Donald Robertson

Marcus Aurelius speaks of the Stoic philosopher training himself to become, ‘an athlete in the greatest of all contests—the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens.’

Zeno told his students that he had come to value wisdom more than wealth or reputation. He used to say, ‘My most profitable journey began on the day I was shipwrecked and lost my entire fortune.’

If our emotions are not ultimately determined by external events alone but by our own beliefs and value judgments, then the habit of making healthy and rational judgments is more valuable to us than anything else.

For instance, when people disagreed with Marcus, he first tried to persuade them to see things from his perspective. However, if they persisted in obstructing what he believed to be a just course of action, he remained calm and transformed the obstacle into an opportunity to practice some other virtue, such as patience, restraint, or understanding. His equanimity remained intact as long as he never desired what was beyond his grasp, which constitutes one of the foundations of the Stoic remedy for worry and anxiety.

Marcus makes it clear that his internal goal is to live with virtue, particularly wisdom and justice, but his external aim, his preferred outcome, is the common welfare of mankind (not just of Roman subjects, incidentally). Although the outcome is ultimately indifferent to Stoics, it’s precisely the action of pursuing the common good that constitutes the virtue of justice.

Marcus actually imagines Nature herself as a physician, like Asclepius, the god of medicine, prescribing hardships to him as if they were painful remedies. To take Nature’s medicine properly, we must accept our fate and respond virtuously, with courage and self-discipline, thereby improving our character.

They taught the young Marcus that inner calm and happiness are natural consequences of a life lived well, in accord with genuine wisdom and self-discipline.

The Stoics want us to go through a radical upheaval in our underlying values so that our supreme goal is to live with wisdom and its accompanying virtues.

Underlying this conviction is the parallelism between physical and spiritual exercises: just as, by dint of repeated physical exercises, athletes given new form and strength to their bodies, so the philosopher develops his strength of soul, modifies his inner climate, transforms his vision of the world, and, finally, his entire being.

Epictetus liked to tell his students that in the face of everything that befalls them, they should get into the habit of asking themselves what capacity, or virtue, they possess for making good use of the event.

If guilt serves a purpose, it is surely to motivate us to change today, in order to prepare for tomorrow, but not to condemn ourselves to endless complaining about yesterday.

There are no gurus in Stoicism. Even the founders of the school—Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus—don’t claim that they were perfectly wise. They believe we’re all foolish, vicious, and to some extent enslaved by our passions. The ideal Sage is perfect by definition, but he’s a hypothetical ideal, like the notion of Utopian society.

At one point, Socrates explains in plain language what it means to him to be a philosopher: ‘For I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul, as I say to you: ‘Wealth does not bring about virtue, but virtue makes wealth and everything else good for me, both individually and collectively.’