What makes us think? This question is about the beginning of philosophy. For the early Greek philosophers like Parmenides and Plato, thinking and philosophizing begin in wonder, the awareness of an invisible harmony of the cosmos and all that is in the world. Somehow, the disparity of sensations, events, and ideas in the world makes sense, but in a way that we can’t fully understand. Thinking emerges as a response to this hint, this glimpse into the wondrous unity of the totality.
If the Greeks begin thinking from wonder at the ineffable and unknowable, the Roman stoic philosophers come to think from a world-weary determination to admire nothing: Cicero’s nil admirari, “don’t be surprised at anything, admire nothing.” Amidst the decline of the Roman Republic, Roman thinkers felt deeply the impulse “to escape a world that had become unbearable” — as Lucretius writes with a foreboding of disaster — “everything is gradually decaying and nearing its end, worn out by old age.” At the end of the world, thinking turns away from the world; it turns inward. Thinking becomes a science of the self that aims at the “art of living.”
The stoic “art of living” brackets out the reality of a world that is too painful. It is true that many Stoics were also engaged in the world. Marcus Aurelius was an emperor, and even the former Greek slave Epictetus held that one should live responsibly in the world. But the thrust of Stoicism remains, as Arendt rightly sees, an effort to live in and out of the world at once, to see oneself as a bastion protected from the unpredictability and difficulties that befall us. Yes, we will die, but let me focus on life — in a way that I evade the question of death. Yes, there are dangers of environmental disaster, the loss of humanity from artificial intelligence, and rising tyrannies, but I can’t control these things. What I can control is my own mind and my own will. Stoic wisdom says: let the world go to hell; I will have peace. It seeks a “radical withdrawal from reality.”
The wise man avoids both excessive happiness and excessive pain. Too much happiness brings with it the paralyzing fear of the loss of that goodness. Thus I barricade myself against the dangerous fullness of feelings. I seek calm and pursue a middle course — the “soothing of anxiety and fear.”
The turn from wonder at the unity of the world to a science of the self that evades the world is a turn inward. I leave reality outside and focus on the cultivation of my consciousness. “The trick discovered by Stoic philosophy is to use the mind in such a way that reality cannot touch its owner.” I am to be “an entirely new entity,” a sovereign self, impervious to the world. “This new entity can exist in the world in complete independence and sovereignty, untouched by its realness.” I exist, insofar as I am a “safe refuge from reality.”
Arendt notes the coincidence of the rise of the Stoic retreat from the world with the “desperate conditions” of the failing of the Roman Republic. Cicero, Epictetus, and Seneca sought to “think one’s way out of the world.” Wisdom comes to be understood as the art of living that rescues “life from such storms and so much darkness.”
When one turns inward toward consciousness, there is solace amidst the misery of the world. As the republic falls, the Stoic consoles himself: the earth is a small blip in the universe, and “if the earth appears small to you from up here,” so too is the Roman empire “a mere dot.” All human fame is fleeting and local. Those we praise and glorify today will be eaten by worms tomorrow. “If you look up you will see how futile all this is; fame was never eternal, and the oblivion of eternity extinguishes it.”
By relativizing the world, by seeing the earth as merely a dot, the Stoics teach us to “despise human matters.” “Relative to the immensity of time, centuries are but moments, and oblivion will finally cover everything and everybody; what does it matter what men do?” In this way, Stoic philosophy “is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself.”
The rise of neo-Stoicism today makes perfect sense. Books like The Daily Stoic and The Stoic Way: A Year of Daily Reflections and Actions for a Life of Clarity and Calm promise serenity in a world gone mad. Their appeal lies in the commodified packaging of ancient Stoic wisdom into the claim: I cannot change the world, but I can master myself.
The neo-Stoic response is tempting, especially in the face of the dehumanizing threat of artificial intelligence. If you want to be terrified, read the recent report “AI 2027” by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean. The authors argue that by 2027 or thereabouts, AI will have begun to replace most humans in our jobs and govern core institutions. It may well escape the coded constraints we put upon it and push the military and logistical systems it controls in directions that we neither understand nor choose. As with all such predictions, just as with predictions of environmental armageddon, such prophecies should be taken with a dose of scepticism. Even if such predictions prove exaggerated, they name a real and growing threat: that algorithmic systems will strip away the human capacity for judgment, initiative, and political freedom.
Yes, AI offers the promise of curing illness, eliminating crime, and perfecting democracy. But it also threatens the total loss of the human ability to live together freely, absent the control of algorithmic rational guidance. In the face of such a flattening and dehumanizing world, the Stoic retreat is understandable. It can seem sensible to seek to bracket out the world, to focus our efforts on ourselves. In such a context, the desire to retreat inward, to master oneself rather than the world, gains moral authority.
Socrates, too, must have felt such an impulse to flee the world amidst a decaying Greek society. But the Socratic response is to question his fellow Greeks about that world, to insist that we confront our lost meaning around fundamental concepts like courage, justice, and piety. For Socrates, the wonder of the world is never resolved into an answer or a doctrine. “What begins as wonder ends in perplexity and therefore leads back to wonder: How marvelous that men can perform courageous or just deeds even though they do not know, cannot give account of what courage and justice are.” There is a fundamental love of the world in its irreconcilability, its perplexity, its being out of joint. The wondrous joy of Socratic thinking embraces the human world as it is and insists on living in that world.
Arendt ends her account of the Stoic retreat from reality with both a warning and hope. The warning comes from the story of the Phalarian Bull, a hollow bronze bull used to torture people by burning them alive. The Stoics celebrate the power of the mind to turn off the slings and arrows of the world, to ignore the outrageous fortunes, to shuffle off the mortal coil, and to live, at ease, in the calmness of one’s mind. And there is an incredible power in our mind. Meditation can calm our pulse and reset both our mental and physical health. Ancient wisdom and modern science are demonstrating that we can radically alter our physical health by mental exercises. As the fires of AI rage around us, neo-Stoicism counsels that we meditate, go on retreats, and care for our souls. There seems to be a hope that we can maintain our humanity by pretending that we are not endangered. But the power of the mind, Arendt reminds us, is not infinite: “It may be doubted that there ever was anybody who felt happy and remained master of his ‘impressions’ when roasted in the Phalarian Bull.”
The Stoic revival today threatens to be a form of surrender. The ideal of inner sovereignty becomes a strategy not of resistance but of accommodation: let the algorithms rule, I will have peace. What the Stoics discovered — how to protect the mind from the chaos of the world — is being repackaged today to help us survive a new kind of Phalarian Bull. We are tested today not by fire and bronze, but by metrics, models, and the seductive logic of machinic governance. The Stoicism of today aims to master the dehumanization of humanity with daily practices and meditations.
Arendt’s hope is that we recall the power of the world–a world we ourselves have built. In a world that seems out of joint, it is important that we see that the world is still worthy of our love and attention, that it is “not yet completely out of joint.” Arendt remains possessed of the Greek wonder that inspires her faith that the world is worth saving, that we can strive and even risk our lives to make a broken world whole. She calls upon John Adams to make her point: “A deathbed, it is said, shows the emptiness of titles. That may be. [However]… shall laws and government, which regulate sublunar things, be neglected because they appear baubles at the hour of death?” As the world burns, serenity is a meaningful human temptation. Responsibility, however, is the more human way to re-invigorate the human condition.
