What the Stoics taught about fear

Fear is a judgment about what is coming

The Stoics sorted the passions by what they are about. Distress is about something bad that seems present; fear is about something bad that seems to be on its way (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). So a fear is a forecast with a verdict built in: this is coming, and it will be bad for me. Both halves are judgments, and judgments can be examined.

Epictetus makes the point in one of the best-known sentences of his Handbook, and the example he reaches for is the largest fear there is:

His argument is short. Socrates looked at death as steadily as anyone has, and it did not seem terrible to him. So the terror is not in death itself. It is in “the opinion about death that it is terrible” (Enchiridion 5). The chapter has its own page: Enchiridion 5.

None of this asks you to stop feeling the first jolt. Seneca notes that the bravest soldier can go pale as he puts on his armor, and a practiced speaker’s hands go cold before he begins; those reactions belong to the body and are not yet a decision (On Anger 2.3, in our paraphrase). The Stoic work starts one step later, at whether you agree with the jolt and let it steer. Stoicism and emotions covers that distinction.

Afraid of the wrong things

Epictetus’s most sustained teaching on fear is in Discourses 2.1. It opens with a puzzle: philosophers say you should be both cautious and confident, which sounds like a contradiction. His answer is that the two belong in different places.

“Will” is George Long’s word for what Epictetus calls prohairesis: your power of choice, meaning what you assent to, decide and do. Everything else is “not dependent on the will”: other people, your body, the economy, the hour of your death. Toward those, Epictetus says, be confident. Keep your caution for your own choices, because in his view that is the only place anything truly bad can happen to you.

The deer show what happens when we swap the two. Hunters strung cords with feathers to frighten deer toward their nets; Seneca mentions the same device in On Anger 2.11. The feathers could not hurt the deer. The nets could. Running from the harmless thing, they ran into the harmful one.

Here is the same trap in an ordinary week. You made a mistake on a project, and you have to tell your manager.

Everything in the left column is outside your control and survivable. Everything in the right column is a choice, and only those choices could make you a worse person. Fear of the first pushes you toward the second. Epictetus would have you walk into the meeting with confidence and be careful about what you say once you are there. His summary is the last line of the passage: confidence against death, and “caution against the fear of death” (Discourses 2.1).

Seeing hard things coming

Seneca recommended one more habit: expecting hard things on purpose, calmly and in advance, so that they are not strangers if they come (On Tranquility of Mind 11; Consolation to Helvia 5). That deliberate look ahead, now usually called premeditatio malorum, has its own guide. If what you feel is less a specific fear than a fog of what-ifs, start with worry instead.

Fear of failure

Fear of failure is rarely fear of the task itself. It is fear of what comes after a bad result: what people will say, what it will cost, what it will seem to prove about you. Epictetus has a passage about difficulty that speaks to all three.

In the lines the excerpt skips, Epictetus imagines the frightened scout’s report: death, exile, slander and poverty are terrible; run, the enemy is near. Most fears of failure are made of the last two. Slander is now embarrassment and gossip; poverty is the money. Diogenes the Cynic, an earlier and better scout, came back with a different report: death is no evil, since there is nothing shameful in it, and fame is only the noise that madmen make (Discourses 1.24, in our words).

The wrestling image comes first, though, and it changes what failing means. A trainer who matches you with a rough young opponent is not trying to spare you a hard bout. He is giving you the match that will make you better. In Epictetus’s image the prize is an Olympic victory, and that is “not accomplished without sweat” (Discourses 1.24). Losing a fall in practice is part of the training, not a verdict on you.

It also helps to notice that a feared failure has two parts. One is the result: whether the publisher says yes, whether the client signs, whether the room laughs at your toast. That depends on other people and on luck. The other is your part: the preparation, the effort and the honesty of the attempt. Fear of failure fixes on the first and often costs you the second. People prepare less so they will have an excuse, skip the application so they cannot be turned down, or leave a finished draft in a drawer for years. By Epictetus’s accounting, that is the real failure, because it is the only part that was ever yours.

When the failure has already happened, the questions change; Stoicism and failure picks up there.

The fear of death

Epictetus comes back to death often. It is the one fear no planning removes, and he states the problem plainly:

Just before this, he dares his listener to name a country death does not visit, or a charm that keeps it away. Just after, he names the source of the trouble: we wish for something, and it does not happen (Discourses 1.27, in our words). Death will come either way. Whether you spend your life “lamenting and trembling” about it is the part still open.

In Discourses 2.1, a few lines after the deer, he gives the fear a picture:

A child is frightened by an actor’s mask because it does not know what the thing is. Turn the mask around and it is hollow; it cannot bite. Epictetus’s claim is that much of our fear of death is that same inexperience, and that the remedy is to look, not to look away.

Seneca gives a practical reason to do the looking: fear of death bends the way you live.

Epictetus goes further in the Handbook: keep death, exile and everything else that seems dreadful before your eyes every day, death most of all, and you will never think anything mean or want anything too much (Enchiridion 21, in our words). The practice now goes by the later Latin label memento mori. For more of what the Stoics wrote about dying, see Stoic quotes on death. Grief at the death of someone you love is a different weight, and has its own guide.

What the Stoics meant by courage

Courage is one of the four Stoic virtues, and the early Stoics defined it as a kind of knowledge: knowing what is really to be feared and endured, and what is not (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). That definition explains why everything above counts as training in courage. Each time you sort the feathers from the nets, you are practicing the knowledge itself. It also explains why courage is not measured by how calm you feel. Seneca’s pale soldier, from the top of this page, still puts on his armor. In Epictetus’s words, “It is circumstances (difficulties) which show what men are” (Discourses 1.24).

Seneca’s example is Socrates. In On Tranquility of Mind he describes Athens under the Thirty Tyrants, who, he says, killed thirteen hundred of its best citizens. Socrates went on with his ordinary work in public anyway:

Look at what Socrates does in Seneca’s account. He consoles, he encourages, he reproaches the rich. None of it is spectacular. It is the work he had always done, carried on after it had become dangerous. The passage ends with a distinction worth keeping: “to keep oneself safe does not mean to bury oneself” (On Tranquility of Mind 5). Caution is allowed. Going silent out of fear is not. The colleague who still raises the safety problem, after the last person who raised it was moved off the team, is doing a small version of what Socrates did.

Marcus Aurelius came at fear from another side. Reasoning about prayer, he asks why, if the gods can help at all, we ask them to change events rather than to change us:

The last example is the hardest. Marcus does not say that losing a child would not matter, and he does not pretend the fear is gone. He changes the request. “How shall I not lose my little son?” asks for something no one can promise. “How shall I not be afraid to lose him?” asks for help with the part that is his.

The closest free exercise

In the Stoic Practice app, Fear is one of the twelve exercises in I Need Perspective. The guided Fear exercise is part of Premium, and this page does not reproduce it. The closest free exercise is Worry, which takes about three minutes: you write down what you actually know, set it apart from what you are picturing, sort what is up to you, and choose one thing to do today. It suits a feared event that has not happened yet: the meeting, the results, the flight.

If the danger is real and in front of you, deal with that first: get somewhere safe and get help. The exercise is for a fear you can sit down and think about.