In response to Carl O’Brien’s “Stoic Practical Philosophy: A Guide for Life?” from the April, 2019 issue of Epoché.

Self-Regulation, Life Choices and their Embeddedness in Societal Contexts

Everyday life consists of multiple situations in which we are supposed to make morally sensitive choices. Carl O’Brien’s Stoic guide to leading a good and enjoyable life starts out by referring to a situation that allegedly requires us to regulate our affective responses: We watch a beautiful — I suppose: sexually desirable — person on the street and refrain from acting on this stimulus. Instead we just “acknowledge” the perception of her attractiveness. This brief episode is meant to demonstrate the regulatory power of our cognitive capacities. According to Stoic thinking, such capacities play a key role in leading an ethically acceptable and enjoyable life: Only by exercising these faculties, will we be able to carefully distinguish between situations in which we should act (because we can actually impact the situation stimulating our affective response) and situations in which we shouldn’t because the stimulus is induced by something which just lies beyond the scope of our prohairesis. This model is, as O’Brien also mentions, very similar to strategies familiar from cognitive therapy: “Epictetus offers a type of cognitive therapy: If you have a favorite cup, think of it simply as an object, you will not be upset then if it gets broken”. [1]

I am writing this article while I am sitting in front of Westminster Palace where London’s Extinction Rebellion Protests currently take place. Protesters claim that the UK-government must acknowledge the “climate and ecological emergency” that is destroying the foundations of our everyday lives and accordingly want to persuade political elites to induce radical policy-changes. [2] To raise awareness and create a momentum that enables individual and collective action on these issues, they employ graphic visualizations, performances, and civilly disobedient forms of political protest. I will refer to this episode to illustrate that it is crucial to recognize that our lives and our most significant moral choices are very rarely concerned with broken cups, i.e. with non-scarce and principally replaceable goods. A large proportion of our moral choices poses complications exactly because they imply decisions about scarce goods and are embedded in complex environments: Should we take the plane to visit our sick friend although we will be (co-)responsible for this plane’s CO2-emissions? Should we stand up for somebody who is offended in public and thereby risk being hurt ourselves? Whom are we supposed to support with the money that is left over from our salary at the end of the year: Our parents who might live on a low pension or the children’s home in Malawi?

What would Epictetus do in such “non-broken-cup-situations”? Although answering this question risks over-interpreting his remarks on moral decision-making (and it is impossible to ask for his opinion for very obvious reasons), I stipulate: He wouldn’t do much after all. More precisely: As long as you’re a person who actually cares about the world she lives in, Epictetus also wouldn’t provide you with much helpful advice for making such decisions. I think that this silence to a large extent results from two of his philosophical premises that, if combined, suggest guidelines for moral decision-making that are (at best) question-begging and (at worst) lead to morally and politically unacceptable results. I therefore argue that Epictetus’ model — as featured in O’Brien’s article — is only helpful for a very narrow subset of our moral choices and cannot serve as an encompassing guide for leading a good life.

Two Stoic Philosophical Premises (and their Political Implications)

The first crucial premise concerns Epictetus’s conceptualization of the human mind. Epictetus features the value of our reflective, rational capacities and argues that they are instrumental for regulating our affective or emotional reactions to external stimuli. This implies a descriptive and a normative claim: On the one hand, Epictetus proposes a model of the human mind which conceptualizes cognitions and emotions as ontologically distinct states. Interestingly, the relationship between both types of mental states is considered to go only one way: Cognitive capacities have a regulatory function vis-a-vis emotions and affects, while emotional capacities are attributed no such function for cognitions. The evaluative claim is distinct from this descriptive model and attributes a superior (moral) value to actions induced by rational thinking. This understanding of the human mind is a necessary presupposition for Epictetus’s guidelines for leading a good life, although it certainly is not sufficient for founding them.

Epictetus’s account presupposes a second important premise, i.e., a definition of the scope of potentially meaningful human action: As O’Brien highlights, leading a happy and virtuous life requires us to restrict our actions to the things that are actually “up to us”. At first sight, asking us to carefully consider how we can invest our personal resources seems like a perfectly reasonable requirement. Epictetus does, however, provide an answer to this question which suggests that the scope of meaningful human action is fairly limited:

“Our convictions, attitudes, intentions and actions are truly ours in a way that nothing else is: they are determined solely by our use of impressions and thus internal to the sphere of volition. The appearance and comfort of one’s own body, one’s possessions, one’s relationships with other people, the success or failure of one’s projects, and one’s power and reputation in the world are all merely contingent facts about a person, features of our experience rather than characteristics of the self. These things are ‘externals’, that is things external to the sphere of volition.” [3]

In a nutshell, Epictetus implies that we should restrict our actions to “getting along with our own reactions to the outside world”. Our inner states (and the ways we deal with them) are the only things that are genuinely “up to us”; it would be a mistake to think that our emotions are “imposed on us by circumstances and internal forces”. [4] This conceptualization of the “sphere of volition” and the “scope of (meaningful) action” leads to Epictetus’s emotion management-approach which, as I will argue below, has striking similarities with some “therapeutic” approaches promoted in contemporary Western (pop-)culture. Epictetus suggests “meditation techniques” that are instrumental for achieving inner peace by adjusting our cognitions and evaluations of affective responses to the outside world.

I will stress that a generalized application of this approach is highly problematic as it provides a far too limited account of what we can — and should — act upon. This becomes significant especially considering our embeddedness in social and political communities and our roles as democratic citizens. Stoicism widely disrespects the fact that our emotional reactions are impacted by the structural conditions of our everyday lives. I argue that therefore it is neither suitable for providing an adequate guideline for leading virtuous nor happy lives. I am well aware of the fact that I thereby criticize Stoicism by applying its teachings — arguably ahistorically — to circumstances and contexts Epictetus himself did not consider. He locates human beings and their choices within “a perfectly rational universe”, a reasonably ordered kosmos. [5] In considering the value of Stoic maxims for guiding our everyday lives, I will with good reasons presuppose no such world-order. Rather, I flesh out Epictetus’s basic model of leading a good life and relate it to structurally similar approaches in contemporary philosophical and popular discourses. I will then suggest an approach suggesting alternative rationales for thinking about our life choices. In so doing, I focus on the social and political dimension of our choices which are essentially embedded in and impacted by such environments.

Contemporary Stoicism in Capitalist Societies: Mindfulness and other cultural tranquilizers

To highlight some potentially problematic consequences of practicing this form of Stoicism in our everyday lives, I’m taking a big leap now to sketch out a model that has become extremely popular over recent years in diverse public and scientific discourses: Mindfulness-based techniques. The concept of mindfulness is rooted “in Buddhist and other contemplative traditions where conscious attention and awareness are actively cultivated. It is most commonly defined as the state of being attentive to and aware of what is taking place in the present.” [6] Cognitive psychologists began to employ this concept for treating mental illnesses in the early 21st century. Modern therapeutic methods such as cognitive behavioral therapy integrate “mindfulness” as a core component for promoting self-regulation and a (meta-)cognitive management of emotions. Allegedly, applying these strategies promotes not only individuals’ overall well-being, but also their “personal autonomy — that is, to enhance the individual’s capacity to act in accord with their personal interests [Young, 1986]”. [7] Chambers et al. offer the following explanation for this stipulation: “Learning to embrace our experiences in this way may reduce the need to directly control or change experience, and thus may result in increased adaptive behavior and psychological wellbeing”. [8]

“Mindfulness” is by now not only an element of cognitive therapies in the narrow sense of the term. Rather, it has become part of the toolkit of self-regulation and self-optimization techniques that are promoted in pop-cultural media and self-help books. As O’Brien correctly pointed out, such advice from cognitive therapists is remarkably similar to Epictetus strategy: Due to the fact that “[…u]sing our prohairesis in an appropriate manner relies upon the correct use of impressions”, we are required to first “meditate” on them, i.e.: to carefully consider in how far the sources of our affective responses lie within the scope of our meaningful action. More specifically, Epictetus suggests strategies such as a cognition-based revaluation of emotional responses, asks us to “suppress” desire and aversion and to practice opposite behavior to break with “bad habits”. [9] As Stoics consider the scope of our actions to be fairly limited, we should then answer our affective responses to events in the outside world by regulating or adjusting our emotions. By habituating such modes to respond to affects, we can integrate these mechanisms in our repertoire of automatized coping-strategies. Psychological and psychiatric researchers could prove mindfulness-based techniques worthwhile to cope with mental illnesses such as clinical depression or anxiety disorders. [10] In public discourses the suggested applications of these techniques are, however, all but restricted to such cases: Mindfulness-based strategies are frequently suggested in self-help sections of bookstores, life style magazines, and in management guidebooks. “Mindfulness for Managers” [11] is supposed to promote overworked managers’ “resilience skills to develop well-being and performance”; Mrs. Mindfulness‘s YouTube videos and blog posts target young women and promise that “[…w]holeness, deep peace and fulfilment are available to anyone who taps into the stillness and silence that dwells within them.” [12]

This is not the place to judge these techniques as an actual therapy method for treating mental disorders such as clinical depression. I argue, however, that promoting and applying such “Stoic” emotion-management to cope with everyday life can be highly problematic. The mindfulness–based strategies I considered in this article share one feature: They abstract from external — i.e.: structural or systemic — reasons for why, e.g., states of anxiety or frustration must be regulated after all. Recent articles in The Guardian and The Huffington Post pointedly put it: “McMindfulness aims to reduce the stress of the private individual and does not admit to any interest in the social causes of stress.” [13]

Thereby,

“[…]stress is framed as a personal problem, and mindfulness is offered as just the right medicine to help employees work more efficiently and calmly within toxic environments. Cloaked in an aura of care and humanity, mindfulness is refashioned into a safety valve, as a way to let off steam — a technique for coping with and adapting to the stresses and strains of corporate life.” [14]

With this, a widespread application of emotion management-techniques may not only help the individual cope with her private situation, but — by supporting an “accommodist orientation” [15] – also helps to consolidate structural conditions that are the object of (potentially justified) emotional responses such as anger, frustration, or despair. Political writer Laurie Penny therefore argues that mindfulness-related meditation techniques are a functional equivalent to religion in Marx’s historical materialism: they are the “opiate of the masses”, “a painkiller, a solace when the work of survival became unbearable”. [16]

This tranquilizing function of self-regulation techniques appears particularly cynical when we consider the fact that they are successively merchandised: Meditation apps, mindfulness-books, and management courses are a successful part of a growing life style-business: “[Sensor tower…] found that the top 10 wellness apps (e.g. mindfulness and meditation) made about 170 percent more revenue worldwide in Q1 2018 than the top 10 wellness apps did in Q1 2017 across both the App Store and Google Play”. [17] – Peace of mind seems to be in great demand these days! But do a Stoic emotion-management and the mindfulness apps that are meant to help us realize prohairesis offer the right advice to get there?

The Scope of Action: Political Protest, Individual Agency, and the “Good Life”

I’m coming back to the Extinction Rebellion protests in London: The global “apolitical network” organizing these protests currently demands UK-politicians to declare a “climate emergency” and to acknowledge “that we are facing an unprecedented global emergency” and “are in a life or death situation of our own making” characterized by phenomena such as global warming, a loss in biodiversity, and food insecurity. [18] People carrying banners and engaging in civilly disobedient performances on Westminster’s streets arguably address structural and environmental phenomena that Epictetus would consider to be way beyond human beings’ scope of action: what is at stake is not only the narrowly conceptualized “environment”, but rather the way the global economy and the society at large function. Although the groups engaged on London’s streets refrain from making specific proposals for “revolutionizing” this order, it is not far-fetched to assume that they would claim that some radical alternative to existing political institutions is required. [19] In order to induce such change, London’s protesters engage in various forms of political action — most of them are exercising peaceful protest that aims at disrupting the accommodated operation mode of London’s politics, public transport, or tourism activities.

These protesters would claim that they are confronted with a situation that not only permits, but requires them to engage in disruptive political action: The impact and intensity of the environmental and humanitarian crises morally oblige us to “stand up”. Roadblocks, graphic demonstrations and disruptions of London’s subway system are not only expressive of citizens’ emotions and affective states (such as their disappointment or discomfort). They are also employed as a mobilizing strategy: Protesters “construct moral shocks” to make people become aware of a situation characterized by injustice [20] and to impact political agenda setting and law-making. In presupposing that their actions are morally required, protesters must presuppose that they are not in vain from the very start — ought implies can!

From this perspective, investing our resources solely in regulating, downscaling, and managing the affects stimulated by events in the outside world would be the wrong approach. Rather, taking austerity, environmental crises, or racist behavior seriously requires acting upon them. Such actions can frequently make use of our affective responses to unbearable circumstances. By contrast, Epictetus’s Stoic perspective would suggest that (a) social and environmental issues of this scale are beyond my scope of action: impacting them is not “up to me”. Thus, to lead a good and enjoyable life I must (b) focus on my emotional adjustment and apply the therapeutic strategies outlined in the previous section to cope with my affective responses to disturbing events in the outside world.

With this, I certainly don’t want to present a cliché picture of Epictetus’ philosophy that merely represents Stoics as “detached” or “cold”. Interestingly, Epictetus did give practical-political advice himself: Marcus Aurelius and Thomas Jefferson are featured by O’Brien as particularly prominent political leaders who claimed to have benefited from Epictetus’s guidelines. As impressive as this line of admirers of Stoic thinking may be, they can hardly serve as a model for the life choices that ordinary citizens have to make in their everyday lives: These outstanding leaders neither find themselves in a situation where they have to oppose oppressive structures limiting their autonomous life-choices nor are confronted with a situation where they must question and challenge the — from Epictetus’s perspective “natural” and “perfect” — world order (kosmos). In order to provide the basis for an alternative perspective for making crucial moral life-choices, I will refer to political philosophy from the tradition of Critical Social Theory.