Conservative-Oriented Stoicism: What It Is and Why It Matters

 

Conservative-Oriented Stoicism: What It Is and Why It Matters

The word "Stoicism" has become fashionable. Bookstores carry titles promising that Marcus Aurelius will help you optimize your morning routine. Social media accounts post daily Epictetus quotations between advertisements for productivity apps. Corporate wellness programs have discovered that "Stoic resilience" makes a useful theme for seminars. Stoicism, it seems, has arrived.

But which Stoicism? That question matters more than it might initially appear. The Stoicism being packaged and sold in the contemporary marketplace of ideas is, in most cases, a carefully edited version — one that has been stripped of its most demanding metaphysical commitments, softened into a therapeutic technique, and made palatable to audiences who would recoil from what classical Stoicism actually teaches. What remains after this editing process is not Stoicism. It is, at best, a mood.

Conservative-oriented Stoicism begins with the refusal to accept that bargain.

What "Conservative" Means Here

The term "conservative" in this context does not refer primarily to political affiliation, though there are connections worth exploring. It refers, first and foremost, to a philosophical disposition: the commitment to preserving what is true and well-grounded against the pressures of intellectual fashion. A conservative-oriented Stoic holds that the classical tradition got important things right — things that the contemporary academic mainstream has abandoned not because better arguments emerged, but because the cultural climate changed.

This is a substantive philosophical claim, not a sentimental attachment to the past. The conservative-oriented Stoic can give reasons for each classical commitment. The defense is rational, not merely traditionalist. But the starting orientation is one of fidelity: we inherit a coherent framework built by careful thinkers over centuries, and we should not discard it casually.

The Metaphysical Core

Classical Stoicism is, before it is anything else, a metaphysical system. It holds that the cosmos is rationally ordered — that logos, reason, pervades reality and is accessible to human intelligence. Human beings are not merely biological organisms shaped by evolutionary pressures and social conditioning. They are rational agents capable of genuine understanding, genuine choice, and genuine virtue.

This metaphysical picture has several components that the contemporary academic mainstream has largely rejected, and that conservative-oriented Stoicism defends. The first is substance dualism — the recognition that mind and body are genuinely distinct. The Stoics held that the rational soul (the hegemonikon, the ruling faculty) is not reducible to the physical body, even though it interacts with it. This position has been out of fashion since the rise of eliminative materialism and functionalist accounts of mind, but the arguments for it remain powerful and have never been decisively refuted. The dismissal of dualism has been more sociological than philosophical.

The second is libertarian free will — the view that human beings are genuine originators of their choices, not merely the last link in a causal chain stretching back before their birth. The Stoics worked hard on this problem. Their analysis of synkatathesis (assent) was specifically designed to preserve rational agency against the determinism of their own physics. Conservative-oriented Stoicism takes this problem seriously and refuses the fashionable deflationary move of redefining "freedom" as compatibility with determinism.

The third is moral realism — the position that there are genuine moral facts, that some actions really are virtuous and others vicious, and that these facts are not created by human agreement, cultural convention, or individual preference. For the Stoics, moral knowledge is possible because moral reality is rational and accessible to reason. This stands in direct opposition to the emotivism, relativism, and subjectivism that dominate contemporary ethical theory in the academy.

The fourth and fifth commitments — ethical intuitionism and the correspondence theory of truth — are closely related. Intuitionism holds that we have genuine rational access to moral truths, not merely emotional reactions that we project onto the world. The correspondence theory holds that truth consists in propositions accurately representing reality, not in coherence, pragmatic utility, or social consensus. Both positions have been under sustained attack from pragmatist, postmodern, and constructivist quarters. Conservative-oriented Stoicism defends both.

Finally, foundationalism — the view that knowledge rests on a structure of basic justified beliefs rather than floating in a web of mutual coherence — provides the epistemological architecture. Without foundationalism, the entire Stoic project of rational self-governance collapses into the kind of endless interpretive regress that postmodern philosophy celebrates as liberation and classical philosophy recognized as confusion.

Why These Commitments Are Connected

It is worth pausing to notice that these six commitments form a coherent package. They are not independently chosen positions that happen to co-occur in classical Stoicism. They are mutually supporting elements of a unified worldview.

Consider: if there is no libertarian free will, then the Stoic doctrine that virtue is entirely within our power becomes incoherent. If moral realism is false, then the Stoic insistence that virtue is the only genuine good degenerates into mere personal preference. If the correspondence theory of truth is abandoned, then the Stoic claim that the sage possesses genuine knowledge becomes empty. If foundationalism fails, then the chain of rational justification the Stoics rely on has no place to stop. The commitments stand or fall together. You cannot selectively extract the Stoic emphasis on equanimity and discard the metaphysics without losing the reasons equanimity is rationally warranted rather than merely psychologically useful.

This is precisely what popular Stoicism has done — and it is why popular Stoicism, despite its appeal, lacks philosophical seriousness.

The Conservative Intellectual Context

Conservative-oriented Stoicism does not exist in isolation. It belongs to a broader intellectual tradition that includes natural law theory, classical theism, and realist epistemology — traditions that have been marginalized in the contemporary academy but that represent accumulated philosophical wisdom of the first order.

The natural law tradition, developed most fully within Catholic philosophy and deeply indebted to Stoic sources, holds that human beings have a determinate nature discoverable by reason, and that ethics consists in living in accordance with that nature. The Stoic concept of kata phusin — life according to nature — is the original formulation of this insight. Its conservative credentials are impeccable: it grounds morality in something objective and stable, resists the reduction of ethics to preference satisfaction, and provides a rational basis for criticizing social arrangements that violate human nature regardless of whether those arrangements have majority support.

For those of us who came to Stoicism through a Catholic philosophical education — through Aquinas, through the natural law tradition, through the synthesis of Greek rationalism and Christian theology — conservative-oriented Stoicism feels less like a discovery than a homecoming. The metaphysical commitments are familiar. The rational structure is familiar. What Stoicism adds is a rigorous practical discipline for actually living the philosophical life.

Against Progressive Stoicism

The contrast with what might be called "progressive Stoicism" is instructive. Progressive Stoicism — the kind that dominates popular discourse and increasingly appears in academic interpretations — tends to emphasize Stoicism's cosmopolitanism and its concern for all rational beings, while de-emphasizing or explaining away its metaphysical realism, its insistence on objective virtue, and its hierarchical account of goods. The result is a Stoicism that can be recruited for social justice causes, therapeutic self-improvement, and corporate mindfulness programs with equal ease.

This is not an accident. The selective reading is motivated. If you accept moral realism, you are committed to the view that some ways of living are genuinely better than others — not merely preferred by some people, not merely the product of cultural conditioning, but actually, objectively better. That is a demanding and uncomfortable conclusion. It is much easier to retain Stoic language about "focusing on what you can control" while dropping the metaphysical framework that explains why rational self-governance is not merely strategically useful but morally required.

Conservative-oriented Stoicism refuses this comfort. The demanding conclusion is not a problem to be managed. It is the point.

The Practical Dimension

None of this means conservative-oriented Stoicism is merely theoretical. On the contrary, the entire point of the philosophical system is practice — the daily work of aligning one's judgments, desires, and actions with reason. The Stoics called this askesis: disciplined training of the rational faculty.

But the practice is only coherent against the metaphysical background. When you practice prosoche — attention to your ruling faculty — you are not merely performing a mindfulness exercise. You are exercising a genuinely free rational agent's capacity to govern itself in accordance with objective moral reality. That is a philosophically loaded activity. Its significance depends entirely on the metaphysics being true.

This is why conservative-oriented Stoicism insists on the whole system. The practice without the metaphysics is, in the end, just a coping mechanism. The metaphysics without the practice is just a theory. Together, they constitute a philosophy: a rational way of life grounded in a true account of human nature and the cosmos.

Conclusion

Conservative-oriented Stoicism is not nostalgia. It is not the preference of people who dislike change. It is the recognition that classical Stoicism — in its full metaphysical rigor, with all six of its foundational commitments intact — provides something that the fashionable alternatives cannot: a rationally grounded, internally coherent, practically demanding account of what it means to live well as a human being.

The contemporary drift away from realism, from free will, from moral objectivity, from correspondence truth — this drift has not been driven by better arguments. It has been driven by cultural and institutional pressures that have nothing to do with philosophical merit. Conservative-oriented Stoicism names that drift for what it is, holds its ground against it, and continues the work that the ancient Stoics began: the work of thinking clearly, living well, and telling the truth about both.

That is a project worth defending. It is, in the end, what Stoic News exists to do.