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!
So many modern criticisms of Stoicism make the same error re: emotions and regarding them from a distance. It’s a key tell that the author has an incomplete grasp of the nuances of stoic epistemology. The portions of the essay that focused on Stoic wife swapping and the difference between Medieval and modern Scandinavians were also disappointing.
There’s nothing wrong with not preferring Stoicism, and even with finding “broics” annoying. Most of us non-broic Stoics also roll our eyes at them. But despite being articulate, this piece misrepresents Stoicism in some pretty big ways. I appreciate the response, @Gurwinder.
There are a lot of reasons to be critical of Stoicism - I write about some of them on my Substack, "Ataraxia or Bust" - but I have to agree with Gurwinder here. The targets you're hitting in your article that you are calling "Stoicism" are not actual Stoicism. As Gurwinder points out, many of them are misrepresentations of Stoicism by people who are pitching something other than actual Stoicism. Others are strawmen of Stoicism that have been used as punching bags for hundreds of years.
If you're going to make claims such as - "Some historians claim Stoics practiced “swapping” their wives with other men to avoid forming an attachment to them" - it would help if you were to provide a citation for them. I've never seen any historian claim that. I think you have this confused with what Zeno said in his "Republic": that in an ideal society populated only by the wise, the men would hold their wives in common and there would be no prohibitions against incest (cited by Diogenes Laertius and Sextus Empircus). There's no indication that the purpose Zeno had in mind was to avoid forming attachments. Instead, the position appears to have been inspired by Cynic ideas.
Was about to write a tedious screed saying that some people conflate stoicism and Buddhism with suppression/resignation. But my god, you did a way better job 😂 seriously, this comment has enough substance to be reworked into a post. A pleasure to read 😊
Do any of the Stoics with which you are familiar advocate for “resignation” as it would be understood with the connotations prevalent in our contemporary culture? “Resignation” seems like a near enemy of the truth best expressed by “acceptance.” I can easily maintain interest in things which I accept but do not approve while if I resign myself to them, I have disavowed not just attachment to outcome, but all levels of interest.
Great point and counter arguments here between the article and this thread. Given the C. G. Jung citation it may be prudent to point out his hand in the formation of AA, and the concomitant serenity prayer: a perfectly rendered distillation of stoic principles.
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.
Well written, well sourced. Very insightful food for thought. I've long sensed a discrepancy between the aim of stoicism and its practice. Maybe.. humans are meant to feel? To experience the entire bandwidth of potential experience, and to choose the good. Rather than restrict our awareness to the menial, and opt for the 'least bad'.
What a brilliant piece. Lots of food for thought for a guy who's spent his life ping-ponging between Stoicism and Jungianism, with a bit of Krishnamurti and Gurdjieff thrown in, and a few psychedelics when younger.
Contrast this with the Epicurean method of self care. In his scroll "On Anger", the Epicurean Guide Philodemus of Gadara says anger can be natural or unnatural, rational or non rational, and if endorsed it can even be virtuous so long as it is channeled into a cause or some choices or rejections that address the initial grievance so that you get pleasure in the end. The scroll on Anger shows how Epicureans turn Poison into medicine ... but you made no mention of Epicureans?
Excellent article. The reason why stoicism gained popularity among elite classes in ancient Greece and Rome was because the ideology rationalized their desire to avoid responsibility for their actions and nonactions. I find it tragic that today, stoicism has been blended with new age platitudes and sold as a faddish escapism--a kind of pet rock for our times into which people can retreat into self-centered obliviousness and pretend they are being wise.
The way that you described stoicism is the way that I conceived it as well at first. I got interested in stoicism because I went through a rough patch in my life and I am a very sensitive. I sought out stoicism as a philosophy that could help me soften the weltschmerz I was experiencing, but stoicism isn't as clear cut as that.
It's not a magical cure and simply reading Meditations didn't do anything for me. I, and anyone else, has to engage with it to get value out of it, so I'm glad to read your post, even though I don't agree ;)
The suspension of judgement is what I like most about stoicism. Rather than denying or suppressing emotions, to me it means that you shouldn't judge emotions. Emotions themselves, too, can be seen as a judgement of a situation, which in some way they are. But anyone would be a fool to judge themselves for having emotions, you can't help it, so you shouldn't judge yourself too harshly for it.
In Dutch we have a saying: 'that person is very stoic' which is not positive and means to say that this person doesn't show their emotions and is cold and distant. Again, this is to my mind a misrepresentation of what Stoicism is all about, namely actively working on being aware of what is within and outside of your control and focussing on working on the things that are inside of your control.
I like this article. I read it and to end. I don’t care whether it’s accurate about stoicism’s meaning or not. Broicism (thanks, Gurwinder) is a thing and this is a quality rebuttal.
Detachment doesn’t mean not experiencing emotions. It is possible to be both angry and vividly aware of your anger, observing it without being controlled by it. This is detachment, not some numb state of disassociation. When in a moment of intense lust you have the ability to stop before you are satisfied, this is a great victory over the force of habit. We don’t need to avoid emotions and sensations - we just need to experience them with awareness to be free.
El problema de fondo con el estoicismo es la falta de conjunción con las trascendentales. Es decir, es demasiado «corporalista» y se desata de una idea metafísica real. Le quita romanticismo a la vida y, sin romanticismo, la idea del devenir muere. El estoico no entiende lo sublime, sino solo lo mundano; e incluso desprecia lo mundano, pues lo ve como un vicio.
I have two thoughts on contemporary Stoicism. The first is that many who espouse it don't read Latin or Greek and aren't philosophers, so they're not well-equipped to dig into the texts themselves and see what the authors said. I think that just as Christians should learn Hebrew and Greek, if you're going to immerse yourself in a worldview, you should learn that worldview as authentically as you can. That means close textual reading in addition to daily practices. I love Massimo Pigliucci's work on Stoicism because he does some of the hard work of digging in (I don't think he knows Greek, but he at least reads multiple translations). Greg Sadler is one of the best about discussing Stoicism. I don't think he's a Stoic. He's on Substack.
The second point is that Broicism is caught up with this weird Great Man Syndrome that neglects the day-to-day. I don't think that this is Stoicism's fault. I think it's the fault of those who push Stoicism without reading the texts and studying philosophy more generally. I wrote something on it.
Okay, I have a third thought. I really enjoy reading and thinking about Stoicism. I think it has actually helped me deal cognitively and affectively with loss, including a time when some medical results suggested I might be facing a terminal illness (I wasn't). Just read other things, too. Read some Aristotle. Read Plato. Read Epicureanism. And read contemporary ethical theory, too.
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!
So many modern criticisms of Stoicism make the same error re: emotions and regarding them from a distance. It’s a key tell that the author has an incomplete grasp of the nuances of stoic epistemology. The portions of the essay that focused on Stoic wife swapping and the difference between Medieval and modern Scandinavians were also disappointing.
There’s nothing wrong with not preferring Stoicism, and even with finding “broics” annoying. Most of us non-broic Stoics also roll our eyes at them. But despite being articulate, this piece misrepresents Stoicism in some pretty big ways. I appreciate the response, @Gurwinder.
There are a lot of reasons to be critical of Stoicism - I write about some of them on my Substack, "Ataraxia or Bust" - but I have to agree with Gurwinder here. The targets you're hitting in your article that you are calling "Stoicism" are not actual Stoicism. As Gurwinder points out, many of them are misrepresentations of Stoicism by people who are pitching something other than actual Stoicism. Others are strawmen of Stoicism that have been used as punching bags for hundreds of years.
If you're going to make claims such as - "Some historians claim Stoics practiced “swapping” their wives with other men to avoid forming an attachment to them" - it would help if you were to provide a citation for them. I've never seen any historian claim that. I think you have this confused with what Zeno said in his "Republic": that in an ideal society populated only by the wise, the men would hold their wives in common and there would be no prohibitions against incest (cited by Diogenes Laertius and Sextus Empircus). There's no indication that the purpose Zeno had in mind was to avoid forming attachments. Instead, the position appears to have been inspired by Cynic ideas.
Was about to write a tedious screed saying that some people conflate stoicism and Buddhism with suppression/resignation. But my god, you did a way better job 😂 seriously, this comment has enough substance to be reworked into a post. A pleasure to read 😊
A great comment, and I wish more online commentary was of this calibre.
Do any of the Stoics with which you are familiar advocate for “resignation” as it would be understood with the connotations prevalent in our contemporary culture? “Resignation” seems like a near enemy of the truth best expressed by “acceptance.” I can easily maintain interest in things which I accept but do not approve while if I resign myself to them, I have disavowed not just attachment to outcome, but all levels of interest.
Great point and counter arguments here between the article and this thread. Given the C. G. Jung citation it may be prudent to point out his hand in the formation of AA, and the concomitant serenity prayer: a perfectly rendered distillation of stoic principles.
Thank you for clearing this out, G!
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.
This is incredible.
Well written, well sourced. Very insightful food for thought. I've long sensed a discrepancy between the aim of stoicism and its practice. Maybe.. humans are meant to feel? To experience the entire bandwidth of potential experience, and to choose the good. Rather than restrict our awareness to the menial, and opt for the 'least bad'.
Appreciate seeing the zeitgeist shift
What a brilliant piece. Lots of food for thought for a guy who's spent his life ping-ponging between Stoicism and Jungianism, with a bit of Krishnamurti and Gurdjieff thrown in, and a few psychedelics when younger.
Contrast this with the Epicurean method of self care. In his scroll "On Anger", the Epicurean Guide Philodemus of Gadara says anger can be natural or unnatural, rational or non rational, and if endorsed it can even be virtuous so long as it is channeled into a cause or some choices or rejections that address the initial grievance so that you get pleasure in the end. The scroll on Anger shows how Epicureans turn Poison into medicine ... but you made no mention of Epicureans?
Stoicism in actuality is no more than the philosophy of Alfred E. Newman. As typically understood it's victim blaming.
I was never really a fan of stoicism. It always felt dull, lifeless and humourless!
Excellent article. The reason why stoicism gained popularity among elite classes in ancient Greece and Rome was because the ideology rationalized their desire to avoid responsibility for their actions and nonactions. I find it tragic that today, stoicism has been blended with new age platitudes and sold as a faddish escapism--a kind of pet rock for our times into which people can retreat into self-centered obliviousness and pretend they are being wise.
Fantastic takedown.
"Look at me I am a mentally healthy person. My life's purpose is to not care about anything and to tell other people not to care as well."
You nailed it.
The way that you described stoicism is the way that I conceived it as well at first. I got interested in stoicism because I went through a rough patch in my life and I am a very sensitive. I sought out stoicism as a philosophy that could help me soften the weltschmerz I was experiencing, but stoicism isn't as clear cut as that.
It's not a magical cure and simply reading Meditations didn't do anything for me. I, and anyone else, has to engage with it to get value out of it, so I'm glad to read your post, even though I don't agree ;)
The suspension of judgement is what I like most about stoicism. Rather than denying or suppressing emotions, to me it means that you shouldn't judge emotions. Emotions themselves, too, can be seen as a judgement of a situation, which in some way they are. But anyone would be a fool to judge themselves for having emotions, you can't help it, so you shouldn't judge yourself too harshly for it.
In Dutch we have a saying: 'that person is very stoic' which is not positive and means to say that this person doesn't show their emotions and is cold and distant. Again, this is to my mind a misrepresentation of what Stoicism is all about, namely actively working on being aware of what is within and outside of your control and focussing on working on the things that are inside of your control.
I like this article. I read it and to end. I don’t care whether it’s accurate about stoicism’s meaning or not. Broicism (thanks, Gurwinder) is a thing and this is a quality rebuttal.
Detachment doesn’t mean not experiencing emotions. It is possible to be both angry and vividly aware of your anger, observing it without being controlled by it. This is detachment, not some numb state of disassociation. When in a moment of intense lust you have the ability to stop before you are satisfied, this is a great victory over the force of habit. We don’t need to avoid emotions and sensations - we just need to experience them with awareness to be free.
El problema de fondo con el estoicismo es la falta de conjunción con las trascendentales. Es decir, es demasiado «corporalista» y se desata de una idea metafísica real. Le quita romanticismo a la vida y, sin romanticismo, la idea del devenir muere. El estoico no entiende lo sublime, sino solo lo mundano; e incluso desprecia lo mundano, pues lo ve como un vicio.
This is a bad reading of stoicism. No it's not western Buddhism.
I have two thoughts on contemporary Stoicism. The first is that many who espouse it don't read Latin or Greek and aren't philosophers, so they're not well-equipped to dig into the texts themselves and see what the authors said. I think that just as Christians should learn Hebrew and Greek, if you're going to immerse yourself in a worldview, you should learn that worldview as authentically as you can. That means close textual reading in addition to daily practices. I love Massimo Pigliucci's work on Stoicism because he does some of the hard work of digging in (I don't think he knows Greek, but he at least reads multiple translations). Greg Sadler is one of the best about discussing Stoicism. I don't think he's a Stoic. He's on Substack.
The second point is that Broicism is caught up with this weird Great Man Syndrome that neglects the day-to-day. I don't think that this is Stoicism's fault. I think it's the fault of those who push Stoicism without reading the texts and studying philosophy more generally. I wrote something on it.
https://philosophychatter.substack.com/p/satire-saturday
Okay, I have a third thought. I really enjoy reading and thinking about Stoicism. I think it has actually helped me deal cognitively and affectively with loss, including a time when some medical results suggested I might be facing a terminal illness (I wasn't). Just read other things, too. Read some Aristotle. Read Plato. Read Epicureanism. And read contemporary ethical theory, too.