My favourite thing and my most challenging thing in Stoicism are one and the same. Virtue, the central aim of Stoic practice, is at once highly clarifying and highly flexible based on situations and circumstances. It’s also nearly impossible to achieve true virtue, and that has felt demoralizing. But the deeper I’ve read into the ways that virtue has evolved over the years, the more I’ve found the original concepts laid out by the Early Stoa to be more helpful and more useful in my practice—which is aretḗ , or excellence.

What is excellence?

The Greeks used the term aretḗ to describe the excellence of anything in the world. Every single thing has a form of excellence that it can achieve based on what it is—or who they are. We can think of aretḗ like we think of potential. The aretḗ of an acorn is to become a thriving oak. The aretḗ of a horse is to have a fine coat and gallop quickly. The aretḗ of your phone is to let you call others. Each of these examples demonstrate that aretḗ is not so much about total perfection as it is about living up to your natural potential. Chrysippus framed the good life around living according to nature—about achieving excellence. But nature has a few different meanings in Stoicism. There’s the universal nature of the cosmos—reality itself. There’s human nature—core traits common to us all. And there’s your individual nature—the affinities and traits that make you who you are.

Universal nature

Universal nature is reality itself. It is the fundamental forces of the cosmos, the laws of physics, and every thing that exists and all things that happen. And, to the Stoics, universal nature is inherently excellent because reality is never wrong. It is always consistent with itself. They challenge us to accept and embrace this natural order for precisely that reason. Reality is never wrong, and you are part of reality. To deny it is to deny a part of yourself.

Moral excellence

The Stoics say that the aretḗ of humanity is moral excellence. By the time it reached the lectures of Epictetus or the journals of Marcus, that had become virtue. Looking at how the Stoics saw cosmic nature as excellent for its consistency, we can see human excellence as striving for moral consistency. We also are not the immutable laws of physics, but we have grown through them, and so I see moral consistency as less about perfect consistency than I see it as a constant growth. There is no perfect oak, but you know a good one when you see it.

Then there’s your individual nature. Maybe you’re naturally more agile than you are clever. Maybe you have a keen interest in the statistics of population demographics while another would talk your ear off about the statistics of professional tennis players. Whatever your natural gifts, talents, and interests, the Stoics would encourage you to cultivate them. And your individual potential is in many ways up to you to decide. If you feel content with yourself, then your potential is achieved.

Accepting reality, being morally consistent

When you embrace reality as it comes, strive to be morally consistent, and cultivate your potential to a point of personal contentment, you’ve lived a good life. That’s it. That’s the roadmap. It’s not achieving moral perfection, becoming a sage. It’s just taking life as it comes and trying to be a little better than the day before.

I’m sure a critic would say I’ve oversimplified Stoic moral philosophy. They may cite katorthōmata—perfect actions done in total harmony with nature. They may cite the arguments that virtue is either perfect or not virtue at all. They may cite Seneca, who explicitly spoke of perfection in the pursuit of virtue:

That which is short of perfection must necessarily be unsteady, at one time progressing, at another slipping or growing faint; and it will surely slip back unless it keeps struggling ahead; for if a man slackens at all in zeal and faithful application, he must retrograde. No one can resume his progress at the point where he left off. - Seneca, Moral Letters, 71, 35

The goal of aretḗ is to strengthen ourselves

I would argue that Seneca is needlessly myopic and austere. If virtue is like a muscle that must be trained, as Epictetus describes it, tell me: what does a perfect muscle look like? You can’t because there is no state at which a muscle is perfect. It can only get stronger or weaker. And I think that the goal of aretḗ is simply to strengthen ourselves in accordance with who we are and our place in the world. If we want practical, I can think of fewer better places to begin.

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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