Nancy Sherman
The Stoics teach us to be prepared for worst-case scenarios: pre-rehearse what they call “the bads” in life, dwell in the future, imagine what might happen so that we can better face the slings and arrows of fortune. They also teach us to be vigilant about interpretations and bias: control begins by monitoring attention to the impressions to which we give assent. In addition, they counsel “mental reservation,” a kind of hedging of bets, so that we can become more adaptive in the face of changing information. These are basic Stoic techniques for mitigating fear and cushioning against vulnerability in uncertain times. Silicon Valley dubs them Stoic lifehacks, workarounds for what the Stoics would call “the art of living.”
But what is often missed in the modern Stoicism conversation is the idea that we are socially interdependent, and resilience depends not just on individual will, but on social support. We are
“woven together” by a “common bond,” with “scarcely one thing foreign to another,” the Stoic Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius writes, telegraphing an earlier ancient Greek Stoic image, from Stoicism’s founder Zeno, of a cosmic city (Aurelius 2011: Bk. 7.9). Our preparedness to face the present and future depends on our own will and the will of others in coordinated, well-informed, and cooperative efforts. As we face increasing anxiety and uncertainty in today’s teaching en- vironment, exacerbated by a pandemic, catastrophic climate change, persistent racism, and more, what are ancient Stoics’ lessons for modern resilience? Are Stoic methods of strengthening our will at odds with the Stoic sense of social connection? I argue that they are not, but the story requires an immersion in Stoic terms and concepts.
External Goods become Indifferents
Marcus’s image of our social connectedness is powerful. Jotting notes to himself during the Germanic campaigns, he paints a visceral picture. The detritus of the battlefield is on his mind:
Picture a hand and head lying apart from the rest of the body. This is what a person makes of himself when he cuts himself off from the world. We can’t be “at home in the world,” a Stoic catchphrase, if our good is reduced to self-interest or our resilience is reduced to self-reliance.
∗ This essay is adapted from my book Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience (Sherman 2021) with permission of Oxford University Press © 2021 Nancy Sherman.
Still, it is hard to square the Stoic idea of social connectedness with their view that our vul- nerability rests in things precisely outside our own virtue. One way the Stoics try to make the case is by arguing that external goods, good friends and family, enlightened political institutions and communities, social esteem and respect – all these are not themselves part of happiness. They grant common sense and say these are things that, in general, we are naturally attracted to as human beings. They are “preferred.” Their opposites are things that, in general, we naturally avoid. They are “dispreferred.” But they insist that their presence or absence cannot make or break happiness.
They are not real goods, as Aristotle had insisted. Rather, they are “indifferents” – for they do not make a difference to happiness positively or negatively. For all that, they still play a substantive role in our lives. Indeed, virtue involves wisely selecting or rejecting them. Wise selection or rejection requires learning a new skill set of affective and behavioral attitudes that can help us navigate how we engage with those externals, including our attachments to others.
The view is challenging, no less in ancient times than now. But one thing crucial to remember is that the term “indifferents” (adiaphora) does not mean “indifference.” We are by birth and breeding neither indifferent to these goods or bads nor should we harden ourselves to become so. Still, learning to live in a Stoic way requires fundamental recalibration of values. In particular, we need to learn behaviorally and not just intellectually that preferring or dispreferring indifferents involves going for them or avoiding them in a way that isn’t filled with restless yearning or panicky aversion.
So not only do the Stoics have a different valuation system for what other ancients more broadly thought of as real goods or their opposites. In addition, they carve out a distinctive kind of approach and avoidance behavior toward them that is meant to inculcate calm – we go for externals without sticky, acquisitive attitudes; we reject others without fearful avoidance or anxious dread. Learning how to cultivate those new attitudes is part of Stoic training. And the striving critical to stabilizing that new value scheme is itself a Stoic way of life. So, while the Stoic sage may be too exalted a model – the human turned divine – the sage arrived where she is through strategies for minimizing the deleterious impact of what is truly outside our control. And these are strategies, the Stoics teach, for all of us to adopt. They are what is involved in aspiration and moral progress.
Assent to Impressions
Tempering vulnerability begins by drawing a line between our psychological faculties and what lies outside. Epictetus famously opens the Encheiridion this way: “Some things in the world are up to us, while others are not. Up to us are our faculties of judgment, motivation, desire, and aversion – in short, everything that is our own doing. Not up to us are our body and property, our reputations, and our official positions – in short, everything that is not our own doing” (Epictetus 2018: Ch. 1).
Many of us would protest right off the bat at where the line is drawn. Even if we can’t fully avoid disease, penury, ignominy, loss of work or safe homeland, some of us can do some things some of the time to protect our health, material means, the communities we live and raise our children in, the quality of our relationships, and so on. Epictetus grants that. But at some point, he argues, our armor and efforts, even that of the most privileged and secure among us, will be no match for natural or human-made misfortune. That is Epictetus’s core claim: We are all hostages of fortune in some way or other.
Fine. We can grant him that. But we still might object that there is no hard line between controlling what is outside and what is inside. For after all, what’s inside is vulnerable, too. Our capacity for judgment might be impaired by traumatic brain injuries or an aging brain or other disabilities, our cravings not in line with what we want to want, our fears pathological phobias rooted in psychological syndromes we wish we didn’t have. Equally, there are epistemic biases.
What we see may be tainted by implicit bias and what we judge to be the case may be less “our doing” than the product of privileged standpoints and access. This is, of course, a modern view of
the psyche and of knowledge. The Stoic view, by contrast, is radically volitional. In significant ways, not often recognized by interpreters, they expand what is within our control. Indeed, the Stoics will go on to argue that we can turn our gaze not only outward but inward so that we can monitor patterns of attention and cognitive bias.
The locus of control on the Stoic view is our assent to impressions, or how things seem to us from the sensory input from outside and from within. Assent is the mechanism by which we tacitly say “yea” or “nay” to that input. It is the volitional moment in judgment, motivation, desire, or aversion. So, we may assent to a perceived insult as an evil, a bad thing that is distressing, or to disease as a perceived threat to be feared, or to wealth as a perceived good to be desired and acquired, or to a relationship as something we can’t imagine living without. Each of these is an evaluative judgment – an acceptance that what appears is a good or bad. In the case of evaluative judgments that are emotions, such as anger or fear, or desire, or pleasure or distress, the evaluations are “umphy”; they engage us affectively and impel us (through “impulses” or hormai) to action.
They are motivational. Hormê is the cognate of our word “hormone,” and like that organic sub- stance, it stimulates action. But it does so through the mediation of the mind.
Seneca explains it this way: “Anger is undoubtedly set in motion by an impression received of a wrong. But does it follow immediately on the impression and break out without any involvement of the mind? Or is some assent by the mind required for it to be set in motion? Our view is that it undertakes nothing on its own, but only with the mind’s approval” (Seneca 1995: Bk. 2.3–4).
Emotion is, thus, a kind of voluntary action (Seneca 1995: Bk. 2.4). Through assent we implicitly frame and grasp the world propositionally and act on the resulting opinions or judgments. Emotions involve agency.
Epictetus insists that with agency comes responsibility: “It is not things themselves that trouble people, but their opinions about things … So, whenever we are frustrated, or troubled, or pained, let us never hold anyone responsible except ourselves, meaning our own opinions” (Epictetus 2018:
Ch. 5). The idea is intuitive. We are inveterate interpreters at the most basic level of perception, seeing a penny, to take a simple example, as having three-dimensional depth when we really only see its flat two-dimensional face. We always see and assess from what philosophers call an “epistemic standpoint.”1
But as we said, we are not always free spontaneously to choose those standpoints. How we see may be others’ impositions, sometimes invisible – “hidden persuaders,” whether through the work of those with power and authority or social media influencing our opinions. How we see or in- terpret situations can also be the result of systemic and profound forms of domination. So, a teenage girl’s crippling sense of shame as a rape victim may be someone else’s opinion that she has inter- nalized. The work of patriarchy and shaming runs deep. Similarly, a young altar boy’s fear of a pedophilic priest’s continued assaults may get muted by the priest’s sacred robes and his avuncular role at the Sunday family table. The inner world can be a socialized construct. And it isn’t always an enlightened place for freedom or peace. Yet it may be a retreat when external forces give few other options. The young boy finds safety in his mind, even if through psychological dissociation.
Epictetus, himself once enslaved, finds inner freedom when outer freedom isn’t possible.
Subordinated, pressured, or in captivity, we push our will to the limit.
We can push the limit out fairly far, but again, we may be constrained by access to input, blinders we don’t even know we wear, intense pressure from authorities, as well as sheer fatigue or fear of adverse consequences. Assent to impression, or its opposite, suspension of assent, itself has limits in giving us freedom.
Still, the Stoic approach to mental discipline always involves trying to strengthen effortful will and slow down impulsive thinking that can cloud our judgment.
What are other Stoic techniques for being proactive in the face of an uncertain future?
Pre-rehearsal of Bads
One of the better-known Stoic mental exercises for training for uncertainty is pre-rehearsing future evils or bads. The idea is this: Try to anticipate the traps that lie ahead. Don’t be caught off guard.
The exercise goes back to the early Greeks. Cicero approvingly quotes a fragment from Euripides:
I learned this from a wise man: over time I pondered in my heart the miseries to come: a death untimely, or the sad escape of exile, or some other weight of ill, rehearsing, so that if by chance some one of them should happen, I’d not be unready, not torn suddenly with pain.
(Cicero 2002: Bk. 3.29)
Euripides, he says, in turn, takes a lesson from the pre-Socratic Anaxagoras who legend has it said when his son died, “I knew my child was mortal.” The Stoics turn the teaching into a pre- meditation exercise: Regularly rehearse potential future evils to mitigate the shock of accident and tragedy (Cicero 2002: Bk. 3.30).
I don’t think I have ever uttered Anaxagoras’s remark in an undergraduate class on Stoic ethics without my students being horrified at the message. They roll their eyes in disbelief. It’s cold and callous, they say. They can’t believe I’m expecting them to take Stoicism seriously, if that’s what it teaches. It’s as if I told them then and there that their parents don’t love them or were willing to abandon them any moment. It takes a lot of back-pedaling to make the Stoic message appealing. I typically do. And I begin with the fact that the Stoics, and especially Epictetus, went in for shock and awe. He clearly succeeded. Still, the gist of the message, I suggest, is quite humane: we shouldn’t run from the fact of our mortality. (Kiss your child good-bye in the morning as if it might be the last time.) To stop running from the fact of our mortality takes work. It takes daily pre-rehearsal and a willingness to actually think about potential losses. The Stoics claim that if we do, we can mute some of the “freshness” of a sudden loss. The Greek term here for “fresh” is telling. Prosphatos connotes not nearness in time, but “rawness,” as in freshly slaughtered meat (Cicero 2002: Bk. 3.52).2 We need advance exposure if we are to weaken the visceral assault of close-up losses. The technique, presumably, involves more than just an incantation of words: “I always knew my child was mortal.”
“Dwelling in advance” (Cicero 2002: 222) may take immersion in imagination,3 but also some teasing and love, both tokens of attachment.
When my mother, Beatrice Sherman, was in her mid-nineties and in a nursing home, I often thought about how we would talk about death. She was healthy, but I knew the end would soon come and I knew her well – that she wanted to avoid talking about death at all costs. She wasn’t a talker at the best of times. When I asked her about a book (she read three or four novels a week) I was lucky if I got out of her, “It was fine.” That was her standard response: “Fine.” Life was fine. She wasn’t a com- plainer. But she was into denial of death. And so at some point, I decided we would have to make a joke of it. I would ask every so often as we talked about how much she liked the Hebrew Home and her caregivers and friends. “Remind me, Mom. We didn’t sign up for the immortality plan, did we?”
“Because if we did, it’s going to be really expensive!” She would smile gently. She was very beautiful.
And she chuckled a bit. Of course, she never said the words: “I always knew I was mortal.” But she thought the idea. She couldn’t talk about death. It just wasn’t her style. But I think our little repeated pre-rehearsal, our joke and my teasing about the immortality plan, made her last days easier for both of us. We shared our mortality, and we shared not dreading death, together. Pre-rehearsing mortality didn’t diminish our attachment. It helped us practice our shared loss.
My mother died just three days after we danced together, she in her wheelchair, and I swirling her around with other “couples” on the “dance floor” at the nursing home. She had been coughing a lot the week before, and we both knew that the end might be near. The antibiotics weren’t working. The nurses were monitoring her closely. We spent the last day together, in her room, facing death together. Our little whimsical joke about the immortality plan was preparation, she for leaving this world and me for saying good-bye and that it was going to be on my mom’s terms: “fine.”
Pre-rehearsal, as I’ve intimated, is a form of pre-exposure, a desensitization ahead of time. If events don’t occur, then we take it as a gain (Cicero 2002: Bk. 3.58). In the case of death, the question is only when. Through pre-rehearsal, we don’t deny attachment. We frame it by accepting loss.
There are contemporary, clinical parallels to the notion of pre-rehearsal. Some may be more familiar with exposure techniques that work on desensitization after the fact. Clinicians have for some time successfully used evidence-based prolonged exposure (PE) therapy after the fact, to re- duce posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PE is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT, itself with roots in Stoicism),4 during which patients confront (in vivo or through imagination) situations or events that are reminders of traumatic situations, though now experienced in safe settings.
Through repeated approach, rather than avoidance, the fear response is deconditioned rather than reinforced. Take the case of military service members exposed to the constant threat of improvised explosive devices. Survival depends on quickly responding to those threats. But the fear response can become overreactive. Hypervigilance is adaptive in a war zone, but not always after war, at home when thunderclaps are heard as gunfire, fresh bumps on a pavement read as newly planted bomb sites, a black plastic bag on a lawn a hiding place for an explosive. Re-exposure to stressors by talking about them, seeing them in virtual settings, revisiting and processing memories in a relationship where there is trust and safety becomes a way of deconditioning both the avoidance response and hyperreaction. The “neutral” garbage bag on a lawn or new bump on the neighborhood road over time loses its associated negative valence (Hendriks et al. 2018).
In more recent studies, researchers have begun to investigate pre-treatment exposure. “Attention bias” (or to cast the idea in Stoic terms, our assent to impressions) is modulated by balancing focus between threat and neutral stimuli. The idea is to learn to shift attention, so that we develop perceptual and cognitive resources for focusing not just on threat, but on neutral situations.
Research suggests that advance training of this sort in shifting focus between threat and un- threatening stimuli reduces anxious hypervigilance characteristic of PTSD (Badura-Brack et al.
2015; Lazarov et al. 2019; Ilan Wald et al. 2013). In a related research experiment, Israeli Defense Force combat soldiers in units likely to face potentially traumatic events were exposed to “attention bias modification training” sessions (Wald et al. 2016: 2633). Through computer programs, they were trained to attend to threat “in an attempt to enhance cognitive processing of potentially traumatic events.” The idea is to make the response to stress cues adaptive and agile: elevate the response in acutely threatening situations in combat, but train it to be transient, so that it recedes in safe circumstances.
Again, we can put a Stoic gloss on this: train in advance to withhold inappropriate assent to impressions of threat by engraining alternative patterns of assent to impressions of calm and safety. In the classroom setting, think of this in terms of inculcating agile responses to live shooters or other grievous threats. We want students and teachers to be alert to threats. But we also want the classroom to be a safe haven and not a place of anxious hypervigilance or constant fear. We want to elevate the response to threat as appropriate by pre-rehearsal. But we want also to train agility in pivoting our focus so that pre-rehearsal exercises don’t leave us traumatized, robbed of anything positive or more neutral to dwell on.
The Stoics go on to suggest that pre-rehearsal may reduce the compounding effects of secondary distress – or as Cicero reports, the distress that we were caught off guard and “might have been able