Fortuna by Albrecht Dürer

Sometimes it feels like all that there is to civilization is the body of stories that our ancestors have spun to make us all feel as though we have mastered luck, or that we might one day do so completely. In short, mass delusion, an intergeneration embrace of various illusions of control.

One of the earliest illusionists we know of was Socrates, as least as he appears as a character in the early and middle Platonic dialogues. This Socrates was obsessed with becoming a philosophic sage entirely impervious to the whims of lady luck. The Socrates of Protagoras wanted to reduce the world to a single commensurable scale so that value judgments would not be left to whim (and therefore leave the correctness of our decisions up basically to luck). The Socrates of the Symposium believes the only beauty is universal beauty, so that we will never put ourselves at risk of falling in love with beauty that is contingent and individual, and vulnerable to luck. The Socrates of the Phaedo says that the philosopher must always be practicing for death, for what is freer from chance than death?

Many of the Hellenistic schools took up the spirit of this quest. Epicurus espoused the ideal of ataraxia, perfect untroubleness or tranquility of mind. Save for satisfying the basic needs of the body, the ideal Epicurean was immune to the variations of the world around him, connected as they are with only natural pleasures which bring no long term harm. The Stoics of course were even more extreme than this, picturing a sage whose virtue and happiness were completely without contingency; a man who was the master of his own fate. Or at minimum, his own relationship with fate. Fate could not make him unhappy, it could not break his virtue. If it threatened to do either, he had the power and the will to take his own life.

Aristotle allowed a great deal more contingency into his view of the good life — we require virtue, as unitary and unbreakable a thing as the Stoics would later claim it to be. But we also require external goods; wealth, friends (philia), a home city-state with a healthy body politic. Friends can disappoint you and they can die, a government can become corrupt and ineffective. And no one needs to be told that wealth requires a great deal of luck — not the least of which being where you are born.

But even Aristotle’s account left some hope for banishing contingency from the ethical realm; if we could just achieve virtue, then even the unlucky and unhappy can at least be good. By contrast, the Greek poets depicted a world in which goodness itself was fragile. The greatest sages can be forced to do terrible, immoral things when the only other options they have are even worse.

The philosophic quest to banish luck has largely been a failure, though it has given us many useful tools along the way. But taken at their word schools such as stoicism practically ask us to cut off our limbs to avoid the risk of lady luck taking them from us. Hegesias of Cyrene, an otherwise eccentric philosopher, called epicureanism the philosophy of a corpse. And I have already mentioned how practicing for the grave was an ideal espoused by Socrates.

Everything beautiful and worth having and worth achieving in life is vulnerable to luck. This is an inescapable fact. We can make ourselves more mentally prepared for loss, and certainly the Stoics had something useful to say on this score. But for the most part intellectual and emotional maturity involves learning to cope with luck, and with our lack of control, rather than struggling in vain to overcome these ineradicable facts of life.