In the halcyon 1990s, I was trying to decide whether to go to graduate school or medical school. I called my father. He told me to become a professor.
“All of my friends who are doctors complain about their jobs,” he said. “Sure, they make a lot of money. But they complain about working all of the time, about billing insurance companies, about their student loans. All of my friends who are professors have happy lives.
“Become a professor, Clance,” he said. “You’ll never get rich, but you’ll have a good life.”
From a Stoic perspective, my father’s advice was excellent. In his Moral Letters to Lucilius, discussing the question of what counts as wealth, Seneca, the first-century Roman Stoic, writes, “Would you rather have much, or enough? He who has much desires more — a proof that he has not yet acquired enough; but he who has enough has attained that which never fell to the rich man’s lot — a stopping-point.”
In addition to recognizing that the lifestyle of the professor was sympathetic to what Seneca called “arranging one’s affairs according to nature’s demands” — satisfying, but not exceeding, the basics of what most human beings desire in order to live well — my father knew me well enough to recognize my strengths and limitations. As Massimo Pigliucci points out in his new book, How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Wisdom to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books), when Zeno of Citium, a Stoic of the third century BC, advises us to live our lives “according to nature,” he means not only that we should respect the fact that we are natural beings who live according to natural laws, but also that each of us must understand his or her own particular strengths and weaknesses, and seek the good life that accords with those talents, inclinations, and capacities. As Epictetus poetically puts it: “Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan.”
As a professor, I was a natural. So I took my father’s advice, demonstrating good Stoic rationality that, I’m sorry to say, has not always characterized my decision making. But a couple of years into my time at the University of Missouri at Kansas City — my first and only job as a professor — I read a magazine essay by another assistant professor discussing how she was working 60, 70, or more hours a week, trying to get tenure. I emailed my mentor, Bob Solomon, about it. Maybe she was right, I wrote; maybe we really were unjustly working our butts off for low pay. Bob, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote back almost immediately, saying: “Please stop believing your own bullshit. Add up how many hours you actually spend working, and email me back. We’ve got it so good.”
There are a few quick Stoic lessons here, from Epictetus, from Seneca and Pigliucci, and from Bob (who, to be accurate, was more Aristotelian than Stoic in his own moral convictions).
Epictetus insists that two things must be eliminated from the mind and character of any person who wants to be happy and good: self-deception (oi’esis) and mistrust (apithia). Oi’esis is also translated as illusion, conceit, or arrogance, and all of those applied to my situation. When I looked at my own work situation and did the math Bob suggested, I quickly realized that I was deceiving myself. While I might have liked to believe, for reasons of arrogance, conceit, and self-serving illusion, that I was slaving away in order to get tenure, the truth was that I was probably putting in a good 40-hour work week, and in a job that I loved. I had no reason to complain, just the opposite. In fact, what I should have expressed mistrust, or apithia, about was my own readiness to see myself as a victim of a job that was in fact a genuine privilege and pleasure.
Seneca recommends that we have well-selected mentors or role models, and that we ask their advice. For me that was Bob, untroubled by things he could not control, including the heart problem that could have killed him at any time, and did at age 64. That ability to let go, and to avoid deceiving himself, gave him a calm and joyful life.
As Pigliucci points out, “the other thing to remember about role models — and the Stoics understood this very well — is that they are not perfect human beings.” Pigliucci, a professor of philosophy at City College of New York, writes that our mentor, the Stoic sage, should simply encourage us to “display a bit more courage, a slightly more acute sense of justice, more temperance, and more wisdom each day.” When I am confronted by difficult decisions even now, 10 years after Bob’s death, I still think about how he would have handled the situation. “No excuses” was his Stoic-sounding mantra: the insistence that we take entire responsibility for our own situation, without ever pretending that we have more control than we do.
I turned 50 this year, and, looking back, I can say that my father and Bob were pretty much right. I have a good life, and so do most of my friends who are professors. But we live in a degenerate age, one of sophistry and materialism, in which education is less and less prized by our leaders and the general public. As readers of The Chronicle need not be reminded, our way of academic life is quickly vanishing. My wife, whose professional credentials are much better than my own, adjuncts four creative-writing classes a year for the grand sum of $10,000 ($2,500 per class). Philosophy departments around the country and around the world are shrinking or being closed. I live in Missouri, where tenure is under attack. At my university, programs are being cut because of reductions in the state’s higher-ed allocation. Professors and grad students wonder if theirs will be the next program to go. Our retirement and health benefits are shrinking. There’s no hope, only discussions of how to manage the pain.
Never mind the academic predicament — the world in general is terrifying these days.
For now it’s those not on the tenure track, but soon enough it could be the rest of us. The classicists are mostly gone. Who knows? Philosophy might be next on the chopping block.
If so, we’d join, in full, the precarious world everyone else already lives in. And never mind the academic predicament — when we glance up from our digital distractions, the world in general is terrifying these days. Our president is dangerously oblivious and unstable; unthinkable nuclear attack is becoming all too thinkable; terrorism, demagoguery, nationalism, poverty, hunger, and war all seem to be escalating. Our children are likely to have more difficult lives than we have. We can reasonably expect the future to be worse than the past. Even the weather is foreboding, and our inability to react responsibly all the more so. You think things are ugly in academe? Things are tough all over, and getting tougher.
If I can’t change the world — and even if I can, I can’t change it very much — is there some way for me to adapt?
“Stoicism,” Pigliucci writes, “originated and thrived in times of political instability; people’s lives could be upturned at a moment’s notice, and death could befall anyone, at any age.” The Stoics are useful when things are going well, but they’re at the top of their game when things fall apart. Ancient Stoicism was at its most popular in Rome during the first century BC and first century AD — notoriously turbulent, uncertain times. And it’s probably no coincidence that Stoicism seems to be enjoying a revival just now. There was a Stoicon conference (in Toronto this year) and Stoic Week. It is being championed by smart young writers and websites as the philosophy for our times. See, for example, Lary Wallace’s excellent essay in Aeon on using Stoicism as a “mind hack,” or other recent books on Stoicism, including Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero (Knopf, 2014), by James Romm, a classicist at Bard College, and The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (Oxford, 2014), by Emily Wilson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
So how can Stoicism help me with the worry that my profession is under threat? That the life I’ve chosen may no longer be available to future generations? Or — to confront a more immediate, personal fear — that I, a 50-year-old professor of philosophy, could suddenly find myself out of work?
In his “Practical Spiritual Exercises” at the end of his book — a refreshing feature in a contemporary book of philosophy! — Pigliucci summarizes how Stoicism can help. He looks to his own well-chosen role model, Epictetus.
Examine your impressions, Pigliucci advises. “Make a practice at once of saying to every strong impression: ‘An impression is all you are, not the source of the impression.’ Then test and assess it with your own criteria, but one primarily: Ask, ‘Is this something that is, or is not, in my control?’ And if it’s not one of the things that you can control, be ready with the reaction, ‘Then it’s none of my concern.’”
The epistemological skeptics among us will fret about the relationship between an impression and the source of an impression. But the practical lesson is clear and helpful: Some things are under our control, others aren’t. About those we can control, we can act to change them, and further worry can only hurt us. About those we can’t control, we cannot act, and worry is, again, counterproductive. Why add mental suffering to whatever we’re suffering to begin with?
The Stoics are useful when things are going well, but they’re at the top of their game when things fall apart.
This familiar advice is easier said than followed, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s eminently sensible. Pigliucci gives the example of getting food poisoning when he wanted to be working. None of us wants to get food poisoning, but once it has happened, we can only make it worse by fussing about it.
Let’s consider, then, the changes at my university. I can — and should — do everything in my power to keep philosophy relevant and to emphasize the importance of philosophy in particular and the humanities in general to administrators and anyone else who will listen. I should keep my own classes dynamic, productive, and thus, hopefully, well enrolled. I should encourage my department to work to adapt our curriculum and extracurricular activities, within the limits of the integrity of our discipline, to the changing needs of our students. I should write what I can to show that philosophy matters to higher education here in Missouri and elsewhere. All this — more than enough to keep me happily busy — I can and ought to do. And after that, I should … let it go.
If the university closes our department, I can’t improve matters by beating myself up over it.
Pigliucci’s second practical exercise — also quoting Epictetus, and recalling the Buddha — is similarly helpful: Remind yourself of the impermanence of things, whether inanimate, like a piece of china, or someone utterly dear to you, like family members who are, alas, only mortal.
Sooner or later, I will no longer be a professor. Although I’d rather adapt to the change after my retirement is fully matured, the fact of the matter is that I will have to retire eventually, and so thinking about no longer being a professor now, rather than later, might actually help me prepare. Furthermore, compared with other things in my life — family, friends, health — being a professor is not all that important. And though I don’t like to admit it, don’t even like to think about it, my family, too, is temporary. My father has already died, and I expect that I will live through the death of my mother. My friends are temporary: Too many have died. Health waxes and wanes for me, as it does for everyone, and it is more often waning as I get older. And so on.
Does this decrease the extent to which I cherish these individual aspects of my life? Quite the contrary. The more aware I am of their fragility and impermanence, the more actively and tenderly I value them.
Pigliucci’s is more than a superficial behavioral guide, because he takes the reader through Stoicism’s philosophical steps, showing how the prokopton (or student) progresses from a particular understanding of the universe and our lives within it, through the human epistemological situation and the structure of desire, to arrive at Stoicism’s promised tranquillity. He lays his cards on the table: He is a Stoic, and his account of how to live is an elaboration of Epictetus’ Discourses, with reference to other great Stoics. He considers both Buddhism and secular humanism as possible nonreligious, therapeutic solutions to the problem of life, but he advocates Stoicism, because it is neither textually opaque, the way Buddhism can be, nor “too dependent on science and a modern conception of rationality,” the way secular humanism often is.
In A Fragile Life (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Todd May, a professor of philosophy at Clemson University, engages more seriously with Buddhism as an alternative to Stoicism but rejects it, because he believes — mistakenly — that the Buddhist seeks to become impervious to suffering. May admires Stoicism and adds that one of the wisest people he’s ever known is a Buddhist, but ultimately decides that neither philosophy provides everything he needs. Instead he draws on a variety of sources, Buddhism and Stoicism among them, to arrive at his own particular view, which he calls “living vulnerably.”
May’s book is an instructive contrast to Piglucci’s, for we, too, might be suspicious of Pigliucci’s idea of “tranquillity.” Am I really willing, much less able, to think of even my children as impermanent? And isn’t attachment kind of handy, maybe even invigorating?
Attachment, desire, suffering and happiness: Aren’t those precisely the things that make human life worth living? May thinks so, even arguing, in his excellent final chapter, “Living Vulnerably,” that we should strive not for invulnerability but rather for acceptance of the fact that we must — perhaps even ought to — suffer. It is suffering that keeps our hearts caring.
A Stoic sage or a Buddhist bodhisattva is missing something morally important, May argues. The bodhisattva’s compassion for others is accompanied by an equanimity “that allows her to take on the suffering of others without adding to her own suffering. In fact we might go further and argue that it is only because of her equanimity that she can do this. We know from experience that the deeper our own suffering, the more difficult it is to relate to that of others.”
May sees Stoicism, Buddhism, and Taoism as providing a kind of invulnerability to suffering. And that, to my mind, is where he goes importantly wrong. That a particular philosophical position is motivated by the need for a response to suffering does not mean that philosophy makes one impervious or immune to suffering. The bodhisattva experiences more suffering than the rest of us, not less — indeed, this is crucial to the moral grandeur of the bodhisattva. The Buddha himself remarks that “suffering and happiness are equally shared between sentient beings and myself.” Similarly, Palden Yeshe, an 18th-century spiritual sage, writes about the great bodhisattva Gyalse Thogme: “In short, like all great beings, Gyalse Thogme suffered more than others when they themselves suffered, and he felt happier than others when they were happy.”
Many of the most painful human emotions — Pigliucci focuses on loneliness — are, as he puts it, in agreement with the Buddhists, “a natural condition of humanity,” whether simpleton or Stoic sage. Loneliness could still be excessive or debilitating — as grief can be — and at that point some sound Stoic or Buddhist advice would surely be helpful.
But if Stoicism doesn’t make us impervious to suffering, we might ask, what’s the point? Its value, as with Buddhism, is that it refines our intellects even as it changes the unhappy habits of our hearts. As Epictetus puts it: “With every accident, ask yourself what abilities you have for making a proper use of it. If you see an attractive person, you will find that self-restraint is the ability you have against your desire. If you are in pain, you will find fortitude. If you hear unpleasant language, you will find patience. And thus habituated, the appearances of things will not hurry you away along with them.”
Stoicism, then, helps us keep from getting carried away, hysterical. As Marcus Aurelius writes in his Meditations: “Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretense.” So much of our unpleasant emotional experience is a consequence of a kind of irrational hysteria about things we cannot control. Usually these are things in the unchangeable past or the unknowable future. That frenzy, which often contains within it a kind of pretense, a hidden showmanship, exacerbates whatever suffering we may be experiencing.
Whatever becomes of ourselves, our families, our friends, our departments, our colleges, and our Trumped-up nation, realism and cool heads can work only in our favor.
Clancy Martin is a professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. His books include Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).
