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What is a Stoic person? On a prominent website, you find this description:
That’s quite misleading, and a good demonstration of why one shouldn’t use dictionaries to answer philosophical questions.
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What Does ‘Stoic’ Mean?
A ‘Stoic’ attitude to life aims to achieve lasting happiness by staying calm, rational and emotionally detached, while cultivating one’s virtues.
The Stoics were an ancient Greek and Roman school of philosophers, who counted among them a slave, a celebrated writer, and an Emperor of Rome (Epictetus, Seneca the Younger and Marcus Aurelius, respectively). Their world view was complex and included the study of the natural sciences, but one of the main principles of their theory of happiness was that:
One should clearly distinguish between events that one has control over, and those that one cannot control.
This is the basis of correct thinking and of reaching one’s maximum potential as a human being. Because only after we’re able to see what we can influence and what we cannot, we can approach these two classes of events in different, and appropriate, ways.
The events that I can control, I must control, the Stoic would say. It is my duty as a human being and as a citizen to use my power and my influence in society to the maximum extent possible, in order to benefit everyone who comes into the sphere of my control.
And this, in turn, has to do with the realisation that we are all equally valuable as human beings, and that our concerns, fears and loves all count the same, all are equally important. Selfish people, in the Stoic world view, are just mistaken about the importance of their own self. They are deluded, they fail to recognise that, to everyone else except themselves, they are “just another dude over …
Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
