The Pattern of Stoicism

Stoicism is a philosophy concerned with regulating the emotions -- and it has weird beginnings. It came from cynicism, a Greek school that despised wealth and pleasure. 

In the third century BC, Zeno of Citium, a Cyprus-born student of the cynic school of philosophy, suffered a humiliating ordeal. When challenging his star pupil to renounce a worldly life, the great cynic Crates challenged Zeno to carry a large pot of lentil soup wherever he went. Through doing so, Crates argued that Zeno could announce his loyalty to cynical philosophy to Athenian society, proving his distaste for worldly conventions. This was a test of faith. 

But the cynical experiment pushed Zeno too far.

Suddenly, whilst walking the streets of Athens, Zeno lost his temper and smashed the pot underneath his clothes. He stood embarrassed, with the liquid trickling down his legs. His fellow citizens found him in the street filthily clad in lentil soup and laughed at him. He soon became a figure of ignominy, a disgusting crank, an idiot with no wisdom to share. 

Facing this ordeal, Zeno’s challenge was deeply personal. He had to remain strong despite his clown-like circumstances, involving their external disturbances. Ultimately, Zeno had to resist hardship without letting his feelings take centre stage. As the story goes, the foundational tenets of Grecian Stoicism were born.

Pain and Sickness, from the Migraine Art Collection, 1983 

This breakthrough moment pushed Zeno to re-evaluate the place of feelings and emotions in the face of adverse circumstances. His ideas aimed to govern both the way he behaved, the way he treated his inner compulsions. If he accepted the world and its difficulties for what they were, then true happiness would follow.

To be sensible is to be stoic, and this involves the idea of rationality. For Zeno, human reason opened up a new way to overcome suffering – that is, to build upon an understanding of pleasure and pain, relying on one’s logical knowledge and using reason to press-down on life’s external difficulties. He was determined to prove that inner strength trumped outer pain. Rational choice and belief determine the outcome of human behaviour; hence, Stoicism is philosophy as therapy, a method of mapping our inner selves against the world’s problems.

If the aim of Stoicism is to offer solace, the inherent structure of its philosophy will focus on personal development. In regard to emotional intelligence, for instance, stoics place empathy in the same bracket as rationality, which understands one’s ability to foster relationships as a logical process requiring both perceptive and comprehensive skills. Lucius Seneca, a Roman statesman and teacher, argued that the stoic’s conception of virtue and perfect reason applies to all of life’s events, that a conceptual framework can help us treat others equally. Using the model of oikeiōsis (a Greek term referring to human psychological development), stoics like Seneca believed that all humans underwent a long process of trial and error before reaching a proper understanding of empathy. 

First comes self-realisation: a new-born baby begins to comprehend its own body, perceiving its own set of arms and legs. Second, a person develops a knowledge of other human beings, realising that others have wants and needs just like their own. Third, an individual comes to realise that desires intersect, thus developing a care for others. All in all, one’s capacity to think rationally engages one in a process that finally leads to virtuous thinking, virtuous acts.

This is the pattern of Stoicism – the brick by brick, step by step motional development of rational thinking that moves towards Seneca’s ideal of ‘perfect reason’. The pattern draws stoic philosophy out and away from the individual and into the external world, making rational thinking the leading standard for interacting with others. 

The early stoics related humankind to what they called the ‘organic whole'. In a cosmological sense Stoicism is about one’s interactions with nature, their environment, and other people. Stoic ideas extend beyond personal resilience, promoting virtue in the social realm.

Stoics viewed equality constructively. In his version of social oikeiōsis, Hierocles, a stoic philosopher, realised this best when he drew up his model of concentric circles, demonstrating how the self relates to humankind (see figure 1). Beginning with the self, the model shows that the next circle, the next order of relation, consists of immediate kinship links – i.e., parents, siblings, children. The following circles extend the self’s relationship to neighbours, local residents, so on and so forth, until the circle reaches all of humankind. 

This displays the Stoic’s idea on the responsibility of cooperation. It is an egalitarian model: Hierocles stresses optional power dynamics, encouraging stoics to view their needs as equal to others. If outer humanity’s needs coincide with those of the individual, then logic will permit the sovereignty of cooperativeness, which values the repetition of virtue, allowing this repetition to govern everyday interactions. 

If we all stand on equal ground, then we have a moral responsibility to cooperate for the sake of human survival. As a pre-Christian mode of ethics, Hierocles’s social oikeiōsis demonstrates the moral attributes inherent to human rationality, a natural sensory awareness that opens onto a healthy view of human cooperation. The pattern of Stoicism leads to an overall good.

Figure 1. Hierocles' Model [1].

Today, Stoicism enjoys a resurgence among practical philosophers, with precepts that still wield the power to counteract eternal issues like suffering. Stoicism encourages constructive thinking on how to counteract adversity. Since this ancient-world philosophy stays true to primary human problems, its teachings will continue to inform teachers and students alike for many years to come. 

Notes:

[1] Liz Gloyn, ‘At Home with the Stoics’ in History Today, 67/9 (2017), p. 54.