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Chris Gill on Learning to Live Naturally (Episode 78)
923 Plays1 year ago
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"Happiness, as the goal of life, can be understood as the highest expression of human nature, as encapsulating the chief markers of humanity at its best, namely rationality and sociability."
In this conversation, I (Caleb) speak with Chris Gill. We kick off the conversation with topics from his most recent book Learning to Live Naturally: Stoic Ethics and its Modern Significance. It’s no exaggeration to say that Chris Gill is a legend in modern Stoicism so having him on again was a real privilege.
(02:19) Indifferents
(10:39) What Grounds Virtue?
(16:55) How to Think About Virtues and Nature
(26:44) Stoicism and the Natural World
(29:43) Stoic Detachment
(38:02) Does Stoicism Promote Self-sufficiency?
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Transcript
Marcus Aurelius on Death
00:00:00
Speaker
Look at Marcus. He devotes, I think it's about 58 of his meditations are devoted to coming to terms with death.
00:00:10
Speaker
Now, if death was just nothing, death is, you know, he wouldn't need to, he wouldn't need to, but he does. He gives himself all these arguments for accepting the reality of death. Death is natural, death is universal, death is part of nature. He has to work at it. Now, he's not in those passages as it were giving a kind of pre-morning, you know, an anticipatory morning.
00:00:37
Speaker
He does, you know, he's working, but he does recognize that to get to that point of view requires work. It does require work of us.
Podcast Introduction
00:00:45
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of Stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
00:01:02
Speaker
In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Chris Gill.
Chris Gill on Modern Stoicism
00:01:06
Speaker
Professor Chris Gill is an emeritus professor of ancient thought at the University of Exeter. He's the author of Learning to Live Naturally, Stoic Ethics and Its Modern Significance. He's one of the most influential figures in modern Stoicism today, so it was an honor to have him on.
00:01:28
Speaker
In this discussion, we focus on themes from his most recent book. It's essential for understanding the core theory of notions like indifference, providence, stoic development, virtue, and the emotions.
Stoic Indifference and Virtue
00:01:45
Speaker
Here is our conversation.
00:01:47
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros, and today I have the honor of speaking with Chris Gill. Chris is an emeritus professor of ancient thought at the University of Exeter and one of the founding members of modern Stoicism. He's the author of the recent Learning to Live Naturally as well, which we'll be discussing today. Thanks for joining again.
00:02:14
Speaker
Very glad to be here, Caleb. I'm sure we'll have a good conversation. Very good. Let's start with this question. So how are indifference the material of virtue for Stoics?
00:02:30
Speaker
Okay. So in life, there are all sorts of things we want to have. We want to be healthy. We want to be reasonably well off. We want to be alive. We don't want to be dead. We don't want to be unhealthy. We don't want to be poor. So all our life consists of
00:02:54
Speaker
Selecting. Well, of course, the stoic is called selecting between indifference. Sometimes we have to choose between them. Sometimes you might have to select health rather than wealth or wealth rather than health and so on. So they can be selected on various principles. You might select them by saying, oh, well, I just want
00:03:17
Speaker
the most of all the positive indifference, the subconsciously preferable indifference. You might say, well, I want everything. I want to be healthy. I want to be wealthy. I want to be famous and so on and so forth. You might think that's a principle that you might use for your decision making.
Virtue in Action: Whistleblower's Dilemma
00:03:41
Speaker
But that would be a very bad principle. That wouldn't be a very virtuous principle. Now, virtue is sometimes defined as knowledge or expertise in living, living well rather than living badly. So virtue enables you to choose correctly between these.
00:04:04
Speaker
these values which present themselves to us all the time, all our lives, we're engaging in this process of selection. There's no time when we're not doing it. We can't just turn it off, you know, it's just the stuff of life. But virtue enables us to choose correctly between indifference. So there might be some situations, let's think of one, exposing
00:04:32
Speaker
Here's an example, supposing you're an employee and you know that something really wrong is happening in your firm. Now, you're now going to have to choose between the comfort of remaining in that job and indeed the income of remaining in that job, perhaps, or doing what you think is the right thing.
00:04:57
Speaker
which is to whistle blow, to let people know that something's going wrong in your firm. It's corrupt. Now, I think it's pretty clear that the virtuous course of action would be to blow the whistle. So you would say, yes, this is going on. You could tell the police. You might tell the press.
00:05:21
Speaker
You might tell people in the firm, whatever, but you would take that risk and you might lose your job, or you might lose promotion, or you might lose a comfortable relationship with your employers.
00:05:38
Speaker
So, the virtuous course of action, then, okay, so virtue is, in that case, in all cases, making the correct choice. It's enabling you to choose between indifference in a way that's correct. Correct, that is, in that it's acting, well, according to the virtues.
00:06:02
Speaker
The virtue here is the virtue of justice. You're actually according to justice. In other cases, it might be a different virtue involved. So does that help at all?
00:06:14
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So indifference, I'm just assuming that indifference aren't completely indifferent. I mean, there's different views on this in stoicism, but they're not completely indifferent. And the Stoics sometimes talk about preferable and dis-preferable. It sounds very technical, but basically preferable, just the kind of thing you normally want.
00:06:38
Speaker
you know, I'm being healthy, not ill. But just looking at the indifferent on its own isn't enough. You've got to give it a kind of context, context of ethical understanding, and that you try and build up your context of ethical understanding.
00:06:58
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, so I suppose thinking about preferable indifference, one way to understand the Stoic view is that it falls in between the philosophical cynics and the Aristotelians, where the cynics held that the only thing
00:07:17
Speaker
of value.
Virtue vs. Preferable Indifference
00:07:18
Speaker
The only thing we ought to pursue is virtue and the Aristotelians held that there were some goods in addition to virtue, health, reputation, what have you.
00:07:32
Speaker
Whereas the one way at least of understanding the stoic account is that their virtue is the primary good. It is what is necessary and sufficient for a happy life. But we can still talk about these other forms of value or other forms of goods in terms of preferable indifference. Yeah. They're still not good. They're still neither good nor bad, but they are preferable.
00:08:02
Speaker
Yeah, on a standard mainstream Stoic view. That's right. And yes, indeed, there is a kind of contrast between, well, I tell you what, it's a contrast between there's someone called Aristo, who is an early Stoic. And Aristo is a bit like the cynics, or he's like the cynics as you described them, in that he just thinks, well, indifference are just indifferent.
00:08:32
Speaker
all indifference at the same. You know, they really don't matter. We can't think about them at all. We can't give them any weight at all. We must just do the virtuous thing.
00:08:45
Speaker
Whereas the more standard view, the view of xeno, cryo-zippers, and really most Stoics is that there are preferable and this preferable indifference. Yes, health, we normally do indeed prefer health, yes, but that doesn't mean it's always right to choose it, or wealth, perhaps an easier example. So yes, you could see it as an intermediate, but it is nonetheless
00:09:14
Speaker
very much the case that it is entirely the case that virtue alone is good and not the preferable indifference. The preferably indifference are neither good nor bad.
00:09:26
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That's right. By the way, what people like Chrysippus said about Aristotle was, well, hang on. If they're really indifferent, how are we going to set about making choices in our life? How can we be like blind people as we stumble around? There would be no difference in health and sickness.
00:09:49
Speaker
between wealth and poverty, even life and death. I mean, how could we, how could we function as human beings? And I think that's quite a strong, strong objection, actually. Yeah. So I suppose the preferable indifference,
00:10:05
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action, although that suggests that there would be action guiding that weren't taken in context. They are action guiding. That's exactly what they are. They're action guiding. They're motivating factors. They are, in principle, motivating factors. Whether they motivate you in any given case, of course, depends on the decision you make or on the response you make.
00:10:34
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But in principle, they're motivating factors. Yes, indeed. What determines?
00:10:43
Speaker
are what makes it the case that some choices are virtuous? And to give you a little bit more context to that question, which is of course a big one, one account that some people give on the stoic side is that ultimately the virtuous choices are grounded in nature. They're grounded in human nature and also the nature of the cosmos as a whole.
00:11:12
Speaker
But my sense is that you have some reticence about that, the strongest views of those sorts of claims. To answer that question, and to give a sort of decision-making context to it, let's think about Cicero's on duties. Cicero's on duties.
00:11:31
Speaker
is a work by a Roman thinker who isn't actually a stoic, but he presents stoic philosophy in some works, and he does so actually quite accurately.
Cicero and Practical Stoic Ethics
00:11:46
Speaker
Now, in Cicero's on duties, he's giving us practical advice, or he's actually giving his son practical advice, but we're listening in. He gives us practical advice about how to make decisions in a stoic way.
00:12:01
Speaker
And what he does is this, he says, okay, we want to get a bit of a better understanding of how to make specific decisions in line with Stoke principles. So the first thing we'll do is to get an understanding of what the virtues involve.
00:12:22
Speaker
And he gives a definition of the virtues. The Stoics have various definitions of virtues. Wisdom is this kind of thing. It's kind of knowledge and understanding. And then he says, and then here are some examples of the kind of thing that exhibit wisdom. It's the typical kind of what you might say is a wise act. Similarly with justice. He'll give a general definition of justice and he'll give an example of the kind of thing
00:12:51
Speaker
that is, in principle, a just act rather than an unjust act. What Cicero is assuming, and I think what the Stoics generally assume,
00:13:03
Speaker
is that ethical understanding is in part just that. It's understanding what these categories mean, what definitions we'd give of them, but doesn't have to be a definition, it might be a statement about it, and the kind of actions that are involved in acting justly or temperately or courageously or whatever.
00:13:31
Speaker
So now these definitions aren't, or there's no reference. So initially in the first instance, there's no reference to nature, but Cicero does actually refer to nature from time to time in his work in various kinds of ways, but he actually refers not to cosmic nature, not to the nature of the universe,
00:13:57
Speaker
although Stoics sometimes do refer to the nature of the universe, he refers to human nature. So he says that, for instance, when he's talking about generosity, he says, well, we're thinking about generosity. Well, to understand generosity, we've got to understand human association, what it is that brings people together. And to do that, we have to have a sort of broader understanding of human nature.
00:14:27
Speaker
And then he explains that human nature is distinguished by being a combination of rationality and sociability. So we've got a general picture of human nature, and that gives you a broad picture of human beings. And then he says this leads us to form various kinds of association.
00:14:47
Speaker
as human beings. Some of these can be very general. We can have a general feeling of affinity with human nature, all human beings, the so-called community of humankind or the cosmopolis. And then within that, we can have specific
00:15:06
Speaker
kinds of human associations, the family, our neighborhood, our workplace, whatever they are, various specific ways. And all of these are more or less specific versions of being a human being and relating to other people. And he says, if we kind of think about this, it helps to give us a broader picture
00:15:29
Speaker
Now, this is all a bit vague, but if you add these two things together, we've got the pictures of the virtues and we've got an account of human nature. So part of what virtue is, is leading a human life well. It's leading a life that is, as you like, the best possible form of human life and fulfilling human nature, which is a combination of rationality and sociability.
00:15:58
Speaker
So Cicero thinks it's quite useful for us when we're making decisions. We might have specific grounds for making decisions, but it's also useful for us to have a broader picture of what it means to be human and types of human association in making specific decisions about who to be generous to.
00:16:24
Speaker
So you're going to be more generous, reasonably enough, to your family and your friends and those who've performed services for you.
00:16:34
Speaker
But you'll also, in appropriate circumstances, be generous to anybody, a stranger that's just stumbled in through the door, a refugee that's just arrived in your country. You might have those grounds for being generous. And you have that if you have a better understanding of what human nature is, which is fundamentally rational and social. So I can see how the picture of human nature enhances.
00:17:02
Speaker
our view of what acts are virtuous and what virtues are worth cultivating in different contexts, different social organizations. How does the larger aspect of nature and nature of the cosmos then enhance how we should think about the virtues?
Stoicism and Cosmic Nature
00:17:25
Speaker
Yes. Well, I think the hysterics make two moves in this direction.
00:17:32
Speaker
They don't always go straight from just us to the cosmos. They're very interested in, I mean, one of the very interesting features of stoic theory is their ideas about ethical development. And ethical development is characterized frequently in terms of what they call appropriation, oichiosis. So they have a theory of oichosis.
00:18:01
Speaker
Oikosis is, well, I don't want to say oikosis is quite complicated, but one of the ways they approach oikosis or appropriation is by saying, well, human beings do this, animals in general behave in a certain sort of way.
00:18:18
Speaker
and human animals behave in this kind of way. So they think that all animals, for instance, are instinctively motivated to self-preservation, to care for themselves in that sense, and that human beings are naturally inclined to maintain their own life, but also their own character as human beings.
00:18:47
Speaker
So human beings have the same basic kind of desire pattern as other animals, but they do so rationally. Remember, human beings are rational and sociable. So one of the moves the Stoics make is to connect human behavior with larger patterns around us, including that of other animals.
00:19:18
Speaker
And then they make a further move, which is a further transition towards this broader cosmic picture. They think that these basic patterns are these basic motives that we have.
00:19:33
Speaker
motives care for ourselves and to care for others of our kind, because they think that we have a natural motive to care for others of our kinds. And the Stoics think that those motives are a reflection of a broader pattern in nature as a whole.
00:19:51
Speaker
the natural world. They think that the natural world exhibits what they call a kind of providential care for everything within it. So nature, on the stoic view, that is cosmic nature, cares for, in some sense, everything in it, plants, animals, human beings, and even the material world, as it were, like sea and air. All those things are in some sense cared for by
00:20:21
Speaker
nature, and so there's a kind of pattern in nature, a pattern of care.
00:20:31
Speaker
I suppose if they were asked to defend this view, they'd say, well, if there was no such pattern of care, if there was no such order in nature, everything would be utterly chaotic and unpredictable. Plants wouldn't grow in the spring, and animals wouldn't look after themselves and protect themselves, and animals wouldn't mate, and everything would be just kind of goes to a stop.
00:20:58
Speaker
So I think that kind of view, which is perfectly reasonable view, underlies that. So that's another way, another link between us, human behaviour, doing normal things, and the cosmos. So we've got several stages
00:21:19
Speaker
if you like, with the idea of nature. We've got human nature. We've got human nature as part of the natural world. And then because they think that nature as a whole has these general tendencies, providential care, they also think that nature is characterized by order. There's an order in nature. They think that in that sense, the cosmos is also a kind of model for us. Just as nature has a kind of orderliness in it,
00:21:48
Speaker
So, and is capable of providential care, we too should have create in ourselves a kind of order, and they think that virtue and happiness based on virtue have a kind of inherent order and structure. So we should model ourselves on the universe in the sense that we create a kind of ethical order in ourselves, psychological order,
00:22:14
Speaker
And similarly, we express nature's providential care by caring for ourselves and by caring for others. So I think there are a number of specific, perfectly credible ways in which the Stoics connect
00:22:34
Speaker
you, me, Chris and Caleb, and the cosmos, but they don't get there mostly in one go. Getting there in one go is a bit tricky, but these various stages, I think, these links make a lot more sense of it.
00:22:51
Speaker
Right, right. Sometimes the Stoics themselves and people like Marcus and Epic teachers, they kind of skip out. They rather omit these intermediate stages, or at least they don't refer to them very much, but they are there in various texts that we've got. I suppose you have this fractal image of sorts where
00:23:14
Speaker
you have reason that has this aspect of order, but also this aspect of pro-sociality or providence that's manifested in different ways through the different levels, spiral. Yes, that's right. Yes, macrocosm and microcosm. We are a microcosm, and the universe is a macrocosm, but the same structures are present in both, the stoic thing.
00:23:40
Speaker
Actually, we think that too, but they're just different accounts of what these structures are. I do think that's very useful to think about, that you have the
00:23:51
Speaker
aspect of Providence at the larger level in terms of supplying what's necessary to live at the natural world to care for oneself, care for others as seen in animals and human animals, of course, too. And then you can be even more specific with the human animal about how that is manifested in different social organizations, different people and so on.
00:24:16
Speaker
Yes. Yes, I think that's right. I think there are all sorts of levels going on and these levels have things in common with each other. And when we use these very large terms like cosmic order, cosmic providence, of course, it seems the mind kind of goes blank often because these are so large. But when you break them down a bit, they do make a reasonable degree of sense. So when we are caring for ourselves,
00:24:42
Speaker
by keeping alive, feeding ourselves and leading a decent life. And when we're caring for others in all the ways in which people do care for each other, then we're enacting, as it were, or we're embodying this very much broader pattern, which is present in nature as a whole, of caring for everything that there is. And nature cares for everything, not by sort of
00:25:11
Speaker
like a great chessboard by moving. It isn't that nature sits there, as it were, and thinks, oh, I want Caleb to do this now. What it does is by enabling us to realize our own humanity, by enabling us to function as independent human beings. Because what nature wants us to be is the best possible form of human being.
00:25:39
Speaker
And the best way of doing that is to allow people to enable
00:25:47
Speaker
people to develop their mind, their understanding, their relationships. Because sometimes people talk, the way people talk about this is as though there's some sort of, you know, Mr. No, some kind of Wizard of Oz at the center, sort of managing everything and telling us, telling everyone what to do. It isn't like that at all. Nature is a kind of enabling power. It's enabling human beings to be this, plants to be this, microbes to be this.
00:26:17
Speaker
rocks to be this, the air to be this, and all that to kind of fit together into a kind of organic whole. That's how I think about nature and that's actually, I think, quite a good picture of nature.
00:26:32
Speaker
It's one we need to recover a bit because we've done rather terrible things to nature, so we need to recover a sense of nature as an organic whole and a kind of homeostasis.
Stoicism's Vision of the World
00:26:44
Speaker
One question I had was, how can Stoic philosophy enhance or help us see more clearly
00:26:54
Speaker
nature, as is understood as a natural world. How can it enhance our encounters with the natural world, if at all? How do you think about that question? It's a kind of continuation of what we were just saying. I think that what nature can help us and what our system can help us to do is to, well, first of all, to stop us saying there's
00:27:19
Speaker
humanity, on the one hand, and nature on the other. I think that's a very bad way, I think, of thinking about the world because it's very artificial. We're not some kind of completely alien entity.
00:27:36
Speaker
We are part of nature. We're part of nature. We're made of the same stuff as everything else in nature. We function, in many ways, like other things in nature, like other animals, like plants. We depend on nature. We depend on bees and insects and all sorts of other aspects of nature. So I think what racism can help us to do
00:28:03
Speaker
is to give us a sense of humanity as part of an organic whole and also one that needs to be preserved as an organic whole. Because what we've discovered of course in recent years with global warming and climate change is that human beings have become so powerful in terms of their manipulation of preferred indifference.
00:28:26
Speaker
that they have altered the balance of nature that we have by pumping CO2 gases into the atmosphere. We have actually altered the climate. We've actually altered the balance between heat and cold and the balance of the seasons.
00:28:47
Speaker
And so what we need to do is to do all we can to try and correct that. And I think Stoicism can't provide us with modern scientific explanations for this. What Stoicism can do is to give us a kind of vision of the world, a world as a coherent and organic whole of which we are an integral part.
00:29:11
Speaker
and can give us a kind of visionary picture of what we should be working towards the story. So I think that's a really valuable feature of, for us now, a really valuable and important lesson. It's not a matter of just going back to, it's not a kind of nostalgia. It isn't that we're kind of going back to, you know, everything in Stoeck, everything was all right. It's just that their picture of the world still has a kind of validity for us.
00:29:40
Speaker
that we can recapture. Yeah, very good. One other area I wanted to ask about was in terms of stoicism and emotion.
Rational Sociability and Mortality
00:29:51
Speaker
So a very common objection to stoic ethics and a stoic view of emotion is that it detaches us from things of value or that it is too self-sufficient, focuses too much on self-sufficiency. And the classic example of that is Epictetus, his discussion of
00:30:10
Speaker
the jugs and the exercise of understanding that jugs are merely temporal things, they will break and then moving from that to kissing your child or wife and saying that this too is a temporal thing, it will die. So I wonder if you could say a little bit about that concern about psoasism.
00:30:34
Speaker
Yeah, sure. It's always the same example, isn't it? Quite interesting. It's always Epictetus and the Jug. So it's a particular passage of the handbook. People always go back to that one. That seems to be based on a larger passage in the discourses. And I'll say a little bit about that passage in a minute.
00:30:53
Speaker
But let's ask what the general Stoic view is of our relationship to other human beings. And as I've stressed, the Stoics actually think that as human beings we are rational and sociable. So sociability is a fundamental element in nature.
00:31:14
Speaker
So it's not enough just to be rational, you've got to be rational and sociable. And so when it comes to Oikos' appropriation, we've got two fundamental motives or instincts to care for ourselves and alongside that to care for others of our kind. So these two motives are
00:31:38
Speaker
They're on a level. It's not that we've got one and we have to kind of manufacture the other, or that we only become caring for others because we're brainwashed into doing so. No, these are part of our nature. These are part of our nature. And the big stake example of that is the instinctive care for your children.
00:32:03
Speaker
look around the world, and even the mafioso boss cares for his children, cares for his family. I mean, the Stokes wouldn't think the mafioso boss was a good example of a good human being, but even someone like that cares for his children.
00:32:22
Speaker
So, the stoic view of what we are as human beings is sociable. And as we develop, as we get a better and more sophisticated understanding, we form families, we form communities, we take part in political processes, and all that is a proper expression of human nature.
00:32:45
Speaker
So the general stoic view isn't at all one of detachment. The general stoic view of what it is to lead a normal human life is to engage with other people. That is, other people matter and we matter to other people. So that's the general view.
00:33:06
Speaker
So then you might say, okay, well, that's all very well. That's all very well. But what about Epictetus and the jug and whispering to your child that he or she may be dead and so on, and thinking about people as like jugs. They can break.
00:33:27
Speaker
Well, the judge's question is a bit complicated, but the general point that I think Epictetus is making, which is actually the same point that other steaks would make, is that, okay, human beings have all these other characteristics, but one characteristic we have is we die. We're mortal, okay? So we're rational and sociable. We're also mortal.
00:33:56
Speaker
except like other animals, like other plants. Now, this is a very uncomfortable fact because death is very much a dispreferred indifferent. We don't want to die. People left to their own devices, choose between life and death, now go for life. So people don't want to die, but they do. They do. And people we love die.
00:34:24
Speaker
And it's very tough. And of course we die. That's perhaps even tougher, I suppose. It depends. In some ways it's a bit hard to say which is tougher really, but they're both very tough. So now most of the time we thrust this to the back of our consciousness and go on acting as if we're immortal. But of course that is a mistake. That is a mistake. And sometimes
00:34:52
Speaker
This can lead us into a kind of mistaken kind of relationship. And sometimes, of course, because we do know as much a fact that people can die, this can make us very anxious. And this comes to the context in which Epictetus is talking. The context in which this passage comes up is Epictetus is talking to a former student who says, well, you know, I'm really worried, I can't really
00:35:21
Speaker
go to Rome, although that's where my job is. He's a senator there. And he says, I can't go to Rome because I'm really worried about my family, especially my mother. And she gets very anxious when I leave. And she might die when I'm away. And I'm really anxious about that. And I have to show what the Stokes call philostorgia. I've got to show a family feeling. So
00:35:48
Speaker
So Epicutors is addressing that particular anxiety. He's addressing the anxiety of someone who can't, as it were, do his job as a responsible member of society because he's so worried that if he leaves home, the people might die while he's away. And then he says, well, no, you've just got to accept it. You've got to just do your
00:36:15
Speaker
play your role. You've got to, you know, if you undertake a certain responsibility and you think it's worthwhile, you've got to do it. So sometimes you've got to go to Rome or you've got to go to Oregon or, I've forgotten where you are, Caleb. Where are you? I'm in San Francisco. I'm in California. California. You've got to go to California.
00:36:34
Speaker
or you've got to leave California. You know, you might say, oh, I can't leave California. I wouldn't say, my partner, my family, I've got to stay in California because they might die while I'm away. And there are times when the commitments we have in life, I mean, we shouldn't be traveling too much at the moment, actually, but sometimes our commitments require us to go to other places. And so I picked Peter says, well, you've just got to accept it.
00:37:01
Speaker
and you've just got to accept that your baby, sadly, might die while you're away or you might die and the baby might live on.
00:37:10
Speaker
or your friend might die, or you might die, you've just got to accept it and not use it as the basis of your decision making in any given context. That's what he's saying. You can't base your decisions on your anxiety about the idea of people dying while you're not there. That's what he's saying.
00:37:33
Speaker
Now, actually, when you examine it, that's a perfectly reasonable thing for someone to say. I mean, anybody actually, not just hysteric. But of course, hysteric, it does fit in with Stoicism because Stoicism stresses you should do your job, you should act virtuously, and that you should accept death. And then, of course, people take these passages out of context.
00:37:56
Speaker
And they say, oh, well, that means that Stoics don't care about anyone. They just care about themselves. They just care about self-sufficiency and so on. But of course, that's completely wrong. And by the way, while we're on self-sufficiency, the Stoics don't actually say that individual people should be self-sufficient. What they say is that virtue is self-sufficient for happiness.
00:38:21
Speaker
Okay, so virtue is self-sufficient for happiness. Now, but virtue isn't necessarily just self-centered. I mean, two of the virtues, the four cardinal virtues, one of them is justice, okay, justice, and the other one is courage. Now, both those virtues only make sense if you're involved in social relationships, if you're acting as a social agent.
00:38:50
Speaker
So what they're saying is, if you lead a virtuous life, then you will be leading what they call a happy life, the life according to nature. But to go from that to individual self-sufficiency, meaning, I'm just here on my own looking after me, that's all that matters. That's completely different. It's just a verbal trick.
00:39:15
Speaker
quite misleading. But people do it a lot. Of course. Yeah, I wonder if, of course, there's a sort of the silly version of the self sufficiency argument, which holds that still actually just care about themselves, and
Virtue's Priority Over Indifference
00:39:30
Speaker
they're not going to be engaged in their community or social relations.
00:39:34
Speaker
I think there's another version that I'm interested to hear your response to that is maybe brought out best with a story of Stilpo or Stilpo where his city is sacked by Demetrius and Demetrius is looking down on the destruction that he has wrought and knows that he has killed Stilpo's family, his children, but sees Stilpo walking out and
00:40:04
Speaker
Stillpo appears, you know, to be holding his head high, doesn't seem obviously displeased, and Demetrius goes to bother him, and Stillpo's one-liner in the story is that, you took nothing good from me, or you took nothing of mine, which portrays sort of this one reading of the Stoic view that
00:40:29
Speaker
Now, the destruction of Silpo City is out of his Silpo's control. It concerns indifference, and he is not going to sort of pay some sort of psychic cost because he has lost his children and his wife in the destruction of his city. And I think that's maybe one version that sort of gets across the thought that
00:40:57
Speaker
If you experience a terrible thing like that, you should have your well-being tied up to others in the sense that you should feel destroyed after that sort of thing. So what's your thought about that story? Well, that's, yes, what you've just said, of course, is that's the Aristotelian view, isn't it? That you should, you should, you have a positive obligation.
00:41:21
Speaker
to feel that if all these things are lost, you are destroyed and happiness depends on a combination of virtue and preferred indifference. I mean, you know, external goods. Now, what is this stoic going to respond to that? We're still so in this kind of one-liner, holds his head high,
00:41:46
Speaker
But I wonder if that is, let's see how one can put this. Let me take a Cicero's example of Regulus in the end of book three of the On Duties. Now, Regulus decides that his honor and his duty as a citizen require him to go back to Carthage,
00:42:12
Speaker
where he's been taken prisoner, he's got to go back there because that's the honorable, the virtuous thing to do. Now, how does he view that? Or how would a stoic view that? Or how does Cicero think that as stoic readers, we would think about that?
00:42:36
Speaker
Because you might, now one way of doing it, this precisely isn't how Cicero does it. As Regulus might say, well, my family and my city are nothing to me. They're nothing to me. All that matters is my virtue. And he might disappear off the horizon. That's not at all actually how Regulus is presented by Cicero. Cicero presents arguments for and against Regulus's position.
00:43:05
Speaker
Regulus has very powerful reasons not to go back to Carthage. He has a family. He has a community. He's become embedded in his family and he's become embedded in his community. He has very powerful reasons to do that.
00:43:23
Speaker
And you could indeed argue that virtue requires him to stay rather than to go. There are different ways of reading that situation, and the steaks are actually very aware of that fact, that virtue isn't like, you know, it's not like writing on a wall which will tell us infallibly what to do. There are different interpretations we have to make of what the virtuous thing to do is.
00:43:49
Speaker
For Regulus, he goes back to Carthage, he goes back to being tortured, he's killed, but what he is giving up is not nothing. What he is giving up is actually a lot. He's giving up lots of, if you like, preferred indifference because he thinks the right thing to do is to go, not to remain, but it isn't a question of there being no loss. There is a loss.
00:44:19
Speaker
There is a loss, but what there isn't, he thinks, is a loss of doing the right thing and a loss of virtue.
00:44:27
Speaker
So I think the Stoics are often presented as if they're kind of have a much simpler view than they actually do. I mean, they do recognize that in situations like this, there is indeed a real loss, but it's not the loss of things that are good in a kind of, you know, in their sense, because the good thing to do is to act virtuously and to do what the right thing is.
00:44:54
Speaker
Now, you might say, well, in this case, the Stoics have just said the same thing as the Aristotelians, but no, that's not right. They would in the end think that the virtuous thing is in a way the only thing that matters.
00:45:07
Speaker
but it matters ultimately. But the other things matter in the sense that they have value, they have causative value. And I do think the trouble, again, Stilpo is a bit of a one-liner like the handbook of Epictetus. These one-liners have their limitations, I think. So it's one reading of the Stilpo case, something like, in some contexts,
00:45:34
Speaker
the right action for someone who experiences a loss like still pose may in fact be
00:45:43
Speaker
long periods of mourning or something of this sort. And yet in other contexts, it might be better to face down someone like Demetrius with the sense that, oh, you haven't lost anything because he's a vicious conqueror and that's how you should treat vicious
Accepting Death: A Stoic Effort
00:46:00
Speaker
conquerors. Yes. I don't think it's quite, I don't think the Stokes would actually advocate long periods of mourning.
00:46:07
Speaker
But I think they do recognize that accepting, say, our own death and the death of others, I mean, look at Marcus, he devotes, I think it's about 58 of his meditations are devoted to coming to terms with death.
00:46:27
Speaker
Now, if death was just nothing, death is, you know, he wouldn't need to, he wouldn't need to, but he does. He gives himself all these arguments for accepting the reality of death. Death is natural, death is universal, death is part of nature, part of the cosmic world. No, he has to work at it. Now, he's not in those passages as it were giving a kind of pre-morning, you know, an anticipatory morning.
00:46:57
Speaker
He's working, but he does recognize that to get to that point of view requires work. He does require work of us. So he's not doing what the psychologist sometimes called ruminating. He's not just going over and over it. He's not just going over and over it. It's work. It's real work. And he's marshalling for himself all the kind of considerations that may make us accept
00:47:25
Speaker
what is indeed the case, the reality of our death, even though there are other factors of our human nature which draw us in a different direction. Absolutely. Well, we're coming up towards time. Is there anything else you would like to add?
Upcoming Stoic Ethics Book
00:47:44
Speaker
I'd just like to mention that I'm writing an introductory book on stoic ethics. It's going to be just called that, an introduction to stoic ethics.
00:47:55
Speaker
And it will explore some of these issues. And I hope if it, well, it will get published by Oxford University Press, but I hope that people might buy it, not because I want to make lots of money, but I hope that people might find it useful. Yeah, I'm sure people will find it useful. I'm looking forward to reading.
00:48:17
Speaker
Excellent. Well, thanks so much for doing this again. Okay. It's been extremely good to talk to you and thank you for your penetrating questions and sympathetic responses.
00:48:29
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations.
Episode Closing
00:48:31
Speaker
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00:48:58
Speaker
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00:49:21
Speaker
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