Stoicism versus Daoism

My reaction to a video comparing the two philosophies

Someone sent me this video on Daoism and Stoicism to look at. As my comments grew, I thought it might as well be an opportunity to turn it into a brief post. Unfortunately, this is a very poorly-researched and therefore very misleading interpretation of Stoicism, as we’ll see. These are my rough notes in response to the video. Of course, it would be possible to attempt a much more sophisticated comparison of these two traditions but, sadly, what you get in these sorts of YouTube videos is very far removed from that kind of exposition.

In a nutshell, throughout this discussion, Tang’s description of Stoicism as a daily self-improvement routine isn’t accurate. It’s more based upon popular self-help books than ancient Stoicism. It’s pretty clear that the image of Stoicism being discussed here doesn’t come from direct study of the actual philosophy, either in modern commentaries or the primary sources, but from blogs, podcasts, etc. That’s just not a good way to research a philosophy. It would be as though I created a video with a Stoic critique of Daoism and based it on having listened to a handful of self-improvement podcasts talking loosely about Daoist ideas — of which there are plenty, say, in the martial arts field — without actually reading Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, or other primary sources. People complain about AI slop but, in all honesty, AI could probably have done a better job of this comparison.

The Practices

The three “Stoic” practices mentioned in Tang’s video are:

Daily journaling. There’s no evidence that what we call “journaling” today resembled a standard feature of ancient Stoicism. Epictetus does tell his students to keep notes. People sometimes refer to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as a “journal” but that’s misleading as it appears to be more like a notebook, probably maintained intermittently, than a regular daily practice of recording thoughts more systematically. Some people don’t distinguish between “notebook” and “journal” but generally in self-improvement when we use the latter term we’re talking about an ongoing daily practice of recording reflections, or doing written exercises, in a broadly consistent format. Research on the psychological effect of journaling has been mixed. How helpful it is depends how you use the method, and in some cases, certain approaches to journaling, have even been found to do more harm than good. You could easily design a good Stoic system of journaling but, strictly speaking, there’s no evidence to conclude it was a self-improvement method integral to ancient Stoicism.

Cold showers. The ancient Romans did take cold baths, if not showers, but that was a common practice not really a technique specific to ancient Stoicism. Seneca and Epictetus do both mention cold baths but it’s a stretch to portray this as especially Stoic. As with journaling, taking “cold showers” is more of a modern self-help trend, which can certainly fit in logically with Stoicism but it’s definitely not a central practice of ancient Stoicism.

Negative visualization. This is William B. Irvine’s name for a mental imagery technique described in his book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. In that book, Irvine explicitly states that the philosophy he’s describing is unlike ancient Stoicism in certain key regards — it emphasizes peace of mind over virtue, which would make it closer in some ways to Epicureanism. This technique resembles the Stoic method of premeditatio malorum, except in Irvine’s version the rationale is “hedonic adaptation”, or learning to enjoy the pleasurable things we already have more fully by visualizing their absence, which again would be more consistent with Epicureanism. The Stoic method has a very different rationale, which is more about the rehearsal of a philosophical attitude toward loss and adversity, and challenging our cognitive evaluation of adversity as something terrible. I think this mix up has led to some confusion online among people about what Stoicism recommends, and its underlying goals.

I can promise you that if you could go back in time and tell Zeno of Citium that in the 21st century, people believe that Stoic philosophy is all about journaling, taking cold showers, and “negative visualization”, for the purposes of “hedonic adaptation”, he’d be very confused.

The History

Tang says that Stoicism was “written” by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. That’s almost true, in a sense, but also very misleading. Epictetus wrote nothing, strictly speaking, and his words were recorded by Arrian, one of his students. More importantly, though, if “written” implies that Epictetus and Marcus were the originators of Stoicism, that’s definitely not true. Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium, around 301 BCE.

Tang says that centuries before Marcus Aurelius, Chinese sages were teaching similar things. That may be true, and the historical chronology is perhaps not the most important thing at stake here, but what he says here is also misleading. Marcus Aurelius is the last famous Stoic of antiquity. Stoicism had already existed for nearly five centuries, by the time of Marcus Aurelius’ death in 180 CE, as we’ve seen that it was founded by Zeno of Citium. Moreover, the Stoics saw themselves as developing the ideas of earlier philosophers such as Socrates, Heraclitus and Pythagoras, going back to the fifth and sixth centuries BCE.

Tang is comparing this tradition to Daoism, which actually originated around the same time as Pythagoreanism, or possibly slightly later. Most modern scholars now believe that Lao Tzu was a semi-legendary figure and that the Dao de Jing was actually composed, in progressive stages, around the fourth and third centuries BCE. That would, in other words, date it to the century or so after the death of Socrates, from whom the Stoics derive most of their ethical teachings. The tradition from which Stoicism derives may, therefore, be slightly older than Daoism. Of course, we can never be completely certain which came first. In any case, it’s certainly misleading if the viewer comes away thinking that we can securely state that Daoism is centuries older than Stoicism.

The Goal

In a nutshell, the quotes he takes from Stoicism and Daoism seem to me to be far too selective. They’re cherry-picked to align with the video’s agenda. So much so that you could, I think, easily reverse the comparison Tang is attempting to make in this video, by finding quotes in Daoist texts that advocate relentlessly guarding your own mind, and ones from Stoic texts that advocate a less is more approach. See the passage in the conclusion below, for example.

He says that the goal of Stoicism is “inner peace”. That’s certainly incorrect. Again, Irvine makes ataraxia (peace of mind) not arete (virtue) this the goal of his unconventional form of “Stoicism”, which perhaps contributed to this confusion. Ancient Stoicism consistently made virtue its supreme goal, and the Stoics were very aware of the significance of distinguishing between that and inner peace. “Inner peace” (ataraxia), the goal of Epicureanism, is not entirely under our control. (The supreme goal of Epicureanism was hedone or pleasure, but they considered its most important form to be ataraxia or peace of mind — a notoriously confusing point.)

Put simply, the ancient Stoics believed making inner peace our supreme goal, in the way the Epicureans did, would risk leading to avoidance, and frustration, as well as other problems. Instead they made virtue, which is defined as a quality of our voluntary actions, and therefore up to us, our supreme goal, and ataraxia, if at all, is of value only as a consequence of virtue. For instance, the “inner peace” that might come from injecting heroin, or by withdrawing from society into seclusion, say, would not be considered intrinsically valuable by Stoics. The Stoics generally preferred to speak of apatheia rather than ataraxia, which more specifically refers to overcoming irrational desires and aversions (passions) rather than general peace of mind, although even apatheia is more like a correlate of virtue in Stoic philosophy rather than the supreme goal itself.

One of the main points in the video is that Stoicism allegedly tells us to “hold the line” and stand firm like a rock whereas Daoism teaches us to be soft like water. This reading takes metaphors too superficially and literally, though. When Marcus says he should be like a rock, against which water crashes — an image also found in Seneca, so probably borrowed from an earlier author — he does not mean that Stoics should be completely unyielding toward external events. Ironically, he means that by having a certain amount of flexibility, in one regard, we become as hard as a rock, in another regard. You could call it a paradox. Stoic literature is also full of references to being flexible and yielding in relation to our desires. The quote that Tang uses at the start of his video “The obstacle is the way”, ironically, makes precisely this point. Marcus means that the wise adapt smoothly to obstacles, like water flowing around them.

Indeed, Zeno famously defined the goal of Stoicism, or eudaimonia, as a “smooth flowing life”, and this metaphor of water flowing recurs throughout Stoic literature. Epictetus has Zeno’s image of the Stoic way of life as water flowing in mind when he says, centuries later, “Do not seek for events to happen as you wish, but wish for events to happen as they do happen, and you will flow well” (Enchiridion, 8).

Conclusion

Off the top of my head, the parallel between Stoicism and Daoism that always struck me is captured in the following passages. (I think I may perhaps already have pointed to this similarity in one of my earlier books on Stoicism.) First, here are two excerpts from Epictetus:

As in walking you take care not to step upon a nail or turn your foot, so likewise take care not to hurt the ruling faculty of your mind. And, if we were to guard against this in every action, we should undertake the action with the greater safety. — Enchiridion, 38

The condition and characteristic of a philosopher is this: […] he watches himself as if he were an enemy and lying in ambush. — Enchiridion, 48

So the Sage is cautious like someone who walks barefoot, basically, and he is mindful of himself as though always on the lookout for an ambush. (He’s clearly not hypervigilant for threat, incidentally, as the Stoics don’t view external events as inherently dangerous.)

Tang, as we’ve seen, attributes the idea of continually guarding the mind to Stoicism but he believes that Daoism rejects this. However, the Dao de Jing employs basically the same image as Epictetus, of walking carefully, to make more or less the same point about guarding the mind against “danger on all sides”.

The wise ones of old had subtle wisdom and depth of understanding,
So profound that they could not be understood.
And because they could not be understood,
Perforce must they be so described:
Cautious, like crossing a wintry stream,
Irresolute, like one fearing danger all around. — trans. Lin Yutang, italics added

Of course, a few lines later, Lao Tzu says the Sage is “Fluid and yielding, like ice about to melt” but the Stoics also say similar things. Basically, both these traditions try to articulate their ideas by using contrasting images, and paradoxes, which can lead to a lot of confusion if we’re too selective about which passages we pick from each source for comparison.