I saw a very interesting discussion in Stoicism Reddit today, and it was titled, “What Do You Think Are the Flaws of Stoicism?” It drew a lot of discussion, much of which I think was fairly decent. And I got to thinking about this, and I realized that what we have here is a topic where we probably want to make some distinctions and explore things a good bit because we use this term flaws or we could say blind spots or things that can be criticized.
There's all sorts of stuff like that that we can bring up. And I think a lot of people take them as basically all the same thing and having the same implication. If there's a flaw, well, then there's something wrong with Stoicism. And some things that might appear to be flaws at first could actually turn out either not to be flaws, to be based on mistaken assumptions, or they're the sorts of things where you can say, well yeah, this is a flaw in a sense, but it's not one we really care about that much. It doesn't shake the system, so to speak.
And so there's a number of different ways of criticism that I want to put out there for you and have you see the differences between them.
So I want to begin by talking about criticisms that can be made and the fact that a lot of the criticisms that people will make in the present are are actually criticisms that people have made of the Stoics either around their own time or a little bit later or later on in the modern period or perhaps even in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. So a lot of people effectively reinvent wheels by coming up with what they think to be new, unique criticisms, but maybe they were actually made already by Plutarch, who has a whole book called On Stoic Self-Contradictions, or by Friedrich Nietzsche, who has a lot to say about the Stoics, much of which is not particularly well-focused as it turns out. Or you know, we could pick whoever else we want.
And one thing that we should be aware of is that for a lot of the criticisms that people do have of the Stoics, there's already responses to those in the Stoic texts that we are fortunate enough to have. We don't even have to defer them and say, oh well, that was covered in Chrysippus' book that we don't have. No, in the Epictetus, the Seneca, the Musonius Rufus, Arius Didymus, Marcus Aurelius, these different thinkers, we can often find things where we're like, yeah I mean, people say this, and here's what Epictetus actually says about this very case, or Seneca says in response to this very case.
So we don't expect everybody to have read everything, but quite a few criticisms are not good criticisms if they've already been satisfactorily addressed by the Stoics. Now, it might well turn out that somebody diagnoses a flaw and makes a criticism of something that's genuinely new that hasn't been said before. I think that can happen. And I don't think necessarily that the Stoics did get everything right. We'll come back to that in just a bit.
Another common criticism that gets made is that the Stoic body of work is not available to us in its entirety. And as a of what was originally available. You know, we don't have any full writings from the early and middle Stoics. And we don't even have all of what Arian wrote down of Epictetus's teachings. The Discourses was supposedly eight books. We only have four of them. And then, you know, the stuff that's in the Enchiridion and possibly the fragments, because some of those are kind of sketchy. So yeah, that's a real issue.
And when it comes to Stoic physics and Stoic logic, so their cosmology, their religious views, their logic, their epistemology, we've lost a lot. We do have a lot of Stoic ethics, probably enough, I would say, although it'd always be nice to have more, wouldn't it? And can you really fault the Stoics for not having somehow preserved their own works? I mean, we can say this about a lot of ancient schools of philosophy, some of which we have nothing by except secondhand in other people's works. So I don't think that's really a valid criticism or pointing out a flaw.
But there is something that's kind of connected to that that we could say might be kind of a flaw. And this would be the Stoics not having responses to later and very different perspectives. You know, what if an Existentialist wanted to criticize a Stoic?Well, assuming that the Existentialist actually got the Stoics right, which is a big assumption, well perhaps there could be something to that. Maybe they do expose flaws or gaps or blind spots in Stoic doctrines.
I don't think that the worries about the Stoics not knowing enough about 20th century and 21st century culture, like for example, the existence of the internet and mobile technology and cell phones and dating apps and stuff like that, that doesn't strike me as a very valid criticism because what we can find in the Stoic texts, they don't obviously speak about those things directly because Seneca doesn't know about cell phones. Epictetus doesn't know about dating. But the things that they say understood rightly are applicable to those matters. That's why we do workshops on that and write articles about that.
Another common thing that has to do with the Stoics being stuck in the past is the criticism that their worldview and assumptions on a moral level are actually deficient because, for example, they accepted the institution of slavery, which we all know is bad. And you know, I'm willing to say that slavery is bad. I'm also willing to point out that every single civilization that we see in ancient times that proceeded past a certain level of development had something like slavery, and that it didn't completely go away. We still have some places in the world where slavery is being practiced and defended.
So it doesn't strike me as a really valid criticism, particularly when we go to the texts and we see that Epictetus and Seneca have an awful lot to say about how you ought to be as a free person treating slaves. And you should reflect on the fact that you could be in their situation so easily if some things had just gone a slightly bit different or that the slave is a rational being like yourself. So you should treat them not as a slave, but as an employee or a family member. And we could go on and on and on with similar sorts of examples
Another thing that people sometimes will view as a flaw, and here we're not looking at the past, we're looking at the present, is they look at current proponents or practitioners of Stoicism and they say: Wow you don't live up to what it is that you say you're all about. You are inconsistent. There's contradictions. You fail. And interestingly, guess who already addressed this?
Seneca in, if I'm remembering right, On the Happy Life. He says, and he's not just talking about the Stoics. He's actually talking about Socrates and Aristotle and Plato. He talks about people in his own time who say, Oh these philosophers, they don't actually live up fully to their own doctrine. So therefore, none of it's any good.
And he says, listen, all you need to be worried about at your current pretty bad state is whether they've gotten further along the path to virtue than you. You don't need to be criticizing them for not being legendary sages. You just need to quit being less of a screw up yourself. And these people have given you some tools that are helpful for that. And I think that's a perfectly valid response in the present.
So I don't see those as really flaws myself. It just means that people fail and they often don't live up to their values or their plans and intentions. And we see that in every aspect of life, not just in applying philosophy. Does this mean that I have now successfully defended the Stoics from every one of their possible critics? No, not at all.
And as a matter of fact, I don't agree with the Stoics entirely myself on every point. If I did, then I would be a Stoic and not an eclectic, which is what I tell everybody that I am, drawing on multiple and sometimes incompatible, at least on certain points, philosophical traditions that I hopefully understand fairly well, well enough to bring them together in a life that's not completely screwed up. So there's some things where I don't buy the Stoic line, and I'm willing to say that there could be flaws in Stoicism.
As a matter of fact even people who were attracted to it in ancient times like Cicero, look at how he begins his Stoic paradoxes. He says you guys have got some good ethical philosophy but man are you bad at presenting it, because you don't pay adequate attention to rhetoric like the Aristotelians do. Let me show you how it's done, buddies! And that's what he does in his Stoic Paradoxes.
So I think we can say that there's flaws, but there's fewer flaws than many people take there to be. Or we'll simply say this. There are fewer things that hold up to scrutiny when we actually look at them carefully and the assumptions behind them, and we go to the Stoic texts to see if there's any answers to them.
There's fewer of those that turn out to be genuine flaws than one might at first imagine. And I think that's often going to be the case for any philosophical thinker or perspective or school that people have been reading and talking about for quite a long time. People caricature René Descartes. A lot of the answers or addresses of their criticisms are right there just in other parts of Descartes that they didn't read and similarly for many other thinkers.
So that's all that I have to say about this. Hopefully this is a useful set of reflections for you.
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