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Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) is the main precursor of modern cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). (Or the earliest form of CBT, depending on how you look at it.) It was developed in the late 1950s by Albert Ellis, who subsequently wrote dozens of books on the subject. Ellis had a forceful and engaging personality.  In addition to writing textbooks for therapists he wrote some very popular self-help books for a wider audience. He also happens to have referred more often to Stoicism than any other famous figure in the history of psychotherapy. (The now almost forgotten Paul Dubois perhaps comes a close second.)  My own background is in philosophy and CBT, so the relationship between REBT and Stoicism particularly interests me.

In Ellis’ first major publication on what would later become known as REBT, he wrote that its central principle “was originally discovered and stated by the ancient Stoic philosophers”. He meant the REBT principle that emotional disturbances, and associated symptoms, are not caused by external events, as people tend to assume, but mainly by our beliefs and attitudes about such events. Ellis would often teach this principle to therapy clients by showing them a famous quote from the Stoic Handbook of Epictetus: “It’s not events that upset us but our judgments about events.” However, many more references to Stoicism can be found scattered throughout Ellis’ writings. Indeed, even when he makes no explicit mention of Stoicism, traces of its signature ideas can arguably be found in other aspects of REBT theory and practice.

I’ve always felt therefore that Ellis was, quite possibly, more influenced by Stoic philosophy than he actually realized. Perhaps because he read the Stoics quite early in life, as a teenager, he underestimated the extent to which their writings may have inspired various ideas he developed many years later as part of REBT. My first book on Stoicism, The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (2010), reviews the parallels between Stoicism and REBT in depth, both in terms of theory and technique. So I won’t be providing another broad survey like that in this short article. Rather I’ll focus on what I think are some notable similarities between the fundamental principles of both Stoicism and REBT.

Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy: A Newcomer’s Guide

Walter Matweychuk is an REBT expert who is also very knowledgeable about Stoicism.  Walter gave a talk about their relationship at Stoicon 2017 the international conference for Modern Stoicism. He recently published a neat little introduction to REBT called Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy: A Newcomer’s Guide (2017). It’s co-authored by Prof. Windy Dryden, a prolific author on REBT and, by my reckoning, the most famous psychotherapist in the UK. Their book is a concise account of REBT for complete newcomers. So it provides a great way for those who are interested in Stoic philosophy to begin learning more about REBT, and I believe they’ll soon grasp the obvious relevance of Ellis’ psychotherapeutic approach to Stoicism.

It starts, naturally enough, by introducing the famous “ABC Model” developed by Ellis. This provides a very simple way to illustrate the difference between healthy (rational) and unhealthy (irrational) ways of responding to any given situation.

A: Activation, meaning you find yourself in a situation or facing certain events about which you draw various inferences
B: Beliefs, you respond by imposing your underlying beliefs on the situation, in this case rigid, irrational demands
C: Consequences, you experience various consequences, particularly emotional distress, but also thoughts and behaviours

For example:

A: I’m giving a presentation at work and someone frowns, so I infer that they think I’m boring
B: I have the inflexible and irrational belief that everyone must find me interesting and if they don’t it’s absolutely awful and unbearable
C: As a consequence, I feel depressed and maybe drink alcohol and distract myself to cope

However, not everyone faced with the same activating event (A) will experience the same emotional consequences (C).  Some individuals might have a more healthy and adaptive response.  Why? Because they have more flexible and rational underlying beliefs (B), akin to preferences rather than rigid demands. This simple model is the foundation stone on which REBT is built. It’s therefore normally taught to clients during the initial orientation (“socialization”) phase of treatment. In more technical terms, it’s used to teach clients a simplified “cognitive” theory of emotion, in which the pivotal elements are their own beliefs (cognitions).

However, when the majority of clients arrive for their first therapy session they tend to talk and think as though certain situations (A) lead directly to emotional distress (C). “She criticized me and that made me feel depressed”, for example. They’re usually missing the cognitive link in the middle, the irrational beliefs (B) that really explain why they’re responding the way that they do. (“People absolutely must not criticize me, because if they do it’s unbearably awful.”)  At first, people often try avoiding or changing the activating event (A), or suppressing the disturbing emotional consequences (C).  However, REBT posits that in most cases the healthiest long-term strategy is to identify the rigid, irrational beliefs that create the emotional response, dispute them, and replace them with flexible, rational beliefs instead.

Ellis always saw his approach as being, in a sense, philosophical because it targets very fundamental beliefs. Indeed, often it could be described as an attempt to transform our underlying “philosophy of life” by disputing irrational beliefs and adopting more rational ones instead. Socrates was arguably the first person to really introduce the notion that rationally disputing our beliefs about what’s good or bad could be construed both as doing philosophy and also as a sort of psychological therapy.  He liked to quote Homer, saying that it was the business of philosophy, not to speculate about the heavens, as previous thinkers had done, but to investigate “Whatso’er is good or evil in a house”, by asking questions of practical significance to our daily lives.  It was the Stoics, though, who really developed this therapeutic aspect of Socratic philosophy the most.

The ancient Stoics actually had a similar three-stage model to Ellis but their emphasis was slightly different. For instance, Epictetus describes this process:

A: There’s an event, such as being caught in a storm at sea, that automatically triggers certain reflexive emotional reactions (propatheiai) and automatic thoughts (phantasiai), such as feelings of anxiety and seasickness, etc.
B: We respond with the belief, or rather value judgement (hupolepsis), that what is happening is intrinsically bad and harmful to our very nature
C: Our initial thoughts and feelings then escalate into a full-blown irrational desires or emotions (called “passions”) and we become excessively upset about the situation

For Stoics, it’s therefore a specific kind of value judgement that’s the root cause of emotional disturbance, and certain behavioural problems in life. For simplicity, we could describe it as judging things outside of our direct control to be strongly good or bad. However, they actually based their therapeutic approach on a more subtle qualitative distinction between two different types of value judgement: one which causes distress and one which does not. They had to introduce jargon to express this, making a distinction between judging something to be supremely “good” (agathos) or “bad” (kakia) versus merely assigning a lighter kind of value (axia) to it for the purposes of planning future actions.

The Stoics believed that only our own character should be judged supremely “good” or “bad”, making these terms synonymous with “virtue” and “vice” respectively. Everything external to our character or acts of will is at best lightly “preferred” or “dispreferred”, advantageous or disadvantageous, but not truly “good” or “bad” in this strong sense.  We can articulate this distinction between something being “good” versus merely “preferred” in several ways because the Stoics employed several definitions of the “good” and a variety of arguments to support their theory. One is that the “good”, in this key technical sense, is synonymous with what is truly beneficial for us, and the “bad” with what is genuinely harmful.

We may rationally value some external things over others, such as preferring wealth over poverty, as long as we don’t actually confuse the value of such things with our supreme good or what is ultimately beneficial for us in life. Money might be useful or advantageous, according to the Stoics, but it’s not really the goal of life.  Likewise, poverty might be a disadvantage that we prefer to avoid but in itself it doesn’t necessarily ruin our life.  Assigning so much value to external advantages such as wealth or status, as if they were a “life or death matter”, is a recipe for neurosis, and the Stoics believed that it was also the root cause of certain vices, i.e., of immoral or antisocial behaviour and even crimes.  In their view, external advantages like having wealth, good looks, or friends, merely gives us more opportunity or control over external events in life.  Whether that’s ultimately good or bad, though, depends on how we use it.  Political tyrants have immense wealth and power but, observed the ancient Stoics, that merely gives them more opportunity to exercise folly and vice.  We go wrong, the Stoics say, when we’re duped into believing that fame, wealth, and other external advantages in life, are somehow more important than wisdom and virtue.

There’s another interesting way of expressing the Stoic qualitative distinction between what is supremely good (or beneficial) and the lighter value placed on externals such as health, wealth, and reputation. They believed that unhealthy passions (desires and emotions) are not only irrational but also excessive. They overreach themselves by demanding that they get what they want despite the fact that their aim is to get (or avoid) external things beyond our direct control. Nothing, say the Stoics, is truly under our direct control except our own will, or our ability to choose one thing over another (prohairesis). It’s therefore madness, or simply irrational and unphilosophical, to desire things in this demanding way.

‘What is it, Passion, that you want? Tell me this.’
‘What I want, Reason? To do everything I want.’
‘A royal wish; but tell me it again.’
‘Whatever I desire I want to happen.’ – Cleanthes

That’ll be an irrational, rigid type of demand then. By contrast, the philosophical attitude aspired to by Stoicism would require embracing the fact that our desires can always be thwarted by external events. Epictetus actually tells his Stoic students that there’s only one thing that they should rigidly demand in life, that they refrain from voluntarily engaging in vice, because that’s always, by definition, within their power to accomplish.

Epictetus called the first stage of training in Stoicism the “Discipline of Desire and Aversion”, which he says is the most urgent for his students to master. It’s basically the Stoic therapy of the passions. He says it boils down to the doctrine that irrational passions are fundamentally due either to being thwarted in getting what we desire or in getting what we seek to avoid in life (Discourses, 3.2). The frustration of certain desires, he says, is necessarily the cause of emotional disturbance, genuine misfortune, sorrow, lamentation, and even envy. He’s clearly talking about a particular type of desire that’s intolerant of being thwarted or remaining unfulfilled. He addresses this demanding quality of unhealthy desires at the very beginning of the Stoic Handbook:

Remember that [this type of] desire contains in it the profession (hope) of obtaining that which you desire; and the profession (hope) in aversion (turning from a thing) is that you will not fall into that which you attempt to avoid: and he who fails in his desire is unfortunate; and he who falls into that which he would avoid, is unhappy. If then you attempt to avoid only the things contrary to nature which are within your power, you will not be involved in any of the things which you would avoid. But if you [rigidly] attempt to avoid disease or death or poverty, you will be unhappy. Take away then aversion from all things which are not in our power, and transfer it to the things contrary to nature [i.e., irrational and unhealthy] which are in our power. (Handbook, 2)

Nevertheless, he adds that his students are to refrain from passionately desiring wisdom and virtue for the time being, in this strong sense, because that would be setting their sights too high at the beginning of their education in philosophy. He concludes by explaining that instead of employing this demanding, passionate form of desire and aversion his students should instead employ a light preference in selecting one external goal over another.

Moreover, Epictetus ends this passage by saying that even when pursuing things lightly in this way, Stoics should also remember to do so “with exceptions”. The meaning of this is usually lost in translation but he’s actually using a Stoic technical term: hupexhairesis. This is often translated as “with a reserve clause”. It means something very specific: undertaking our actions while calmly accepting that they might be thwarted. In plain English, the Stoic reserve clause is like saying: “I want to do xyz but if I don’t succeed, that’s not the end of the world.” Sometimes the “reserve clause” is expressed by qualifying desires and intentions with the clause: “if nothing prevents me”, “Fate permitting” or “God Willing”. Epictetus and other Stoics would also imagine specific setbacks thwarting their desires, which they practised accepting with equanimity and indifference. It seems to me that the addition of the “reserve clause” might be compared to what REBT means by holding “flexible” as opposed to “rigid” beliefs about what we want in life. It’s the subtle knack of being able to say “I want this but if I don’t get it – so what? – it’s not the end of the world” rather than “I must have this!”

REBT likewise shows clients that their irrational beliefs (B), in the form of rigid demands, are the key to their problem and that’s what the therapy focuses on helping them to change.

Note that failing to gain what we value is insufficient for emotional disturbance. REBT does not target unfulfilled values; rather it targets rigid attitudes that suggest the values we have absolutely must be fulfilled. Flexible attitudes specify a preference for what is valued and explicitly negate a demand for it. (p. 16)

For example, they might turn the rigid demand “I absolutely must succeed in valued areas of my life” into the flexible preference “I would prefer to succeed in valued areas of my life but do not have to do so.” In REBT it’s assumed that the strength of a desire alone isn’t what makes it into a rigid demand but nevertheless very strong desires are more likely to mutate into rigid demands.  This distinction can be compared to the one made thousands of years earlier by the Stoics: between the sort of excessive desires or aversions that inevitably cause emotional disturbance when frustrated and the sort of light preferences that seamlessly adapt themselves to being thwarted.

REBT also distinguishes between three domains in which people hold such beliefs: about themselves, other people, or life in general.  Stoicism actually employed exactly the same distinction.  The early Stoics apparently began by employing a twofold distinction between internal and external nature, or ourselves versus the rest of the world.  (This is probably the origin of Epictetus’ famous “dichotomy of control”, which distinguishes what is up to us, our own actions, from everything else.)  However, at least by the time of Marcus Aurelius, this had evolved into a threefold distinction between ourselves, the rest of humankind, and the universe (or nature) as a whole.

Extreme Attitudes

This newcomer’s guide also covers three common “extreme attitudes”, which REBT believes are derived from rigid demands.

1. Extreme awfulizing
2. Discomfort intolerance
3. Extreme devaluation

These also have parallels in the Stoic literature, although for the Stoics, as we’ve seen, the root cause of suffering is the belief that external things, which are not entirely up to us, are supremely good or bad. Sometimes, to be fair, it’s difficult to separate these sort of toxic attitudes as they’re very closely intertwined. For that reason, the difference in emphasis between Stoic therapy and REBT is arguably less significant than what they have in common. Both approaches agree that broadly-speaking a nexus of irrational, evaluative, demanding beliefs are at the core of our emotional distress.

Awfulizing

REBT holds that extreme “awfulizing” attitudes often derive from rigid demands. For example, if I believe “People must treat me with respect” then as a consequence I may also have an extreme attitude that says “It’s awful when people don’t treat me with respect.” What’s meant by “awful” is defined as:

1. Nothing could conceivably be worse in terms of this situation
2. It’s worse than what we’d normally think of as 100% bad – it’s off the scale
3. Absolutely no good can be derived from something as intrinsically bad as this
4. There’s no way to transcend something this awful by responding constructively to it

The opposing attitude in REBT consists of asserting that the situation may be bad but it’s not awful, e.g., “It’s bad when I don’t succeed in valued areas of my life but it’s not awful”. We might also say “I don’t like it but it’s not the end of the world.”

As we’ve seen, the Stoics view rigid, irrational desires as the corollary of irrational value judgments. The two things are basically synonymous. What Ellis meant by awfulizing can be compared to what the Stoics meant by someone judging an external event to be supremely “bad” and “harmful”, in their special technical sense. This involves the belief that some external misfortune is so bad that it harms our fundamental interests, striking at the very core of our being. The Stoics believe this attributes a form of extreme “badness” to external events that they simply cannot possess: only the corruption of our own character, by folly and vice, can actually ruin our lives in this way.

To paraphrase one of their metaphors: imagine a set of scales with folly and vice on one side. No matter how many external misfortunes we pile up on the other side, it should never be enough to tip the scales. The form of “badness” attributable to external misfortune, no matter how severe, is inherently inferior and qualitatively different from the sort of “badness” possessed by our own descent into inner wretchedness. In plain English, both Stoicism and REBT agree that much of our emotional disturbance is caused by the belief that apparent misfortunes in life are not only “bad”, in the ordinary sense, but terrible or awful in an exaggerated and disproportionate sense. It’s right off the scale, in fact, and the Stoics would say that’s because it makes the error of conflating two different sorts of value.

Discomfort Intolerance

REBT believes that many problems are due to the belief that discomfort is unbearable, which causes people to feel overwhelmed and give up prematurely when perseverance is required. Tolerance of discomfort happens to be essential to most psychotherapy, though. For example, treatment for many forms of anxiety requires repeatedly confronting our fears, which is impossible without a willingness to accept and tolerate a certain amount of emotional discomfort. Put crudely, we usually have to be willing to step outside of our comfort zone in order to achieve significant changes. In fact, discomfort intolerance can be a severe handicap in many areas of life. When we tell ourselves “I can’t bear it”, we’re usually wrong. It’s often just fear or laziness speaking. We can bear a lot more than we tend to assume.

The Stoics remind themselves of this quite frequently. One of the recurring themes in The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is the claim that we are, by nature, capable of bearing more discomfort than we realize. For example, Marcus tells himself not to overwhelm his mind with exaggerated worries but to divide troubling events into small parts and focus on one aspect at a time. I call this the Stoic technique of “Depreciation by Analysis.” When we calmly ask ourselves “What is there about this particular aspect that’s actually unbearable?” we come to realize how absurd that question is because there’s almost always a way to cope.

Do not disturb yourself by picturing your life as a whole; do not assemble in your mind the many and varied troubles which have come to you in the past and will come again in the future, but ask yourself with regard to every present difficulty: ‘What is there in this that is unbearable and beyond endurance?’ You would be ashamed to confess it! And then remind yourself that it is not the future or what has passed that afflicts you, but always the present, and the power of this is much diminished if you take it in isolation and call your mind to task if it thinks that it cannot stand up to it when taken on its own. (Meditations, 8.36)

By focusing on the here and now, and one aspect at a time of a larger situation, Stoics learn to cope with even the most challenging misfortunes in life. Marcus, like other Stoics, also frequently asks himself what “virtue” or coping ability nature has given him that he could use to deal with the situation he faces. This is related to the Stoic emphasis on studying role models and learning coping strategies from them, which Marcus does extensively in Book One of The Meditations. One way of increasing our appraisal of our ability to cope with adversity and tolerate discomfort is by reminding ourselves how other people have managed to cope with similar situations.

Devaluation and Acceptance

REBT holds that a great deal of emotional disturbance is caused by beliefs rigidly deprecating oneself, other people, or life in general. This is typical in clinical depression but it can manifest in many other types of emotional problem as well. These extreme attitudes are interpreted as derivatives of rigid demands. For example, someone who rigidly believes “You must not ignore me” may conclude “You are a bad person if you do ignore me.” The essence of this attitude is a global rating of negative value. Something is judged to be bad as a whole, whereas in reality most things have a mixture of positive and negative qualities. It’s a form, therefore, of over-generalization. REBT recommends that these attitudes should be replaced with more flexible ones that actively refrain from attaching a global negative rating to oneself, other people, or life in general.  Even better, we should learn to accept ourselves and others unconditionally even if we object to specific attitudes or behaviours.

This sort of extreme negative evaluation is similar to what the Stoics mean by judging externals, including life as a whole or other individuals, to be bad in the strong sense described above. Epictetus actually says that when you fail to distinguish between things that are up to you and things that are not, and invest too much importance on the latter, as a consequence “you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will blame both gods and men”, i.e., railing against life in general (Handbook, 1). The Stoics repeatedly warn us not to indulge in judging other people to be “good” or “bad” in the strong sense they’re concerned with, similar to a global rating of value.

Epictetus says that someone who is uneducated in philosophy blames other people, someone who is partially educated blames himself, and someone who has completed his education blames neither himself nor others (Handbook, 5).  Human nature is fundamentally something sacred to the Stoics because, despite our flaws, our very nature contains the seeds of wisdom  and virtue, the potential for good.  Rather than condemning themselves others in this global deprecating sense, therefore, the Stoics encourage us to view our many passions and vices as, ultimately, being irrational mistakes made by beings that are fundamentally capable of doing good as well as evil.

Conclusion

There are many more comparisons we could make between REBT and Stoicism.  For example, one of the methods of Socratic disputation employed in REBT, known as “functional disputation”, involves evaluating the consequences, emotional and otherwise, of holding rational versus irrational beliefs.  That’s very similar to one of the most common methods cited by the Stoics, which involved comparing the consequences of living rationally versus those of being ruled by unhealthy passions, i.e., desires and emotions based on irrational beliefs.  The Stoics often allude to this through the shorthand method of stating the paradox that irrational fears typically do us more harm than the things of which we’re afraid – highlighting the harmful consequences of irrational beliefs.  Anger, they say, does us more harm than the person with whom we’re angry ever could, because it poisons our very character with temporary madness.

I’ve only been able to touch briefly on some similarities between REBT and Stoicism here. So I’ve focused on some of the key similarities in their conceptualization of emotional disturbance because that’s of absolutely fundamental importance, underlying as it does most of the other concepts and techniques employed in both approaches. As I mentioned at the beginning, my book The Philosophy of CBT attempts to provide a fairly comprehensive overview of the similar concepts and techniques found in REBT and Stoicism. So, in particular, if you’re interested in looking at the practical therapeutic techniques that go with the theory described above that would be worth reading.

However, this newcomer’s guide by Matweychuk and Dryden explains the core techniques of REBT more thoroughly, in plain English, in a way that I think will be of interest to those studying Stoic philosophy. For anyone looking for a quick introduction to REBT, it’s perfect in that respect because it’s very concise and yet covers the key concepts of the approach very well.

NB: See my video below for a discussion of the twelve practical techniques listed at the end of this book.

Cleanthes, the second head of the Stoic school, once said that while its philosophical doctrines may well be contrary to popular opinion they are surely not contrary to reason. He was speaking of “paradox”, which literally means contrary to opinion in Greek. Stoic philosophy, like the philosophy of Socrates, was known in the ancient world both for its famous paradoxes and for its rigorous appeal to reason. It’s worth clearing up from the outset that the word “stoicism” (lower case) denotes a personality trait, having a stiff upper lip, whereas “Stoicism” (capitalized) is an entire school of Greek philosophy. The relationship between these two things is pretty tenuous, although they’re often mistakenly conflated. Stoicism was meant to shake things up by challenging its followers to swim against the tide and embrace a moral worldview radically at odds with the values implicitly accepted by the majority of ordinary people. In doing so, it explicitly cast itself as a form of psychological therapy (therapeia) and self-improvement. It’s experienced a resurgence in popularity in recent decades because its emphasis on “philosophy as a way of life” appeals to a growing number of people as an alternative to Christianity and other religions. However, Stoicism is a philosophy not a religion. Its conclusions were based solely on reason rather than faith, tradition, or revelation. Massimo Pigliucci’s How to be a Stoic provides a restatement of Stoic philosophy and practices that takes the form of a self-help guide but one that attempts to update Stoicism in terms of a contemporary scientific worldview.

The Author

Pigliucci is professor of philosophy at City College of New York but he also holds PhDs in genetics and evolutionary biology. He credits his background in both philosophy and science as explaining the desire to find a rational philosophy of life and worldview that, in turn, led him to ancient virtue ethics and eventually to Stoicism. He says he was raised a Catholic but abandoned belief in Christianity as a teenager and like many others today was left looking for something else to replace religion as a guide to life. Pigliucci found that Stoicism satisfied the same needs as religion in that it could provide him with a practical philosophy of life. However, it was also fundamentally rational and science-friendly. The Stoics were materialists who believed in a God that was synonymous with Nature, a forerunner of the philosopher’s God of Spinoza and subsequently Einstein. Pigliucci found this appealing as a scientist because it allows us to find a place for spirituality, alongside reason, and without any form of superstition. The final thing that drew him to Stoicism was the way it directly engages with the existential problem of our own mortality. The Stoics neither reassure us with the promise of an afterlife nor simply turn away from the problem and ignore it, burying their heads in the sand. “A man cannot live well”, said Seneca, “if he knows not how to die well.” Having recently turned fifty, Pigliucci found himself, midway upon life’s journey, re-evaluating things and turning to Stoic philosophy as a way of coming to terms with the crude fact of his own mortality. He found himself in agreement with the core tenets of Stoicism but was also reassured that as a rational philosophy it was open to revision in areas where modern science or philosophy has made progress. So he states quite frankly “I have decided to commit to Stoicism as a philosophy of life”.

The Journey

The book opens with an account of Pigliucci’s personal journey. It describes how, faced with a bewildering array of religions and philosophies to help us make sense of life, he chose to become a Stoic. He immediately explains, for readers unfamiliar with the philosophy, that this does not mean being unemotional like Mr. Spock from Star Trek. Stoics have feelings too. They just seek to reduce the hold unhealthy and irrational ones have over the mind and to replace them with more healthy and rational ones. One of its central practical components is the habit of distinguishing rationally between what is under our direct control and what is not in any given situations, especially ones that might be expected to upset us. Stoics learn to take more responsibility for their own thoughts and actions not to accept the reality that other things in life are not entirely under their control. Ancient Greek philosophy refers to the state of mind someone has when they fulfil their potential and live in accord with reason as “virtue” (arete). That word can sound overly pompous and moralizing to some modern readers but it can also be translated using the slightly broader term “excellence”. Pigliucci says he was drawn to Stoicism because of its emphasis on trying to flourish by living rationally and virtuously. He emphasizes from the outset that although Stoicism involves cultivating a special kind of indifference (apatheia) and acceptance toward external events, beyond our direct control, that does not make it passive or apathetic, in the modern sense of the word. The very thing that attracted him most was the way it attempts to square this circle by combining emotional acceptance with a commitment to positive action in the world. He does readers a service by making these simple points in the opening pages because it’s a common misconception that Stoics are unemotional and passive or disinterested in external events. Nothing could be further from the truth, though. Pigliucci was raised in Rome and says that since high school, where he studied Greek and Roman history and philosophy, he had an awareness of Stoicism as part of his cultural heritage. Many other people who “discover” Stoicism today have a kind of deja vu experience as they notice its ideas seem strangely familiar. Traces of its influence crop up throughout Western art and literature. In some ways, Stoicism is also the great grandaddy of the modern field of self-improvement.

Pigliucci is a member, along with me, of the multidisciplinary team that run a non-profit philanthropic organization called Modern Stoicism. Each year, Modern Stoicism puts on a free online course called Stoic Week, which helps people to try out different Stoic practices each day. It’s grown rapidly over the last five years and last Fall about seven thousand people from all around the world took part. Pigliucci cites this as one of several pieces of evidence pointing toward the conclusion that Stoicism is suddenly gathering popularity again. He rightly stresses that the data collected from Stoic Week and other research projects are tentative. These are merely pilot studies, nevertheless they consistently provide evidence that following Stoic practices can have a beneficial effect on mood and life satisfaction, as shown by results from established psychological measures.

What is Stoicism?

Stoicism is a school of ancient Greek philosophy, founded at Athens by a Phoenician merchant called Zeno of Citium around 301 BC. For many years, Zeno had studied different schools of Athenian philosophy before founding his own. He’d embraced the austere lifestyle of a Cynic philosopher as well as studying in the Platonic Academy and with the dialecticians of the less well-known Megarian School. The Cynics and Platonists were often contrasted insofar as the former embraced a simple but extremely demanding approach to philosophy as a way of life whereas the latter were somewhat more, well, “academic” and scholarly. Zeno’s Stoicism tried to bring together the best of both traditions. Whereas the Cynics eschewed bookish studies, Zeno introduced a threefold curriculum for his Stoic students encompassing Ethics, Physics and Logic. However, like the Cynics, the Stoics remained wary of study or debate that did not serve the fundamental goal of life, defined as “living in agreement with nature”. As Pigliucci explains, this didn’t mean hugging trees but rather fulfilling our natural potential as animals gifted with language and reason. For Stoics this ultimately equates to living in accord with virtue, and the love of wisdom. The Cynics had taught the austere view that everything except virtue should be seen as indifferent whereas the Platonists had recognized a variety of things as contributing to the good life. Zeno adopted a compromise position by arguing that though virtue is the only true good, other things in life naturally have some value albeit of an inferior sort.

In 155 BC, the head of the Stoic school at that time, Diogenes of Babylon, went from Athens to Rome on an ambassadorial trip, along with two other philosophers. While he was there he also lectured on philosophy, introducing Stoicism to the Roman Republic, where it quickly took root as it resonated with traditional Roman values. Over the following centuries many influential Roman statesmen became associated with Stoicism. The last famous Stoic we hear about is the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations survives today. From Zeno to Marcus, therefore, the history of the Stoic school as a living tradition spanned nearly five centuries, before it was gradually eclipsed by Neoplatonism and then by Christianity. Pigliucci begins by surveying the history of the school for those unfamiliar with the subject, although the main focus of his book is how Stoicism can be reprised in the modern world by providing us with a modern-day philosophy of life compatible with the current scientific worldview. He weaves his account of Stoic theory and practice into anecdotes drawn from his own life experiences, showing how the philosophy can be applied to everyday challenges.

Pigliucci was a relative newcomer to Stoicism when he began writing this book so he takes the famous Roman Stoic Epictetus as his guide along the way. Like Epictetus, he divides Stoicism into the three “disciplines” of desire, action, and assent. The main part of the book is divided into three sections. These deal respectively with training in mastering our desires and emotions, organizing our actions around a coherent moral goal, and learning to withhold our assent from initial misleading impressions.

The Discipline of Desire

Epictetus believed that we should learn to master our own fears and desires before focusing on the more theoretical aspects of Stoic philosophy. Pigliucci describes this discipline of desire as knowing “what it is proper to want or not want”. He therefore begins with the Stoic doctrine expressed in the opening sentence of Epictetus’ Handbook: some things are up to us whereas other things are not. The whole practice of Stoic philosophy, at least in Epictetus, revolves around this fundamental distinction between our own voluntary actions and everything else, i.e., what we do and what happens to us. Many people today are familiar with this aspect of Stoicism from the Serenity Prayer made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous: “God, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.” Pigliucci stumbled across this prayer himself in the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse Five. It’s one of the central tenets of Stoicism that we should take greater responsibility for our own voluntary thoughts and actions while emotionally accepting the fact that other things are beyond our direct control. Bearing that simple distinction in mind has tremendous benefits in terms of building emotional resilience. However, people sometimes confuse it with an attitude of passive resignation, which it is certainly not. The Stoics explained this paradox through the metaphor of an archer who places great importance on the way he draws his bow, takes aim, and releases the arrow. However, once he’s done his part, he accepts that whether or not he actually hits his target is something ultimately in the hands of fate. It could move, for example, or a gust of wind could blow his arrow off course. The Stoic archer accepts this from the outset and although he has an external goal, or target, he focuses his will only on doing what’s under his control to the best of his ability, while accepting both external success and failure with equanimity. Pigliucci discusses how this kind of thinking helped him to cope with the stress of being surrounded by angry crowds on the streets of Istanbul following the failed 2016 military coup d’état against the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Pigliucci next appeals to modern biological science to explain the Stoic definition of the goal of life, “living in accord with nature”. This was meant as a call to fulfil our human potential as inherently social creatures, capable of reason. He argues that it’s a serious mistake for modern scientists and philosophers to reject the concept of human nature. Although Darwinism dealt a deathblow to the assumption that humans are somehow essentially unique compared to other animals nevertheless, Pigliucci argues, our capacity for complex grammar and reasoning is special enough to justify speaking about it as a defining characteristic of human nature. The Stoics also argue that although nature has given us instincts, like those of other animals, we’re capable of reflecting on whether we actually want to act in accord with them or not. Children with chickenpox feel a desperate urge to scratch their itching blisters. However, if they’re old enough to understand then reason is capable of stepping in and telling them that’s a bad idea and that their natural instinct should be resisted. That’s why the Stoics called reason the “master faculty” and believed that we had a duty to protect and cultivate our ability to apply it in daily life. Their goal was to learn the art of living wisely. However, they believed that human nature is both rational, meaning capable of reason, and social. Human infants are born relatively defenceless compared with those of other mammals. We have evolved a powerful parental instinct toward our offspring, which the Stoics called “natural affection”. They believed that when this pro-social aspect of human nature is developed in accord with reason it becomes the basis of social virtues such as justice, fairness, and kindness. Pigliucci explains that the Stoics believed reason guides us to extend this natural familial affection to others on the basis of their humanity, and capacity for reason. Stoics learn to care about humanity in progressively widening circles through a process called oikeiosis, which is notoriously tricky to translate but means something along the lines of metaphorically bringing others into our household. This leads to the famous ethical cosmopolitanism of the Stoics, who viewed themselves, like Socrates and the Cynics before them, as citizens of the whole world, and the rest of humanity are their fellow-citizens. This moral vision preceded the Christian notion of the “brotherhood of man” by four centuries.

Epictetus also said that external things are indifferent but how we handle them is not. The Stoics compared the way we deal with even the most serious life events to playing a ball game: death, bereavement, exile, poverty, etc. It’s not the thing itself that really matters, in other words, but the way we choose to deal with it. That’s what they mean by virtue. The ball is relatively worthless, in itself, but the game consists in handling it well. However, as we’ve seen, some external things are naturally “preferred” over others, according to Stoic ethics. Pigliucci explains the tricky Stoic concept of the value (axia) assigned to “indifferent” things by comparing it to the concept of “lexicographic preference” in modern economics. People are willing to trade money for a holiday because they place them both on the same lexicographic level but you probably wouldn’t trade your daughter for any amount of money or holidays. For the Stoics, health is preferred to sickness, wealth is preferred to poverty, and life is preferred to death, but wisdom and virtue should never be sacrificed in exchange for any of these external things because their value is of an entirely different order.

The discipline of desire is believed to be related to Stoic Physics and theology. The Stoics were basically pantheists and some aspects of their theology are unappealing to modern readers. The majority of modern Stoics, perhaps surprisingly, are atheists or agnostics. However, Pigliucci argues that Stoicism makes room for both religious believers and unbelievers. The founders of Stoicism leaned heavily on the Argument from Design, which holds that because the universe, in all its complexity, looks like it was planned by some divine craftsman it therefore must have been. Fewer people are persuaded by that argument today because Darwin’s theory of natural selection provides a plausible explanation for the diversity of animal life, which is simpler insofar as its based largely upon observable physical phenomena. Modern astrophysics likewise explains cosmological phenomena without reference to a divine creator. However, most modern Stoics find its central principles to be justifiable without reference to theology. Indeed, the ancient Stoics actually appeal quite seldom to the existence of God in the philosophical arguments they provided for their ethical doctrines. Moreover, they employed an argument based on agnosticism known as “God or atoms” to show that whether one believes in divine Providence or that the universe is created by the random collision of atoms, either way the core doctrines of Stoicism would still be justifiable. Marcus Aurelius actually refers to this ten times in the Meditations but Seneca and Epictetus also mention it in passing so it’s acknowledged by all three of the main Stoics whose works survive today. As far as we know, all of the ancient Stoics believed in God, and placed great value on piety, although they nevertheless disagreed about many important aspects of theology. What matters from a modern perspective is that Stoicism is, and always has been, flexible enough to accomodate atheists and agnostics as well as pantheists. It’s a philosophy, at the end of the day, and not a religion.

The Discipline of Action

Stoics were trained through the discipline of fear and desire to master their feelings, facing external misfortune without becoming upset. However, the discipline of action taught them to balance this emotional acceptance with vigorous moral action in the service of humanity, their fellow world-citizens. Pigliucci describes it as “how to behave in the world.” The word “stoicism” (lower-case S) has come to mean something like being unemotional and having a stiff upper lip, which doesn’t even do justice to the discipline of desire. However, it really falls short when it comes to the rest of Stoicism (capital S) as we’ll see.

Stoicism is all about virtue. Pigliucci explains this by referring to the importance of improving our character. For example, before he gained his freedom, Epictetus was a slave owned by the Emperor Nero’s secretary. He lived through the madness, corruption and tyranny of Nero. He also witnessed the Stoic Opposition to Nero, the criticism and resistance toward him and other autocratic rulers from principled republican Stoics, who were frequently exiled or even executed for speaking truth to power. Epictetus told his students anecdotes about several of these Roman Stoic heroes, who he appealed to as moral exemplars and role models. Pigliucci, while acknowledging that no role models can be perfect, refers to modern-day examples of principled individuals such as Malala Yousafzai. He also mentions the psychological research on virtues carried out by Martin Seligman, Christopher Peterson, and their colleagues, which shows a surprising amount of consistency in the values of different individuals around the world in this regard. Their model incorporates the four “cardinal virtues” of Socratic philosophy: wisdom, justice, courage and temperance. This fourfold model provides Stoics with a broad template for understanding the character traits that define human excellence.

Another of the Socratic paradoxes embraced by the Stoics is that no-one does evil knowingly, or willingly. Pigliucci explains this tricky concept by introducing a very crucial word: amathia. It denotes a form of moral ignorance, the opposite of genuine wisdom. Someone can be very intelligent yet still exhibit moral ignorance or amathia. The Stoics liked to point to Euripides’ Medea as an example. However, Pigliucci draws upon Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” to show modern readers how it’s possible for ordinary people to do evil things through moral stupidity. Arendt coined the phrase while covering for The New Yorker the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi lieutenant-colonel and one of the organizers of the Holocaust. Like Socrates and the Stoics before her, Arendt argued that the evil of such men consists in a kind of moral ignorance or thoughtlessness. Eichmann wasn’t evil in his own eyes; he genuinely believed he was just “doing his job”. Whereas Christian forgiveness depends on faith, Stoicism achieves something similar by interpreting all evil as due to moral ignorance. As a consequence, Stoics place more emphasis on reforming those who do wrong rather than punishing them for the sake of retribution.

The role of positive role models in Stoicism is further explored by introducing readers to one of the most important examples of a modern-day Stoic: James Stockdale. Stockdale was a US Navy fighter pilot shot down over North Vietnam at the start of the war. He’d been introduced to Stoicism at college and as he ejected over enemy territory the thought flashed through his mind that he was leaving his world and entering the world of Epictetus. He spent over seven years as a prisoner of war in the so-called Hanoi Hilton where he was repeatedly tortured and found himself making more and more use of ancient Stoicism as a coping strategy. After the war Stockdale wrote and lectured about Stoicism and his experiences in Vietnam. Pigliucci sets his example beside that of Cato of Utica, the great Stoic hero of the Roman republic, who opposed Julius Caesar’s rise to power.

He then turns to a discussion of how Stoicism has helped people more recently to cope with disability and mental illness. Larry Becker, a retired professor of philosophy, is the author of a highly-regarded academic book on Stoic ethics. He’s been suffering for decades from the effects of polio but Stoic philosophy has helped him to cope with some severe physical limitations. His strategy focuses on the need to reclaim our agency, focus on our abilities, develop a life plan, and strive for internal harmony. He also cautions us to beware of brick walls and to know when to quit. Pigliucci likewise provides examples of two more contemporary individuals who have used Stoicism to help them cope with clinical depression and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) respectively.

The Discipline of Assent

The disciplines of desire and action deal with our feelings and behaviour. The discipline of assent, however, is about our thoughts. It teaches us to suspend value judgements in response to our initial impressions and how to apply reason to evaluate them instead. Pigliucci describes it as “how to react to situations”. Stoics believe that by coming to terms with our own mortality and learning to adopt a philosophical attitude toward it, we overcome many other fears in life. Zeno of Citium, the founder of the school, opted to die by the traditional method of euthanasia, refusing food, when he was very elderly and concluded his health was too poor to continue. Pigliucci notes the value that Stoic perspectives on death have in relation to modern questions surrounding the ethics of euthanasia and assisted suicide.

There are many other aspects of life, though, where our initial reactions can be unhelpful. When Epictetus’ iron lamp was stolen from outside his home he told his students about it and used it as an example of something to be shrugged off with indifference. Pigliucci compares this to his experience of being pickpocketed on the subway in Rome. His initial impression was one of shock and anger, naturally, but Stoicism had taught him how to take a step back from these automatic impressions. He told himself instead that what happened to him was not under his direct control but how he chose to respond was, and it was no longer worth getting angry about. In relation to anxiety, Epictetus says that we should always consider how it’s typically fuelled by placing too much importance on things beyond of our direct control. He also taught that the wise man is prepared to endure solitude without complaint as sometimes being a natural part of life.

This leads into Pigliucci’s discussion of love and friendship. The Stoic wise man prefers to have good friends but doesn’t absolutely need them. It’s more important to be capable of acting like a friend, something under our control, than to have lots of friends, something that’s partly in the hands of fate. For ancient Greeks, the line between friendship and love was more blurred than we tend to assume today, and the Stoics, indeed, viewed friendship as a kind of love. A good friend is a good person, someone whose character we admire and values we share. Perhaps one of the most highly valued externals, from a Stoic perspective.

Pigliucci concludes by describing a dozen valuable Stoic exercises:

1. Examine your impressions, checking whether they place too much value on external things outside your direct control.
2. Remind yourself of the impermanence of things.
3. The reserve clause, which means adding the caveat “fate permitting” to every planned action.
4. How can I use virtue here and now?
5. Pause and take a deep breath, waiting for strong emotions to abate naturally rather than acting rashly when we’re upset.
6. Other-ize, getting beyond personalization by considering how we’d feel about our misfortunes if they befell another person.
7. Speak little and well – the Stoics were known for speaking “laconically”, like Spartans.
8. Choose your company well.
9. Respond to insults with humour.
10. Don’t speak too much about yourself.
11. Speak without judging, just stick to the facts and remain objective.
12. Reflect on your day, by reviewing events each evening in a constructive and dispassionate manner, looking for areas in which you can improve.

I would suggest some people might benefit from reading these first before starting the book.

Conclusion

Pigliucci is an important voice in the modern Stoicism movement. Instead of lecturing readers on academic philosophy he’s chosen to provide them with a practical guide to living like a Stoic in the real world. He shows that Stoicism can provide a philosophy of life consistent with a modern scientific worldview, and with atheism or agnosticism as well as different forms of religion. He provides many vivid examples of everyday situations in which Stoic philosophy was found helpful in his own life. He also draws upon many examples from the lives of other individuals to make his point that adopting Stoic attitudes and behaviours can contribute to a more fulfilled and emotionally resilient way of living. For that reason, I think that both newcomers and people who are familiar with the philosophy will potentially obtain something of value from reading this book. The Stoics believed that the wise man is naturally drawn to writing books that help other people and they would surely see How to be a Stoic as a fitting attempt to reprise their timeless wisdom for the 21st century.