The focus of my undergraduate, masters, and doctoral research is Stoicism, with a capital ‘S’. Unfortunately, I am also a social person. This is all to say that I am regularly in situations where someone asks me what I do, and I have one of the three following conversations. First, there is the classic, ‘what is Stoicism’. This is an easy conversation for me. I give my well-rehearsed elevator pitch, explaining a brief history of Hellenistic philosophy and the ‘cool’ parts of Stoicism. It heavily influenced Christianity and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Arguably, their metaphysics align well with the Big Bang Theory. Some Stoics, like Gaius Musonius Rufus, were actually pretty feminist.
During the second type conversation, I have to attempt not to roll my eyes. This conversation traditionally occurs at a party or pub with a 20-something year old white man. It begins with, ‘wait you study Marcus Auralius, I read Meditations and it changed my life’. The conversation only worsens as they explain how living with their parents with no long-term goals is Stoic, a variety of text misinterpretations, and the worst: equating Stoicism with Buddhism.
Somehow, this second type of conversation is not the worst. The worst is the third. This conversation needs the special, yet not uncommon, ingredients of an extremely leftist individual who is also hyper-critical. This person will respond with, ‘Oh isn’t that the philosophy those red-pill/manosphere/incels love’. To be fair it is. But then I try to explain that these men have misinterpreted the philosophy; as clearly they are angry and what did Seneca write On Anger for, if not to say, ‘knock that shit off’. This is not the response these people want. The conversation then devolves into, ‘yeah, but what matters is they’re using the philosophy’, or, ‘okay, but you need anger for political activism, Stoicism doesn’t care about [insert socio-political problem]’. It perplexes me why these peoples’ ideological value of tolerance never shows itself when you disagree with them.
This essay isn’t meant to be on any of these types of conversations. Especially, the last, which has been well responded to in works like Nancy Sherman’s Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons For Modern Resilience and Donna Zuckerberg’s Not All Dead White Men. My point here is to call out a new misinterpretation of Stoicism: the business man’s interpretation. I recently received an email from my partner’s aunt, a sweet woman who will email you things she thinks you might enjoy or find relevant to your life. In this email was a link to a recent article published in Fortune, entitled, Why today’s business leaders are turning to a 2,000-year-old philosophy. (Spoiler Alert: The “2,000-year-old philosophy” is Stoicism.) This article was not written in a vacuum, if you do an internet search for “business Stoicism”, similar articles will appear from publications such as Forbes, Leaders, Entrepreneur, and the New York Post. A search on YouTube, will bring about hundreds of videos explaining how you can use Stoicism to advance in business.
You may be thinking that this article is a veiled attempt to promote Stoicism in the manosphere, more specially in where that sphere intersects with business. I thought so too when opening the link. However, I was wrong. In broad strokes, the piece doesn’t misinterpret the ideas of Stoicism like those in the red-pill community do, it simply illustrates how the business men claiming to live the philosophy have missed a crucial point of the philosophy. Let me explain.
The article gives a brief overview of different C-Suite executives who claim to use Stoicism, and how necessary philosophy is in our unstable world. Fair enough. The article then mentions different ideas from Stoicism that the executives find useful. These include how the philosophy, “champions self-control, resilience, and rationality not to suppress emotion but to act with intentionality and integrity”. Part of me thinks that is correct – acting with intentionality and integrity will probably help you succeed and self-control, resilience, and rationality, will get you there. A larger part of me is reminded of Bernard Williams’ reply to Richard Sorabji’s essay defending Martha Nussbaum and Stoic psychotherapy. In essence, Williams opened with this: yeah, Stoicism gets some stuff right, but that stuff is all tautologies that are obvious to everyone. Intentionality helps you achieve goals – any goals, not just business – and self-control is critical for intentionality. If you focus on something and don’t let yourself get distracted, you’ll do that thing better. In this case, Williams is right – we don’t need Stoicism to teach us what kindergartners know.
Williams aside, the issue I take with the Stoicism-will-help-you-become-a-CEO trend is not so much a misinterpretation as it is a complete overlook of Stoic opinion on valuing careers. Like all other Hellenistic philosophies, Stoics did want to be eudaimoniac, in our terms, to flourish. But they didn’t think having a successful business career was necessary for this. A quick glance at any work of Epictetus – Marcus Aurailius favorite predecessor – tells us this. Epictetus claimed that one could flourish while being enslaved. Literally enslaved. He said this because he felt that through practicing Stoicism he flourished while being enslaved. Whether or not Epictetus is right on this is debatable and besides the point. Stoicism thinks you can flourish, be a true Stoic sage, whether you are the best paid person in the world – say, Emperor of Rome – or not paid at all.
You may think there is a difference though, between thinking that career doesn’t matter and saying that Stoicism cannot help you succeed at business beyond the obvious ways that nearly any philosophy would. That is true and where Seneca comes in. In Letter 22 of his Moral Letters to Lucilius he wrote, “Rid yourself of those business duties. Now listen carefully to the opinion which I shall offer; it is my opinion that you should withdraw either from that kind of existence, or else from existence altogether”. To give this quote context, Seneca is encouraging his nephew – not really, he wrote the letters for public consumption – to stop focusing so much on his career and instead to focus on practicing virtue. Seneca goes on to say that instead of intentionally focusing on his business duties, Lucilius should practice poverty. Get a bad mattress and gross food, says Seneca, learn to live without so you never worry about not having enough.
Context aside what is important from our purposes is the point Seneca makes, the true Stoic opinion. If you can’t stop focusing on business, you are better off offing yourself. We can disagree with Seneca here, I’m not trying to encourage anything. We can also call him a hypocrite, in today’s financial landscape, he would probably be considered a billionaire. Yet, how a philosophy that advocates suicide over even trying to be successful at business can help you be successful at business is a mystery to me. So, next time I’m out, I’ll talk to the genuinely interested, the dude that won’t get out of his mom’s basement, and the sanctimonious activist. But if someone in a suit asks me what I do, I’ll just leave.