Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

These might seem like relatively harmless (and actually helpful) hints, but to Aristo they were crutches that sent people down the path to memorizing a script for the challenges of life. “Advice from old women,” he called it. Aristo argued that the expertise of a javelin thrower in the Olympic Games comes from training and practice, not from studying the target or memorizing rules. You get better by practicing with your javelin. “One who has trained himself for life as a whole,” he said, “does not need to be advised on specifics. He has been taught comprehensively, not how to live with his wife or his son but how to live well, and that includes how to live with members of his family.”

An athlete isn’t thinking on the court or the field; their movements come from the muscle memory of their training, guided by their intuition. It’s from this flow state, rather than from conscious deliberation, that excellence—moral or physical—emerges.

So what Aristo wanted people to focus on were big, clear principles, things that could be internalized by the wise from their training. He wanted the Ten Commandments, not books about what order the sacraments go in. He wanted to give students a North Star to look to—virtue—and believed every caveat and explanation beyond that would lead to confusion.

Virtue was the sole good, Aristo was saying. Everything else was not worth caring about.

This put him at odds with Zeno, who believed there was plenty of gray area in between virtue and vice. Zeno had held that certain things in life, like wealth and health, which have no moral value per se, do tend to approximate the nature of truly good things. Having lots of money isn’t virtuous, but certainly there are virtuous rich people—and like all other fates, financial success presents its own opportunities for moving toward virtue as well as temptations for turning to vice. Zeno’s somewhat ingenious argument was to call these things—being healthy, being handsome, possessing an illustrious last name—“preferred indifferents.” It’s not morally better to be rich than poor, tall than short, but probably nicer to be the former than the latter.

Right?

To Zeno, it was not controversial to say that one could lean toward virtue and still desire wealth or fame or preeminence, for those were tools to employ in the building of an even more virtuous life. In this way, the early Stoics argued that we can and should pursue preferred indifferents as part of the good, virtuous life. It’s a classic middle ground, practical realism to be expected from someone like Zeno who was a merchant before he was a philosopher, as well as precisely the kind of thing that his student Aristo could not stand.

Aristo strongly argued that the goal of life is to live in a state of indifference to everything that is in between virtue and vice, making absolutely no distinction between those tricky things that can be nice to have but dangerous in excess. He didn’t want some complicated list of categories. He didn’t want to rank things in order of their goodness or badness. He didn’t want to consider gray areas or consult a rulebook. He wanted black and white. He wanted to rely on his training and his intuition to immediately know what to do in a given situation.

It’s like the story of a general who, in taking over an important command, was given a thick book of the practices established by the generals who had preceded him. “Burn them,” the general said. “Anytime a problem comes up, I’ll make the decision at once—immediately.”

It certainly sounds impressive: I make no equivocation. There is only good and evil. There can be no in between. A wise man simply knows!

It’s also a pretty ridiculous belief for someone as smart as Aristo, as Cicero would point out. With the refusal to rank or prefer, “the whole of life would be thrown into chaos.” Surely some things are better than others, surely there are general rules that can guide us as we live. We need precedents, because situations are complicated and fast-moving. Because sometimes the people who preceded us were actually wiser, and figured things out by painful experience.

Still, Aristo knew how to argue brilliantly. Disputing Zeno’s notion that health was one of these preferred indifferents, he said that “if a healthy man had to serve a tyrant and be destroyed for this reason, while the sick had to be released from the service and, therewith, from destruction, the wise man would rather choose sickness.” It’s an argument that could be applied to so many of the preferred indifferents. Is it really better to be rich if your wealth makes you the target of those same tyrants? Aren’t there situations where height has disadvantages?