Stoic Fortitude — On Failure and Failing

this Stoic virtue won’t keep us from failing, but it will help us deal with it well, rightly, and intelligently

Below is the edited transcript from a workshop I was invited to deliver virtually at the Stoa. It took place very early on during the Covid-19 lockdown, near the end of March 2020. If you’d like to watch or listen to the videorecording of the entire session, you can do so here.

What follows is my presentation, up to the point where the Q&A began. I’ll publish that portion of the session as a separate piece shortly.

Getting Started — Failures, Failing, and Stoicism

Thanks for the invitation to come into this virtual space and talk about these things. I am going to talk about fortitude, or the the virtue of courage, but I’m also talking quite a bit about failure and failings

When Peter approached me about what topic I might want to talk about, that’s what came to mind right away, because I think that we don’t we don’t talk about it enough in terms of Stoicism. I know in our local group we we do every once in a while. We bring up where we went wrong, and then we analyze it. But it’s not it’s not something that people are often happy to discuss. And it’s really important, because any mode of intentional living — and Stoicism is one of those — there are going to be a lot of failings, and a lot of failures.

So Stoicism helps us to understand those, and to wean ourselves away from dysfunctional approaches to the inevitable failures that we have. The reason why I picked fortitude wasn’t just because of the alliteration, the nice “F” sounds, or something like that. It’s because if we if we look at what the Stoics actually said about that virtue of fortitude or courage, it’s broader than just dealing with fears. It really does have some some resources there to help us deal with the inevitable failures that we fall into

So, this is going to be somewhat restricted in scope. There’s so much that could be said about this topic, I think, that one could actually write a small book about it. We’re going to talk about some some key points.

One Example Of My Own Failing

I’ll start by talking about a failing of mine that’s also culminated in several failures. If you’re not involved in academia, all of you are still quite aware that everything has had to go online. That takes a lot of work, and a lot of thought. I’ve been teaching online for eight years now, so when we first got quarantined — at first they were going to extend Spring Break, and said you better start shifting your classes online.

That first weekend, I thought: “Oh this is a perfect opportunity! I can get a lot of this work done right away.” And then I found myself (as many of you probably have as well) — and this is a topic we could talk about as well at the end — feeling kind of unmotivated. Feeling kind of kind of blue and sad, and not getting the things done that I said I would. And that’s both a failure, but it’s also a failing. I’ll talk about the difference between those in a bit, because it’s something that I often do more often than I’d like.

I create this great Google Calendar full of things that I’m going to do, and then I don’t actually get to them and then I have to revise it and take stock of the fact that the work didn’t get done. And who does it affect? Well, it affects my students. And it’s not like I left them in the lurch. But I wanted to do all these different things that would use their transition, and keep them from feeling anxious. I got maybe half of them done, on the scale that I had wanted.

That’s a classic instance. I have some duties towards these people that I have responsibility for. I know what the right thing is to do, and yet I find myself not getting all of the right thing done. I think many of you can bring up similar instances in in your own. Just the last couple weeks, the quarantine, and the staying at home and all the anxieties about Covid-19 and the situation that we’re in, I think, makes this even more important to talk about. Because as we put more stress on the systems that we live in, and we put more stress upon ourselves, we’re going to make more mistakes. We’re going to shift into unhealthy ways of looking at things.

Failings and Failures

So let’s talk about failings and failures. We often use these words synonymously, as if they’re the same thing. I’m not saying that we have to be grammar police, or anything like that about this. But it is useful to make a distinction.

We often fail at things, and we do so in determinate ways within situations. That’s a failure, and it could be minor. It could be I forgot to take the dog out, and so the dog is is upset, and maybe has an accident or something like that, and then it has to be cleaned up and inconveniences people. Or it could be a really big thing, like I didn’t check into my classes all week, and my students are wondering: “Where is this guy? What are we going to do?”

There’s all sorts of possibilities, and then when we realize that we’ve failed, sometimes we realize that there’s something more going on, that we have failings. That there’s there’s things about ourselves that aren’t what we’d like them to be. Our society is very good at giving us all sorts of sometimes correct, and very often incorrect, information about what our failings would be.

You might think about the fashion industry, and how it pushes a certain not just coiffeur and set of clothes that should change every season, but body types, and what we ought to be investing our time and attention into. Those can make us think that we’re failing, when we’re not really doing so. So we can talk about that as well.

We also see failings and failures in other people, and one of the things I think we can be on guard against from the beginning is interpreting failures on people’s part as automatically signifying failings on their part. So if I neglect an email for a while, and don’t respond to it right away, that doesn’t mean that that failure is automatically because of a failing with me, and not wanting to address people or being disrespectful or anything along those lines.

But we have to be on guard against that, because that’s a natural tendency to read those things into other people’s behavior. As I was saying, in any path of intentional living and personal development ,we really want to expect to fail very often when we’re starting it. And I know just looking at the list of people here, some have been practicing Stoicism for quite a long time And even all of those who haven’t, you can weigh in and say “yeah we keep on failing” as well.

When you’re first embracing some Stoic principles and practices, you’re going to fail all the time, and you know that’s just part of the course. It’s just like learning a musical instrument, or going to the gym and starting a new exercise routine. It makes sense that that would happen, and so dealing with failure productively is going to be very important for us.

The Many Ways We Fail

We can think about some of the ways in which we fail. I came up with a list here. I’m just going to hit on some of the general ways, right? Some of them are cognitive.

• We get mixed up in what we think or assume, or we have incorrect ideas about things, like mixing up what’s in our control and what’s what’s not in our control.

• We make mistaken inferences.

• We follow out automatic thought processes, or lines of reasoning that are mistaken.

• Sometimes we actually just sort of make a mistake, almost like in mathematics we wind up with the wrong number at the end . We’re not quite sure how we got there. We get the wrong results. Well, we do that with our reasoning as well.

But we also have affective ways in which we fail, and this is where I think Stoicism can be really helpful, in telling us what we want to desire and what we ought to be averse to, right?

• We often desire the wrong things or are averse to the wrong things, or too much, too little.

• We direct our emotions towards the wrong objects.

• Sometimes we act on them in ways that are not helpful for us, or for others, and we often do realize if we’ve been thinking about ourselves and examining ourselves — which is part of Stoicism — that we we should feel something better, or different, but don’t. Then we feel that as a failure on our on our part.

There’s also a volitional modality.

• We we sometimes choose the wrong things, or commit to the wrong things, the bad instead of the good. And then afterwards, we say “Well, what was I thinking there?”

• We choose things that could be good, but end up being bad, because we don’t pay close enough attention to what we’re doing. We start with a good intention but don’t follow through on it, or we prioritize things in a way that that gets in our own way, to use Epictetus’ term

• Sometimes we fail to fulfill the duties that we have, and that leads us into action.

• Sometimes when we have an action, we don’t follow through on it. We don’t check up to see whether the results actually turned out the way that we assumed, or things turn out differently than we intended because we we don’t act in a pure vacuum. We were within an entire matrix of causes that include other people and the universe itself, and all of these these processes. So things go astray, and we have to stay on top of that

Those are all different ways in which we might experience failure, and when we bring Stoicism into the mix, in a way it kind of raises the bar.

Stoicism, Its Standards, and Our Failures

So we hold ourselves to higher standards than we would have in the past, when it comes to our choices, and actions, and thoughts, and particularly to emotions. For myself, I’ve struggled my entire life with anger. That’s part of how I got into studying Stoicism in the first place. So the back story, I would be happy to share it in the Q&A if people want.

You know the Stoics are very zero-tolerance when it comes to anger. I can say I fail at that, probably not every single day, but pretty close. So when we begin to hold ourselves to higher standards, we become much more conscious of where we’re failing.

I think there’s a very helpful mental construct when it comes to virtues and vices, when we can give a name to ways in which we don’t want to be, and is bad for a person to be. And we can give a name to the ways that we ought to be, that would be good for us to be. That helps us to guide ourselves, and we often fail when it comes to the virtues, the entire realm of duties or appropriate actions (officia in the Latin), our relations to others.

Well, we often fail in those. I’ll speak for myself. I often do those. Maybe some of you do as well. And Stoicism reinforces for us: “Hey! You’ve got all these connections to other people. You really need to pay attention to them, and do the right thing in the fabric of those relationships.” And you might say: “Oh well, you know, in that case maybe we should get rid of Stoicism. It just makes us more miserable, right? It’s not fulfilling its promise of making us happier.”

We might want to think about the legendary sage, and the fact that maybe some of you aim to be the sage. I don’t. I’m a prokopton, and I intend to be that my entire life, because that’s good enough. I just want to get a bit better and a bit better. Just like Epictetus says: “Hey, I don’t have to be Socrates! It’s enough if I just make some progress along the way.”

And I think another thing that Epictetus says is helpful in this. All of you remember the passage from the Enchiridion about the beginner who blames everybody except for themselves, right? And the person who’s making some progress blames himself. And then the person who’s actually made a lot of progress or understands things doesn’t blame anybody. We use this as a classification principle.

I think we should see this as a continuum instead, as a process where we wean ourselves away from blaming other people, and we start focusing more on what we need to change in ourselves, and what we need to be sometimes hard on ourselves about, and then eventually move away from that as well. It doesn’t mean that we’re ever going to get there entirely, and not blame anybody, and be totally cool with everything that’s going on. Maybe that’s not not what we need to do.

Mistakes We Make After We Fail

Another thing I wanted to talk about is common mistakes that people make when they fail, and how we can look at them from a Stoic perspective. I think looking at them from the Stoic perspective will happen more in the Q&A, but here’s some common mistakes — and you can add your own as well.

So the first one is denying that there was any failure in the first place. “It didn’t happen.” All of you are familiar with this path of excuses:

• “It didn’t happen.”

• “It did happen but it wasn’t me.”

• “It was me, but I didn’t intend it.”

• “I did intend it, but it really didn’t have the bad effect that that you’re saying.”

All this minimizing that goes on is not helpful at all, right? If we fail, we need to actually acknowledge that we did fail.

Another big problem is that people launch themselves into a set of problems. Actually when I was thinking about this, I realized this is a very common theme in sitcoms. A person will fail at something, and then they will try to fix it by any means they can. And they don’t approach it attentively. They don’t approach it with prosokhē or attentiveness, as we would say in Stoicism. They’re reacting immediately, and the efforts that they make, make it worse, and worse. and worse, until around the 28-minute mark, everything falls apart. And then we have a nice coming together, and we learned a lesson. Well, in real life this, this approach towards failure often doesn’t pay off that way.

Shifting responsibilities to others — that’s another problematic way of dealing with failure. We actually need to deal with things that are our business, the things that are up to us.

Ignoring how we make things harder for others when we fail, that’s another common thing as well. I think if we’re Stoics, we have to think about larger systems that we’re involved. So for example, if I didn’t show up until 20 minutes into this session, I would be putting out however many people were waiting for this, right? If I fail myself, I let others down sometimes, and that’s a matter of justice, a matter of duties

Another thing that often happens when people fail is excessive emotional reactions, and sometimes this can be guilt or shame. Sadness is a common one. Anxiety — “what if people think I’m a bad person because of this?” Some of the other ones that come up that maybe you don’t experience, but I know I do, frustration that leads to anger, and then lashing out at others which generates yet another failure, or even a desire and enjoyment in seeing others fail. That at least distracts from from what you’re doing.

Another another common mistake I think is being too concerned about what other people will think, and not about what you’re actually dealing with in the situation.

Stoic Resources For Dealing With Failures

So how can we approach these things as a Stoic? I think one of the most helpful principles is the “dichotomy of control”, thinking about what is genuinely up to us, and what isn’t up to us. One thing that we definitely don’t control is whether we failed or not. So once we fail, that is set, and that’s there in the past. We can tell whatever story as we want about it, and we can reframe things in more productive ways. But the thing happened, and if it came from something within us — a failure within us — that’s still there too. We can change how we approach it in the future, but we really can’t do much more than that.

We will have failings and failures with respect to all sorts of things that are indifferent, and you know those in fact do matter. As Epictetus tells us, the things that are indifferent, like money, it doesn’t have no value whatsoever. It just doesn’t have the value that a lot of people ascribe to it. How we use it is important, and is up to us. So we can think about those classifications.

Prudence has to do with how we use indifferents in large part. The same thing goes with justice. The same thing with fortitude, and we probably should try to work on our skills and abilities that we call virtues. It will help us deal well with the indifferents. So I think that’s one key thing.

We look at what is in our control and we focus on that, but we also try to maintain some focus on what we don’t absolutely control, but can influence in some way. We should do that well.

Another thing is being concerned about, as I mentioned, what other people make of our failures. Marcus Aurelius has a thing that he says at one point. Epictetus I believe has another thing, and in Seneca there is something similar, where somebody’s criticizing somebody else, and they say: “Well obviously you don’t know me that well, because if you did not only would you criticize me for this one thing over here that I fail. You’d see all these other things where I’m screwing up as well.” And doing that can kind of help you put things in perspective. I’m not saying you can say that to everybody, but you can say that to yourself in your mind, and then maybe not feel as as bad about the single thing that it’s weighing upon you.

Realism about success rates is also very important, you know. Socrates himself went around — and this is his divine mission — and told people “Focus on your soul. Don’t worry so much about these other things.” And what was his success rate? About one in a thousand, Epictetus says. So if Socrates himself was not succeeding all of the time, maybe we need to adjust downward depending on what it is we are doing. Our conception what success and failure are. Maybe some of the things that we think of as failures are just partly failures. And you could say: “Well in that case we go back to the dichotomy of control. All Socrates could do is put the message out there, and in a very assertive way which got him killed eventually, but it’s up to the other people to take that into account. And that’s not up to him.”

We can also think about what we learn from failures as experiences. Experiences are appearances, phantasiai for Stoicism, which doesn’t mean that they have no reality whatsoever. Even reason itself, the faculty of reason, is a system of appearances Epictetus tells us. So we need to look at how things are connected with each other, and whether we’re getting them right cognitively and affectively.

The last thing I would say you know that might be helpful from a Stoic perspective — and this is not just there in Stoic advice but it runs throughout intentional modes of living — is that we can’t hope to fix everything at once. If we discover failings in ourselves, we have to work on them bit by bit. So if I’m struggling to not drink two pots of coffee a day (which I’m not going to change by the way — that’s that’s my normal consumption!), there’s other things I could focus on more, like what my students need from me. But if I decided to make that my focus, I probably shouldn’t try to do everything else at the same time.

We can remind ourselves what the goal of Stoic philosophy is. So the stock answers are eudaimonia, good flow of life, and tranquility. How do we actually do that? What does that actually look like? The Stoics tell us this is where we get to the nitty-gritty of it. It means understanding and choosing and actually doing the things that we’re supposed to do. Appropriate actions or duties, they also tell us. And Epictetus is constantly stressing this, that the goal of the Stoic life is to recognize where we are in conflict with ourselves, where we are contradictions. The Greek word for that is makhē, literally “battle”, where we’re fighting ourselves. And to work through that, gradually untangling these knots that we have within ourselves.

They also think that we are truth-seeking animals. We want to know reality. We don’t want to be screwing up all the time in our assessing things, so we have to be very realistic about the world, and very realistic about ourselves. That means seeing where we’re failing, and Stoic philosophy is about a progressive transformation of the person. It’s not about an on/off switch where we learn some principles, and now everything turns into happiness and tranquility. Instead we have to do some work, and so here’s where we get to fortitude.

The Stoic Virtue Of Fortitude

I realize I’m already going a little bit long so I’m going to keep this fairly short. So fortitude is a virtue, right? We often translate it as courage. In Latin, it’s fortitudo, and in Greek it’s andreia. And like the other three cardinal virtues, it’s an overarching basket of things. So what does it encompass? It does include the traditional notion of dealing with fear or anxiety, being brave in the face of danger or stuff like that. But it encompasses more for the Stoics.

So Cicero tells us in On Duties that fear is one of the emotions that it helps us to handle. Desire is another, and anger is another as well. Those all fall within the scope of this. Arius Didymus — who if you haven’t checked him out, he’s worth he’s worth taking a look at — in his Epitome of Stoic Ethics, he talks about these five different aspects to courage or fortitude. I’ll give you the Greek terms, and I’ll tell you what they mean, and I’ll give you his gloss on them, because he doesn’t go much further than that.

The first one is karteria and this we translate as “perseverance” but also as “endurance” depending on which translation you’re looking at. He calls this the knowledge — there they’re all types of knowledge, epistēmē, but they’re not just purely cognitive but also within our habits and and our feelings — this is a knowledge that is ready to remain in what is rightly decided. So when we’ve decided we want to do X, perseverance helps us to do that. That’s part of what it means to be courageous in this respect. So being courageous doesn’t have to be running into the burning building. It could be actually doing the things that you said you were going to do, washing all the dishes instead of saying “We’ll do them in the morning,” to take a sort of trivial example.

Another one that’s a little bit closer to the the feeling of courage is tharraleotes, “intrepidness”. It’s related to the word for confidence. He says this is the knowledge through which we know we will not encounter anything terrible. We can realize that we’re up to the challenges in front of us, even if they happen to be like dealing with this terrible illness that’s going on.

Another one that they said fits into that is megalopsukhia which is often translated as “great-souledness” or “magnanimity.” Aristotle treats it as a separate virtue, but the Stoics thought that fit under courage. It’s a rising above and sort of looking at things from that perspective. So it helps us put things into perspective. And he says it doesn’t just apply to trivial stuff. It also applies to the stuff that’s genuinely valuable. So we realize that it is valuable for us to have certain relationships, but if we have to let those go in order to accomplish yet greater good, then we do that.

Another one is what he calls eupsukhia, “stout-heartedness”. This is something I think a lot of people are attracted to in Stoicism. Its knowledge belonging to the soul, and grasping itself as unconquered. Reminding ourselves that we do get to decide, we are the ones who determine what we’re going to do with ourselves and our faculties, and our abilities.

And then the final one that I particularly like is called philoponia, literally meaning “loving toil” or “loving difficult things,” and so this is translated as “industriousness” or “diligence.” It means being able to accomplish what’s proposed without being prevented by the toil that’s involved, and this is where we get reluctant sometimes. We encounter things or we’ve got this great idea this intention, and then you know it gets kind of late at night. We’re tired, and we’re like: “Oh I’ll do that later.” And then it doesn’t happen. That’s a failing, right? And so by being industrious, we can not just keep ourselves from doing that, but we can return back to what we need to do.

Epictetus doesn’t talk about courage much, but he does talk about all these parts. He doesn’t use the word “virtue” very often now. Lawrence Becker himself — I think many of you know his A New Stoicism — he summarizes these in three things: courage, endurance, and perseverance. But it covers a lot of the same ground. He says that we need these in order to be able to exercise our agency that we ought to have.

Concluding Remarks

So this is sort of like a little pep talk more than a deep analysis or anything like that, but it gives you an idea about how we can use this this virtue fortitude to approach the inevitable failures that we we see, and then the failings within us that we want to work on.

The last thing I’ll say is the Stoics are often portrayed as saying that virtue is just a kind of knowledge, right? And it’s true that they do think that there’s a cognitive side. It’s not just having an automatic response. You do need to know what you’re doing, and you do to think about it and you do need attentiveness. Epictetus talks about us having the virtues within us as sort of resources that we can draw upon And that’s another aspect to it — these are all part of our nature, if we choose to develop it.

But the other thing where the Stoics do line up with other virtue ethicists is their emphasis that, if we want to actually have the virtues available to us, if we want to have fortitude, we have to continually choose and practice and that leads to establishing new habits. That is going to happen over time, and there’s sort of a meta-level here. We’re going to fail at that too, and so we have to be willing — if we want to use more of the imagery — like the wrestler to pick himself up, dust himself off, and get back in the ring again. And fortitude is the virtue that helps us do that. So fortitude develops itself in its own practice.

The last thing I’ll close on is just saying: if you do this, it gets better, it gets easier. I’m saying that from somebody who’s gone a bit of the way, and can see further on the horizon. Probably some of you are further along with that than I am, but you know the message is: You can do this. You can deal with failings and failures.

And it’s okay. In one respect, it’s okay to fail because you’re going to, and you have to become okay with it. Obviously you do want to fail less, but you want to be quite realistic with yourself about what’s going on. So fortitude is the thing that we need to focus on that. That’s my schtick here. So I’ll open it up to Q&A. . . (you can read that here)