There’s this image in my head of a quintessential modern day philosopher. It’s of an older man, bearded, wearing a sweater. He lives a small life in a small town, but his mind is filled with these big ideas he’s never done anything about. It’s a reductive image, I know. But the point is that, today, philosophy has this connotation of being all thought and no action. It’s an ivory tower hobby of privileged pontificators. But it wasn’t always this way.

A couple thousand years back, philosophy was for the everyman. It was a symbol of resistance to a cabal of tyrannical elites. The Stoics in Athens would roll their eyes at the Academics; now, the Stoics are mostly academics—and I don’t think the lowercasing does much to save their reputation. Stoicism was always a subversive philosophy that goaded people into moral action for its own sake. Not because it would give them a comfortable life or make them famous. They did the right thing regardless of the consequences. A moral act of failure is preferable to immoral inaction.

When you look at the underpinnings of Stoicism, that fact has always been there. The original Stoics were mostly immigrant outsiders who had sharp critiques of society; they were failed merchants, water carriers, the people society wouldn’t look at twice. They iterated on generations of philosophical schools, developing a cohesive model for living a principlesdriven life of action.

By the time Stoicism found its way to Rome, it was a philosophy for anyone. The Roman Stoics varied from slaves who taught nobles, senators who died standing up to tyrants, a wealthy advisor who tried to teach virtue to a fool clad in silks, and an emperor whose personal journals are considered—to this day—one of the single best sources of leadership, moral action, and introspection in Western literature.

These were all people who lived big lives, driven by big ideas. They did not shrink away from their roles, they defined them. And the difference between them and we modern Stoics? Courage. They had it, we lack it, and I say we need to find it again. Too many of us lack the courage and conviction necessary to fail doing what’s right.

I want to hear Stoics in the streets quoting Seneca to me:

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. - Seneca, Moral Letters, 104

I want to hear Stoics in the halls of government quoting Cicero:

An upright man will never, for a friend's sake, do anything in violation of his country's interests or his oath or his sacred honour, not even if he sits as judge in a friend's case. - Cicereo, De Officiis, Book III, Section 43

I want to hear Stoics in the boardroom quoting Rufus:

If anyone thinks that wealth is the greatest consolation of old age, and that to acquire it is to live without sorrow, he is quite mistaken. - Musonius Rufus, Lectures & Fragments, Lecture XVII

I want to hear Stoics everywhere quoting Marcus:

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 10.16

I’ll paraphrase Rufus when I say that it’s not enough to know virtue; we must act on it. That is what virtue demands of us. It is both knowing and acting. I’d rather know a person who doesn’t know the first thing about virtue, but isn’t afraid of standing up for the right thing, than someone who can school me on the intricacies of Stoic monism and its implications for the moral interconnectedness of the cosmos, but hasn’t fought a day in the life for the things they say they believe in. Philosophy is not a hobby or a study of fascination; it’s a way to live your life with purpose and principle.

To quote the wisest of them all:

Do, or do not. There is no try. - Jedi Grand Master Yoda

John Kuna is a Stoic prokopton, writer, and dog lover. He likes digging deep into Stoic theory, but also writing accessible and inspiring Stoic content.

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