Thoughts on Chris Gill's Learning to Live Naturally

Part I

Learning to Live Naturally is the most important book on Stoic theory since Lawrence Becker’s A New Stoicism was published in 1998. Not only is Christopher Gill one of the most eminent scholars of the ancient world working today, but he is also a leading figure in the practical philosophical movement we know as Modern Stoicism. He is one of the few people in the world who could write a scholarly monograph that revolutionizes how Stoicism is perceived by both scholars and practitioners. And that is exactly what he has done with his new book, Learning to Live Naturally: Stoic Ethics and Its Modern Significance (2022, Oxford University Press).  

Because this is such a landmark work—and because it’s prohibitively expensive for anyone who doesn’t have “University Library” in their name—I’m going to be publishing a series of explanatory commentaries about its content. This is not really a book review, since it’s a given that Learning to Live Naturally is a work of immense erudition, the highest quality scholarship, and significant practical relevance for Stoics. This book is highly recommended for any committed student of Stoicism who has access to it. I’m merely making some of its main themes available to anyone who can’t buy it but would like to benefit from Chris’s deep knowledge and experience of Stoicism.

As the title suggests, the book revolves around the key Stoic idea that the endgoal of life is living in agreement with nature. But this somewhat cryptic phrase, originating with Zeno or Chrysippus, can be (and has been) interpreted in very different ways ever since the early Stoa. Because we have so little directly-surviving information from the Greek Stoics, scholars have had to piece together and re-interpret all the available remaining evidence about what the ancients actually meant. In addition, as Stoic practitioners, we also have to think about what it all means for us today. How do we apply ancient Stoic ideas to our lives in the 21st century?

This is the task Christopher Gill sets for himself in this work. Along the way, he carefully examines some of the most trenchant debates raging in Stoic scholarship, including the question of whether or not Stoic ethics depends foundationally on Stoic physics. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.) He also tackles the misunderstanding that the ancient Stoics advocated emotional detachment from other people as a means of finding inner peace. And he adds significantly to our understanding of the emotional dimension of Stoic psychology.

But Gill doesn’t dwell only on the past. He devotes Part III to the present, investigating how a reconstructed Stoic ethics can advance contemporary philosophy. This is an incredibly valuable contribution, since today’s virtue ethics philosophers tend to focus only on Aristotle and Aristotelian ethics. The preponderance of Aristotelianism is a serious problem in fields such as moral psychology, where researchers investigate how children grow into ethical adults or such things as the moral trajectory of adults in midlife.

You may know that Aristotle suggested people need to have certain conditions met in childhood in order to become virtuous grown-ups. He held out little hope for anyone who didn’t have those conditions met and wants to improve in their adult life. As you can imagine, if you have a whole field of moral psychologists who believe childhood experience is destiny, things can become very skewed. This mindset tends to minimize the personal agency of adults who recognize their moral education was flawed and would like to re-educate themselves. It’s a gaping hole in the psychology literature, one that Stoicism and Learning to Live Naturally can help fill.

Gill has also done more than almost anyone else to incorporate Stoic ethics into contemporary environmental philosophy. He continues that thread here, offering Stoicism as a coherent ethical system for dealing with our current degraded environmental situation. The idea of living in agreement with nature obviously entails caring for our planet, and this book helps flesh out both the theory and practice of a Stoic environmental ethics.

My greatest interests lie in the first two parts of the book, and we will be looking at them in detail in the Learning to Live Naturally series. Part I, “Living Naturally,” explores the ancient Greek philosophical context into which Stoicism was born and some of its foundational tenets, including Greek ideals of happiness and the often-misunderstood Stoic position on virtue and indifferents. Of great interest to us here is Chapter 3, “Ethics and Nature,” in which Gill carefully dissects the decades-long scholarly debate on the relationship between Stoic ethics and physics. While most of the material in these chapters is not new or astonishing for practicing Stoics, Gill presents an authoritative summary of these foundational concepts.

Part II, “Learning to Live Naturally,” considers the very interesting Stoic theory of oikeiosis, or lifelong development. As Gill argues, the ancient Stoics were extremely innovative in their use of this technical concept, and this is one of the areas in which practical Stoicism continues to shine today. Alongside a helpful analysis of emotions in Stoicism, which supports and extends Margaret Graver’s important 2007 book Stoicism and Emotions, Gill ties together the cohesive psychological framework that makes Stoicism a credible and compelling philosophy for our times.

Overall, I believe Learning to Live Naturally is one of the most significant Stoic works of the 21st century, which is why I want to share it with you in an accessible way. (Although Gill mentions in the introduction that the intended audience is not just academics, the length and depth of the book suggests that it will primarily be of interest to academics or very committed Stoics.) There is only one semi-important point on which I disagree with him (stay tuned to find out what!), but in general this work corresponds well to humanist Stoicism and is an invaluable cornerstone of the Modern Stoicism movement.

Thank you for joining me as I explore Chris Gill’s latest book. See you next time!