Accordance with Nature

The ultimate goal of life was agreed by all ancient schools of philosophy to be Eudaimonia.

This goal of life – Eudaimonia – is a bit tricky to translate. Think of it as the supreme happiness or fulfilment attainable by human beings. The Good Life – a flourishing, lofty, and smoothly flowing life.

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How to live to get to the Good Life?

... how the Stoics summed up their goal of life:

‘Living in agreement with nature.’

This abstract maxim is the best-known definition of the Stoic goal of life. (The Stoics often expressed their philosophy in such short statements and used them as daily reminders.)

So ‘living in agreement with nature’ was a central slogan of Stoicism, but it requires further explanation as it begs the question, “What exactly does it mean?”

Let’s hear out one of the principal leaders, Epictetus:

“For what is Man? A rational animal, subject to death. At once we ask, from what does the rational element distinguish us? From wild beasts. And from what else? From sheep and the like. Look to it then that you do nothing like a wild beast, else you destroy the Man in you and fail to fulfil his promise. See that you do not act like a sheep, or else again the Man in you perishes. You ask how we act like sheep? When we consult the belly, or our passions, when our actions are random or dirty or inconsiderate, are we not falling away to the state of sheep? What do we destroy? The faculty of reason. When our actions are combative, mischievous, angry, and rude, do we not fall away and become wild beasts?" The human being is a rational animal. That’s what separates us from sheep and beasts. We are different from all other species on the planet Earth, both for better and worse. The point of interest is not that we have smaller teeth, different skin, or weaker bones, but our social and mental abilities – the very abilities that let me write this article you care to read.

What distinguishes humans from all other species is our capacity for rationality. We should not behave like sheep or beasts because doing so negates our humanity, the most precious and natural thing we have.

‘Living in agreement with nature’ is about behaving rationally like a human instead of randomly (and out of passion) like a beast. In other words, we should always apply our natural ability ‘reason’ in all of our actions. If we apply reason we live in agreement with nature, because we act like humans are meant to act.

Humans are meant to apply reason and act like humans, not like animals.

So far so good. But this is very abstract and difficult to grasp. So to better understand how this ‘applying reason’ looks like in the real world, let’s explore another Stoic maxim they used to express their goal of life: ‘living in accord with virtue.’

That human beings are special in the animal world was perfectly clear to the ancients. Aristotle, for one, famously said that we are the rational animal - meaning not that we always behave rationally, since even a cursory observation proves that not to be the case, but rather that we are capable of rationality. He also thought that we are political animals, meaning not that we engage in political campaigns or discourse (although of course we do that as well), but that we live and, more importantly, thrive in a polis - a community of other human beings. From Aristotle's insight that we are by nature both social and reasoning, the Stoics derived the notion that [the function of] human life is about the application of reason to social living. The difference between Aristotle and the Stoics may seem subtle, but it is crucial: Atistotle thought that contemplation is the highest purpose of human life, because or unique function in the animal worls is our ability to think. As you might imagine, this purpose might make for a rather insular existence, so the Stoics shifted the emphasis very much toward the social, essentially arguing that the point of life for human beings is to use reason to build the best society that is humanly possibly to build.

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[In relation to the "For what is Man..." quote above] Epictetus is affirming that what distinguishes humankind from all other species is our capacity for rationality and arguing for an ethical precept as a result: we ought not to behave like beasts or sheep because doing so negates our very humanity, presumably the most precious (and natural!) thing we have...

...Stoics held a "developmental" theory of ethical concern, according to which we begin life guided only by instinct (not reason), and those instincts favor both self-regard and regard for the peple with whom we interact daily... Gradually, we are taught to expand our concern as we approach the age of reason - rough speaking, when we are six- to eight-year-old children. At that point, we begin to make clearer distinctions between our thoughts and our actions and to have a better grasp of the world and of our place in it. From this point on, our instincts are enhanced, and sometimes even corrected, by a combinations of self-reflection and experience - that is, by both rationalist and empiricist processes. The Stoics thought that the more we mature psychologically and intellectually the more the balance should shift away from our insticts and toward the deployment of (empirically informed) reasoning. During our conversation, Epictetus explained to me that it is "the nature of the rational animal, that he can attain nothing good for himself, unless he contributes some service to the community. So it turns out that to do everything for his own sake is not unsocial." That brought us back to human nature: Epictetus was telling me that a fundamental aspect of being human is that we are social, not just in the sense that we like the company of others, but in the deeper sense that we couldn't really exist without the help of others; the implication is that when we do things for the good of the polity, we are actually (perhaps indirectly) benefiting ourselves.

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The Stoics perfected this idea of ethical development and called it oikeiôsis, which is often translated as "familiarization with" or "appropriation of" other people's concerns as if they were our own. This led them ... to coin and use a word that is still crucial to our modern vocabulary: cosmopolitanism, which literally means "being a citizen of the world."...