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- Author: Ward Farnsworth
- Full Title: The Practicing Stoic
- Category: #books
- The first principle of practical Stoicism is this: we don’t react to events; we react to our judgments about them, and the judgments are up to us.
- construct our experience of the world through our beliefs, opinions, and thinking about it – in a word, through our judgments – and that they are up to us.
- All irritations can be viewed the same way – the noisy neighbor, the bad weather, the traffic jam. If you are riled up by these things, you are riled up by the judgments you make about them: that they are bad, that they are important, that one should get riled up about them. The events don’t force you to think any of this; only you can do it.
- For example, death is nothing terrible; for if it were, it would have seemed so even to Socrates. Rather, the opinion that death is terrible – that is the terrible thing.
- Each of us is as well or badly off as we believe. The happy are those who think they are, not those who are thought to be so by others; and in this way alone, belief makes itself real and true.
- treating thoughts and judgments as matters of choice is central to the practice of Stoicism but something that many people rarely do and some never do. It is more normal to take for granted whatever ideas and opinions pass through our minds, living them out with no more scrutiny than we give to the air we breathe. Stoics try to get enough separation from those mental events to control them – to notice the irrationality that drives much of what we say to ourselves and to replace it with something wiser.
- (Cultivation is called for in cases like the one Seneca describes above, as when learning how to take satisfaction from simple and natural pleasures.)
- Generally the Stoics identify the good with the rightful use of reason, which in turn leads them to a life led for the benefit of the whole – that is, for others.
- When confronted with a report or an event or an object, in short, the Stoic tries to just see it as it is. Any additions are made with care. “His ship is lost.” What has happened? His ship is lost. “He has been led off to prison.” What has happened? He has been led off to prison. The notion that he fares badly, each man adds on his own. Epictetus, Discourses 3.8.5
- Guillaume du Vair noted a particular snare when interpreting events: creating false metaphors to describe them, and making other kinds of alarming and misleading comparisons. Our opinions torment us more than things themselves, and are formed by the words we use when something surprising occurs; for we call one thing by the name of another, and imagine it to be like that other thing, and the image and idea stay there in our minds. du Vair, The Moral Philosophy of the Stoics (1585)