The Discipline of Assent

I have something of a longstanding interest in Stoicism going back to my college days. The appeal of Stoic philosophy to an anxious college boy, especially an anxious college boy who is majoring in philosophy, should be obvious: when you’re perpetually confused, fearful, and harassed by worries that feel borderline existential, Stoicism’s emphasis on tranquility amidst chaos is especially seductive. Even better, its ancient pedigree would seem to give it a bit more intellectual heft than modern self-help literature possesses. At some level, I believed that reading Seneca makes you more interesting than reading Brené Brown.

As I got a little older, my relationship with Stoicism became more ambivalent. If you don’t believe in predestination or a perfectly rational, well-ordered universe, then the metaphysics that undergird its ethical principles can be hard to swallow. And while reading Epictetus in particular, I was struck by how alien the ancient Stoics’ theory of mind can seem to someone living in the age of psychiatry. The notion of the rational spirit as an impregnable fortress, separate and distinct from the human body, persists in pop psychology up to the present day — but in my view, it’s no longer philosophically or scientifically tenable.

That said, there is still a lot in Stoicism that can seem almost spookily relevant to contemporary concerns. The ancient philosophy’s influence on cognitive-behavioral therapy has been well documented. Its influence on Christianity has obviously been even more significant for Western culture. And the historical milieu in which Stoicism flourished—as a set of practices for socially conscious elites grappling with their own powerlessness in the face of political decay—may feel somewhat familiar to the kind of people who read left-leaning Substack newsletters.

Still, it can be difficult to reconcile Stoicism’s odd contemporary resonance with its less savory elements. A lot of people don’t think you should even try; the great classicist Mary Beard recently described Stoicism as “nasty, fatalistic, bordering on fascist.” Others, such as the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci, have updated Stoicism into a form that may be more palatable to modern audiences but which I still find sort of psychologically shallow and unsatisfying.

To get anything useful out of Stoicism, I think, you can’t just read translations of the ancient texts as if they were modern self-help manuals. Better to understand the philosophy on its own terms, as a system rooted in a particular social and political context. And better to read the great Stoics themselves as flawed individuals, muddling through with the use of the best tools they had at their disposal.

I’m currently reading Pierre Hadot’s The Inner Citadel, which is my preferred guide to the above approach. Hadot was a French philosopher and historian who specialized in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy as a way of life, to paraphrase the title of one of his books. With The Inner Citadel, he turned his attention to one text in particular: the Meditations of Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

The Meditations have taken their place alongside Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in airport bookshops as a sort of practical guide for corporate warriors, but the original text was probably never meant to be read. In Hadot’s account, Marcus used the act of writing the Meditations as a sort of, well, meditative exercise: a spiritual practice intended to remind their author of the Stoicism’s basic ethical precepts, so that he could better internalize and embody them.

Taken on those terms, what emerges from the Meditations is not a series of rules you can rigidly follow in order to become preternaturally tranquil, but something much more human. Marcus Aurelius, like anyone, suffered. Despite believing in the Stoic doctrine that one should always greet events as if one had willed them, there is no doubt he had some experience with the great chasm between hope and reality. And in contravention of Stoicism’s apparent indifference to human attachments, Marcus made the greatest mistake of his reign by elevating his clearly unfit son Commodus to the purple.

Like the other great Stoics (especially Seneca), Marcus Aurelius was very far from an infallible sage. And rather than being sage-like advice from someone who embodies Stoic wisdom, the Meditations are best read as the private exercises of a conflicted individual reminding himself of where he fell short in his own estimation.

I think that implicit sense of humility is actually core to understanding Stoicism’s appeal, and to getting something useful out of it. In Philosophy as a Way of Life, Hadot distinguishes between Stoicism and Epicureanism by saying the former’s “fundamental inner attitude” is one of tension or “unrelaxing vigilance”, while the attitude of the latter is one of ease and “the renunciation of unnecessary desires.” Stoicism’s doctrine of hypervigilance may be the less appealing of the two (if a little validating, depending on how neurotic you are already), but it also strikes me as a bit more ethically serious-minded. It reminds adherents that they will also fail to meet the philosophy’s loftiest expectations, so they just need to do the best they can.

Even the perfect sage is not perfectly tranquil. Here is Hadot, from a chapter in The Inner Citadel called “The Discipline of Assent”:

From one angle, the withholding of assent might look like an unhealthy act of emotional repression. But from another, it sounds not dissimilar to what modern therapy recommends for people wrestling with depression or anxiety: to allow your feelings to happen, to notice and describe them, but to not ascribe any objective reality to them. The discipline of assent, in other words, is similar to the practice of identifying one’s anxiety without identifying with it.

Despite the ways in which Stoic thought rhymes with certain elements of contemporary therapeutic language, there is obviously something very stereotypically masculine about Stoicism. The Stoic sage speaks little but has an iron will; he is vigilant, righteous, protective, and not particularly emotive. He strongly resembles a certain archetype from American Westerns. In the words of Tony Soprano, “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type. That was an American.”

Funnily enough, though, the modern figures who seem most preoccupied with masculine virtue cut a very un-Stoic figure. Where Stoicism counsels humility, simplicity, and equanimity, figures like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate revel in ostentation, braggadocio, and a sense of perpetual aggrievement that inevitably shades into outright whininess. It’s hard to imagine a serious Stoic getting suspiciously buff and then posting shirtless workout videos to bolster his candidacy for office. It’s even harder to imagine a Stoic strutting around and threatening to beat up a business competitor. And is there any living public figure more clearly un-Stoic than Jordan Peterson?

Like seemingly all men these days, I have a somewhat agonistic relationship to traditional notions of masculinity. (It’s something I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to following this superb Know Your Enemy episode and the ensuing back-and-forth between KYE’s hosts and Phil Christman.) But to the extent that any cultural, masculine-coded archetypes are worthy of admiration, Marcus Aurelius seems to have the clear edge on any of the above figures. His philosophy probably doesn’t deserve your uncritical adherence, but it does merit some serious study.