THE THEORY OF STOICISM

I first found Stoic philosophy through a friend around 2 years ago when I was in deep depression and my life was almost at the ending spot. The first thing that stood out was its honesty and practicality for everyday life. With a focus on dealing with hardship, taking personal responsibility, and reducing stress and suffering. My collection of books increased by number of “self-help” books that promised happiness, confidence, peace of mind, but to be honest most of them were useless. However, in Stoicism and the stoic philosophers, a 2000 year old philosophy that added more value to my life than all of the other books and their combined pages. Since then, it is part of my foundation of my personal philosophy I use day to day.

Stoicism

Stoicism is basically a school of ancient philosophy about life. A school of Hellenistic philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BC. It is a philosophy of personal ethics informed by its system of logic and its views on the natural world. According to its teachings, as social beings, the path to eudaimonia (happiness, or blessedness) is found in accepting the moment as it presents itself, by not allowing oneself to be controlled by the desire for pleasure or fear of pain, by using one's mind to understand the world and to do one's part in nature's plan, and by working together and treating others fairly and justly.

“A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”

- Nassim Taleb

Origins

Originally stoicism was known as "Zeonism", after the founder Zeno of Citium. However, this name was soon dropped, because the Stoics did not think their founders to be perfect, and to avoid the risk of the philosophy becoming a cult of personality.^[5]

"Stoicism" is derived from the Stoa Poikile (Ancient Greek), or "painted porch", a colonnade decorated with mythic and historical battle scenes, on the north side of the Agora in Athens, where Zeno and his followers gathered to discuss their ideas.^[6][7]

Sometimes Stoicism is therefore referred to as "The Stoa", or the philosophy of "The Porch".^[5]

Modern usage

The word "stoic" commonly refers to someone who is indifferent to pain, pleasure, grief, or joy.^[8] The modern usage as a "person who represses feelings or endures patiently" was first cited in 1579 as a noun and in 1596 as an adjective.^[9] In contrast to the term "Epicurean", the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Stoicism notes, "the sense of the English adjective 'stoical' is not utterly misleading with regard to its philosophical origins."^[10]

Basic Doctrine

Stoicism teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions; the philosophy holds that becoming a clear and unbiased thinker allows one to understand the universal reason (logos). A primary aspect of Stoicism involves improving the individual's ethical and moral well-being: "Virtue consists in a will that is in agreement with Nature."^[11] This principle also applies to the realm of interpersonal relationships; "to be free from anger, envy, and jealousy,"^[12] and to accept even slaves as "equals of other men, because all men alike are products of nature".^[13]

The Stoic ethic espouses a deterministic perspective; in regard to those who lack Stoic virtue, Cleanthes once opined that the wicked man is "like a dog tied to a cart, and compelled to go wherever it goes".^[11] A Stoic of virtue, by contrast, would amend his will to suit the world and remain, in the words of Epictetus, "sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy,"^[12] thus positing a "completely autonomous" individual will, and at the same time a universe that is "a rigidly deterministic single whole". This viewpoint was later described as "Classical Pantheism" (and was adopted by Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza).^[14]

Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for man, otherwise it would be admitting something that lies beyond its proper subject-matter. For as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subject-matter of the art of living is each person's own life.

— Epictetus, Discourses 1.15.2, Robin Hard revised translation

The Stoics are especially known for teaching that "virtue is the only good" for human beings, and that external things—such as health, wealth, and pleasure—are not good or bad in themselves (adiaphora), but have value as "material for virtue to act upon." Alongside Aristotelian ethics, the Stoic tradition forms one of the major founding approaches to virtue ethics.^[1] The Stoics also held that certain destructive emotions resulted from errors of judgment, and they believed people should aim to maintain a will (called prohairesis) that is "in accordance with nature." Because of this, the Stoics thought the best indication of an individual's philosophy was not what a person said, but how a person behaved.^[2] To live a good life, one had to understand the rules of the natural order since they thought everything was rooted in nature.