Waking Up in Stoicism

Metaphors of sleep and dreaming in ancient philosophy

Last year, I was invited to design an audio course on Stoicism and Mindfulness for Sam Harris’ Waking Up app. Waking Up have provided a special link so that you can enroll on the course and claim a free 30-day trial if you’re new to the app.

To be really awake when you are awake, to fear nothing, to be anxious about nothing… — Epictetus

The app is named after Sam Harris’ bestselling book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, where mindfulness meditation is, basically, compared to awakening from sleep or a dream. It recently struck me that the same “awakening from a dream” metaphor is front and centre in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, where it appears to be connected with the influence of the presocratic philosopher Heraclitus. In this article, I’ll therefore be exploring the concept of “waking up” in Stoic philosophy.

First of all, we can potentially find a similar notion in the Discourses of Epictetus, who said to his students, for example,

In order then to secure freedom from passions, tranquillity, to sleep well when you do sleep, to be really awake when you are awake, to fear nothing, to be anxious about nothing, will you spend nothing and give no labour? — Discourses, 4.10

Here, as elsewhere, being “really awake” is associated with Stoic apatheia or freedom from irrational desires and emotions. The language that Epictetus uses, in Greek, implies that he means awakening, in this sense, is freedom from psychopathology, mastering our irrational fears and desires, through the process of Stoic psychotherapy.

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Marcus devoured the Discourses of Epictetus, and was probably more influenced by him than by any other philosopher. In one of the most striking passages of the Meditations, he writes:

Of human life the duration is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgement. And, to say all in a word, everything which belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapour, and life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after-fame is oblivion. What then is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing and only one, philosophy. — Meditations, 2.17

The contents of the soul, that is, are a dream (oneiros) and mist (tuphos). The word tuphos is typically associated with Cynic philosophy, where it refers to a mist that clouds our judgment with regard to the world, e.g., holding misplaced values, such as prizing wealth and reputation above wisdom and virtue.

Return to your sober senses… and in your waking hours look at these things about you as you look back on dreams. — Marcus Aurelius

This theme of awakening from a dream, by clearing the mist from our mental vision, recurs throughout the Meditations.

Return to your sober senses and call yourself back. And when you have roused yourself from sleep and have perceived that they were only dreams which troubled you, now in your waking hours look at these [the things about you] as you once looked at those [dreams]. — Meditations, 6.31

That’s a slightly ornate way of saying: awaken! Realize that until now you have been living as if in a dream state. Stoic philosophy is your wake-up call.

Inquire of yourself as soon as you awaken from sleep whether it will make any difference to you if another does what is just and right. It will make no difference. — Meditations, 10.13

In the passage above, Marcus takes it for granted that the sleep he’s referring to is ordinary life. Awakening means realizing that other people’s actions are indifferent to us, and withdrawing our value judgments from externals, by reminding ourselves that virtue is the only true good.

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Heraclitus

Elsewhere in the Meditations, Marcus explicitly attributes similar language to the presocratic philosopher Heraclitus. The influence, indeed, of Heraclitus’ writings on Marcus appears second only to that of Epictetus. The Stoics in general admired Heraclitus, starting with Cleanthes, the second head of the school, who wrote several lost volumes on him.

We are all working together to one end, some with knowledge and design, and others without knowing what they do. As men also when they are asleep, of whom it is Heraclitus, I think, who says that they are laborers and cooperators in the things which take place in the universe. — Meditations, 6.42

Even those who are asleep play their role in the story of the universe. Heraclitus is typically cryptic here. Does he mean those who are literally asleep? I think he is referring, metaphorically, to the “sleep” of the ignorant and unenlightened.

Always remember the saying of Heraclitus, that the death of earth is to become water, and the death of water is to become air, and the death of air is to become fire, and reversely. And think too of him who forgets whither the way leads, and that men quarrel with that with which they are most constantly in communion, the reason which governs the universe; and the things which they daily meet with seem to them strange: and consider that we ought not to act and speak as if we were asleep, for even in sleep we seem to act and speak; and that we ought not, like children who learn from their parents, simply to act and speak as we have been taught. — Meditations, 4.46

Here, Marcus seems to be presenting a flurry of references to the sayings of Heraclitus. The one most relevant to “waking up” has to do with Heraclitus’ saying that we should not act and speak as if we are asleep — we should awaken! The context seems to make it clear that the “sleep” in question is metaphorical. Being asleep, and dreaming, is equated with accepting uncritically what we have learned from our parents, as opposed to learning how to think for ourselves, which is what philosophy aims to teach us. Marcus seems to interpret Heraclitus as meaning by “sleep”, a kind of metaphorical death, in which we forget our way in life, and quarrel over things that should be obvious to us. In this “sleep”, our clouded judgment alienates us from everything, even universal reason and everyday experience.

Indeed, Heraclitus, known among ancient philosophers as “The Obscure”, in the surviving fragments of his On Nature, frequently refers to sleep and dreaming in cryptic and paradoxical ways, often seemingly as a metaphor for a sort of ignorance that leads us to become alienated from the real world.

The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own. — Heraclitus, B89

They are estranged from that with which they have most constant interaction. — Heraclitus, B73

It is one and the same thing to be living or dead, awake or asleep, young or old. The former aspect in each case becomes the latter, and the latter again the former, by sudden unexpected reversal. — Heraclitus, B88

Finally, this is perhaps Heraclitus’ most concise and mysterious saying about the sleep that afflicts us. To awaken, and come alive, is to see death in all things.

Death is all things we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep. — Heraclitus, DK B21

I can only speculate that he means that when we are asleep, figuratively, we see nothing but dreams. When we awaken, we perceive Nature for what it is, a constant flux, in which nothing is permanent, the perpetual death of one thing as it becomes another. Of course, Heraclitus is most famous for his doctrine of panta rhei, “everything flows”, the image of Nature as a river, and the saying “We cannot step into the same river twice”, because new waters are continually flowing through it.