Stoicism: An In-Depth Explanation

so I like stoicism a lot and one of the things that I'll sometimes do is just go into the YouTube search bar type in stoicism and see what I get and lately a lot of the content that I've seen has been like this it's basically AI generated muscleman trying to give you motivational advice and when I see that I just think that doesn't look a lot like the stoicism that I've read about in books if you read books like Marcus aurelius's meditations or older stoic texts from the Greek World you'll see that stoicism is weird

it has strange views about God and logic matter the nature of the Mind what a good life is and boiling it down to just a couple of inspirational quotes just really doesn't do it justice so that's why I wanted to make this video this is an in-depth explanation of stoicism by the end of the video I want you to be able to answer questions like what is stoicism what is stoic physics logic and ethics what is the stoic sage and why has stoicism remained relevant for thousands of years I'm Jared Henderson I'm a philosopher and

if you like this video or you like other that I've made I want to ask you to consider supporting me over on substack that helps me make videos and bring in-depth philosophy content to YouTube and you also get some writing in exchange I think it's a pretty good deal so first we need to start with a little bit of History you might think that the history of stoicism begins with Marcus Aurelius it's not uncommon even to hear Marcus Aurelius referred to as a pioneer of stoic philosophy but you have to understand that Marcus actually comes

very very late in the development of ancient stoicism in order to really tell the story of stoicism you have to go to ancient Greece and I would say that you actually need to go back to Socrates Socrates was a Greek philosopher who lived in Athens while Socrates himself did not found a school many of the people who were influenced by him did this is how you have Plato's Academy or the parapatics who are the followers of Aristotle or the epicureans or the cynics or the different kinds of Skeptics or the stoics each of these schools

of thought had its own kind of flavor but they PA inherited a way of thinking about Philosophy from Socrates which was that philosophy was in service of helping you to live a better life in fact the ancient Greeks were kind of obsessed with this idea of determining what the best human life was they viewed all of philosophy and learning so physics and logic and ethics all of it was part of this larger project of human flourishing and in this regard at least the stoics are just a typical normal example so the founder of stoicism was

Zeno of kitum and almost everything that we know about Zeno of kitum comes from this book this is the lives of the imminent philosophers by the ancient historian diogenes lus so in that text we actually learn a few interesting things about Zeno of kitum he was very interested in figuring out how to live the best possible life and one of the ways that he tried to make some progress on that was by visiting the Oracle of Deli this is also how the story of Socrates begins Zeno asked the Oracle how he could live the best

possible life and the Oracle told him that he needed to take on the complexion of this the dead and Zeno interpreted this as meaning that he needed to make his mind more like ancient authors and so he needed to read and study them Zeno eventually goes to Athens he's looking for a philosophical teacher like Socrates but the only problem that he has is that Socrates has been dead for quite a while but Zeno did find a teacher that was the cynic philosopher creates we're not going to go in depth about cynic philosophy it's just helpful

to note that in a lot of practical ways cynic philosophy and stoicism actually have a lot in common it's just that the cynic to be significantly more intense about things for instance the stoics would go on to say that it's fine to be wealthy but that wealth strictly speaking doesn't matter the cynics might openly advocate for just being poor on purpose the cynics also really didn't care about social convention um and in fact the name cynic actually comes from the Greek word for dog which was kind of meant as an insult that they later took

on as just a name for themselves so Zeno doesn't only study with cynics though eventually he studies with people who have been influenced by Aristotle and by PL as well and it's only after that that he goes on and founds his own school and he started to teach at a place called The Painted porch and this is actually where we get the name stoicism the Greek word for porch is stoa so the stoics are basically like the people who meet at the porch they're porch people it would be really great here to talk about some

of Zeno's writings the truth is we don't have any and this is true for many early stoics much of their work is just completely lost to history this includes the second head of the stoa cleanthes we only have one text by him him and then the third head who's considered to be possibly the most foundational and important stoic cryus we only have fragments from him but from other ancient summaries and accounts of stoicism we know that cryus played an important role in systematizing stoicism turning it into a complete and comprehensive system that you could study

as a whole cipus basically took stoicism which previously had been maybe some disconnected but very interesting and related teachings and tried to turn it into a philosophy that was about life and the universe and everything now the stoa continued after cipus and in fact there would be many other heads of the school and many other stoic writers but typically when people say the stoics believed they're often referring to CPUs systemization of the earlier teachings from people like Zeno and cleanthes sometimes we talk about a group called the middle stoics this be other Greek stoics like

antipater or posidonius some of these stoics would actually make significant changes to the ideas of stoic philosophy the philosophy would continue to spread through the Greek world and then the Roman world and that leads to a group of writers that we sometimes call the Roman stoics these are people like Marcus Aurelius epicus Cicero to some extent and cica we'll get back to the Roman stoics after we've talked a little bit about what the stoics really believed for the stoics philosophy could actually be broken up into three components that's physics logic and ethics now different stoics

actually disagree about which should come first the logic or the physics but ethics was usually seen as the culmination of stoke philosophy and would be presented last all of these terms are meant to be used pretty broadly like physics isn't just about what you would study in a physics class but it's also about things like whether or not God exists and what God is like logic is also understood pretty broadly so it's not just the formal analysis of arguments like we would use it now but it was also the study of good reasoning and what

we would typically call epistemology the study of knowledge I'm wondering if knowledge was even possible and then ethics is basically how to live a good life in light of what we know about the world and about Logic the stoic viewed philosophy as a kind of field around that field is logic the land and the trees in the field are physics and the fruit of the trees it's ethics all of stoic philosophy really is leading up to those ethical questions which I think by the way is why so many people look to stoicism just for practical

advice it's what the stoics really thought we be aiming for it's just that currently modern readers like to skip a couple of steps and go straight to the ethics and not worry about the physics or the logic we're going to follow the example of those early stoics and we are going to talk about physics logic and then ethics oh hold on um I need to see who's at the door hey Jared just so you know delete me is sponsoring this video all right that's good to know um do I know you no but I know

you how' you find my address it's on the internet you see data Brokers take all of your information and then they sell it and people can use that to steal your identity or to discriminate against you when you're applying for jobs or to show up at your house exactly but if you use delete me they can help you remove all of that information from the internet so how does this work all you have to do is set up your account with delete me you give them some information and then their experts get to work and

they're going to start removing your information from the internet they'll find and remove your personal information from hundreds of websites like my address and your name your phone number your relatives social media all that kind of stuff and they don't just do it once they'll keep scanning for an entire year I do like that I knew you would and I think your audience would too so I just need you to read this get 20% off delete me US consumer plans when you go to join delet me.com Henderson and use promo code Henderson at checkout that's

join delet me.com Henderson Cod Henderson hey that's a that's a pretty good deal now in all seriousness I use delete me to keep my private information off of the internet and I think you should too so go to join delet me.com Henderson use the code Henderson at checkout and you get 20% off a US consumer plan now we're going to get back to talking about stoic physics stoic physics is often described as materialist though some Scholars prefer the name corporalist because stoics believe that everything that truly exists has a body if you know how philosophers

talk about metaphysics today you might think the view that everything that exists has a body would mean that the stoics don't believe in souls or in God or in anything that we would consider to be kind of immaterial but that's not quite right the stoics believe that God exists for instance it's just that God has a body there are souls but Souls have bodies even wisdom itself something that the stoic seek has a kind of body stoic metaphysics in this way is just really kind of weird now the stoics also believe that there's a thing

called subsistence which differs from existence and this lets you talk about a different class of entities that don't really exist but we still kind of need them as we build our theories of the world this would be things like time or void is kind of like space these are said to subsist but not exist when stoics would do a kind of analysis of language they would rely on something called Lea and leca are a lot like what we take to be propositions nowadays in contemporary philosophy of language or philosophy of Mind Lea also only subsist

rather than exist the distinction between existence and subsistence is vexed in fact I would say a lot of contemporary philosophers would say that it's meaningless or you can't even make coherent sense out of it or even if you can make coherent sense out of it it's pointless you just don't need it in any serious philosophical theorizing if you're interested in learning anything about this stuff I'm just going to point you down below to what I think is a pretty comprehensive list of resources for you to go and learn more about stoic philosophy on your own

other parts of stoic physics look pretty common for the period for instance thinking that the world is made up of four main elements those four elements being fire water Earth and Air but more distinctively the stoics believe that all of reality was made up of two principles the active principle and the passive principle the active principle which is also identified with God sort of Acts upon the passive principle and the passive principle is really the primordial stuff out of which objects or things in the world are made but the active principle doesn't just act on

the passive principle the active principle acts through something else which is called Numa that comes from the Greek word for breath this is what makes objects endows them with certain properties differences between types of creatures is described in terms of differences um in Numa sometimes talking about the tensility of Numa the stoics didn't just say that the active principle was identified with God they would also describe what God is like sometimes the active principle was identified with Zeus you see this for instance in a text that we have from cleanthes called a himy to Zeus

we'll talk about that himym a little bit later the active principle though was also sometimes identified with the low Loos which is the Greek word for well basically word in Greek philosophy logos is something like a technical term and it can often mean something like a rational structure or principle behind the world if you're familiar at all with the Bible you'll actually see this in the Gospel of John if you look in the Greek there so at the very beginning of the Gospel of John it says in the beginning was the word that word there

is logos John the Evangelist is actually using terms from earlier Greek philosophy to then try and describe Jesus Christ and in this way you actually see some parallels between the stoic conception of the universe and the early Christian conception of the universe but Christians also say that the logos is like a person the Divine person and that is not the stoic view God might be better understood as a kind of life force that goes through the universe and this life force actually dictates everything down to the smallest detail so the Stokes were actually very deterministic

about the universe everything that would happen in the universe was sort of planned out and was being guaranteed by God and this includes what's going to happen to the universe eventually for the stoics the Universe goes through periods of order we're in a period of order right now and then periods of disorder are kind of a conflagration in which the entire universe is actually consumed by fire and then it repeats it's not always clear if these Cycles are supposed to be strictly the same so I don't know if in the next stoic cycle there will

be someone who is identical to me making a video that is identical to this and that someone who is identical to you will be watching the video but it could be or it might be that the Cycles are similar but not strictly the same I was trying to think of a good way to illustrate this and unfortunately the best example I can think of is like this fantasy series The Wheel of Time which you might know I'm a big fan of it's just basically common knowledge in those books that the world is going to go

through Cycles um and that people will be reborn but but they're not going to do the exact same things they're highly similar Cycles but they're not always the same really the key point for stoic physics are that everything that exists has a body and bodies really are the things that can be affected causally the active principle is the thing that kind of makes objects into what they are by acting on the passive principle and that's either God or Zeus and the active principle also ensures kind of Highly deterministic universe that will go through cycles of

Destruction and rebirth later stoics like tetus will talk about the metaphysics of stoicism but they often don't take the time to defend it they almost take stoic metaphysics as obvious they're just assuming it there's a section in epictetus's discourses where he talks about Providence and how he's just admiring the fact that Zeus basically takes care of all of us and he thinks that a rational person is just going to be grateful for the kind of care that Zeus has shown this doesn't strike many of us as obvious but it's just how the stoics even the

later Roman stoics thought when we talk about logic now we often want to just say that we're studying arguments seeing whether or not arguments are good or bad but again the stoic way of conceiving of logic is much more broad stoic logic includes what we would call philosophy of Mind philosophy of language epistemology logic itself and also rhetoric and a lot of the stoic logic stuff actually culminates in a figure known as the stoic Sage this by the way is one of those key places where Modern popularizations of stoicism just completely ignore something something which

was at least at one point in the history of stoicism incredibly important so we're going to talk a little bit about what the stoic Sage actually is a key part of stoic logic was the study of dialectics but again they're using the term in a way that we typically wouldn't for us dialectics is a kind of process you can even think about it in terms of Plato's Socratic dialogues in those what will happen is someone will propose a definition or a philosophical position and then the interlock will engage in a kind of question and answer

session with them and each answer is supposed to refine the previous definition or position and by the end you're supposed to have a satisfactory definition and you've done this through a dialectical process but the stoics actually just say that dialectics is the knowledge of what is true false and neither true nor false and according to how diogenes summarizes the stoics only the stoic Sage is a dialectician so only the stoic sage has true true comprehensive knowledge of what is true false and neither true nor false in the world when the stoics talked about knowledge they

would sometimes use an illustration of your hand this illustration is credited directly to Zeno of kitum so Zeno would splay his fingers out and say that this was like an impression on the mind he would then close his fist and say that this was like calyps catalepsy is a kind of assurance that the impression in your mind reflects how the world actually is then Zeno would grip his fist with his other hand that kind of strength was akin to the knowledge that was possessed by the sage I found this great description of the sage from

the philosopher RJ Hinson and this is how he describes the sage stoic sages never make mistakes securing their understanding of the providential structure of the world which is identical with fate which in turn is identical with the will of Zeus sages order their lives in accordance with it assimilating their will to the will of Zeus living in accordance with nature and so achieving the smooth flow of life so devoutly to be wished for another scholar the great AA long whose book helenistic Philosophy by the way was a huge resource in me making this video describes

the age like this he never IRS never fails to grasp things with complete Security his knowledge is equivalent to truth since it is based upon the causal Nexus which controls Cosmic events unlike the ordinary man who utters some true statements which he cannot prove against every attempt to overturn them the wise man's judgments are infallible since he knows why each of them must be true the stoic Sage is a kind of Ideal for us the sage can perceive what is true in the world and is able to justify all of his beliefs the sage is

confident in his beliefs because he can give proofs for them or justifications when challenged and he never airs and he never fails and this allows him to see the world for what it's like including that providential structure that we talked about when we talked about stoic physics the sage is actually able to sort of see how God or the active principle is working in the world this then allows the sage to act rightly and that's the whole point of stoic ethics it is the ethics that draws so many people to stoicism and this is for

good reason if you pick up a book like this epic titus' complete works and you read it you will mostly be reading stoic ethics and you will likely find them inspiring and I would even say helpful in how to live a better life that's because stotis is practical and it is an applied philosophy but what I've hoped to try to convince you of so far in this video is that the ethics is really kind of built on top a lot of theoretical philosophy the kind of philosophy that frankly people like to dismiss the stoics thought

that physics and logic were essential parts of living a good life you see the core idea in stoic ethics is the idea of virtue and virtue is really about acting in accordance with nature but in order to act with accordance to Nature you have to know what the world is like without having an understanding of what nature is like you're just not going to know if you're acting rightly by acting in accordance with nature first to act virtuously you have to understand what human nature is like what sort of being or creature argue and for

the and for the stoics that mostly means that we're rational and that we're social but then there's sort of nature with a capital N kind of universal nature which is sort of the world and the stoics believe that nature is good in itself it is not the random haphazard and disordered world that sort of modern science seems to indicate that we live in it's a world of intention namely the intention of God or the active principle which is making everything work out according to a plan this goes hand in hand with the stoic idea of

Divine Providence so cleanthes the second head of the stoa writes about this in a text that we call him to Zeus and here Zeus is clearly identified as God or the logos or the active principle in that cleanthes writes nothing occurs on the Earth apart from you oh God not in the Heavenly regions nor on the sea except what bad men do in their Folly but you know how to make the odd even and to harmonize what is dissonant to you the alien is a kin so all good things are being sort of insured by

nature but occasionally free agents like us like we human beings will will choose not to act rightly but the active principle is actually capable of taking all of these bad things that we do and make making them just work out for the sort of divine plan and I love that metaphor that cenes uses here of finding Harmony out of dissonance I think that's a really nice way to put it if you skip ahead several centuries and look at Marcus aurelius's meditations you can see this thinking was still preserved in the later Roman stoics when Marcus

is dealing with someone who has done him wrong or is acting wrongly he attributes it to their ignorance of the world or to their human nature they just don't know what sort of creature they are and so he kind of Pies them when they do wrong even even when they are doing wrong toward him but whenever there are things in the world that he can't seem to make sense of he'll try to take the perspective of the universe thinking about how those things might appear to him to be bad but from the perspective of the

universe actually everything is going to work out and he uses this sometimes to even kind of comfort himself and here you can see that Marcus is actually basically trying to emulate the figure of the stoic Sage the stoic Sage is someone who knows what the universe is like and they use that in their moral reasoning and so here Marcus is actually using principles from stoic physics to try and make sense of the ethical life it's not always clear if the stoics mean the stoic Sage to be an attainable ideal or if what it's supposed to

be is kind of an Exemplar for all of us in our reasoning about the world and our actions but regardless you can see that Marcus is actually trying to emulate the sage I said earlier that the good life was living in accordance with nature and the stoics call that virtue because of these ideas that are going on in the physics and the logic the stoics actually believe that virtue is always possible so actually in every circumstance you have the ability to act rightly to do the right thing maybe there would be some very limited circumstances

where you have no virtuous options in that case the stoics have fairly extreme Solutions like killing yourself I think that's a bad bit of advice and so we're just going to skip over that things like Pleasure and Pain which for the epicureans were part of the constituents of either the good or the bad life are really kind of Irrelevant for the stoics the stoics will talk about pleasure as what they called a preferred indifferent it feels nice to have but strictly speaking doesn't make your life better and they would say the same things about social

status or wealth these things you know generally make your life easier and they might even make it easier for you to be virtuous but they aren't themselves the things that make your life good for the stoics it boils down to Virtue and there really are just four and those four main virtues for the stoics are Prudence Justice Temperance and courage that's acting prudently or wisely understanding right actions it's kind of wisdom Justice which is about treating people fairly and with the respect that they deserve Temperance which is about moderating your desires and not letting your

desires prevent you from acting virtuously and courage which is about not letting fear hold you back from acting virtuously either the stoic Sage actually strictly speaking has no passion and sometimes we will describe the sage as being apathetic but that doesn't have that negative connotation that we talk about now the passions are sorts of things that take over for us and sometimes they get in the way of us acting rightly but the sage doesn't need passions the sage just sees the world for what it's like and only has true perceptions of the world and so

the sage really is passionless or kind of emotionless as we would understand it now and that actually brings us to a pretty important myth and a myth about a myth because a lot of people like to say that stoicism is about not having any emotions and then Everyone likes to say well that's a myth stoics know you have emotions it's about handling them and both of those are kind of true so it does mean that actually in the ideal you would not have passions but but almost none of us or possibly any of us will

ever be the ideal and so there the stoic answer is not about suppressing your emotions or pretending you don't have them that's just living in denial it's acting rightly even when you do have those emotions so you remember when I talked about that early stoicism stuff and said we' get to talk about r stoics well we finally managed so after chus who's the third scholar of the stoa you see an expansion of the philosophy you see other stoic writers like posidonius just as an example and they would start engaging in responses and debates with other

philosophers from other schools especially the academics those followers of Plato and especially after the academics took a sort of skeptical turn just a whole wing of philosophy that's often just described as the academic Skeptics and as you see stoicism sort of get defended out in the world it starts to change some people start to see it as being a little bit watered down or diluted it's just that how ideas function in the world though right just because CPUs wrote it all down doesn't mean that's how everyone's going to understand stoicism forever and that's especially a

good attitude to have I guess since you can't read anything that chry has ever wrote down since we lost it all but stoicism was remarkably successful and it spread throughout the Roman Empire when most people want to talk about stoicism they're thinking about stoicism in the Roman Empire the L stoics or the Roman stoics these are people like Marcus aelas like epicus like cica like moonius Rufus there are more but those are kind of the big four cisero is sometimes also included cisero is not really strictly a stoic you can just see the influence of

stoicism in his writings and just by looking at three of those figures you can see how widespread stoicism had become so we all know Marcus Aurelius is a stoic we also know that Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of Rome according to makavelli actually he is the last good emperor of Rome when we read his meditations we get to read the thoughts of an emperor and a stoic philosopher trying to live virtuously in circumstances that do not always make that easy but then when we go back and read epicus we're actually reading the thoughts of a

slave epicus was a slave he was owned by a secretary to Nero so while he had it better than many slaves because he was able to study philosophy and in fact that's how he studied under masonius Rufus he was still the property of someone else Aus was eventually freed when his master died he was then kicked out of Rome because the emperor Dom Mission banished philosophers so he went back to Greece which was his place of origin and then started to teach Philosophy eus by the way was alive about three decades before Marcus Aurelius cica

came before either of them he was actually born in 4 BC cica was a dramatist and a writer and a philosopher prolific letter writer and he's also a Statesman so we see three very different levels of power having access to stoic philosophy you have the slave who eventually becomes a free man but holds no particular social status the Statesman and the emperor all of them could find something in stoic philosophy that Drew them in and I think one of the reasons that they could find so much that they loved is because by then stoicism had

already shifted in orientation toward being more practical and downplaying the physics and the logic it's not as if the physics and logic of stoicism completely disappear you see it in epicus clearly you see it in Marcus Aurelius but the ethics seems to just take up a bigger portion of their thought fourth Roman stoic that I really love masonius Rufus almost all of his surviving writing is practical in nature he writes about food and sex and the equality of men and women and whether or not philosophers should live in caves and work in the fields his

answer to both of those questions is yes now masonius Rufus might have written more about physics and logic it's just that what we have is all about ethics this is either because his main focus was on ethics or it's because the people who were preserving these text and making copies valued the ethics more than they valued the other stuff you can even see the shift in focus on Ethics in how epicus structures his handbook the very beginning of the inidian the handbook begins with this line some things are up to us and some are not

up to us are judgment inclination desire aversion in short whatever is our own doing not up to us our bodies possessions reputations public offices in short whatever isn't our own doing this is a statement of what later commenters call the dichotomy of control modern stoics people writing today about stoicism place a lot of emphasis on this passage especially and while you might say that there's some physics and logic going on in the background the handbook clearly begins with ethics which just is a break from how stoicism was traditionally thought of developed and taught of course

the reason that you might have clicked on a video like this is because you've previously read the writings of someone like Ryan holiday or MIM Puchi or Donald Robertson these writers have tried to do is translate some stoic ideas and bring them into Modern Life and by and large they've done this by taking just the ethics and then seeing what still works when you give up The Peculiar and weird stoic views about physics and logic these modern stoics are not the first ones to do that you even see references to stoicism in Montaine even though

Montaine is a skeptic and the stoics kind of hate Skeptics uh but Montaine is still able to find some inspiration of the stoics Ralph Waldo Emerson mentions stoicism favorably in his essay on self-reliance but there's no mention of Lea or Numa or even Divine Providence as the stoics would understand it so there's a history of just taking the good parts of stoicism and leaving behind the parts that we don't really believe anymore I don't see any of the modern stoics talk explicitly about whether or not they believe in God or the logos or any kind

of Divine Providence so those arguments that Marcus Aurelius or epicus or other stoics might use to take on the perspective of the universe just don't work and so whatever modern stoicism is it's just going to look very different in that regard than ancient or sort of classical stoicism and this leaves us with an interesting tension something I think we should all think about a little bit more in the ancient world stoicism was actually admirable and admired because it was seen as this interconnected system where if you changed any one piece all of the other pieces

would have to change too but one of the reasons that stoicism has been able to be so inspirational for so long is that it seems like actually people have been able to detach stoic ethics from stoic physics and logic in a way that the ancient stoic probably didn't think possible and that's a puzzle for us to think about as we try to read and learn from the stoics in our own lives now even though I called this an in-depth explanation I still feel like we're only still scratching the surface so you check out in the

description a pretty comprehensive list of resources so you can learn more and if you like this and want to support my work consider checking me out over on substack there is a link down below all right I'll talk to you soon