The Pain and the Passion
A Research Note on Ayn Rand and the Stoics
After my recent call for support for my book, I got a lot of people signing up as free subscribers on this list. Thanks for coming aboard, and I’m glad you’ll be following my progress—but I’ll warn you that I’m putting a pretty strict paywall on these posts, so you won’t get more than a short teaser. If you want to see more of the substance of what I’m working on, please consider becoming a paying subscriber.
This is a research note covering some philosophical background for my book. I’m not sure how much of this will make it directly into the book, and it’s a little out of order from what I’m currently working on, since it pertains mostly to what I’m covering in the second half (and most of it will probably be more relevant to a future book). It’s also a bit longer than I expected, but as you’ll see, there’s a lot to chew on.
I’m writing this now because I recently read a helpful overview of the Stoics and wanted to get my thoughts down while it’s all still fresh in my mind. The book is The Practicing Stoic, by Ward Farnsworth. It is not very satisfying from a purely scholarly perspective, because it is not a systematic presentation of the Stoics’ whole philosophy. It focuses on what you might call their practical moral and psychological advice, but it mostly skips the underlying metaphysics. (I’ll discuss why that’s important in a moment.) Yet the topics it does deal with are what I am most interested in for my present purpose. The book is a good overview, organized thematically with quotations from a range of Stoics, though concentrated on the later Romans, particularly Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, accompanied by brief explanations from Farnsworth. While it is not rigorously systematic, it does a good job of giving an overview of the Stoic outlook.
(I want to give a thanks here to Patrick Frey, who writes a pretty well-known legal blog under the handle Patterico. When I posted on Twitter asking for recommendations for books on the Stoics, he was so enthusiastic about this one that he generously offered to send me a copy.)
To begin with, why study the Stoics, and particularly in the context of a book about the philosophy of Ayn Rand?
Stoicism is worth understanding because it was the dominant philosophy of the late Classical era, to the point of being expounded by the last of the Five Good Emperors at the height of Rome’s power. I also think that in some specific ways it was a predecessor of Ayn Rand’s theories and possibly an influence on them, particularly in its treatment of emotions and the relationship of reason to emotion.
Yet there are some big differences, particularly one underlying theme that gives seemingly similar ideas a very different meaning in the two philosophies.