Over the ages, many philosophers have looked to ground ethics in our natural and apparently innate tendency towards self-preservation. It is often termed ‘self-love’: we have a deep need to look after our own interests. An infant cries when its needs are not met; an adult wants what pleases it. This would seem to be a truth so universal that we would call it a natural law, like gravity.
The Stoics fall in with this analysis. They say that all life begins with the need to pursue its own interests: initially survival, then simply getting what you want. They don’t challenge this natural law but go along with it.
They assume that you want to look after yourself and get what you want, and what you want is to be free from suffering. They point out that a philosophical education can give you what you want, and it is the only thing that can give you what you want. The only way that you can protect yourself from suffering is to learn to go along with the world as it is and not how you want it to be. Learn to govern your opinions and desires and aversions by your judgement and you will never suffer again.
Happiness depends only on the proper exercise of judgement, and this is something that you can always control, so you can be happy now or you will never be happy.
But they will further point out that once you begin down this philosophical road, cultivating good judgement, you begin to understand things differently. You start from the motive of self-interest and for that reason look to become wise. But once you gain some wisdom, you come to recognise different motivations, different reasons for or against certain judgements. You come to understand that you ought to think in a particular way, not necessarily because it is in your interests to do so (even though it is), but because it is the right way to think. And once you understand that, then you only want to think rightly: to think well becomes your motivation, because you understand that that is what it is to live well, and that desire can overrule even the will to self-preservation, as Socrates demonstrates when he chooses to suffer the sentence of the court rather than inconsistently go against it.
Second Nature
You begin with the natural desire for self-preservation, self-protection, and self-interest. Learning the lessons of philosophy, you learn to pursue what is in your interest (wisdom, good judgement, self-control) and reject what isn’t (ignorance, faulty inferences, being a slave to your bodily appetites). You decide to choose on the basis of this rule: choose wisdom, reject ignorance; choose to be a philosopher. You choose this repeatedly, until it becomes a habit, a second nature. Finally, this second nature becomes your nature. You are no longer ruled by your ‘first nature’ of self-interest, like a child or an animal; you are ruled by your ‘second nature’ as a philosopher, and you are better off as a result.
But by the point at which you have become a philosopher, it is not done because it makes you better off. It is done because it is right, and you recognise it to be right, and in recognising it as something that is right then you recognise it as something that you ought to do. You have a different understanding of what it means to be ‘better off’: not ‘getting what you want’ but ‘wanting what is right’. And in wanting what is right, you have a healthy soul. Your basic animalistic ‘self-love’ is no longer ruling you: you have freed yourself from that tyrannical ignorance.
You rule yourself, as yourself and by yourself and for yourself, by your own good judgement, according to rules of your own choosing. This is what it means to be truly free, and a powerful lesson of Stoicism is that it is possible to be this truly free even in a materially-determined world of suffering.
You can be happy now or you will never be happy: it is always entirely in your hands.
Read more: Think Well, Live Well: A Free Introduction to Philosophy
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