How to Be Epictetus in the Gym and on the Mats

Intro

Happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to my annual fitness post. Last year I wrote How to be Aristotle in the Gym, so this year I thought I'd try doing something similar with Epictetus. Epictetus is one of the 4 famous heads of the Stoic school (Zeno of Citium, Cleathes, and Chrysippus are the other 3). He is perhaps best known for his curmudgeonly and conversational style. If you've never read him, check out some of the Discourses. Many lessons are as hilarious as they are enlightening.

Anyhow, for this post, not only will I incorporate his ideas but, for fun, I'm going to adopt his tone. The focus of the post will cover mindset and how to deal with injuries and other setbacks. But first let's get a familiar with some of the main tenets of stoicism and how they relate to physical health...

[Aside: If you're looking for injury prevention technique, see my past post: Here and Here. For my current weightlifting routine go here. For increasing plant-based protein in your diet without losing gainz, go here.]

Epictetus and the (Non)Value of Physical Health
Why do you do something rather than nothing? The aim of all action is happiness. People find happiness in a variety of things and this explains why people pursue different things. But isn't the part of happiness that we most value not wealth, fame, power, or university degrees but rather how we handle the cards we are dealt?

No life is free from misfortune, chance, and adversity. But in facing such occasions we encounter opportunities to exercise and develop the genuine foundations for a stable happiness:  Strength, dignity, equanimity, composure, stability, fortitude, persistence, and courage. None of these virtues are meaningfully developed without facing some adversity. And no person can live a happy life without these traits. So, if it's a stable enduring happiness you're after, develop your virtues.

So, what about physical health? Ought I to pursue it? It seems like it's also part of a happy life.

"No my friend: enjoying health in the right way is good; making bad use of your health is bad."
(Discourse III. 20. 4)

The stoic view on physical health, like anything outside of your will, is that it is neither good nor bad. What matters is whether you make (virtuous) use of it and/or pursue it virtuously. A sound body enables a criminal to commit his crimes just as it enables a good person to do good deeds.

You should not pursue fitness merely for the sake of fitness. This is why the whole bodybuilding/fitness industry would be such a travesty for Epictetus. What do such lives amount to? They devoted 10s of thousands of hours to making their muscles puffy. What kind of life is that?

So, does this mean I should be indifferent about my health? No. A happy life is one in which we develop a beautiful soul. The body is the vessel of the soul and so it's important to care for the vessel that contains it. Notice, however, that the reasons to pursue health and fitness are purely instrumental, they are not ends in themselves.

There are a few other stoic reasons for caring about your health, most of which are inherited from Socrates/Plato.

First, whatever burdens you must bear, they are more bearable to the healthy person.

And yet what has to be borne by anyone who takes care to keep his body in good condition is far lighter and far pleasanter than those things subjected to the out of shape person. (Plato, The Republic)

Also

Why even in the process of thinking and not using our body, it is a matter of common knowledge that grave mistakes may often be traced to bad health. And because the body is in a bad condition loss of memory, depression and discontent often attack the mind so violently as to drive out whatever knowledge it contains. (Xenophon quoting Socrates)

In short, in poor health we are more prone to bad decisions and a weakened will in the face of challenges. We are less likely to do the kinds of virtuous actions that beautify our soul. As the saying goes, "Fatigue makes cowards of us all." (Quote is attributed to both George Patton and Vince Lombardi). And the unfit are easily fatigued.

Second, physical development is practice for the much more difficult task of intellectual and moral development. It also cultivates our affinity for Beauty. For that ancients, Truth, the Good, and Beauty are inextricably connected and all are required to develop a beautiful soul.  People aren't always immediately interested in the Good or Truth; but if the three are tied together, Beauty can draw them in the right direction.

Physical beauty, however, is inferior to beauty of a soul. Having a beautiful soul requires knowing (and acting on) the True and the Good. It follows that cultivating a beautiful soul is much more difficult than developing a beautiful body. That is, is easier to get puffy muscles than it is to discover and act on moral and intellectual truth. Hence, especially for youth, it's important that they at least have some aspiration for beauty--even if it's initially of the inferior kind. This is a starting point to "show him the way to more appropriate objects of devotion" (Sherman, Stoic Warriors. P. 31)

In Epictetus's own words (concerning leading a youth to care for having a beautiful soul):

But if he should come to me befouled, dirty, with whiskers down to his knees, what can I say to him, what sort of comparison can I use to draw him on? For what has he ever concerned himself with that bears any resemblance to beauty, such that I can redirect his attention, and say, "Beauty is not there, but here"? Would you have me say to him, "Beauty lies not in being befouled, but in reason"? For does he in fact aspire to beauty? Does he show any sign of it? Go and argue with a pig, that he should not roll in the mud." (Discourse III. 23. 27.)

Some Simple Advice that Would Improve Most People's Health and Save them Money
Recall the earlier lesson that the unfit are easily fatigued, that fatigue undermines our will and judgment, which in turn interferes with developing a beautiful soul. In short, a developing a beautiful soul requires we avoid fatigue to the extent that we can.

Think of health and fitness as a three-legged table. Each leg represents one of

• diet/nutrition, 
• exercise, and 
• sleep/recovery. 

If you remove one leg, the table collapses. Also, if the legs aren't in the correct proportion, the table is unstable.

Different people struggle with different "legs," however, I think sleep is the most often overlooked. You can do all the right exercises at the right intensity and eat all the right foods in the right amounts but if you aren't getting enough sleep, your efforts are soon undermined. During deep prolonged sleep, your body releases hormones necessary for recovery and growth. You simply cannot recover physically (or mentally) if these hormones aren't regularly released into your body. And, without quality sleep, these hormones will not be released into your body.

The fitness industrial complex offers no end of new supplements, magic pills, special diets, exercise plans, and exercise innovation. Some of them are useful, some of them not, most are only moderately so. But rarely do you hear about sleep, and if you do, it's often as an afterthought.

If sleep's as important as I claim it is, why don't we hear about it as much as the other two legs? The answer is simple, Big Fit doesn't make a profit off of you sleeping. They can't sell it to you (yet!).

But now I've told you what they don't want you to know. Figure out how much sleep you need and restructure your life such that you get it. You'll be surprised at what a difference it makes. It blows my mind how much money people are willing to pay for supplements of questionable efficacy yet unwilling to find a way to get one more hour of sleep a night. I'd be willing to bet anything that an extra hour of sleep will do you more good for your health than all your expensive supplements combined.

"Why are you willing to pay so much for supplements?"
"Because I want to be healthy."
"I just told you that getting an extra hour of sleep will help you much more than your supplements ever will. So, why don't you get an extra hour of sleep instead of staying up online or watching Netflix?"
"I know but I don't want to have to change my life."
"Fine. Then don't complain about your health when I've just told you how to improve it." (Epictetus, The Lost Discourses)

 Injuries and Setbacks
My first genuine interaction with Stoicism was Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. My first reaction to Stoicism was to throw the book across the room.

Why? Well, you know all those annoying self-help-y aphorisms like "Everything happens for a reason" and "Every challenge presents an opportunity"? Well, the Stoics were the OG's (original gurus) of self-help. They viewed their philosophy as being first and foremost a practical guide to living well and a means of dealing with the inevitable difficulties and misfortunes of life. There is deep wisdom in their teachings. The problem is that, after 2, 000 years of being repeated ad nauseam and out of context, they can seem like just one more vacuous platitude to scroll past in our newsfeed. Especially when it's the person posting it that most needs to heed the advice! (Tu quoque for those keeping score).

How does all this fit with the theme of this article: fitness and injuries? Let me illustrate.

Four years ago, I suffered perhaps the worst injury of my grappling career. I rolled my right ankle and tore a bunch of soft tissue. I was on crutches for 2 months, limping for a year and a half, and only recently completely pain free. I still tape my ankle every judo practice as a preventative measure.

After about 6 months of no judo, I started doing some light technique practice. Because I'd injured my dominant foot, I couldn't practice throws to my dominant (i.e., strong) side. The only way I was going to be able to train at all is if I practiced to my weak side.

It took a full 2 years before I was able to begin training to my strong side again. By that time, my weak-side throws were better than my strong side throws. After a few months, my strong side caught up. The net result is that now I can do some throws just as well to either side.

Without getting too far into judo technique, I'll explain why that's such a huge advantage. To avoid a throw in judo or wrestling, you circle away from the direction of the throw. If you walk into the direction of the throw, you make your opponent's job very easy since you are walking in the exact direction required for the throw to be successful.

So, what happens when you can throw equally well on both sides? If I attack one direction, you circle away from the throw. But circling away from a throw in one direction is also walking into the throw from the other direction. If I can throw in both directions, your defense to my initial attack actually literally walks you into my attack from the other direction.

What's the moral of the story? The simple one is that every challenge presents an opportunity. The challenge presented to me was what very easily could have been a career-ending injury. Instead, I chose to use it as an opportunity to develop a part of my game I otherwise wouldn't have spent as much time on. The net result was to move me another step closer to the ideal martial artist.

Think of your own injuries in the same way (And I promise, you will have injuries, whether you train or not!). Maybe you injure your shoulder or your back. Give your body a chance to heal from the initial injury, but now figure out how to train around your injury and eventually restrengthen it. This forces you to learn new exercises and improve your technique on ones you already know. Doing it imperfectly now has real consequences. The long run effect is to make you improve in ways you otherwise wouldn't have if circumstance hadn't forced you to.

Now, he's where part of me wants to throw the Discourses across the room. Surely, some injuries are so bad and permanent that we will forever be impaired. An extreme example might be paralysis. What kind of asshole tells someone newly paraplegic, "hey, man, you should see this as an opportunity." Now, just because what the stoics say isn't true in every case, doesn't mean it isn't true in some cases. In my case it was true.

My own view is that, psychologically, we ought to err on the side of stoicism when we are confronted by setbacks. I think there's much more harm in despair and giving up than there is in a mentality that seeks opportunity in misfortune.

He's the first lesson: Learn What You Would not Have Otherwise Learned
You're going to have setback in your fitness journey. This is the nature of life. So whachugonna do abouddit? Give up and cry like a little baby or find a way to learn and improve from it?

Moving on...

The more subtle message has to do with value. Initially--well, let's be honest--not just initially, but for a long time, I was genuinely heart-broken by my injury. I wasn't hopeful at all. Right before the injury, I was the best I'd ever been. I was on track to test for my brown belt. I was looking forward to doing well in tournaments. I was upset because the injury interfered with realizing what I valued: belt promotion, tournaments, winning.

But the stoic is concerned with internal goods: wisdom, perseverance, composure, courage, and so on. These are the goods that make us a complete person and that most reliably contribute to living a good life. These are the fruits we ought to pursue. And I ultimately gain the sweetest fruits of all by refusing to quit and continuing to persevere in the face of misfortune:

What will you make of illness?
I will expose its true nature by outdoing myself in calmness and serenity; I will neither beg the doctor's help, nor pray for death. What more could you ask? Everything, you see, that you throw at me I will transform into a blessing, a boon--something dignified, even enviable. (Discourse III. 21. 14-15)

Or

[Y]ou have inner strengths that enable you to bear up with difficulties of every kind. You have been given fortitude, courage, and patience. Why should I worry what happens if I am armed with the virtue of fortitude? Nothing can trouble or upset me, or even seem annoying. Instead of meeting misfortune with groans and tears, I will call upon the faculty especially provided to deal with it. 

'But my nose is running!' What do you have hands for, idiot, if not to wipe it? 'But how is it right that there be running noses in the first place? Instead of thinking up protests, wouldn't it be easier just to wipe your nose? (Discourse 1. 6. 28-32.)

In other words, it is through the various challenges life inevitably sends our way that we most develop our virtues--the true and reliable foundations for a happy life. And who are you to think of yourself as so weak as not to be able to face such challenges?

Suck it up buttercup. You kan dou eet!

All that energy you spend complaining about your ankle, your back, your neck, etc... isn't going to heal it. You might as well redirect your efforts toward addressing it. Wipe your nose!

Here's the second lesson: Focus on What Really Matters
In the long run, in facing injuries and misfortune, you develop the traits that have genuine value: Fortitude, courage, perseverance, wisdom, etc...

Brace yourself: It's not puffy muscles or being able to lift a certain amount of weight that matters for a good life. It's the character traits you develop that allow you to manage and overcome, not only your current injuries and health problems, but future ones too.

This is another way of expressing the earlier Socratic point: Physical fitness and sports are a controlled environment for character development. In fitness/sports, more than in any other endeavor, there's a strong correlation between effort and results. The lessons learned and traits you develop are meant to prepare you for the more difficult domains of intellectual and moral development. Intellectual and moral challenges are infinitely more demanding than any physical ones.

Too many people think puffy muscles or round booties are the final goal and despair when they're thwarted. Such people never surpass the most basic level of development as human beings. They are incomplete human beings and they never fully achieve complete lasting and reliable foundations for a good life.

I know. It's all easy to say. Personal development is extremely difficult and takes time. However,

Nothing important comes into being overnight: even grapes and figs need time to ripen. If you say you want a fig now, I will tell you to be patient. First, you must allow the tree to flower, then put forth fruit; then you have to wait until the fruit is ripe." (Discourse 1. 17. 7.)

Conclusion:
Fact: In pursuing your fitness goals you will get injured. You will also get sick. You will get overwhelmed with work and social obligations. These will set you back. Crying about it won't change anything. Neither will anger, sadness, or quitting. So, whatchugonna do?

Adopt that OG (Original Guru) self-help mindset: See an opportunity to learn to train differently and improve your technique. Better yet, see this as an opportunity to develop the virtues. When you face the next inevitable setback, you'll be better equipped to handle it.

Epictetus often compares the quest for happiness (through the exercise and development of virtuous character) to athletic competition. There are important disanalogies. First, in the contest of life we compete against ourselves, not against others. Second, we compete over and over, through repeated opportunities for achievement. To be defeated need not mean that we are out of the race. Life gives us new opportunities in which happiness may flower:

Even if we fail here and now, no one stops us from competing again, we don't have to wait another four years for the next Olympics, but as soon as a man picked himself up and renewed his grip on himself and shown the same enthusiasm he is allowed to compete. And if you give in again, you can compete again, and if once you win, you are like someone who never gave in. Only, don't let sheer habit make you give in readily and end up like a bad athlete going around being beaten in the whole circuit like quails that run away. (Discourse 3. 1-5)

Jigoro Kano (founder of judo) echos something similar in this wonderful quote:

The man who is at the peak of his success and the man who has just failed are in exactly the same position: Each must decide what to do next.

Why Do Something Rather than Nothing? A Stoic Puzzle

Introduction

The first question of philosophy is, How should I live my life? For the Ancient Greeks, the answer was to live a good life. A trivial answer to be sure until we ask further, What is a good life? Or to rephrase it, what makes a good life good? Answers varied from school to school but for just about all of them a good life consists primarily in developing the virtues—both moral and intellectual.

From our modern perspective it’s perhaps odd to conceive of a good life primarily in terms of moral and intellectual development. For many people ‘living well’ and moral development aren’t necessarily connected. For the Greeks, however, they were intimately connected: You simply cannot have a good life without developing the virtues.

One prominent school, the Stoics, place the virtues at the absolute center of their philosophy of the good life. They believed that a life dedicated to developing the virtues was not only necessary for a good life but also sufficient. That is, a good life isn't possible with out the virtues and a good life requires no other thing. In this post I’m going to discuss their philosophy of living well along with an apparent puzzle that arises out of their view. 

I’m choosing Stoicism because over the last 8 months, as an experiment, I’ve been trying to live according to Stoic principles. For a variety of reasons, I’ve decided to follow Stoic teachings to see how the quality of my life changes. Since at least my early twenties I’ve “tried on” various philosophies in search of a life well-lived. I doubt I’m the only one conducting these sorts of experiment. 

Despite the personal angle, I hope to avoid navel-gazing and stick to the philosophy. However, I do want to briefly mention that by living according to Stoic teachings, the quality of my life has changed dramatically—in the “good” direction. I’m still puzzling through parts of it and I’m not on board with many of their metaphysical beliefs but if you’re looking for a time-tested way to improve the quality of your life, I strongly recommend giving Stoicism a try. 

I’m not grounding this recommendation in a single data point but in a history of great names who studied and incorporated Stoic principles into their lives: Marcus Aurelius, Nelson Mandela, Seneca, James Bond Stockdale, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, Bill Clinton, Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Sam Sullivan (Mayor of Vancouver!), Arnold Swartzenegger, Beatrice Webb, Bill Belichick, T-Pain, Brie Larson, John Steinbeck, JK Rowling, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Tim Ferriss to name only a few.

Introducing Stoicism

If we want to live a good life we need to figure out exactly makes a life good in the first place. For the Stoics, a good life is one that is virtuous, mentally tranquil, self-determined, and lived according to reason. An interesting feature of the Stoic system is that it is logically closed. By this I mean I can begin with any premise within the system and get to any other. This leads to a kind of logical equivalence between the various Stoic constituents for a good life: living according to reason, mental tranquility, and virtuous living all amount to the same thing. If I live according to reason, I will practice the virtues, and if I practice and develop the virtues I gain mental tranquility. I can start with virtue or self-determination and make the same connections: If I am virtuous, my actions will conform with reason, and when my actions conform with reason, my mind is tranquil. 

From the point of view of teaching Stoicism, this internal logical structure makes introducing it a bit of a puzzle because it isn’t clear where best to begin. In this post, I’ve decided to begin with the aspirational goal of Stoic living as described by Epictetus: The aim of Stoic practice is to joyfully accept the world as it is. 

When I first read this, I thought this was some D-pak Chopra-level bullshit. I’m supposed to joyfully accept when shit goes wrong? What kind of pollyannaish new-age nonsense is this? 

Aside: You may have noticed that the idea of joyfully accepting the world as it is doesn’t conform with the popular understanding of the Spock-like Stoic. I’ll talk more about the Stoics and emotion in another post but a constant theme throughout Stoic writing is that one should cultivate a cheerful disposition. 

Alright, back to philosophy. The obvious question that falls out of the above aspiration is, How the heck are we supposed to maintain a cheerful disposition when so often our desires and goals are obstructed and frustrated? (Not to mention the general shit-show that the world can be). 

The answer requires we understand clearly what has value and what doesn’t (through exercise of reason!) and to pursue only that which has objective value; i.e., that which is valuable no matter who you are or what you believe. 

For most modern people, the idea that there are things with objective value is foreign: What do you mean there are things everyone should pursue? We are all special individual snowflakes, each with our unique set of things we should pursue to make life go well. Everything’s—like—subjective, maaaaaaaan! Amiright? 

Stoics argue that people get frustrated and anxious—and hence have their tranquility disrupted—because they pursue the wrong sorts of things. They pursue things they mistakenly think have objective value with respect to making their lives go well.

The Stoics divide objects of pursuit into two main categories: Internals and Externals. Externals, such as money, fame, material objects, relationships, career, sex, reputation, power, and even health have no objective value in so far as being able to make your life good or not. The only things that can objectively make your life meaningfully better are internals; i.e., the virtues. 

Note: There is more nuance to the Stoic view regarding the value of externals but I’m going to set that aside for now. It is enough to say here that, for the Stoics, externals have no ultimate value when it comes to determining the goodness of your life.

We can track the distinction between internals and externals as a division between things over which our will does or does not have ultimate control. For example, there are lots of things I can do to try to get recognition or affection but ultimately, receiving either depends on whether others want to give it (and continue to give it) to me. Because achieving these aims depends on something outside my own will (i.e., the wills of others) I set myself up for frustration and resentment when I don’t get what I want. And even if I do momentarily gain reputation or affection, I am anxious because its maintenance depends ultimately on elements outside my will. 

The same goes for something like money. I can work really hard, get the right education, and so on but ultimately the amount of money I get is outside my will: I can get robbed, my company can go bankrupt, my bank can go bankrupt, my business partner can make a bad deal, the stock market can crash, the job market can change rendering me obsolete, etc… 

It’s not that I have no control over acquiring externals, it’s that ultimately, at the end of the day, whether I obtain them and maintain them depends on forces outside my will. This explains why pursuing externals can never lead to a sustained good life. When attaining them is difficult or obstructed—which it inevitably will be—we feel frustrated and resentful. And even if we do attain some external, its maintenance is precarious. It depends not on our will but on the will of others and on the world conforming to our desires, all of which contribute to a perpetual state of background anxiety.

Marcus Aurelius put it this way: 

If you insist on pursuing externals "of necessity you must be envious, jealous, and suspicious of those who can take away those things and plot against those who have that which is valued by you. Of necessity a man must be altogether in a state of perturbation who wants any of these; and besides, he must find fault with the gods" (Meditations, Bk VI, 16).

I’ll make one more remark on Stoic attitudes toward externals. The Stoics were not naive. They recognized that a human life does go better when, for example, a person has some wealth rather than none. But the good that comes from externals is conditional. That is, it is conditional on the circumstances the individual finds himself in. For example, if someone with a bad opioid addiction came into a bunch of money, this would not be a good thing. The goodness of money, unlike the virtues, is conditional--not objective--with respect to making our lives go well. Similar cases can be constructed for any external: the world is full of unhappy people with good careers, fame, reputation, money, material wealth, and so on. 

When we observe that our life circumstances and desires will inevitably change over time, there is no guarantee that the externals we pursue and possess will preserve their goodness in those new circumstances. In short, externals on their own don’t reliably cause us to have a good life; in fact, sometimes they can make it go worse. The virtues, on the other hand, reliably cause us to have a good life: There is no situation or identity where courage, wisdom, self-control, and justice don’t cause one’s life go better.

Also, acquiring internals, unlike externals, depends entirely on my own will. The quality of the judgments and decisions I make (i.e., intellectual virtue), the character of the actions I choose and the way I react to situations (i.e., the moral virtues) are all ultimately under the control of my will. 

No one can force me to assent to a false proposition or make a bad decision, and no one can force me to act foolishly or viciously. Whether I develop wisdom, courage, self-control, patience, compassion, persistence, humility, generosity, and so on, depend entirely on my will. And the same goes for their maintenance. Since I can never be prevented by some outside force from developing and maintaining the virtues, I avoid frustration, resentment, and anxiety towards myself and others. 

The Puzzle

Early into my experiment with Stoicism, the following sorts of thoughts started to creep into my head:

If no thing external to my will has value, what the heck do I do with my life? Get a job? Meh, what’s the point? Money and a career can't make me happy. Besides, they could be taken away at any point. 

Deadline for my dissertation coming up? Meh. Dissertations ultimately have no value, so no real point in doing that.  

I should probably start preparing the lecture for tomorrow. Meh. The lecture has no objective value with respect to how my life goes.  

Well, since I'm not going to work on my dissertation or tomorrow's lecture, I might as well go to the gym to stay healthy. Meh. No point. I could just get sick and lose my gainz despite all my hard work. Worse yet, my time of death is out of my control which means I could die in an hour. Why workout if I might die soon?

Here's the funny thing. At this point, I'd been following Stoicism for about 5-6 months. Despite not caring about anything, I was actually noticeably happier than I had been in quite a while. Things that previously would have made me angry or upset rolled off me like water. Nothing bothered me cuz nothing really mattered. In a way, I’d internalized the most difficult lesson of Stoicism, to joyfully accept the world exactly as it is.

But this way of living, this grinning apathy, can't be right. And it isn't what the Stoics intended either. 

What had I gotten wrong?

Solving the Puzzle

Solving the puzzle requires we hold in our heads what appear to be two inconsistent beliefs: That externals don’t matter but that how we use them does matter. Somehow, Stoicism requires that I act as though externals matter while also believing that they don’t. Epictetus recognizes the apparent paradox: 

It isn’t easy to combine and reconcile the two—the carefulness of a person devoted to externals and the dignity of one who’s detached—but it’s not impossible (Discourse II, vi, 9). 

We can reconcile the positions by way of analogy. Think of a great sportball player. A great sportball player pursues the ball with courage, persistence, and skill—that is what makes her a great sport ballplayer. But does the great sportball player believe the ball itself has objective value? No. The ball, within the context of the game, is a means of developing and demonstrating the virtues of a great sport ballplayer. But no sportball player, no matter how good, thinks that the ball itself has objective value. What has value—what is objectively good or bad—is how sportball players pursue the ball.

As Epictetus puts it, we need

the star athlete’s concentration, together with his coolness, as if it were just another ball we were playing with too. To be sure, external things of whatever kind require skill in their use, but we must not grow attached to them; whatever they are, they should only serve for us to show how skilled we are in our handling of them (Discourse II, v, 21).

Or as he puts it another way: 

Life is indifferent, but the use we make of it is not indifferent. So when you hear that even life and the like are indifferent, don’t become apathetic; and by the same token, when you’re advised to care about them, don’t become superficial and conceive a passion for externals (Discourse II, vi, 1-2).

To summarize, Stoicism done right requires we inhabit a delicate doxastic state: We must believe that externals have no value yet we must act as though they do in order that we may develop the virtues. In a way, externals are a tool to develop the things that actually matter: the virtues. 

My mistake was was to focus solely on the idea that externals have no value. As a result I became apathetic. I failed to realize that apathy cannot breed virtue—the genuine aim of Stoicism and source of a good life. So, while it’s (sadly) true that my dissertation has no objective value with respect to the goodness of my life, how I go about writing it does. My lecture has no objective value but how I go about preparing it and delivering it does. My health has no objective value but how I go about sustaining it does. My career has no objective bearing on the goodness of my life, but how I go about pursuing it does.

How To (Genuinely) Joyfully Accept the World as It Is

In retrospect, I wasn’t genuinely joyfully accepting the world as it was. Because of my new-found non-attachment I think I was merely joyful to be free of the sorts of situations that previously would have sent me into a fit of rage, frustrated, or saddened me. Indifference was just a step up from all the negative emotions that come from attachment to and pursuit of externals. 

But when we adopt the complete Stoic view, that developing the virtues is what makes your life go well, then—through consistent practice—we can approach a joyful state of acceptance. How? Because at every turn, you will find an opportunity to develop at least one of the virtues. 

Stuck in traffic? Here’s a chance to develop patience. Working on a dissertation? Here’s an opportunity to develop persistence. Facing a difficult choice? Here’s an opportunity to develop courage. And just about every judgment, decision, and action affords us a chance to develop our wisdom. 

If it’s the virtues that matter for living a good life then we should be grateful every time we are presented with an opportunity to develop them. These situations should be received joyfully because they are opportunities to acquire something of genuine objective value to the goodness of your life—unlike the externals which have no objective value. Although, in order to develop the virtues we have to act as though externals have value, all the while understanding their objective indifference to the goodness of our life.

And so, as with so much so Stoic thought, we come full circle. If we internalize the idea that it’s the virtues that are the end goal and that have objective value, not externals, we see how we can joyfully accept the world as it is.

Aristotle's Virtue Ethics: A Common Misunderstanding

The first question of philosophy is "how should I live my life?"  Sometimes this is also presented as "what is the good life?" because the trivial answer to the first formulation is "the best way possible."  However you want to frame it, it eventually boils down to the same thing.  For the purposes of this article, I'll frame it as "what is the best possible way to live?".

For the ancient Greeks, in order to answer the motivating question you need to answer a prior question: what is the good?  The idea here is that before you can figure out what a good life is you need to figure out what "good" is, then you'll want to live the life that most partakes in the "good."

As it turns out, there are two types of "good": intrinsic and instrumental.  Let's begin with the latter by using an example.  Money is an instrumental good because we don't seek it for itself, rather we seek it for the goods we can trade it for.  We seek money because with it we can get the things we're really after like vacations, food, nights out, etc... If we were stranded on a deserted island and had a bunch of money, the money would have no value at all (except maybe as toilet paper).  This shows that money has no intrinsic value; that is, it has no value itself.  It only has instrumental value (i.e., it only has value in so far as it allows us to get other things that we really value).

To summarize, something has instrumental value if we value it only because it gets us things that we really want.  The things we really want have intrinsic value: we don't want them in order to get some other thing.  Common examples of things that have intrinsic value are love, friendship, happiness, and health.  We don't value these things because they get us some other thing; we value them simply for what they are.  They are intrinsically good.

Notice that some things have both intrinsic and instrumental value.  For example, love and friendship have intrinsic value (we value them for themselves) but they also have instrumental value: they bring us happiness which is a purely intrinsic good.  We don't pursue happiness for any other reasons. It's not valued as a means to some other end. Happiness is the reason why we pursue everything else and so we say it is a purely intrinsic good.

Incidentally, by happiness Aristotle did not mean pleasure or any other emotional states. He meant something very different from what we mean by it today, but let's set that aside for the moment and assume his position:  For now, all you need to know is that by "happiness" Aristotle means the process of developing and realizing human excellences. To put it another way, happiness isn't an emotional state but a way of being.  Assuming this is the case, then everything we do ought to be directed at this end if we want to live a good life.

To summarize up until now: We want to know how we ought to live a good life.  In order to answer that question we need to figure out what the chief good is; that thing for which all other things are pursued. Knowing this will allow us to direct our actions.  As Aristotle says:

Will not the knowledge of [the chief good] then have a great influence on life?  Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right? 

That chief good is happiness.  So, if we want to live a good life we ought to pursue things that will lead us to happiness.

In a moment, we're going to come back to this instrumental-intrinsic distinction and Aristotle's definition of happiness but I want to discuss a question that motivates most of moral philosophy, why should I be moral? The answer to this question (for the ancient Greeks) is directly related to the first question of philosophy and its prior question regarding the nature of the good.

Depending on our conception of "the good" our answers to why we should be moral will differ.  For example, if I define the good as "whatever brings me pleasure" then there doesn't seem to be any strong reason for me to be moral and none at all where self-interest and morality diverge. The only reason I would have to be moral would be to avoid the consequences of people perceiving me as immoral.  Of course, there are many cases where our personal self-interest happily lines up with what is moral and so in these cases I'd derive instrumental goods from being moral (because it serves my own ends, gives me a good reputation, etc...). We want to know if I'd acquire some good from acting morally even in situations where I don't stand to benefit in any obvious way.

Let's break this down (wika-wika).  Plato, in a passage of The Republic called "Glaucon's Challenge," asks whether acting morality has any intrinsic value; that is, in addition to the times when acting morally serves our own interests (i.e., has instrumental value) does acting morally have any value above the instrumental goods it gets us; i.e., Is there any reason to value being moral even when there are no instrumental reasons for doing so? 

Two other ways of framing this issue make it clear:  If you could act immorally yet always be perceived as acting morally and never get caught (i.e., get all the instrumental benefits of acting morally without any personal costs) would you personally be missing out on any good?  Or if you acted morally but were perceived as acting immorally, would you gain anything of value? This is Glaucon's challenge to Socrates:  Does acting morally have any intrinsic good or is it purely an instrumental good.

In one of my favorite passages in all of philosophy, after giving his argument, Adeimantus (Glaucon's brother) says

For the things said indicate that there is no advantage in my being just, if I don't also seem to be, while the labors and penalties involved are evident.  But if I'm unjust, but have provided myself with a reputation for justice, a divine life is promised.  Therefore, since as the wise make plain to me, 'the seeming overpowers even the truth' and is the master of happiness, one must surely turn wholly to it. [my italics]

In other words, the instrumentalist position is pretty compelling.  If I want to give myself the best shot at achieving happiness, it's more important to appear to be moral than it is to actually be moral. The costs of acting morally are great, especially if one is going to be perceived as immoral while doing so, and the benefits of appearing moral (even if you aren't actually being moral) are great. What good does the "pretend" moral person miss out on that the real moral person gains? Or does he not miss out on anything?

Here's where we have to take another detour in order to answer the question.  It will seem round-about but bear with me (and Aristotle).

What is the function of a cup?  This may sound like a strange question but if we interpret this question the way the Greeks used the word "function", it won't sound so strange.  "Function" should be understood as "the attributes that make a thing the sort of thing that it is."  When I ask "what is the function of a cup?" I'm asking, what properties make a cup a cup, and not something else?  I'll add that even under this definition of function, E-40's lyrics "we out here trying to function" don't make much sense to me.

We might answer that what makes a cup a cup is that it is something that holds fluids and it something that is easy to drink from.  The degree to which a cup fulfills its function (i.e., has the properties that make it a cup), is the degree to which the cup is a good cup.  For example, a cup with a leak in it (i.e., doesn't hold fluids "excellently") isn't as good a cup as one that does doesn't leak at all. Similarly, a cup that's really awkward to drink from isn't as good a cup as one that is really easy to drink from.

Notice also that if something doesn't hold fluids or can't be drunk from, it isn't a cup! (You are welcome for the profound philosophical insight; it's what we do!).  The moral of the story here is that the more excellently something fulfills its essential functions (i.e., exhibits its defining properties), the more excellent that thing is as a such-and-such AND to the degree that something fails to exhibit excellence in its defining features, that thing is not a such-and-such.

So, why are we talking about cups? Wasn't this supposed to be about moral philosophy and Aristotle? Allow me to try to explain how this fits into the puzzle:  We want to know what it would require to live a maximally good life.  But, if we want to know what a maximally good life is, we need to know all the possible good things there are for humans.  This way, like the archer, we can "aim" our actions at them.  If it turns out that being moral is one of them and has intrinsic value (not merely instrumental) then we're not going to want to skip out on this good because that would mean excluding ourselves from the maximum good possible.  We'd be leaving a piece of the good out.

Before moving forward it's important revisit Aristotle's notion of happiness.  Happiness is the process of developing and realizing human excellences. To put it another way, happiness isn't an emotional state but a way of being/living.  Happiness, the highest good, is the process of actualizing the qualities that make us human and not something else.  To put it simply: happiness=the greatest good for humans=development and exercise of excellence in those features that make humans humans rather than something else.

In order to figure out whether moral virtue has intrinsic goodness we're going to have to figure out what the function of a human being is because we need to know what we need to be excellent at to achieve maximum human goodness/happiness.  (Remember by function we mean "the defining features of a human/that which makes a human a human, and not something else).

This brings us back to the humble cup. How did we distinguish between a good cup and a less good cup or not cup?  We said it was according to how much something possesses its essential features (i.e., fulfills its "function").  As with the cup, if we are to distinguish between a good human and a less good human, we're going to need to know what a human's essential properties are because maximum happiness will require maximum actualization of those essential properties.

Ah! At this point hopefully some light bulbs are turning on in regards to how everything is going to fit together.  Let's see if we can figure out how the intrinsic/instrumental good distinction, the "function" of a human, happiness, morality, and the good life all fit together. First let's ask what traits make a human a human.  For Aristotle this is the capacity to reason (and guide our actions according to reason) and live in large communities (i.e., we are "political animals").

The degree to which we are able to live in large communities will depend in large part on our moral virtues. If everyone just runs around acting only according to self-interest ("but I gots mah rights! don't tell me what to do!") without any consideration for others (i.e., not being morally virtuous), then that community will be dysfunctional and those people will not be able to fully develop and exercise important parts their essential human-ness.

Conversely, if everyone exercises moral virtue, the community will flourish along with the particular individuals that inhabit it and people will have a good shot at fully developing their essential features. Maximal development and exercise of the human virtues is the greatest good for humans and this is what happiness consists in.  People in a dysfunctional community don't and can't maximally develop the essential features of human beings.  Consequentially, they are cut off from full happiness.

Aside: It comes as no surprise to an Aristotlean that the rise of the tin-foil hat "individual-rights-trump-everything" dogma correlates strongly with the demise of community and with it human happiness.  Yeah, he called that 2300 years ago.

So, where does this instrumental/intrinsic stuff fit in because it seems like our reason to be moral, on this model, is instrumental.  I should be moral so I can be happy, right?   I initially thought this and it perplexed me.  How could Aristotle have made this obvious error?

(Another) Aside: Here's a rule of thumb for reading philosophy (and life generally).  When a thinker whose works have survived centuries and especially millennia seem to contain an obvious error, odds are you have misunderstood their position.  In philosophy we call this epistemic humility.

My mistake was to confuse the instrumental good for why we should be moral with the intrinsic good that comes from being moral.  Why should I be moral? So I have a shot a maximally good life (instrumental reasons).  How do I do that?  I have to "get" all the possible "goods".  If I don't develop moral virtue, there's no other way for me to acquiring the particular good that comes from being morally virtuous. This is the intrinsic good that comes from being moral.

I'll repeat this because it's a little tricky: We should exercise, develop and actualize our moral virtues so that we can get the full goodness necessary that makes up full human happiness. This is an instrumental reason to be good and it is an instrumental good that comes out of being virtuous, but the particular good that we get from being moral (development of our moral virtues) cannot be obtained any other way except by being morally virtuous (i.e., this is the intrinsic goodness that comes from being moral).

Let's return to the central questions: why should we be moral?  Because there is no other way to "get" the fullest human good (i.e., happiness) without actually being moral.  To repeat, we might have an instrumental reason for being virtuous (so we can be happy) but there's no way to achieve full human happiness without being morally virtuous because otherwise an important intrinsic good will be missing.  People who aren't virtuous are not exercising and developing maximum human excellence. They are not fully developed humans and therefore never have a shot at maximum human happiness. By not being virtuous they are cut off from a possible piece of full human excellence/happiness.

Just like a cup is a cup to the degree that it exhibits the properties that make it a cup and not something else, you are only human to the degree of excellence that you exhibit those attributes that make a human a human, and not something else.  The ultimate good for a cup is to possess its essential features in the most excellent way possible.  It follows that the ultimate good for a human is the same.  And since moral virtue is an essential feature of human beings, if we are to achieve ultimate human good (i.e., the fullest possible happiness) we must develop moral excellence (along with other kinds); otherwise we exclude ourselves from the fullest conception of human good/happiness.

Now, go be an excellent human being!