The Stoics were basically naturists (they just wore togas)
What a 2,000-year-old philosophy gets right about the body, vanity, and living without performance
Here is a small but genuinely wild fact: one of the most sophisticated philosophical defenses of naturism was written not by a 20th-century nudist reformer or a German Lebensreform enthusiast, but by a Roman emperor in the second century AD. Marcus Aurelius never visited a nudist resort, obviously. But read Meditations with naturist eyes and you’ll find, tucked between meditations on mortality and empire, a worldview that maps surprisingly cleanly onto what we believe and practice.
This is not a stretch. Stoicism and naturism share a surprisingly deep intellectual DNA, and working out exactly where they overlap tells us something useful about why naturism is worth defending on philosophical grounds, not just personal ones.
The body as a neutral thing
Let’s start with the concept that sits at the center of Stoic ethics: the “indifferents.” For the Stoics, virtue alone was genuinely good; vice alone was genuinely bad. Everything else, including wealth, reputation, physical beauty, and yes, the body itself, fell into the category of things that simply are. Poverty, ill-repute, and ill-health are not bad, and wealth, fame, and physical beauty are not good, because possessing or lacking them does not determine our happiness.
This is more radical than it sounds. The Stoics were not saying the body doesn’t matter at all. They were saying it doesn’t carry the moral weight we insist on loading onto it. Marcus Aurelius, in a passage that reads like something from a very bracing meditation retreat, describes the practice of “stripping away the legend that encrusts” things to see them as they really are. The premium outfit, the carefully curated appearance, the status signaled through what we wear: all of it is, in Stoic terms, noise.
Sound familiar?
Naturism’s core contention is that the naked body is natural and that modesty and shame are cultural impositions with deleterious effects on psychological, sexual, and social wellbeing. The Stoics would not have framed it quite that way, but they would have nodded along. When Epictetus said, “It is a mark of want of intellect to spend much time in things relating to the body, as to be immoderate in exercises, in eating and drinking, and in the discharge of other animal functions,” he was pointing at the same trap naturism tries to spring us from: the anxious, exhausting over-investment in the body as a social performance.
Clothing as costume, status as theater
One of the things that gets lost in polite naturist conversation is how deeply political the original European nudist movement was. Socialist accounts argued that clothing effected oppressive social stratification, that clothes masked the innate equality of all people. Early nudists were not just after a tan. They were making a point about how much of what we call social reality is costume and theater.
The Stoics were making that same point, two millennia earlier. For Stoicism, nudity means freedom and self-determination, a refusal to bend to society’s expectations and prejudices. When we strip away clothing, we strip away the most immediate and legible set of social signals available to us. We stop broadcasting status, wealth, profession, tribe. We stop performing. And according to Stoic philosophy, that performance was never where the good stuff lived anyway.
Marcus Aurelius, who was literally the most powerful man in the world and wore imperial purple as a job requirement, kept reminding himself that none of it was really him. “It never ceases to amaze me,” he wrote, “we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.” That gap, between what we are and what we perform for others, is exactly the territory naturism collapses.
Learning to see the body without the story
There is a Stoic practice called hypomnemata, a kind of regular self-examination, writing and reflecting as a way of checking whether your judgments about things are actually accurate or just inherited. The question the Stoics kept returning to was: am I reacting to the thing itself, or to the story I’ve been told about it?
This is the work naturism asks of people, too. Naturism recognizes that conceptions of modesty about the body are learned behaviors, passed on from generation to generation and reinforced through routine explicit and implicit conditioning, and are not in any way necessary for happiness. The discomfort most people feel in a naturist setting on their first visit is not evidence that nudity is wrong. It’s evidence that they’ve internalized a lot of stories about what bodies mean. The Stoic prescription? Examine those impressions. Don’t just accept them because they’re familiar.
Researcher Keon West, who has studied the psychological effects of naturism, found that participation in naturist activities was associated with improved body image and life satisfaction, even after controlling for other factors. The mechanism, broadly, is what Stoics would recognize immediately: repeated exposure to real human bodies, in all their variety, breaks down the gap between what bodies are and what we’ve been told they should be. You can’t sustain a fantasy about ideal bodies for long in a naturist space. You’re too busy having a conversation or playing volleyball.
Where the parallel has its limits
To be fair to both traditions, the fit is not perfect. Stoicism was not a communal or social project in the way naturism is. It was deeply individualist, concerned primarily with the internal life of the practitioner. Naturism, at its best, is a social practice. The community matters. The shared experience matters. The leveling that happens when two hundred people are at a pool with no visual cues about who earns what is not something you can replicate alone in your backyard.
Stoicism also had, let’s be honest, a somewhat punishing relationship with pleasure. The body, for the Stoics, was mostly something to be managed rather than enjoyed. Naturism is considerably warmer about joy, about the simple pleasure of sun and water and ease. We’re not trying to transcend the body. We’re trying to be at peace with it.
But as philosophical companions go, the Stoics are surprisingly good company. Their insistence on separating what is actually real from what is merely performed, what is actually ours from what society has layered onto us, is a very useful lens for understanding what naturism is actually doing. It’s not about the absence of clothes. It’s about the presence of something more honest.
As Epictetus put it: “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.”
He probably meant something slightly different. But still.
What’s your take? Do you find philosophical frameworks useful for thinking about naturism, or does all the theory miss the point of a practice that’s fundamentally about showing up and living it? Drop a comment below.
References
Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. (Various translations available; passages cited from Books IV and VI.)
Epictetus. Enchiridion and Discourses. (Translated editions widely available; quotes attributed throughout post.)
West, Keon. “I’m Not Ashamed of My Body: The Effects of Naturism on Body Image and Life Satisfaction.” Self and Identity, 2018.
Barcan, Ruth. “Nudism.” In Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, 2015. Wiley Online Library. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118896877.wbiehs315
AANR West. “Examining the Spiritual and Philosophical Roots of Nudism.” November 20, 2023. https://aanrwest.org/information/blog/examining-the-spiritual-and-philosophical-roots-of-nudism
AANR West. “Naturism and Freedom: Exploring the Philosophy Behind It.” February 26, 2024. https://aanrwest.org/information/blog/naturism-and-freedom-exploring-the-philosophy-behind-it
Reform Naturism. “12 Values You Should Already Accept If You Want to Get Naked With Us.” Medium, May 17, 2016. https://medium.com/@reformnaturism/12-values-you-should-already-accept-if-you-want-to-get-naked-with-us-2990c653786
Manther. “A Philosophical Defense of Nudity.” May 21, 2023. https://manther.de/en/2023/05/philosophische-ansaetze-zur-apologie-der-nacktheit/
Daily Stoic. “A Stoic Response to Beauty.” February 16, 2021. https://dailystoic.com/a-stoic-response-to-beauty/
“Nudism.” Encyclopedia.com. https://www.encyclopedia.com/fashion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/nudism
“Gymnosophy.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnosophy
Some may find these ideas something of a stretch; I find it intellectually honest. No matter how much we try to keep reinventing ourselves, we are influenced by our cultural history. And we can always learn something about ourselves by studying our ancestors.
Thank you for this analytical research. I really enjoy including pieces like this in my naturist reading, alongside the news, fiction, and travel or personal essays. Please keep it up!