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Gurwinder's avatar

Hi Alessandra, as you may know, I’m a big fan of Stoicism, and have read many counterarguments against it. I think yours is one of the most articulate, but would like to clarify a few things.

After Stoicism saw a resurgence among young men in the early 2010s, many counterarguments against Stoicism were published online. The counterarguments tended to make three claims: Stoicism is about suppressing emotions, Stoicism is about resigning oneself to fate, and Stoicism stops people embracing life.

At first I thought these were mischaracterizations of my favorite philosophy, but as I grew to understand the online revival of Stoicism, I realized there were in fact many self-proclaimed Stoics who believed these things. And so I began regarding these beliefs as a wayward school of thought within Stoicism that I called “Broicism” because it was mostly popular among masculinity influencers and their followers.

Broicism is a specific kind of online, red-pilled Stoicism, derived mainly from viral (mis)quotes of the Stoic philosophers, and made to be disseminated in tweets and TikTok clips. It therefore doesn’t reflect the depth and diversity of traditional Stoic thought, and in fact often serves as a straw-man for it.

One common idea among Broics is that emotions are anti-masculine, and therefore should be suppressed. This is in contrast to the ancient Stoics, who didn't believe we should suppress emotions, but that we should master them, which is to say, we should be able to step back and objectively consider whether a feeling is justified before acting on it. Only if the feeling is justified do we embrace it and use it to drive us toward action.

As you point out in your essay, even Seneca – the most cerebral of the ancient Stoics – recognized that anger could be a source of power, but only when channeled in the right direction. You astutely observe that “the only harmony in the apparent chaos of our feelings is precisely one where we realize they have a purpose,” but I think this supports Stoicism, because it is only when we detach from a feeling enough to objectively scrutinize it that we can work out its purpose!

Another common accusation against Stoicism is that it teaches people to resign themselves to fate. Some Broics may believe this; among manosphere incels, for instance, there's a culture of resignation at not getting laid. I don't know any devoted Stoics who live passively, though, because to do so would require a profound misunderstanding of amor fati which you unfortunately echo. You write: “it is a philosophy that preaches us to accept the unacceptable while facing life’s challenges passively. Should a slave embrace his condition by changing his view of slavery?” But amor fati isn’t resignation to fate; it’s resignation to what you can’t change, so you’re free to focus all your energies on what you can. And I’d regard slavery as belonging to the latter group. It’s a blurred line, though, as Epictetus knew too well, and one of the chief problems for Stoics is trying to work out what we can control and what we can’t.

Another common accusation against Stoicism is that it stops people from fully embracing life. You implore us to instead embrace the Faustian spirit of overcoming, or “a conception of life that drives us to shape, rather than to be shaped by our surroundings.” But this is precisely what the Stoics proposed. Again, they only asked us to resign ourselves to what can’t be changed so we could focus on what could. They only asked us to defy emotions that may mislead or weaken us, so we could fully embrace emotions that invigorated or enriched us.

You write that Nietzche’s “most poignant criticism of Stoicism was that it was a philosophy of death; a denial of life’s passionate, dynamic nature, which should be embraced.” I think Stoicism is only a philosophy of death insofar as it is a philosophy of life; its use of memento mori is to encourage us to embrace living. For the Stoics, the one thing worse than death was being alive but not living. As Marcus Aurelius wrote: “It is not death that one should fear, but never beginning to live.”

In conclusion, I think you agree with us Stoics, and we agree with you about the Broics, more than you might think. You wrote an eloquent and necessary rebuttal to a toxic philosophy that is affecting many young men’s minds, and have given Stoics like me a valuable opportunity to distance ourselves from it. Although my critique of your essay may sound disapproving, I always find you to be a lucid thinker and illuminating writer. Even when I think you’re wrong, I find you wrong in intelligent and interesting ways, and I’m glad to have read this essay. You didn’t make me appreciate Stoicism any less, but you did make me appreciate your writing more. So thank you!

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Bill Price's avatar

Very nice case against Stoicism.

The dry, logical version is that Stoicism's worldview is strictly deterministic -- fatalist essentially. In such a world it makes perfect sense to cultivate a machine-like indifference to our passions, but we know that freedom exists, so abject resignation is not a virtue, but rather a vice.

Materialist determinism has been the dominant worldview for a long time now, but that is changing, so it makes sense that Stoicism should be starting to lose its appeal.

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