Michael Trembly of the Stoa Conversations podcast (no relation to The Stoa) invited me to his podcast because one of his listeners requested he speak with me about my interpretation of Stoicism. I swore off doing podcasts two years ago but said I would take up his listener's curiosity as a journaling prompt, replying via a public entry. This entry is my reply.
Minimum viable philosophy. I first saw this phrase from street photographer Eric Kim. The term is borrowed from the business technique of having a "minimum viable product," creating the most basic product version, including only the essential features to satisfy early customers. Once the product meets the market, gather feedback and iterate. With a minimum viable philosophy, once one's current philosophy meets reality, gather feedback and iterate.
The problem with many people who do philosophy online is that they have a philosophy with too much propositional architecture and argumentative bloat. As metamodern philosopher
says, the world is deliciously complex; to appreciate its deliciousness while navigating its complexity, we must keep our premises lean, giving zero fucks about what does not matter so we can provide full fucks about what does. Like Eric, my minimum viable philosophy has a Stoic inspiration.Stoic scholar Brad Inwood divides Stoicism into large and minimal Stoicism; the former consists of logic, physics, and ethics, while the latter solely focuses on ethics. Most Modern Stoics are minimal, dropping the logic and physics because how the original Stoics expressed them is outdated. Ethics are not outdated, just forgotten, with their faint whispers undergirding many of the foundations of culture and society.
If pressed, I would describe my philosophy as hyper-minimal Stoicism because I do not care about many positions Modern Stoics see as axiomatic to Stoicism, like Epictetus’ “three disciplines.”1 While Epictetus is my favorite Roman Stoic writer, he is just one dude with his own philosophical expressions. Modern Stoic writers like to engage in “boundary-work,” determining what Stoicism is in the propositional sense. I prefer “boundary-play,” plugging into the spirit (or daemon) of what Stoicism wants to be—finding its conceptual edges and seeing how blurry the boundaries are. I like to play with Stoicism; when I play, I play with its main essence: virtue.
What is virtue? Moral excellence. What is morality? A sense of good and bad. Morality is contrasted with ethics, the shared standards of good and bad, codified into rules, laws, and religious doctrines. Stoicism is a "virtue ethics," meaning having shared standards cultivating a sense of good and bad—the Good Life, a life that unfolds from moral excellence, is the aim of all virtue ethics.
There are different kinds of philosophical schools from the Hellenistic tradition, mapped out by
in his excellent book, How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life:
The Good Life for each of these schools shakes out differently. The Epicurean line, a bunch of existential perverts, are considered egoistic hedonists, viewing their pleasure as intrinsically valuable, with virtue instrumental. In contrast, the Aristotelian and Stoic lines are virtue ethics, viewing virtue as intrinsic, with subtle but important distinctions:
For Socraticism: Wisdom is what brings virtue, examining the unexamined parts of life.
For Platonism: Plato agrees with Socrates' notion of virtue, adding metaphysical considerations of the Forms, arguing for harmonization of his tripartite division of the human soul: reason, thumos, and appetites.
For Aristotelianism: Practicing virtue, which Aristotle offers twelve2, is required for the Good Life, but “external goods” are also needed: upbringing, education, relationships, health, wealth, physical attractiveness, etc.
For Cynicism: The most hardcore of the bunch, who see only virtue is needed for the Good Life, arguing many external goods distract from its cultivation and should be avoided altogether. Diogenes is the most famous example, living in a barrel, defecating in public, and stinking up Athens.
For Stoicism: Like the Cynics, they believed virtue mattered only for the Good Life. Unlike the Cynics, they saw it wise to pursue external goods or avoid their opposites without attachment, which they called “preferred or dispreferred indifferents.” The former are things a person prefers to have, aka health and wealth, and the latter are things a person prefers not to have, aka sickness and poverty.
I resonate with the Stoic school, viewing it as the most clever virtue ethic. The Good Life results from what is solely under my control—my thoughts and actions. Yet, I can still enjoy the occasional cigar and enjoy the new Barbie movie. The Stoics, unlike Aristotle, have four virtues:
Wisdom, expressed as practical wisdom or phronesis
Courage
Temperance
Justice
The way I understand each:
Wisdom. I like psychologist Igor Grossman’s definition of wisdom, the “meta-value that adjudicates all values.” I also see defining wisdom as a Rorschach test, and each person’s definition represents what is wise for them to cultivate now. For me, “navigating life well enough” resonates. When combining both definitions, wisdom is the meta-value for life navigation, or “existential wayfinding.”3
Courage. While wisdom points the way4 toward the good, one still needs to move there. Courage is doing good with boldness when the way is difficult and fear is present.
Temperance. While moving toward the good, many temptations will present themselves. Our biological “machinery,” as cognitive psychologist John Vervaeke refers to our bodies, evolved in environmental niches providing innate desires that were once beneficial but are now maladaptive without conscious practices5. Temperance is the practice of moderation in all things, including moderation itself,6 to follow the way wisdom points to.
Justice. I prefer Plato’s poetic description: “harmony of the soul,” and take inspiration from monastic Daniel Thorson's aspiration of an “omni-harmonizing agent” as the just archetype to strive toward. An omni-harmonizing agent not only harmonizes their internal “parts” or “subpersonalities” but harmonizes a group of people, leading to communitas, and perhaps can harmonize a community, a country, a collective mind, aka “noosphere.”
I resonate most with the Stoics and agree with John in spirit with his definition of Stoicism presented in his After Socrates series: "Stoicism is the philosophical religion of internalizing Socrates." As Socrates embodied, wisdom is the highest-leverage virtue because it unfolds the other virtues, hence why it is referred to as the "mother" of all virtues. It is wise to focus on becoming wise before focusing on other virtues.
It seems foolish to me to pursue wisdom directly because that leads to overconfidence and "wisdom signaling,"7 the narcissistic display of being wise simply because you can talk impressively about it. Instead, I follow the Stoic principle of "via negativa," defined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb as:
The principle that we know what is wrong with more clarity than what is right, and that knowledge grows by subtraction. Also, it is easier to know that something is wrong than to find the fix. Actions that remove are more robust than those that add because addition may have unseen, complicated feedback loops.
This is why I focus on becoming “less foolish,” the opposite of wisdom, instead of directly pursuing wisdom. You must own up to being a fool, feeling more foolish before becoming less so. Foolishness is what gives wisdom a chance. My beef with some Modern Stoics is they are too focused on the history of Stoicism and what it means propositionally, doing boundary-work by telling others what Stoicism is rather than telling people how to practice it.
One does not become less foolish by memorizing Epictetus' three disciplines and other philosophical framings from the fragments available from ancient Stoic texts, teasing practices from them, awkwardly force-fitting them into our life. How does one become less foolish, then? My answer is simple: "Doing philosophy," which is different from "having a philosophy," one's comprehension of reality and how one should live it.
The only person I directly experienced doing philosophy with the spirit of philosophy was a man I consider my philosophical mentor,
. For me, the O.G. of rediscovering how to do philosophy is and always will be Andrew. John is a close second, with his "dialectic-to-dialogos" offerings, but John comes with too much propositional architecture for my liking. First and foremost, Andrew treats doing philosophy as art, corresponding to the poetic expression of philosophy as "the art of living."How does one do philosophy? Again, a simple answer; one engages in philosophical inquiry. My modified definition of philosophical inquiry from Andrew's The Art of Inquiry is "an unrehearsed exchange that reveals the unknown, bringing greater clarity." You can engage in philosophical inquiry with oneself via journaling like Marcus Aurelius famously did, and I am doing now, or with interlocutors, aka friends of virtue. Perhaps besides John's new courses, I see no place where philosophical inquiry is taught well.
Therapists and coaches engage in practical inquiries, one looking internally and the other externally, while academic and para-academic philosophers look to the "meta," engaging in theoretical inquiries. You rarely see someone combine them. Andrew did, and I strive to as well in my practice. One must start with the practical and weave into the theoretical when required. If you start with the theoretical, you do not have to weave into the practical; you can stay in theoretical la-la-land, untethered from reality. This untethering is why philosopher Pierre Hadot, author of Philosophy as a Way of Life, called modern academic philosophers "artists of reason," not "artists of life" as he viewed the ancient Stoics.
To summarize: Stoicism focuses on virtue. First and foremost, this focuses on the inverse expression of the mother of virtue, wisdom, hence less foolishness. The practice of less foolishness is philosophical inquiry, done in a journal on "things to one's self" ("ta eis heauton") or with friends of virtue in conversation. The other virtues that unfold from wisdom - courage, temperance, justice - will be needed, or one will stay a fool. It is impossible to become wise alone, so we must collectively midwife a "wisdom commons," a place that makes wisdom more common, which is what my creative "community" based projects are in service to.
Each person's journey toward less foolishness will be radically different, bespoke to them, and expressed with different theoretical perspectives because everyone has different capacities, circumstances, and callings. My "brand" of Stoicism is a minimum viable philosophy: all that is needed is an orientation to less foolishness, a blank page to write on, and the courage to meet reality with the philosophy one has, gather feedback and iterate.
Regardless of what normative ethical system attracts a person, consequentialism/utilitarianism, deontology, care-based ethics, hedonistic egoism, or virtue ethics, and all the variations each contains, one is betting on presuppositions that shape a philosophy, and a philosophy shapes a life. The one expressed in this entry is the philosophy I am betting on to shape mine.
If you like to create your minimum viable philosophy, there is no better way than doing so during a journal session. Become a paid subscriber and join those becoming less foolish at Collective Journalling, a 90-minute Zoom practice at 8 AM ET on weekdays with communal silence, chat check-ins, breakout room connections, and optional passage sharing.
Here are some shares and activities from the regulars at Collective Journalling:
“Astrology is Real: Part 1” by
. The journalling warworld attempts to astropill the world by exploring the “Big 3" celestial influences (sun, moon, rising signs), concluding with an experiment that puts trust in our vibes.- . A reflection on the difference between striving to be a "good human" versus a "good man," the complexities of masculinity, and the potential guidance mature masculine archetypes offer in reconciling historical pain and societal expectations.
An event later today with Collective Journalers
and at Hyphaensoul, discussing Holly’s work with grief, how she integrates Gene Keys wisdom into her practice, and how rituals support her role in holding space for others.
The discipline of desire is about accepting our fate. The discipline of action is about our relationship with others. The discipline of assent is about our response to what happens to us.
Courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, patience, truthfulness, wittiness, friendliness, ambition, justice, and modesty.
“Wayfinding is the art of finding one's way in physical space, and we can view "existential wayfinding" as the art of finding one's way in life.” - “Existential Wayfinding,” Apr 27, 2023
We can get Taoist here, saying “the way” is the “Tao,” and being wise brings about “wu wei,” an effortless effort, or what I call “wisdom moments.”
See the “Monasticization of Daily Life” entry for an argument as to why an ecology of practice is needed to respond to our evolved givens, ameliorating our suffering.
Sometimes extreme ways are needed.
See The Stoa session “Wisdom Signalling & the Wisdom of Criticism” featuring John Veraveke, Chris Mastropietro, Chris Kavanagh, & Matt Browne.