reward for doing one’s social duty, Marcus says, is something far better than thanks, admiration, or sympathy. Marcus, as we have seen, thought the gods created us with a certain function in mind. He also thought that when they created us, they made sure that if we fulfilled this function, we would experience tranquility and have all things to our liking.

  Indeed, if we do the things we were made for, says Marcus, we will enjoy “a man’s true delight.”12 But an important part of our function, as we have seen, is to work with and for our fellow men. Marcus therefore concludes that doing his social duty will give him the best chance at having a good life. This, for Marcus, is the reward for doing one’s duty: a good life.

  For many readers, I realize, this line of reasoning will fall flat. They will insist that duty is the enemy of happiness and consequently that the best way to have a good life is to escape all forms of duty: Rather than spending our days doing things we have to do, we should spend them doing things we want to do. In chapter 20 I return to this question. For now, let me say this: Throughout the millennia and across cultures, those who have thought carefully about desire have drawn the conclusion that spending our days working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is unlikely to bring us either happiness or tranquility.

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  T E N

  Social Relations

  On Dealing with Other People

  T h e S to i c s, it should by now be clear, are faced with a dilemma. If they associate with other people, they run the risk of having their tranquility disturbed by them; if they preserve their tranquility by shunning other people, they will fail to do their social duty to form and maintain relationships. The question for the Stoics, then, is this: How can they preserve their tranquility while interacting with other people? The Stoics thought long and hard about this question. In the process of answering it, they developed a body of advice on how to deal with other people.

  To begin with, the Stoics recommend that we prepare for our dealings with other people before we have to deal with them.

  Thus, Epictetus advises us to form “a certain character and pattern” for ourselves when we are alone. Then, when we associate with other people, we should remain true to who we are.1

  The Stoics, as we have seen, think we cannot be selective in doing our social duty: There will be times when we must associate with annoying, misguided, or malicious people in order to work for common interests. We can, however, be selective about whom we befriend. The Stoics therefore recommend that we avoid befriending people whose values have been corrupted, for fear that their values will contaminate ours. We should instead seek, as friends, people who share our (proper Stoic) values and in particular, people who are doing a better job than we are of living in accordance with these values. And while enjoying the companionship of these individuals, we should work hard to learn what we can from them.

  Vices, Seneca warns, are contagious: They spread, quickly and unnoticed, from those who have them to those with whom they come into contact.2 Epictetus echoes this warning: Spend time with an unclean person, and we will become unclean as well.3 In particular, if we associate with people who have unwholesome desires, there is a very real danger that we will soon discover similar desires in ourselves, and our tranquility will thereby be disrupted. Thus, when it is possible to do so, we should avoid associating with people whose values have been corrupted, the way we would avoid, say, kissing someone who obviously has the flu.

  Besides advising us to avoid people with vices, Seneca advises us to avoid people who are simply whiny, “who are melancholy and bewail everything, who find pleasure in every opportunity for complaint.” He justifies this avoidance by observing that a companion “who is always upset and bemoans everything is a foe to tranquility.”4 (In his famous dictionary, by the way, Samuel Johnson includes a wonderful term for these individuals: A seeksorrow, he explains, is “one who contrives to give himself vexation.”)5

  Besides being selective about the people we befriend, we should be selective, say the Stoics, about which social functions we attend (unless doing our social duty requires us to attend them). Epictetus, for example, advises us to avoid banquets given by nonphilosophers. He also advises us, when we do socialize, to be circumspect in our conversation. People tend to talk about certain things; back in Epictetus’s time, he says, they talked about gladiators, horse races, athletes, eating and drinking—and, most of all, about other people. When we find ourselves in a group that is conversing about such things, Epictetus advises us to be silent or to have few words; alternatively, we might subtly attempt to divert the talk to “something appropriate.”6

  This advice, to be sure, is a bit dated; people no longer talk about gladiators (although, significantly, they still do talk about horse races, athletes, eating and drinking—and, of course, about other people). But modern individuals can nevertheless extract the core of Epictetus’s social advice. It is permissible—indeed, it is sometimes necessary—for us to socialize with “nonphilosophers,” with individuals, that is, who do not share our Stoic values. When we do so, however, we must take care: There is a danger, after all, that their values will contaminate ours and will thereby set us back in our practice of Stoicism.

  What about those occasions on which, in order to do our social duty, we must deal with annoying people? How can we prevent them from disturbing our tranquility?

  Marcus recommends that when we interact with an annoying person, we keep in mind that there are doubtless people who find us to be annoying. More generally, when we find ourselves irritated by someone’s shortcomings, we should pause to reflect on our own shortcomings. Doing this will help us become more empathetic to this individual’s faults and therefore become more tolerant of him. When dealing with an annoying person, it also helps to keep in mind that our annoyance at what he does will almost invariably be more detrimental to us than whatever it is he is doing.7 In other words, by letting ourselves become annoyed, we only make things worse.

  We can also, Marcus
suggests, lessen the negative impact other people have on our life by controlling our thoughts about them. He counsels us, for example, not to waste time speculating about what our neighbors are doing, saying, thinking, or scheming. Nor should we allow our mind to be filled with “sensual imaginings, jealousies, envies, suspicions, or any other sentiments” about them that we would blush to admit. A good Stoic, Marcus says, will not think about what other people are thinking except when he must do so in order to serve the public interest.8

  Most important, Marcus thinks it will be easier for us to deal with impudent people if we keep in mind that the world cannot exist without such individuals. People, Marcus reminds us, do not choose to have the faults they do. Consequently, there is a sense in which the people who annoy us cannot help doing so. It is therefore inevitable that some people will be annoying; indeed, to expect otherwise, Marcus says, is like expecting a fig tree not to yield its juice. Thus, if we find ourselves shocked or surprised that a boor behaves boorishly, we have only ourselves to blame: We should have known better.9

  Marcus, as we have seen, advocates fatalism, as do the other Stoics. What Marcus seems to be advocating in the passages just cited is a special kind of fatalism, what might be called social fatalism: In our dealings with others, we should operate on the assumption that they are fated to behave in a certain way. It is therefore pointless to wish they could be less annoying. But having said this, I should add that elsewhere, Marcus suggests not only that other people can be changed but that we should work to change them.10 Perhaps what Marcus is saying is that even though it is possible to change others, we can take some of the agony out of dealing with them by telling ourselves that they are fated to behave as they do.