Donald Robertson

Someone who realizes he is ignorant about the most important things in life will naturally be keen to learn from someone he considers wiser than himself, according to Socrates. The real danger consists in believing that we know what is good for us when, in reality, we do not know anything of the sort. Knowing what we do and do not know is the most important form of self-knowledge.

‘How can I help you best?’ replied Socrates. ‘By false praise or by urging you to become a good man? No... if you want to be thought good at anything, you must try to be so; that is quickest, the surest, and the best way.’ This became a famous maxim of Socrates. We should be as we wish to appear.

This is the worst sort of ignorance, which I will call double ignorance. For, ignorant of his own ignorance, man conceitedly takes himself to know what he doesn’t know.

Marcus Aurelius speaks of the Stoic philosopher training himself to become, ‘an athlete in the greatest of all contests—the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens.’

If guilt serves a purpose, it is surely to motivate us to change today, in order to prepare for tomorrow, but not to condemn ourselves to endless complaining about yesterday.

If our emotions are not ultimately determined by external events alone but by our own beliefs and value judgments, then the habit of making healthy and rational judgments is more valuable to us than anything else.

Underlying this conviction is the parallelism between physical and spiritual exercises: just as, by dint of repeated physical exercises, athletes given new form and strength to their bodies, so the philosopher develops his strength of soul, modifies his inner climate, transforms his vision of the world, and, finally, his entire being.

At one point, Socrates explains in plain language what it means to him to be a philosopher: ‘For I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul, as I say to you: ‘Wealth does not bring about virtue, but virtue makes wealth and everything else good for me, both individually and collectively.’

Zeno told his students that he had come to value wisdom more than wealth or reputation. He used to say, ‘My most profitable journey began on the day I was shipwrecked and lost my entire fortune.’

Marcus actually imagines Nature herself as a physician, like Asclepius, the god of medicine, prescribing hardships to him as if they were painful remedies. To take Nature’s medicine properly, we must accept our fate and respond virtuously, with courage and self-discipline, thereby improving our character.

They taught the young Marcus that inner calm and happiness are natural consequences of a life lived well, in accord with genuine wisdom and self-discipline.

There are no gurus in Stoicism. Even the founders of the school—Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus—don’t claim that they were perfectly wise. They believe we’re all foolish, vicious, and to some extent enslaved by our passions. The ideal Sage is perfect by definition, but he’s a hypothetical ideal, like the notion of Utopian society.

The Stoics want us to go through a radical upheaval in our underlying values so that our supreme goal is to live with wisdom and its accompanying virtues.

For instance, when people disagreed with Marcus, he first tried to persuade them to see things from his perspective. However, if they persisted in obstructing what he believed to be a just course of action, he remained calm and transformed the obstacle into an opportunity to practice some other virtue, such as patience, restraint, or understanding. His equanimity remained intact as long as he never desired what was beyond his grasp, which constitutes one of the foundations of the Stoic remedy for worry and anxiety.

Epictetus liked to tell his students that in the face of everything that befalls them, they should get into the habit of asking themselves what capacity, or virtue, they possess for making good use of the event.

Marcus makes it clear that his internal goal is to live with virtue, particularly wisdom and justice, but his external aim, his preferred outcome, is the common welfare of mankind (not just of Roman subjects, incidentally). Although the outcome is ultimately indifferent to Stoics, it’s precisely the action of pursuing the common good that constitutes the virtue of justice.

According to Plato, for instance, we’re told that Socrates himself would have advised us as follows: ‘If you take my advice, you’ll care little for Socrates but much more for the truth. If you think I’m speaking the truth, agree with me; but if not, resist me with every argument you can muster.’

Could there be a whole philosophy of life based on, or at least consistent with, the fundamental insights of modern psychotherapy? Socrates, like most ancient philosophers, saw the quest for wisdom and the promise of emotional well-being as two sides of the same coin. He insisted that the mission he undertook, in the spirit of Apollo, the god of healing, was not only philosophical but also therapeutic.

Democracy worked if the people behaved rationally, but once they fell completely under the spell of a demagogue, rule by the people became a form of tyranny in disguise.

Some people describe angry rumination as a failed attempt at problem-solving.

Instead of working in stone, crafting likenesses of the gods, Socrates would therefore begin roughing out his own character. He would sculpt himself, chiseling away the debris of false beliefs, in the hope of revealing the true nature of his own soul.

Whereas the earlier philosophers taught moral maxims, or rules, Socrates encouraged his students to question them. It seems to me he realized that true moral wisdom requires some degree of openness, flexibility, and adaptability in our thinking. In a word, it’s healthier in the long run for us to learn to think for ourselves than to depend too much on memorizing the sayings of wise men.