The Structure of Stoic Practice, Part 1: The Rationale

The root causes of the fundamental problems in life that most philosophies and religions try to solve can be summed up in one saying –

We don’t get the things we want, and we get the things we don’t want.

“Things” here can be anything – actual quantifiable things, like food, shelter, toys, money, friends, leisure time, or any other resource, but also less quantifiable things, such as certain experiences you might want (happiness, pleasure, admiration and respect of your peers) or not want (suffering, pain, rejection, ridicule).

We can break this down into two main issues: wanting, and having.

There are things we want, and things we don't want.

There are things we have, and things we don't have.

Pretty much every human problem is some mixture of these two, which can be combined in all four possible ways.

There are things we want, which we have.

There are things we want, which we don't have.

There are things we don't want, which we have.

There are things we don't want, which we don't have.

For people who like charts, graphs, and tables:

 This way of categorizing things into four possibilities is enough to cover pretty much all problems and situations a human might come across. But there is one more way of categorizing things and events that the Stoics were particularly interested in –

There are things we can control, and things that we can't control.

Or, as someone somewhere on the Internet once described it:

Another way of phrasing this that shows up in Stoic literature is –

There are things internal to us, and things external to us.

“Internal” and “external” in this case refer to your conscious will, with “internal” referring to anything you can will to do that you have complete control over, such as where you direct your attention, or how you analyze and react to the thoughts, images, and emotions that you experience. Pretty much all of the things in the category of “internal/things you have control over” can be subsumed under the phrase “things you can do in response to the current moment.”

“External” here means anything outside of the control of your conscious will, so not only everything in the external world, but also things like your health, what has happened in your past, what is going to happen to you in the future, what thoughts or images come unbidden to your mind, and other people’s opinions about you.

Note that all of these “externals” are things that you can influence, but they are also being influenced by a huge number of other factors, so the ultimate outcome is not something you have complete control over.

In practice, this distinction between what we can and can't control, or what is internal and external to us, is not always very simple, and can get fuzzy. I will flesh out more of the details about this in a separate post, which will have to get into topics such as what you mean when you say “me”, and even probably things like determinism versus free will. But for our purposes now, we're going to take a simplified, pragmatic approach to this distinction. Meaning an approach that, if applied correctly, will give us the greatest chance of getting the results we want – a life full of eudaemonia, a deep sense of well-being (also a topic for another post).

Back to the four-fold division in the table above – we have to figure out how to add in this variable of control/lack of control. Instead of completely redoing the table, let's just add this one more dimension to the structure we already have –

 This may be starting to look a little overly complicated, but it turns out that this division of the main issues in life into eight distinct realms is important because each of these eight realms are not only describing different situations but also for the most part require different strategies or approaches (although there is some overlap between some of them, so the same problems and strategies show up in a few different places). Let’s take a look at each of these in turn, what some examples are in each category, what kinds of problems might come up in that realm, and what strategies for action in response to these problems will be the most helpful.

A note about valuing what matters

One of the ways that I’m going to describe of dealing with these various situations is to practice or learn how to value things that are worth valuing, instead of valuing things that will potentially cause you to suffer when you don’t get them. This is a vague concept, and I want to talk about this idea in a little more detail to clarify what I mean so that the rest of the ideas I’m presenting come across as more coherent. You can read my ideas about what it means to value something here.

In the next post, we’ll start getting into specific examples of each realm, as well as the problems that can occur with each one, as well as the practices that Stoics have promoted to deal with each of them.