“That you may know”, he says, “that these truths from which tranquility and peace of mind come to men are not false—take my books and you shall find that what gives me peace of mind is true and in harmony with Nature.”
O great good fortune! O great benefactor, who shows us the way! And yet—though all men have raised temples and altars to Triptolemus, for teaching us the cultivation of the crops, yet what man of you ever set up an altar in honor of him who found the truth and brought it to light and published it among all men—not the truth of mere living, but the truth that leads to right living?
Whoever dedicated a shrine or an image for this gift, or worships God for it? I say shall we, who offer sacrifices because the gods gave us wheat or the vine, never give thanks to God that they produced this manner of fruit in the mind of men, whereby they were to show us the true way of happiness?
As with any other person, what Chrysippus can offer will be in the content of character, far more than in the eloquence of books; what is written will only be as good as what can be done.
I regularly hear people praised and admired for their wealth and fame, and yet the only influence that ultimately matters is an example that inspires moral progress. If it is really true, it will show itself in a life of understanding and tranquility.
We might scoff at the worship of the old Greek and Roman, gods, convinced that we have no more need for such superstitions in our enlightened age, and yet we still raise temples and altars to the things we revere, only under different guises. Our skyscrapers honor finance and banking, out sports stadiums glorify entertainment, and our shopping malls are beacons of consumption.
I will have to look very hard to find so much time and effort dedicated to the praise of wisdom, or justice, or compassion. It is still much the same, where the money and the attention flow to what gratifies the gut, not to what glorifies the heart and the mind.
I had to bite my tongue the other day, as I listened to a dean say a prayer before a faculty meeting, where he at length thanked God for the success of the recent fundraising drive. Of all the things to be grateful for, this should be the one I am asked to get most excited about? I catch myself feeling discouraged, and I try to remind myself that I can still choose to think and to live very differently.
The measures are all wrong, not because people wish to be deliberately wicked, but because they grow confused about the superior and the inferior, the ends and the means, the necessary and the contingent. Does it come as any surprise, when we honestly observe the popular pantheon?
For this that he has gone abroad for is nothing; his true work is to study to remove from his life mourning and lamentation, the “ah me” and “alas for my misery”, the talk of “bad fortune” and “misfortune”; and to learn, what is death, what is exile, what is imprisonment, what is the cup of hemlock; that he may be able to say in prison, “My dear Crito, if it pleases the gods, so be it” (Plato, Crito 43d), and not such words as “miserable old man that I am, is it for this I kept my grey hairs?”
Whose words are they? Do you think I shall name to you a mean man of no reputation? Are they not the words of Priam and of Oedipus? Are they not the words of all kings that are? For what else are tragedies but a portrayal in such metrical form of the sufferings of men who have set their admiration on outward things?
If delusion after all were the only means for a man to learn this lesson—the lesson that not one of the things beyond the compass of our will concerns us, then I for my part would choose a delusion such as this, if it should procure me a life of undisturbed tranquility; I leave it to you to see what you choose.
As wonderful as a book can be, hiding my nose in its pages is no substitute for learning about myself. As wonderful as travel can be, running away to a distant land is no substitute for facing myself. I have attempted both diversions, and hard experience has taught me that they offer no lasting solutions. I have no excuse for neglecting what is closest to home.
The act of casting blame on the world is most noticeable in the agony of self-pity, but it is equally the cause of rage and aggression toward others. Once I reduce my problems to how I have been wronged, I have also failed to recognize that my own thinking is what can make things right. It was I who did myself the harm, not Fate.
Whether it is poverty, or sickness, or loneliness, or even death itself, I am a fool to believe that I can somehow make myself a master over such forces. Whatever I may, or may not, have done, the external consequences that follow from the act are not mine to determine. My judgment and will are within my certain power, and nothing more.
I think of all those who are proud to say they made themselves rich or popular, and yet they cry to the high heavens at the terrible injustice when Fortune takes these circumstances away. They were never ours to claim, and so there is no “right” to object when they, quite predictably, follow their own path.
Socrates may not have preferred to die, but he accepted the time of his departure with good cheer, content that he had done what Nature had asked of him. How different that is from the wailing of the tragic victim, shaking his tiny fists, cursing the gods, or gouging out his own eyes in despair.
No, someone like an Oedipus is not a “bad guy” here at all, because all he went through, and how he chose to respond to what he went through, offered a priceless lesson about the true meaning and dignity of any human life. With the many different accounts of the legend, I don’t know if he genuinely learned that lesson, but all of us, regardless of the dramatics scale, are given that very same chance.
Is it necessary to suffer in this way, to rise in pride before falling into humility, in order to bring oneself to peace? I only know that, in my own small way, it was crucial for my own growth. Had Nature not put me in my place with a sound thrashing, I would probably still be parading about, thinking myself the king of the world.
If any one of you, dismissing things without, has brought his mind to bear on his own will, to work out its full development, that he may bring it into perfect harmony with Nature—lofty, free, unhindered, untrammeled, trustworthy, self-respecting.
If he has learned that he who wills to get or to avoid what is not in his power cannot be trustworthy nor free, but must needs himself change as they change, fitful as the winds, and must needs have made himself subservient to others, who can procure or hinder such things; and if, in a word, when he rises in the morning he guards and keeps these principles, washes as one that is trustworthy, eats as one that is self-respecting, and on each occasion that arises labors to achieve his main tasks, even as the runner makes running his one aim and the voice-trainer his training—he is the man who is indeed in the path of progress and who has not travelled to no purpose.
On the rare occasions when people have actually asked me about Stoicism, and they sincerely want a sense of what it is all about, I may feebly attempt to play my best Socrates, and ask whether they think it is more important to rule themselves or to rule others.
Unless I am dealing with a total control freak, the answer will, after perhaps a moment of reflection, be the former.
Then I further ask how much time and effort they have expended on each, and whether the proportion happens to fit with their previous answer.
Some get angry and storm off, but some will pause, smile, and nod their heads. “Yes, I see where you’re going with that. I hadn’t thought of how I might get it backwards.”
My clever intention, of course, is to suggest that it isn’t even possible for them to rule their circumstances; as soon as they try, they are now themselves ruled by a worry over what isn’t theirs.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that my own failures have come from an attention to the wrong sort of mastery. As much as I might believe I have the world on a string, I suddenly find myself all tangled up. Rinse and repeat: I am not God.
I should gladly accept that others will be as they choose, that the world will play out as it does, and that what I can do is to attend to my own thinking and living. Even when I am able to somehow influence who others might become, this can only happen when I first have a handle on who I am.
I have one job, within the whole, and that is to put myself in order. Then I am finally of service to the whole.
Will what is mine to will, avoid what is mine to avoid. How many problems would be solved if I minded my own business?
Work with conscience, integrity, and justice, regardless of whether anyone else does the same. How much anger and fear could be overcome if I stuck to my own convictions?
Wake up with that sense of caring purpose, spend the day happy to commit unrecognized acts of total love, and go to bed content with a job well done. How much loss and suffering can then be avoided?
“Take the treatise ‘On Impulse’ and learn how I have read it.”
Slave, that is not what I am looking for—I want to know what impulses you have, for action and against it, to know what you will to get and will to avoid; how you plan and purpose and prepare—whether in harmony with Nature, or out of harmony with Nature.
Show me that you act in harmony with Nature, and I will tell you that you are making progress; act out of harmony with Nature, and I bid you begone and write books on such things and not merely expound them.
What good, I ask, will they do you? Do you not know that the whole book is worth but five pence? Do you think then that the man who expounds it is worth more? Therefore, never seek your work in one place and progress in another.
I immediately think of the people I have known who spent thousands of dollars on a home gym, and then proceeded to show it off to guests as evidence that they were in peak physical condition.
Or the scholars who pointed to their many peer-reviewed publications as proof that they were the best of teachers.
Or, to consider myself, how often I have bought a shiny new book, never actually bothered to read it, but kept it on a shelf to give myself the false impression that I had the world figured out.
Even when I did read those books, was I in any way making actual use of what I had learned, or was I going through the expected motions of merely looking learned? I once wasted an hour of my life, precious time I will never get back, arguing with someone about which English terms to use for the cardinal virtues, and in what order they should be listed.
I can hear Epictetus in my head, telling me quite bluntly that the point of a virtue is that I practice it, not that I pontificate about it. The talking will only be as good as the doing.
My standards are too often caught up in the external appearances instead of the internal disposition. A conformity to Nature is the measure of a good life, not whether anyone else can see me grandstanding. I tell myself that I know this, and yet I will still catch myself looking around, expecting to be rewarded with someone’s approval.
Whenever I have managed to make some genuine progress in life, it is not at all in the ways that I might have expected. The things that mattered did not involve stately processions, trumpet fanfares, or raucous applause. In most every case, no one else even noticed them, and yet the consequences for me were profound.
They were the little moments of insight, the weary struggle of simple acts of kindness, the willingness to leave behind nagging resentments, the power to turn away from creeping temptations. What the world said was big was not so big at all, and at those times I came to appreciate how the smallest thoughts and deeds can truly become the most significant, all because I am managing to find human greatness at the humble scale of my character.
Bravo, by the gods, you make progress, fellow. Progress indeed!
Why do you mock him? Why do you draw him away from the sense of his own shortcomings? Will you not show him what virtue really means, that he may learn where to seek for progress?
Miserable man, there is only one place to seek it—where your work lies.
Where does it lie? It lies in the region of will; that you may not fail to get what you will to get, nor fall into what you will to avoid; it lies in avoiding error in the region of impulse, impulse to act and impulse not to act: it lies in assent and the withholding of assent, that in these you may never be deceived.
But the first department I have named comes first and is most necessary. If you merely tremble and mourn and seek to escape misfortune, progress is of course impossible.
I always found it odd that the intellectual aesthetes would put me down for trying to be more like they were; was I not trying hard enough?
No, that wasn’t it at all; perhaps they were so full of their own superiority that they could not conceive of anyone else striving to be as brilliant as they were?
Learn your Chrysippus? That’s a fine thing, so don’t knock it. Learn to live with a conscience? Now that’s the absolute thing, and there’s no decent living without it.
The world is full of snobbery and hypocrisy, but I am learning to look past it, learning to recognize the players and the frauds, and learning to work on myself before I worry about anyone else.
They have their own place, intended by Providence, just as I have my own place. Maybe, just maybe, that blowhard was put in my way, for the express purpose of teaching me to not also be a blowhard. He, in turn, is given his own lessons. It all works together.
Through the daily grind, the work of simply being human is forgotten. What must be done? Let me take a complete responsibility for myself, and finally stop showing off.
The work to be done is right here, in my own head and in my own heart. No pedigree is necessary, no honors are necessary, no glory is necessary. No one else needs to see it, because, quite honestly, it isn’t their business. The real work will be done inside, where there is no opportunity for making a scene.
Once I have a feeling, it is my place to now make something of that feeling. Did it arise from my own choices? Then it will come and go with those very choices. Did it come to me without my consent? Then it is still within my power to give it meaning and purpose.
“I couldn’t help myself!”
That isn’t really true, is it?
“I didn’t help myself!”
Now we’re talking.
An impression is just an impression, a desire is just a desire, a passion is just a passion. None of these define me, unless I decide to let them do so. I can now focus in on what really makes the difference, the power to form my own judgments. For all the things people can do to me, they can’t do that for me.
Peace of mind.
Who then makes progress? Is it he who has read many treatises of Chrysippus? Can this be virtue—to have understood Chrysippus?
For if this be so, we must admit that progress is nothing but to understand a lot of sayings of Chrysippus.
But the fact is, we admit that virtue tends to one result, and yet declare that progress, the approach to virtue, tends to another.
It should come as no surprise that living well will lead to being well, and yet the Stoic argument that virtue is the means to happiness will still elicit smirks and frowns. I suspect a part of the problem lies in overlooking the fact that human nature, defined by reason and will, is intrinsically ordered to the exercise of understanding and love. We neglect that necessary connection.
All the other things that surround us can become an assistance or a hindrance to this task, and yet such conditions are themselves foolishly confused with the greater purpose. I think I might become happy by accumulating all sorts of spoils and trophies, and then I worry why peace of mind still remains so elusive.
Beyond the many distractions, it’s all fairly simple: I become happier by becoming better, and I become better by improving my own character. This is the mastery of my own nature, not a subservience to the nature of other things, and it concerns what is within my power, not what lies beyond it. There will be found progress.
“Ah, I see. I should become fluent in all the books about virtue, and then I will become better!”
Be careful; though an academic proficiency can be a help in acquiring wisdom, these are not one and the same thing. Many years of formal study have taught me that there is no real correlation, let alone a causation, between book learning and life learning. That last and most crucial step, that of personal commitment, must still be chosen for its own sake.
Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoic School in Athens, was by all accounts a prolific writer, and yet only small fragments of his work have survived to the present day. I suppose that is itself a wonderfully Stoic lesson, about the transience of worldly things, and yet I can’t help but wish I could read through all of those texts. I ponder how greatly it would assist me in working on all of my weaknesses.
I catch myself. Aren’t Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Musonius, and Epictetus himself more than enough for me to work with? Yet however much they are of aid, are even these books necessary? Wouldn’t the good example of any thoughtful and decent person be sufficient to nudge me in the right direction?
And that is all it is, the right direction. The sign may point me to a path, but I will be the one who has to tread it.
Progress in scholarship can sometimes accompany an increase in character, and sometimes it can just as easily accompany an increase in wickedness. A mastery of words alone will not provide me with a mastery of my soul.
“Yes, didn’t Ignatz Schmuckenheimer discuss this at length in the third section of his influential work, The Unity of Ontical Consideration? It really only makes sense in the German second edition, unless you want to go all the way back to the handwritten notes in Dutch from his research in Batavia. . . .”
