Stoic Kennedys

The Stoic Philosophy of Jack and Bobby

“The point is that you’ve got to live every day like it’s your last day on earth. That’s what I’m doing.” Thus spoke John F. Kennedy, in a private conversation.[1] It happens to be a Stoic precept, from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations VII,69: “The perfection of moral character consists in passing every day as the last.” JFK was a Stoic. He had seen death up close three times in his life, before November 22, 1963. And so he practiced smiling at death.

Jack, as his friends called him, was in physical pain most of his life, yet never complained about it. In their audio Historic Conversation on Life with John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. talked about Jack’s “total stoicism”: despite the pain constantly nagging at him, “he always seemed to have this extraordinary joy and vitality,” and that was “a tremendous spiritual victory.”

Kennedy wrote in Profiles in Courage (1956): “A man does what he must—in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers, and pressures—and that is the basis of all human morality.” I know the book was partly ghost-written by Ted Sorensen, but that sentence certainly represents Kennedy’s philosophy of life: “A man does what he must.” That’s Stoicism in a nutshell.

For the Stoics, virtue and happiness are one and the same. True happiness is of the soul. It is not the reward of virtue, but rather the taste of it, the joyful sense of purpose in the Cosmos. “With a good conscience our only sure reward,” said JFK in the closing statement of his inaugural address. In his press conference of October 31, 1963, he said in response to a question about the difficulty of his job:

as far as the job of President goes, it is rewarding and I have given before to this group the definition of happiness of the Greeks, and I will define it again. It is full use of your powers along lines of excellence. I find, therefore, the Presidency provides some happiness.

The Stoic welcomes difficulties and challenges, which give him more purpose in life: “Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men,” JFK said at the Presidential Prayer Breakfast, February 7 1963.

I have read much about John Kennedy for the last ten years. On his political philosophy, I have particularly appreciated Monika Wiesak’ book America’s Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy, and I regularly get new insights from her posts on X. Having more recently become very interested in ancient Stoicism, as well as in “modern Stoicism”, I can now see what Kennedy and Stoicism have in common. His intimate relationship with death was more Stoic than Christian. President Kennedy was a kind of Marcus Aurelius—whose reign, according to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), was “possibly the only period in history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.”[2] Like Marcus Aurelius, JFK was rooted in filial piety (not exactly an Evangelical precept: read Luke 14,26).

The philosophical school of the Stoa (“Portico”) was founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium, a Phoenician by birth, at the end of the 4th century BCE. It has had “the least explicit and adequately acknowledged influence on Western thought,” according to scholar Anthony A. Long.[3] It was most creative in Rome during the first and second centuries CE, with the works of Seneca (in Latin), and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius (in Greek). There was a neo-Stoicism school during the Renaissance. Cicero’s Stoic treatise On Duties (De Officiis) was the first classical text printed in 1465. Then Erasmus edited Seneca’s work in 1515, and in 1584 Justus Lipsius praised Stoicism in his essay On Constancy, which impressed many thinkers such as Montaigne (1533-92).

Philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome encompassed the totality of human knowledge, with “natural philosophy” corresponding roughly to what we now call “science”. As most philosophers, the Stoics distinguished, for teaching purposes, between logic, physics, and ethics.

Logic is the foundation: it is the way to think clearly, the rules for distinguishing truth from falsehood. The Greeks loved it, and they excelled at it. Their philosophers left muthos in search of logos, and the first place they landed on was mathematics. This was the beginning of the Greek miracle. Reason, said Epictetus, is the only faculty which can contemplate itself (Discourses I,1).

The Stoics deified Reason, or Logos. They deified the Cosmos as well, both being almost identical in their view. Kosmos translates as “order” or “harmony”, and can mean either the ordered universe or the ordering principle of the universe, which is also Logos. The Stoics could have said, before Hegel: everything that is real is rational. Human reason (logos) is not man’s invention to understand the Cosmos, it is man’s participation in divine reason (Logos).

The Stoics are sometimes branded as Pantheists, but “Cosmotheism” would be a more appropriate term for their understanding of God. The Stoic Cosmos is a perfect and divine unity, alive, self-creating, organized according to intelligible laws. And since God is infinite, nothing can be outside of God. Therefore, the Stoics can say occasionally that Nature (Phusis) is God (Seneca, On Benefits IV,7). But phusis, like kosmos, is a dynamic term: it is the force that makes things come into being and grow.[4] The Stoics can also speak of God as a distinct Being, and address Him in prayer (see Cleanthe's Hymn to Zeus). But they emphasize that everything, including human beings, are part of God. “But our souls are thus connected and intimately joined to God, as being indeed members and distinct portions of his essence; and must he not be sensible of every movement of them, as belonging and connatural to himself? (Epictetus Discourses I,14). Epictetus also speaks of the “sympathy” (sumpatheia) that unites things and makes them resonate with each other, through their participation in the Cosmos.

The Stoics’ ethics is based on both their logic and their physics. Through rational thinking and self-examination, we can distinguishes what is under our control and what is not, and focus on what we can do. What is under our control includes our own representations of the things that happen to us, good or bad. By a cognitive discipline, we can make those things indifferent to us, and face challenges with confidence and gratitude, for challenges give us purpose and are good for our souls. Avoiding anger, self-pity and resentments is crucial to building character. “The fault of another must be left where it is" (Marcus Aurelius, Thoughts, IX.20).

It is easy to understand the interest that cognitive psychology has in Stoicism today. However, the tendency to promote Stoic ethics without its metaphysics, for the purpose of psychotherapy or personal development, betrays the teaching of Greek and Roman philosophers. It is by cultivating the insight that all the events affecting him have a hidden rationality (called Providence, pronoia), that the Stoic works on his mental representations, and finds the courage to move forward.

Pierre Hadot writes in the conclusion of his discussion on Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations:

Among the many attitudes that man can adopt toward the universe, there is one that was called “Stoicism” in the Greco-Latin world, but which could be given many other names, and which is characterized by certain tendencies.

In the first place, the “Stoic”, in the universal sense in which we understand it, is aware of the fact that no being is alone, but that we are part of a Whole, constituted as much by the totality of men as by the totality of the Cosmos. The Stoic has the Whole constantly present in his mind.

We can also say that the Stoic feels absolutely serene, free and invulnerable, to the extent that he has become aware that there is no other evil than moral evil and that the only thing that counts is the purity of the moral conscience.

Finally, the Stoic believes in the absolute value of the human person. It cannot be repeated enough and is too often forgotten: Stoicism is at the origin of the modern notion of “human rights”. On this subject, we have … the beautiful formula of Seneca: “Man is a sacred thing for man.” But how can we not also mention this statement by Epictetus who said, addressing someone who asked him how to put up with a clumsy slave: “Slave yourself! Will you not put up with your brother, who has God as his father, who, like a son, is born from the same germs as you and who, like you, descends from above?”[5]

John F. Kennedy was a Stoic. Not that I think his philosophy came from reading the Stoics. Rather, he formed it himself through the challenges of his life. But it is likely that Jackie, who was fond of Greek literature and philosophy, had shared that interest with him (she says in her oral history that Jack, a voracious speed reader, would often borrow whatever books she was reading).