From ancient to new Stoicism: IV — Becker’s update
A conceptual map of where Stoicism came from and where it may be going
How do we update ancient Stoicism so that it becomes a viable philosophy for the 21st century and beyond? We start, as we did in this ongoing series, with a solid understanding of ancient Stoicism: if we don’t know the starting point we can hardly chart the way forward. Now that we have a grasp of ancient Stoic physics (i.e., science), logic, and ethics, we can begin to tackle four explicit attempts, made by different authors, to come up with a modern rendition of Stoic philosophy.
We’ll look in turn to Lawrence Becker’s New Stoicism (this essay), Piotr Stankiewicz’s Reformed Stoicism, Steven Gambardella’s new modern Stoicism, and my own modest attempt. We will, of course, not settle the matter once and for all. I hope, however, to provide some food for thought and a venue for continued discussion. Stoicism is a big tent, and together we can make it even bigger and more relevant to today’s living.
It is not going to be easy to summarize Becker’s attempt in one essay. He wrote a whole (somewhat hard to read) book about it, and I published a ten-party synopsis of it (authorized and corrected by Becker himself, as he was still alive when I first wrote it). Still, out of fairness to the other…
