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Zena Hitz on The Meaning of Life, and Religion (Episode 90)
789 Plays1 year ago
“This day will end like all others.”
“And after that?”
In this conversation, Caleb speaks with Zena Hitz about her recent book “A philosopher looks at the religious life.” They discuss meaning, Christianity, and Stoicism.
(01:10) Wholeheartedness
(06:59) Meaning
(14:18) Abandonment
(17:45) Devotion and Role Ethics
(30:08) Service and Happiness
(40:32) Freedom
(44:33) Nietzsche
***
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoic Conversations
00:00:00
Speaker
The idea of freedom is that the kind of freedom that abandonment gets you is the freedom to do things that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do because you would be too fearful about the pain and suffering that would cause you. But I think in that way, it's quite simple.
00:00:20
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. In this conversation, I speak with Zina Hitts.
Introducing Zina Hitts and Her Work
00:00:41
Speaker
I loved her two recent books, Lost in Thoughts, and then, most recently, a philosopher looks at the religious life
00:00:50
Speaker
It's that latter one that we will be focusing on in this conversation. In addition to teaching philosophy at St. John's, Zina is also the founder of the Catherine Project, a free and volunteer-led great books organization.
Zina's Journey to Teaching
00:01:09
Speaker
They have some excellent tutorials and reading groups, so do check out their website, CatherineProject.org, if you're interested in thinking about
00:01:19
Speaker
some of the great works of philosophy and literature with others. Here is our conversation. Thanks for joining again. Thanks so much for having me back, Caleb. Well, let's start with this broad question that I can't recall if I asked you last time, but what's your story? How do you answer that question? I am philosophy, teacher of philosophy, teacher of liberal arts.
00:01:46
Speaker
And I began my life as a liberal arts student, became a research academic, left everything to join a religious community, and came back and sort of reshaped my vocation into something more oriented towards teaching and service rather than research. And that's
Wholeheartedness in Christian Life
00:02:07
Speaker
my story. I tell it mostly in Lost in Thought, the first book, but also the experience in the religious community is behind this new book.
00:02:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think a useful way for people to understand what kind of religious life is on offer is through this trait of wholeheartedness, also one that is shared by many of the ancient Greek philosophical schools and other philosophical schools as well, of course. But I wonder if you could speak to that a little.
00:02:38
Speaker
Well, so maybe the first thing to clarify is that the religious life that's the topic of the book is not just the life of any old religious person, but a person who lives a certain kind of committed life. So monks, nuns, hermits, these are kind of the central figures. Although I also try to treat these as being instances of Christian life more generally and having ways that I think there's a way in which every Christian lives a life like this.
00:03:07
Speaker
I do focus on Christian religious life even though, as we all know, their religious life exists in many cultures. It's just the one I know the best.
Wholeheartedness vs. Lukewarmness
00:03:16
Speaker
First say that, and then what I distinguish wholeheartedness as being the key goal of making a commitment. Commitments, for instance, of poverty, chastity, which is celibacy, in this case, obedience to a superior, along with sometimes there's a vow of stability not to change places, a renunciation of wealth as well as a renunciation of work.
00:03:44
Speaker
And my thought is that these are all aiming at wholeheartedness. That is, not, wholeheartedness might sound like it means purity of motive. That is that all you care about is God or all you care about is loving your neighbor. But I want to be quite clear. I think it's been confusing to some of my readers. It's not having no other motivations. It's just that what you're committed to at the bottom, what organizes your life,
00:04:15
Speaker
The standard by which you judge everything else that you're doing is that ultimate commitment to love of God and love of neighbor. It's contrasted with what's called lukewarmness, which appears in the book of Revelation in the New Testament, where someone who's neither hot nor cold
00:04:36
Speaker
Usually described in that section as being a person who's wealthy and thinks they're self-sufficient, that person is not worthy to enter the kingdom of God. So one has to be all in. One other example from the New Testament, in the Gospels, there's a famous story, a parable about a person who finds a pearl of great price and sells everything they have to get it.
00:05:02
Speaker
So it's the idea of selling everything you have for one thing. It doesn't mean you don't ever want anything else or you don't ever feel anything else, but it means that your commitment is to that one thing. You're committed to trading anything that you have to in order to keep that thing.
Applying Wholeheartedness to Secular Life
00:05:18
Speaker
Yeah, so how would you distinguish wholeheartedness from the kind of person who you might be, in a fictional example, the person who comes to mind is Howard Rourke from The Fountainhead, who's obsessive about architecture. And of course, I'm in Silicon Valley, so you have many different models of people who might take that.
00:05:44
Speaker
in the corporate structure. Would you define that as a kind of wholeheartedness where I think there's a sort of single pointedness either towards some personal goal of enrichment or some idea of art or building a company or something like this? Is that a kind of wholeheartedness or is that a distinct? I think that's a wonderful question. I'm very grateful for it. So I think something like this. It's an attempt at wholeheartedness.
00:06:12
Speaker
So it bears some similarities. So you have a total commitment to
00:06:20
Speaker
space travel, total commitment to architecture, total commitment to getting as rich as possible. People don't always admit that that's their motive, but it is obviously the motive of many people where they wouldn't actually achieve it. Or there could also be moral commitments, political motivations, which you just want to give everything you have to end in climate change or what have you.
00:06:48
Speaker
What happens, I think, is that part of the background thinking in Christianity is that we can't actually want anything wholeheartedly.
Transcendent Good in Christianity
00:07:00
Speaker
We're put together in such a way that we desire, above all, a transcendent good that is God. So we might try to organize our life about one thing, and we might succeed to an extent
00:07:17
Speaker
But it's never going to be completely peaceful or comfortable because there's something in us that wants something different. And we find this in pop culture all the time, the sense of it being lonely at the top or a sense of an emptiness, even though you have everything you're looking for, even though everything is within your grasp, there's a sense of emptiness, a sense of meaninglessness. It's a very common trope theme image. And I think that Christianity has a version of that that is
00:07:47
Speaker
None, we can try to be wholeheartedness. We could try to be wholehearted about things that aren't really going to make us flourish, but it's something about it's not really gonna work. It's not gonna end well. And we're going to have inner conflicts that can't be resolved.
00:08:05
Speaker
So in the beginning of the book, I suppose you talk about the challenge of life's meaning and
Life's Meaning Without God
00:08:13
Speaker
more or less argue that a life without God is meaningless or pointless and perhaps tragic as well.
00:08:26
Speaker
So one question I have here is, I think there's of course something to that argument, but on one hand, meaning seems very cheap. You know, if I just think about reasons for action or good things in the world, they come to mind immediately, unless one's in especially dour mood, I think.
00:08:47
Speaker
So I suppose, but there isn't like the last something there is maybe one way to think about that. The thrust of that argument is that we have a desire to commit ourselves to something fully, something that is eternal in this wholehearted way.
00:09:09
Speaker
but is not met by what the Stoics would call so many preferred indifference or the things in this world that might be good but are temporary and perhaps not, in some ultimate sense, meaningful.
00:09:24
Speaker
I think that's right. And I think it's not honestly as clear in this book as I would like it to read. We think about meaning in really more than one way, just as you said. So we can think of a walk in the park as meaningful because it's obviously good. It's good for everyone, not just people who believe in God. Nature is beautiful, and using one's body in a healthy way is good.
00:09:53
Speaker
That's available to anyone. So I'm not saying that somehow only religious people have good things. I think that would not be true.
00:10:02
Speaker
But there is, it's the sense in which, and I think in my first book I was clearer about it, what's the final end of your life? What's the thing towards which that you're ultimately committed to? And I think that every philosopher thinks there has to be such a thing. I'm pretty convinced that there has to be not only one that we can choose, but also one that's implicit. Whenever we have a dramatic choice,
00:10:30
Speaker
whenever we're in a crisis, we're usually in a crisis about what our ultimate end is. A conflict between career and family, say, or a conflict between morality and respectability or any of these things. You have to look at your ultimate commitments. And I think that it boils down ultimately. There has to be one for which you trade everything.
Ultimate Commitment and Meaningful Life
00:10:52
Speaker
And so that's
00:10:55
Speaker
the candidate for the source of meaning. And so it's connected to the thing about wholeheartedness in that the meaningful life is the wholehearted life. And again, it's just a claim that Christianity makes it. It follows on some other classical thinkers, more like Plato and Aristotle than the soaks maybe.
00:11:15
Speaker
where we're just put together in such a way that only one such thing will satisfy us. And that's a claim that I think many people today would reject.
00:11:25
Speaker
most of us secular liberal people think that there's more than one thing that could satisfy human being. These more radical claim of I think many of the world's religions and some philosophies is that no, there's really only a much narrower set of things that can really satisfy it and make our lives so that we can look at our lives and say, this whole thing was worth doing. Never get to that. You could walk in the park every day
00:11:55
Speaker
the rest of your life and it might still be great. I have this in mind because I was just walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain where it is kind of like that every day. In a way, you think you could do this forever. In another way, well, what's it all for? You would have to have an answer to that question. Otherwise, it would just be one day walking after another, one pretty bird, another pretty flower after another. You might really wonder whether that life was something that
00:12:24
Speaker
was worthy of all that you put into it. Yeah, so I suppose both Christianity, other religions, and the Greek philosophies, many of the Greek philosophies at any rate, hold that there is this one thing you can aim towards, different conceptions of virtue or happiness. Do you think it's useful to contrast the Greek answer with the Christian answer as something like,
00:12:53
Speaker
many of the Greeks, maybe holding aside things like Epicureanism, are aiming to strive for divinity. Whereas as a Christian, you're embracing a kind of, I think, dependence as the word you use.
Greek Philosophy vs. Christian Happiness
00:13:12
Speaker
Right. So this is something else I've gotten in a little bit of trouble with with my readers. In the book, I do make the contrast between
00:13:23
Speaker
your ultimate good, your eudaimonia, your flourishing as something which you achieve and something which is given to you in which, in a way, the main practice is a type of surrender rather than some kind of achievement. I think the fact is that that's true. I think what I said was true, but it is a bit of a simplification because there's a way in which
00:13:51
Speaker
even in the case of the Greek philosophy, so that for someone like Aristotle, the best life is the most pleasant. Now you don't aim at pleasure, it just ends up being the most pleasant.
00:14:03
Speaker
So in a way, it also matters the way that you aim at something or how you aim at something. And it could also be for someone like Aristotle, a matter of chance, whether you actually actualize that potential. And so in that way, it may be something that happens to you. So in a matter of your environment, your education, things that are not under your control. So I think it's a little bit misleading. And I also think that ultimately,
00:14:33
Speaker
And this, I think, is borne out by the later Christian tradition that tries to reconcile Greek philosophy with Christianity, Augustine, and then finally Aquinas, that Christian happiness is meant to be a type of eudaimonia. It's sometimes held out in some of these authors as Christianity is how you achieve the thing that these people always wanted.
00:14:57
Speaker
which is to be divine.
Stoic Individualism vs. Christian Providence
00:15:00
Speaker
And it turns out in the Christian point of view, it's not under your control. It's given by grace. And that's, I think, distinctive from the ancient views, but the end in some sense is the same. And there's some way in which Christians succeed where others have failed, but where the objective is quite close.
00:15:23
Speaker
Yeah, right. Yeah, I was thinking about this in terms of the stoic case where on one hand you have the stoic idea is almost the best expression of this idea is striving to be divinity. And they'll say, unlike Aristotle, none of this is up to chance. It's all up to the individual. Every individual has a chance of happiness so long as they are virtuous. It doesn't matter their education, their background.
00:15:53
Speaker
or what have you. But on the other hand, you also have these ideas of determinism, fate. The thing that allows you to be happy is the fact that you are a rational being, but that reason is not, in a sense, not your own. It's merely a fragment of a much larger whole. And I think if you keep on looking at that picture,
00:16:20
Speaker
You do get these ideas of dependence, even if you started with this very sort of individualistic picture.
00:16:29
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that makes sense. And of course it's historically true that stoicism is in the air when Christianity is born. And it's hard not to read someone like Epictetus and hear the Christian descendants. And it's something like what you're saying. There's a parallel too if I think about
00:16:58
Speaker
You know, you can correct me. You know, you know more about socialism than me, so you can correct me. But if I think of the stoic point of view as being something like it doesn't, it doesn't matter what happens to you. It matters what you're doing when that happens, how you respond to what happens. I think that's also fundamentally a Christian thought and it's, it's behind the
00:17:21
Speaker
It's, it's a version of the thing I call abandonment in the book where it's, it's not somehow, and this is, I think in contrast, both of them contrasting that they are subtle, that it's, it's not that liked if the right stuff happens to you, you win, but you, you can receive anything that happens to you and be happy from it. Assuming that you, you yourself are in the
Abandonment in Stoicism and Christianity
00:17:48
Speaker
right condition. I think, I think that's a very close parallel.
00:17:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. There's an idea of you want to harmonize yourself with the universe and even explicitly not what you want, but align your will with this larger thing. Exactly. It's an idea, I think, certainly many modern stoics don't talk about abandonments, but your book maybe thought maybe that's something that should be emphasized a bit more. Of course, there is a large debate about
00:18:21
Speaker
in modern Stoics, whether there is something to be abandoned to, you know, what is this idea of? It's underlying structure. Right. Right. And I guess this might be a difference between the ancient and the modern Stoics. I think it's usually a divine reason in the ancient Stoics, but maybe we don't today so much believe it's harder for us to believe in the divine reason.
00:18:45
Speaker
Yeah, there's I think lots of debates and questions about that particular question. So one issue that I think always comes up with these this project of
00:19:00
Speaker
fully devoting oneself to something is, how is that justified when doing so seems to violate some role ethics? And I think you go through a number of stories of figures who seem exceptionally virtuous, but nonetheless leave
00:19:21
Speaker
relationships that I think many would think of as central marriage or children or communities to enter a new kind of community. So big question, of course, but how do you make sense of this conflict between ordinary common sense role ethics and moving to a new community, devoting yourself? Well, hardly to something distinct.
Role Ethics vs. Religious Devotion
00:19:50
Speaker
So I think it depends a bit on how you end up cashing out your role ethics. So I don't think Christianity holds to a pretty sharp distinction between pursuits that are worldly, and that's a narrow sense of worldly, where it means something like the pursuit of power, wealth, or status, and the pursuit of God. So there's no normative hold
00:20:21
Speaker
of the pursuit of wealth. You can use wealth status and power for good. It's not that they're somehow forbidden, but they have no normative pull. So renouncing them costs you nothing. The hard cases, I think, and there's a particularly hard case in the book, which is one of my, it's one of my favorite stories. I discovered it just a couple of years ago. Wolada Petros, who's a saint of the Ethiopian Coptic church.
00:20:48
Speaker
and who was a figure of resistance against the Roman Catholic missionaries in Ethiopia in the 17th century. So this is just a fascinating person and her life. It just undermines all of your thoughts about what Christianity is, what an African is, any of these things, what a 17th century woman might have been capable of or not capable of.
00:21:15
Speaker
So it's very interesting for all those reasons. But she leaves her husband to become a nun. And that is something which violates, if in the world I know, which is the Roman Catholic world of today, if you went to your bishop or your pastor or to a religious community and you said, I think I have a call, I'm married.
00:21:41
Speaker
with or without children, they would say, no, you can't be called. You're married. In the contemporary version, the marriage commitment is its own vocation, which exists because of the call to celibacy and direct conflict with the religious life.
00:21:59
Speaker
So to me, it's just interesting to think that that's not a universal rule in the Christian churches. It hasn't always been true and it's not true outside of the Roman tradition necessarily. So Orthodox priests can be married. That's another contrast. And there's a famous saints. This is a bit funny. I don't mean to make fun of my own religion, but
00:22:25
Speaker
There's a saint, I think he's Swiss, I can't remember his name, but he had 12 children, married with 12 children, and he felt the calling to be a hermit.
00:22:35
Speaker
It's very funny because it's not hard to imagine if you had 12 children in your home that you might feel a calling to be a hermit. Anyway, he lived out his vocation. He lived outside. His family would bring him food. He lived out behind his house. Anyway, so there are variations in the past which suggest something different. And I don't quite know how to think about that. I think it can't be... So I suppose I don't...
00:23:03
Speaker
I don't hold that there should be a direct moral conflict. So you can't be called by God to do something morally evil. So it's abandoning your wife and children as morally evil. You can't be called by God to do it. But I think there might be, especially if we think about the way the institution of marriage has changed over the years, over the centuries and how it changes across cultures, it seems to be possible that in certain contexts, in certain ways of imagining it,
00:23:31
Speaker
you might be called out of one commitment into another. So yeah, I don't know if that's helpful or if you want to come back with a more narrow question, but something like that.
00:23:43
Speaker
Yeah, well, maybe another way to ask it is if you see someone doing something as extreme as leaving their marriage, there's certainly going to be, at least I think there are valid reasons for leaving marriage and also there are invalid ones. And there's always a question, I think maybe for people who find themselves
00:24:12
Speaker
in a kind of position like this, am I more likely to be in the situation where I am rationalizing some misstate? Or am I truly called, whether that takes on religious shape or not? And perhaps this is just an exceptionally difficult question, but I would
00:24:38
Speaker
How do you think about distinguishing which of the two cases you might be in? Maybe focusing on marriage is not the most interesting because in the Roman Catholic Church where I come from, there's a whole canon law structure which determines when it's valid to leave your marriage and when it isn't and when it can be annulled and when it can't be. So there's a whole set of laws
00:25:07
Speaker
that I think most listeners are, they're not, if they accept them, they might make sense or they might not accept them and they don't make sense. And it doesn't get down to fundamentals. But I thought your question might be getting too, it's something beyond marriage, like something like your, so I can think of two people, they're not vowed religious, but they lived something
Balancing Religious and Worldly Commitments
00:25:27
Speaker
like that. Dorothy Day and Catherine Doherty, they both had young children at the time when they received a call to live a kind of radical life of poverty.
00:25:37
Speaker
And it's quite uncomfortable to read about their lives at that stage because it's obvious that their children are suffering from the life that they've chosen. It's also obvious that their lives are extremely fruitful and beautiful and fascinating and noble. And it's challenging to see what the issue is or something that I think many, many people who are called religious life faces, care of aging parents.
00:26:07
Speaker
You know, what do you do if you're the person who's going to care for your aging parent in your call to this life? And I think there's a Christian spiritual practice called discernment, where you're meant to really work through on an individual basis the subtleties of your situation and to really try to see what the right thing to do is. And that might be subtle because there might be cases where because you believe that the world is governed by a providential God,
00:26:36
Speaker
You have to see the limits of your own choices and abandon the things that are outside your control to Providence. So sometimes it falls into that category, but sometimes you might really have an obligation. So it all ends up being
00:26:53
Speaker
quite complicated. I think very difficult. I think it's honestly one of the things that real life religious have always struggled with most intensely is the sense of obligations to, you know, or suppose your community is under a grave threat. Should you leave the cloister to defend it or to... So there's, I think it's not a
00:27:19
Speaker
Yeah, there's not an easy answer to that kind of question. It's discerned by individuals. And you can make mistakes. I mean, it's not one way or the other. And I think it is at the heart of what happens to many people who are discerning a call like this, either at the beginning or later on.
00:27:42
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, I didn't mean to fix on marriage too much. And I'm certainly right that there are different kinds of places this will crop up, whether maybe someone feels the urge to be something close to a moral saint, leave their community and either work abroad or start donating on amounts of money that the people surrounding them think is bizarre. And I think that many of us can
00:28:09
Speaker
bring to mind individuals of people who act this way and are clearly virtuous, even if there are trade-offs or harms that result in their actions. But it's also true that there are ideas like the person who loves all of humanity does more for their own sake than for the sake of all of humanity, right? A way to justify ignoring neighbors and this sort of thing. Right. That makes sense.
00:28:40
Speaker
Yeah, and it is exceptionally difficult to think about these sorts of cases. I think so, yeah. But in some ways it seems like it's the sort of thing that many people are not always faced today. Does that seem right to you? So we have these kinds of hard decisions people make, and perhaps how often do these crop up in a life? What do you think?
00:29:08
Speaker
I don't know how, I think major conflicts between things that really matter and that we care about are very, very common. But conflict between ones, if we go back to the way we were talking earlier, so we're thinking about our eudaimony, our own flourishing as human beings. Conflicts between the deepest source of our flourishing and
00:29:39
Speaker
the source of meaning in that big picture sense in our lives and other things, I think those are less commonly experienced because I think people are less likely to make those kinds of commitment.
Providence and Life Decisions
00:29:53
Speaker
But when they do, I think they experience them. But maybe this gets more to the heart of the question you were originally asking about this, that one of the advantages of dealing with a crisis like this in
00:30:09
Speaker
from within the Christian worldview is that you know it's supposed to work out because there's a divine mind that has ordered all things towards good, even though that's sometimes impossible to see. If you are genuinely called by God to this particular life and there's an apparent conflict, you have to assume that you've misunderstood something.
00:30:36
Speaker
So there's always this, and in fact, even if you make a mistake, that mistake too is already by Providence. So there's a way in which
00:30:45
Speaker
The struggle is real and probably essential to this kind of life and the struggle to understand and discern what the right thing to do is. But on the other hand, it's all under the rubric of this omnipotent divine providence. So you ultimately, you can be at peace because you know that even your mistakes are integrated into some further good.
00:31:13
Speaker
Yeah,
Cultural Differences in Valuing Life
00:31:14
Speaker
that's right. So I suppose that if you have that kind of view where Providence is allowed into your worldview, that certainly will shape how you handle these decisions that show up on your, or questions that need decisions that show up on your doorstep, as it were.
00:31:33
Speaker
One story that you tell from a classroom that stuck out to me, and I'm curious, the significance of it is to you is when you talk about teaching Jonathan Glover's piece on the value of lives and in Alabama and students not being able to grasp.
00:31:52
Speaker
onto the question and I think eventually when you say something to the effect of we're trying to figure out what's the value of your life to you and a student replies with, why would you ever think the value of your life was for you? What was the significance of that story?
00:32:13
Speaker
Yeah, it was maybe my first year of teaching, so I remembered it. I was very shocked by it at the time, and it was also a moment of culture shock. I've always been a coastal person, so I was in Alabama, and I didn't think that that exchange would have happened in another country.
00:32:33
Speaker
We were talking about whether your life is worth living with certain kinds of challenges or disabilities. So is your life worth living if you're totally unconscious? This is the Glover article. Is your life worth living if you're conscious but in constant pain? Is your life worth living?
00:32:49
Speaker
you know, what have you. And, you know, he ends up concluding that your life is worth living when more or less it's worth living. That is when it's a good life. And so if, you know, I think these students had had experiences either in volunteering or in their own families was of living with people with quite severe disabilities. And I think their experience was these people were valuable for them.
00:33:17
Speaker
So you see something of your humanity in a person who's in pain, a person who's suffering, a person who has limited consciousness or limited capacities. You see something of yourself and you see what's possible for a human being even at the limits. And that's very nourishing for that person. So that's the background.
Self-Sacrifice and Happiness
00:33:47
Speaker
I think it's in Christianity of the stamps that I follow, it ends up being a bit, there's a bit of a parent, at least a parent tension because in a way your devotion to God or your devotion to your neighbor is eudaiministic, it's for you. But there's another way in which it's total self-sacrifice.
00:34:13
Speaker
So, and that is I think meant to be something like the, in the image of Christ crucified, which I think I also talk about in that same section where, you know, you, you, here's this person who has not, you know, in some sense is in a perfect state of suffering.
00:34:30
Speaker
but has also perfectly renounced every worldly good. I think you can see this also from a stoic perspective. They are indifferent to pain, they are indifferent to humiliation, they are indifferent to death, they are serene in their choice and their surrender to the way things are going.
00:34:53
Speaker
and this is a happy person. This is a happy person. The example from the Alabama classroom is
00:35:07
Speaker
meant to be a bit of a challenge to people like me and the communities I've always lived with, secular coastal communities, non-religious communities, where you tend to think of it as being more zero sum. You tend to think that there might be a type of disability that a family member could have that it couldn't possibly be worth it for you or for them.
00:35:36
Speaker
And I think the Christian point of view is that those zero-sum conflicts are not real. I think the kids in the classroom were putting it in the opposite direction, right? So they were saying like, oh no, what you want doesn't matter is what the other person needs. But in fact, that's in a way just a kind of halfway point to the main picture, which is just that there's not a conflict. A life of self-sacrifice is a life of happiness.
00:36:04
Speaker
I think that's the point. Yeah, I think so. I think you see the same tension in stoicism, or at least this tension around being virtuous. It is doing so, exemplifies your greatest good, but of course also what might be required of you by being virtuous could be acts of great sacrifice, great courage, or what have you. And then I think you also see this
Sacrifice in Teaching vs. Research
00:36:32
Speaker
at least initial tension where if you think about the focus of your decision-making, should it be what is pursuing your own good or pursuing the good of the much larger whole of these communities you find yourself in? And both Stoics and Christians think that ultimately those are going to be one and the same, but
00:36:58
Speaker
in our actual decision making their difficulties apart. I think I love that story because I think so many of us have just been so programmed to think about decisions about career, decisions about what's next in my life from the standpoint of my good that to bump into people who think differently is a useful way to check one's assumptions.
00:37:24
Speaker
No, and I mean, this is also just part of my experience, which you asked about at the beginning. Sometimes when I talk about it, it sounds like a very boring, undramatic thing to have done, but I leave research academia for teaching academia.
00:37:39
Speaker
But it is a case where it looks like you're giving up something which is good for you, that is free time, status works that redounds to your own reputation, and then there's an exercise of your pasties for something which is self-sacrificing, that is teaching, service, helping other people think. It just turns out that it's just, in my experience, just 10,000 times more gratifying
00:38:09
Speaker
My day-to-day life is just way better when I'm involved in this academia as service than this academia as achievement. You can cash that out in the details how you like, you can analyze it how you like, but I think it's a fact that many people experience, religious or not, that your happiness tends to come through connections with others.
00:38:35
Speaker
helping others. We think of helping as being giving something up, but in fact, we actually really like it. So I think it is an attempt to undermine that mindset that I think is very familiar to people like us. You don't want to give up too much now or you won't be happy. It's like, no, actually,
00:39:01
Speaker
You might be happy if you gave up a lot more than you are now. You might even be the happiest if you give everything up. Who knows? Yeah, I feel like our freedom or autonomy is threatened by these images of a life and worry that people in these other communities are not free or they're not acting on desires that are in fact their own. Right.
00:39:25
Speaker
I have a dear friend, sorry, I interrupted you, but I have a dear friend who, who died of cancer last year. He, he left. I graduated from college and then he enlisted in the army. This was in the nineties and it looked, I think to him and to others as this.
00:39:42
Speaker
sacrifice, service.
Joy in Sacrifice and Service
00:39:44
Speaker
I'm going to give up everything I could have been, and I'm going to give myself over to this life of obedience, risk, danger, boredom, et cetera, and regimentation. This person was not at all the kind of... You would never have pegged him for a military guy. I mean, he loved poetry and the good life, and you just wouldn't have thought it. Anyway, I remember getting a letter from him after
00:40:08
Speaker
few months or a year. He said, you know, it's weird. I really like this. I just, I really, I'm really enjoying being in the army. It's great. Uh, so I think it is not unusual to buy something like that.
00:40:23
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think there's also the idea that I think you can, if you want your ideas to have other people to interact with your ideas, your thoughts, of course, there's the academic path. There's a prestigious path, but in the medium term, I think that works out for many people, at least having some form of influence. But I think if there's a much perhaps longer path to continuing to interact with people,
00:40:52
Speaker
freed as much as you can of these other corruptions of prestige, of different intellectual fashions. And many people who do that, I think long enough, do find readers, of course, people to interact with their work. And people recognize, even if you're doing the smaller thing, playing in the smaller pond, if you're doing it in the way that's
00:41:14
Speaker
you know, they, they like without all these other distractions. There's something, something, something to that.
Freedom Through Abandonment
00:41:20
Speaker
And often I think these people find influence later on, not always, of course. And there's examples of people who purely take the prestige route who do very well for themselves. Um, but I think we should overlook the other other facts. That's right.
00:41:37
Speaker
Excellent. Well, one, coming back to, I think, an earlier line about abandonment. How does one find freedom, if at all? Is that something you would look for, or if not look for, think about an important question to answer? How does one find freedom in the state of abandonment? Well, I think part of it is thinking about freedom
00:42:08
Speaker
as in a very, you know, there's a lot of philosophical fussing about the senses of freedom. And sometimes I resist it, even though I've learned a lot from those conversations. So if I just think about my choices being restricted. Okay, so you're not free when you're, you're more free the less your choices are restricted. If you think about pain and suffering,
00:42:36
Speaker
They are usually perceived pain and suffering. Prospective pain and suffering is a major, major limitation on the kinds of choices that we have. And that's through our own way of choosing, right? And that happens even though, as I explained in the book, I think you are free when you're capable of choosing things which cause you pain and suffering.
00:43:05
Speaker
Even so, my daily life, like everyone else's, is conditioned by choices which are trying to avoid being powerful. So the idea of freedom is that the kind of freedom that abandonment gets you is the freedom to do things that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do because you would be too fearful about the pain and suffering that would cause you.
00:43:32
Speaker
But I think in that way it's quite simple. Abandonment is difficult. The Christian ideal of abandonment, that is accepting everything that happens to you as coming from a loving will.
00:43:46
Speaker
That's difficult because of the astonishing amount of suffering that takes place in the world. That's what makes it hard. If it weren't for that, if life were all cupcakes, it would be easier to abandon ourselves. If it was like cupcakes versus donuts, you could abandon yourself. Like, well, whatever happens, cupcakes or donuts would be fine.
00:44:04
Speaker
But
Historical Examples of Freedom in Abandonment
00:44:05
Speaker
if it's, you know, when you're faced with the kinds of things that are out there in the world, the various horrors and torments that are out there, then I think abandonment comes very hard. So the freedom is, you know, I don't need to let this restrict what I do. So again, Christ on the Christ crucifixion is a kind of paradigm example, right? He can choose this suffering and death
00:44:35
Speaker
without regard for the fact that it's suffering and death because of something that it means on the cosmic scale. On a much less mystical sense, you think about someone like Socrates, right?
00:44:48
Speaker
He can choose. He can run away from Athens. He cannot run away from Athens. He can give a good speech to the jury that persuades them, or he can give the terrible speech he gives, which makes them even angrier. He has these choices because he doesn't care. It's a matter of indifference to him, whether he dies or not. So I think that's the basic nugget of it. And I think there's a way in which is very intuitive.
00:45:19
Speaker
People who live their lives in a kind of pathological avoidance of pain and suffering live very, very limited lives. And I think anyone can see that. They might not leave their houses, they might not ever take a risk, and they're not living in the fullest sense.
Nietzsche's Amor Fati and Abandonment
00:45:38
Speaker
Right. How do you think about the idea of Nietzsche's version of this idea where you practice a more fatty, the great person loves fate, they take the decisions that they would will if they were ever in that situation again. You have this idea of eternal recurrence and then embrace everything else that is outside of that.
00:46:04
Speaker
You know, I love Nietzsche. I've never vibed, as the kids say, with this particular aspect of his thinking. And I don't know whether it's because I don't understand it well enough or whether, which is probably the case or whether it just doesn't attract me for whatever reason. So I don't know whether I'm compelled by that. But again, maybe if you can explain it in terms that will
00:46:34
Speaker
put its teeth into my thinking, maybe I could be pulled over. I suppose it seems similar to these earlier ideas of abandonment with this added dimension of
00:46:50
Speaker
There's some of Nietzsche's idea of a great person, someone who you have these ideas of overcoming pain. Maybe it's something like this. It's helpful. Nietzsche and I gather Schopenhauer, who's a thinker who I also don't know well enough, but who I'm always interested in, always want to read. They think of human happiness as being essentially competitive.
00:47:19
Speaker
you prevail or you don't. And that goes along with a rejection of the Christian critique of strength and power. So if you believe that the world is that human flourishing is essentially competitive,
00:47:42
Speaker
then you don't, that closes off this Christian option of, oh no, I win by giving everything. Like, I win when the bad guy kills me. Most of all, that's martyrdom, that's the highest achievement of a Christian life. Whereas to someone like Nietzsche, that's an obvious absurdity. It's like, no, no, when the bad guy kills you, you've lost. You're the loser.
00:48:11
Speaker
So I think that Nietzsche is presenting a kind of challenge to Christian thinking that I think is based on just an inability to accept, a very understandable inability to accept that the world is providentially ordered and that there's a loving God who runs all things. So I think once he rejects that, then
00:48:43
Speaker
argument for achievement through weakness or achievement through suffering, achievement to abandonment, becomes less credible. Maybe totally incredible. That would be a struggle.
Promoting the Catherine Project
00:48:55
Speaker
Right. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Excellent. Well, is there anything else you would like to add?
00:49:05
Speaker
Only when I always like to add, which is that if you, if you want to read really good books, like Nietzsche and the Stoics and talk to people about them, then look for the CatherineProject.org and sign up for one of our groups or volunteer. We're always looking for volunteer leaders. And I feel like Stoa podcast listeners would be good candidates either for the courses or for leadership. It's all volunteer and it's all free of cost.
Closing Remarks
00:49:31
Speaker
CatherineProject.org.
00:49:33
Speaker
Excellent. Perfect. I'll be sure to put that in the intro as well. Thank you. Well, thanks again for taking the time to come on. Thanks for a great conversation here. It's great. Great talking to you.
00:49:46
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyer.com. And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stommeditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.