Living according to nature

In brief

“Live according to nature” is not an instruction to obey every impulse or to retreat from civilisation.[1] Stoic writers use “nature” at more than one level: the ordered cosmos, the capacities of human beings as rational animals, and the social relations through which human life is conducted.[1] Ethical life is the attempt to bring judgement and action into agreement with those features, rather than treating immediate appetite or public approval as the measure of a good life.[1]

What the texts say

The Stoic system joins ethics to physics and logic.[1] If the cosmos is an ordered whole and human beings possess reason, then an account of how to live cannot be separated entirely from an account of the world and how judgement works.[1] The ancient sources preserve analogies that describe philosophy as a unified system: ethics is its fruit, but logic and physics are not dispensable decorations.[1] The exact strength of this unity remains debated.[1]

At the human level, “natural” includes sociability.[4] Stoic ethics does not reduce the good life to private calm; it asks how a rational person should act among other people, with responsibilities shaped by kinship, citizenship and shared human capacities.[4] Marcus repeatedly tests his conduct against this social dimension, including the thought that human beings are made for cooperation.[4] The Meditations is a personal exercise, not a neutral textbook, so its recurring reminders show a writer trying to practise the ideal rather than reporting effortless success.[4]

How it has been read

Some readers take the phrase as a call to submit to whatever happens.[1] Others treat it as a general ecological or “authentic self” slogan.[1] Neither captures the full ancient argument.[1] Stoic nature has a physical sense, a psychological sense and an ethical sense; translations that flatten these into one English phrase can hide the connections.[1] Scholars also disagree about how tightly ethical conclusions depend on Stoic physics.[1]

Reading it now

The phrase is most useful when it leads to concrete questions: what capacities does this choice exercise, what responsibilities come with my relationships, and what features of the situation cannot be changed by wishing? It is not a ready-made answer to political or personal conflicts. “Natural” does not mean automatically good; it is the conclusion of an argument about human life and virtue.

Further reading

Compare the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Stoicism with Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.54.

Sources

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism — Stoicism — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcus-aurelius — Marcus Aurelius — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy