If You're Not A Sage, You're Not a Stoic

Stoicism has always had an air of high specificity around it

Specificity of language plays, I feel, the largest role in contemporary misunderstandings of Stoicism. The ancient Stoics were a very thoughtful and nuanced bunch, and I think this must needs extend to our self-applied moniker of “Stoic”.

In the trades (here in the U.S. anyway) there are three levels of mastery — let’s take the trade of Electrician as a for instance:

First you are an Electrician’s apprentice. After some years as an apprentice you can advance to Journeyman Electrician, where you work under a “Master” Electrician but are generally trusted to do much of your work without direct supervision.

Finally, after many years of practice and experience, you’ve learned enough (and practiced enough) to become a Master Electrician. You are now the epitome of electrical expertise, you’re the penultimate — in Stoic terms, you are a Sage.

If you, as an Electrician’s apprentice, called yourself an Electrician, would you be telling the truth? Certainly not. Not anymore than a student driver, while driving on a test course under the supervision of a driving instructor, could call themselves a driver. Apprentices are very clearly students, early students at that, and are not already the thing they are only just learning to become.

How about as Journeyman, though? If you called yourself an Electrician, when you were only a Journeyman Electrician, would you be lying? This seems like a grey area, doesn’t it? You’re certainly knowledgeable, you know how to install light switches and power receptacles without help, you’ve even got one of those pen testers clipped to your shirt! Certainly you are an Electrician… right?

I would say no.

A Master Electrician could call themselves an Electrician and, in so doing, would leave out no pertinent information re: competency caveats. If I tell you I’m an Electrician, and you don’t know I’m a Master Electrician, well, the only thing I’ve done, in the worst case, is undersold my skillset. On the other hand, if I told you that I was an Electrician — full stop — and left out the Apprentice part or the Journeyman part, I would be withholding very relevant caveats from you. You, not knowing the finer details of the trade, might think there was no difference between a Journeyman and a Master — because you wouldn’t even know the distinction existed.

If Master is to Sage as Journeyman is to Prokoptôn, I think the same is true of Stoics. We have a responsibility as non-Sages to clarify this. You could argue our non-Sage status was implied, given the rarity of Sages, but I think the technicality matters. I think it matters for two reasons:

1. We should want to be forthright with others (I am a student, not a master)

2. We should want to be forthright with ourselves (I have much more work to do)

We are Stoic Prokoptôn, not “Stoics” — the only person who can call themselves a Stoic, full-stop, is the Sage.

That’s my opinion. What is yours?