[Superheroes, from comicbasics.com.]

Dear fellow Proficientes,

Following Greg’s (https://newstoicism.org/2025/06/04/sidelining-the-stoic-sage/) and Massimo’s letters (https://newstoicism.org/2025/06/12/in-defense-of-the-stoic-sage/) on the Stoic sage, I’d like to add my thoughts. My approach: let’s redefine the sage. Let’s bring this figure “down to earth,” much like Socrates did for philosophy (in Cicero’s words, Socrates “called philosophy down from heaven, and placed it in cities, and introduced it even in homes”).

We should not be looking for utter perfection in a sage; it’s not helpful and completely unrealistic. We should not hope for the once-every-500-year being to help guide us or show us the way, but instead, let’s seek out the real humans we can admire, relate to, and walk alongside here on this planet—imperfect humans who can help make us better.

The Stoic sage concept focuses on a wholly (infallibly) virtuous human being, and Greg highlighted many of the problems with this. Here I’ll share a few of my own objections.

I know the sage is meant to be inspiring, but to me, the idea of the sage seems superhuman. All the humans I know are, at least in part, driven by self-centered instincts and impulses that often take them off the path to virtue; it’s very hard to imagine someone who is not at least slightly imperfect, except a god-like being. I don’t believe in the supernatural on earth, and I don’t believe in real-life superheroes either (though I’ve definitely enjoyed superhero movies (https://meredithink.com/2017/12/03/take-it-from-thor-laugh-a-little/)!).

If not a supernatural entity, what other kind of being could be perfect? In my view, only a machine could be reliably accurate in judging and acting on virtue every time. But even machines, robots, and AI often fail at their goals, or when they do “succeed” their actions may have terrible unintended consequences (witness the many dystopian books and movies about super intelligent machines or software like The Terminator or The Matrix …or the trope of the paper-clip-making robot that eventually turns the whole planet into paper clips).

Does any of this sound good to you?

Humans are not gods; we are not machines; we are creatures with nature-given traits that help us survive, which the Stoics acknowledged. I think this means that we are imperfect by nature. There’s really no such thing as human perfection, so holding it up as a trope seems like pure fiction. That’s not so awful; check out the many books of Brené Brown (https://brenebrown.com/) to celebrate this—much like our mortality, our imperfections can be seen as a gift that helps us learn to understand our own minds, offer mutual support, and make common cause with other people.

In the Stoic worldview, humans possess some positive traits that lead us towards virtue (alongside those that can make us vicious): we can use reason to think through our problems, and we can act pro-socially in support of the human community. Each of us can prioritize and act using these traits, along with the Stoic virtues. And as Massimo points out, we can make progress in our goodness as we live our lives. These good traits, and our knowledge of the virtues, can help us restrain our negative impulses (which you may recall were formulated in the Christian tradition as “cardinal sins” that counterbalance the cardinal virtues). Those include the pull towards greed, anger, excessive pride, etc..

Back to the sage. What we really need to become better humans is other good humans. We need folks to be our fellow travelers on the path, for support and inspiration. Maybe we look to someone who is walking a few steps ahead and has been through the worst of it. Or another patient in the same metaphorical hospital, seeking a cure, with no doctor in sight—in Seneca’s formulation that I often go back to. Someone capable of rising above the most common foibles of humanity, who can show us how to improve by example. And someone we can feel connected to, not judged by, and not far below.

I think of this wise person as a teacher or even a friend who inspires me with ideas and with joyful, compassionate, wise living in the face of adversity. It could be anyone. But it is a human, someone who has the willingness to express vulnerability so that I can learn what struggles she has overcome and find renewed strength to take on my own struggle and live according to nature and to virtue.

It’s because these other travelers are not perfect that I could see myself aiming to be more like them. As a student of history and literature, I’ve read about many heroes and heroines, both fictional and real. I believe that the ones that people learn from the most are those who go on “a hero’s journey,” a notion popularized by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Heroes can be regular people. To become heroic, they are challenged with an “ordeal” and must rise to the occasion against dark forces, returning with some kind of gift or reward to share with other people. I like thinking about Seneca in this sense. He was by no means perfect from what we know of his personal history. But he continued to struggle to try to be good, and to try to live by the virtues. I think of him attempting to balance power, material wealth, and goodness in a world of violence, tyranny, and corruption (some of which he was complicit in). This inspires me and gives me hope for taking on my own struggles in modern America.

I’d also like to add that the time and place you are living in changes who you are, and influences what you think is virtuous. For example, in ancient Greece and Rome, people frequently enslaved others. Those who owned other people as slaves included Stoic thinkers. Was that virtuous?

This is a huge issue for us in the modern world. In the philosophy-inspired TV series The Good Place, there’s a scene where the judge tasked with figuring out if the protagonists should be sent to heaven or hell finally goes down to earth. She’s meant to assess their choices over their lifetimes. On earth, she sees that life (especially modern life) is complicated, and it’s essentially impossible to make decisions that are fully ethical because you are only able to act on the information that you have, and you don’t know everything. For example: If I eat this tomato, how do I know doing so doesn’t support abusing farm workers who grew or picked it? The judge learns it may just not be possible to be fully ethical or virtuous on every axis.

This gets at the question of who, in fact, could be considered a Stoic sage. I think it’s impossible to answer. In fact, my opinion on who I think is a role model / sage-like often changes when I find out more about what’s happening with that person behind the scenes, or when their actions have harmful consequences later on. I won’t name names here, but I’m sure most readers have experienced this with people they have looked up to. I think of the phrase “never meet your heroes”… there’s a high chance they will disappoint you when you find out they are only human.

This strongly suggests that we cannot really define a true Stoic sage. Instead, we can look for people doing the best they can in the situations they are in, and take note that some people are working to follow the virtues, and striving to become more clear-thinking (rational) and supportive of common humanity (pro-social) than others. That is the re-definition I prefer.

One other thought: As humans, we can’t really be exact replicas of other people. As a modern American woman, how much can I really be like Socrates? Or even know what he was truly like? And without getting too deep into identity politics, if he were here today, I imagine he would look down on me as a woman and a non-Greek.

Even with people I admire for their courage or wisdom or sense of justice or self-control, I understand I will never replicate them because I’m shaped by my experiences, community, family, time/place, etc. And to me, that’s a beautiful thing. We all have the power to determine our choices and to improve. We can all find people in our lives to look to as wise models of the virtues. And above all, we can live by measuring our choices and actions on a human scale, not an imagined one for superheroes, gods, or robots. 

Vale, Meredith Alexander Kunz