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‘Excellent… Sellars gives a lucid, easy-to-follow account of what Stoicism as a way of life amounts to, and how you might start to put it into practice’ Nigel Warburton How can Stoicism inspire us to lead more enjoyable lives? In the past few years, Stoicism has been making a comeback. But what exactly did the Stoics believe? In Lessons in Stoicism, philosopher John Sellars weaves together the key ideas of the three great Roman Stoics — Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius — with snapshots of their fascinating lives, to show us how their ideas can help us today. In vivid prose, Sellars shows how the works of these three Stoics have inspired readers ever since, speaking as they do to some of the perennial issues that face anyone trying to navigate their way through life. Their works, fundamentally, are about how to live — how to understand one’s place in the world, how to cope when things don’t go well, how to manage one’s emotions and how to behave towards others. Consoling and inspiring, Lessons in Stoicism is a deeply thoughtful guide to the philosophy of a good life.
Lessons in Stoicism - John Sellars.pdf (file not included in this release)
AI Summary
Chapter 1: The Philosopher as Doctor
The central idea is that philosophy functions as a “hospital for souls,” where the philosopher acts as a doctor to heal the mind of mistaken beliefs. The Stoics argue that the quality of our lives is determined by the condition of our character—the only true “good”—rather than external “indifferents” like wealth or health. Living well requires cultivating the four cardinal virtues: wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.
Chapter 2: What Do You Control?
This chapter introduces the ”dichotomy of control,” asserting that human unhappiness stems from trying to control things that are not “up to us”. We have complete control only over our internal judgements and the actions that follow from them. Conversely, external outcomes, bodies, and reputations remain outside our final power; we must accept them and focus solely on what is within our reach.
Chapter 3: The Problem with Emotions
The main idea is that destructive emotions like anger and fear are the result of mistaken judgements, making us responsible for our own emotional states. While we cannot stop “first movements”—involuntary physical reactions like flinching—we can prevent them from snowballing into out-of-control “temporary madness” by pausing to reflect before passing judgement on a perceived injury.
Chapter 4: Dealing with Adversity
Seneca proposes that adversity should be viewed as a “training exercise” rather than a disaster, allowing individuals to test and improve their character. Through the “premeditation of future evils,” Stoics mentally prepare for inevitable hardships like loss and death to lessen the shock when they occur. Whether an event is a calamity or an opportunity is entirely a matter of choice and perspective.
Chapter 5: Our Place in Nature
This chapter focuses on the “cosmic perspective,” viewing humans as tiny parts of a vast, rationally ordered living organism called Nature. Because the natural world is governed by a chain of cause and effect (fate), it is fruitless to wish for things to be different than they are. True harmony comes from accepting the inevitability of universal change and acting as a loyal subject to Nature’s laws.
Chapter 6: Life and Death
The primary argument is that life is not short, but rather that humans waste the majority of the time they are given. Stoics treat life as a “loan” or a gift from Nature that must eventually be returned with gratitude. By living each day as if it were the last and removing the judgement that death is “terrible,” one can reduce anxiety and truly appreciate being alive.
Chapter 7: How We Live Together
Stoicism emphasizes that humans are social and political animals with deep-seated duties to their communities. We belong to two “commonwealths”: our local community of birth and the global community of all humankind. Living well requires fulfilling our social roles with integrity while carefully choosing companions who encourage virtue rather than vice.
Highlights
1. The Philosopher as Doctor
• By ‘soul’ we ought not to assume anything immaterial, immortal or supernatural. Instead in this context we should understand it simply as mind, thoughts and beliefs. The task of the philosopher is to analyse and assess the things one thinks, examining their coherence and cogency. On this almost all philosophers, ancient or modern, would agree.
• Socrates famously chastized his fellow Athenians for paying great attention to their bodies and their possessions but very little attention to their souls – to what they think or believe, to their values and characters.
• It shows that the real value – the source of what is good or bad – resides in the character of the person who has the money, not in the money itself. It also tells us that paying excessive attention to our money and possessions while neglecting the state of our character is a grave mistake. It is the job of the philosopher to provoke us to see this, and then to support us as we try to cure our souls of whatever infirmities they may have.
• If humans are by nature social animals, automatically born into families and communities, then a good human being will be one that behaves sociably.
2. What Do You Control?
• The Handbook of Epictetus opens with a fairly blunt account of what things he thinks are and are not ‘up to us’. The things that we can control – the things in our power – include our judgements, impulses and desires. Pretty much everything else is, Epictetus suggests, ultimately out of our control, including our own bodies, our material possessions, our reputation and our worldly success. He goes on to say that much of human unhappiness is simply due to misclassification, the product of thinking that we have control over certain things when in fact we don’t.
• Epictetus does not say that we have control over everything internal to us or over all of our thoughts. Instead he claims that we have control only over a certain set of mental actions. To be more precise, he thinks that all we really have control over are our judgements, along with things that derive from our judgements. We don’t have complete control over everything in our minds; we don’t choose the sensations and memories that we have, and we cannot switch on and off our emotions (we’ll come back to emotions in the next chapter). No, all we have complete control over are our judgements, which is to say what we think about the things that happen to us.
• So, judgements are fundamental, and we neglect them at our peril, but we often make them so swiftly that we don’t even notice that we are doing anything. We might judge so quickly that something is good, and do it so often, that we start to assume that the thing in question just is good in itself. But nothing external is inherently good; it’s all just matter in motion. Only a virtuous character is genuinely good.
• If you make your happiness dependent on one of these things, it will be extremely vulnerable to forces out of your control.
• It is worth stressing here that Epictetus is not suggesting that we should give up on or turn away from the external world. Just because we cannot control something does not mean that we ought to ignore it. It’s simply a matter of developing the right attitude towards it. Later on in his Handbook, Epictetus proposes thinking of your life as if you were an actor in a play. You haven’t chosen your role, you don’t get to decide what happens, and you have no control over how long it will last. Rather than fight against all these things which are out of your control, your task is to play the role you find yourself in as best as you can.
• We have control over our actions, we don’t have control over their outcomes.
• Accept what happens and work with it rather than fight against it.
• Epictetus is particularly insistent on the need to focus our attention on the things that are within our control. Forget about the things you can’t control and direct all your attention to your judgements, which will, in turn, improve your character, which is the one thing that will enable you to achieve what Zeno called ‘a smooth flow of life’.
• Integrate periods of reflection into our daily lives.
• Seneca outlines a process of evening reflection during which he goes over his day, thinking about what he did well, where his attention may have slipped, and how he might do better tomorrow.
3. The Problem with Emotions
• We cannot control other people’s emotions, because they fall into the category of things not up to us.
• Chrysippus likened having an emotion to running too fast. Once you have a certain amount of momentum, you cannot simply stop. Your motion is out of control, and being in the grip of an emotion is very much like this. So, you can’t simply turn off an unwanted emotion at will, but what you can do is try to avoid letting the next one pick up momentum to the point that it becomes out of control.
• Stoics do not suggest that people can or should become unfeeling blocks of stone. All humans will experience what Seneca calls ‘first movements’. These are when we are moved by some experience, and we might feel nervous, shocked, excited or scared, or we might even cry. All these are quite natural reactions; they are physiological responses of the body, but not emotions in the Stoic sense of the word. Someone who is upset and momentarily contemplates vengeance, but does not act on it, is not angry according to Seneca, because he remains in control. To be momentarily scared of something, but then remain firm, is not the emotion of fear either. For these ‘first movements’ to become emotions proper would require the mind judging that something terrible has happened and then acting on it. As Seneca puts it, ‘fear involves flight, anger involves assault.’
• There are thus three stages to the process, Seneca suggests: first, an involuntary first movement, which is a natural physiological reaction out of our control; second, a judgement in response to the experience, which is
• Within our control; third, an emotion that, once created, is out of our control. Once the emotion is there, there is nothing we can do but wait for it to subside.
• This is why, he continues, it is important not to react impulsively to events. It is essential to pause, take a moment and reflect on what has just happened before making a judgement about it.
4. Dealing with Adversity
• For the Roman Stoics life is full of adversity, and one of the central tasks of philosophy is to help people navigate through the ups and downs of life.
• Not only does he think that we ought not to see apparent misfortunes as genuinely bad; he also thinks that we ought to welcome them as things that can benefit us. The good person, he says, treats all adversity as a training exercise.
• To experience adversity, then, is a mark of having a virtuous character.
• Excessive good fortune is in fact really bad for us. When are we ever tested if we never experience any difficulties? How will we ever develop the virtues of patience, courage or resilience if everything always goes well? There is no worse luck, Seneca says, than unending luxury and wealth, which will serve only to make us lazy, complacent, ungrateful and greedy for more. This is real misfortune! By contrast, whatever adversity life throws at us will always be an opportunity to learn something about ourselves and to improve our characters.
• Whereas Seneca proposes that we think of seemingly bad things as in fact good (or at least beneficial), Epictetus counsels that we pay minimal attention to such events, instead keeping our focus squarely on our own judgements.
• The most interesting part of Seneca’s response to this situation is his account of what is sometimes called the premeditation of future evils. This was something advocated by earlier Stoics, such as Chrysippus.
• In effect, what Seneca is advising is that we prepare for every eventuality, including those that we’d rather did not happen and prefer not to think about. We shouldn’t just assume that everything will work out as we hope or expect, for it’s unlikely to do so. This is an important, if uncomfortable, lesson.
5. Our Place in Nature
• For the Stoics, thinking about fate is a central element in the remedy for adversity, because part of coming to terms with unpleasant events is accepting that they had to happen. Once we grasp that something was inevitable, we shall see that bemoaning it is pointless, will only generate further distress and simply displays a failure to grasp the way the world works.
• The lesson here is that we are but parts of Nature, subject to its greater forces and inevitably swept along by its movements, and we shall never be able to enjoy a harmonious life until we fully comprehend this.
6. Life and Death
• First of all we should stop worrying about what others think. Don’t try to impress others; don’t pursue their favour in order to secure some advantage. Too many people care about what others think of them, but pay little attention to their own thoughts. They sacrifice their time to others but rarely set aside time for themselves. Yet it’s absurd, Seneca suggests, that someone might be so protective of their money and possessions and yet so freely give away their far more valuable time.
• Seneca mocks the person who postpones all their plans and dreams until retirement. Do you really know you’ll make it to then? If you do, are you sure you’ll be in good enough health to do whatever it is that you’ve been postponing for so long? But even if all goes well, why postpone life until the bulk of it is already over?
• As Seneca puts it, ‘living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man’. They are effectively taken up with doing nothing. Once this habit develops they fall into a continual state of restlessness, unable to relax or to concentrate on anything. Such people become fully conscious of the value of life only when it is almost over.
• Seneca insists that preserving one’s time and devoting it to oneself is essential: Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day.
• It’s worth stressing that Seneca isn’t suggesting that we try to think that this really is our last day. Instead, he is reminding us to contemplate the fact that it could be.
• Your own life, then, is a gift, and one day you will have to give it back.
• The same goes for the lives of your loved ones: Under no circumstances ever say ‘I have lost something’, only ‘I returned it’. Did a child of yours die? No, it was returned. Your wife Died? No, she was returned.
• Nothing can be kept for ever, not least because we will not be here for ever. It is tempting to present this as a tragic, bittersweet truth about human existence, but Epictetus himself is far more blunt about it: You are a fool to want your children, wife, or friends to be immortal; it calls for powers beyond you, and gifts not yours to either own or give.
7. How We Live Together
• The whole point of it is that afterwards we turn back outwards to play our parts as more effective members of the various communities of which we are necessarily a part.
• Epictetus gives a good example of this. A man of some importance came to visit his school in Nicopolis. He was a magistrate, and so presumably had some sense of the sorts of duties and responsibilities that come with certain roles. The man was also a father. On being asked about the wellbeing of his family, the man responded by saying that his daughter had been so gravely ill that he couldn’t bear to stay with her and see her in such a condition. So he had run away. Epictetus chides him for two things: selfishly obsessing about his own feelings while neglecting those of others, not least his daughter’s, and neglecting his role as a father. Epictetus also challenges the inconsistency of his behaviour, for he certainly wouldn’t want everyone to abandon his daughter when she was ill, leaving her all alone, and he wouldn’t want everyone to abandon him if he were ill. He claims to have fled due to his love for his daughter when, as her father, his love for her should have made him stay. He failed to fulfil his role.
• The Stoics think it does. We have a duty of care to all other human beings, and they suggest that as we develop our rationality we shall come to see ourselves as members of a single, global community of all humankind.
• A slightly less wellknown Stoic of the imperial period called Hierocles (about whose life we know almost nothing) outlined in his treatise on Stoic ethics the idea that we are each at the centre of a series of expanding circles of concern, starting with ourselves, then containing our immediate family, then our local community and eventually ending with the largest circle that embraces all humankind. The modern idea of cosmopolitanism, then, has its origins with the Stoics.
• It is worth noting, though, that this does not mean that you should neglect your place within your local community. In a famous passage, Seneca put it like this: Let us grasp the idea that there are two commonwealths – the one, a vast and truly common state, which embraces alike gods and men, in which we look neither to this corner of earth nor to that, but measure the bounds of our citizenship by the path of the sun; the other, the one to which we have been assigned by the accident of birth.
• Epictetus suggests that we should think of all of life like this and that we ought to consider very carefully whom we spend time with, what influence they might have on us, how we might unwittingly end up aping what they think and do.
Epilogue
• Many of the ideas that we have considered are neatly summed up in a passage by Seneca in the letter of consolation he sent to his mother, she bewailing the loss of her son, he stranded on Corsica, not knowing what the Emperor Claudius’s next move against him might be. It was Nature’s intention that there should be no need of great equipment for a good life: every individual can make himself happy. External goods are of trivial importance and without much influence in either direction: prosperity does not elevate the sage and adversity does not depress him. For he has always made the effort to rely as much as possible on himself and to derive all delight from within himself.