If You're Not Laughing, You're Probably Doing Stoicism Wrong
How to practice philosophy and have a good time.
Philosophers stamp out every last flicker of unbridled joy in their lives. It is known!
Reason? Virtue? Man can’t be happy when straightjacket with these killjoys.
Eudaimonic philosophers particularly carry this stigma, with the Stoics wearing the laurel crown of peerless curmudgeons.
This is a problem if, like me, you agree with
that fun is sometimes the X-Factor keeping people leading otherwise good lives from truly thriving.…if I was a therapist I would tell all of my clients to go have fun—the emotive and collective kind…I would tell them to grab a friend and go to Disney World, to go to Comic-Con and get all the way into it, to go to Mardi Gras and throw all the beads they could get their hands on, to go to a haunted house with friends. Just see if you feel more alive, I would say. Just see if it will shake you out of your slumber.
Fun can be a therapeutic balm for the soul and I don’t think we should let “propriety” hold us back from it. Some of the best nights of my life have been full of uproarious laughter.
But Griffin writes that the wild abandon of a good mischievous laugh — of pure unadulterated joy — is at odds with the philosophical life:
The old philosophers would have found [passionate joy] a frivolous ask. As much as they spoke about the good life, it lived far apart from any kind of passion toward it. Aristotle's “Eudaimonia” is often translated to “flourishing,” but he actually defined it as living a virtuous life informed by reason. The stoics warned against the excesses of passions, saying we should be ruled by logic instead. Even the Epicurean concept of “pleasure” was more focused on the absence of suffering than having fun.
…Good emotion often comes with bad emotion, and this is where the philosophers would place a wet blanket over the whole thing, calling passion and its erratic moods a precarious thing.
But is this actually true?
Philosophy vs Joy
Griffin is right that the Stoics are suspicious of passion, realizing that strong positive or negative emotions can lead us to bad places.
Having fun cheering for the home team in a sports arena is one thing, but rioting afterward because that team lost is quite another. Stoics think there’s a slippery slope between the two.
But are Stoics against the “emotive and collective,” kind of fun Griffin finds so meaningful? Would they advise us to never let loose?
If so, a reading of Stoic philosophy should turn up:
A stance against euphoric, transcendent states and joy-filled activities.
No mention of joy’s therapeutic effect.
Little to no evidence that individual Stoics sought out euphoric, transcendent states and fun in which they “lost themselves.”
So what do we find?
Socrates’s Laughter:
Stoics view their philosophy as a branch of Socrates’s. He was their model, and their philosophy is an explication of his precepts. So we should ask how Socrates incorporated — or eschewed — joy and ecstatic states.
Socrates’s conception of eudaimonia (a state of flourishing/happiness) was radical. He thought virtue was necessary but also completely sufficient for eudaimonia. Food? Nope. Shelter? Nope. Friends? Nope. Fun? Absolutely not.
If we display wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation in every circumstance, Socrates thinks we’ll thrive. Nothing else is needed. But despite this seemingly puritanical stance, many of the Socratic dialogues depict him having a great time.
Let’s start off with the basics: friends. Socrates is often surrounded by them. Yes, their debates sometimes get heated as they push themselves to grow. But they also laugh a lot.
Two of Socrates’s most famous dialogues are Xenophon’s and Plato’s Symposium, in which Socrates and his friends drink at a dinner party, chat, and watch live entertainment. These were hardly joyless evenings.
In Xenophon’s account, Socrates asks a Phoenician dance master to show him some dance moves. Everyone laughs: what will you do with dance moves, Socrates? He replies: “I’ll dance, by God!” These parties got a little rowdy.
Socrates’s friend says he stopped by the philosopher’s house that morning and found him dancing. Socrates confesses to solo-dancing all the time. It’s great exercise, can be done indoors or outdoors without equipment, and it improves the appetite and digestive system. Dance also happens to be one of the joyful pursuits Griffin promotes in her piece as superior to more puritanical exercise.
What should we make of Socrates’s laughter and good cheer? In The Republic, he insists laughter isn’t a universal good and can be unjust. He believes the truism: If we’re laughing at people instead of with them, it erodes our character. Laughter can be a vice if misused.
But barring this, Socrates favored fun of the types Griffin finds so important, and more importantly, regularly engaged in fun activities and play. His cheerfulness and pursuit of joy seem close to Griffin’s ideal.
Laughter as Therapy:
Stoic philosophy has a wonderfully modern understanding of human nature, including that we’re different. What suits one of us doesn’t suit another.
This is why Epictetus tells foppish teenage playboys who take nothing seriously to shape up, while Seneca has very different advice for the dour and work-focused. Stoics are supposed to be cheerful, not morose. So what should the stolid do to liven up?
“…(some people) are in no danger from anger, but they must beware the more sluggish faults – fear, moroseness, discouragement, and suspicion. And so such natures have need of encouragement and indulgence and the summons to cheerfulness. And since certain remedies are to be employed against anger, others against sullenness, and the two faults are to be cured, not merely by different, but even by contrary, methods, we shall always attack the fault that has become the stronger…Games will also be beneficial1.”
Seneca knew the power of taking a break from the seriousness of life for joy-filled activities.
“The mind must not be kept invariably at the same tension, but must be diverted to amusements,” Seneca insists. “Socrates did not blush to play with little children, Cato would relax his mind with wine when it was wearied by the cares of state, and Scipio would stir his triumphal and soldierly person to the sound of music2.”
Even the depressing state of the world can be a source of laughs if we bring the right mindset to it:
“We should bring ourselves to see all the vices of the crowd not as hateful but as ridiculous; and we should imitate Democritus rather than Heraclitus. For the latter, every time he went out into public, used to weep; the former used to laugh. One saw everything we do as wretchedness, the other as absurdity. Things should be made light of, and taken more easily: it is more civilized to laugh at life than to bewail it.3.
The Dour Emperor Lets Loose
Read Marcus Aurelius’s timeless Meditations and you might come away with the mistaken impression that the Philosopher-emperor was always dour, and mostly focused on the darker side of life.
That’s because Meditations is a personal journal filled with spiritual exercises intended to correct Marcus’s shortcomings. He wrote to battle his temper, disgust with self-centered supplicants, intractable health problems, struggles to protect his people from Germanic attacks, and worries about legacy. Presumably, an inability to laugh wasn’t one of his flaws — or at least not one he perceived.
Marcus’s letters (included in this translation of Meditations) present a different side of the emperor — affable, loving toward his family, and proud of his children.
We read of Marcus’s mischievous side. While riding in the countryside with friends in non-royal clothing, they were accosted by shepherds who absurdly accused them of banditry. Marcus laughs this off, spurs his horse, and gallops through their flock, scattering them left and right as if to say “I’ll show you a bandit!”
Marcus also traveled to Athens for initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries towards the end of his life. This wasn’t “fun,” but many scholars believe initiates took the hallucinogenic drug ergot, which brought about transcendent experiences and the realization of higher truths. Cicero said initiates learn “the beginnings of life, and have gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope4.” So Marcus wasn’t afraid of losing himself in transcendent experiences, at least not purposeful ones.
Virtue Doesn’t Hold Back Joy
I suspect Griffin feels joy and its pleasures are cornerstones of wellbeing, and because Socrates and the Stoics didn’t enshrine joy as a pillar of Eudaimonia, they’re off base.
But they also didn’t consider food and shelter to be part of this formula, though readily admitting their lack could kill us.
Imagine if Socrates elevated food, joy, and laughter above virtue, or even to the same level. The result would be an insistence that murdering someone for food was fine, since justice is no obstacle. Pursuing joy and pleasure beyond moderation (perhaps hurting themselves or another) would also be perfectly reasonable.
Luckily, the joy Griffin prescribes is not blocked by virtue — virtue might well demand it.
The dreary, good-enough lives she bemoans could be unvirtuous in that they’re immoderate. Moderate people don’t cut themselves off from the good things in life for no reason. They don’t neglect what will keep them balanced. If these Americans traveled back in time and asked Socrates or Seneca how to get out of their funk, their advice would probably be much like Griffin’s: let loose a little and find some joy.
And if they were prisoners locked up in solitary confinement and unable to pursue the joyous experiences Griffin suggests? Wouldn’t that prove the Stoic/Socratic formula is broken since they couldn’t find joy? Maybe they could take a page from Socrates and solo-dance till they hit a flow state and found a little pleasure amidst their constrained circumstances. Stoics readily admit that some things beyond virtue have value, but simply insist that no joy is good if its acquisition demands vice. You live virtuously — and pursue the good life as best you can — wherever you find yourself.
I’ll leave you with one reminder: The third head of the Stoa, Chrysippus, reportedly died of a heart attack or stroke during a fit of laughter. He’d seen a donkey looking silly eating some dried figs and said, "Now give him a drink of wine to wash down the figs!"
I hope I make my exit from this world like Chrysippus — laughing all the way. I’m pretty sure virtue won’t stop me from doing it.
Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind 17.4
Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind 15.2
Cicero, De Legibus
I enjoyed this article very much - thanks
Thank you. Very wise and helpful.