Do you know these 10 Stoic ideas?

10 fundamental Stoic concepts

Stoicism is a complicated philosophy. If you had to understand just a few key ideas to make the biggest impact on your life, what would they be?

This list attempts to answer that question. These are the most impactful ideas that you must know in order to practice Stoicism well.

1. Happiness

εὐδαιμονία | Eudaimonia

Understanding Stoicism starts with understanding eudaimonia. Ancient Greek philosophy, following Aristotle, argued that the goal of ethics was to become happy or flourish (achieve eudaimonia in the original Greek).

The ancient schools then argued about what happiness was. For the Epicureans, it was maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain. For the Skeptics, it was avoiding false judgements. For the Cynics, it was freedom from control or social convention.

Stoicism, like its contemporaries, is a eudaimonistic philosophy. It offers a holistic conception of what the good life for humans is, and how we can get there.

2. Virtue

ἀρετή | Arete

So what is happiness for the Stoics? What does it mean to have a good life? For the Stoics, it meant to possess virtue. Talking of virtue can sound moralistic or even puritan, but the focus was not on being without sin or error (although, this is a part of it). In Greek, the word for virtue is arete. This means excellence. Everything was thought to have its own unique arete, so virtue clearly does not have to do only with moral judgements. You could speak of the excellence of a house, or argue about what makes an excellent book or play.

When the Stoics say that happiness is found through virtue, they are saying that a good life is achieved by being an excellent person. The innovation here is that they are placing the responsibility for happiness within the individual.

The Stoic says if you want to have a great life, become a great person. Don’t think the question of happiness is separate from the question of personal development. Virtue is necessary and sufficient for a great life.

3. Knowledge

ἐπιστήμη | Episteme

For the Stoics, the actual characteristic of virtue, what makes some humans excellent and others terrible, is knowledge.

This was a controversial claim in ancient Greece and Rome, and it still is today. A person is not made excellent by their beauty, salary, or fame, but by how much they know. An ignorant billionaire has a worse life than a wise beggar.

There are two main arguments for this.

First, any thing is made excellent by perfecting its unique characteristic. We judge fish by how well they swim, because they are swimming creatures. We judge race cars by how fast they drive, because that was what they were built to do.

Humans are uniquely among all animals in our capacity for reflection and self-awareness. We are the only creatures that can make self-aware choices. And so what makes us excellent is to perfect that capacity.

The second argument comes more from observation. All terrible people display some kind of ignorance. They want too much, think they are owed something they aren’t, or hate someone who doesn’t deserve it.

All great people display knowledge. They are the activist who knew the truth long before others recognized it, the head of state who understood the right thing to do in a complicated situation, the parent who knew their family had enough to be happy as long as they did the best they could to parent well.

Great people, happy people, have knowledge. All bad people suffer from some kind of ignorance.

4. To Live in Accordance with Nature

κατὰ φύσιν ζῆν | Kata Phusin Zehn

The goal of Stoicism is to achieve happiness through knowledge. What this means in practice is what the Stoics called ‘living in accordance with nature’.

When we are ignorant, misled, or misinformed, about either ourselves or the world there is a kind of tension or friction. We want things to happen a certain way, we expect certain outcomes, and when they don’t happen we get frustrated. We expect the world to match our expectations, and are angry at it when it inevitably doesn’t.

The wise person doesn’t do this. They live in accordance with nature. The Greek word for nature, phusis, is where we get the modern english word for physics. It doesn’t just mean trees and animals (although they are included), but rather the entire world. To live in accordance with nature means to live in accordance with the facts. You don’t fear death because you know it’s inevitable. You don’t hate flawed people, because you expect people to have flaws.

To live in accordance with nature, is to have a smoothly flowing life, the Stoics tell us. It is to both go with the flow, and to understand your own autonomy and capacity to change things when you can.

5. Mindful Attention

προσοχή | Prosoche

For the Stoics, living well is ultimately a consequence of thinking well. So Stoic ethics, or their practical advice for becoming a better person, is mostly a set of tools for disciplined thinking, combined with rules and guidelines for the topics that are most important for living well.

Thinking the capital of Canada is Toronto, and that you need your crush to like you back to ever be happy, are both false judgements, but the Stoics are going to be much more interested in the cognitive errors that lead to the second kind of mistake, and how to fix them.

The way we achieve knowledge in any domain, but especially ethics, is through a process of mindful attention. The Stoics called this prosoche.

Prosoche is essentially the idea that if you want to think better, you have to pay attention to how you think and what you are thinking about. You need to understand both the content of your thoughts, and your thought patterns.

When we live non-reflectively, we make mistakes. We judge prematurely, we form hard to shake preconceptions, we don’t recognize contradictions or inconsistencies.

The Stoic first and foremost pays attention.

6. Impression & Assent

φαντασία & συγκατάθεσις | Phantasia & Sunkatathesis

What the stoic pays the most attention to are impressions (phantasia in the Greek. The same word we get the english fantasy from). The world is filtered through our minds and presented to us. These representations of the world are called impressions. The Stoics recognized that our impressions do not necessarily accurately represent reality.

I can make factual errors. For example, I can mistake someone in a busy restaurant for my friend, and get pretty close to them before noticing my mistake. But I can also make moral errors. For example, I can be angry at someone because of the story I have made up to justify my actions, when really I am the one who deserves the blame.

While false or misleading impressions are dangerous, we have the tools to address them. The Stoics argued that humans had a special ability to reflect on our impressions, something that makes us distinct from other kinds of animals.

We don’t have to believe our first impressions. We can interrogate them, question them. And we only have to believe the ones that stand up to our test. The Stoics called choosing to believe an impression ‘assent’. We assent to the impression as true and it becomes a belief, something that guides our actions and becomes a part of us.

The Stoic practices mindful attention, to be sure that they only assent to true impressions. This is how they live with knowledge.

As Epictetus would say, our primary task as philosophers is to make proper use of impressions.

7. The Things Up to Us

τὰ ἐφ' ἡμῖν | Ta Eph' Hemin

If the Stoic’s task is to make proper use of impressions, how can we tell which ones are worthy of assent? It’s easy with factual errors, but more complicated with moral ones, or value judgements. Who deserves to be praised and scorned? What situations deserve sadness or anger or jealousy?

This is where Stoic theory comes in. The Stoics provide arguments for what kind of value judgements are right and which are wrong.

The simplest rule of thumb is the dichotomy of control. Introduced by Epictetus, this is the idea that some things are up to us (Ta Eph' Hemin) and some things are not up to us, and that only the things up to us deserve to be called good and bad. What is up to us are our choices and character, and what is not up to us is everything else.

If I am angry at my friend for insulting me, that is a false impression I should not assent to, because their words are not up to me.

If I am proud of myself for showing kindness or courage, then I should be proud, because how I act is up to me.

This is not the only Stoic tool for navigating impressions, but it is the most important one. If you understand what’s up to you and what’s not, and reject impressions that value or place a lot of importance on the things not up to you, then you will already be progressing well.

8. Ruling faculty & faculty of choice

ἡγεμονικόν & προαίρεσις | Hegemonikon & Prohairesis

The Stoics place this importance on the things up to us, because they saw our fundamental identity as being our minds (or close to it). We are not our reputations, or our bodies, or our nice possessions.

We are the part of ourselves that thinks, and feels, and makes decisions. We might today call this our minds, or our souls. The Stoics called this either the Ruling Faculty (Hegemonikon), or the Faculty of Choice (Prohairesis). There is a small distinction between these two, the prohairesis is probably a bit more restrictive and was the preferred term of Epictetus, but the idea is consistent.

Good people are not those with nice bodies and big houses because we are not our houses or our bodies. We are a thinking, choosing thing, so we should be judged on, and are made excellent by, the choices we make.

The things up to us, our choices, are what we should judge as good and bad, because they are what tells us about a person’s quality.

The things not up to us, our hairline, our clothes, our family name, don’t tell us anything about the quality of a person or the happiness of their life.

9. Indifferents

ἀδιάφορα | Adiaphora

Indifferents are what the Stoics call the things that are not up to us. These are all the things that make up our lives besides our character: money, reputation, power. Even our health or death are indifferents. They aren’t good, in the Stoic sense, because they don’t necessarily make our lives better. But they also aren’t bad. We shouldn’t reject possessions or sabotage our reputations. They are just indifferent. Something to be detached from. Things to neither desire nor fear.

One way to think about indifferents is that, on their own, they make no necessary difference to the happiness of a life. Imagine I told you there were two people. One was rich and beautiful and famous. The second was poor, ugly and unknown.

Who has a better life? Who is happier? The Stoic answer to that question is that there is no way to know. We don’t have enough information, because you haven’t told us anything about their character, nothing about the quality of their ruling faculty or faculty of choice. You’ve only told us about indifferents, but there are many rich people that are unhappy and many poor people that are happy. That is the concept of indifferents.

Something worth noting is that the Stoics did recognize indifferents are not equal. Getting food poisoning is not the same as spending time with friends. The Stoics said some indifferents were preferred, and others were dispreferred. This means that, all things being equal, it is natural to prefer health to suffering, life to death, popularity to isolation, money to poverty, and so on.

We make a mistake when we think things like health, popularity and money are necessary to be happy, but it is natural to prefer them.

10. Harmful Passions and Good Emotions

πάθη & εὐπάθεια | Pathe & Eupatheia

To achieve knowledge, you must be mindful of your impressions, and carefully assent to what is true and false, using Stoic theory as your guide. But this is more than an academic exercise.

The Stoics argued that our emotional lives depended upon the quality of our judgements. They had a cognitivist view of emotions - meaning that our emotions are not irrational responses to stimuli, but something constructed from our judgements and beliefs.

I am angry at you for cutting me off in traffic because I judge that I have been harmed and you are to blame. If I am not in a hurry, then I don’t think I have been harmed and the anger subsides. If I notice you are driving aggressively because you are having an emergency, then I don’t think you are to blame for your actions, and the anger subsides as well.

The Stoics divided emotions into two categories. Passions (pathe) are intense feelings that come from false judgement. Anger, irrational grief, jealousy or envy.

Good emotions (eupatheia) are feelings that come from true judgements. A feeling of joy for your friendship, a gentle caution not to make an unnecessary mistake.

Our worst emotional experience, Stoics argue, those intense passions that upheave our lives, come from ignorance. When we think our happiness depends on indifferents, things which are necessarily outside of our control, then we have a tumultuous emotional life that is also outside of our control.

We are happy if our crush likes us back, but devastated if they don’t. We are constantly afraid of losing what we have, but also desire more.

This is the link between Stoic theory and the adjective stoic, meaning cold or without emotion. Stoics are not without emotion, they can have eupatheia, good emotions coming from true judgements. But a Stoic, at least a Stoic who has achieved virtue, will not experience the kinds of disruptive passions that are so common and painful in our lives.

When you think happiness depends on virtue, and you recognize that this is within your control, then there is much less to be disturbed about.