Today, Monday 24th November 2014, is the first
day of Stoic Week – an annual event started
by the Stoicism Today team at the University
of Exeter. The team at Exeter are some academics, philosophers and
psychotherapists who run a blog that offers resources to explain Stoic
philosophy and show how it can be useful in people’s lives.
I’ve taken a casual interest in philosophy since my school
days, through until now this has been limited to a few popular philosophy books
and internet comics, like this one.
Superficially at least, I’ve always
admired the Stoics, maybe because they feature early on in most popular histories
of philosophy so I actually get to their chapter before giving up on the book.
My understanding of stoicism is mostly limited to the word as it is commonly
used; a stoic person is noble and uncomplaining, carrying themselves with a
dignified and stereotypically British stiff-upper lip “mustn’t grumble”
attitude. This ideal is basically the opposite of my usual snivelling, moaning personality
and so I am quite keen to find out more about Stoicism and how it might improve
my attitude to life.
To shoehorn some relevance to medicine in here, participants
in last year’s stoic course reported a 14% increase in life satisfaction and a
decrease in negative emotion. Like mindfulness and cognitive behavioural
therapy (which are proven to be effective in treating depression), it seems
likely that courses in Stoic resilience might have similar benefits in
improving mental health.
Stoic Week is an
event that invites people all over the world to spend a week thinking about the
basic ideas of stoicism, on each day there is a different theme and some
exercises to practise. The impact of stoic thinking on attitudes, behaviours
and wellbeing is also assessed using online wellbeing surveys taken before and
after the week. The website has loads of information about stoicism in general and
includes a downloadable copy of the stoic week handbook and information on how
to take part in the week.
So I signed up to the course at www.modernstoicism.com. After
completing 4 brief questionnaires designed to reveal my levels of contentment
(or otherwise) I was given a quick summary of Stoicism from Epictetus’ handbook.
I’ll try and summarise the summary as I understand it here:
Stoicism is an ancient school of philosophy founded in
Athens about 301BC, by Zeno of Citium. Other important Stoics include
Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. The core view of stoicism
is that the highest authority is reason, and Nature, life and death exist as
they appear to. Nature is governed by rational principles that we cannot change
nor should desire to. In contrast, emotional responses are not subject to reason;
they are falsehoods. So we can control our judgements through rational thought use
this to inform our actions, and our voluntary actions are the only important
thing; they are our true self.
Our body, health, possessions or status are often not due to
our voluntary actions, we have no control and so it is not rational to be
distressed with these things. By remembering this a person can meets hardship
and even their own mortality with dignified acceptance; harm cannot reach one’s
true self.
A much better summary can be found on the Exeter blog: http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/stoicismtoday/what-is-stoicism/
The first day of the course suggests spending time thinking
about the level of control a person has over there situation. Stoics think that
confusion between what you can control (your thoughts and actions) with what
you can’t (everything else) leads to unhappiness. Broadly speaking this is good
advice; I try not to get annoyed when I get caught in traffic on the way to
placement or when the teaching session I drove in for is inevitably cancelled.
And the reverse is true too, it doesn’t make sense to feel too smug when things
go well; the fact that I don’t have any real concerns regarding my shelter,
health, safety, finances, education or future are not due to my thoughts or
actions, they are lucky by-products of the accident of my birth.
But overall I’m not entirely sure I can get completely on board with
the stoic thinking. There're far too many unwell, unhappy, or dying people in hospitals, and most of them do indeed meet their challenges with dignity and grace. I don’t see how a person with a terminal
illness (and there are plenty of them) can choose to be not pissed off even if they have no control over their
situation. I guess they are supposed to realign their thoughts with their
reality, and accept their fate without emotion, but this seems to me a
heartless and impossible expectation. Good stoics would argue that virtue is all that is needed for happiness but I think that an absence of terrible circumstance is important too. Maybe I've not fully understood the stoic attitude here, I suppose it is only day one.
