Sagehood is individualised, but not individualistic

Following a post I made earlier this week about what a person's duties would look like if they were a sage, I wanted to address something that seems to be less well understood than it should be across the "Stoic diaspora."

Primarily: if I'm a sage, and someone else is a sage, our responses to the exact same external inputs are very unlikely to be identical.

In contemporary Stoic practice, I often hear people asking for "the Stoic position on X" or "the Stoic way to Y." That betrays a deep misunderstanding of individual practice within this philosophy.

I'll start by conceding that, yes, some scenarios will frequently lead to the same choice. For example, whether someone is a wealthy Black woman or a poor white man, the appropriate response to finding a lost wallet is very likely to be the same. Personal circumstances probably won't change what duty requires in that case.

But what about the Stoic response to the war in a particular country? To the atrocities of a political leader? To political turmoil more generally? Here, two sages with different lives, roles, and responsibilities would almost certainly exercise their duties differently.

Every Stoic has a duty to the cosmopolis and its citizens, but a soldier living in the country where a war is taking place will fulfil that duty very differently from an expatriate of that same country working as a university professor 6,000 miles away. There is no single Stoic response to war. There is only an individual's response to war, and the question of whether that response is Stoic given their circumstances, roles, and duties.

When I ask coaching clients, or the members of my free community, to reflect on what sagehood looks like for them, I don't want an abstract discussion about "a" sage or "the" sage. I don't want them to tell me what they think a sage would do. I want them to tell me what they believe they would do if they were a sage.

Stoicism is individualised, but it is not individualistic. And there are very few absolutes within it—beyond the absolute that Virtue is the only true good. Even then, that claim is absolute only within the framework of Stoicism itself.