Stoicism: overcoming one's emotions.

We are in the 3rd century BC. Stoicism is a great philosophical current that can be
called a total philosophy, because it is not only a system of thought, a system of
understanding the world, it is both a theoretical philosophy and a practical
philosophy. It is a philosophy that is oriented both towards understanding, but also
towards action.

To begin with, Stoicism says, “There is what depends on us and there is what does
not depend on us”. The Stoic vision of the world is therefore based on this
separation which we must be aware of in order to understand our limits as human
beings.

There are things that depend on us, for example: it depends on me to work to
succeed, to seek the truth, to act well. It does not depend on me to be great,
powerful, beautiful, to be born in this or that place. What the Stoics say is that
there is what we inherit and what we have to build ourselves. Obviously, we can
always answer that this limit is rather vague, but in broad outline, we understand
what that means.

Becoming aware of this distinction for the Stoics is only the first step towards
realizing that we are not able to do everything and that we are fundamentally
limited. From this point of view, the Stoic philosophy is a call to humility.
Humility which is nothing other than the recognition of our powerlessness, our
finitude. Put backwards: if I have completely outsized wishes, desires or
ambitions, I will somehow be confronted with my limits. I will not be able to
access everything I want and when I encounter obstacles to my desires, I risk
being unhappy.

To put it synthetically: if I desire impossible things, I will suffer because I will

realize, by definition, that what is impossible is not accessible to me. It is
important to specify this because on a daily basis, we tend to forget that certain
things do not depend on us.

Example: death. For the Stoics, being sad when someone dies is a logical
aberration, because you can't make the people you love last forever, that's a fact.
This limit (death), I must not only know that it exists, but I must also accept it.
This is where we understand that among the Stoics, to know something is not only
to know that it exists, it is to accept it in the depths of oneself. Stoic philosophy is
therefore a practical philosophy, not just a theoretical one. In the example of death,
it is when I accept it as a law of nature that I can emancipate myself from the grief
and suffering that this idea normally conveys.

The core of the Stoic philosophy is the important place occupied by the role of the
imaginary projection which makes that an individual is never completely in his
present reality. We are always anticipating the future or nostalgic for the past, but
never really in the present. The problem with these projections is that they arouse
in us emotions that the Stoics called passions. In Greek, passion is pathos, which
means suffering. And passion is also what we are passive in the face of, it is what
we suffer. Fear, regret, jealousy, envy, anger, these are emotions, passions. They
are creations of our minds and proof that we do not accept existence as it is.

For example, if I am jealous of my neighbor for a given reason (his wife is more
beautiful, his children are smarter, his car is bigger, his house is bigger, etc.), this
jealousy is a projection of my mind. . That is to say, if my neighbor didn't have
everything that I don't have, I wouldn't be unhappy. It's because he has what I don't
have that I have this frustration that translates into jealousy. So it's not my
neighbor who is responsible, it's me. I'm the one letting that thought (and the
emotions that flow from it) take over my emotional state. So, I am responsible for
it and therefore, it depends on me. There, we arrive at the idea of the Stoics which
is that I should not be affected by what does not depend on me.

Conclusion: there is what depends on me, there is what does not depend on me,
and I must not be affected by what does not depend on me.

Just as with death, any emotion, for the Stoics, is a logical aberration, for a simple
reason which is that no emotion solves the problem that is causing it. In reality, for
the Stoics, the cause of our emotions is ourselves, but we identify the cause of our
emotions with something outside of us. "If I'm angry, it's because someone made
me angry." For the Stoics, that is rubbish! If we are angry, it is because we cannot
control our emotions and the other is only a pretext to justify our anger, that is to
say our inability to control our emotions. . The proof that we are responsible for
our emotions is that some people know how to manage their emotions very well
by not allowing themselves to be disturbed or affected by external events, however
serious and painful they may be. These people are said to know how to stay stoic.

Stoic, in common parlance, means impassible. Impassible = without passion. It is a

form of indifference not linked to an absence of awareness, on the contrary, it is a
controlled, assumed indifference, since it corresponds to the awareness that there
are certain things that do not depend on us. The Stoics tell us: why be affected by
what does not depend on me? This will not solve the problem. Anger will not
remove the reasons for anger, jealousy will not remove the reasons for jealousy.
For the Stoics, emotions are a bit like the heat produced by an energy that we
cannot channel, when we need to exteriorize this energy through an emotion, but
that does not solve the problem.

For the Stoics, there is no point in being emotional and in reality, through our
emotions, we mask our ability to accept the world as it is. It is for this reason that
another quote from the Stoics is: “Do not seek to change reality, but to change
your view of reality”. But beware, this is not a philosophy of submission or
passivity. One could think that if we accept everything, it is a form of renunciation,
it would mean saying that we must accept injustices, that we can be lied to,
robbed, deceived, accept the immorality of others, etc., since the Stoics tell us that
if we don't accept, we are mad. So…yes and no.

There are things over which I can have control and the Stoics tell us: “Give me the
strength to change what can be changed”. We must therefore find what can be
changed and act at our level on this, but I must not have claims that are beyond my
means. I have to accept that on my own, the changes I can make in the world are
as good as my abilities…that is, not much, but I always have a choice: do what I
can do and let go, telling myself that after all, it's no use. I can agree to give up by
saying to myself "what's the point?" and in this case, for the Stoics, I don't do what
depends on me. I give up, but why? Because I can't stand the idea of not having
more control over the world. So, I renounce by ego and therefore, this reasoning is
dictated by emotion, feeling and the desire for omnipotence. But there, for the
Stoics, we are always in aberration. For them, we must act on the perimeter on
which we can act, without worrying about the rest, because the rest does not
belong to us. The rest is up to the world and the world goes on without us.

It is up to us as individuals to do things of which we are capable, but it is not up to

us to act for others. So, rather than a philosophy of renunciation, we speak of a
philosophy of lucidity. People who accomplish great things are those who don't
worry about what they can't do. They care only about what they are capable of
doing. Having unattainable dreams is the best way to achieve none. To desire the
impossible is the best way to remain in inaction, therefore in passivity and
therefore in the frustration that accompanies this passivity. The philosophy of the
Stoics is a practical philosophy because it pushes us to align our actions with our
thoughts.

If I act with emotions such as anger, jealousy or resentment, my actions will bear
the mark of these emotions. On the contrary, if I act with enthusiasm, cheerfulness,
unconditional joy that does not need a reason for being, I am much freer because I
do not depend on my emotions, on an unrealistic ambition, of an illusion. For the
Stoics, our emotions enslave us. They prevent us from seeing and understanding
reality as it is. It's like a filter that we put between us and reality and which, at the
same time, would distort this reality in our eyes. Emotions enslave us since by
definition, we do not choose to have them. For the Stoics, we suffer our emotions
because we do not make the effort necessary to control them. In fact, the Stoics
believe that the goal of human existence is to achieve happiness and wisdom, since
for them, wisdom is the condition of happiness. This wisdom is also linked to
knowledge, to understanding: I understand the world and the way it works and
because I accept it, I can be happy.

There is a sentence from Sartre which sums up quite well the point of view of the
Stoics: "The important thing is not what has been made of us, but what we do with
what has been made of us. ". This means that we all have a temperament and we
are all inclined to experience emotions, passions. It does not depend on us (some
are calm, peaceful and others more worried or even angry), but nothing prevents
us from working on it. We must become aware of this character which is ours
since that is within our possibilities.

The Stoic view of the world is a deterministic view. This means that for the Stoics,
everything that happens in the universe happens for a certain reason. This does not
mean that there are gods pulling strings and pushing us to act one way rather than
another, that would be too simplistic. It means that when something happens, there
are causes for that event. No event occurs without a cause. When we say that
everything has a reason, in fact we mean that everything has a cause (the word
reason is interesting and we will come back to it). Everything that happens has a
cause (or a set of causes), which makes it possible to explain everything that
happens. Explaining does not mean automatically accepting or justifying in the
sense of legitimizing.

For example, if a man commits a crime, his crime can be explained by a

psychiatric or psychological diagnosis, but that does not justify his action in the
sense that it does not excuse him. For the Stoics, this distinction between
explaining and excusing has no place (it obviously has place in the social context),
in the sense that if something happens, it is because in any case, it had reasons to
happen, it had causes, since nothing happens without a cause. Everything that
happens is an effect of causes that precede it.

If we were able, from the point of view of our knowledge, to identify all the causes
of what happens, we would realize that in fact, everything is "normal" term which
lends itself to controversy… Let’s say that everything is logical, rational. The
reason includes everything that is possible to understand and if something
happens, it is that this thing had causes and these are understandable. Obviously,
we are not always able to identify all the causes of what happens, but we are able
to know that these causes exist.

Example of the famous coincidence: let's imagine that we meet someone we

haven't seen for a long time in a totally improbable context.

The feeling of the extraordinary coincidence is something we have all experienced

before, but which, for the Stoics, corresponds only to our individual point of view,
our point of view of being “ignorant”. We are surprised at something when we do
not know the causes. That's the surprise: we don't know the causes. But if we had
known the causes of the event before it happened, we would have been able to
predict it, to anticipate it, as being the logical, rational and necessary consequence
of these causes. Indeed, if we had an omniscient point of view of a city, we would
see all the streets and the movements and we would therefore see the meeting
before it took place and in this case, nothing would be surprising. For those who,
on the other hand, meet around the corner, it is extraordinary. It's all a matter of
perspective, really!

Surprise, astonishment, coincidence, is an individual feeling. If the individual was

able to rise, from the rational point of view, that is to say objective, omniscient, he
would not be surprised, he would expect it. For the Stoics, nothing that happens is
surprising, because they adopt this omniscient point of view. They know that when
something happens, there was a reason for it to happen. This is determinism. It is
the fact of saying that everything that happens is the necessary, that is to say fatal,
effect of causes that precede this event.

The universe is totally rational, it obeys the laws of logic, so it is comprehensible

in its entirety. If the reality is rational and logical, man, as part of the universe,
must, as much as possible, conform to this model of rationality and must seek to
behave like this universe. The more he behaves like the universe, that is to say in a
rational and logical way, the less he will be subject to suffering, frustration,
sadness... In short, the less he will be subject to his emotions. The closer he gets to
this model of rationality, the freer he will be. The freer he is, the happier he will
be. Happiness is when I become able to no longer depend on my emotions, which
are leeches that prevent me from deploying my rational potential.

This model may seem inhuman, inaccessible to human beings, this capacity for
absolute objectivity which means that we will no longer depend on our emotions.
The Stoics don't care! They wonder if we are able to move towards this ideal, to
free ourselves from the influence of our emotions. The answer is yes: we can do it,
but it is not easy. Of course it's not easy! The Stoics never said wisdom was easy,
and philosophers generally never said happiness or knowledge was easy. They say:
“It is possible, it is doable: we can conquer our emotions and it is through this
work of combating our emotions that we can move towards wisdom and
happiness”.

For the Stoics, happiness is in no way the satisfaction of one's desires. For them,
satisfying their desires is even the opposite of happiness.

To conclude with: the Stoics tell us that there is what depends on us and what does
not depend on us, and that it only depends on us to no longer be dependent on
what does not depend on us. For the Stoics, the universe obeys implacable laws,
which one could call the laws of fatality, but among the Stoics, the word fatality
does not have a negative connotation. It is also especially in our modern societies
that the notion of fatality has a negative connotation, since it is considered that
from the moment there is fatality, there is an absence of free will, but for the
Stoics, that's not it at all. Free will exists for the Stoics, in the sense that it depends
on us not to be affected or moved by the relentless necessity of the world. It is up
to us to be happy in our situation. This does not imply that we must be passive in
the face of existence and in the face of what happens. It only implies that we must
be discerning and clear-sighted about what can be changed, why to change what
needs to be changed, and how to change what needs to be changed.

Stoicism is a practical philosophy. Moreover, it has converted a little today in

personal development techniques. However, they are a somewhat superficial
aspect of something much deeper which is a philosophy in its own way. You can't
just take the practicality of Stoic philosophy and think that's enough. For the
Stoics, this ability to control one's emotions, to once again become the captain on
the liner of our existence, can only be the result of a process of understanding the
world. Understanding the world does not mean accepting it, but it is impossible to
accept it if we do not seek to understand it.

To understand the world is to understand that what happens has reasons to happen
and that what is, is the only arbitrator. I can deplore a situation on an individual
basis, but nevertheless this situation has a reason for being. It doesn't matter if I
don't understand the meaning or the causes, this situation is there and I can only
accept it. There is no point in resisting in the face of what is implacable, there is no
point in getting angry, it will not help. If I accept what is, a priori, unpleasant to
me, it ceases to be unpleasant.

When we are in a stoic state of mind, a state of neutrality with regard to our
emotions, we realize that from a rational point of view, everything is justified and
that if life is not limited to reason, there is no reason for life to be a long
succession of suffering.