Is It Stoic To Be Healthy?

I’m 6’1” and, last I weighed in, I’m just over 300lbs. I’m heavy, I’m broad, I’m tall, and, like many men of Scottish descent, so says my father, I’m built like a barrel (as wide in the chest as I am in the hips). I’m “blood” healthy, believe it or not (perfect BP, low cholesterol, all the right levels of all the right things), quite healthy in fact, but I’m not in great shape and I’m carrying probably 100lbs of excess weight.

I’m leading with that information because the point of this edition is, very likely, for a good many of you, going to seem to be “you’re not behaving like a serious Prokoptôn.”

And, in regards to our health, very few of us are… and I wanted to point out that I’m very much not an exception to that.

There’s one other thing I want to be sure I make clear before continuing as well: while taking care of our bodies (health) is almost always morally appropriate (and not taking care of them is almost always morally inappropriate), it is always the case that such care will be contextually related to our ability to provide it. Or, more plainly: sometimes we are limited in what we can choose by the externals present in our lives. A paraplegic taking care of their body (health) will look different than an Olympian doing the same.

The most important bit of this prefacing is that the morally judgement of our approach to health is not linked to its outcome… it’s linked to the moral reasoning which guided our approach. This is Stoicism, the quality of our character can only be reflected in the things which we have the power to choose. We cannot choose outcomes.

An appropriate approach toward health starts with roles.

The number one rule about roles is that you cannot have a role that conflicts with another role. If you do, one of those roles (or both of them) is inappropriate for you to be assuming.

For example: if striving to become as physically fit as Tony Horton of the P90X fitness program requires a level of commitment and involvement which conflicts with your duties in your role as a parent, then your conceptualization of the health portion of the “rational human being” role isn’t appropriate.

Your roles, once assumed or assigned, must be fulfilled in a balanced manner. Otherwise, they will work against one another.

Here’s another example, a more realistic one perhaps:

Imagine a twenty-year-old, male, student going to university for a degree in Marine Biology. At this age, our student has only a few roles:

1. Student. He must fill the role of student appropriately. He must study, attend class, take notes, try his best to pass exams, put forth a contextually appropriate effort toward this role.

2. Older brother to a toddler sister & son to a mother and father. He must perform some supportive duties to his family (and we’ll assume his family has burdened him with duties appropriately; that their expectations are not unjust). One of these duties is to babysit his sister after class every day for a few hours until his parents get home from work.

3. Partner to a significant other. Our student has a girlfriend. She’s extremely just and fair, and she understands his workload and goals in life. She only wants to go on a date once a week, on Saturday nights, to dinner, a movie, or a local attraction like a nature trail or a museum. To be a just partner, he must act appropriately in that capacity.

4. Friend. David has a close-knit group of friends. They like to play video games online, and meetup for local events from time to time. To be a just friend, he must be a participating member of his friend group.

5. Human being and Prokoptôntes. As a human being progressing toward virtue (or working to do so), David must do all the “Stoic things.” He knows that the Circles of Concern are a two-way street of interconnected relationships, and that the mind (the self) is central to sussing out how to navigate these relationships appropriately. He recognizes that choices related to his physical and mental health are reflective of his moral character.

Health is an indifferent — choices are not. Anyone, in any state of health, has the theoretical potential to become morally perfect because Virtue is not a measure of health… it is a measure of moral knowledge.

If Dave were morbidly obese because of some sort of glandular or hormonal issue that made it impossible for him to lose weight, but he still made whatever effort he could toward being contextually (and thus appropriately) healthful, he’d not be vicious on account of his weight or fitness level.

It is absolutely possible for a person to reason (and reason well) that their body’s physical health is not appropriate for them to pay any special mind to. I don’t want to delve into specific scenarios because I think you already understand my point, but it is the case: being overweight, or otherwise “unhealthy”, does not necessarily make someone vicious (in the Stoic sense of the word “vicious”).

Given David’s roles, what might a contextually appropriate approach to health look like for him?

In David’s case, we can be sure that placing too much emphasis (and thus effort) on physical health and fitness (becoming a so-called “gym rat”) would certainly work against his other duties. Still, David might reason that, for him, the appropriate choice is to put some kind of special effort toward his physical health.

He reasons that on Tuesday and Thursday mornings he can spend 40 minutes at the gym and, on Wednesday and Friday afternoons he can bike to and from university (from his home). David also feels he could eat better, so he decides to start incorporating more vegetables and home-cooked meals into his daily diet.

David cannot run an Iron Man. David is not a strong contender for American Ninja Warrior. David cannot keep up with Tony Horton, and he almost always skips “leg day.” Tony isn’t a Spartan and isn’t interested in becoming one because he hasn’t assumed (or been assigned) any roles that would make such high degrees of fitness contextually and morally appropriate. In fact, if he decided to become a Ninja Warrior anyway, and this detracted from his other duties, such a choice would be contextually and morally inappropriate.

A quick word on “Stoic” masculinity influencers

There are a lot of so-called “Stoicism influencers” who frequently (obnoxiously frequently) associate Stoicism with masculinity… and then associate masculinity with the twin notions of “alpha male-ism” and “lone wolf-ary” — insisting that real men are warriors with hard bodies, killer instincts, and tendencies toward ascetic living from frivolous silly things like video games, women, comic books, women, fatty foods, women, “gay stuff”, and… WOMEN.

You, hopefully, recognize that I’m mocking this warped idea of masculinity — one that frequently demonizes women (treating them like evil temptresses who “ruin” “good men” with their tricky feminine wiles) and other men who do not meet the levels of physicality and aggression required by its creators.

Stoicism isn’t masculinity… I hope that much was known to you before reading this edition… but it also isn’t anything physical at all. Stoicism is about logically understanding reality for the sake of justly reasoning toward moral choices. For some people that will look like being bodybuilders, Ninja Warriors, or Olympians — for most people, though, it will not (and likely cannot).

Back to David: if we lack intellectual honesty, we can get ourselves into trouble

Our thought experiment with David wrapped up with a nice little bow on it, but that’s because I made it easy. Real life isn’t as easy as dreamed-up-thought-exercise-life, though, is it?

‘Course it isn’t.

The truth is that most of us are not being intellectually honest with ourselves when we reason toward what is a contextually appropriate fulfillment of our roles as human beings. This is broadly true, of course, but it is especially true when it comes to the portion of that role which concerns our physical and mental health.

Most of us aren’t exercising at all.

Most of us aren’t protecting our mental health at all.

Most of us make more detrimental choices concerning our nutrition and health than we do beneficial ones.

Most of us struggle immensely, day-to-day, not to create situations for ourselves, through our own poor reasoning, which actively work against our likelihood of making progress toward the thing we swear up and down we’re trying to achieve.

Very few of us practice what we preach. Most of us preach the ideal while possessing a resolve too weak to live up to it.

Not on everything, maybe not even on most things, but for a few things certainly. Especially physical and mental health.

So what’s the point? What’s the takeaway from this edition?

First: it is morally appropriate to choose to do what we can do to be healthy (both mentally and physically).

Second: that if it is morally appropriate to choose to do what we can do to be healthy, then it is, in a word, “Stoic” to choose to do what we can to be healthy.

Third: that if we are not choosing to do what we can do to be healthy, we are choosing to act viciously as Stoics — which works against our progression, which is un-Stoic.

Lastly: that we must be very careful in assessing what is appropriate with regards to our health. We must not lie to ourselves about whether our present degree of effort is the appropriate degree of effort given our roles. We can’t say things like, “I don’t have time to take a walk,” or “I can’t go to the gym twice a week,” or “I can’t ride my bike a few miles a week,” when, in fact, we could do all of those things, we’re just using the Stoic concept of indifferents to excuse ourselves from choosing better.

Whether we’re eating like gluttons or starving ourselves, getting fat or becoming emaciated, neglecting our family to pump iron at the gym, or foregoing all physical exercise so we never have to leave the house, there’s something vicious about our choices when these behaviors are driven by choices and not external forces.

As a Stoic Prokoptôn, if you’re not choosing to put a contextually appropriate amount of effort into your health… you’re behaving viciously. So being healthy isn’t Stoic, but choosing to move toward appropriate health is.

Thanks for reading.

¹ Almost always because, sometimes, it would be appropriate to ignore our health for the sake of someone else. For example: if we only had one piece of bread to eat, and we had to choose to feed our starving child or ourselves, one could reason that prioritizing their child (given their role as parent) over themselves would be appropriate.

² Prokoptôntes — this is actually the singular of the plural Prokoptôn. It’s a bit odd because it’s Ancient Greek, but Prokoptôn is plural the same way the word “sheep” is plural… it’s just that we’ve gotten used to using Prokoptôn as if it were singular.