Antoine Bourdelle’s Herakles the Archer (1909) captures the Stoic ideal: complete commitment to the action, complete detachment from the outcome.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Whereas depression weighs upon life as it is, anxiety points towards the future: what might happen, what might go wrong, what might be expected of us.
Of course, some concern for the future is necessary. It motivates us to do what’s needed, pay our bills, and avoid danger. So the aim cannot be to abolish anxiety altogether—simply to prevent occasional alarm from becoming a permanent state.
Modern Life
The modern world makes this difficult because threats are seldom all-or-nothing. Our ancestors faced a predator, or did not. We have emails, deadlines, mortgages. And when we look on social media, we feel we are falling behind.
Because the pressure is diffuse and continuous, we internalise it. Eventually, nobody needs to chase us; we carry the pursuer in our head.
Once the pursuer is inside us, we try to outrun them by keeping busy. Activity gives us a sense of control, but often we are not addressing the anxiety so much as preventing ourselves from feeling it. We run faster and faster so that we never have to ask where we are going.
There is a Zen story about a horseman galloping down a path at speed. It seemed as if the rider was on some urgent and vital mission. “Where are you heading?” hollered a bystander. “I don’t know!” came the already distant reply, “Ask the horse!”
How to Reduce Anxiety
The first step, then, is to stop running and name the anxiety. A vague anxiety can fill the whole sky; a named fear becomes one object within it. Once identified, it can be worked with, accepted, or dismissed.
In particular, we can determine what part of the anxiety is actually within our control. The ancient Stoics emphasized this distinction between what is and is not in our control. What is not in our control must simply be let go.
The Stoics had this image of an archer. The archer does all he can to shoot accurately. But once the arrow leaves the bow, its fate is no longer within the archer’s control. So the right-thinking archer focuses on the action, not on its result—because the first is in his control, whereas the other is not.
When dealing with our anxiety, we should all become like the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, who wrote, “Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.”
Many people have been able to cure their anger simply by looking into a mirror.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In the first century CE, the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote a short book called On Anger, which to this day, in my view, remains the best book on anger management.
The first thing we should know about anger is that it is both learnt and highly contagious. Seneca tells the story of a child who was raised in Plato’s house. When the child was returned to his parents, he saw his father shouting, and remarked, ‘I never saw this at Plato’s house.’
If you are surrounded by angry people, it is hard not, in turn, to become angry—and conversely, calm people tend to calm us. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle remarks that even wild animals grow gentle in the company of the calm—although I wouldn’t go to the zoo to test this out.
So our first defence against anger is the company that we keep. Avoid the angry, seek out the calm.
Why We Get Angry
Beyond this, it is important to understand why we get angry. Anger feels powerful because it converts injury or helplessness into reaction and aggression. But it is in fact a sign of weakness, revealing the very injury or helplessness that gave rise to it.
And it is often irrational: we assume the worst about people, exaggerate the harm they have done us, and interpret their incompetence or lack of thought as contempt.
We sometimes rationalise our anger as moral courage, that is, as a spur to virtue. But even in the face of terrible injustice, anger is not required to obtain redress or do the right thing. Indeed, anger may impair our ability to act effectively.
How Anger Defeats Us
If anger arises from an injury, it often inflicts a second injury of its own making. Whereas other vices impel the mind, anger overthrows it. Anger, said Horace, is a short-lived madness. It is from anger that Alexander the Great killed the friend who saved his life—the conqueror of kings, himself conquered by madness.
We get angry because we seek reparation. But often, we make things much worse than if we hadn’t got angry. If someone has wronged us, we would do much better to calmly explain this to them, rather than lose our temper, and, with it, their ear.
The Surest Cure for Anger
Anger begins with a judgement: someone has wronged me, and I must punish them. But it is easier to revise our judgement than to rage against the world, to rage against how things are.
Before that judgement carries us away, there is a little space. Maybe we can’t prevent the first flash of irritation. But we can refuse to go with it. In that little space that we have, we can ask ourselves three things:
Am I expecting too much of the world?
How is getting angry going to help me?
Who will remember this tomorrow, or in a year’s time, or in a hundred years’ time?
That’s why the surest cure for anger is delay.
When he retired from the imperial court, the Stoic philosopher Athenodorus advised the emperor Augustus: ‘Whenever you become angry, Caesar, say or do nothing until you have repeated the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet.’ At this, Augustus seized his departing teacher by the hand and replied, ‘I still have need of your presence here.’
Perhaps we all do. The surest way to prevent anger from ruling us is to refuse to act while it is on the throne.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
‘Hypersanity’ is not a common or accepted term. But neither did I make it up. I first came across the concept while training in psychiatry, in The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (1967) by RD Laing. In this book, the Scottish psychiatrist presented ‘madness’ as a voyage of discovery that could open out onto a free state of higher consciousness, or hypersanity. For Laing, the descent into madness could lead to a reckoning, to an awakening, to ‘break-through’ rather than ‘breakdown’.
A few months later, I read CG Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), which provided a vivid case in point. In 1913, on the eve of the Great War, Jung broke off his close friendship with Sigmund Freud, and spent the next few years in a troubled state of mind that led him to a ‘confrontation with the unconscious’.
As Europe tore itself apart, Jung gained first-hand experience of psychotic material in which he found ‘the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age’. Like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Heracles, Orpheus and Aeneas before him, Jung travelled deep down into an underworld where he conversed with Salome, a young woman, and with Philemon, an old man with a white beard, the wings of a kingfisher and the horns of a bull. Although Salome and Philemon were products of Jung’s unconscious, they had lives of their own and said things that he had not previously thought. In Philemon, Jung had at long last found the father-figure that both Freud and his own father had failed to be. More than that, Philemon was a guru, and prefigured what Jung himself was later to become: the wise old man of Zürich. As the war burnt out, Jung re-emerged into sanity, and considered that he had found in his madness ‘the prima materia for a lifetime’s work’.
The Laingian concept of hypersanity, though modern, has ancient roots. Once, upon being asked to name the most beautiful of all things, Diogenes the Cynic (412-323 BCE) replied parrhesia, which in Ancient Greek means something like ‘uninhibited thought’, ‘free speech’, or ‘full expression’. Diogenes used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing a lit lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply: ‘I am just looking for a human being’ – thereby insinuating that the people of Athens were not living up to, or even much aware of, their full human potential.
After being exiled from his native Sinope for having defaced its coinage, Diogenes emigrated to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to deface – metaphorically this time – the coinage of custom and convention that was, he maintained, the false currency of morality. He disdained the need for conventional shelter or any other such ‘dainties’, and elected to live in a storage jar (pithos) and survive on a diet of onions. Diogenes proved to the later satisfaction of the Stoics that happiness has nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s material circumstances, and held that human beings had much to learn from studying the simplicity and artlessness of dogs, which, unlike human beings, had not complicated every simple gift of the gods.
The term ‘cynic’ derives from the Greek kynikos, which is the adjective of kyon or ‘dog’. Once, upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, Diogenes regretted that it was not as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach. When asked, on another occasion, where he came from, he replied: ‘I am a citizen of the world’ (cosmopolites), a radical claim at the time, and the first recorded use of the term ‘cosmopolitan’. As he approached death, Diogenes asked for his mortal remains to be thrown outside the city walls for wild animals to feast upon. After his death in the city of Corinth, the Corinthians erected to his glory a pillar surmounted by a dog of Parian marble.
Jung and Diogenes came across as insane by the standards of their day. But both men had a depth and acuteness of vision that their contemporaries lacked, and that enabled them to see through their facades of ‘sanity’. Both psychosis and hypersanity place us outside society, making us seem ‘mad’ to the mainstream. Both states attract a heady mixture of fear and fascination. But whereas mental disorder is distressing and disabling, hypersanity is liberating and empowering.
After reading The Politics of Experience, the concept of hypersanity stuck in my mind, not least as something that I might aspire to for myself. But if there is such a thing as hypersanity, the implication is that mere sanity is not all it’s cracked up to be, a state of dormancy and dullness with less vital potential even than madness. This, I think, is most apparent in people’s frequently suboptimal – if not frankly inappropriate – responses, both verbal and behavioural, to the world around them. As Laing puts it:
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last 50 years.
Many ‘normal’ people suffer from not being hypersane: they have a restricted worldview, confused priorities, and are wracked by stress, anxiety and self-deception. As a result, they sometimes do dangerous things, and become fanatics or fascists or otherwise destructive (or not constructive) people. In contrast, hypersane people are calm, contained and constructive. It is not just that the ‘sane’ are irrational but that they lack scope and range, as though they’ve grown into the prisoners of their arbitrary lives, locked up in their own dark and narrow subjectivity. Unable to take leave of their selves, they hardly look around them, barely see beauty and possibility, rarely contemplate the bigger picture – and all, ultimately, for fear of losing their selves, of breaking down, of going mad, using one form of extreme subjectivity to defend against another, as life – mysterious, magical life – slips through their fingers.
Hypersanity is not simply a matter of intelligence. Intelligence can make us more ingenious in defending our prejudices and rationalising our desires. Hypersanity requires something more: the ability to step outside ourselves, to see our lives in proportion, and to question the assumptions that we were weaned on.
We could all go mad, in a way we already are, minus the promise. But what if there were another route to hypersanity, one that, compared with madness, was less fearsome, less dangerous, and less damaging? What if, as well as a backdoor way, there were also a royal road strewn with sweet-scented petals?
In fact, the ancient philosophers cleared several such paths. Socrates sought to free himself from false opinion through relentless questioning; Diogenes, from convention through radical simplicity; the Stoics, from destructive emotion through reason and perspective. In India, the Buddha went further still, seeking liberation from the attachments and illusions of the self. I’m busy recovering them all.
Besides Jung, are there any modern examples of hypersanity? Those who escaped from Plato’s cave of shadows were reluctant to crawl back down and involve themselves in the affairs of men, and most hypersane people, rather than courting the limelight, might prefer to hide out in their back gardens. Perhaps, then, we should not expect the hypersane to be famous, or even conspicuous. To recognise them by worldly achievement would be to judge them by the very standards they have transcended.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Ataraxia—literally, ‘lack of disturbance or trouble’—was the Holy Grail of ancient philosophy: a state of profound mental tranquillity in which a person was no longer tossed around by anxiety, anger, desire, and the vicissitudes of fortune. For what is the point of wealth, power, pleasure, or even freedom if we ourselves remain in a state of inner turmoil?
Prior to the advent of Christianity, there were, of course, the pagan gods, but, especially for the high-minded, there were also a number of philosophical schools.
Aside from the more academic Platonism and Aristotelianism, the four major philosophical schools of Western antiquity were Cynicism, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism.
Despite each having their own outlook and approach, all four schools emphasised the attainment of mental tranquillity and mastery, or ataraxia—making them, in my view, much more similar than different. If you like, ataraxia was to the Western schools what liberation was to the Indian schools.
The best way to grasp the concept of ataraxia is to look at how it fitted into each of the four schools, starting with Cynicism.
Cynicism
The first Cynic appears to have been the Athenian philosopher Antisthenes (d. 365 BCE), who had been an ardent disciple of Socrates. Then came Diogenes (d. 323 BCE), the paradigm of the Cynic, who took the simple life of Socrates to such an extreme that Plato called him ‘a Socrates gone mad’.
Diogenes held that human beings had much to learn from the simplicity and artlessness of dogs, which, unlike human beings, had not ‘complicated every simple gift of the gods’. In fact, the term ‘Cynic’ derives from the Greek kynikos, which is the adjective of kyon, or ‘dog’.
Diogenes placed reason and nature firmly above custom and convention, which he held to be incompatible with happiness. Rather than pursuing wealth, renown, and other worthless things, people should have the courage to live like animals or gods, partaking in life’s simplest pleasures—which are also its greatest—without bond or fear.
The stories surrounding Diogenes, though embellished, or because embellished, help to convey his spirit. Diogenes wore a simple cloak which he doubled up in winter, begged for food, and sheltered in a tub. He made it his mission to challenge custom and convention, famously ‘defacing the currency’—that is, overturning the false values that governed society. Upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, he mused, ‘If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly.’ He used to stroll about in broad daylight brandishing a lit lamp. Whenever people gathered around to gawk at him, he would explain, ‘I am just looking for a human being.’
His fame spread far beyond Athens. One day, Alexander the Great came to meet him. When Alexander asked whether he could do anything for him, he replied, ‘Yes, stand out of my sunlight.’
For Diogenes and the Cynics, much of our disturbance is self-inflicted. We surrender our peace of mind to things we do not need: money, possessions, and the good opinion of others. The less we depend upon such things, the less power they have to disturb us.
Stoicism
Diogenes was followed by Crates of Thebes (d. 285 BCE), who renounced a large fortune to live the Cynical life of poverty. Crates married Hipparchia of Maroneia, who, uniquely, adopted male dress and lived on equal terms with her husband.
By the first century, Cynics could be found in cities throughout the Roman Empire. At that time, Cynicism vied with Stoicism, a broader philosophical system that emphasised perspective and clear thinking. Stoicism was popular with leading Romans such as the senator Cato the Younger and the emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Zeno of Citium (d. 262 BCE), the founder of Stoicism, had been a pupil of Crates, and Cynicism came to be seen as an idealised form of Stoicism.
Like their ancestors the Cynics, the Stoics sought freedom by reducing our dependence upon things outside our control. But whereas Diogenes had dramatised this freedom by living in radical simplicity, the Stoics developed a more nuanced, and moderate, psychology of judgement and emotion.
Events do not simply make us angry, anxious, envious, or miserable. Between the event and the emotion lies our interpretation of the event. If we can catch and work on that interpretation, we can alter our emotional response. Thus, Stoics such as Epictetus drew a line between things that are ‘up to us’ and those that are not. Our possessions, reputation, and body are vulnerable to fortune. But our mind is more properly our own. Marcus Aurelius often returns to Epictetus in his Meditations, for example, when he says, ‘If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.’
Skepticism
Skepticism and Epicureanism also took off around the time of Alexander. Unlike the sophists whom he opposed, Socrates had skeptical tendencies, claiming that he knew little or nothing and cultivating a state of non-knowledge, or aporia.
Pyrrho of Elis (d. 270 BCE) travelled with Alexander across Persia and into India, where he encountered various schools of thought and ascetics, including the ‘naked wise men’ or gymnosophists (probably Jain monks), with their emphasis on detachment and inner peace.
Blending East and West, Pyrrho came to believe that certain knowledge is impossible and urged suspension of judgement with the aim of exchanging anxiety and dogmatism for ataraxia. After all, if we cannot know what is true or false, or good or bad, why attach so much importance to our opinions? For example, most people are convinced that death is a terrible thing, when it might in fact be the best thing for us.
The Pyrrhonian Skeptic Sextus Empiricus (d. 210 CE) compared Pyrrho’s prescription for ataraxia to a real or fabled episode in the life of the painter Apelles of Kos. One day, Apelles was painting a horse but failed so completely to depict its froth that he gave up and flung his sponge at the picture—thereby accidentally achieving the desired effect. When we stop straining and let go of our judgement, as Apelles did, tranquillity may arrive as if by accident.
In the sixteenth century, the translation of the complete works of Sextus Empiricus led to a resurgence of Pyrrhonian Skepticism, and the work of Descartes—‘I think therefore I am’—can be read as a response to a Skeptical crisis… with roots in Ancient Athens and Ancient India.
Epicureanism
Epicurus of Samos (341–270 BCE) and Zeno of Citium (the founder of Stoicism) were almost exact contemporaries in Athens but may never have met.
A few years before Zeno began teaching, Epicurus founded a school of philosophy in a garden outside the city’s Dipylon gates. This school, called ‘the Garden’, dedicated itself to attaining happiness through the exercise of reason, and, in a highly sexist and stratified society, admitted both women and slaves.
Life in the Garden was not as you might imagine. Epicurus was content with bread and water and famously asked a friend to send him a little cheese so that, when he wished, he might feast. Far more important than luxury was friendship. ‘Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life,’ he wrote, ‘by far the most important is friendship.’
Like Zeno, Epicurus dedicated himself to attaining happiness through the exercise of reason: reason teaches that pleasure is good and pain bad, and that pleasure and pain are the ultimate good and bad. This has often been misconstrued as a call for rampant hedonism, but actually involves a kind of hedonic calculus to determine which things, over time, are likely to result in the most pleasure and least pain. Epicurus explicitly warned against overindulgence, because overindulgence so often leads to pain; and, rather than pleasure, emphasised the avoidance of pain, the elimination of unnecessary desire, and ataraxia. ‘If thou wilt make a man happy,’ said Epicurus, ‘add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.’
Epicurus divided pleasures and pains into physical and mental, and argued that fear of the future, especially fear of the gods and fear of death, is the greatest obstacles to happiness.
Although the gods exist, they have absolutely no concern for, or even awareness of, humankind. Indeed, for the gods to involve themselves in the menial matters of men would be to perturb the supreme happiness and tranquillity that characterises and defines them. Instead of fearing the gods, we would do better to emulate them in their supreme removal and detachment.
Neither should we fear death, and this for two main reasons. First, Epicurus, drawing on Democritus, held that everything in the universe, including the human body and mind, is ultimately composed of atoms. Our death entails the disintegration of both body and mind and the re-dispersion of their atoms. As there is no longer any person to be troubled, death cannot trouble us after we are dead. And if death cannot trouble us after we are dead, neither should it trouble us while we are still alive. Second, the eternity that comes before our birth is not regarded as an evil; therefore, neither should the eternity that comes after our death. These two arguments are early formulations, respectively, of the ‘no subject of harm’ argument and the ‘symmetry’ argument, which have both, more or less, withstood the test of time.
Where the Cynic says, ‘free yourself from convention and artificial wants,’ the Stoic says, ‘stop trying to control what you cannot control,’ the Skeptic says, ‘stop demanding certainty where certainty is unavailable,’ and the Epicurean says, ‘simplify your desires and free yourself from unnecessary fears.’ Different diagnoses, different methods, but a remarkably similar destination: ataraxia, freedom from disturbance.
The Ultimate Cool
As a psychiatrist, I find the concept of ataraxia especially appealing. Psychiatry is chiefly concerned with the treatment of mental disorder, as of course it ought to be. Once a person has stopped taking the tablets, surely, that cannot be the end of their journey. I believe that there is much more to mental health than the mere absence of mental disorder. Mental health is not just about surviving, but about thriving, about developing and expressing our highest, fullest potential as human beings.
The concept of ataraxia is so important to me that I named my six-book Ataraxia series after it. Like each of the ancient philosophical schools, each book in the series adopts a distinct but complementary approach to peace of mind: exploring the deep origins of our distress in The Meaning of Madness; defending against the demons of self-deception in Hide and Seek; understanding and refining our emotions in Heaven and Hell; regulating our relations with others in For Better For Worse; developing our cognitive capacities in Hypersanity; and, finally, rethinking success and failure in The Art of Failure.
These books are not only about achieving tranquillity but also about expressing our full potential as human beings. Ataraxia is closely linked with eudaimonia, which is often translated as ‘happiness’ but which is, in fact, a much deeper, fuller, and richer concept, sometimes articulated in terms of flourishing, or living a life that is both fulfilling and fully realised.
Ataraxia may be more difficult to attain today than it was in Ancient Athens. In our economy of disturbance, the danger is not merely that we become more restless, but that we have become so accustomed to disturbance that we cease even to notice it. Younger people in particular, who may have spent their whole lives answering, reacting, worrying, scrolling, and striving, may not even know what it is like to enjoy an undisturbed mind.
Ataraxia is not indifference or disengagement. Diogenes was anything but disengaged, and Marcus Aurelius led armies and governed an empire. It is the ability to engage fully with the world without being continually thrown off balance by it.
The person who needs less, fears less, and is less easily manipulated has achieved a rare kind of freedom.
Scipio looks down upon the Earth from the Milky Way. From this far away, even Rome looks provincial.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
At its height, the Roman Empire brought most of Europe, together with large parts of North Africa and the Near East, into a single political and economic space. Roads and sea lanes connected distant provinces, trade flourished, and the Pax Romana, or ‘Roman Peace’, brought long periods of peace, security, and prosperity to peoples more accustomed to being at one another’s throats.
Unlike the European Union, Rome created its union, in the main, by conquest, rather than by cooperation and the voluntary pooling of sovereignty. That’s two thousand years of progress for you. But the EU and the Roman Empire enlarged the political community beyond the borders of individual peoples, with profound consequences for how people lived—and, in time, for how they thought about themselves.
By the Late Roman Republic, the world had never been more cosmopolitan. Stoics such as Panaetius, who shuttled back and forth from Athens to Rome, Rutilius, who stood up for the inhabitants of Asia against his own countrymen, and the Syrian Posidonius, who moved from Athens to Rhodes to start a school that became the empire’s stopping place, were not Greeks or Romans so much as citizens of the world.
The First Citizens of the World
This broadening of horizons had begun well before Rome. In the fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great built an empire that took in the already multinational Persian Empire and stretched into India.
As Alexander battled his way to the Hyphasis River, back home in Greece another boundary was being broken, not, this time, from some palace or military tent but from an empty jar. Upon being asked where he came from, Diogenes the Cynic declared, ‘I am a citizen of the world (Greek, cosmopolites)’. This is the first recorded use of the term that became our ‘cosmopolitan’. In many parts of Britain or America, to call yourself a citizen of the world would be asking for trouble. In a Greek world still organised around close-knit city-states, it was a truly radical and dangerous claim.
Diogenes inspired Crates of Thebes, a wealthy man who abandoned his fortune to follow in the Cynic path. Crates in turn taught Zeno of Citium, who went on to found Zenonism—better known as Stoicism. The Cynic ideals of living according to nature, freedom from external goods, and cosmopolitanism thus passed, in modified form, into one of the most influential movements of the ancient world.
‘The eagle,’ said the Stoic teacher Musonius, quoting Euripides, ‘can fly through all the air, and a noble man has all the earth as his fatherland.’ The wise, argued Musonius, can make themselves at home anywhere, so that exile, to them, is not the punishment that it may seem. Indeed, one of several advantages of exile is that we are not dragged into political service by a country that only seems to be ours, or bothered by people who only seem to be our friends, or waylaid by petty relatives. Musonius points out that the Stoic Rutilius flourished so fulsomely in exile that he refused Sulla’s invitation to return to Rome.
Musonius taught Epictetus. When he was young, the future emperor Marcus Aurelius had the greatest men of his age for tutors, but it was a dog-eared copy of Epictetus that made the greatest impression upon him. Still, today, it is difficult to read Marcus’ Meditations without hearing the echo of Epictetus… and, ultimately, Diogenes: ‘My city and state are Rome… But as a human being? The world. So for me, ‘good’ can only mean what’s good for both communities.’
The Philosophical Basis of Cosmopolitanism
Stoic cosmopolitanism is rooted in the belief that all human beings form part of the same organism and that this organism, like each of its parts, is shot through with God. It is true that some people behave like cancers, but even they, if only they knew it, are doing the work of God, or the universe. Just as our eyes, ears, and teeth each have a role to play in our body, so we, too, each have a role to play in society—even if it is only to serve as a warning to others.
‘Kindly remember,’ said Seneca, ‘that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.’
To live selfishly is fundamentally self-defeating. To feel alive and happy, we need to have a sense of working with others, for others—because, like ants and bees, that is the kind of creature that we are. If we do not contribute to our community, we will feel disconnected and depressed. In a word, we will feel dead—and, in truth, might as well be.
Whatever good we do, said Marcus Aurelius, we should do it quietly, without expecting anything in return, ‘as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.’ Our reward will be our own, and much greater than any wealth or honour that might or might not be bestowed upon us: to lead and to have led a good life, to do and to have done what we were born to do.
What brings no benefit to the hive brings none to the bee. —Marcus Aurelius
From Rome to Europe
In 212 CE, Rome extended citizenship to almost every free inhabitant of the empire. But for the Stoics, citizenship had no frontier: every human being belonged to the same community. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe divided and redivided into kingdoms, empires, and nation-states whose rivalries repeatedly ended in war. During the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), to take an example, the population of the Germanic lands fell from 21 million to 13 million.
After the Second World War, Europeans returned to an ancient problem: how to belong to something larger without ceasing to be themselves. The European Union offered a new answer. It brought together nations that had fought one another for centuries, contributing to an extraordinary period of peace, security, and prosperity. Unlike Rome, it did so not by conquest but by cooperation.
The importance of European unity becomes clearest when it begins to fracture. Brexit removed one of Europe’s largest powers from the Union. Six years after the referendum, Putin invaded Ukraine, apparently calculating, among other things, that a divided West would fail to respond decisively. Whether Brexit entered into that calculation is impossible to know, but the timing is at least worth noticing.
Perhaps the EU’s most interesting achievement is psychological. A Frenchman can be French and European, just as Marcus Aurelius could be Roman and a citizen of the world.
The Stoics would have gone further still, emphasising that, as well as French and European, the Frenchman was also, and above all, a citizen of the world.
The Stoics sometimes arrived at this insight by looking down upon human affairs as though from the heavens. Marcus Aurelius repeatedly adopts this ‘view from above’ in the Meditations. In Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, Scipio looks back upon the Earth from the Milky Way and is struck by how small the Roman Empire appears. From this far away, even Rome looks provincial.
What about the view from below? When we imagine an alien planet, we rarely imagine it to be divided into countries. We do not even stop to think: surely, the aliens would not be so backward.
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Stoic Stories.
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