Commentary
“Stoic idealism degenerated in somewhat the same fashion. It began with appreciation for all men because they possesed a common reason; and ended with condescension for those who did not have a full measure of rational endowment.” - Reinhold Niebuhr
I despise the way Stoicism is referenced today as yet another hyperindividualist reality-bending self-help tool. It’s on the same shelf to me as Buchmanism, The Four Agreements, and radical interpretations of CBT that unfalsifiably conflate every instance of distress with distortion.
The core ideas of Stoicism as the Ancient Greeks and Romans practiced it is a genuinely interesting approach to life. Every human engages in the application of universal reason called Logos, which puts everyone capable of reasoning into a single universal community referred to as the cosmopolis that transcends superficial communities like the state or tribe. This is, on the surface, radically egalitarian by rising above in-group and out-group distinctions.
In practice, to value anything in a society as a measure of one’s worth is to eventually make a hierarchy out of who demonstrates that value the most and is thus the most valuable. If we use the capability for reason to give value to humans, then what happens when people demonstrate different capabilities for reason? A newborn baby almost certainly has less rationality than most adults. That’s why we feel comfortable dictating to a child what they ought to do while depriving them of full human liberties. Someone in a coma can’t apply rationality either, so we use a proxy who can still apply rationality to make decisions in their place.
What about democracy? Should someone get to vote if they demonstrate irrational thinking or patterns? Buying a lottery ticket isn’t a rational use of money. Skipping a seat belt isn’t rational thinking. Drinking any amount of alcohol or smoking any substance, even nicotine and weed, is toxic to your body and isn’t rational (to those arguing about the medicinal properties of marijuana, oral consumption would be rational compared to smoking or vaping). Having kids isn’t rational. They’re an enormous cost and add a ton of constraints to your life, and you’re going to spend the rest of your life worried about their well-being. Should we deprive someone of voting rights if they demonstrate consistently irrational behavior? What about someone with a mental health condition that leads to frequent hallucinations and delusions?
Or maybe you disagree that some of the above makes you irrational. That’s the other problem: who decides what’s rational or irrational? How do you resolve disagreements in a way that doesn’t favor the current authority’s concept of rational? How do you challenge or appeal a rational decision without coming across as irrational? We run into this problem every single time we try to elevate a virtue or quality tied to self-worth into systemic policy. There’s no way to have a managed system that isn’t biased by the managers, even if they had nothing but good intentions.
Niebuhr’s main arguments go to the problem of evil: Stoicism claims evil stems from ignorance that conceals the rational decision or failed attempts at evaluating rationality. The model of the human mind being used implies that the capacity to reason can be the sole driving factor in human thought and action. Niebuhr, writing in part from a Christian premise that humans have the temptation to sin in our nature, claims that passions and especially pride drive humans to evil. In fact, the more rationality someone is capable of, the more rationalizing of a passion they’re capable of, and consequently the better they can convince themselves and others of a rational approach. Reason is often a personal passion expressed in universal language. Soren Kierkegaard elevated this line of criticism into the argument that Stoics were attempting to escape the complex nature of the world in which their idea of self is contingent and dependent on external factors by creating a fantasy in which the internal world is unconnected to the external one.
Niebuhr was also politically oriented towards collective action in the modes of both socialist organizations and labor unions, so he criticized the individual’s pride in rationality as taking humans away from recognizing their interdependence and limitations.
At the same time, he acknowledged that individuals have the capacity for self-reflection with their reason, but in groups, a collective egoism emerges that’s more powerful than rationality in the group’s discourse. People who disagree but use the same vocabulary, especially upper class jargon, will identify with each other more than people who agree but seem to come from different traditions and tribes. This also means that rational discourse cannot lead to conflict resolution so long as rationality and knowledge are corrupted by power. As a realist, he concluded that self-interested working-class collectives were a less corruptible alternative to hierarchies that either dilute responsibility across a group or look to a handful of elite individuals for leadership. Ralph Waldo Emerson put it more succinctly than me: “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.”
Niebuhr actually draws on a Christian philosophical tradition that dates back to at least St. Augustine about the fundamentally passionate nature of humans, where reasoning is real but subservient to our desires. David Hume took a more aggressive position that “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of passion.” Hume highlighted something called the is-ought problem in moral philosophy where people can describe something factually but prescribe something irrationally, or at least in a way that doesn’t follow from the facts.
Say someone takes candy from a 5 year old and the thing begins to cry. The thing is experiencing distress, and that someone is experiencing guilt and concern. Most of us would say that we should not take the candy and that if we do, we should return it.
“But why?”
“Because it’s selfish.”
That’s a claim to a factual description. It doesn’t answer-
“Why avoid selfish actions?”
“Because that leads to a lonely and unhappy life.”
“Why is a lonely and unhappy life bad?”
“Because happiness is pleasurable, and unhappiness is painful.”
“Why is pain bad?”
Like a 5 year old, we can keep asking “why” to figure out when a description becomes a prescription. At some point, you might get exasperated and say something to the effect of “because I’m not an asshole and I have decency, and that’s good enough for me to decide to bonk you over the head if you steal candies from babies. You can decide afterward whether that pain was good or bad”.
I don’t necessarily disagree with that conclusion, but I can’t say we actually showed through a rational or logical process why we want to do that. I just happen to have the same sense of decency as the person described above. If we can’t agree on that fundamental decency that we use to decide what we ought to do, we have to resolve conflict through means other than attempting rational discourse. We can try to share an experience that instills a common sense of decency, or we can declare war on each other and let the winner determine rationality.
Along those lines, there’s another argument St. Augustine made that I’m partial to: Stoicism in practice can quickly become apatheia. Apathy. Sure, some passions drive us into temptations or pain we hoped to resist, but some passions are responsible for the greatest human experiences.
The debilitating grief that accompanies periods of mourning is a reflection of how strong one’s attachment and commitment has been. You can’t experience love without being vulnerable to loss. You can’t make memories without longing for them in the future.
How do you make personally meaningful art from a position of pure reason, without passion striking through inspiration? As the saying goes, writers write what they know, and how moving can writing be from someone has never been moved?
From the religious perspective, how can you love God or God’s creations if you close yourself off from the heights of love and beauty? Aren’t despair and desperation a reminder of the impact that love and hope had?
Existential philosophers, or philosophers who proposed existentialist arguments, generally seemed more interested in life-affirming approaches given a perceived collapse in the traditional approaches to find meaning in serving an objective function.
I’ll go into more detail later, but it suffices to say that psychology researchers and cognitive scientists have empirically demonstrated that humans are systematically irrational. We certainly do have some ability to apply logic and rationality that comes from within ourselves, but we also have irrational yet predictable biases that we repeat in ways. We are not irrational randomly as a result of failing to approximate rationality; we systemically operate in ways that can’t be modeled successfully through a rational-irrational dualism.
People are motivated tacticians who apply motivated reasoning while their brains process more information than could possibly be examined rationally give our finite limitations. In fact, detaching oneself from emotions to pursue rationality single-mindedly is not necessarily considered healthy for an individual person. Emotions and thoughts alike represent information.
All in all, Stoicism has great aspirations and a true appreciation for a human mechanism at its foundation. It just gets used by the absolute worst “facts don’t care about your feelings” memelords and fintech bros to justify all kinds of selfish actions coated in self-righteous rationalizations.