Modern Stoics

Excerpts from From http://philosophyforlife.org/philosophies-for-life/stoics/


Who were the Stoics?
The founder of Stoicism was Zeno of Citium (pictured on the right in Raphael’s School of Athens), who lived and taught in Athens in around 300 BC. He and his students taught and discussed philosophy under the Stoa Poikile, or ‘painted colonnade’ in the Athenian market-place. Stoicism became very popular among the Roman ruling class, and most of the surviving Stoic books were written by Roman Stoics, particularly Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. You can access many of the Stoic texts for free here and here.
What did the Stoics believe?
Stoicism originally emerged at quite a volatile period in Greek history, when Athenian city-states were being conquered by foreign empires. It developed as a way of staying sane amid all that chaos. An important part of the therapy of Stoicism was to remind yourself at all times of what you can control and what you can’t. We can’t control geopolitics, we can’t control the weather, we can’t control the economy, we can’t control other people, we can’t even control our own bodies, not entirely anyway. The world is beyond our control. It’s a rough and unpredictable environment that is constantly changing. The only thing we can really control are our own thoughts and beliefs. If we remind ourselves of that, and focus our energy and attention on our own beliefs and opinions, then we can learn to cope wisely with whatever the world throws at us.
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Epictetus: ‘Men are disturbed not by events, but by their opinions about events’. This inspired Ellis’ cognitive therapy of the emotions, which became the basis of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). It’s based on the idea that our emotions follow our beliefs and judgements. If we change our habitual beliefs, we also change our emotions. We can use this technique even to overcome chronic emotional disorders and severe traumas.
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It’s important to understand that Stoic therapy doesn’t involve suppressing your emotions or denying them beneath a ‘stiff upper lip’, as the popular understanding of ‘stoic’ might suggest. In fact, Stoic therapy involves exploring the beliefs and opinions that give rise to your negative emotions, seeing if those beliefs are irrational, and if they are, challenging them and replacing them with new beliefs. So Stoic therapy involves dismantling the beliefs and habits that create an emotion, rather than simply denying an emotion.

CBT may have been inspired by Stoicism, but there are some big differences as well, aren’t there?
Certainly. I discuss some of the differences and similarities in this talk . The biggest difference is that Stoicism wasn’t just a set of therapeutic techniques. It was a spiritual philosophy, the end of which was bringing the self into harmony with the Logos.
What’s the Logos?
The Stoics followed Heraclitus in believing that the cosmos is connected by an all-pervasive intelligence called the Logos, which you can translate as the Word or the Law. It’s a form of divine providence that guides all things. It exists in all things, but it vibrates particularly strongly in human consciousness. For the Stoics, the meaning of life, the goal of human existence, is to develop our consciousness and bring it into harmony with the Logos.
How do we do that?
By overcoming our attachment and aversion to external things. Nature is constantly changing, nothing is permanent, so if we become attached or averse to external things, we’ll often be unhappy, insecure and anxious, because the world will not be the way we want it to be. By focusing not on external goods but on the inner goods of virtue, we can become one with the ebb and flow of the cosmos, accepting whatever happens to us as the will of the Logos.