Criticisms of Stoicism, answered from the texts

The objections at a glance

Six objections come up again and again, from ancient opponents, modern philosophers and people who have met one too many “stoic” posts online. Each section below states one as strongly as we can and answers it from the Stoics’ own texts.

A seventh complaint, that modern Stoicism is self-help with Roman quotations attached, is about the modern version, and it is taken up under where the critics are right.

Fatalism: “If everything is fated, why try?”

The Stoics did believe in fate. Every event, they held, follows from earlier causes in one unbroken chain, and that chain is the reason of god working itself out (SEP (opens in a new tab)). Ancient critics drew the obvious conclusion, known as the lazy argument: if your recovery is fated, there is no point calling the doctor. A modern critic adds a second charge. A philosophy that calls whatever happens rational has taught you to stop objecting to anything.

Chrysippus, the school’s third head, answered the first charge by arguing that some events are fated together. The recovery is fated along with the call to the doctor, so the call is not wasted. He also offered an image: a cylinder needs a push to start rolling, but it rolls because it is round. Events supply the push. How you respond comes from your own character. Cicero reports both answers in On Fate. Is Stoicism a religion? explains the Stoic picture of fate and providence, and Marcus Aurelius’s argument that his way of life holds whether or not the gods attend to him (Meditations 6.44).

Marcus answers the second charge by example. In his notebook, fate never makes him idle. It tells him where his effort can still go:

“Acquiescing in the hindrance” does not mean stopping. It means moving your effort to what is still possible, because “another opportunity of action is immediately put before thee” (Meditations 8.32). Suppose you spent a month on a proposal and the budget was cut. The cut is outside your control. How you deal with the people affected, and what you propose next, are not. “Nothing will stand in the way of thy acting justly and soberly and considerately” (Meditations 8.32).

What the critic gets right: whether fate and responsibility really fit together is still argued over, and nobody has settled it. And the ancient reason for welcoming events, that the world is arranged for the good of the whole, is a belief many modern readers don’t share.

Coldness: “Stoics suppress their feelings”

At its strongest, this objection quotes the Stoics accurately. They did aim to be free of the passions: fear, grief, anger and craving. Epictetus advises that when you kiss your child, you remind yourself you are kissing a human being, who can die (Enchiridion 3, in our words). Read alone, that sounds like a method for loving people less.

But the passions the Stoics targeted were judgments gone wrong, such as believing that an insult must be repaid or that a loss has ruined your life. Numbness was never the aim. Epictetus says a person should not be without feeling, like a statue (Discourses 3.2), and the Stoics described good feelings, such as joy and caution, that a wise person has. Are Stoics emotionless? covers all of this with the sources, and the Stoics on grief reads Enchiridion 3 in context.

What the critic gets right: some Stoic sayings are hard, and the orthodox ideal of a wise person who is free of grief, even at a death, is one that many sympathetic readers still reject. Seneca pushed back on it himself: in his Consolation to Polybius he tells a grieving man to let his tears flow, and he dismisses those who say a wise man never mourns (chapter 18, in our words).

“Stoicism is cope”

“Cope” is internet slang for a comforting story you tell yourself so you don’t have to face a loss. On this view, Stoicism is cope with a reading list: you can’t change your situation, so you redescribe it until it stops hurting. Epictetus can be read that way:

The unjust man is richer. You are more honest. So “why are you vexed then, man, when you possess the better thing?” (Discourses 3.17). The same discourse ends by saying that what we must get rid of is not poverty but our opinion about poverty (Discourses 3.17, in our words). To a critic, that is exactly what you would tell poor people if you wanted them to stay quiet.

Two things count against reading this as cope. The first is context. Epictetus is talking to a man who resents someone who got rich by flattery and shamelessness. His point is that you can’t have both the rich man’s money and your own decency, because giving up the decency was the price of the money. That is an argument about envy. It says nothing against working, earning or asking for a fair wage.

The second is what cope means: choosing a belief because it feels better. Epictetus demands the opposite. In Discourses 2.15 he deals with a companion who had misread Stoic firmness as never changing his mind:

The man had made a dangerous decision for no good reason and defended it only because he had made it. Epictetus’s reply is that steadiness is worth something only when it rests on a judgment that has been tested. First comes “an inquiry whether the determination is sound or not sound” (Discourses 2.15), and only then firmness. A Stoic is supposed to hold a view because it is true and to drop it when it isn’t, however much comfort it gives. A rotten foundation, in Epictetus’s image, only brings the building down faster.

What the critic gets right: the texts spend far more words on changing your judgments than on changing your circumstances. A reader who stops at “not up to me” can use the phrase to put up with what is up to them: a job that is wearing them down, a debt they could renegotiate, a person who keeps taking advantage of them. The dichotomy of control puts your choices and actions on the side of what is yours, and letting go of what you can’t control is not the same as tolerating what you can change.

Quietism: “It keeps people out of politics”

A philosophy that tells you to care only about your own character is convenient for whoever is in charge. A population of Stoics, the critic says, would endure anything. Seneca supplies the best evidence. His essay On Leisure defends withdrawing from public life, and in chapter 8 he pushes the argument a long way:

Stewart’s first sentence is stronger than Seneca’s Latin, which says the wise man will not take part in just any state. But the conclusion is Seneca’s own: no real state is good enough, so leisure is necessary for everyone. He also notes that Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus, the school’s first three heads, never governed a state (On Leisure 6, in our words). If you want a Stoic text that recommends staying home, this is it.

The mainstream rule ran the other way. Earlier in the same essay Seneca quotes Zeno: the wise man will take part in politics unless something prevents him (On Leisure 3, in our words). And the Roman Stoics’ heroes were resisters. In the first book of his notebook, Marcus Aurelius thanks Severus for teaching him about Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dion and Brutus, and about the idea of a state where one law applies to everyone and people may speak freely (Meditations 1.14, in our words). In the same breath he credits Severus with the idea of a monarchy that respects the freedom of the governed: what Marcus admired was resistance to tyranny, not an end to emperors.

Every man on that list is remembered for standing up to a ruler. Cato fought Julius Caesar in the civil war, and Brutus helped kill him. Dion, usually identified as Dion of Syracuse, overthrew the tyrant Dionysius II. Thrasea walked out of the Senate rather than join its congratulations to Nero on his mother’s death, and Nero later ordered his death (Britannica (opens in a new tab)). Epictetus tells how Helvidius, Thrasea’s son-in-law, refused the emperor Vespasian’s order to stay away from the Senate, even when Vespasian threatened to have him killed (Discourses 1.2, in our words). Marcus himself spent most of his adult life in government, and much of his last decade at war on the Danube frontier.

What the critic gets right: Stoic politics was about how an individual should serve, not about changing institutions. The surviving Stoic texts do not call for ending slavery. Seneca’s Letter 47 asks masters to regard their slaves as fellow human beings and to eat with them, not to set them free. And as On Leisure shows, the exceptions to the duty of public life could be stretched to cover almost anyone.

Hypocrisy: “Seneca didn’t live it”

Seneca wrote that poverty is not an evil while being one of the wealthiest men of his time, and he spent years as an adviser to Nero (IEP (opens in a new tab)). The historian Tacitus records a political enemy, Publius Suillius, asking in public what philosophy had taught Seneca to pile up three hundred million sesterces in four years of imperial favor (Tacitus, Annals 13.42, in our words).

Seneca knew the charges. In On the Happy Life he lists them himself, at length:

The part of his reply that comes three chapters later doesn’t deny the gap. It argues about what the gap proves:

Two questions need separating here. Whether Seneca was a hypocrite is a question about Seneca. Whether wealth is a good is a question about wealth, and a rich man saying it isn’t doesn’t make the claim false, any more than a smoker’s warning about smoking is false. Seneca’s own defense works this way. He says in chapter 17 that he is not a wise man and never will be, and that he is content to chip away at his faults a little each day. In chapter 20 he asks readers to “look with respect on those who attempt great things” (On the Happy Life 20).

What the critic gets right: “the teaching might still be true” is a weaker defense than it sounds when the teaching is about how to live. A philosophy of life has to be livable, and its most famous Roman teacher, by his own account, didn’t manage it. Take his arguments seriously and his biography as a warning. The page on Seneca gives the fuller story, including his years with Nero and his death in 65.

“Virtue is the only good” asks too much

Philosophers have pressed this objection since antiquity. The Stoics held that virtue is the only good, and that health, money, freedom and even life are “indifferent”: worth preferring and pursuing, but not good in themselves. Cicero, who respected much of Stoic ethics, argued in On Moral Ends that the theory survives only in the lecture room. No lawyer could tell a jury that exile is not an evil, and no speaker, with Hannibal at the gates, could tell Rome that enslavement and death are not evils, so in public the Stoics talk like everyone else (SEP (opens in a new tab)). In the same book he argues that Zeno changed the older schools’ words more than their substance (On Moral Ends 4). The dilemma is sharp. If the difference is only verbal, Stoicism is ordinary good sense in technical dress. If it is real, it seems inhuman.

The Stoics answered that the difference shows up in choices, not vocabulary. You may prefer money, work for it and be glad to have it. What you may not do is lie for it, because the lie costs the one thing that is good. Epictetus’s question in the passage above, “Is it not better to be modest than to be rich?” (Discourses 3.17), is the test in miniature. Preferred indifferents sets out the distinction in full.

What the critic gets right: plenty of careful readers, ancient and modern, are not persuaded that someone who loses their health, home and family has lost nothing good. That disagreement isn’t a misunderstanding of Stoicism. It is the main argument about Stoicism, and it is still open.

Where the critics are right

Collected in one place, the concessions are these:

• The theology carried weight. Ancient Stoic acceptance rested on providence, the belief that the world is ordered for the good. Many people who practice Stoicism today don’t hold that belief, and the ethics without it is a modern adaptation, not the ancient system.
• The focus is inward. The texts are about reforming yourself, not institutions, and the Stoics lived with slavery without calling for its end.
• Some sayings are hard. Read without context, parts of the Enchiridion sound like advice to love less.
• The teachers fell short. Seneca is the clearest case, and he said so himself.
• The popular version is often self-help. Much of what is sold as Stoicism keeps the techniques and drops justice, the duty to other people and the demanding claim about virtue. Some of it turns into posturing, which toxic Stoicism vs. the real thing takes apart. Critics of that version are mostly right.

What the critics usually get wrong is the picture of a Stoic who feels nothing and accepts everything. That person is hard to find in Epictetus, Seneca or Marcus, who spent their lives teaching, advising and governing, and wrote constantly about justice and duty to others.

Judging it for yourself

The Stoics’ own test was practice. Try the method for a few weeks and see whether you judge more accurately and act better. Today’s teaching gives you one passage and one practice for the day, and the Evening Examination asks each night what you did well, what you could do better and what outside your control disturbed you. Read the sources too. The Enchiridion is short enough for one evening, and Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life is not much longer.