Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius - by Ryan Holiday
Date read: 2020-10-22How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
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Provides a thorough history and profile of influential Stoic philosophers, supporters, and leaders focusing on late Athens, early Roman Empire. There are a few nuggets of Stoic philosophy but not as many from Ryan's other books.
My Notes
“If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you’d be furious,” Epictetus said, yet we so easily hand our mind over to other people, letting them inside our heads or making us feel a certain way.
Alexander the Great and his mule driver, Marcus writes, both died and both ended up buried in the same cold ground. What good was fame or accomplishment? It didn’t hold a candle to character.
Every one of us dies, the Stoics said, but too few of us actually live.
The only reason to study philosophy is to become a better person.
To philosophize is to learn how to die.
“Of the three kinds of life, the contemplative, the active, and the rational,” Diogenes would write, the Stoics “declare that we should choose the latter, because a rational being is expressly produced by nature for contemplation and action.”
The four virtues of Stoicism: courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom.
That is to say that one’s self-talk must be strict, but never abusive. It appears his frugality and work ethic followed along similar lines. He was tough. He was firm. But he hardly relished self-punishment.
There is no better definition of a Stoic: to have but not want, to enjoy without needing.
One of the central beliefs of Stoicism is the idea that history is cyclical. That the same thing happens again and again and again. We are not so special, they would say. We are interchangeable pieces, role players in a play that has been playing since the beginning of time.
It’s not what you say that lives on after your time; it’s not what you write or even what you build. It’s the example that you set. It’s the things that you live by.
The human being in action is better understood as an archer. We train and practice. We draw back the arrow and aim it to the best of our abilities. But we know full well that despite our training and our aim, many factors outside our control will influence where the arrow hits the target—or if it falls short entirely.
What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee and vice versa.
Learn. Apply. Learn. Apply. Learn. Apply. This is the Stoic way.
Each of these layers is an essential part of living virtuously in the real world. A soldier has to manage their obligations as a human, as a warrior, as a member of a family (or as an immigrant or as a wealthy heir), and as a person who has made promises and commitments (to friends, to families, to business partners). The pieces of the equation are different for a head of state or a beggar, but the complicated balance—and the need for guidance—is the same.
It wasn’t just a contest with oneself, but actual combat—with opponents and fate. He believed we need to be prepared for the blows that will inevitably fall upon us.
You can and should be interested in everything, the Stoics taught, because you can and should learn wisdom from everything. The more you experience, the more you learn, and, paradoxically, the more humbled you are by the endless amounts of knowledge that remain in front of you.
“Best,” to the Stoics, did not meaning winning battles. Superior did not mean accumulating the most honors. It meant, as it still does today, virtue. It meant excellence not in accomplishing external things—though that was always nice if fate allowed—but excellence in the areas that you controlled: Your thoughts. Your actions. Your choices.
Most strong-willed leaders have a temper. It’s the truly great ones who manage to conquer it with the same courage and control with which they deal with all of life’s obstacles.
We naturally care what people think of us; we don’t want to seem too different, so we acquire the same tastes as everyone else. We accept what the crowd does so the crowd will accept us. But in doing this, we weaken ourselves. We compromise, often without knowing it; we allow ourselves to be bought—without even the benefit of getting paid for it.
A Stoic does the job that needs to be done. They don’t care about credit.
Stoics must always keep their head. Even the scariest situations can be resolved with reason and courage. And even if you believe in silly things like ghosts or superstitions, you can’t let your life be ruled by them. You must be in charge—no excuses.
“Whenever you feel yourself getting angry, Caesar,” he instructed, “don’t say or do anything until you’ve repeated the twenty-four letters of the alphabet to yourself.”
The Stoics would have never argued that life was fair or that losing someone didn’t hurt. But they believed that to despair, to tear ourselves apart in bereavement, was not only an affront to the memory of the person we loved, but a betrayal of the living who still needed us.
Wisdom is the knowledge of what things must be done and what must not be done and what is neither, or appropriate acts (kathekonta). Within wisdom, we’ll find virtuous qualities like soundness of judgment, circumspection, shrewdness, sensibleness, soundness of aim, and ingenuity.
Self-control is the knowledge of what things are worth choosing and what are worth avoiding and what is neither. Contained within this virtue are things like orderliness, propriety, modesty, and self-mastery.
Justice is the knowledge of apportioning each person and situation what is due. Under this banner Stoics placed piety (giving gods their due), kindness, good fellowship, and fair dealing.
Bravery is the knowledge of what is terrible and what isn’t and what is neither. This included perseverance, intrepidness, greatheartedness, stoutheartedness, and, one of Arius’s most favored virtuous qualities—one he illustrated well in his own life—philoponia, or industriousness.
We must focus on the task at hand, and waste not a moment on the tasks that are not ours. We must have courage. We must be fair. We must check our emotions. We must, above all, be wise.
“I am not a hindrance to myself,” Epictetus quotes him as saying. He did not add to his troubles by bemoaning them. He would not compromise his dignity or his composure for matters big or small, whether it was a meaningless party or a cruel miscarriage of justice.
Most interestingly, he quibbled with the idea that death was something that lay ahead of us in the uncertain future. “This is our big mistake,” Seneca wrote, “to think we look forward toward death. Most of death is already gone. Whatever time has passed is owned by death.” That was what he realized, that we are dying every day and no day, once dead, can be revived.
But this is what Stoicism trains us for: to be able to focus in even the most distracting of situations, to be able to tune out anything and everything—even creeping death—so that we lock in on what matters.
You do your job, I’ll do mine, the Stoic says. You be evil, I’ll be good. Let everything else come what may.
So if we’re going to suffer, ought we not suffer in a way that gets us somewhere worth going? Suffer and endure toward virtue—that’s the core of Musonius’s teachings. As he said, “And yet would not anyone admit how much better it is, instead of exerting oneself to win someone else’s wife, to exert oneself to discipline one’s desires; instead of enduring hardships for the sake of money, to train oneself to want little; instead of giving oneself trouble about getting notoriety, to give oneself trouble how not to thirst for notoriety; instead of trying to find a way to injure an envied person, to inquire how not to envy anyone; and instead of slaving, as sycophants do, to win false friends, to undergo suffering in order to possess true friends?”
Musonius Rufus believed that we were like doctors, treating ourselves with reason. The power to think clearly, to get to the truth of a matter, that was what nursed that rock-hard, unbreakable citadel of a soul that he had. He was not interested in shortcuts, he said, or smelling salts that “revive . . . but do not cure the disease.”
To Epictetus, no human was the full author of what happened in life. Instead, he said, it was as if we were in a play, and if it was the playwright’s “pleasure you should act a poor man, a cripple, a governor, or a private person, see that you act it naturally. For this is your business, to act well the character assigned you; to choose it is another’s.”
Epictetus didn’t believe it was possible to be offended or frustrated, not without anyone’s consent. “Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed,” he said. “If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions; take a moment before reacting, and you will find it easier to maintain control.”
Persist and resist. The ingredients of freedom, whatever one’s condition.
“Remember,” he said, “that it’s not only the desire for wealth and position that debases and subjugates us, but also the desire for peace, leisure, travel, and learning. It doesn’t matter what the external thing is, the value we place on it subjugates us to another. . . . Where our heart is set, there our impediment lies.”
A Stoic’s greatest, most impressive triumph, he said, is not over other people or enemy armies but over oneself—over our limitations, our tempers, our egos, our petty desires. We all have these impulses; what sets us apart is if we rise above them. What makes us impressive is what we are able to make of this crooked material we were born with.
You can only lose what you have. You don’t control your possessions, so don’t ascribe more value to them than they deserve.
The fate of these things remained, for the most part, outside his control. Which for a Stoic means only one thing: Cherish them while we have them, but accept that they belong to us only in trust, that they can depart at any moment. Because they can. And so can we.
Action was what mattered. Not reading. Not memorization. Not even publishing impressive writing of your own. Only working toward being a better person, a better thinker, a better citizen. “I can’t call a person a hard worker just because I hear they read and write,” Epictetus said, “even if working at it all night. Until I know what a person is working for, I can’t deem them industrious. . . . I can, if the end they work for is their own ruling principle, having it be and remain in constant harmony with Nature.”
Marcus believed that plagues and war could only threaten our life. What we need to protect is our character—how we act within these wars and plagues and life’s other setbacks. And to abandon character? That’s real evil.
You must build up your life action by action, and be content if each one achieves its goal as far as possible—and no one can keep you from this. But there will be some external obstacle! Perhaps, but no obstacle to acting with justice, self-control, and wisdom. But what if some other area of my action is thwarted? Well, gladly accept the obstacle for what it is and shift your attention to what is given, and another action will immediately take its place, one that better fits the life you are building.