Ancient wisdom, oriented

For the Stoics, virtue is the only good. Wealth and health can be used well or badly, so they are not goods but preferred indifferents, worth choosing over their opposites. The four virtues, prudence, justice, courage and temperance, are each a kind of knowledge, and because that knowledge forms one system, whoever has one virtue has them all.

The training starts with Epictetus's sorting. Up to you are your own acts of mind: judgment, impulse, desire and aversion. Your body, property, reputation and office are not. That is no license to stop caring about externals; Epictetus says to use them with care, but with composure. People are disturbed, he says, not by events but by their opinions about events. So the Stoics separate an impression, which arrives unbidden, from your assent to it, which is up to you. Behind the ethics sits a physics in which fate is an unbreakable chain of causes, yet Chrysippus kept responsibility: a push starts a cylinder moving, but its own shape makes it roll, as your assent comes from your own character.

The famous mistake is to read Stoicism as suppressing emotion. The Stoic target is passion, an impulse built on a false judgment that something is good or bad. Epictetus refuses to be unfeeling like a statue, involuntary jolts such as turning pale remain, and the wise have three good feelings of their own: joy, caution and wishing. So apatheia means freedom from false-judgment passions, not numbness. Say you are told that someone spoke ill of you. Marcus Aurelius's reading: that much was reported, but not that you were harmed. The jolt can stay; what you test is the judgment added to it.

Rule: a Stoic asks which judgment a feeling rests on and whether it is true, never how to stop feeling it.

Applied Stoicism moves the measure of success from the outcome to the choice. In Cicero's account of Stoic ethics, an archer must do all he can to aim straight, and a choice can be correct even when the outcome it aimed at never arrives. Seneca plans with a reserve clause, to sail unless something intervenes, so a blocked plan comes as no surprise. He argues that a blow foreseen lands more lightly; Cicero, who borrows that rehearsal of losses from the Cyrenaics, records the Epicurean objection that it only adds suffering. Marcus opens Book 2 of the Meditations with a morning drill: expect to meet the meddling, the ungrateful, the arrogant and the envious. Seneca reviews each day at bedtime, then pardons himself on condition he does not repeat the fault. Epictetus says every situation has two handles: if your brother wrongs you, carry it by the fact that he is your brother, not by his injustice. Seneca's chief remedy for anger is delay, so the offense is judged correctly once the first heat passes.

The common mistake is to hear acceptance as passivity. Acceptance concerns outcomes, not effort: Seneca reports Zeno's rule that the wise engage in public life unless something prevents it, and Marcus governed Rome. Critics posed the lazy argument: if recovery is fated, why call the doctor? Chrysippus answered that recovery is fated together with calling the doctor. Say you are bidding for a contract. On the Stoic view your goal becomes making the strongest honest case you can, while winning stays a preferred result rather than the measure of success. That gives you no reason to prepare less, since the preparation is the part that is yours.

Rule: when a Stoic accepts something, check that it is the result being accepted, never the effort.

Epicurus made pleasure the goal of life, but by the best pleasure he meant aponia and ataraxia: a body without pain and a mind without disturbance. Every pleasure is good, yet not every one is worth choosing, so you weigh each option by what follows, passing up a pleasure that brings greater trouble and accepting a pain that leads to greater pleasure.

His remedies target the false opinions behind most anxiety. Desires are natural and necessary, like drinking when thirsty; natural but unnecessary, like wanting costly food; or empty, like the wish for crowns, statues or boundless wealth, which can never be filled. The soul is a fine arrangement of atoms that scatters when the body dies, so no punishment waits after death, and death is nothing to you: while you exist it is absent, and when it comes you no longer exist. In the wording found in Philodemus, the fourfold remedy packs this into four claims: god is not to be feared, death is not to be dreaded, the good is easy to get, and the bad is easy to bear. He put friendship first among the things wisdom supplies, and his followers sought security among friends in the Garden, not in politics.

The common mistake lives in the language. In English an epicure loves luxurious food, nearly the reverse of a man content with plain bread and water who held that luxury is enjoyed most by those who can do without it. Say you hear a friend who orders the costliest wine called an epicurean. Epicurus would class that want as natural but unnecessary, a pleasure varied rather than increased, and would ask what follows from it.

Rule: to read an Epicurean choice, sort the desire, then weigh the pleasure by its consequences, not its intensity.

Socrates made philosophy a practice of examination. His elenchus draws out your own beliefs until your answer about a virtue contradicts them, and his one advantage, he concluded, was not believing he knew things he did not. At his trial he said the unexamined life is not worth living. In the Protagoras he argues that no one knowingly chooses what is worse, so wrongdoing comes from ignorance.

Plato looks beyond appearances. Past the many things that look beautiful or equal stands one unchanging Form, what beauty or equality truly is, and the Republic's cave shows prisoners taking shadows for reality while the freed soul climbs toward the Good. In the same work, justice in a person is reason ruling the soul, with spirit as its ally and appetite kept to its role.

Aristotle asks how a whole life goes well. Eudaimonia, usually translated happiness, is an activity of the soul in line with virtue across a complete life, not a mood: one swallow does not make a spring. A virtue is a settled state built by habit, as builders become builders by building, and full virtue also needs practical wisdom, the ability to deliberate well about how to live. Against Socrates, Aristotle grants akrasia, acting against your own better judgment.

The common mistake is to take the golden mean as moderation in everything. The mean is relative to you: if ten pounds of food is too much and two too little, a trainer will not just order six, which is too little for the athlete Milo and too much for a beginner. The right anger is whatever the situation warrants, sometimes a great deal, and some acts, such as theft, have no right amount at all. Say you are told the virtuous response to a serious betrayal is mild irritation, halfway between rage and indifference. Aristotle would ask what this case warrants, not where the midpoint lies.

Rule: find Aristotle's mean by judging the case and the person, never by splitting the difference.

The first Greek philosophers sought an arche, a first principle: water for Thales, as Aristotle reports, the boundless for Anaximander, and air for Anaximenes. Parmenides argued that What Is cannot come to be or move, and Democritus answered with atoms that only rearrange in a void.

Later schools offered rival answers about the goal of life. The Cynics shed convention to live by nature: Diogenes made a large jar his house and, in one story, asked Alexander the Great only to stop blocking the sun. The Cyrenaics made each present pleasure the goal. Epicureans aimed at freedom from pain and distress, and the Stoics made virtue the only good. Pyrrhonian skeptics set opposing arguments against each other until judgment was suspended, and found tranquility followed, as a shadow follows a body. For Cynics, Epicureans, Stoics and Skeptics, the shared thread is detachment: from convention, from goods that fortune can take away, or from belief itself.

The Five Modes credited to Agrippa leave a claim's support unsettled: each reason needs another, stopping rests on a bare assumption, and leaning on what you meant to prove is a circle. Say you see a claim backed by an article, the article by an expert, and the expert by the original claim. That is the circle, and a Pyrrhonist would suspend judgment.

The common mistake is the word cynic. The modern cynic, who thinks everyone acts from self-interest, keeps only the scorn and drops the Cynics' positive claim that a life lived by nature is the happy one. Take the same care with Heraclitus: the line that you cannot step into the same river twice is a later paraphrase, found in Plato and Plutarch.

Rule: before you use a school's name as an adjective, check what that school took the good life to be.

The Four Noble Truths, from the Buddha's first sermon, read like a physician's report: the illness, dukkha, suffering or unsatisfactoriness; its origin; its cure; and the course of treatment. The origin is tanha, Pali for thirst: a restless, never-satisfied craving for pleasure and for continued existence. The treatment is the Eightfold Path, eight factors each called right, among them effort, mindfulness and concentration. It is a middle way between sensual indulgence and self-mortification, the extreme fasting that, in the older account, left Siddhartha no wiser.

Three marks describe all conditioned existence: unsatisfactory, impermanent and without an abiding self. Anatta, non-self, holds that none of the bodily and mental components of a person is a self, since a self would be permanent and none of them is. It is not materialism, and it does not deny that a life runs on as a series; scholars still debate whether it rules out every self or only an empirical one. Dependent origination supplies the mechanism: if this is, that is; if this is not, that is not, so suffering ceases when its conditions cease. Nirvana, the putting out of lust, hatred and delusion, is reachable in this life, and its negative descriptions do not mean annihilation.

A common mistake is to think Buddhism condemns all desire. Tanha is narrower than the English word desire: the Buddha did not condemn good desires, such as the effort to reach nirvana, and right effort is itself a factor of the path. Say you worry that wanting to keep up a demanding practice is the very craving the second truth names. On that account it is the effort the path asks for, not thirst.

Rule: when a Buddhist term sounds like a total denial, of desire, of the self or of existence, ask exactly what it negates.

Confucians and Taoists both prize te, virtue or power, and differ over how it is gained. Confucians build character through ritual and study, likening it to cutting bone and polishing jade. Ren, the Analects' central virtue, is rendered benevolence or Goodness. Confucius insists that li, ritual propriety, be filled with real feeling, and the Analects makes the junzi, the exemplary person, a matter of character rather than noble birth. Reciprocity is stated negatively: what you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others. Mencius finds in everyone four moral sprouts that must be cultivated into virtues, shown by the alarm anyone would feel at a child about to tumble into a well. Xunzi replies that inborn nature tends toward strife and is made good by ritual, teachers and deliberate effort.

The Laozi, or Tao Te Ching, treats that effort as a symptom: benevolence and righteousness came into vogue only after the great Tao was abandoned, and its remedy is ziran, naturalness. Its images are water, the softest thing, which overcomes the hard, and the hollow of a pot, useful because of what is not there. Yin and yang are relative labels, not fixed properties: the same thing can be yang in one relationship and yin in another.

The common mistake is to read wu wei as doing nothing. It is set against action driven by self-serving desire, and some translators prefer effortless or non-coercive action. Say you take wu wei as permission to coast. Zhuangzi's Cook Ding carves an ox along its natural joints instead of hacking through bone, so one blade has lasted 19 years, yet at a hard spot he slows down and takes care: effortless is not careless.

Rule: read wu wei as acting without grasping or forcing, never as not acting.

Many thinkers of the Upanishads and of the Buddha's era shared a frame: samsara, the cycle of rebirth governed by karma, and moksha, release from it, won by ending ignorance of your true identity. The Upanishads identify atman, the self, with brahman, ultimate reality. For Shankara's Advaita Vedanta the self is pure consciousness, identical with brahman, and the Chandogya Upanishad's tat tvam asi, you are that, is a strict identity. Ramanuja instead keeps souls and matter real as the body of God, and the dualist Madhva divided the same words to say you are not that. Of the schools that do not rest on the Vedas' authority, the Jains extend ahimsa, non-harming, so far that ideal restraint comes close to not acting at all.

The Bhagavad Gita, whose date is uncertain, is set in a war chariot where Prince Arjuna refuses to fight his kinsmen. His charioteer Krishna counsels acting without craving the results and staying even-minded whether the work succeeds or fails. The common mistake is to hear this as giving up action. The Gita says no one in a body can stand wholly apart from acting, and that dropping a duty you are bound to do springs from delusion. Say you agree to organize a fundraiser, then decide to drop it because it may miss its goal. On the Gita's terms you have inverted the teaching: the work is yours to do well, and only the craving for its fruit goes.

A second mistake concerns maya. Calling Shankara's world an illusion is not exactly wrong but misses his aim: for him it is a shared appearance, less than real yet not nothing, like a magic trick rather than a hare's horn.

Rule: in the Gita, give up the craving for results, never the action itself.

Much of what you read from these schools is secondhand. Epictetus taught by talking, and his Discourses survive because his student Arrian wrote them up. Chrysippus is credited with more than 705 books, yet not one survives complete, so his views are rebuilt from quotations and reports, many by hostile critics such as Plutarch, Galen and Sextus Empiricus. Doxography, writing that reports what philosophers held, preserves lost views but reshapes them: checked against surviving authors, the compiler Aetius proves to adapt and distort. Diogenes Laertius's Lives is indispensable yet repeats anecdotes, even slanders he himself rejects, and Cicero, a main Latin source, followed the skeptical New Academy and criticized the views he reported. Survival itself was narrow: Lucretius's poem rests on two ninth-century manuscripts and was rediscovered in 1417. Marcus wrote the Meditations to himself, and the title comes from a modern editor.

Translation adds a layer. Read as feeling nothing at all, apatheia turns the Stoic sage into a cartoon robot, though the sage has good feelings. When a rendering seems odd, find the Greek behind it.

The modern mistake is to treat Stoicism as a kit of coping techniques. Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck named the Stoics as forerunners of their cognitive therapies, but the orthodox Stoics held that logic, physics and ethics form one system, and even Epictetus grounds his ethics in theology. Whether Stoic ethics can stand apart from its physics is a live scholarly dispute, so a revival that keeps only the ethics takes a side.

Say you meet a line credited to Chrysippus. His views are rebuilt from other authors' quotations and reports, many of them hostile, so ask who quoted it, and why.

Rule: before you trust an ancient quotation, trace who reported it, in what language, and with what purpose.