Day 26 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
Good philosophy withstands scrutiny.
If it doesn’t, it’s a closed system that protects itself from examination, and is therefore, not good philosophy.
The Stoics themselves were clear on this: follow the argument where it leads.
So let’s follow it somewhere the Stoics didn’t always go.
Stoicism has real limitations.
Acknowledging them honestly makes the parts that work more credible, not less.
The first and most serious is its relationship with passivity.
The dichotomy of control, the foundational Stoic distinction between what is yours and what isn’t, is one of the most useful ideas in the tradition.
It’s also susceptible to a particular misuse: the rationalisation of inaction.
“I can’t control the outcome, so the outcome doesn’t matter” is a corruption of the Stoic teaching, one that’s easy to slide into.
When “accept what you can’t control” becomes “don’t bother fighting systemic injustice because systems are outside your control,” the philosophy has been turned against itself.
The Stoics didn’t teach quietism.
Marcus Aurelius governed an empire.
Epictetus taught resistance to oppression.
Seneca wrote political essays.
The framework can be used, by people who want an intellectual justification for staying comfortable, to do exactly that.
For vegans, this matters directly.
The individual focus of Stoicism, your choices, your inner life, your virtue, can be weaponised against systemic thinking.
“Just focus on your own plate” is a Stoic-sounding response to questions about collective action and political change.
It’s not a Stoic response.
The Stoics believed in the common good and in the obligation to contribute to it.
Marcus didn’t just govern his own inner life, he tried to govern well.
The individual and the systemic are not in opposition in Stoic thought, even though the popular version sometimes makes them look like it.
The second limitation is the treatment of emotion.
The Stoics were more nuanced on this than their reputation suggests, as we covered on Day 15, and that nuance gets lost easily.
The practical application can tip into something that looks a lot like emotional suppression.
People who take “don’t be governed by your passions” to mean “don’t feel” tend to develop a managed, performative equanimity that is neither genuine nor sustainable.
The goal was appropriate emotion, not reduced emotion.
The difference is significant, and the tradition doesn’t always make it clear enough.
The third limitation is the most significant for this series: the Stoics said almost nothing useful about animals.
Their logos criterion excluded animals from direct moral consideration, and they didn’t push further.
Whether this was a considered conclusion or an unexamined assumption is worth asking, and this series has asked it.
The gap is real regardless.
The Stoics built an ethical framework powerful enough to challenge slavery, to demand justice for the vulnerable, to extend moral consideration beyond what was socially convenient.
And then they stopped at the species line.
That stopping requires explanation, and the explanations available are not all convincing.
The Stoic ideal of reason is presented as universal; the practical application was considerably less so.
This doesn’t make the ideas wrong.
It does mean reading them with awareness of what the context excluded.
None of these limitations are fatal.
They’re the limitations of a tradition produced by human beings in specific historical circumstances, as all traditions are.
The question is whether the core is sound enough to work with after the limitations are accounted for.
The answer, for this series, has been yes, with eyes open.
A philosophy you can’t criticise is a faith.
A philosophy you can criticise, have criticised, and still find useful, that’s something you’ve actually tested.
Practice for today
Write two genuine criticisms of Stoicism that feel true to you.
Not criticisms you’ve read elsewhere, ones that come from your own engagement with the material over the last twenty-five days.
Then write the strongest Stoic response to each.
Where does the response hold?
Where doesn’t it?
The examination is the practice.
Cameron Blewett has been vegan for thirty years. He spent over a decade living by Stoic principles before he found out that’s what they were called.
He writes about food safety, vegan ethics, and the overlap between Stoic philosophy and plant-based living, work that doesn’t fit the modern secular Stoic mould, and isn’t trying to.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, he also writes at CameronBlewett.blog, greybeardedvegan.blog and foodsafety.ist.