Why Stoics Should Not Be Indifferent to the Indifferents

how to avoid a common misunderstanding about Stoic philosophy and practice

This is the invited presentation I gave remotely for the inaugural Stoicon-X Brazil conference in 2020. It focuses on a key concept of Stoicism that many get mixed up about. Below, you’ll find the transcript and the videorecording of the presentation. I hope you find it interesting, instructive, and useful.

I’m very happy and grateful to have been invited to present here at Stoicon-X Brazil 2020. The topic that I’m going to be talking about is the doctrine of the indifferents, and why it is that Stoics shouldn’t be completely indifferent to the indifferents.

Before I get started, I’d like to say thanks, of course, to everybody who’s watching, to Claudia for the invitation, and for organizing this great event, and especially to the translators who are going to make it possible for us to communicate across different languages. As somebody who engages in translation work myself, I know how difficult that work can be and I am incredibly grateful for it. My Portuguese extends to basically being able to say muito obragado, and that’s about it.

The Stoic Doctrine of the Indifferents

So let me jump right into my presentation then. The key issue here is that one of the distinctive features of the Stoic school is what we call the doctrine of the indifferents, namely that the idea that there are things that are good things, that are bad, and then a wide range of other things that are actually indifferent — in Greek adiaphora, meaning the things that don’t make a difference. And we can say: don’t make a difference in what way? (Well we’ll get to that in a moment)

And Stoicism is not unique in saying that some things just don’t have any value or don’t make a difference at all. Aristotelians can say that. Epicureans can say that. Pretty much anybody can say that. What makes Stoicism unique is that there’s so many things that go into that. So you know, if we think about wealth as a prime example that we’re going to talk about a little bit later on, being wealthy, being poor, being in the middle — all of that is strictly speaking indifferent from a Stoic perspective.

And so Stoics talk about things outside of our control, or things that are externals, being indifferent instead of talking the way that other virtue ethicists do — talking about things being lesser goods or lesser bads or evils. So for example, an Aristotelian would say that pleasure is not the good, but it is a good — it’s not something that is indifferent. And pain is not the bad, but it certainly is a bad thing. Stoics would say: No, those things are actually indifferents.

Should We Be Indifferent To Indifferents?

It’s very easy to gather the impression that we we shouldn’t care about externals or indifferents at all, and that would come from a, you might say, selective or superficial reading of Stoic texts. But there are some doctrines that, for example Epictetus is going to give us, that would lead us to that conclusion quite easily.

• When he tells us that we should withdraw our desire and aversion from externals as much as possible, is that not telling us we should be indifferent to them?

• When we should say to things “you are nothing to me,” that’s being indifferent as well.

• When we say that nothing external can really harm or benefit us that sounds like we’re being indifferent.

• And then when we say that the only things that really matter are vice and virtue, misery and happiness, that seems like we’re saying everything else should just be left to to do what it’s going to do — we shouldn’t care about it, we shouldn’t be concerned about it

And this can go so far as to say we shouldn’t even worry about what other people think or feel. I think if we go too far with that, that’s a bit of a dangerous view. Some people like that, because this doctrine can be quite comforting or consoling — the view that we can sort of wall ourselves up in ourselves, and be these individuals who don’t have to be connected with the rest of the myriad things of the world. We don’t have to be emotionally invested. We don’t have to have worries or anxieties, or have responses or responsibilities.

But we do have responsibilities, and that’s where we should start thinking about this. Before that though, let’s look at something that Marcus Aurelius says, as sort of representative of this. He says to live a good life, we have the potential for it, if we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference. This is how we learn looking at each thing, both the parts and the whole, keeping in mind that none of them can dictate how we perceive it. They don’t impose themselves on us, and he goes on telling us traditional Stoic ideas. But the core idea there is that the things that don’t make a difference, we should be indifferent to them.

Later on he tells us that we can use nature as the index for this.

Some things nature is indifferent to. If it privileged one over the other, it would hardly have created both. And if we want to follow nature, to be of one mind with it. we need to share in — notice what he says — its indifference. To privilege pleasure over pain, life over death, fame over anonymity is clearly blasphemous. nature doesn’t do that. And when I say that nature is indifferent to them, I mean that they happen indifferently at different times to the things that exist and the things that come into being after them, through some ancient degree of providence.

So once again, we see nature is indifferent to these things. We should imitate nature in this respect. We should follow nature. Doesn’t this sound like traditional Stoic ideas and values? Well it sounds like some of them, but we have to contextualize these.

Looking More Closely At The Indifferents

So let’s look at the indifferents very briefly — like I mentioned, adiaphoria, the things that don’t make a difference. And so “don’t make a difference” . . . in what way? Here’s where we want to turn to Diogenes Laertes, who summarizes Stoic doctrine in book seven of his Lives of the Philosophers. He tells us that there are two different meanings to indifferent, according to the Stoics

One is things that do not contribute to happiness or misery — you can be happy or miserable without them, but use of them in certain ways contributes to happiness or misery. We’re going to come back to that notion of use in just a few minutes.

The other things that he says that are indifferent are things that have no power to stir inclination towards or against — and the words that he’s using there are the same words that we can translate as choice and rejection (horme and aphorme). You see these already when Epictetus tells us that these are things that we actually have control over in Enchiridion 1 and in Discourses 1.1.

So what are examples of things that are indifferent? Wealth versus poverty from a Stoic perspective — neither being wealthy nor being poor is going to make us happy or miserable, because neither of them are going to make us virtuous or vicious. They can play a role in that, though.

Pain versus pleasure — obviously we are averse to pain, but from a Stoic perspective the aversion that we have towards pain should not be the same sort of reaction as we do when we have horror of, or we turn away from, vice.

Health versus illness — this is something that many of us experience firsthand, isn’t it. High status versus low status, physical attractiveness versus physical ugliness — why are these things indifferents?

Do Indifferents Have Any Value?

They’re not indifferent because they don’t matter at all — they do have some value. They don’t have value to the extent of making us happy or miserable in the genuine sense, and having them doesn’t make us good or bad. So a painful life is not necessarily a bad life. You can live with chronic pain and be a virtuous person.

You can also let your chronic pain get to you and be a miserable person, and let everybody down, and do all sorts of other things. Just like if you’re poor it may be harder in some respects to exercise virtue, not just because you need money as a means or something like that, but because you’re presented with so many things that make it difficult.

But they don’t by themselves determine anything, so a common mistake is to think that these don’t matter at all from a Stoic perspective. There’s a tendency to equate the indifferent, the externals, what’s not in in my control — to the degree that we withdraw from all of these. And that goes against a Stoic approach, as a matter of fact.

There might even be a sort of pridefulness in this withdrawal from everything in that way. We should think about whether the indifferent do have any value. If they don’t have the value that makes us happy or miserable. What what do they have?

So there’s a very important distinction that’s made between the classical Stoics and some other philosophers on this matter. If you want to see the best discussion of this, go to Cicero’s On The Ends and see what he has to say about Pyrrho and Aristo. They said that nothing other than virtue mattered as far as human happiness, and as far as our duties the Cynics also seem to be saying something like that.

Getting this wrong actually means abandoning Stoicism. Some things do have value and others don’t. There are some genuinely indifferent matters. Some of the examples that the Stoics used were whether your finger is straight or bent, or picking up something along the way while walking, like a twig. Interestingly one of the things that they actually said was indifferent — pale or dark skin — we should think about that.

One that they use is a very great example: is the number of hairs on your head even or odd. (You know I’ve got a nice thick head of hair). Unless we’re betting on, it or something like that, who cares? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make any difference to anything. There’s nothing that rides on the number of hairs on my head, but there are on other matters, right?

Preferred and Rejected Indifferents

So the the classic Stoics introduce this distinction between on the one hand preferred indifferents, and on the other hand rejected indifferents. And this means things that other people would consider to be good or bad, but usually lesser goods or lesser bads by comparison to justice (or to virtue rather, justice as one of the virtues). The Stoics say: No these are indifferents, but they have a kind of value.

We can prefer them. We can reject them. We can prefer wealth. We can reject poverty. But none of them are going to make us necessarily virtuous, and so they do have positive or negative value. In Diogenes Laertes, we get this formulation of “they can contribute to harmonious living”. Some preferred indifferents are so because they’re for the sake of something else. They are useful. Wealth is a useful tool for doing things, right? Poverty is being impeded in that respect.

Seneca talks about death. In Letter 82, he says death is an indifferent among the things that are not bad, and yet have a semblance of badness, not something one can easily ignore. And the indifferents do have relations to each other. Diogenes of Babylon, we discover in (I believe) On Duties, tells us that wealth does have something to contribute to health — this is Cicero telling us what Diogenes the fourth scholarch had to say.

What We Should Not Be Indifferent To

And so, how can we make something out of indifferents? How can we not be indifferent to them? There’s a lot of ways, and I’m only going to go into two main discussions of it here, because I want to leave plenty of time for us to discuss matters. So I mentioned that there’s this this idea of use — the “use” or khresis in Greek, usus in Latin, of indifferents. It can also be translated as “dealing with,” our approach towards things.

Epictetus leads the way in this respect. He tells us that while some things are indifferent — and this is in a chapter on indifference in things in book two of the Discourses — some things are indifferent but our use of them is not indifferent. How we use them — how we deal with them — what we do with them — that is something that is up to us (ep’hēmon in Greek), something that we are responsible for, something that is good or bad on our part. He talks for example about the hypothetical syllogism.

The hypothetical syllogism — that’s a matter of indifference. It’s just a bit of logic over here, an argument that’s being made. But the judgment we make about it is not indifferent, he says. We are either involved in knowledge or opinion or delusion, and that matters because that has to do with wisdom or with foolishness. So he tells us that we really need to be careful. That is we have to have concern rather than being careless, when it comes to indifferent things, because the use of them is not indifferent. He tells us that the materials (the hule in Greek) are indifferent, but the use that we make of them is not.

So we need to imitate those who play a game, like those who are playing dice or playing ball. Whether or not things go a certain way, that’s indifferent. But whether we do our job whether we do a good job, that is up to us. So using indifferents carelessly is bad for the prohairesis — it’s contrary to nature for it.

The Virtues Bear Upon Indifferents

The other thing I’ll mention very briefly is that the virtues, far from being a withdrawal from the indifferents — they have to do with how we use, and arrange, and prioritize the indifferents. Because virtue is good and not an indifferent, it’s a mistake to think (as some people do) that it would not be concerned with things that are indifferent.

The Stoics are rejecting this idea, this doctrine that Cicero discusses. He tells us if we maintained that all things were completely indifferent, “the whole of life would be thrown into confusion, and no function or task could be found for wisdom” — the most important of the virtues right? “Since there would be no distinction between the things that pertain to the conduct of life, and no choice need be exercised among them.”

Seneca in Letter 92 gives us some great examples about pursuing and using preferred indifferents. He tells us that taking them is an exercise of good judgment. Think about these examples he’s using:

• putting on clean clothing

• taking a walk in the proper way

• dining as one should

There’s an intention there of maintaining a measure that pertains to reason. In Letter 82 he also tells us “nothing is glorious that does not involve indifferents. Illness, pain, poverty, death — none of them are glorious in themselves.” As a matter of fact we’d like to not have those if we could. “But nothing is glorious without them. Virtue meets and handles them. Each object takes on a splendor not its own when virtue is added to it.”

So I want to close here by saying there are some things that we could be indifferent to, you know the number of hairs on my head, we don’t have to care about that, right? There are a lot of things that we probably should be indifferent to — the results of how things turn out with our intentions. But there are many things concerning the indifference that we should not be indifferent to at all. As a matter of fact, we should be very concerned and careful about them in a rational way, if we want to follow the teachings of the Stoics.

So thank you very much! I’m delighted, as I said, to be here, and I look forward to seeing what questions you have about this matter, and hopefully having a good dialogue.