Stoicism and Existentialism

By Greg Sadler

Welcome to Stoicism Today! This week’s post comes to you from Greg Sadler, former editor of Stoicism Today and YouTube philosopher extraordinaire. Please enjoy his thoughtful analysis of the common ground and differences between Stoicism and Existentialism as philosophies of life.

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Over the years, I have been asked many questions bearing on two different philosophical traditions, Stoicism and Existentialism. Since I teach about both of them frequently, students enrolled in my classes will often have questions about whether there are important similarities, possible connections, or vital differences between them. Individual tutorial and philosophical counseling clients, audience members at talks I give, even participants in my monthly AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions will bring up similar questions as well. I also get asked frequently about prospects and possibilities for effectively and authentically combining Stoic and Existentialist perspectives into one’s own philosophical stance and practice.

Since I’m teaching an online, open access 16-week Existentialist Philosophy and Literature class, and since I’ve been engaged for decades in a number of projects where Stoicism figures centrally, I’ve been giving a good bit of thought to those recurring questions. When invited to set down some of my reflections on the matters here, I thought I’d take the opportunity to work them out at some length. The hope is that doing so may prove useful, or at least interesting, for some readers who might be wondering about the two distinct but occasionally overlapping philosophical movements.

Both Stoicism and Existentialism are, among other ways they may be characterized, what we nowadays commonly call “philosophies as ways of life.” This is a term that Pierre Hadot popularized from the mid-20^th century onward, though as he points out over and over again, not remotely a new idea, nor one that didn’t have plenty of representatives in modern as well as ancient and medieval times. Sometimes “philosophy as a way of life” gets a bit mistakenly and unhelpfully contrasted against “academic philosophy” as a whole, but in reality quite a few philosophies as ways of life get taught, interpreted, applied, even developed within at least certain academic settings and institutions.

What is key to philosophies as ways of life is that they involve ongoing personal commitment to philosophical activity in practical and concrete ways, (as opposed to merely theoretical and abstract), often taking the form of philosophical practices. Generally there’s an overall goal or end in mind. Continual application of philosophical ideas, experimenting with them within one’s own life, functions as a means to that end. Those ends can vary considerably from school to school, tradition to tradition, and even in some cases, there can be differences and debates about these between members who hold some common allegiance.

Stoicism takes on its classic form within antiquity, starting from the first scholarch and founder, Zeno, and continuing on for centuries. Its key ideas and practices get discussed and sometimes appropriated by members of other philosophical and religious ways of life (the ancient Greek term for those was haireseis, the path one chooses). Stoicism will occasionally emerge again in various robust reinterpretations from the era of the Renaissance down to the present day. By contrast, although there are some precursor authors that some label “proto-Existentialist,” including Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Montaigne, and Pascal, the Existentialist movement as such is really a late modern, 19^thand 20^th century phenomenon.

In the present, many people identify themselves in one manner or another to belonging to these philosophical movements, at levels of commitment ranging from those seriously engaged in study and practices for decades all the way to those mainly swapping memes and inspirational quotes, with all sorts in between. In fact, you can find some people claiming to combine Existential and Stoic perspectives within their own particular brand of philosophy (years back, I gave an interview to an “Existential Stoic” podcast, as one example).

Neither Stoicism nor Existentialism in their classic eras of development were philosophies marked by complete agreement among their members, let alone an orthodoxy compelling assent as requirement for belonging. One need only read book 7 of Diogenes Laertes Lives Of The Philosophers, devoted to the Stoic school, to realize that Zeno himself productively brought together elements from three previous Socratic schools (Cynic, Platonic, Megarian), along with his own insights into a synthesis that eventually comes to be called “Stoicism”. Reading further, we learn that in the very first generation considerable philosophical differences arose between Zeno’s followers. Throughout the history of the school, although certain doctrines, themes, and focuses appear largely shared across the spectrum of those identifying as Stoics, and down through the many generations of the school, one can find occasional dissenters on particular points. Key authors emphasize different aspects of Stoicism more than their fellow authors. For instance Epictetus, who rarely references virtue in explicit ways, seems very clearly committed not just to the existence of progress (prokopēs) but to its central importance, and reinterprets and elaborates prohairesis (translated as “faculty of choice,” “moral purpose,” even “will”) in ways very different from other Stoics.

In the present, there is arguably yet greater variance between people who explicitly identify as contemporary adherents of Stoicism. Still, there are a number of identifiable central doctrines that anyone who isn’t just fooling themselves or misappropriating the term “Stoic” would need to be in agreement with, at risk of not being a “Stoic” in any genuine sense. I’ll just mention a few of these quickly as examples. The notion that virtue is an absolutely central good (note: I don’t say “only”, since there are classic Stoic texts that contradict that) and that one should be striving after and acting in accordance with those virtues would be one of those. The valuation of certain things as genuinely good or bad, other things as “indifferent,” supplemented by noting that some of those indifferents (“preferred”) do possess some positive value and are worthy of choosing, and that others have negative value and are worth avoiding, that’s another one. The assertion that all human beings possess a common rational nature that needs to be developed furnishes a third.

When we turn from Stoicism to Existentialism, do we find a similar sort of robust consensus but also room for certain differences about doctrines distinctive to the school? Common responses reflective of superficial level of understanding of Existentialism say: Yes. They usually highlight a “definition” provided by one member of the Existentialist movement in a popular lecture, Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Existentialism Is A Humanism.” His famous phrase “existence precedes essence” has been lifted from that one work and deformed into the main characterization of Existentialism’s putative essence. To put this into proper context, it is worth pointing out three things specifically about that work and reactions to it.

First, that formula, which Sartre uses several times in the work, is nested in each case in a more complex set of discussions. Leave those out, and one isn’t really getting what Sartre is saying. Second, Sartre makes a distinction between Christian Existentialists and atheist Existentialists, and identifies only the latter as the people who fully accept that existence precedes essence. Third, several major Existentialists of the time responded to Sartre’s attempt to define the term either by saying he was welcome to it and recharacterizing their Existentialist philosophy as something else (for example, Gabriel Marcel saying: Fine then, I’m not an “Existentialist.” I’m a “Christian Socratic”), or by more subtly showing there’s much more to Existentialism than existence preceding essence (e.g. Simone de Beauvoir surpassing Sartre’s work in her Ethics of Ambiguity).

Unlike Stoicism, Existentialism doesn’t really comprise a philosophical “school” in a proper sense. It is much better understood as a fairly loose movement of multiple authors, some of whom clearly read, responded to, and reinterpreted each other. Existentialism centers around a number of identifiable key and recurring themes. Its members sometimes opposed themselves to and criticized the dominant academic philosophy, or the prevailing thought and culture, of their times, but certain key figures held and articulated their work from academic positions. While sharing some themes and preoccupations in common, they also differed considerably from each other, sometimes taking stances on key matters opposed to their fellow “Existentialists.”

I’ll just mention a few illustrative examples. Albert Camus denied himself the title of “Existentialist” precisely because in his early work The Myth of Sisyphus, he deliberately confines the meaning of that term to religious thinkers who in his view misuse “the absurd,” making a leap into “philosophical suicide.” One of the thinkers Camus targets with that criticism, Lev Shestov, earlier criticized Kierkegaard, another thinker Camus brought up, for not going far enough into the absurd. Both Gabriel Marcel and Simone de Beauvoir criticize Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous and rather pessimistic treatment of human relations to each other in Being and Nothingness, and provide more positive alternative models. Even the fundamental nature of human existence in the world is something Existentialists disagree about. Some of them declare it to be absurd, others that it is ambiguous, still others that it is a mystery.

We could easily multiply examples, but the main point here is that there are really significant differences within the Existentialist movement, so that any easy and succinct characterizations of “Existentialism” as a whole will most likely be wrong, oversimplistic, or misleading. Does that then mean that no useful comparisons can be made between Stoicism and Existentialism? That points of similarity, key differences, or even potential overlaps and productive ways to bring Stoicism and Existentialism together will be simply illusory or erroneous? That won’t be the case, provided we have two bases for engaging in these. First, as with any other philosophical movement, school, or tradition, in order to compare or combine two of them well, one has to have developed a sufficient level of understanding of both of them (or at least rely upon well-researched sources that provide one with that understanding). Second, specifically with Existentialism, since it is a much looser movement, encompassing an entire range of deep thinkers, generalizations about the “Existentialist” position will require qualification in some cases. That too will require some familiarity, if not every major Existentialist thinker, at least a representative proportion of them.

So with all that in mind, what features can we say Stoicism and Existentialism share in common, at least to some extent, enough to perhaps make the prospect of placing them into conversation with each other an interesting or attractive one? There are quite a few, but here I’ll just mention three of them.

Both Existentialism and Stoicism are philosophies that, while they do possess their own technical jargon, and do articulate themselves through rigorous thought, are not originally or primarily academic approaches. When I introduce Existentialism to students, I stress to them that what we see in the movement is a rejection of the idea that there’s some privileged position that one should philosophize from, for example one of social status, wealth or power, or an affiliation with elite academic institutions. One’s daily life and experience, no matter where or who one is, is just as good a place to engage in reflection from as any other. Something similar can be discerned at the core of Stoicism. I don’t want to give the suggestion that one can bypass attentively reading Stoic authors and to just focus on practice (a mistake some would-be “Stoics” fall into), but what we can say is that Stoicism is an eminently portable philosophy. Anyone who wants to can study, practice, reflect upon, and grow in it. As Seneca or Musonius would both say from their own experience, you can practice it just as well exiled to a tiny, barren island as you can at the very heart of the empire.

Another interesting possible comparison can be drawn between the two on the matter of society, its conventions, and the mistaken assumptions we pick up from it, often without even realizing it. Stoicism stresses the social nature of human beings, the importance of fulfilling our social roles, and understanding ourselves as parts of greater wholes, which could suggest it would advocate conforming to dominant social norms and cultural expectations. It just requires a little reading around in classic Stoic texts to be disabused of that misconception. What we might call the standard Stoic point of view is that at any given time, in practically any society or culture, most people have deeply mistaken conceptions of what matters in life, what they ought to care about and pursue, and whose points of view they ought to consider or follow. Being the proverbial “purple thread” as Epictetus suggests (1.2) involves departing from widely prevalent social norms. Among the Existentialists, we can also find a deep-running distrust of ideas derived from what “everyone thinks”. Whether it be Kierkegaard rejecting but also making fun of the Hegelianism and Christianity of his time and place, Rilke criticizing overreliance on and the sterility of social conventions, or Fanon charting a complicated path past an alienating colonial society, there would seem to be similarities to the Stoics on this issue.

A third important similarity, one which perhaps to some seems so obvious as to suggest the likely fruitfulness of bringing Stoicism and Existentialism together, is the emphases both of them place on human freedom, responsibility for oneself, and the importance of one’s choices. There are, of course, difficulties that arise out of Stoic philosophy, given their commitment, when it comes to freedom of choice or of the will, to some sort of compatibilism, that is, a position combining a commitment to a deterministic universe along with an insistence on the reality of human freedom, but I’m going to just wave those aside in this piece. The Stoics do talk a lot about freedom, and they don’t just praise it as something good. Their discussions of it make it clear that people often have quite mixed-up conceptions of the freedom they and others possess. There are respects in which we are less free than we think we are, and others in which we are more free than we assume, and those latter are particularly important. We form the complex of who we are by the use of that freedom over time, with the choices and commitments that we make, bearing responsibility for the people we make ourselves, the degree to which we develop the human nature we are endowed with, the ways we are connected with others in ongoing relationships. To anyone who has read much Existentialist philosophy or literature, all of that could sound just as Existentialist as it does Stoic, and for good reason, since it gets thematized and analyzed by Existentialists in so many different and complementary ways.

After thinking briefly about these genuine and important similarities between Stoicism and Existentialism, it is worth reconsidering each of those three in terms of how Stoics and Existentialists differ from each other. It is true that both Stoicism and Existentialism hold that any given person can take their current situation as a place to think about, learn, and practice philosophy productively. One key aspect to this in classical Stoicism is that we all share in a same and common human nature, central features of which can be elaborated rationally, as they are in depth and detail in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, among others. Do Existentialists in general believe in such a shared human nature? There’s considerable variance among its key authors, some denying that altogether but others seeming to hold some room open for it. Even those who do have a conception of something in us that is the same, for example when Rilke who highlights the importance of developing spaces of solitude within oneself tells us in Letters To A Young Poet that there is ultimately only one solitude, there isn’t an appeal to a robust concept like human nature as the Stoics, or other ancient philosophers, articulate it.

A term, concept, and experience very prevalent in Existentialist literature, sometimes of course called by different names, is that of the alienation of the human subject. This can be the case within depictions of familial relationships as well as at the same time social and economic structures, as we see Gregor Samsa experience in Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis.” Or it can be something global as we see in Camus’ analysis of the absurd, where he sets out many avenues for our awareness of it breaking into consciousness, and outlines a triadic structure to the absurd. The Existentialist human subject not only is aware of the falsity, wrongness, absurdity, or pointlessness of predominant social meanings and mores. They have to fight a way forward to something genuinely valuable, meaningful, true. Often that will not be something quite as positive as the classic Stoic conception of a fully developed human nature, within a meaningful cosmos, a community of divine beings and human beings, to cite a commonly used metaphor.

Despite the similarities pointed out earlier, there are important differences between Existentialist and Stoic conceptions of freedom, choice, and responsibility. Some Existentialist thinkers explicitly reject the conception of the universe as inherently deterministic, perhaps opening up more scope for human freedom than classical Stoics do. That could be a bit contestable, however, so let’s shift focus to the aspect of responsibility for the use of freedom, the choices and commitments one makes. Here a deep disagreement becomes quite evident. It isn’t that there’s only one way to make oneself into, to choose and act as, a Stoic. However, we can say that, despite their differences on some points, pretty much all of the classical Stoics, and (I would say) anyone whose present-day “Stoicism” is informed by ongoing conversations with the classical Stoics, are going to hold to a quite robustly developed ethics or moral theory. Stoics have a definite conception of human nature and what developing it involves. One absolutely central aspect to this is rooting out some clearly identified vices and replacing those with equally clearly identified virtues, and acting consistently in accordance and motivated by those very virtues. There are some Existentialists who do discuss virtues, for example, Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but the virtues they identify as such, and we might say the very conception of what a virtue is, and how virtues work with or conflict with each other, are deeply at odds with the Stoic understanding of the virtues.

Given what might seem to some readers a trick I just pulled, first setting out promising similarities between Stoicism and Existentialism, and then using those very same topics to point out substantive differences between these two popular philosophical approaches, one might despair about the prospect of bringing them into any fruitful connection or conversation with each other. That, I think, would be a mistake. Given any two robust philosophies as ways of life, you won’t be able to simply combine them into some new amalgam, precisely because they are different from each other, and that means that they differ on some critical points of disagreement. There will inevitably be matters on which you can choose to adopt one perspective or the other perspective, but you can’t hold both. To bring in a different philosophy to illustrate this, the Aristotelian tradition, if you find both Aristotelianism and Stoicism attractive, if you’re being true to both them, there will be some matters where you can’t combine them and you have to pick one or the other (or neither). Whether pleasure and wealth are simply lesser goods than virtue, as Aristotle holds, or whether they are actually indifferents, as Stoics hold, is one prime instance.

Similarly, unless you for some reason wish to impose serious cognitive dissonance upon yourself, you can’t be both entirely a Stoic and entirely an Existentialist (of whatever sort you pick), since there will be some matters on which the differences reveal themselves as so stark that you have to take a stance on one side or the other. Still, if your goal is something more realistic, to take useful ideas where you find them and to incorporate them rationally into a more or less coherent fabric that you can use to understand, live out, and improve your life, nothing prevents you from doing so with some ideas, themes, even practices derived from both movements. Doing so effectively, of course, will require devoting enough study to the classic thinkers and texts to be confident that you are prudently combining elements drawn from both approaches. But that too is something that is up to you, a matter of what choices and commitments you decide to make.

About the Author

Greg Sadler is the former editor of Stoicism Today and a member of the Modern Stoicism team. He teaches traditional academic classes at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and open access online classes at the Study With Sadler Academy, where his Existentialist Philosophy and Literature class is currently enrolling. His YouTube channel provides hundreds of videos on both Stoicism and Existentialism, and you can find additional writings on both schools in his Substack.

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