Stoic Wisdom: Telling the Good From the Merely Pleasant

What the Stoics meant by wisdom

The Greek word most often used is phronesis, sometimes translated as practical wisdom or prudence. The Stoics also spoke of sophia, the wisdom of the sage, which included knowledge of the divine and the human. For practical purposes, the definition that matters is the one reported by Diogenes Laertius and other sources: wisdom is the knowledge of things good, bad and neither.

That definition sounds simple. Its consequences are not. It means that wisdom is above all a matter of valuation: of seeing things at their real worth. Most foolish decisions are not failures of information. They are failures of valuation. We knew the facts but treated something as more important than it was, or less.

Under wisdom the Stoics listed several subvirtues: good deliberation, good calculation, quick wit, discretion and resourcefulness. Together they describe a person who thinks clearly, weighs options properly and finds the right course even in unfamiliar situations.

Good, bad and indifferent

The core of Stoic wisdom is a three way classification.

• Good: virtue and what shares in it. Acting with wisdom, courage, justice and temperance.
• Bad: vice and what shares in it. Acting foolishly, cowardly, unjustly or intemperately.
• Indifferent: everything else. Health and illness, wealth and poverty, reputation and disgrace, pleasure and pain, life and death.

This does not mean indifferents do not matter in any sense. The Stoics divided them into preferred and dispreferred. Health is preferred, illness dispreferred. It is natural and reasonable to seek the first and avoid the second. But neither makes you a better or worse person. Both can be used well or badly.

The practical meaning is this: when a preferred indifferent and virtue conflict, virtue wins, every time. You may want the promotion. You may not lie for it. You may want to be liked. You may not betray a friend for it. A wise person sees those conflicts clearly, where others see only a hard choice between two goods.

Good versus merely pleasant

The title of this article comes from a confusion the Stoics thought was at the root of most unhappiness: mistaking the pleasant for the good. Pleasure is an indifferent. So is pain. Many things that are pleasant are bad for us, and many that are good are unpleasant at the time.

Children learn this slowly. Adults often never finish learning it. The person who cannot tell the difference is at the mercy of whatever offers the most immediate pleasure, which in modern life is a great deal. Advertising, social media and much of the food industry are, in Stoic terms, businesses built on the confusion between the pleasant and the good.

Wisdom does not reject pleasure. It puts it in its place. A good meal with friends is both pleasant and, as an expression of friendship and moderation, good. An evening lost to scrolling is pleasant in small doses and empty in total. The difference is not visible from inside the moment. It becomes visible when you ask what the thing actually is and what it does to your life.

Wisdom and intelligence

Stoic wisdom is not the same as intelligence, education or expertise. History is full of brilliant people who made disastrous choices about their own lives. The Stoics would say they lacked not intellect but valuation: they wanted the wrong things, or wanted the right things in the wrong measure.

Epictetus is especially sharp on this. He mocks students who can analyze complex syllogisms and still tremble before a powerful man, or who can explain the theory of the good and still envy their neighbor’s house. Knowing about wisdom is not wisdom. Being able to quote Marcus Aurelius is not wisdom. Wisdom shows in what you do when it costs you something.

The sage

The Stoics described an ideal figure, the sage, who possesses perfect wisdom and therefore all the virtues. The sage never assents to a false impression, never acts badly, is never disturbed by passion and is happy in any circumstance.

The Stoics were frank that sages are extremely rare. Some said there had perhaps been one or two, others that there had been none. Seneca says that a good man of the first rank might appear once in five hundred years, like the phoenix. So why describe him at all?

Because an ideal shows direction. The Stoics called those who were working toward wisdom prokoptontes, people making progress. Almost everyone who takes philosophy seriously is in that category for their whole life. The goal is not to become a sage. It is to be wiser this year than last.

How to build wisdom

Wisdom cannot be downloaded, but it can be grown. Some practices that help, most of them old:

• Examine your choices. Seneca reviewed each day in the evening. The habit of asking “was that wise?” after the fact slowly turns into asking it before. See Stoic journaling.
• Name the indifferent. When you are agonizing over something, ask whether it is good or bad in the strict sense, or merely preferred or dispreferred. Often the agony shrinks.
• Test impressions. Most unwise choices begin with assenting too quickly to an impression about value: “this is a disaster”, “I must have this”. See impressions and assent.
• Learn from lives, not only from books. The Stoics recommended keeping in mind someone you admire and asking what they would do. Seneca suggests choosing a Cato or a Laelius as a witness to your conduct.
• Take time over big decisions. Wisdom is easier at the speed of reflection than at the speed of reaction. See deciding and holding a decision.
• Accept that you will be wrong. Progress in wisdom includes seeing your past mistakes clearly without being crushed by them.