Category: Philosophy

Well done!

Why do people shoot their mouths off every day on social media when life’s too short? Great story Kasey!

How a Philosophy of Life Came From a Snack

How a Philosophy of Life Came From a Snack

To look for the fig in winter is the act of a madman… — Marcus Aurelius

Figs are in season again here in Athens. When they’re spotted in the local groceries it’s a cause for excitement. Who would have thought we’d miss them so much when they weren’t available? Of course dried figs are available year round but, trust me, that’s definitely not the same!

Learning philosophy, or the love of wisdom, requires patience, says Epictetus, because “the fruit of a man’s mind” does not ripen overnight.

“Nothing great”, said the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, is produced immediately, not even figs (Discourses, 1.15). In other words: Rome wasn’t built in a day! Suppose you make it known that you really are craving a fig right now. Epictetus would reply, we’re told, that you need to learn to be patient. It takes a long time for figs to grow and ripen, he says.

Some of his students were maybe taking that a bit too literally because he’s careful to spell out that he means it as a metaphor for life in general — he’s doing philosophy not planning his grocery shopping. Learning philosophy, or the love of wisdom, requires patience, says Epictetus, because “the fruit of a man’s mind” does not ripen overnight. Indeed, the essence of training in Stoicism, the “discipline of desire”, is about being able to want something without becoming upset about not having it — replacing irrational demands with rational preferences, as cognitive psychotherapists say today.

Zeno on Figs

The Stoic love of figs goes right back to the founder of the school, the Phoenician philosopher Zeno, who hailed from the town of Citium, in Cyprus. We’re told that after being shipwrecked near Athens, losing his entire fortune, and taking up the life of a Cynic beggar-philosopher there, he would decline most invitations to Athenian homes for supper. Instead, he “he was fond of eating green figs” and would rather be found “basking in the sun”, outdoors. That sounds like paradise but it’s probably meant to show that he was able to enjoy the simple things in life. In ancient Athens, figs literally grew on trees all over the place and so, for a while each year, they were as freely available to everyone as fresh air and sunshine.

Zeno’s contemporary, the satirical poet Philemon of Soli, wrote of him in a lost play called Philosophers:

This man adopts a new philosophy.
He teaches to go hungry: yet he gets
Disciples. One sole loaf of bread his food;
His best dessert dried figs; water his drink. — Quoted by Diogenes Laertius

So apparently, Zeno was known for enjoying fresh figs when they were in season but he wouldn’t turn his nose up at the dried variety when that’s all that was available. He probably inherited this habit during his time training as a Cynic, before founding the Stoic school, as the most famous Cynic of all, Diogenes of Sinope, was also known for eating figs.

According to one story, his most famous successor, the third head of the Stoic school and its greatest intellectual, Chrysippus of Soli, died laughing at one of his own jokes about a donkey eating figs.

After an ass had eaten up his figs, he cried out to the old woman [who looked after him], “Now give the ass a drink of pure wine to wash down the figs.” And thereupon he laughed so heartily that he died. — Diogenes Laertius

I think this joke was funny, in part, because the Stoics often used figs as a metaphor for something that it’s pointless worrying about. Perhaps only a drunken ass would think someone else’s figs are worth stealing.

The Price of Figs

Fig trees bear a lot of fruit. Although figs are sometimes a bit pricey today, to the ancient Athenians figs, like nuts, were symbolic of something “ten a penny” — trivial and abundant. In modern English some people still say I could not give a fig! — usually when talking about the news or other people’s opinions.

The Greeks and Romans liked to watch children scrambling for a handful of little treats. Epictetus reminds his audience of up-tight Roman elites that:

A man scatters dried figs and nuts: the children seize them, and fight with one another; men do not, for they think them to be a small matter. — Discourses, 4.7

He goes on to say that his students should view money, government positions, and suchlike in the same way: “to me these are only dried figs and nuts.” The Stoics loved the presocratic philosopher Heraclitus who went even further: human opinions are toys for children!

Suppose the emperor is scattering around these sort of favours and you lose out for some reason, and fail to get anything. If you have any sense, and you’re being philosophical about things, you’ll be no more perturbed than if you failed to catch some figs or nuts. Of course, if a fig happens to land in your lap, says Epictetus, that’s a nice treat. You should be grateful: “take it and eat it; for so far you may value even a fig.”

However, it’s not worth stabbing people in the back, or demeaning yourself, just to grab some favours from the emperor, and more than it would be to grab some dried figs and nuts being thrown around. Incidentally, around the time we believe Epictetus was saying this the emperor of Rome was Trajan and, for a while, one of the students in the audience listening to all of this was reputedly a young social-climber by the name of Hadrian.

Figs in Winter

To look for the fig in winter is the act of a madman and such is he who looks for his child when it is no longer allowed. — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.33

I’m confident that anyone, Greek or Roman, reading this passage in Marcus Aurelius would be reminded of the myth of the goddess Demeter, and the Eleusinian Mystery religion based on her story. Allow me to explain…

Demeter was the “grain mother”, the Greek goddess of agriculture and the harvest. She was also responsible for teaching mankind how to cultivate fig trees — so the fig was one of her symbols.

After he finished writing The Meditations, Marcus went to Athens for the first time, where we know, from several sources, that he was initiated into the Mysteries at the nearby temple of Demeter in Eleusis. Indeed, he became a major patron of the Eleusinian Mysteries. There’s a bust of Marcus Aurelius that still survives today, sitting right there in Eleusis (modern-day Elefsina). We can see it’s surrounded by poppies, another symbol of Demeter. People going to Eleusis to be initiated, after 176 CE, walked through a massive stone gate, constructed by Marcus, with his image crowning it.

Marcus, who was obviously really into the Eleusinian Mysteries, clearly knew all of this.

The main myth around which the mysteries were based was the abduction of Demeter’s virgin daughter, Persephone, by Hades, the tyrannical god of the Underworld. Demeter searched the earth in vain looking for her daughter, and had some adventures along the way. Eventually, Zeus felt sorry for the grieving mother and ordered Hades to return her daughter. He agreed but tricked Persephone into eating six pomegranate seeds, which meant she had to spend six months of each year in the Underworld. Demeter was forced to reconcile herself to only having her beloved daughter with her part-time — so she knew a thing or two about loss. Of course, this is universally agreed to be a metaphor for the cycles of growing and harvesting crops, particularly grain, sacred to Demeter, but also her figs. Marcus, who was obviously really into the Eleusinian Mysteries, clearly knew all of this.

When Marcus talks about wanting your child to be with you when they’re no longer around being as irrational as craving fresh figs in winter, he’s quoting the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. The “highest discipline” of Stoicism, says Epictetus, “which stands as it were at the entrance” is that we must learn to view the things we enjoy, or desire, as temporary — so that we don’t freak out when we lose them. He even says, somewhat notoriously, that when we kiss our children, friends, or brothers — Roman men kissed their friends on the lips — we should remind ourselves that they are mortal.

Do you also remind yourself in like manner, that he whom you love is mortal, and that what you love is nothing of your own: it has been given to you for the present, not that it should not be taken from you, nor has it been given to you for all time, but as a fig is given to you or a bunch of grapes at the appointed season of the year. But if you wish for these things in winter, you are a fool. — Discourses 3.24

Figs and grapes were both associated with the Eleusinian Mystery religion and familiar symbols of the cycles of nature. Demeter, famously, was deprived of her beloved daughter, Persephone, just as nature deprives us of fresh figs and grapes except when they’re in season.

So if you wish for your son or friend when it is not allowed to you, you must know that you are wishing for a fig in winter. For such as winter is to a fig, such is every event which happens from the universe to the things which are taken away according to its nature.

Epictetus says that people are frightened to talk about death. The Greeks and Romans didn’t even like to say the name of Hades. However, Epictetus thinks this is an irrational superstition, and philosophy requires that we talk about and face our mortality.

Say that even for the ears of corn to be reaped is of bad omen, for it signifies the destruction of the ears, but not of the world. Say that the falling of the leaves also is of bad omen, and for the dried fig to take the place of the green fig, and for raisins to be made from the grapes. For all these things are changes from a former state into other states; not a destruction…

This is a major theme of Stoicism: that death is not a catastrophe but merely a natural process, the inevitable change of one thing into another.

In Meditations 3.2, Marcus Aurelius, who had studied painting in his youth, muses that figs, when they are very ripe, burst open. Although, in a sense, this is a flaw, a natural sign of their impending decay, like the lines on the face of an elderly man or woman, it can potentially be seen as something quite appealing and even beautiful. Birth and death are both part of the cycle of nature. Sometimes the greatness of a thing, or a person, lies precisely in the way that it meets its end — think of the “noble death” of Socrates, going out in a blaze of philosophical glory.

Taking the Good with the Bad

In Meditations 4.6, Marcus speaks of the Stoic doctrine that we should be prepared to accept as inevitable the way foolish people do foolish things, or vicious people do vicious things, and so on. He compares this to fresh figs, which naturally contain an acrid juice that can, sometimes, slightly burn the lips and tongue. In other words, every rose has its thorn. An ancient Greek or Roman wouldn’t get angry with a ripe fig for burning his lips— that’s just how things are in nature. It would be childlike to act surprised and bitterly resent something like that happening from time to time because that’s life. He returns to this metaphor several times:

Consider that he who would not have the bad man do wrong, is like the man who would not have the fig tree to bear [acrid] juice in the figs, and infants to cry, and the horse to neigh, and whatever else must necessarily be. For what must a man do who has such a character? If then you are irritable, cure this man’s disposition. — Meditations, 12.16

Marcus says again later that someone would rightly be ashamed if he was surprised at the way a fig-tree produces figs because that’s common knowledge. And yet people act surprised when they encounter misfortunes or setbacks in life that they could easily have anticipated (Meditations, 8.15).

The Bigger Picture

The fresh fig was as freely available as fresh air and sunshine in ancient Greece, except when it wasn’t in season. Even beggars, like the Cynics, could feast on figs, which kept them healthy. Dried figs were thrown to children as small gifts. So they became a metaphor for trivial things in life. Nevertheless, we become attached to them, and crave fresh figs when they’re not available. Like Demeter, goddess of the mysteries, we must learn to enjoy our loved ones, the fruits of the harvest, and other good things in life, without attachment, knowing that they won’t always be around.

The tiny seed of a fig becomes a metaphor for another important concept from Stoic philosophy in Meditations 10.17. Here it symbolizes our place in the vastness of the universe. All individual things, says Marcus, are no more than a fig seed in comparison to existence considered as a whole.

Wednesday, August 11th — A Guide to Stoic Exercises

Hello everyone,

Thanks for subscribing to Stoicism — Philosophy as a Way of Life on Medium. If you want to follow my Medium profile for even more articles it’s Donald J. Robertson. Oh, and scroll down to the end for a sneak peek of our current cover design proposal for Verissimus my forthcoming graphic novel on Marcus Aurelius.

I want to let you all know that you’re invited to a free Facebook Live Event that’s taking place on Wednesday 11th August, called A Guide to Stoic Exercises. See the event listing below for more details, and please feel free to share the link with your friends.

Register Now for the Webinar

This webinar will give simple hints and tips how to use the main Stoic psychological practices in daily life. If you want more in-depth information you should also check out my Medium story A Guide to Stoic Exercises.

You can also enroll in advance, free of charge, on the new email course we’re launching…

Sign up for the email course!

Look forward to seeing you on Facebook Live,

Donald Robertson

Great article, well done!

https://donaldrobertson.name/2017/11/23/stoic-politics-and-the-republic-of-zeno/

Here’s an article about the actual evidence of early Stoic political writings but the way Stoicism was later applied to politics probably evolved…

https://donaldrobertson.name/2017/11/23/stoic-politics-and-the-republic-of-zeno/

Here’s an article about what Marcus Aurelius actually says regarding politics in The Meditations:

https://donaldrobertson.name/2017/08/03/marcus-aurelius-politics-and-freedom/

People keep asking me for a practical guide to using Stoic exercises in daily life. So I went ahead and created one for you. It’s a free…

People keep asking me for a practical guide to using Stoic exercises in daily life. So I went ahead and created one for you. It’s a free email course consisting of six lessons — each one describes how to use a different psychological technique from ancient Stoicism. The goal is to help you build your emotional resilience and cope better with stress.

My latest Medium article provides an overview of the six practical exercises we chose to focus on.

Read “A Guide to Stoic Exercises” on Medium

The new email course goes into these in more depth. It will officially launch on Tuesday 27th July. However, as you’re a subscriber to our Stoicism — Philosophy as a Way of Life newsletter on Medium, I’ve decided to give you early access. If you choose to enroll now you can join our beta testers on the pilot version of the course — free of charge.

Enroll on A Guide to Stoic Exercises

You’re also invited to attend our launch webinar on Instagram Live, at 8.30pm EST on the 27th. Follow our verissimusgraphicnovel account on Instagram for notifications of the event.

Hope you enjoy the Medium article. Please feel free to comment on it with your thoughts and questions — and remember you can highlight, clap, or share. If you want more information please join us on 27th July for the free launch webinar — I look forward to seeing you there.

Six of the Best Practices for Emotional Resilience

Stoicism is experiencing a renaissance in popularity. This arguably started because it provided the philosophical inspiration for the pioneers of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1980s, CBT had become the leading evidence-based form of modern psychotherapy. However, around the start of the 21st century more and more self-help books influenced by Stoic philosophy began to hit the shelves.

My background is in both academic philosophy and CBT. I was among the first wave of authors to begin writing popular books on Stoicism. I focused on self-help techniques that combined ancient Stoic philosophy with modern research-based psychology. The Stoicism of ancient Greece and Rome contained a system of psychological therapy but there was also much more to it. It’s grounded in a philosophical worldview and a set of core ethical principles — what we call today a “virtue ethic”. However, even in the ancient world, people were often drawn to Stoicism initially because it held out the promise of relieving their emotional suffering and helping them to build greater mental resilience.

People are often still unsure how they’re supposed to practice the philosophy in daily life.

Although Stoicism is more popular now than ever, many people are still unsure how they’re supposed to practice the philosophy in daily life. “How exactly,” they ask, “does it promise to relieve our suffering?” I recently created a short email course to explain six of the most important psychological practices derived from ancient Stoicism. In this article, I’ll summarize and describe them for you…

1. Separating Thoughts from Events

This is probably the most important psychological technique in Stoicism but perhaps the hardest to describe. It’s summed up, though, in a very famous quotation from Epictetus:

It’s not things that upset us but rather our opinions about them. — Epictetus, Enchiridion, 5

This was widely-quoted by the founders of CBT because it happens to express what we sometimes call the “cognitive theory of emotion”. This is the view that our emotions are caused, to a large extent, by certain underlying thoughts and beliefs. As soon as we realize that our emotions are “cognitive” in nature, or derived from our thinking, we open up a whole toolbox of cognitive therapy techniques.

However, the most important and powerful of these techniques consists in reminding ourselves, and truly grasping, that our emotions are being shaped by strong value judgements, such as that something is “awful” or “catastrophic”, and so on. It’s a subtle technique but a very powerful one because viewing our emotions in this way tends to weaken their intensity, making it easier for us to see through them and exercise greater self-control.

2. Contemplation of the Sage

The Stoics believed that we could gain considerable insight into the goal of life by regularly contemplating and discussing the idea of a perfectly wise human being, known as the ideal Sage or Sophos. Whereas many other philosophies and religions claimed that their founder was perfect, the Stoics did not, and avoided turning into a cult as a consequence. Instead, they argued that we are all flawed — we’re all relatively foolish and vicious . Yet we are also capable of envisaging perfection because we are born with reason. The “seeds” of wisdom and virtue reside within us, in the form of our deepest moral preconceptions.

We’re often capable of being more objective when we take a step back and consider what it means for another person to exhibit wisdom…

When we turn our attention toward ourselves, our judgement tends to be distorted. We can see a small sliver of wood in our brother’s eye, as the saying goes, but not a huge plank of wood in our own. Indeed, we’re often capable of being more objective when we take a step back and consider what it means for another person to exhibit wisdom and other positive character traits. Once we realize this, we can potentially use it as a guide to life.

First, carefully consider the qualities you admire most in other people. Then ask yourself how it would affect your own life if you were to genuinely embody more of the same qualities. You can see Marcus Aurelius doing something along these lines throughout Book One of The Meditations, where he lists the virtues of about seventeen of his family members and tutors, the individuals he admired most in life.

3. Living in Accord with Virtue

In modern evidence-based approaches to psychotherapy, we often distinguish between clarifying values and living in accord with them. Contemplating the qualities you most admire in other people, and the concept of an ideally wise and good person, is one powerful way of clarifying your values, as we’ve just seen. However, it’s equally important to put these insights into practice in your daily life by actively living in accord with your most authentic values. (And to be clear, by that I do not mean that moral values are somehow subjective, and neither did the ancient Stoics.)

The Stoics do this in a number of ways, e.g., Marcus Aurelius repeatedly brings his focus back to the question of his fundamental goal in life. He repeatedly asks himself each day whether his actions, or even his train of thought, are truly necessary. By this he means: do they contribute to the goal of life? Do these actions bring me closer to wisdom… or am I drifting further away from it? We can also brainstorm activities that exemplify our values and plan small steps to incorporate them into our daily schedule — something modern therapists call “activity scheduling”. For example, if writing down your personal reflections on the meaning of life seems like it would bring you a step closer to wisdom then why not get into the habit of doing that each day? It takes effort at first to create new habits but remember that even small changes can have big consequences!

4. Stress-inoculation Training

Most people try to avoid thinking about upsetting things. Either that or they dwell on them in unhelpful ways, such as morbidly ruminating about the past or worrying about the future. The Stoics advise us to get into the habit of facing our fears and imagining all the most common misfortunes that may befall us in life: sickness, poverty, rejection, loss, death, and so on. They reasoned that by visualizing these setbacks as if they were already happening, we could potentially prepare ourselves in advance to cope with them better if they ever happen. It’s a very direct method of building emotional resilience, in other words. Seneca calls this premeditatio malorum, or the premeditation of misfortunes.

Modern psychotherapists teach their clients to do many things that resemble this. There are actually around five or six different benefits linked with picturing feared events in this way. From the perspective of Stoicism, the main thing is that we realize that it’s not the thing itself that upsets us but rather our opinions about it, i.e., that we separate our upsetting thoughts from these perceived misfortunes, as noted earlier. However, the Stoics also seem to have realized something that’s very firmly established by research in modern psychotherapy. When we repeatedly imagine upsetting events for a more prolonged amount of time than normal, emotional distress tends to naturally abate, or fade over time, if we allow it to do so.

This takes patience and a little bit of self-discipline but it’s a very robust way of overcoming anxiety, in particular. Donald Meichenbaum, one of the early pioneers of CBT, referred to a similar approach as “stress-inoculation training” (SIT). We inoculate people by giving them an injection that exposes their immune system to a small dose of a particular virus. We can do something similar with the things that cause stress or anxiety, exposing ourselves to them gradually, in small doses, so that we have a chance to build up our psychological coping ability, and emotional resilience. Face your fears in your imagination, therefore, and allow yourself time to patiently master them.

5. The Contemplation of Death

Of all the threats we face in life, death is clearly unique, being absolutely final in nature. The Stoics believed that our fear of death underlies most of our other fears. Seneca therefore says that to learn how to die is to unlearn how to be a slave. He meant that by overcoming our fear of death we liberate ourselves, potentially, from all other fears and attachments.

For this reason, the Stoics rehearsed the moment of their own death, as we’ve described them doing above with other misfortunes, such as poverty or exile. However, the contemplation of our own death plays a larger role in Stoicism. Seneca told himself each night, as he fell asleep, that he might not awaken in the morning. Learning to face our own mortality calmly, and with a philosophical attitude, can empower us to re-evaluate our priorities in life.

Things that seem important to the majority of people, often begin to seem trivial, in retrospect, when we face our own death. Accepting our own mortality can also help us to “seize the day” (carpe diem) as the Roman poet Horace said, and to act with greater integrity and self-awareness, from moment to moment, in our daily lives.

6. The View from Above

Finally, one of the most striking, memorable, and popular contemplative techniques found in ancient philosophy. The French scholar Pierre Hadot called this The View from Above and found evidence of it in the writings of philosophers from different schools of thought. However, it features prominently in Stoicism, particularly toward the end of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, where it’s mentioned a number of times.

Sometimes it consists in literally imagining things as if viewed from above, like the figure of Zeus, in Greek mythology, looking down on human affairs from Mount Olympus. Sometimes it’s more cosmological and involves imagining our place within the vastness of cosmic time and space:

How small a part of the boundless and unfathomable time is assigned to every man, for it is very soon swallowed up in the eternal! And how small a part of the whole substance, and how small a part of the universal soul, and on what a small clod of the whole earth you creepest! Reflecting on all this, consider nothing to be great, except to act as your nature leads you, and to endure that which the common nature brings. — Meditations, 12.32

In modern psychology, it’s well-known that emotional distress such as heightened anxiety tends to be accompanied by selective attention and narrowing of our focus onto perceived threats. This naturally distorts our perception of events, though. The Stoics realized that by doing the opposite and broadening our perspective we can train our minds to counteract the anxious mode of thinking.

What Next?

I’ve only been able to summarize these techniques here. There’s a lot more to say about each of them. However, I hope that by providing you with a brief introduction to some practical exercises, you’ll have a better understanding of Stoicism as a way of life and not merely as a “pen and ink” philosophy. If you are keen to learn more, check out my free email course A Guide to Stoic Exercises. (You’re also invited to join us on 27th July for a special live webinar hosted on our Instagram account where we’ll be discussing these techniques.)

You’ll learn more quickly by actually doing these exercises, though, rather than just reading about them. So get started putting them into practice to the best of your ability. As Marcus Aurelius once said: Stop arguing about what it means to be a good man and just be one.