Stoic Warriors

Stoic training

This renewed interest in hard control of the body may sound Stoic in spirit, especially in terms of its emphasis on self-toughening through severe training and drill. Epictetus, a first century Stoic who inspired Marcus Aurelius’s meditations, routinely employs athletic metaphors to capture the dedication and discipline needed for Stoic training: We are to be like the “invincible athlete” who continues to prove himself even after “he has been victorious in the first round”, even if it is “burning hot”, even if there are naysayers who try to bring him down. No one can be “an Olympic victor … without sweat.” “Remember that god, like a wrestling master, has matched you with a rough young man.” But discipline, whether physical or mental, is one thing. Attachment to the body, is another. And Epictetus argues that while we have duties to care for the body, ultimately, our bodies should be regarded as indifferents, not intrinsic to happiness.

This can be difficult advice to swallow. For we non-Stoics tend to view ourselves as embodied, and our identities as a function of our bodily existences. We may exaggerate that identity and become obsessive in our care and cultivation of the body, but a healthy sense of self does not leave the body behind. Soldiers who return from war with bodies maimed and disfigured lose more than just a physical part of themselves. They sacrifice a fundamental part of what shapes their sense of self and good living – easy mobility, full and independent use of arms and hands, sightedness and hearing, and in many cases, a fitness for competitive physical adventure and risk that made the military attractive to them in the first place. And they return home having to live with the fact that they may have inflicted comparable losses on others. The bitter irony of war is that the fittest risk becoming the most disabled. True, cutting edge technology has transformed the lot of veterans, with many more surviving the sort of severe injuries that would have killed them in past wars. Even so, they still must adjust to a new kind of life, lived with a new kind of vulnerability and set of compensatory skills.

Stoics on happiness

The Stoics argue that human flourishing – i.e., our happiness or well-being (what the Greeks call, eudaimonia) – is not a matter of the state of one’s body, even its global condition of being healthy or diseased. Rather, the body and its states constitute “indifferents”, i.e., goods outside our full control. Genuine happiness is a matter of virtue alone.

The Stoic view, with its retreat inward to virtue, is rooted in Plato’s reaction to Homer. In the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey , the good and happiness are, in no small degree, a matter of fortune and status, of tangible honour, measured in war booty, strength, and wealth. These are largely external goods, tied up with the gods’ will and with the caprice of war’s victories and losses. Socrates’s radical move, transmitted to us through Plato, is to shift virtue and happiness inward to the soul or psyche ( psyche ) – to make honour a matter of virtue, and virtue largely achievable by a training of the soul. Virtue alone becomes sufficient for happiness, without dependence on external goods or luck. It is this position, in essence, that the Stoics return to and embrace. It is against this backdrop that we should read Epictetus, a fairly orthodox Stoic, when he claims: “In our power are moral character and all its functions; not in our power are the body, the parts of the body, possessions, parents, brothers, children, country and associates in general.”

The “paltry body”, Epictetus continues, is like a petty estate or reputation. It is something you may think you possess, but it can be easily taken from you by disease or death. We, as bodies, are little donkeys, weighted down by our worldly loads. We hold tight to those material loads, though they enslave as much as they nurture. This general view of the body seems unduly harsh. Cicero registers a blunt complaint in his interpretation of the view: The Stoics “show concern for nothing but the mind, as if human beings had no body.” We might further object that even if it is plausible to think of goods like physical strength and fitness as only conditionally good, they are nonetheless not typically fully outside our control. Our habits of diet, hygiene, and fitness all are factors that contribute to physical well being, even if they are not sufficient for it.

We are now in a position to take a hard look at some concrete cases and Stoic implications. What of the men and women returning now, as I write, from war in Afghanistan and Iraq, who are amputees at the elbow or knees, or blinded, or who have hollow sockets in place of eyes and nose? What is the contest for happiness like for those who are no longer able to touch their children with hands and fingers, or see a loved one’s face, or walk when they used to be the most physically elite among soldiers? Can modified versions of Stoicism provide consolation for those who face severe physical loss?