Thinking Well With Others

What being a social animal means for Stoics

Oct 21, 2024

Welcome to The Stoa Letter, the newsletter on Stoic theory and practice.

🏛️ Theory

Stoicism is a deeply social philosophy. I’ve talked a lot about this in the letter before.

I’ve also written about how Stoicism is all about managing impressions.

But if you ask me what is the good for humans, I cannot say to you anything else than that it is how you make choices with respect to impressions.

Epictetus, Discourses 1.8

We receive appearances, reflect on them, and then decide how to respond. It’s this emphasis on managing impressions that grounds so many other Stoic ideas. How do we deal with negative emotions? Reflect and respond to the impressions that cause them with skill instead of passion. What is virtue? Ultimately, it’s the knowledge of how to respond to impressions well.

It’s also a social skill. Humans are rational and social creatures after all.

So many of our impressions involve other people. In one sense, this is obvious. We see and hear other people all the time. It’s true in a deeper sense too: when we reflect on any experience we bring other people’s thoughts with us. We carry around ideas from others that we’ve acquired over the years. Indeed, many of our concepts are relational and social. What it is to be a good brother, sister, spouse, employee, neighbor, citizen is determined by our interactions with specific people and cultures.

In a real sense then, we don’t stand alone. We’re individuals shaped by others and embedded in communities.

We’re connected to others through our shared ability to reason – or as the ancient Stoics would say – we share logos. Critically, we can’t think without other people. Thinking, even when we’re alone, is done with the contributions of others. This is another reason why the Stoics saw other humans as kin:

I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine… We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1

To bring it back to the concrete, it pays to think about, once you’ve mastered Stoic psychology, pay attention to how your impressions and reflections are shaped by others – and ensure that you and those around you – are being shaped in the right direction. This means consuming, promoting, and sharing good ideas and habits of mind.

Philosophy is nothing but the practice of noble behavior.

Musonius Rufus, Lecture 4

Action

Pay attention to how your thoughts are shaped by others today. Focus on positive contributions.

🎯 Action

Let’s others shape you well. Chose what to consume judiciously.

🔗 Links

📗 A key way in which individuals begin to share impressions is through joint attention. The anthropologist Michael Tomasello argues that this is what makes humans unique. If you’d like to take a deep dive on his work and Stoic agency check Brittany Polat’s series here.

🇨🇳 There are fascinating connections here between Confucianism and Stoicism.