Lives of the Stoics
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When the student is ready, the old Zen saying goes, the teacher appears.
Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom. It should not surprise us then that we
tongue.” He was also the first to express the four virtues of Stoicism: courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom.
Zeno is also credited with originating the expression that man was given two ears and only one mouth for a reason.
The only reason to study philosophy is to become a better person. Anything else, as Nietzsche said, is merely a “critique of words by means of other words.”
What the Stoics were after, what we remain interested in to this day, were lights to illuminate the path in life. They wanted to know, as we want to know, how to find tranquility, purpose, self-control, and happiness.
To the Greeks, each of us had a daimon, an inner genius or guiding purpose that is connected to the universal nature. Those who live by keeping the individual and universal natures in agreement are happy, Zeno said, and those who don’t are not.
Zeno consulted an oracle about what he should do to live the best life. The oracle’s response: “To live the best life you should have conversation with the dead.” It must have struck him there in that bookstore, possibly the same one his father had shopped in years before, as he listened to the words of Socrates read aloud and brought to life, that he was doing precisely what the oracle had advised. Because isn’t that what books are? A way to gain wisdom from those no longer with us?
The word “stoic” in English means the unemotional endurance of pain. Yet even a cursory look at the stories of these (mostly) men proves an enormous difference between the expectations of that lowercase stoicism and the realities of the philosophy, uppercase Stoicism. Stoicism is a vibrant, expansive philosophy filled with people who loved, who grieved, who strove, who fought bravely at close range in the great battles of history, who raised children, who wrote important works, who stood tall, who believed, and who lived. In their own time, these philosophers resisted the stereotype of lowercase stoicism, that they were unfeeling beasts of burden who suffered through life and looked only inward.
“You’ve wandered all over,” Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself in Meditations, “and finally realized that you never found what you were after: how to live. Not in syllogisms, not in money, or fame, or self-indulgence. Nowhere.” If philosophy is anything, it’s an answer to that question—how to live. It’s what we have been looking for. “Would you really know what philosophy offers to humanity?” Seneca asks in his Moral Letters. “Philosophy offers counsel.” It will be your job, after you read these pages, to heed this counsel, and to struggle with what Seneca described as the most important job of a reader of philosophy—the act of turning words into works. To turn the lessons of the lives of the men and women who came before us, their living and their dying, their succeeding and their failing, into actions in the real world. For it is this, and nothing else, that earns one the title: Philosopher.