From ancient to new Stoicism: IV—Becker’s update
A conceptual map of where Stoicism came from and where it may be going
How do we update ancient Stoicism so that it becomes a viable philosophy for the 21st century and beyond? We start, as we did in this ongoing series, with a solid understanding of ancient Stoicism: if we don’t know the starting point we can hardly chart the way forward. Now that we have a grasp of ancient Stoic physics (i.e., science), logic, and ethics, we can begin to tackle four explicit attempts, made by different authors, to come up with a modern rendition of Stoic philosophy.
We’ll look in turn to Lawrence Becker’s New Stoicism (this essay), Piotr Stankiewicz’s Reformed Stoicism, Steven Gambardella’s new modern Stoicism, and my own modest attempt. We will, of course, not settle the matter once and for all. I hope, however, to provide some food for thought and a venue for continued discussion. Stoicism is a big tent, and together we can make it even bigger and more relevant to today’s living.
It is not going to be easy to summarize Becker’s attempt in one essay. He wrote a whole (somewhat hard to read) book about it, and I published a ten-party synopsis of it (authorized and corrected by Becker himself, as he was still alive when I first wrote it). Still, out of fairness to the other projects I will comment on during this series, one essay it shall be. (Fair warning, though: this is going to be a bit long, even by my standards…)
The way things stand
Why would we want to update Stoicism, and what does that mean, exactly? Because Stoicism is a philosophy, not a religion, and as the Stoics themselves clearly expressed, we need to constantly seek new and better ways, even though we are duly respectful of well tested paths:
“Shall I not follow in the footsteps of my predecessors? I shall indeed use the old road, but if I find one that makes a shorter cut and is smoother to travel, I shall open the new road. Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides. Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover.” (Seneca, Letter 33.11)
Becker asks himself a simple question: since Stoicism got “interrupted,” so to speak, by the rise of Christianity, what would it have looked like if it had had a chance to organically respond to the philosophical and scientific challenges of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, modernity, and post-modernity?
Stoicism has been “pillaged,” claims Becker, first by Christianity and then by modern psychotherapy, though arguably it is precisely that pillaging that has allowed Stoic ideas to make it to the 21st century. Especially modernity and post-modernity have been, in his view, largely problematic: “Pluralism, relativism, and irony abounded, alongside various forms of dogmatism about natural duties and the intrinsic moral worth of human beings. … It is a complete disaster. Only a few are escaped to tell you.” (p. 4)
Science has raised challenges for Stoicism, particularly in the rejection of the sort of organismic view of the universe the Stoics embraced. The cosmos—to the best of our understanding—is not a living being endowed with reason, but a set of processes described by empirical regularities we call laws of nature. Romanticism, on its part, has rejected the Stoic emphasis on logic and fully embraced the emotions, including the ones that Stoics think are unhealthy. And much modern moral philosophy sees ethics in terms of universal statements that are arrived at autonomously from an understanding of the way the world works, again contra Stoic thought.
After considering all of this, Becker proposes that a modern Stoic has to accept science as it comes, not attempt to rationalize it in order to fit ancient preconceived ideas about the nature of the world. Ethics must be a naturalistic enterprise, informed by facts about human nature and elaborated by way of practical reason in order to meet human concerns and needs.
Given all the above, what does Stoic training, and hence a Stoic life consist of? To begin with, Stoics evaluate the facts on the ground that shape their own and other people’s lives. They derive their values from practical reasoning applied to such facts, and they try to make their values into a coherent set, rank ordering their motivations to pursue a lifelong eudaimonic project. Moreover, Stoics aim at shaping their motivational dispositions (i.e., emotions) so that they align with and reinforce their chosen lifelong project:
“Stoic training aims to make it possible for us to salvage some form of a good life under adversity, and to be able to handle sudden, massive changes in our circumstances. … Living virtuously is the process of creating a single, spatiotemporal object—a life.” (pp. 20, 21)
In summary, a Stoic is a person who reflects on the facts of life and makes human-appropriate choices, who values agentic autonomy, and who thinks of her life as a virtuous project to be pursued, as logicians say, “all things considered.” And speaking of logic…
Normative Stoic logic
In his book Becker develops the rudiments of a modern Stoic normative logic, that is, a logic that is capable of helping us make decisions about how we ought to live our life. “Norms,” in this context, are facts about the behaviors of agents, their goals, their projects, and their endeavors. The crucial bit to grasp is that Becker builds Stoic logic as a series of conditional imperatives, similar to modern virtue ethicists like Philippa Foot. There are no universal imperatives (e.g., something like the Ten Commandments) but only IF…THEN conditionals: IF I wish to be a happy and well regarded member of a human society THEN I need to act cooperatively and prosocially with other human beings. That sort of thing.
This is the kind of means/ends practical reasoning that connects “is” and “ought,” that is, facts (about the world and human nature) with values. Such a connection is possible because ethics, as mentioned above, is not an autonomous discipline, but a result of science and logic. Ethics is practical reasoning applied to the human condition, as it was so understood by the Greco-Romans (but not by most modern moral philosophers).
There is no space here to delve into the details of Becker’s logic, but I wanted to point out that, like all systems of logic, it too is based on a set of axioms that are taken for granted. Four axioms, to be precise. They are:
The Axiom of Encompassment: the exercise of our agency through practical intelligence, including practical reasoning all-things-considered, is the most comprehensive and controlling of our endeavors. That is, we try our best to live rationally.
The Axiom of Finality: there is no reasoned assessment endeavor external to the exercise of practical reasoning all-things-considered. Meaning that no other considerations (e.g., the alleged wishes of a god) shape our eudaimonic project.
The Axiom of Moral Priority: norms generated by the exercise of practical reasoning all-things-considered override all others. Even though you may like to indulge in pleasures all the time, you recognize that you have a prosocial life to live.
The Axiom of Futility: agents are required not to make direct attempts to do (or be) something that is logically, theoretically, or practically impossible. What falls into such categories, of course, is up to your judgment. Which is why refining one’s judgment is crucial.
Live according to nature = follow the facts
Famously, the ancient Stoics’ motto was to “live in accordance with nature.” But they had a significantly different understanding of nature, both at the cosmic and at the human level, compared to ours. They didn’t know anything about quantum mechanics or general relativity, nor were they aware of evolution or genetics. Hence Becker’s reformulation of the concept along the following lines:
“Following nature means following the facts. It means getting the facts about the physical and social world we inhabit, and the facts about our situation in it—our own powers, relationships, limitations, possibilities, motives, intentions, and endeavors—before we deliberate about normative matters. It means facing those facts—accepting them for exactly what they are, no more and no less—before we draw normative conclusions from them. It means doing ethics from the facts—constructing normative propositions a posteriori. It means adjusting those normative propositions to fit changes in the facts.” (p. 46)
Norms, then, are neither independent of facts (as, say, Kant would argue) nor can they be read straightforwardly from the facts (as Sam Harris or Michael Shermer maintain). Again, in order to act ethically we need facts (science) and we need to be able to reason correctly about those facts (logic). Hence the recovery of the classical Stoic triumvirate of fields of study: science, logic, and ethics.
Stoics reject universal approaches to moral philosophy because the world is too complex for that sort of thing, despite the fact that much modern discourse in ethics centers around two types of universalism: Kantian deontology and Bentham-Mill style Utilitarianism. Too bad for modern moral philosophizing, then:
“Stoic ethics is messy because the social world is messy. We begin (and end) our deliberations in terms of actual human beings, rather than hypothetical, idealized, or schematic ones.” (p. 50)
What allows us to follow the facts is practical reason, the faculty that makes possible human agency. But Becker accepts—as did the ancient Stoics—that we live in a deterministic universe where everything happens as a result of cause and effect. Isn’t agency, then, an illusion? Not if properly construed. We Stoics don’t believe in “free” (meaning, independent of causality) will because we don’t believe in miracles, which are suspensions of the laws of nature.
Agency is simply the ability to arrive at autonomous—meaning internally generated—decisions concerning logically and materially possible courses of action. Importantly, agency is a unique human characteristic because it is recursive: it can be repeatedly applied to everything, including itself. Becker makes the point by comparing agency with a more standard human ability: digestion. Digestion applies to one thing and one thing only: the processing of food. Agency, by contrast, is the most comprehensive process we engage in. And it improves over time because of the human capacities to learn from experience and to plan by way of reason.
Of course, agency can be weakened by all sorts of external factors (imbibing alcohol, taking drugs) as well as internal ones (neurological damage, because of genetic causes, disease or accident). People so affected, temporarily or permanently, will be weakened agents, and they will therefore have more
trouble than others practicing virtue and conducting a Stoic life. Stoicism is not a panacea, it is a mode of life possible only for certain kinds of agents who are naturally social, capable of reason, and endowed with a more or less normally functioning brain. Psychopaths, for instance, cannot be Stoic.
This may not be enough for some people. But if one wishes to have a more robust sense of agentic responsibility one is out of luck, because of cause-effect determinism. Similarly, if one wishes to have a significantly less robust sense of agentic responsibility—along the lines of “my brain made me do it,” or “this was bound to happen since the Big Bang,” then one is also out of luck because he will not be able to actually act as if he really believed in such weakened or non-existence sense of responsibility. At the end of the day, some sort of what philosophers call compatibilism about agency is the only logically viable, and pragmatically useful way around these issues.
Virtue
A major challenge tackled by Becker in A New Stoicism is a modern reconceptualization of the fundamental Stoic notion of virtue. Virtue, from the Greek arete, means excellence. Here is how Becker modernizes the idea:
“We make the argument that virtue is achieved only through a natural course of moral development ending in a specifically Stoic form of ideal agency. The virtue [such process] produces is sufficient for eudaimonia. … Ideal agency is relentlessly aimed at the only thing that is ultimately good, namely, achieving and sustaining Stoic virtue, from which—and only from which—a Stoically appropriate form of eudaimonia will emerge.” (p. 90)
Let’s unpack this a bit, as this is both crucial and often misunderstood. Virtue is ideal agency in a way not very different, at the end of the day, from the Greco-Roman notion that virtue is a type of excellence. But “ideal” or “excellent” with respect to what, measured by which standards? By the notion of living according to nature that we just examined above. In the same way as for the Greco-Romans arete / virtue meant, in the case of human beings, to be prosocial and rational, so for Becker ideal agency means prosociality and rationality. Why? Because those are the characteristics defining humans as a species, the characteristics “following which” we arrive at a eudaimonic existence.
Becker’s notion of ideal agency is sometimes criticized on the grounds that a very efficient psychopath will also be characterized by it. But this is nonsense on stilts, and a profound misunderstanding of what Becker very clearly spells out in his book. A psychopath is a mentally damaged human being, which means that, by definition, he cannot achieve ideal agency, though of course he will still have some sort of agency, twisted toward non prosocial aims.
Agency, maintains Becker, is constituted by elements that may be “received” (i.e., arrived at without the aid of one’s agency, like our genetic makeup) or “constructed” (i.e., resulting from the exercise of one’s agency). Agency emerges during the normal course of human development, initially as a natural, instinctive behavior, and later, gradually, as a behavior shaped by external influences, habit, and conscious reflection and decision making.
Becker, just like the ancient Stoics, makes use of an analogy with physical health: we are all endowed with agency in the same way in which we are all endowed with muscles and an aerobic capacity. Through exercise, we can make both our body and our agency rise to the level of “fit.” Through much more exercise, we can make both of them rise to the level of “virtuosity.” If you are not practicing Stoicism (or a similar kind of philosophy) you are, in a sense, not going to the gym. If you are practicing at Olympic levels, you may be a sage. Most of us are okay with being merely fit…
Crucially, according to Becker, ideal Stoic agency is both necessary and sufficient for achieving virtue, and virtue in turn is necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia, thus inextricably interconnecting the three basic concepts of a life well lived according to the virtue ethical approach.
Happiness
Which brings us to happiness, in the sense of a eudaimonic life, a life worth living. The reason, as Socrates put it, that we need to live an examined life is because our life is a project all-things-considered, and the only way to make sure we live it well is to pay attention to the big picture and from time to time adjust our decisions accordingly. Think of eudaimonia as the pole star and of your agency as the rudder that keeps you on track.
What about the infamous “preferred indifferents,” that is, all those things that non-Stoics think are fundamental to happiness, like health, wealth, career, reputation, and so forth?
“It is true that Stoic happiness does not necessarily include nonagency pleasures—all the other possibilities for what we ordinarily call having a good time. But it is highly misleading to go on to say that such pleasures are superfluous, or that they ‘add’ nothing to virtue. They do not add virtue to a virtuous life, but they add something else to it. … The pleasures of virtue are never to be traded for nonagency ones, but among virtuous lives, those with nonagency pleasures, and nonagency goods generally, are preferred to those without them. Further, with virtue held constant, the more nonagency goods the better.” (p. 158)
How to live well as a modern Stoic
To live a good Stoic life requires social and political involvement. That’s because a Stoic simply cannot go through her life by exercising virtue only for her own sake. Virtue, by its very nature, is other-directed, which is why both ancient and modern Stoics are cosmopolitan, meaning that they are concerned with the whole family of humanity (and, arguably, with other species as well as with the environment).
But how, exactly, do we navigate life as Stoics? Becker suggests a model that is found in Cicero’s On Duties, which itself was inspired by the Stoic Panaetius of Rhodes. Panaetius introduced a concept known as role ethics (see also Brian Johnson’s excellent book on Epictetus’s take on the same notion).
Here is how Cicero explains it:
“It should be understood that nature has endowed us with two roles, as it were. One of these is universal, from the fact that we all share in reason and that status which raises us above the beasts. … The second role is the one which has been specifically assigned to individuals. … To the above-mentioned two roles, a third is appended, which some chance or circumstance imposes; and a fourth as well, which we take upon ourselves by our own decision.” (On duties 1.107, 110–11, 114–17)
Each of us plays four kinds of roles in life (personae in Latin, a reference to the roles performed by actors on a stage):
1. The universal role of a human being, a member of the human cosmopolis, endowed with reason and a prosocial instinct;
2. Whatever character we happen to have as a result of our genetic background, family upbringing, and cultural milieu;
3. Roles imposed on us by circumstances, like being someone’s son or daughter;
4. Roles chosen by us given the circumstances, like those associated with our career, with getting married, or with becoming a parent.
A good Stoic life, then, consists in the perfection of our agency aimed at playing our multiple roles as well as possible, inevitable trade-offs included. That is what virtue is. And that is what a eudaimonic life consists of.
[Previous installments: Stoic physics; Stoic logic; Stoic ethics. Next time: Piotr Stankiewicz’s Reformed Stoicism.]
This is great, Massimo. I think "excellence" might be more easily understood than "virtue", or rather, less likely to be misconstrued. But virtue is the goal, and your last paragraphs make a straightforward guide.