The Stoic Path to Greater Control

Use all three branches of Stoic philosophy to improve your life and then the world.

Photo by Steve Ding on Unsplash

Stoicism counsels distinguishing what we can control from what we can’t control, and focusing our energy on the former. This begs us to ask: can we increase the range of what we control, and if so, how?

The early Stoics divided philosophy into three branches: physics, logic, and ethics. It isn’t clear whether Zeno the first Stoic or whether someone who came later developed this scheme to its fullest. Later Stoics emphasized the third, and for good reason: they wanted philosophy to apply directly and immediately to human life. They wanted results that would make the lives of their students better, by having become better themselves.

Most writers today focus on the third. I think looking at all three areas will increase the range of what we can use Stoicism to do.

Physics in the Stoic sense is how the world works. Nuts and bolts, not physical cosmology. Nothing about stars and planets. Logic is our thought about how the world works. Thought is ordered, just as the world is ordered. Ethics, finally, is reflected in the actions we take, or should take, or sometimes shouldn’t take, based on our best thought about how the world works. It aims to make us better humans who lead by example.

How does the world work? Again, we don’t need to wade into cosmology or quantum electrodynamics or string theory. We just need to think in terms of causality. What happens, happens because prior events set conditions for it. If this seems like common sense, that’s because it is. If it seems useful to state it, that’s probably because common sense is really uncommon. What’s common is magical thinking. Think of the old saw about doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result.

Causality is patterned. A doesn’t merely cause B, it always causes B. Hot stove burners always burn. Most kids figure this out by age six.

If A doesn’t always cause B — if there are exceptions — that’s probably not divine intervention or gremlins but because of a confounder in the causal pathway. If we identify it, we can qualify our basic claim: A causes B except when C holds. And so on. Sometimes causes are…