Practice like a Stoic: 44, Decompose desired externals

Let’s learn how to control our passions by being a bit more analytical

After the banquet, by Midjourney.

[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. 258-260 of the paperback edition.]

“In regarding meats or eatables, you say: that is the carcass of a fish, or fowl, or pig; falernian is so much extract of grape juice; the purple robe is sheep’s wool dyed with juices of the shellfish; copulation, a functional discharge. Regards of this kind explore and search the actual facts, opening your eyes to what things really are. So should you deal with life as a whole, and where regards are overcredulous, strip the facts bare, see through their worthlessness, and so get rid of their vaunted embellishments. Pride is the arch sophist, and when you flatter yourself that you are most engrossed in virtuous ends, then are you most fooled.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.13)

Critics of Stoicism often mention Marcus’s thought experiment to support their notion that it is a dull philosophy, seeking to strip pleasure from human life. But that is to spectacularly miss the point of the exercise! Similarly, people read the “functional discharge” bit about copulation and conclude that Marcus must have been averse to sex. Well, if he was, he managed to have thirteen children nonetheless. More likely, Marcus lists these specific things and engages in this mental exercise precisely because he was prone to overindulge in them.

The way this works is by objectifying, if you will, the things that are at the root of your hard-to-control desires. Do you have a tendency to drink too much? Remind yourself that you are making a fool of yourself for some fermented grape juice. (Incidentally, falernian was a highly prized wine in ancient Rome.) Do you feel the lure of lust a little too often? Remember that it is the animal in you that is responding to a natural urge to procreate. And so on. Describing the objects of your desires in a neutral fashion is a way to help you put some cognitive distance between you and your passions (in the Stoic sense of negative, unhealthy emotions), an approach that is used even today in cognitive behavioral therapy. The point is not to do away with pleasure, but to keep in mind that these things we desire fall under the Stoic category of preferred indifferents: things you can pursue, within limit, so long as they don’t become an obsession and get in the way of your practice of virtue.

This leads us to Marcus’s wise reminder that it is precisely when you think you’ve gotten the hang of this virtue thing that you are more likely to fool yourself. You, reader, have made it this far, well into the third and most advanced Epictetian discipline; you have probably made progress, and feel justifiably satisfied by it. But this isn’t the time to let your guard down and consider yourself a sage. You’re not there just yet.