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Welcome to The Stoa Letter, the newsletter on Stoic theory and practice.
🏛️ Theory
There are stupid questions. But it is better to be seen as ignorant by others than to be ignorant of reality.
Marcus Aurelius praised his adoptive father, saying: "His searching questions at meetings. A kind of single-mindedness, almost, never content with first impressions, or breaking off the discussion prematurely."
One of the shifts Stoics ask us to make is toward seeing character and away from individual actions. Basic questions are good examples of why this shift matters. Don't think in terms of single questions – think about the search for truth as a whole.
We've all been in a meeting where someone asks a question that doesn't contribute to the discussion at all, only slows things down, and reveals their ignorance. But we've also been in situations where someone asks a basic question that reveals something important. Perhaps everyone else had the same question. Perhaps we initially thought the question was silly – but the follow-ups caused us to recognize that we were wrong.
What separates these cases, perhaps, is not just the skill to know what and when to ask, but the ability to genuinely seek understanding.
Many people who have a reputation for getting things done ask basic questions. Take a description of Napoleon, for example, from a fellow officer:
Some of his questions showed such a complete ignorance of the most ordinary things that several of my comrades smiled. I was myself struck by the number of his questions, their order and their rapidity, no less than the way by which the answers were caught up, and often found to resolve into other questions which he deduced in consequence from them. But what struck me still more was the sight of a commander-in-chief perfectly indifferent about showing his subordinates how completely ignorant he was of various points of a business which the youngest of them was supposed to know perfectly, and this raised him a thousand cubits in my opinion.
It's the fact that the questions kept coming – that they're driven by a genuine desire to understand – that matters. Cultivate this desire to know things as they are – and then act on it.
Focus on this trait – and maybe become a little less ignorant of reality.
🎯 Action
Genuinely seek the truth even when it’s uncomfortable to do so.
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💬 A choice quote from Epictetus:
If you would improve, submit to be considered without sense and foolish with respect to externals. Wish to be considered to know nothing: and if you shall seem to some to be a person of importance, distrust yourself. For you should know that it is not easy both to keep your will in a condition conformable to nature and (to secure) external things: but if a man is careful about the one, it is an absolute necessity that he will neglect the other.
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