Virtue can’t be enough. What about pleasure, friendship, family, and wealth? And what about avoiding pain and not being hungry and homeless? How can virtue possibly counterbalance all that?
Cicero has heard your objections and sets about tackling them in Book V, the final part of Tusculan Disputations. He previously explained how we can overcome a fear of death, our physical pains, psychological grief, and other mental disturbances through reason. He’s been laying the groundwork.
But there’s a huge leap between “reason is a salve for miseries” and “therefore you don’t need anything besides virtue/reason to live a good life.” I expect this gulf is the biggest stumbling block keeping people from embracing Stoicism and related worldviews.
Cicero’s basic argument is that the theoretically wise person/sage is inherently stable. If their well-being depended on anything that could be lost like money, reputation, or loved ones, then they’d live in constant fear of losing these things. This would prevent them from being inperturbably happy.
But we need a translation check here. Because the Greek Eudaimonia has no English equivalent. It is not mere happiness. And Cicero’s use of beatitudo or beata vita in Latin may only muddy the water.
Eudaimonia is a state of flourishing satisfaction/contentment that comes from living excellently and in line with our values. Most people have probably had horrible days or weeks that felt miserable on one level, but could be contextualized and made meaningful by the fact that going through the misery was the appropriate thing to do. Our excellence and standards demanded we do it, and do it well. So misery and excellence/contentment can coexist. They are not a contradiction in terms.
This is what the ancient Stoics meant by happy life — flourishing through good times and bad.
A perhaps trite example: I used to be obese. Switching to an appropriate amount of calories for a healthy weight and activity level and choosing healthy foods wasn’t “happy.” I lost some food pleasure and experienced some hunger till I reached an appropriate weight. Others might characterize this as “bad.” But doing what I thought was right, in line with virtue, actually felt great. The excellence of what I was doing far outweighed the pleasure loss/discomfort of eating better.
Cicero is saying that if fear is incompatible with this kind of satisfied flourishing, and external goods are subject to loss, true happiness must rely on virtue alone. Virtue is always within our control and can never be taken from us against our will.
Most of our assumptions about the good life are wrong.
People want wealth, luxury, and power, and think some amount of it is required for happiness. But Cicero points out that the “most fortunate” in terms of worldly achievement and possessions are often miserable. He mentions Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, who lived a horrible life for all his wealth and power. Dionysis is contrasted with Archimedes of Syracuse, the humble mathematician who led a happier life.
Cicero then discusses the things we think stop happiness — poverty, exile, disease, blindness, loneliness, and physical pain. Building off his earlier arguments, he says these are only evil if we think they are. If we see the supremacy of virtue, their effect is muted.
Cicero takes the Stoic position that humans have a divine breath [pneuma], which comes from the universal reason [logos] running through existence. Our reason mirrors the order of the cosmos, giving us a spark of the divine. Therefore, our highest potential is mirroring the reason found in nature.
Just as the purpose of a knife is to cut, the purpose of a human is to exercise reason. If we do, things will go well for us. Happiness is not a reward for doing good, but a byproduct of functioning correctly as part of the universal order.
Many will have qualms with this argument.
Cicero again mocks Epicurus and his followers for what he views as inconsistent beliefs.
How can it be, as the Epicureans claimed, that wise people are happy under torture if pain is evil and only pleasure is good? You can’t have it both ways.
I wrote a longer piece on what Cicero meant by being happy under torture here.
The followers of Aristotle, the Peripatetics, probably offer the most tempting alternative to the Stoic position. It seems more intuitive for most people. Peripatetics thought happiness emerges when three things line up:
Soul Goods: Virtue and reason
Bodily Goods: Health, strength, and beauty
External Goods: Wealth, sex, friends, reputation, power, etc.
“Yes, virtue is critical,” they’d say. “But you can’t call a man happy who suffers from a disease, has no friends, is despised by his neighbors, and can’t afford any luxuries.”
If this were true, Cicero’s project to make happiness invincible would fail. His solution was modifying an analogy from the philosopher Critolaus.
Imagine a set of scales:
On one tray you put virtue. On the other, you pile every bodily and external good you can imagine — money, luxuries, friends, fine houses, etc.
Virtue is so heavy that it quickly bottoms out the scale. The physical goods may have value, but they have zero “weight” when put on the scale of true happiness.
This is not so far from the Stoic position of preferred indifferents. They’re not saying that we wouldn’t prefer wealth to poverty and respect to disdain, but it’s not enough to really move the needle on happiness for the wise person.
We need a big caveat here.
Cicero isn’t saying you don’t need anything besides virtue to be happy, but that a wise person (sapiens) doesn’t.
One-off “aha!” moments about virtue won’t do it. We’re not talking about sudden enlightenment. Wise people become wise through a lifetime of psychological restructuring. Wisdom seekers are building an internal fortress that the world can’t breach, and most of us will never finish it, even if we devote ourselves to the task.
There is a gulf between a Buddhist and a Buddha, between Christians and Christ. Similarly, Stoics don’t suddenly become wise sages.
The Stoic term for non-wise people attempting to become wise is proficiens/prokopton — one who makes progress. This term bridges the gap between the fools [stulti], who make up most of humanity, and the sages/wise people, who make up 0.00000001% of humanity, if that. The ancient Stoics believed sages were as rare as the phoenix, and some implied there’s never been one. Nevertheless, it’s an ideal to strive for, and a good one.
Proficientes acknowledge that virtue is the only good and commit to bringing their actions and judgements in line with this fact, however imperfectly. They’re no longer wandering blindly like the fools.
For the sage, virtue is sufficient. For the proficiens, it is becoming sufficient.
How do we move in the right direction?
Learn to see the world exactly as it is, without the distortion of human projection, ego, or wishful thinking. If you perfect reason, you won’t desire what conflicts with virtue nor fear what you don’t prefer.
Learn to categorize everything that’s not virtue as indifferent to what matters. You might still prefer money to poverty and health to sickness, but you won’t let a lack of these preferences disturb you.
Fools are tossed about by longing, FOMO, anxiety, and other emotions, but proficiens are working toward constancy and tranquility, using these exercises to deflate perturbations as they arise. You’re always doing practical training [Exercitatio]. You can’t read your way to wisdom. You need to put into practice what you’ve learned. You reframe initial impressions that things are good or bad. When something goes wrong, instead of deciding a disaster has occurred, you say, “I have the impression of a disaster. Let’s see if it actually harms my character.”
It is easy to mock the wise sage ideal. Maybe no one becomes imperturbable in the face of fate. But this misses the point. It’s on the journey toward wisdom where the best fruit can be picked. By accepting that virtue is the only good, and realizing that it can’t be taken from us, we stop being hostages to luck and begin finding calm amid the storm.
Even if we don’t become sages, we might escape the ranks of the fools.
Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.
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