Episode 61: Ward Farnsworth, author of The Practicing Stoic

JV: Justin Vacula

WF: Ward Farnsworth

JV: You're listening to the Stoic Solutions Podcast - practical wisdom for everyday life. I'm Justin Vacula and
this is episode 61 – Ward Farnsworth author of The Practicing Stoic. We talk the psychological benefits of
applying Stoicism, finding fulfillment in life, and changing bad habits amidst discussion of his chapters on
judgements, externals, perspective, death, desire, emotion, and adversity.

Visit my website at stoicsolutionspodcast.com where you can connect with me on social media; find past
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justinvacula at gmail.com.

Today's guest, Ward Farnsworth, is Dean of the University of Texas School of Law. He has written
extensively on law, rhetoric, and Chess. His prior books include Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric and
Farnsworth's Classical English Metaphor. Visit wardfarnsworth.com for more information.

I was eager to chat with another contemporary author reflecting on Stoicism and how this ancient philosophy,
in modern times, can improve our lives. Thanks, Ward, for your time in chatting with me and sending me a
pre-release copy of your book.

Onto today's discussion...

JV: All right. Thank you for joining me today.

WF: It’s great to be here.

JV: Great. So, with me today is Ward Farnsworth, who recently released his book The Practicing
Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual. What led you to…

WF: Well, first of thanks for having me on your podcast. The book, for me, lies at the intersection of
a couple of paths. One is just a long term path of reading the Stoics, which I’ve been doing one way
or another for maybe 20 years. Stoics and their successors like Montagne and others, who are in
the book. The other is that I like to write books that try to capture and make practical use of ancient
learnings. So I’ve got a book on rhetoric, that takes rhetorical ideas that were very well established
in ancient Greece and Rome, and shows how they’re used in English by people like Lincoln and
Churchill and others. And this book follows a very similar format. It’s trying to capture some
knowledge that I think is underappreciated now.
JV: And amidst a modern revival of Stoicism you index several topics, or otherwise put many quotes
together to give people some advice for everyday concerns.

WF: Yes, in view of the revival you mention, and all of the books that have come out about Stoicism
lately, I probably should say something about why I thought another was needed. My preference in
studying Stoicism is to stick with the original, so I know there’s a lot of books that restate Stoicism
and there are those who love them, but my preference is to always read Epictetus or Marcus
Aurelius where possible, because I think they had a way of expressing ideas that was brilliant and
has not been improved upon.

But I also know that there are many who find those books - those original writings - a lot less
accessible than the restatements, because the original writings, when you go back to them, are not
very systematic. Those writers tend to jump around a lot and they - it’s very difficult to find. If you
want to see everything Seneca had to say on the subject of fear, or desire, or some other topic, you
can’t really do it, because he might talk about it on in 3 or 4 different letters, and he might pop in -
pop onto the subject in some essay, and then depart from it. Same with Marcus Aurelius. ‘

So what this book tries to do is sort of take a middle path, where it presents what the original Stoics
said, but it edits it and organizes it and presents it in a way that I think modern readers will find
accessible, as if the Stoics has sat down to teach a course in a systematic way about their ideas -
the original ones had. I like to think that the book, in 12 chapters, presents how it might have gone.

JV: Right. My physical copies of the originals have a lot of margin notes. I write “desire”, I write
“chance”, “adversity”, all of these things, and those happen to be the chapters in your book, so that’s
great.

WF: Yes, that’s right. So the book is supposed to have 2 audiences. One is people who are fairly
early in their study of Stoicism and are interested in reading or taking a course on the subject, taught
by the ancient writers on it. But the other would be people who already know a lot about Stoicism
and might value the book as a reference, because the book lets you look up a topic and see right
away in one place what the different Stoics all said about it, and what they’ve said about
subdivisions and how they can - you know. you can do comparative Stoicism, you can sort of see
them talk to each other.

JV: Right, and for those audiences we can hear similar perspectives from people like Schopenhauer
and Johnson, you mention in the text some that people may not be too familiar with.

WF: That’s right. So the Stoics of course have many descendants, and you mention a couple of
them. Montagne, Samuel Johnson. Adam Smith is another example. Arthur Schopenhauer. All of
these thinkers were heavily influenced by Stoicism. You probably wouldn’t call them Stoics, they
had too many disagreements with the Stoics, on usually high level matters. But on very practical
questions about adversity, or emotion, or desire, or death, they usually - or at least often - would
subscribe to Stoic views, and they would elaborate on them in very interesting ways.

So my view is that once you become a student of any given Stoic idea, it immediately becomes
interesting to see what has been done with that idea by others who’ve come later and who were
brilliant in their own right. So once you understand Stoic teachings about desire, seeing how those
very same teachings were discussed by Samuel Johnson or Schopenhauer later on seems to me to
be a natural part of one’s education.

JV: Good. We can have more of an eclectic view and draw inspiration from many schools of
thought, many people, even Seneca’s texts - he’s quoting Epicurus, and some different authors of
his time.

WF: Yeah, Seneca’s view was he’ll quote the truth wherever he finds it, and he’s not afraid to quote
Epicurus where appropriate. And so the book also draws a little on Epicurus as appropriate, or on
Cicero, who was a Stoic in some ways and in other ways not, or Plutarch appears prominently in the
book, and Plutarch did not like the Stoics, or didn’t think he did.

But again, the way I put it in the book is that these philosophers of neighboring schools who you
couldn’t classify necessarily as Stoics - they converge as they descend, meaning, that is, they move
from more abstract propositions down to more applied claims about the world, they tend to agree
more. And so it’s no surprise that whether or not Plutarch would have had any sympathy with
Stoicism as he read about it from the original Greeks, [he] agreed entirely with the Stoics about a lot
of claims on the role of judgment in how we form our reactions to things, for example. And he
appears a lot in that first chapter.

But it is my hope that one side service this book can do is introduce some readers to some great
writers who they’ll really enjoy and who they might not have come across yet. So that if you have
listeners who think they like Stoicism but don’t know that they have ever come across Montagne or
Johnson, I hope they have some treats in store for themselves, because those writers restate
Stoicism and discuss it in ways that anybody who likes the original should also enjoy.

JV: Good. And some in modern times reach Stoicism through maybe self-help or personal
development literature, or talks. You talk about the Stoics being more like modern-day counselors
or psychologists, especially Seneca.

WF: Yeah. So when the Stoics wrote, philosophy and psychology were not separate disciplines in
the way that they’re usually now considered. And so a lot of what I think makes the Stoics of lasting
interest is their psychological insight. In fact, if you were to tease apart their psychological ideas and
their philosophical ones, I might suggest that their psychological insights have held up and stood the
test of time considerably better. They’re more robust.

So, there are philosophical claims about nature that very few people believe now. But the Stoic
claims about our irrationality, most people would still subscribed to now. And I think the reason that
the Stoics are popular still, and have always had a lot of enthusiastic readers, is because their ideas
about human nature are so profound, and so lasting, not because the ideas about the cosmos are.

And so in other words, it’s their psychology that I think has made the more enduring contribution.
And I think - one audience for Stoicism these days are the same sorts of people who enjoy reading
cognitive psychology. They’ve read Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow - or other books
from that genre - that talk about bias and irrationality and ways that we make ourselves miserable.
And the Stoics in many ways are predecessors of those kinds of psychologists, in my view - or
maybe to turn it around, I regard some cognitive psychologists to be, in effect, heirs of Seneca.

JV: Right, a big overlap between cognitive behavioral therapy, rational emotive behavioral therapy,
and Stoicism.

WF: Right, exactly.

JV: And some of the topics you discuss in your book, one is desire. You talk of unhealthy
attachment in your book as something which guarantees anxiety and enslavement.

MF: Yeah, so the Stoics drawn a distinction that I think is useful and sometimes underappreciated
between things that are merely desirable, or what they call “preferred indifference”, and things to
which people are attached. So it’s not the Stoic view that nobody should want anything or nobody
should want wealth, or people should not care about adversity. Seneca’s pretty clear about it, he
says look, everybody would prefer to have wealth than not have it, everybody would prefer to avoid
adversity than have it confront them. The question is not, do you prefer one or the other, the
question is what’s your attachment to it; how unhappy are you when you don’t have what you want
with respect to the thing in question.

And so Seneca’s ideal was the goal should be to hold these things lightly. You prefer wealth?
That’s fine, but the question is, how do you feel when you lose it. And if you can lose it without it
costing you your equilibrium, you’re doing pretty well as a Stoic.

JV: Right, there’s this question of what must be traded with what, and in order to achieve certain
desires, to own certain things we’re going to have to exchange a lot of time, effort, maybe even
mental anguish as well.

WF: Yes, the Stoics are keen students of the invisible costs and benefits of things, so the actual
cost of anything you might acquire isn’t just the money, it’s the time it takes, it’s the anxiety it costs,
it’s the anxiety not only involved in getting it but the anxiety about keeping it, and so forth.

JV: Even Epictetus jokes and says not to sell ourselves cheaply, but if you must, make sure to do
so for a good price.

WF: I guess that’s right. Yeah, that’s not in my book, but that’s in one of his Discourses.

JV: The Stoics I see as questioning wisdom of the crowd, things that maybe modern society might
find to be very valuable, the Stoics are saying “Well, actually, it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.”

WF: Well, they go a little farther than that. They say that a proof the worst choice is the crowd, so
that that which is popular is immediately suspect. There’s a little anecdote in the book that’s fun,
about a trainer of wrestlers or boxers, whose student is applauded for his performance. And when
he comes back to the coach, the coach takes his staff and strikes the student with it and says “you
should have done better than that; if you’d done it right, they wouldn’t have applauded.” Because
the applause is a sign of possible pandering by the student.
JV: And even in Seneca’s work the topic of fame, or otherwise external validation, he says to be
your own spectator, and seek your own applause.

WF: Yes, that’s right. He’s talking about substituting away from the desire for approval from others
to a healthier desire for self-respect. I think in that passage he’s talking to his friend about wrestling
with disease and he’s saying, “You don’t need to have an audience to be a hero, you can wrestle
with disease bravely even in your bedclothes.”

JV: Today we sees these concepts of the hedonic treadmill, that we want more and more and more,
we keep trying for it but we’re never satisfied. We want more, and instead of having moderation in
our desires, people continue, and this seems to have bad consequences.

WF: The treadmill, that’s of course a good example of what I was mentioning a few minutes ago,
that’s a very prominent theme in modern cognitive psychology. And it’s foreshadowed extensively
and discussed a lot by the Stoics, and I sometimes wonder how much modern cognitive psychology
has really added to what Seneca already perceived on the subject.

JV: Right, and these were ancient works, where now we have so many more material things in
society. We have access to so much more technology. In many ways, life has gotten better, but yet
people are still unhappy.

WF: Yeah, and that’s - I think that’s part of why it’s interesting to go read the original Stoics,
because they’re writing under such different conditions, and yet most of their observations ring so
true, and you realize that that the basic points about human nature don’t change much, even if you
substitute one material situation for another.

There’s a great passage from Seneca where he’s sitting in a bathhouse and saying, “Well, here I am
in this nice bath that would have been thought pretty great a generation or two ago, but now people
think a bath is no good unless you can enjoy a view of the ocean from it, or unless you can get a
suntan while you’re lying.” And you realize he’s talking, you know, 2000 years ago, but in terms that
you could easily imagine somebody talking now.

JV: And perhaps a lack of gratitude today, where people are overlooking things that are going well
for them, the nice things that they have, the comfortable living situations, whereas the Stoics might
worry about things like exile, torture, many of those things...

WF: Right.

JV: ….wars breaking out - we’re not going to be dealing with those things today, certainly as much
as they were dealing with them, in times ago.

WF: Yeah, that’s right. So, the topics - or the applications change in that way, but the principles are
still the same. And there are little glimpses of this, again, that’s part of the fun of reading the
Romans, is they’ll be talking along in ways that are totally familiar, and then Seneca will say
something like, “This is the nonsense for which we wear our togas threadbare.” And you think, “all
right, we aren’t wearing our togas threadbare,” but you understand what he meant, and the point is
still the same.
JV: Death. Stoics talk a great deal about this. They say that the awareness of our eventual death
should lead us to live more productive and fulfilling lives, rather than place us into despair.

WF: Death is the longest chapter in my book, because it’s probably the single - if you divide
Stoicism into topics, maybe the topic they talk about the most. And they’ll say things - Cicero said
that the life of a philosopher is essentially just preparation for death.

And other Stoics, or people - writers who are more clearly Stoics - take the same position, that death
is really the central issue in philosophy. Partly it’s because the master fear that lies behind many
lesser fears, and a lot of Stoicism is about conquering fear. And so if you can avoid the fear of death
you can probably avoid a lot of other sub-fears also. But as you say, it’s also more than that, it’s not
just the fear they want to overcome. Their view is that if you really look death in the face, and you’re
not scared of it, and you remember that it’s alongside you at all times, it can be a source of
inspiration. It’s not something to run away from or be afraid of, it’s something to remove the fear
from, and then treat as a reason for good living in the present, because it may not last too long.

JV: There is this theme of the fragility of life in Stoic texts, mentioning that, “well, things might
change, you might lose these opportunities that you have now, and if you procrastinate you may
never have a chance to do what you would want.”

WF: Yes, Seneca has a line about that I think sounds out of character to some people who haven’t
read as much of him as they might have, where he says “Drain joy” to the bottom, “to the dregs,”
without delay, enjoy your children to the fullest, because you don’t know how much longer you have.
As he puts it, you have to hurry, the enemy’s pressing on your rear, death is right behind you.

JV: There are these metaphors, with war - these comparisons. And if we were under siege in
battle, you would think that people would make these adjustments so that they can go on doing what
they will, accomplish what they want, but yet when death is around us people maybe squander their
time. They’re just scrolling mindlessly through social media at times, or just not really accomplishing
much of any value. Tuning out in some sense.

WF: Yeah, one of the themes in the book that I return to a fair amount is how the way Stoics value,
as I said earlier, invisible costs and benefits, and that strongly includes time. The Stoics usually
think we tend to undervalue time because it’s intangible.

We value property, nobody gives away their property lightly, but people give away their time very
lightly, even though for most of us when you look at it rightly your time’s much more valuable than
your money. And if you want to see that, just find people who are running out of money and people
who are running out of time, and compare how they feel about that. Yeah, we don’t guard our time
as carefully as our property, or as carefully as we should in their view, and they spend time trying to
counter that. And one way to do it is to by dwelling on the possibility of death.

JV: Helping others, being part of a society, this cosmopolitan attitude is also a big theme in the Stoic
texts. To be part of society and help others, rather than withdrawing from it.
WF: Right, that’s another underrated Stoic theme is that they regarded public service or helping
others as imperative. And I’ve seen Stoic sometimes described as a philosophy that leads to
withdrawal, and I think that’s a terrible misunderstanding.

JV: Right, some people might see Stoicism as some sort of resignation, or seclusion, but yet many
of the Stoics we know today were very active in society.

WF: Seneca and Marcus Aurelius were two of the most powerful statesmen in the world, deeply
involved, obviously, in public affairs. Whatever you might think of what Seneca did or the emperor
he was involved with, he was not somebody who was living most of his life in retreat, although he
was in exile for a little while. But even on top of that example, Seneca’s explicit about it, and the
chapter of the book on Virtue discusses this, that his view is that - the Epicurians would say, “the
sage does not get involved in public affairs unless necessary,” and the Stoic says that “the sage will
get involved in public affairs unless he cannot.”

JV: So there’s some self-awareness that comes with that, to know our skills, to know our potential,
and to use it well.

WF: Yeah, that seems like a fair implication. That’s not a particular theme that they follow up as
heavily, but I think that follows from what they said.

JV: And there’s a lot of talk about fulfilling certain roles, and that life might happen to change, you
might end up in this position, that position, and whatever we have to make the best of the situation
and to apply virtue, right. To have mastery in what we’re doing.

WF: Yes, that’s right. That’s a good restatement.

JV: We have coping with our own death. How about coping with the death of others, dealing with
grief. What might be your thoughts on that?

WF: So that appears in my book under a different heading, a different class state, it’s under the
section on Emotions. So I think grief presents a famous challenge to Stoicism, because the Stoics
will say that we don’t react to things, we react to our thoughts about them.

But however you might try to change your thoughts about the loss of somebody who you loved, it’s
not going to take away the experience of grief. And I think Seneca has a very appropriate and
humane attitude, he doesn’t view grief as a mistake or as something we can entirely avoid. His view
is to some extent it’s natural. And he knew what he was talking about, he lost a young son. And so
he says that anybody who says that grief is something that can simply be thought away, is
somebody who probably hasn’t dealt much with it.

On the other hand, though, he says that the Stoic goal is not to completely avoid grief, it’s just not to
add to it by the way we think about it. By going beyond what grief is natural, and compounding it by
thinking that we’re supposed to feel a certain way, or that - or thinking about the loss in a way that
makes it worse. One of the major themes in Seneca is just taking responsibility for your thinking and
the effect that it has on you, and his view was we can easily make grief much worse by certain ways
of thinking about loss, and there’s no reason to do that.
JV: You talk about three different steps to perceiving events. There’s the event itself, the opinion,
and the reaction. But many people don’t recognize that middle step, you say, but if we alter our
judgments we can improve our lives.

WF: Yeah, so one of the challenges writing a book like this is figuring out what order is best for
representing Stoicism. And I might invite your listeners to give that some thought, because it’s just
an interesting exercise, and it may be that no two would come up with all the same order for the
ideas.

But if you have to pick a first idea, or a most foundational idea in Stoicism, my choice was the one
you just mentioned: the idea that we don’t react to things, we react to what we think about them. Or
to our judgments about them. And in some ways the ideas seem strained, because there are
obvious examples where what we react to is not a conscious thought about whatever happens, but
some deeply ingrained judgment.

But that basic principle is a really fascinating one, and the way that Epictetus expressed it is a line
that Montagne, the French essayist, inscribed into one of the beams of the ceiling where he wrote
his essays, because he thought it was so valuable and profound. So I regard that as lesson one of
Stoicism, because so much follows from that. So much of the rest of what they talk about is, “okay
now that you understand that, that your judgments or opinions or thoughts about things are really
what you’re reacting to, the next question is how do you want them to be. I mean, if those are up to
you, what’s a rational judgment, what’s an irrational one? And so much of the rest of Stoicism is
about exactly that, it’s about then marching through the stuff of our inner lives, of emotion and desire
and fear and all the rest, and scrutinizing it and asking, “all right is this - does this make any sense,
is this serving us well?” and so forth.

JV: So some self-reflection on that. Someone might see the death of a friend, a loved one, even
someone moving from place to place, and they might come to a conclusion, “oh this is the worst
thing that has happened, this is the end of the world, how am I going to support myself now?” They
might jump to these wide conclusions that might not be so accurate.

WF: Yeah, so I think that’s the first - that’s the beginning of Stoicism, is you notice that you’re
reacting to what you say to yourself about something, and what you’re saying to yourself may be
something that you haven’t reflected much about. It’s just a conventional reaction. You’re saying to
yourself what you’ve been taught to say to yourself. Your response to whatever’s happened. And
then you’re very upset about that thing - “This is a disaster, I’m - it’s going to - I’m ruined now, how
can I go on?”

And the Stoic view - or at least Seneca’s view - is, you really need to slow down and ask yourself
how you really feel or think about it, and whether all those reactions are necessary, because a lot of
them, if you really examine them rationally, turn out to be nonsense.

JV: And some Stoics even take an approach and say, things that we view as misfortunes aren’t so
much. These are inevitable things, but the good fortune is bearing these things nobly.
WF: Yeah, that’s right. So there’s the chapter on Adversity, of course. And that’s part of Stoicism is
treating things that look unwelcome and are unwelcome, but treating them as opportunities because
although nobody wants adversity, that’s sort of it means for it to be adversity. It’s only because of
adversity that we get other things that we want, things that we build in response to setbacks, or
aspects of character that only develop under pressure or under stress. So the Stoic view is:
whatever happens, I’ll make use of it.

JV: We could view is as a learning opportunity, a chance to grow. If life were this really super easy
thing, we’re never challenged, what good would that be? Seneca talks about that.

WF: You have to remember that things that look like bad events, like setbacks, in the long run often
turn out not to be. It’s very hard to judge things as they happen.

JV: Right. Even in Eastern philosophy there are these thoughts about, “well we might think that this
was a bad thing, but then, oh well, I ended up having this injury in my leg, but then I didn’t end up
being drafted for a war...

WF: Right,right.

JV: ...so I ended up not dying,” is that. Right. We might think of the worst outcome.

WF: That’s from the Tao Te Ching I think, where he ends up - the farmer says, who can say what is
good or bad.

And that’s a good example of a theme - there are many of them - that Stoicism develops that you
can also find in other philosophical and spiritual traditions.

But I think the Stoics get to them in a way that a lot of readers find more appealing. Because
although the Stoics had a metaphysics, most of the direct path they take to these conclusions is very
reasoned. It’s not based on faith, for the most part. It’s based on careful observation of human
nature and how people actually react in various situations.

JV: We might find ourselves in certain unhealthy habits, not only in ways of thinking but actions that
we take. How is it that we’re to use Stoicism and change our bad habits?

WF: Well, I don’t think there’s one answer to that. Part of the - one of the pleasures of the Stoics, or
anyway of Seneca, is that they understand different people have different temperaments, and you
need to deal with them differently.

So the book talks about this, and I think you were talking about it with one of your other guests, that
there are people whose problem is anger. And for those people they need to develop a certain set
of counter-habits to deal with the tendency to go off into anger, and that might mean reconsidering
the opinions about things that lead you to anger. It might just involve waiting to act until you - anger
has had a chance to subside.

But he also says there others for whom anger is just not an issue they’re not in danger of anger,
they’re in danger of depression. Or they’re in danger of suspicion. And what they need are gains.
They need the summons to cheerfulness, because their problem is they’re too morose. And he says
it really depends on what your temperament is, you try to attack the fault that it most prominent, with
its opposite. And so the right strategy for dealing with a habit is going to depend on the person and
the habit.

JV: And it’s not fatalistic in a way, “well we’re never going to be able to recover from this or that.”
Stoicism offers us a great degree of hope, and also a realistic sense of change not happening
overnight. We might have gradual change, and when we see that change we should be very
gracious for it, even.

WF: That’s right. Especially, that’s important because of course Stoicism’s very difficult. And it’s
sometimes been criticized as impossible. It’s sometimes been said to be impossible to do all the
Stoics ask, which is of course no doubt true. But Stoics - at least the Romans, whose work has
survived - didn’t think that meant that it was futile. There is some language, I guess from Chrysippus
that we have in fragments that suggests - and this has been criticized a great deal - that you either
have virtue or you don’t. And if you come up short it’s like drowning in a very shallow amount of
water, but you drown all the same.

Seneca’s view was, there are stages of progress. And that most of us aren’t going to get very far in
Stoicism, but if we get a little way we’ve done pretty well for ourselves.

JV: Doesn’t have to be an all or nothing enterprise. And perhaps that’s where moderation can
come in. For instance, if a person has a very unhealthy diet, and they make changes to improve
that, and maybe once a week have a small snack.

WF: If anger’s your problem you can start counting the days when you manage to be free from it,
and if you manage to be free from it for a week, then you can congratulate yourself on having gotten
that far and make a sacrifice to the gods.

JV: Right, I think that was Epictetus who had said that of having a thanksgiving there where he
noted that “I used to be angry but now I’m much better at that.”

Good, and with these negative passions, or negative emotions going away, we’ll have more room in
our life for positive emotions.

WF: What we think of as happiness, what they would call eudaimonia, which is a more complicated
idea that different philosophers interpreted in different ways than we now think of it. The standard
way to think about happiness now is basically you’re in a good mood. And the Stoics were less
interested in the good mood than in the good life. And so I don’t think that - although there are signs
of this in the Stoics, especially in Seneca, that actually Stoicism can be something that leads you to
actual joy, their vision of happiness is not just a state of constant joy. Possession of the good life. A
life that you can be pleased with.

JV: More of a lasting experience rather than, “oh well, the food really tastes good” and maybe you
have that pleasure for 5 or 10 minutes or the dining experience for an hour, and then maybe 2 hours
later, that’s gone.
WF: Yeah, I think it’s - again, you made reference earlier to hedonic psychology, and there are
different ways of measuring happiness. And one is to talk about how happy somebody feels at the
time. Another is to ask them more broadly how they feel about their life. And I think Stoicism is
more interested in the second kind of happiness than in the first.

JV: And even a lack of negative emotions can really fit in that category.

WF: That’s right. I think that that’s true, and that can - one way that the Stoic leads a better life is
just through freedom from certain kinds of anxieties or fears, as well as by adherence to virtue,
which of course the Stoics thought was necessary for happiness, and also sufficient for it.

JV: Even the word contentment comes up quite a bit.

WF: Yeah, there are other words that come along with - that they associate with happiness, for
example tranquility or peace of mind.

But in the end, a difference between Stoicism and, say, Epicureanism, is the Stoic view that you
need to pursue virtue as a philosophical imperative, and from that happiness is a byproduct. But it’s
very hard to achieve happiness directly, by saying “let’s go out and try to make ourselves happy.”
Go out and try to be good, to be virtuous, and when you do that you find that you get happiness by
the wayside, but it’s very hard to achieve happiness in any other way. And a lot of others have
taught that. The book quotes a passage from John Stuart Mill who took the same view, and many
others have taken the same view since. It’s often, as the book says, a point that’s rediscovered by
modern authors with much fanfare. But just the idea that happiness is much easier to achieve as a
byproduct of efforts in other directions than it is to achieve though, you know, very direct efforts at it.

JV: Good. And even surrounding ourselves with quality people as Seneca would talk about. He
talks a good deal about friendship in his texts, as his letters were written to a good friend. Sharing
your life enthusiastically with another person can increase that happiness, but yet we’re not to be
totally reliant on another.

WF: Yeah, the Stoics regard friends as important, they just want you to pick them carefully.

JV: As the dangers of crowds, we mentioned that earlier, right. The poor behaviors of others can
rub off on us, or we can compromise our virtue to try to win that popularity.

WF: Yes, they talk about - it’s like a burning charcoal next to one that isn’t. They can either both be
lit or they can both be put out, and so you’ve got to choose your companions carefully.

JV: I’m here chatting with Ward Farnsworth, author of The Practicing Stoic.

You talk of envy and social comparisons, mentioning that we have a habit of comparing ourselves to
those of higher positions, rather than taking a broader view.

WF: The way the Stoics work, usually, is that they’ll pick something that bedevils us, like envy. And
first they’ll analyze it, and try to show that it’s irrational and pointless. And then they’ll talk about
antidotes, or things that can be used to counter this - just practical strategies for how to think, in a
way that makes us better off. And so some of that is just learning how to value what you already
have, instead of looking at what others have that you don’t have, you can look at what you do have
and imagine not having it, and think about how much you’d want it if you didn’t have it. And they all
talk about that.

But they also talk about comparing yourself to others who are worse off than you are. And you
might think that seems like a philosophical mistake, because if envy is the irrationality of making
yourself unhappy because others have more than you do, why should you make yourself happier by
looking at others who have less than you do? It seems like the opposite error, although it makes
you happier rather than unhappier.

I describe that as an example of pragmatism in the Stoics, where they’re - it may be - it’s very
practical, because most people do feel better when they reflect that whatever they wish they had
that they don’t, that somebody else has, there’s usually a lot they have that others don’t. And there’s
a funny passage from Samuel Johnson where’s he’s talking with Boswell, and Boswell’s saying, “I’ve
heard this advice, but it can’t really work, right, because aren’t some people so badly off, there’s
nobody worse off than they are?” And Johnson says, “well, probably, but there’s nobody who knows
that they’re in that position.” Everybody - no matter how badly off you are, you can always find
others who, to you, seem even worse off. So it’s not so hard after all.

JV: There’s even that sense of gratitude of, oh well, look, this person might lack a home, this person
might lack this certain thing, but I have that, and aren’t I fortunate to be in that position, rather than
living in squalor or without the ability even to talk or walk.

WF: Right. The Stoic view is that people habitually have this bad habit of looking up rather than
down, or ahead rather than behind, thinking about the few who are doing better than they are,
whatever they’re trying to do, and forgetting about all the others who are behind them, looking at
them...

JV: Right. And even these things that we want can largely be outside of our control, such as fame,
or good looks, or reputation, right. The Stoics talk a good deal about this.

WF: Yes, well that of course a whole nother theme, which is that, as Epictetus says, there are
things that are up to us and things not up to us. And if you’re going to worry about things like the
ones you just mentioned that are not up to us, then - in his view - what you’ll be is a slave.

JV: Right. We can make a very good effort to try to attain this, and that’s what we’re to be focused
on, right, the effort and the process rather than the outcomes - something that can largely be outside
of our hands.

WF: Right. That’s, I mean if - I mention the first teaching of Stoicism, at least as I present it. The
second one is the one you’re talking about, which is the Stoic relationship to externals, and the idea
that what we ought to be spending our energy on are those things we can control, and not getting
attached to things we can’t.

And so these 2 ideas really go together - that which we can control, that would be our mindset, our
opinions about things. Externals we can’t control, and so Stoics I view as trying to move one’s
psychological center of gravity to a more useful location, away from externals and toward how you
think about them.

JV: There could even be an argument for goal-setting in that we have this thing that we’d like to
achieve, we can question, “how do I go about getting this? What kind of effort would I need to put in
to get to a certain position?” You talk about games in your book, and you’ve recently authored about
chess, so there can be “well, I’d like to be of this certain skill level” and “oh, well what am I going to
need to do to accomplish this?” We can come up with a plan to do that, maybe a goal that can be
realistic.

WF: And this has to do with the notion we touched on earlier, sort of the invisible costs and benefits
or prices of things. That if you think you want a certain goal, there are certain things you have to do
in order to get there. And you either are ready to pay that price or you’re not. And if you’re not, then
you shouldn’t rue your failure to get the goal - you didn’t want to spend what it took to get it. And
there are a lot of things in life that you might like but you didn’t want to spend the money, and this is
no different.

JV: For something like chess, you might have to put in a lot of time studying, maybe watching some
educational videos, reading books, maybe get coaching, analyzing your own game, right? That’s
going to take a lot of effort to get that. Whereas a person might say, “oh well, this is just something I
want” but they’re not willing to put in the effort, well they’re probably not going to get that result.

WF: Yeah, I’m afraid chess may be too trivial an example, but it works as well as any.

JV: And in your book you also talk about games. It’s one of my favorite passages from Epictetus, in
imitating those who play at dice, that the counters are indifferent, the dice are random, but what we
are to make use of is that which turns up, and apply our skill and diligence to that.

WF: Yes. Yeah, that’s a great metaphor, and then Adam Smith develops it a little further, and that
passage is also in the book, where he talks about Stoics as viewing life as a mixed game of skill and
chance, and that if you’re attached to winning the game, you’re doomed to a certain kind of anxiety.
But the Stoic approach is to be attached to how you play it, and that’s under your entire control.

JV: If we have that wrong goal of winning, we’re not focused on the process, while if we have a
good process we could make the best effort and end up losing at the end of the day, but maybe we
can reframe what it means to play well, or to win and not be so attached to a specific outcome.

WF: I think that’s right. The Stoic view is you interpret winning as being a certain way of playing.
And if you play in the way that you wanted to play, then as far as you’re concerned you won.

JV: In many ways, Stoicism could be that mastery of life, of just trying to be this actualized person
trying to live this examined life and live well.

WF: Yeah, I guess that would be the large scale application of the idea.

JV: All right, anything else that you’d like to discuss as we’re coming up on time here?
WF: No, I appreciate the chance to chat about the book with you, and to call it to the attention of
your listeners. I hope those who haven’t had a chance to dig into the ancient writings of the Stoics
might find The Practicing Stoic a fun way to do it, because it takes all that they said and organizes it
and presents it in a way that’s - I hope - accessible and something like what you might have
expected if they were all around now to teach a course on the subject.

And if there are those who already know all about it, as I mentioned earlier, it might serve as a place
where they can go look something up if thinking about the Stoic view, some emotion in the Stoic
view, some particular life problem. The book gives you an easy way to check out what all the major
surviving Stoics had to say about it.

JV: Very good. Something for people just getting into Stoicism, maybe a recommendation for a
good friend or relative. Or for people who are quite knowledgeable, seeing the viewpoints of other
writers who’ve been inspired by Stoicism. Or at the very least a reference tool, that can be very
helpful.

WF: Well, I hope so. So thanks again for having me on. It’s been a pleasure.

JV: Thank you. And how can people find your book?

WF: It should be available at Amazon now, The Practicing Stoic. Also thepracticingstoic.com is the
webpage for the book, and it’ll have links for places to purchase it.

JV: And for them to contact you? How could they reach out?

WF: Yeah, so at that page, or there’s a link at wardfarnsworth.com. There’s information about this
book and about other projects that I’ve done, and also contact information if somebody wants to
write.

Jv: All right, very good. Thanks for reaching out to me, and for your time today in recording.

WF: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

JV: All right, have a great day.

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