An Intuitive Argument For Stoicism

Making a radical philosophy more obvious

One of the key Stoic claims is that a happy life is just a matter of cultivating excellent character. A virtuous life is a happy one. That’s all you need.

This frees our lives from the grasp of fortune and places it directly in our hands. Our happiness is up to us and us only. It’s also a properly egalitarian view. Happiness is available to all because external circumstances don’t matter.

On the face of it, this is a counter-intuitive view.

So, of course, there are several arguments for it. A classic defense derives from our nature. The good life for us is determined by what we are and we are decision-making beings. A happy life isn’t found in the pursuit of pleasure or externals but in excellent decisions and judgment, in other words, virtue. Another argument comes from the nature of the good. Still another derives from risk management.

Today, I want to explore a different one, one whose aim is not to persuade, but make Stoicism seem more intuitive. 

First, an observation. We’re all bothered by minor obstacles. Whether it’s traffic, career setbacks, insults, or sadness – these negative experiences interfere with us all. Yet, we recognize, in a real sense, that none of these setbacks are threats to our happiness. If a satisfactory life is achievable at all, it cannot depend on setbacks never occurring. 

The Stoics called these things indifferents. The kind of things that don't make or break a life. 

The ancient biographer Diogenes Laërtius includes a helpful list:

The Stoics say that some existing things are good, others are bad, and others are neither of these… Everything which neither does benefit nor harms is neither of these: for instance, life, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, reputation, noble birth, and their opposites, death, disease, pain, ugliness, etc….

At some level, everyone believes in the Stoic ideal. Neither the experience of negative events nor missing out on great things ruin a life.

The question is – why then grant the power to determine the value of our life to larger setbacks?

None of us escape death, physical suffering, loss, trials, or dark nights of the soul. Some lives are more or less tragic, but we must recognize that even the best 21st-century lives are full of trials. The world we’re born into and love falls away. Everything and everyone that we love suffers. All this is put at an abstract level. It doesn’t adequately capture the ordinary tragedies of experiencing and watching painful mental decline, personal betrayal, the loss of a child, the recognition that your family line has come to an end, humiliation, and on and on.

Yet despite seeing such events as challenges to a good life, we recognize a happy life is still possible. In this sense, Stoicism is intuitive.

The argument is simple: it’s easy to see that, at low intensity, negative experiences do not destroy a life. When adversity becomes more intense, this simple point does not fundamentally change. Happiness cannot depend on externals. It cannot be dependent on what happens to us. Just as we recognize that small obstacles cannot prevent us from finding the good, so we should see that adversity and tragedy are, in a real sense, not barriers to living well.

The issue for most people is the absolute nature of the Stoic claim: no negative event, so long as it is external, is sufficient for unhappiness. As Marcus Aurelius said:

“Take away your opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, "I have been harmed."

Take away the complaint, "I have been harmed," and the harm is taken away.”

Meditations 4.8

This applies to everything. Death, torture, and tragedy…

Many people start with the Stoic, but eventually, as pain increases, the possibility of happiness fades away.

One way to understand this view is to think of it as balancing indifferents. How good a life is depends on weighing up the bad and the good. Think of a simple philosophy that defines happiness at some level of the good and calls anyone who ascends to that level happy. Small setbacks matter, but cannot move you into the red. However, that doesn’t mean that no setback can. Sufficient tragedy can remove the possibility of happiness for a life by pushing us below the threshold.

The difficulty with this reply is that countless people have experienced heart-wrenching pain and achieved a kind of happiness nonetheless. We find flourishing throughout history even in the most devastating situations. What accounts for this? How people respond to their circumstances, not the weighing up of the goods and evils in a life.

There’s more to say here. I don’t think this is a knockdown argument by any means. But it’s an interesting one, in part because it starts with a simple and intuitive observation.

If we recognize that the loss of a jug is no obstacle to happiness, why should the loss of our loved ones be? There are vast differences in the intensity of pain, but no kind of suffering is enough to guarantee unhappiness. Joy is found in what we do and how we respond to what happens to us.