What is Stoicism? The ancient philosophy, made practical

Stoicism is a school of philosophy founded in Athens around 300 BCE that teaches a way to live: the only thing truly good is a good character, most of what happens to you is outside your control, and your distress comes less from events than from your judgments about them. It is a full ethics, not a habit of hiding feelings.

In short

• Stoics hold that virtue (wisdom, justice, courage and moderation) is the only real good, and that health, money and reputation are neither good nor bad in themselves.
• Their best-known tool is sorting what is up to you (your judgments and actions) from what isn't (everything else), and spending your effort on the first.
• Being "stoic" in the everyday sense, keeping a stiff upper lip, is a later meaning; the Stoics wanted feelings that fit the facts, not no feelings at all.

Where does Stoicism come from?

Zeno of Citium, a merchant from Cyprus, began teaching in Athens around 300 BCE. He taught in the Stoa Poikile, the "painted porch" in the city's marketplace, and the school took its name from the porch. Zeno was followed as head of the school by Cleanthes and then Chrysippus, who led it from about 230 to 206 BCE and turned its ideas into a system, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Almost all of the early Stoics' writing is lost, which is why most people meet Stoicism through three Romans whose books survive.

Teacher	Lived	Who he was	What survives
Zeno of Citium	c. 334–262 BCE	Founder, in Athens	Fragments quoted by others
Seneca	c. 4 BCE–65 CE	Statesman, adviser to the emperor Nero	Letters and essays, such as On Anger
Epictetus	c. 50–135 CE	Born a slave, later a teacher in Greece	The Discourses and the Handbook, written down by his student Arrian
Marcus Aurelius	121–180 CE	Roman emperor from 161 to 180	The Meditations, a private notebook

The spread is the point: one philosophy was practiced by a former slave and by the most powerful man in the Roman world.

What do the Stoics actually believe?

Stoicism starts from a claim about value. Virtue is the only good, and vice the only bad. The Stoics named four main virtues: wisdom, justice, courage and moderation. Everything else, including health, wealth, reputation and even life itself, they called "indifferent": not good or bad in itself, because it can be used well or badly. They didn't pretend those things don't matter. Health is "preferred" to sickness, and a Stoic will sensibly pursue it. But happiness doesn't depend on getting it.

The goal of life, in the school's phrase, is "living in agreement with nature." For a Stoic, that means living by reason, which they saw as both human nature and the order of the whole universe. It also means seeing yourself as part of something larger: a citizen of the world with duties to other people, not a lone individual looking after your own peace of mind.

Emotions, for the Stoics, are a kind of judgment. Fear is the judgment that something bad is coming; grief, that something bad has happened. If the thing isn't truly bad, because it is an "indifferent", then the strong passion rests on a mistake. The Stoics hoped to replace such passions with calmer "good feelings", such as joy in doing right and caution about real wrongs. That is a long way from feeling nothing.

What is in your control, and what isn't?

The Handbook of Epictetus opens with the line Stoicism is best known for: "Some things are in our control and others not." In our control are opinion, pursuit, desire and aversion, "whatever are our own actions." Not in our control are the body, property, reputation and command (Enchiridion, trans. Elizabeth Carter). A few sections later comes the line most quoted from him: people are disturbed "not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things."

Here is the idea applied to one bad morning. Your flight is canceled and the next seat is tomorrow.

1. Sort. The cancellation, the weather, the airline's policy and the queue are not up to you. Your next decision, your tone with the agent and what you do with the evening are.
2. Check the judgment. "This ruins everything" is a judgment, not a fact. The fact is a 20-hour delay.
3. Act on your part. Rebook, call the person you were meeting, and treat the agent the way you would want to be treated. That last one is where the virtue is.
4. Let the rest go. Staying angry at the weather takes effort and changes nothing about the weather.

Later writers often add a middle category: things you influence but don't control, such as whether you win a race. A common Stoic answer is to aim at your own part (training well and running your best) and to hold the outcome lightly.

How do people practice Stoicism?

The Roman Stoics left exercises, not just arguments. Three are the most widely tried:

• The evening review. Seneca describes asking himself each night what he did badly, what he did well and what he could do better, in On Anger.
• Imagining losses in advance. Picturing setbacks before they happen, which later writers call by its Latin name premeditatio malorum, so that they arrive as something already considered rather than as a shock.
• The view from above. Marcus Aurelius often pictures human affairs from a great height or across vast stretches of time, which shrinks a day's worries to their size (Meditations).

The Meditations show what this looks like in practice. They are a notebook in which an emperor reminds himself, again and again, to be patient with difficult people, to do his work and not to fear death. Practicing a philosophy as a daily discipline, rather than only studying it, was normal in the ancient schools.

In the 20th century, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, who founded the first cognitive therapies, both named the Stoics, Epictetus especially, as forerunners of their idea that thoughts shape feelings. That history explains part of the modern revival. Stoicism, though, is a philosophy of life, not a treatment, and reading Epictetus is no substitute for care from a professional.

Is being stoic the same as Stoicism?

No, and the difference matters. In everyday English, a "stoic" person endures pain without complaint or shows no emotion. That narrow meaning grew out of the Stoic ideal but drops most of it.

	Stoicism, the philosophy	"stoic", the everyday word
Emotion	Correct the judgments behind harmful passions; keep good feelings	Hide or suppress feelings
Goal	A good character and a good life	Getting through hardship
Other people	Duties to everyone, as fellow citizens of the world	Not part of it
Source of calm	Seeing what is and isn't up to you	Willpower

A modern reader can turn Stoicism into a tool for productivity or toughness and leave out justice and duty to others, which the ancient Stoics put at the center. They wouldn't have recognized that version.

Still argued

Critics, ancient and modern, question whether virtue alone can make a life happy, whether calling health and loved ones "indifferent" is livable, and whether accepting what you can't control slides into accepting injustice. Defenders reply that Stoics act hard on what is in their power, including public duty. How Stoicism compares with rivals such as Epicureanism, or with the view in nihilism that nothing has value at all, is still debated among philosophers.

Like critical thinking, the Stoic habit of questioning a first impression before accepting it can be practiced on small things daily. And the Stoic account of emotion as judgment sits close to modern psychology, including the idea of cognitive dissonance, in which a clash between a belief and an action is felt as discomfort and pushes the belief to change.

Check yourself

• What did the Stoics mean by calling health and wealth "indifferent", and why is that different from saying they don't matter?
• Using an example of your own, sort what is and isn't up to you the way Epictetus does.
• Why is "stoic" as an everyday word an incomplete picture of Stoicism?

Sources

• Stoicism — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Marion Durand, Simon Shogry and Dirk Baltzly, 2023
• Stoicism — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The Enchiridion — Epictetus, translated by Elizabeth Carter, The Internet Classics Archive
• The Meditations — Marcus Aurelius, translated by George Long, The Internet Classics Archive