Practice like a Stoic: 28, Put the sage on your shoulder

Choose a role model in order to improve your virtue

Cato the Younger, Stoic role model. Bronze bust from Volubilis, dated to the 1st century, Musée de l'Histoire et des Civilizations in Rabat, Morocco. Image from Wikimedia, CC license.

[This series of posts is based on A Handbook for New Stoics—How to Thrive in a World out of Your Control, co-authored by yours truly and Greg Lopez. It is a collection of 52 exercises, which we propose reader try out one per week during a whole year, to actually live like a Stoic. In Europe/UK the book is published by Rider under the title Live Like A Stoic. Below is this week’s prompt and a brief explanation of the pertinent philosophical background. Check the book for details on how to practice the exercise, download the exercise forms from The Experiment’s website, and comment below on how things are going. Greg and/or I will try our best to help out! This week’s exercise is found at pp. 169-171 of the paperback edition.]

“We can get rid of most sins, if we have a witness who stands near us when we are likely to go wrong. The soul should have someone whom it can respect—one by whose authority it may make even its inner shrine more hallowed. Happy is the man who can make others better, not merely when he is in their company, but even when he is in their thoughts! And happy also is he who can so revere a man as to calm and regulate himself by calling him to mind! One who can so revere another will soon be himself worthy of reverence. Choose therefore a Cato; or, if Cato seems too severe a model, choose some Laelius, a gentler spirit. Choose a master whose life, conversation, and soul-expressing face have satisfied you; picture him always to yourself as your protector or your pattern. For we must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler.” (Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 11.9–10)

How do we learn to be more virtuous? According to the Stoics, the same way you get to Carnegie Hall: with practice. Lots of practice. It’s all well and good to understand Stoic theory at a conceptual level, but it takes real work to actually become wiser and live a more serene life. An effective technique to make the transition between theory and practice is to pick a role model and imagine that they are sitting on your shoulder, watching what you do and giving you some gentle, yet clear, feedback.

Socrates, the ancient philosopher who inspired Stoicism, said that he often heard the voice of a daimōn, an entity that kept him from doing wrong—a personification of our modern concept of conscience, if you will. The Stoics took this advice a step further and translated it into a purposeful exercise; as Seneca suggests to his friend Lucilius, choose a suitable role model to help you out. The model sage would help “straighten that which is crooked” (i.e., our own character) by use of a ruler—examples from the life of the model you choose.

A Stoic role model can be a close friend or relative, a stranger whose reputation we know from other people’s accounts, or a historical figure. They can be dead or alive, real or imaginary. As an example Seneca mentions Cato the Younger, Julius Caesar’s archenemy, who gave his life in order to keep his moral integrity. If that’s too exacting a standard, Seneca tells Lucilius, then go for a gentler soul, like Gaius Laelius Sapiens, a friend of the famous Roman general Scipio Aemilianus, to whom the orator and philosopher Cicero had previously written a treatise on friendship. But the Stoics also used legendary figures such as the mythological hero Odysseus or the demigod Heracles as role models and potential “rulers” against whom they could measure their own progress. The idea of conjuring a role model is found in other traditions as well, such as in the modern “What Would Jesus Do?” meme popular among Christians.