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Stoicism and literature: A Man in Full, by Tom Wolfe
I discovered Stoicism as recently as 2014. On September 5th, to be precise, because of this tweet. Of course, I had read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations back in college, and had translated some Seneca from Latin in high school. But somehow I never actually associated either one of them with a sophisticated, coherent philosophy, or even realized that they were talking about the very same approach to living a good life.
What brought me to Stoicism was a midlife crisis. Nothing terrible. The usual things: a (unexpected) divorce, the death of my father, a new job, and moving to a different city. Any psychologist worth her salt would tell you that one of these events in isolation is going to be pretty stressful. When all of them take place in the span of a few months, it really makes you think.
At the time, my philosophy of life was secular humanism, which I had adopted ever since leaving the Catholic Church as a teenager. But when I turned to secular humanism for guidance, I found none. To this day I still agree with the philosophy’s major tenets, its call for human rights and its endorsement of a reason and evidence based approach to solving life’s problems. But there wasn’t much actionable there that could get me through the shock of a divorce or the grief I felt for my father’s death.
When I discovered Stoicism and especially Epictetus, the philosophy instantly clicked. Here was a practical, no-nonsense approach to life, the universe, and everything. And Epictetus was a straight talking teacher characterized by a delightful sense of humor bordering on sarcasm. Here is one of the first lines I read by him that made an immediate impression:
What decides whether a sum of money is good? The money is not going to tell you; it must be the faculty that makes use of such impressions — reason. (Discourses I, 1.5)
Right! Money has value, because it may make our lives better. But it is not an intrinsic good, because it doesn’t give us any guidance on how to actually use it. What does? Our faculty of reason, the sophisticated survival weapon that evolution provided for us in lieu of sharp claws, fast running, or powerful muscles.
