“Live in agreement with nature” to find happiness.
Like many thinkers that came before and after, the Stoics believed that rationality exists in nature. We can see evidence of this in nature’s patterns, processes, and the laws of nature, which allow nature’s forms to work in an excellent way. Because human beings are a part of nature, we are capable of being rational and excellent too. According to Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, if we “live in agreement with nature,” our lives will then “flow smoothly.” (Of course, it’s hard to imagine living a happy life if you are constantly struggling against nature.) While living in agreement with nature had multiple meanings for the Stoics, one of the central, most important meanings was that we should strive, as human beings, to develop our own human rationality and excellence.
2
Virtue, or excellence of one’s inner character, is the only true good.
While there are several dimensions to this, I’ll just mention one now: if you lack this kind of inner goodness, you won’t be able to use anything else in a good way, to benefit either yourself or others.
For example, the Stoics did not see money as a good in itself, since it can sometimes be used well and can sometimes be used poorly. If you possess wisdom and moderation, which are virtues, it’s likely that you could use money in a good way. But if someone lacking wisdom or moderation ends up blowing thousands of dollars over a weekend on drugs and other vices, few people would consider that to be good or healthy—or a good use of money either. As Seneca wrote, “Virtue itself,” or excellence of character, “is the only true good, since there is nothing good without it.”5
What makes a virtue like justice or fairness truly good is that it is always or consistently good. By contrast, other things can be used well or badly. They are not intrinsically or consistently good.
3
Some things are “up to us,” or entirely under our control, while other things are not.
For the Stoics, the only things fully under our control are our inner powers of judgment, opinion, and decision making, our will, and how we interpret the things we experience.
To reduce emotional suffering, a person needs to focus on what is under his or her control, while still trying to create a better life and a better world for others. (We will explore this in chapter 6, “How to Tame Adversity” and chapter 8, “The Battle Against Fortune: How to Survive Poverty and Extreme Wealth.”)
4
While we can’t control what happens to us in the external world, we can control our inner judgments and how we respond to life’s events.
This is highly significant to the Stoics, because extreme, negative emotions originate from faulty judgments or opinions. But if we understand and correct the faulty interpretations by viewing things differently, we can also get rid of the negative emotions. (See chapter 3, “How to Overcome Worry and Anxiety” and chapter 4, “The Problem with Anger.”)
5
When something negative happens, or when we are struck by adversity, we shouldn’t be surprised by it, but see it as an opportunity to create a better situation.
For the Stoics, every challenge or adversity we encounter is an opportunity to both test and develop our inner character. Also, to believe that misfortunes will never befall us would be out of touch with reality. Instead, we should actively expect occasional bumps in the road, and sometimes major ones. (See chapter 6, “How to Tame Adversity.”)
6
Virtue, or possessing an excellent character, is its own reward. But it also results in eudaimonia or “happiness.” This is a state of mental tranquility and inner joy.
Eudaimonia has been translated variously as “happiness,” “human flourishing,” “well-being,” and “having the best mindset possible.” But for the Stoics, “having a life that is truly worth living” is probably the most accurate translation. (See chapter 14, “Freedom, Tranquility, and Lasting Joy.”)
In one of their famous “paradoxes” or paradoxical sayings, the Stoics said that a perfectly wise person, a Stoic sage, would possess eudaimonia even while being tortured on the rack! While we couldn’t describe a person who was being tortured as being “happy” in the modern sense of the word, we could imagine that he possessed a life truly worth living, especially if he was being tortured for standing up to an evil tyrant.6 Similarly, many heroic people have given up their lives fighting for the greater good, to benefit society. In other words, living the best possible life, or a life truly worth living, might involve some pain.
7
Real philosophy involves “making progress.”
Philosophy involves critical thinking, intellectual analysis, and trying to understand the world scientifically. But ultimately, for the Stoics, the most important dimension of philosophy is ethics, which has a very practical dimension. The Roman Stoics saw real philosophy as a kind of path in which one makes progress toward virtue or developing a better character. (See chapter 1, “The Lost Art of Friendship.”)
8
It’s essential that we, as individuals, should contribute to society.
The Stoics were the most prosocial philosophers in the ancient world. They taught that humanity is like a single organism, and that we, as parts of that organism, should contribute to the greater good of society as a whole. (See chapter 10, “How to Be Authentic and Contribute to Society.”) Significantly, the Stoics were’t just interested in improving their own lives. They were interested in improving the lives of all humanity.7
SENECA’S LIFE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF ADVERSITY
This is a book about Seneca’s ideas and not his life. Naturally, though, there’s some relation between the two, so a few details are in order. (For those who would like to learn more about Seneca’s life, I recommend the excellent biography by Emily Wilson.8)
Seneca was born around 4 BC to a well-to-do equestrian family, or family of Roman knights, in what is now the city of Córdoba, Spain. His father, Seneca the Elder (54 BC–AD 39), was a teacher of rhetoric and oratory. Like today, being an excellent communicator was a vital skill for creating a successful career in the Roman Empire, and Seneca’s family excelled at this.
Little is known about Seneca’s life as a child, but his father took him to Rome when he was five years old or a bit older. As an adolescent, he studied with various teachers in Rome, including several philosophers.
Unfortunately, Seneca suffered from some kind of chronic lung disease since childhood, likely a combination of asthma and tuberculosis. When he was around twenty-five, his aunt took him to Alexandria in Egypt in an attempt to quell the disease, which might have been made worse by living in Rome. Surprisingly, he ended up staying in Egypt for ten years, and only returned to Rome around the age of thirty-five. Fortunately for Seneca, his aunt had political connections, and due to her influence he was able to join the Roman Senate, when Rome was under the rule of Caligula.
In the previous century, Rome had been a republic. But with the dissolution of the republic, the newly created Roman emperors possessed, for all intents and purposes, absolute powers, which led, of course, to terrible abuses. The reigns of Caligula (AD 12–41), Claudius (10 BC–AD 54), and Nero (AD 37–68), under which Seneca lived, were corrupt beyond imagination, and filled with examples of murders, poisonings and assassinations, sexual infidelity (including reports of incest), exiling innocent people from Rome, brutal torture, and other terrible acts, many of them based simply on whim. It was like a television soap opera gone bad in the worst possible way, but with deadly, real-life consequences.