The Stoic Self

Reconstructing Modern Stoicism From the Inside Out

It’s often thought that Narcissus falls in love with himself. That’s not true — Narcissus falls in love with his reflection — an image of his body — as if it were somebody else. Because that image was incapable of reciprocating his love, Narcissus became heartbroken and killed himself or withered away, depending on the version you read. The myth’s lesson is not about vanity, but about the most central aspect of the human condition — the our illusory sense of self, which can cause us immense harm. Image: Gyula Benczúr, Narcissus (detail), 1888 (Public Domain. Source: Wikipedia).

What makes Stoicism so compelling in today’s world? Why does it endure as an ethical philosophy despite the fact that so few people subscribe to panentheism, the religious belief underpinning Stoicism?

If we can answer questions like these, we’ll find the force from which Stoicism emerges.

Ancient Stoicism is built on a dogma — that the universe is part of, and guided by, a supreme deity. Being part of the universe, human beings are also part of God.

The Human Being according to a “panentheist” view of the universe. The world is a part of God, the human being is part world — in that your body is made of matter — and part not-of-the-world. The “pantheist” views the universe and God as one and the same thing. The stoic insistence that a divine logos rules the interation of all things suggests that Stoic thinking is maybe not pantheistic, as commonly supposed, but panentheistic.

There are three areas of inquiry in Stoic philosophy. Firstly, there is physics – the Stoic understanding of the universe (what we would call “science” now), logic — the system of reasoning, and ethics — the theory of living well.

Diogenes Laërtius, the historian of ancient philosophy, relays to us that the Greek Stoic Chrysippus used the metaphor of the garden when describing these three aspects of the philosophy.

Ethics are like the fruits of the garden, providing sustenance to people, logic is the fence — the barrier protecting the fruits from the intrusion of weeds, physics is the soil itself — both nourishing and providing a grounding for the fruit trees.

The “physics” — science — of Stoicism underpins the universal claims of this philosophy. If the Stoic understanding of the world — its cosmology — is accepted, it is armored against contingency — it is deemed to be eternal, true, and perfect. It is always right for every person.

If we understand that we are a part of a universe that can only be the way it is, then aligning our desires to the way things are will make us virtuous and our minds tranquil. In turn, our aligned desires will enable us to better understand the workings of the world. The Stoic path is therefore a virtuous spiral to enlightenment.

It’s beautiful logic, and the beauty is best shown in illustration. The three fundamental aspects of Stoicism are not separate parts, but a continuum where logic connects our conduct — ethics — to the workings of the universe — physics and vice versa.

The circle of Stoic reason. The three aspects of Stoicism — physics, Logic, and Ethics — in the continuum of Stoic understanding.

Consider Marcus Aurelius’s summary of this grand formulation. He wrote,

“All things are linked together mutually, and their linkage is sacred. Nothing, so to speak, is foreign to anything else, for everything is coordinated and everything contributes to the order of one single world. One single world is the result of all things, and one single God penetrates throughout them all; there is one single substance, and one single law which is the Reason common to all intelligent beings; there is one truth.” (7.9)

People find that difficult to accept in today’s world (though there are whispers in the philosophical and scientific community about the idea that the universe might indeed be alive and conscious). Yet, the compulsion towards Stoic thinking exists among people coming from many different belief systems and religions.

This benefit is also a hindrance. Stoicism, as it originally evolved in ancient Greek and Roman culture, is a spiritual way of life. As such modern Stoicism is like a religious icon stuck in a museum’s glass case, divested of its spiritual power.

While the beauty of a religious icon served to throw people onto their knees and worship God, the ethics of Stoicism served to reconcile the Stoic with the totality of nature.

In both cases we get the wrong end of the stick — we admire the beauty of the icon as an end unto itself, and we look to the ethics of Stoicism as a therapy to cope with life’s trials. Both are in fact a bridge to what is most sacred according to those who created them.

Ancient Stoic ethics are built on a pedestal of Stoicism’s cosmology — a set of axioms about the world and our place in it. Modern Stoicism is lacking the continuity of such a relationship, it’s built on modern beliefs and values that have no relation to Stoicism’s core ethical priorities. (Author)

The problem with transplanting an ancient ethical philosophy onto modern values is that you lose the universalist basis of that philosophy. A grounding in received values, sketchily delineated, gives us an ethical philosophy that is ultimately contingent. All the ethical notions are stacked on changing normative values.

Any philosophy, without its core governing axioms, its essence, loses its vitality. The application of Stoicism becomes pragmatic, depriving it of its generative potential to actually change society itself.

Centrifugal Force

If we were to disregard, without outright rejecting, the dogma that the world is ordered by a divine provenance, then that solid pedestal for Stoic ethics — one that can accommodate a multitude of cosmological beliefs — will need to be reconstructed.

This would transform our modern Stoic philosophy from a reactive “way to cope” to an active “way to live”.

But how? It would be wrong to swap in its place a substitute dogma. A dogma is a belief that can be accepted, rejected or even disproved. That would not afford the self-sufficiency required for a modern ecumenical Stoicism. Such a Stoicism is one that could stand up by itself if it were to accommodate our many beliefs about the origin and nature of the cosmos.

What would be preferable is to form the basis of our ethics in an equally Stoic, yet non-dogmatic, “first principle”. Making claims about the origin and nature of existence are a matter of belief, but there are conditional aspects of simply being that are universal.

When we talk of the “human condition”, we are, of course, talking of something that is conditional.

The human condition refers to fundamental characteristics of human existence. At its core, the human condition is characterized by the collective awareness of our mortality. It’s also seen in our capacity for reason and reflection, and our experience of a range of emotions such as happiness, love, pain and sadness.

As such the human condition has emerged from a wide range of factors in the soup of our biological and cultural make-up. We can all agree on this, regardless of our cosmological beliefs.

We may reason in different languages, but we nevertheless reason. We may feel sad or happy about different things, but we are nevertheless happy or sad. There is no culture without sadness or happiness. All these dimensions of being human are universal.

As the wheel of nature has spun, a centrifugal force has pushed human beings into an exclusive margin. We search for meaning and purpose because we are compelled to do so through our understanding of the contingency of everything around us, including ourselves.

This makes us exceptional to ourselves. Human exceptionalism — the idea that we are different from everything else in the universe — is perfectly valid within human consciousness, even if not in the grand scheme of things.

The idea of the human condition is where we can find a basis for a Stoic way of life that is not an absolutist dogma, but a conditional state.

The part of the human condition where we can find a basis for a modern Stoicism is the place where Stoic ethics and physics are knotted together — the human self.

All mentally-fit human beings have a sense of self, that is a fundamental part of the human condition. We are physical objects that think. That’s the first principle of a new Stoic physics.

The self is emergent and can only be negatively defined, just as the triangle you see here is. (Source: Wikipedia. By Fibonacci. CC BY-SA 3.0. Modified by author.)

Not-I

What makes you sad? The feeling of a lack of control, the loss of power. What makes you happy? The feeling of control, of events aligning to how you wish them to be.

At the heart of this is “you”, what we call the self — myself, yourself, ourselves. And there is a consistency in the way the self relates to the world no matter what perspective the self takes on.

From these relations of feelings to the events that surround us, we can pinpoint and isolate something inside of us, some thing that is happy or sad.

Through thinking through these emotions, we become aware of our freedom of judgement, our capability to change our desire (whether or not that freedom is an illusion is besides the point).

Our toenails are not happy or sad, neither is our liver, nor our heart. Our brain seems to be happy or sad, but its capability to be so is dependent on our social existence and our use of language. Let’s consider, then, that our mind is happy or sad. What’s more, the mind can change the parameters of happiness or sadness. We can start to understand what is and isn’t in our control, and by extension, what we can identify with.

Throughout the Discourses and the Enchiridion, Epictetus repeatedly returns to delineating the self.

“We are responsible for some things, while there are others for which we cannot be held responsible. The former include our judgement, our impulse, our desire, aversion and mental faculties in general; the latter include the body, material possessions, our reputation, status — in a word, anything not in our power to control.” (1)

In the passages that modern Stoics define as falling within the “dichotomy of control”, Epictetus is taking an inventory of what the “self” actually is. Am I my name? My reputation? My possessions? If the answer is no, then what is it that is “me”?

The process of elimination leads to an inner self that makes sense of the impressions the external world has on me. I may “have” other things, but they are not part of me — they are not identifiable with the “self”. In another passage, he is recorded as teaching:

“A man only loses what he has. ‘I lost my clothes.’ Yes, because you had clothes. […] Loss and sorrow are in only in respect to things we own. ‘But the tyrant will chain…’ What will he chain? Your leg. ‘He will chop off…’ What? Your head. What he will never chain or chop off is your integrity. That’s the reason behind the ancient advice to ‘know thyself’.”

A basis for Stoicism — a set of axioms that provide the grounding for ethics — without the need for a cosmology, is found in the relation between self and world. “Know thyself” becomes a matter of defining what you are not, rather than what you are.

Marcus wrote,

“Consider that the mind, once it has abstracted itself and come to know its own defining power, has no contact with the movement of the bodily spirit, be that smooth or troubled […] And here are two of the most immediately useful thoughts you will dip into. First that things cannot touch the mind: they are external and inert; anxieties can only come from your internal judgement. Second, that all these things you see will change almost as you look at them, and then will be no more. Constantly bring to mind all that you yourself have already seen changed. The universe is change: life is judgement.”

In Marcus, following Epictetus, we find the self only in the directing force of our decisions — the faculty of judgement, the “guiding principle”. As Pierre Hadot, historian of philosophy, put it,

“when he speaks about ‘us’ and about the soul, he is thinking of that superior or guiding part of the soul which the Stoics called the hēgemonikon. It alone is free, because it alone can give or refuse its assent to that inner discourse which enunciates what the object is which is represented by a given phantasia. This borderline which objects cannot cross, this inviolable stronghold of freedom, is the limit of what I shall refer to as the “inner citadel.” Things cannot penetrate into this citadel: that is, they cannot produce the discourse which we develop about things, or the interpretation which we give of the world and its events.” (Inner Citadel, 51)

What is selfhood? There’s two conventional and incompatible notions of selfhood in the Western world. These are widely accepted in broad terms.

Firstly, there is the “dualist” notion, largely held by deists, that the self resides in an immaterial spirit that animates the body and survives bodily death. Then there’s the materialist notion, largely held by atheists, of the body being the limit of the self, the seat of consciousness and intelligence being in the physical matter of the brain.

We would assume the latter idea that the self is all the particles from which we are composed. But, to take a simple example, your name is not composed of particles. How consciousness emerges from physical matter remains a mystery. In the former idea there is no observable spirit. If it exists, its workings are obscure. Both these notions posit, but cannot really account for, a stable, integrated and complete self.

Is there a third way? The Stoics point to an idea of self that is more oblique than reductive modern ideas of selfhood. The Stoic self is part in the world and part divine. It emerges from being momentarily caught between God and world.

The quantity of the divine “breath” (pneuma) within us gives rise to reason, which mirrors the reason that orders the universe. The sense of self we have, then, is conditional — it is resultant of our position between the material world from which we are composed and the immaterial divine logos.

As Epictetus put it, “this body does not belong to you, it is only cunningly constructed clay.” Speaking in the guise of God, Epictetus goes on, “I could not make the body yours, I have given you a portion of myself instead, the power of positive and negative impulse, of desire and aversion […] the power of making good use of impressions. If you take care of it and identify with it, you will never be blocked or frustrated.” (D. 1.1.10. My emphasis.)

So the body is dirt, the soul is a loan from God, giving us only the power of choice. The integrated self is a fiction in Stoicism. It doesn’t exist.

There is no self as anything substantive at all. The self has structure in the same way a hole in a doughnut has structure. The body is a momentary and changing collection of atoms, growing and disintegrating by turns. Most of the metal processes that coordinate these atoms are obscure to our consciousness. The vast majority of our “actions” are automatic. What “we” have, and what we ultimately are, are the conscious choices we make.

What about our identity? Much of what constitutes us in society is arbitrary and out of our control — we’re named before we are born, fate doesn’t permit us to choose our family, our nationality, our regionality, our ethnicity, our gender, or our social class.

All these things are attached to us as dimensions of our social being, but they are not us. All the material and immaterial dimensions of the self form a ring around a nothingness, because though they are attached to the “I”, they are not the I.

And yet there is something choosing, something that exists by virtue of our being caught between material substrate — the stuff of our body, and immaterial logic, language and labels. This is the self at the core of our being, it is an openness that is never filled by the succession of sensations and choices it faces.

So at best we can only negatively define the self by what it is not. That is exactly what Epictetus did. On a number of occasions we are treated to an inventory of exactly what the self is not. What we can identify with is given many labels and dressed in metaphors, because it’s not a thing of any substance. By turns Epictetus and Marcus refer to a “ruling power” (Hēgemonikon), “soul” (psyche), “inner spirit” (Daemon), and so on.

The Stoic self is transcendent and transparent — it is as unknowable and mysterious as substance itself. Yet it exists. It exists in the choices we make. So the self cannot be positively defined for what it is, but it can be positively defined for what it does.

There is no self when we seek it, but in seeking it we are a self. The self can know other things while unable to know itself in the same way fire can burn things without being able to burn itself.

That’s not to say that “self” in the broadest sense of the word — the way us moderns use it — doesn’t play a role in Stoicism. Self care, for example, is an important aspect of Stoic ethics. But we ought to care for the body — or indeed our social reputation — in the same way good tenants care for a rented room, as Epictetus instructed us to care for our possessions and relationships. (E. 11)

The Non-Self as the Stoic Lode Star

If we took ancient Stoicism’s divine logos and subtracted the divine part, we have logic — the way we understand the world’s workings. The self can therefore be considered as resulting from being caught between the material stuff of the world and the immaterial reality of logic.

This is the mechanism by which we can be Stoic without the baggage of Stoic cosmology. We can understand the scientific part of this new Stoicism — the inquiring part — as the science of the dissolution of the self.

A new formulation of the stoic system that does not have a cosmological proposition, i.e. a claim about the universe. (Author)

What is both a new grounding for Stoic ethics and a new formulation of Stoic continuity between ethics and science (“physics” to the Stoics), is fully coherent with the idea that the world is ruled by divine provenance. It is also fully coherent with the idea with a materialistic and non-deist understanding of the world.

It is a complete Stoicism that is fully ecumenical to all faiths. It is predicated not on a cosmology that would compete with religion or science, but on a condition of simply being human — the only thing that belongs to us, the only thing truly identifiable with us, is our choices.

In plain English we use the word “selfless” to mean acting altruistically. We mean, “be selfless in spite of the self”. Stoicism, as a philosophy, urges us to act selflessly because there is no self.

This allows for the splitting apart of that-which-chooses and the choice one ought to make. Both Marcus and Epictetus make references to an “otherness” within us at the moment we make choices.

Marcus refers to this otherness is a “Daemon”. Epictetus literally refers to “the other” that is present when you are accounting for your actions to authorities. He recommends that you should please this “other” over the magistrate who is questioning you.

This other is not merely your conscience, or your super-ego, or even the voice of God, it is the reason within all of us. It is transcendent and universal. By turning inwards to rationality, we turn away from externals and we realize even the self is an external.

When we act with reason, we subsume ourselves into it. We become truly one with the universe since we efface any residue of the ego that seeks to set us apart. We find peace, unity, absolute security. We find oneness.

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