‘Beyond Stoicism' Review: Part-Time Philosophy
The worst readers, Nietzsche claimed, are like 'plundering troops' who loot the few ideas they can use and trash the rest. But what if the texts in question are a hodgepodge of good sense and nonsense? Isn't selective pillage the best, not worst, way to read them?
How you answer that question will shape how you judge 'Beyond Stoicism,' written by three self-proclaimed modern stoics: Massimo Pigliucci, a professor of philosophy at the City College of New York; Gregory Lopez, the founder of New York City Stoics; and Meredith Alexander Kunz, the creator of the Stoic Mom blog. Despite its title, the book is not limited to Stoicism but seeks wisdom from thinkers of other philosophical schools as well.
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Forbes
29-05-2025
- Forbes
Dealing With Setbacks: A Modern Stoic Approach To Anger Management
Travertine pools in Pamukkale This article may seem at odds with others I have written about the value of emotions and emotional expression—but hear me out. I recently picked up William Irvine's 2019 book, 'The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer and More Resilient.' His modern application of Stoicism offers a worthy counterbalance to the exhortation/meme to 'feel all the feels,' and provides some great practical advice on dealing with setbacks. I'm generally a fan of emotions. They are the texture and quality of an experience—not just what happened, but what it meant; not just what you learned, but how it touched you or sparked something within. Emotions are data that clue you in to what matters: anger might indicate that a core value, like fairness or justice, is being violated; contentment is a sign that your needs are being met; fear of losing something or someone signals how much you cherish them. Emotions can provide inspiration or fuel for action to create a positive future. And a shared emotion, such as parents' love for their child, can bond us to one another. But indulging emotions can interfere with our ability to move through setbacks. So-called 'negative' emotions—more accurately described as 'difficult' or 'unpleasant'—can cloud our thinking and undermine our agency. When we experience a setback, anger can cause us to lash out at others in unproductive ways; and anger's cousin, blame, can trap us in self-righteousness or victimization. None of this helps solve the problem. Imagine you're heading to a meeting and reach the bus stop just as your bus pulls away. The next one isn't due for 20 minutes. Now what? You could curse the driver—who could clearly see you running to catch the bus—for not waiting for you. You could rage at the MTA for budget cuts that reduced the frequency of buses. You could kick yourself for lingering over breakfast, or fume about having to do the dishes your kids left in the sink. None of this changes the situation. At best, it wastes energy; at worst, it makes things worse by blocking clear thinking. Getting swept up in difficult emotions can amplify suffering—but suppressing them isn't the answer either. Stuffing your anger can be a short-term fix, but over the long haul, you pay a price for bottling up emotions—either by blowing up later or through health problems like ulcers, high blood pressure, etc. Back to the bus stop. What if you could skip the anger and blame? You could choose to use your time more constructively or pleasantly. You could pop into the coffee shop for a latte. You could read over your notes and prepare for the meeting. You could consult the map and realize that walking will get there earlier than the next bus would deliver you, and it's a nice day for a walk! Irvine's modern take on the philosophy of the Greek Stoics calls on us to rise to the occasion when we hit a setback, not by suppressing emotion, but instead by not allowing ourselves to get angry in the first place. They understood that while we can't control external events, we can control our reactions. According to Irvine, the Stoics (currently enjoying a popular resurgence among Silicon Valley dudes sometimes called 'Broicism') were not anti-emotion, but were concerned with reducing the experience of negative emotion, specifically frustration, grief, envy and anger, which Irvine calls 'anti-joy.' He quotes Seneca's On Anger, 'No plague has cost the human race more.' Austrian psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl is credited with saying,'Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.' Irvine gives that space a time frame: five seconds to reframe a setback before difficult emotions can take hold. His Stoic Challenge framework invites you to see a setback not as something terrible, blameworthy or unfair but instead as a test of your ingenuity and resilience. When you miss the bus or get passed over for promotion, don't leap to 'how terrible, this is bad' and its accompanying feelings of dismay, anger or blame. Instead, reframe the situation as a challenge being offered to you by the Stoic Gods (Irvine's construct; insert any real or imagined being with your best interests at heart). Welcome it as an opportunity to practice virtue, find a clever work-around, and grow stronger. Irvine offers the following approaches to reframing a setback: It could be worse: Practice brief 'negative visualizations' to build gratitude. Stuck without your luggage? At least the plane landed safely. No villain: Resist the urge to assign malicious intent. People may be overcommitted, incompetent—or simply human. This is a story/funny: Imagine the story you'll tell later. Humor helps keep perspective and authorship calls you to agency rather than reactivity. This is a game: You chose this 'field of play.' Challenges are part of the game. How will you meet them? This is a test: See the setback as a challenge from the 'Stoic Gods' to help you grow stronger. Keep your cool and get to work! By offering these alternate frames, he invites us to turn obstacles into a choose-your adventure story. Don't get me wrong—I am still in favor of attending to our emotions and those of others. Irvine's book offers a fresh take on ancient wisdom and provides a handy toolkit for facing setbacks, but it has real limitations and still leaves me somewhat unsatisfied. His approach focuses on the individual and risks turning others into objects. Additionally, though he draws on psychological research, the author dismisses psychotherapy in ways that overlook mental illness and trauma and their profoundly debilitating effects. And for someone whose approach is mind-centric, Irvine doesn't even acknowledge the existence or value of mindfulness meditation practices in managing anger and other difficult emotions. Finally, while he asserts that the Stoic's goal is to eliminate or reduce only unpleasant emotions but not joy or delight, he overlooks how deeply grief and joy are often intertwined in lived experience. That said, I wholeheartedly agree with Irvine: most of us have more capacity to meet adversity than we realize. I'm glad to add the 'Stoic Challenge' framework to my coaching toolkit.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Yahoo
Empathy can take a toll – but 2 philosophers explain why we should see it as a strength
In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, billionaire and Trump megadonor Elon Musk offered his thoughts about what motivates political progressives to support immigration. In his view, the culprit was empathy, which he called 'the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.' As shocking as Musk's views are, however, they are far from unique. On the one hand, there is the familiar and widespread conservative critique of 'bleeding heart' liberals as naive or overly emotional. But there is also a broader philosophical critique that raises worries about empathy on quite different and less political grounds, including findings in social science. Empathy can make people weaker – both physically and practically, according to social scientists. Consider the phenomenon known as 'empathy fatigue,' a major source of burnout among counselors, nurses and even neurosurgeons. These professionals devote their lives to helping others, yet the empathy they feel for their clients and patients wears them down, making it harder to do their jobs. As philosophers, we agree that empathy can take a toll on both individuals and society. However, we believe that, at its core, empathy is a form of mental strength that enables us to better understand the impact of our actions on others, and to make informed choices. The term 'empathy' only entered the English language in the 1890s. But the general idea of being moved by others' suffering has been a subject of philosophical attention for millennia, under labels such as 'pity,' 'sympathy' and 'compassion.' One of the earliest warnings about pity in Western philosophy comes from the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus. In his 'Discourses,' he offers general advice about how to live a good life, centered on inner tranquility and freedom. When it comes to emotions and feelings, he writes: 'He is free who lives as he wishes to live … And who chooses to live in sorrow, fear, envy, pity, desiring and failing in his desires, attempting to avoid something and falling into it? Not one.' Feeling sorry for another person or feeling pity for them compromises our freedom, in Epictetus's view. Those negative feelings are unpleasant, and nobody would choose them for themselves. Empathy would clearly fall into this same category, keeping us from living the good life. A similar objection emerged much later from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche framed his discussion in terms of 'Mitleid' – a German term that can be translated as either 'pity' or 'compassion.' Like Epictetus, Nietzsche worried that pity or compassion was a burden on the individual, preventing them from living the good life. In his book 'Daybreak,' Nietzsche warns that such feelings could impair the very people who try to help others. Epictetus's and Nietzsche's worries about pity or compassion carry over to empathy. Recall, the phenomenon of empathy fatigue. One psychological explanation for why empathic people experience fatigue and even burnout is that empathy involves a kind of mirroring of other people's mental life, a mirroring that can be physically unpleasant. When someone you love is in pain, you don't just believe that they are in pain; you may feel it as if it is actually happening to you. Results from neuroscience and cognitive psychology research indicate that there are different brain mechanisms involved in merely observing another's pain versus empathizing with it. The latter involves unpleasant sensations of the type we experience when we are in pain. Empathy is thus difficult to bear precisely because being in pain is difficult to bear. And this sharpens the Stoic and Nietzschean worries: Why bother empathizing when it is unpleasant and, perhaps, not even necessary for helping others? The answer for why one should see empathy as a strength starts with a key insight from 20th century philosophy about the nature of knowledge. That insight is based on a famous thought experiment by the Australian philosopher Frank Jackson. Jackson invites us to imagine a scientist named Mary who has studied colors despite having lived her entire life in a black and white room. She knows all the facts about the spectrum distribution of light sources and vision science. She's read descriptions of the redness of roses and azaleas. But she's never seen color herself. Does Mary know everything about redness? Many epistemologists – people who study the nature of knowledge – argue that she does not. What Mary learns when she sees red for the first time is elusive. If she returns to her black and white room, never to see any colored objects again, her knowledge of the colors will likely diminish over time. To have a full, rich understanding of colors, one needs to experience them. Thoughts like these led the philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell to argue that experience delivers a special kind of knowledge of things that can't be reduced to knowledge of facts. Seeing, hearing, tasting and even feeling delivers what he called 'knowledge by acquaintance.' We have argued in a book and recent articles that Jackson's and Russell's conclusions apply to pain. Consider a variation on Jackson's thought experiment: Suppose Mary knows the facts about pain but hasn't experienced it. As before, it would seem like her understanding of pain is incomplete. In fact, though Mary is a fictional character, there are real people who report having never experienced pain as an unpleasant sensation – a condition known as 'pain asymbolia'. In Russell's terminology, such people haven't personally experienced how unpleasant pain can be. But even people without pain asymbolia can become less familiar with pain and hardship during times when things are going well for them. All of us can temporarily lose the rich experiential grasp of what it is like to be distressed. So, when we consider the pain and suffering of others in the abstract and without directly feeling it, it is very much like trying to grasp the nature of redness while being personally acquainted only with a field of black and white. That, we argue, is where empathy comes in. Through experiential simulation of another's feelings, empathy affords us a rich grasp of the distress that others feel. The upshot is that empathy isn't just a subjective sensation. It affords us a more accurate understanding of others' experiences and emotions. Empathy is thus a form of knowledge that can be hard to bear, just as pain can be hard to bear. But that's precisely why empathy, properly cultivated, is a strength. As one of us has argued, it takes courage to empathically engage with others, just as it takes courage to see and recognize problems around us. Conversely, an unwillingness to empathize can stem from a familiar weakness: a fear of knowledge. So, when deciding complex policy questions, say, about immigration, resisting empathy impairs our decision-making. It keeps us from understanding what's at stake. That is why it is vital to ask ourselves what policies we would favor if we were empathically acquainted with, and so fully informed of, the plight of others. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Emad H. Atiq, Cornell University and Colin Marshall, University of Washington Read more: Too many people with back pain call ambulances or visit the ED. Here's why that's a problem Empathy is the secret ingredient that makes cooperation – and civilization – possible The morality of feeling equal empathy for strangers and family alike The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Wall Street Journal
24-04-2025
- Wall Street Journal
‘Beyond Stoicism' Review: Part-Time Philosophy
The worst readers, Nietzsche claimed, are like 'plundering troops' who loot the few ideas they can use and trash the rest. But what if the texts in question are a hodgepodge of good sense and nonsense? Isn't selective pillage the best, not worst, way to read them? How you answer that question will shape how you judge 'Beyond Stoicism,' written by three self-proclaimed modern stoics: Massimo Pigliucci, a professor of philosophy at the City College of New York; Gregory Lopez, the founder of New York City Stoics; and Meredith Alexander Kunz, the creator of the Stoic Mom blog. Despite its title, the book is not limited to Stoicism but seeks wisdom from thinkers of other philosophical schools as well.
