A stoa is a portico or porch. At the Stoa Poikile- (“Painted Stoa”) in the marketplace of ancient Athens, beginning around 300 BCE, a group of men gathered to philosophize about the world, its nature and causes, the divine, language, meaning, and the goal of life. These “members of the Stoa” devised a powerful system that would endure and evolve for centuries. Thus, since its inception, Stoicism was never the intellectual property of any one philosopher—no matter how brilliant—who called himself a Stoic.
Of all ancient philosophies, Stoicism is the most systematic. The Stoics divided philosophical discourse (doctrine) into three parts: logic, physics, and ethics and it was no surprise they were in search of "eudaimonia" using this tripartition. Ancient Greek philosophers agreed that the goal [telos] of all human effort is eudaimonia, an enduring state of happiness, well-being, or flourishing. The Stoics believed that the purpose of philosophy is to achieve this goal by mastering the art of living.
The Stoics define the goal [telos] as “living in agreement with nature.” Moreover, for a being with reason, living in agreement with nature means living in agreement with reason. The perfection of reason is what the Stoics call virtue. Virtue, they insisted, is the only good because it alone is necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia.
The Stoics divided virtue into four main types: wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. Wisdom is defined as knowledge of what is good, what is bad, and what is neither. Wisdom is the virtue of the sage. The sage recognizes that living in agreement with nature also means living in agreement with the entire cosmos. The sage is a mortal microcosm in harmony with the providential macrocosm, embracing all events and affirming their meaning and necessity. The sage is free of all disturbing passions [pathe- ].
The sage experiences three “good feelings” [eupatheiai]: joy [khara], caution [eulabeia], and rational wish [boulesis]. The Stoics believed that the sage is as rare as the phoenix. Some suggested that
Socrates, Zeno of Citium, or Cato the Younger may have been sages. The rest of us they
regarded as fools. Within the class of fools, one who makes progress toward virtue is a
“progressor” [prokopto-n]. A progressor can perform an “appropriate action” [kathekon],
like exercising to be fit or caring for one’s parents. But only the sage performs actions
wisely, comprehending their harmony with the universe. The sage performs a “perfect
action” [katortho-ma].
In their investigation of “eudaimonia” (happiness, human flourishing) Hellenistic philosophers (i.e., members of the Epicurean, the Stoic, and the Skeptic schools) made frequent use of terms that were relatively new in the philosophical lexicon; among others: ataraxia (freedom from disturbance), hēsychia (serenity), tranquillitas and securitas (Seneca and Cicero’s Latin translation of euthymia), eustatheia (stability), athambia (quietness), adiaphora (indifference), and apatheia (the condition of being unmoved)
What the ancient philosophers had in mind with the term eudaimonia is quite different from the modern view of happiness as “enjoyment” or “delight.” Considered strictly as a philosophical term, eudaimonia indicates the final end, the summum bonnum of human life for, as Aristotle observed, “every kind of knowing and every choice reach toward some good” Thus eudaimonia points toward the ultimate goal, the final reason why people do what they do.
Although ‘apatheia’ in Greek and ‘tranquilitas’ in Latin are the Stoics’ preferred terms to describe the condition of the sage who has attained the end, they are by no means the only ones and, in fact, despite the Stoics’ vocal critique of the School of the Garden, many Epicurean claims about ataraxia could find a natural place in a Stoic discourse.
Apatheia has a rather specific sense and the Stoics take some time to distinguish it from mere indifference: “the wise man is free of passion because he is not disposed to them but the wicked man is ‘free of passion’ in a different sense, in the sense of being insensitive and cold”. The freedom from passion the Stoics seek is therefore not hardheartedness at all. The ‘wicked man’ isn’t moved because he doesn’t care. Having been repeatedly exposed to suffering of all kinds he is now unaffected. His is a case of insensibility, not of Stoic apatheia. By contrast the sage is free from passions because, although she is subject to emotions and sensations, she does not depend on them, she does not let them control her life, which is quite different from being insensitive. One is tranquil when one is capable of coping with emotions, not repressing them.
Apatheia is not about suppressing emotions (this would be an impossible task in the first place given our embodied condition); rather, it is about preventing them from ruling our life, something that happens only when we let them rule us, that is to say when we assent to them. Irrational judgments, hasty flights of imagination, superstition, susceptibility to folk tales and so forth prevent us from seeing reality as it is and confuse what is the case with our misconceptions: “What disturb people are not the things, but their beliefs about the things” (Epicurus, Encheiridion, 10).
No doubt, the Stoic sage is a fully rational being, but there is joy in acting in a rational way. Joy, vigilance and wish, the three good affects (eupatheias) are therefore concomitant with apatheia. They are fully rational affects and in that sense they have an active rather than a passive sense. While the passions enslave us because they enlist our best judgment at the service of their satisfaction, the rational good affects express the satisfaction one experiences at being in control of one’s own acts.
Nature, virtue, and happiness are ultimately unified in the sage. Since to ask about happiness is to ask about the end of life, the stoic must establish that a virtuous life (and it alone) is a complete and fulfilled one.
The Stoic conception of human nature is a dynamic one; it proposes a teleological development and in that respect the satisfaction of our needs may be where the enquiry must begin but it is not where it should end. The sage who has achieved virtue hasn’t stepped outside nature but has completed it. Thus, a life that agrees with nature is ultimately a life that follows virtue. Cicero has a clear formulation of the equation between nature and virtue: “When they say that the final good is to live in agreement with nature, what this means, is, I think, the following, always be in accord with virtue and choose that which is in accord with nature if it is not in disaccord with virtue.”
Still, a further difficulty arises from the fact that the Stoics have two candidates for
the title of ultimate end. Must we seek the good or must we seek to be happy? Both,
answer the Stoics; yet, in matters of ultimate end, there is no room for plurality. If,
however, the ultimate end can only be one, this doesn’t prevent the goal from being
multifaceted. Just as philosophy is ultimately one even though it has various branches of
investigation, the end we are seeking is one even though it appears as virtue and as
happiness. If we search for happiness we discover that virtue is the right candidate and if
we attain virtue we experience true happiness.
One can be subjected of desire and hatred; life and death, health and sickness, pleasure and pain, prosperity and poverty, and so on. All of these are not good or bad things in themselves; however for Epictetus we must avoid or at least eliminate them. If a human being saves him or herself from these contradictions, he or she will reach the apatheia, where one can gain peace, happiness and serenity. However, human beings cannot be separated from their desires. What makes our character–and our interests, and our fears–are our passions; people choose things according to what they like; according to what makes them feel good and satisfied. Our dreams are built on our passions, and our delicate and dear purpose in this short life is making our dreams come true. In modern times we do live our lives upon virtue, either in our daily life or in our ideological life in cognitive understanding. Stoics' purpose is to live virtuous life, and this kind of life consists in wanting, thinking, wishing and doing what is good. It can be hard to apply Stoic teachings, but the glamorous and shining side on this issue is that there is such a possibility, and this life deserves a chance for the realization of this possibility.
