Stoicism
Virtue, agency, and living according to nature.
Temple of Poseidon, Cape Sounion, Attica (photo A.Savin, 2013, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Origin
Founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens, c. 300 BCE, teaching in the Painted Stoa.
Central claims
- Virtue, grounded in reason, is sufficient for a good life.
- Some things lie within our agency; most do not.
- Emotions follow from judgements and can be examined.
Criticism
Critics argue Stoic detachment risks political quietism and understates how much a flourishing life depends on external goods and relationships.
Development
Stoicism began as a public Athenian school but became a portable discipline for enslaved teachers, Roman statesmen and imperial writers. Its continuity lies less in identical doctrine than in repeated exercises: distinguish judgement from event, train desire, and make the common good part of self-command.
Legacy
Modern readers often meet Stoicism through resilience language, but the older tradition is more demanding: it joins personal steadiness to cosmopolitan duty and asks whether anger, fear and ambition are forms of bad reasoning.
In their words
“Some things are in our control and others not.”
“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.”
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”