Living According to Nature in Stoicism: What It Means

Living according to nature, in Stoicism, means using your reason well and consistently, as one part of an ordered whole. It does not mean following instinct, living outdoors or doing whatever comes easily. The Stoics made the phrase their definition of the goal of a human life, and they held that it says the same thing as "live virtuously".

Find Your Meaning, a set of short lessons on Stoic philosophy, healthy habits and the story of who you are, puts Stoicism first of its three parts, and this phrase sits at the base of that philosophy. The slogan hides four separate matters: who coined it, which "nature" it refers to, how the argument runs, and where it is weakest.

Where the phrase living according to nature comes from

The Stoic school was founded in Athens around 300 BCE by Zeno of Citium. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Stoicism, the later compiler Stobaeus reports that Zeno gave the goal of life in two words, "living in agreement", and that his successor Cleanthes added "with nature". Zeno's short version was about agreement with yourself: one coherent outlook, because a person in conflict with themselves is unhappy.

The record is not tidy. Diogenes Laertius, in book 7 of his Lives of Eminent Philosophers (section 87), credits the longer formula to Zeno himself, in a lost work called On the Nature of Man. Either way, by the time of Chrysippus, who led the school from about 230 to 206 BCE, the full phrase was the school's official statement of the end, the telos.

Three natures inside one phrase

The word "nature" does three jobs here, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on Stoic ethics, by William O. Stephens, separates them.

• The nature of the whole. The Stoics held that the universe is a single ordered system, rational throughout, which they identified with Zeus and with fate. Nothing in it happens by chance.
• The nature of each kind of thing. It is the nature of fire to move upward. It is the nature of a plant to take in food and grow, and of an animal to perceive, move and care for its young.
• Human nature. Humans are not the strongest or fastest animals. What marks them out is reason.

The phrase asks for agreement with all three at once. Diogenes Laertius (section 88) puts it as a life in accordance with your own human nature and with that of the universe, in which you do nothing that the reason running through all things forbids.

The steps from impulse to reason

The argument for the phrase is a sequence, and Diogenes Laertius preserves it in sections 85 and 86.

1. Every animal starts attached to itself. Its first impulse is to keep itself intact. Chrysippus argued this in the first book of his work On Ends, as Diogenes Laertius reports. Pleasure is not the first aim. It is a by-product that arrives after the creature has found what suits it.
2. Plants live by nature without impulse. Nature regulates their growth with no sensation or wanting involved.
3. Animals add impulse. For them, living by nature is following impulse toward what suits their make-up. The Stanford entry reports an example from Seneca: a turtle turned on its back struggles to right itself, with no training, because it perceives that the position is bad for it.
4. Humans add reason. Children begin as the animals do. Reason arrives later and takes charge of impulse, shaping it with skill. From that point the natural life for a human is the life governed by reason.

The fourth step is the one that matters. The natural life depends on the kind of creature you are, and it changes when the creature changes. An adult who lives by raw impulse is living according to a nature they no longer have.

Why the Stoics said nature and virtue are one thing

If the natural life for a human is the life of reason, then the best human life is reason in its best condition. The Stoics called that condition virtue. The Stanford entry describes virtue as the perfected state of human reason, a mind made consistent across a whole life, and notes that the Stoics treated each virtue as a form of knowledge.

This is how Diogenes Laertius can say in one sentence (section 87) that the life in agreement with nature is the same as the virtuous life. Chrysippus added the link to the whole: living virtuously is living by experience of how nature actually goes, because each person's nature is a part of the nature of the universe. A later head of the school, Diogenes of Babylon, gave a more practical wording: the end is to reason well in selecting the things that accord with nature, such as health and life itself.

That wording explains a Stoic technical term. Health, income and reputation are "preferred indifferents": worth choosing, but not what makes a life good. Choosing them well is the work. Getting them is not the measure.

One decision followed through three questions

Here is an invented case with invented numbers. A sales manager must file a quarterly report in 5 days. Her target is 600 orders and she has 560 confirmed. Her director suggests she count 40 orders that customers have discussed but not confirmed. A bonus worth 10% of her salary depends on reaching 600.

What does the nature of the whole fix? The count today is 560. That is how things stand, and agreement with nature begins with assenting only to what is so. Writing 600 asserts something false.

What does her nature as a reasoning, cooperating creature ask? The report exists so that other people can plan. A false figure passes 40 orders of bad planning to them. The Stanford entry notes that a just person, on the Stoic account, will sometimes take the worse outcome for herself so that others get their share.

Can she agree with herself? Zeno's two words apply. If she would object to a member of her own team inflating a number by 40, she cannot hold one rule for them and another for herself.

The answer is to report what is confirmed. The bonus is a preferred indifferent, so she is right to pursue it by honest means: she can spend the 5 days calling the 40 customers. Suppose 25 confirm. She reports 585, misses the bonus, and has still done everything the phrase asks. The outcome was never fully hers to decide. The reasoning was.

The mistake of reading nature as instinct

The most common misreading takes "nature" to mean whatever comes naturally: appetite, anger, the urge of the moment. The four steps show why that fails. Following impulse is the natural life for an animal. For a human adult it is a step backward.

A second misreading takes it as advice about wilderness, diet or rejecting technology. The nature in question is the rational order of things and the rational make-up of a person, so it applies in a city office as much as in a forest.

A third misreading is passive acceptance. Agreeing with how things stand does not mean doing nothing. The manager in the example makes 40 calls. Diogenes of Babylon's wording is about selecting, which is an activity.

The strongest objection and what is still unsettled

The hardest objection is that a description is not a reason. Suppose animals do seek self-preservation and humans do reason. Why does it follow that anyone should live a certain way? The Stanford entry, written by Marion Durand and Simon Shogry and first published on 20 January 2023, lists this as the first of three open questions about the Stoic account of development. The second is how a starting point in self-preservation can ground duties to strangers. The third is whether an animal's pull toward food resembles a wise person's attachment to virtue.

Ancient rivals pressed a different point. Philosophers in Plato's and Aristotle's traditions accepted that virtue is needed for happiness but denied that it is enough. A person who is dying in pain, poor and despised, they said, is not happy however well they reason. The Stoics held that only virtue is good, so happiness is fully in a person's own power.

Three things remain unsettled:

• Which nature. Diogenes Laertius (section 89) records that Cleanthes meant the nature of the universe alone, while Chrysippus meant both the universe and human nature. The school's early heads did not agree.
• What to do in a hard case. The Stanford entry says the evidence points against the Stoics having one rule for deciding the right act, and cites an exchange among modern scholars about it.
• Whether the ethics needs the physics. The ancient argument rests on a universe that is rational and providential. The same entry records disagreement among scholars about how far Stoic virtue depends on that picture.

Frequently asked questions

Who first said to live according to nature?

The sources disagree. Stobaeus reports that Zeno of Citium said "living in agreement" and that Cleanthes added "with nature", while Diogenes Laertius credits the full phrase to Zeno.

Does living according to nature mean following your instincts?

No. The Stoics held that following impulse is natural for animals, and that once reason develops in a human, the natural life is the one that reason governs.

Do you have to believe in a rational universe to live this way?

The ancient Stoics built the idea on that belief. Whether the ethical part stands without it is still argued among scholars.

Living according to nature as a daily measure

Stripped to its working parts, the phrase is a three-part check on any choice. Start from the facts as they stand. Ask what a reasoning creature who lives among others should do with it. Make sure the rule you act on is one you could hold tomorrow. The Stoics never reduced it to a formula, and the question of why nature should bind anyone remains open. What the phrase does give is a measure that depends on the quality of a person's reasoning and not on how events turn out.

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