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Lesson 2.8: Pneuma
10 Plays20 days ago
Emotions are judgments in disguise. Can you learn to withhold yours?
Topics discussed:
- The Stoic theory of impressions, assent, and the role of judgment in emotional life
- How pneuma—the cosmic breath—structures the soul, the cosmos, and Stoic psychology
- The importance of prohairesis (moral will) as the seat of freedom and virtue
- Why the Stoics saw emotion as a consequence of belief
- The rigorous practices of attention, self-monitoring, and withholding assent
- How Stoicism offers a radical kind of inner freedom in a world ruled by fate
For more information, visit theluxuryofvirtue.com.
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoicism
00:00:02
Speaker
Today we begin to cover the philosophy of Stoicism and as such it is fitting that we begin with Zeno of sc Citium. Zeno is officially the founder of the school of Stoicism and by hearing his biography you will get a real feel for the philosophy or at least I hope So Zeno was born in 334 BCE. e For historical context, he was about 11 when Alexander the Great died.
00:00:35
Speaker
So he was just a little bit younger than Epicurus, who we covered in the last lesson. And Zeno turned towards philosophy as a young man when he survived a shipwreck.
00:00:47
Speaker
And in this shipwreck, he literally lost everything that he owned. And so apparently he just made his way to a bookseller and he just collapsed there. Basically, he just collapsed by ah bookstore and he found himself reading an account of Socrates' life where written by one of his students, whom we've covered before, Xenophon,
00:01:12
Speaker
And right then and there, Zeno realized he is to devote his life to philosophy. Well, at least after a quick visit to an oracle.
Zeno and the Birth of Stoicism
00:01:22
Speaker
And so after that, Zeno becomes the student of Crates of Thebes.
00:01:28
Speaker
You may remember Crates because he is a cynic. He was married to Hipparchia and they used to copulate in public, shall we say? And of course, Crates was a student of Diogenes the dog, and you certainly will remember him, I hope.
00:01:46
Speaker
So Zeno spent some time studying cynicism. He also spent some time studying at the Megarian school. We have not covered or even spoken about the Megarian school, but this school was founded by Euclides of Megara.
00:02:02
Speaker
That's why it's called the Megarian school. And Euclides was another student of Socrates. So there were many, many Socratic movements and Zeno studied at a few of them.
00:02:12
Speaker
Not only did he spend some time at the Megarian school, he also spent time at Plato's academy. Now, of course, this is long after Plato died. Nonetheless, he is steeped in the thought of Socratic thinkers.
00:02:27
Speaker
However, he didn't quite align himself fully with any of these philosophies. He found something lacking or wrongheaded about all of them.
00:02:40
Speaker
For example, he saw Platonism as being maybe too intellectual and they would focus on what seemed to him to be trifling issues. Why should we worry about this particular conception of the forms versus that one?
00:02:55
Speaker
Why does that matter? When it comes to the cynics, it seems like Zeno kind of saw them as lacking intellectual rigor, right? The exact opposite of what was going on over at Plato's Academy. and To Zeno, it just looked like the cynics would put themselves through sort of mindless hardship to try to find a shortcut to wisdom.
00:03:18
Speaker
So Zeno, if these are the two poles of, you know, radical philosophies you can follow, he tried to, you know, stake out for himself a middle path or a middle way.
Core Tenets of Stoicism
00:03:31
Speaker
And so he developed his own philosophy and we can call his mature philosophy as an attempt to try to rescue conventional Greek values.
00:03:44
Speaker
What do I mean by this? Well, Everything that was emblematic of traditional Greek culture, Zeno embraced, right? So the gods, traditional religion, the classical virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and prudence, a conventional life in the public sphere, unlike, for example, the Epicureans who would just go live in their communities and not have anything to do with politics.
00:04:13
Speaker
These are things that Zeno liked. conventional Greek ideas. However, he wanted to add a philosophical element to this approach to the conventional life. He wanted to add a little bit of Socrates in there to be more precise.
00:04:33
Speaker
In particular, Zeno took this idea from Socrates that we have before described as moral intellectualism. That's this idea that virtue is a type of wisdom.
00:04:48
Speaker
Virtue, in other words, is some specific bit of knowledge, something that you learn and know, and that's how you you know correct to your views and live in the right way.
00:05:00
Speaker
So virtue is a form of knowledge. Zeno wanted to inject that and somehow provide a philosophical justification for living a conventional life.
00:05:12
Speaker
But Zeno was also influenced by the cynics. And so he really liked that. You know, you can say a lot of things about the cynics, but one thing you can't say is that they weren't hardcore.
00:05:26
Speaker
there was a mental toughness about them that you kind of have to admire a little bit. And that's the part that Zeno wants to infuse into his views.
00:05:38
Speaker
So there's the embrace of traditional Greek ideas, but with a little bit of moral intellectualism from Socrates and mental toughness from Diogenes getting sprinkled in.
00:05:52
Speaker
That's the best way I can give you a glimpse into what Stoicism is. And by the way, it took off. It appears that Stoicism absorbed other Socratic movements. In other words, some of the other schools that were around that were in some way based on Socrates' teachings eventually got sucked into the greater umbrella of Stoicism.
00:06:19
Speaker
Of course, this was not the case for all schools. Plato's Academy, Plato, of course, the most famous student of Socrates, Plato's Academy always stayed independent of Stoicism. In fact, they were, for a time at least, bitter rivals.
00:06:35
Speaker
Later on in the history of Stoicism, it is the Stoics and the Epicureans who tended to do philosophical battle with each other. All this to say that Stoicism came into the scene when it was actually already pretty crowded, but they did pretty well for themselves and they became influential rather quickly.
00:06:59
Speaker
I should also note that it wasn't just pure competition between Stoicism and other schools of thought. There was also some borrowing going on. For example, when we look at Stoic physics, we can see that it is actually based in large part on certain Platonic dialogues.
00:07:21
Speaker
In particular, if you look at Plato's dialogue called the Timaeus, we can see a lot of what eventually will be will become Stoic physics.
00:07:32
Speaker
By the way, the Timaeus, the dialogue itself, was influenced by Heraclitus. And so here we can see that we don't get Stoicism without a whole lot of intellectual predecessors giving rise to certain ideas.
00:07:47
Speaker
Another area of thought that Stoics borrowed from other schools has to do with logic. The Stoics will become very famous for their particular brand of logic. And in fact, it is very close to modern propositional logic. If you take a symbolic logic course, you will do at least a little bit of Stoic logic.
00:08:09
Speaker
Well, this logic came from a few different sources. For one, Aristotle was the preeminent logician of the ancient world, so they borrowed some ideas from Aristotle, although their type of logic is very distinct from Aristotle's type of logic.
00:08:25
Speaker
And they also borrowed logical ideas so from the Megarian school. You'll recall that Zeno studied with the Megarians for a little bit, so he definitely had several influences in generating his worldview.
Chrysippus and Stoic Expansion
00:08:40
Speaker
Well, Zeno ran his school for the rest of his life. He and his students would meet at the Stoa, which is sort of like the porch at the Agora, the marketplace in Athens.
00:08:53
Speaker
That's why they call Stoics. They would meet at the Stoa. But now we come to another figure that's very important in the history of Stoicism, and his name is Chrysippus.
00:09:05
Speaker
Chrysippus was much younger than Zeno, some 50 years younger. He was born in 280 BCE. And really, he is the most important thinker in the history of Stoicism.
00:09:19
Speaker
When Chrysippus came onto the scene, Stoicism was already a thing, but Chrysippus felt that he could argue better for the position, the doctrines of the Stoics, than his teachers, such as Zeno.
00:09:33
Speaker
And he did. so you know, it sounds a little cocky and pretentious and maybe it was, but in the end, Most scholars believe, maybe all scholars believe, that he is the most important figure in Stoicism.
00:09:49
Speaker
In fact, when we think of Stoicism, we're really thinking of the Stoicism of Chrysippus. His arguments and his views, in other words, are considered orthodox Stoicism, the the main, the official doctrine of Stoicism.
00:10:07
Speaker
And so today, it is the Stoicism of Chrysippus that we will be covering. The way I want to do this is that I want us to imagine that it is, i don't know, let's just say 200 BCE and you're wandering around Athens. You've kind of, you know, heard a little bit of what all the schools have to say, but you've decided, you know what, I'm going to be a Stoic.
00:10:31
Speaker
Okay, so you decide to join the school. Let's go through the process of initiation into Stoicism in exactly the way that they would have done so.
00:10:44
Speaker
So let me first tell you about the three areas of study for the Stoics and then we'll learn about each of those in the order in which you would have learned about them.
00:10:56
Speaker
But first, in general, there are three areas of study for the Stoics. Physics, logic and ethics. Now when we say physics for the Stoics, it doesn't necessarily mean just what we today think of physics.
00:11:10
Speaker
For them, physics included, of course, natural philosophy, what we today call science, but also cosmology, which has to do with the nature of the universe. And also, it's going to sound kind of weird at first, but you'll see why later, theology.
00:11:27
Speaker
And of course, metaphysics. So theology, you know, that's what you learn if you're going to become a priest or something like that. And metaphysics, that's typically seen as philosophy, but the Stoics all considered that under the greater umbrella of physics. So we will see why in a little bit.
00:11:45
Speaker
That's physics. There's also logic, but logic for the Stoics includes not only logic the way we think about it today, where you study valid patterns of reasoning,
00:11:56
Speaker
But for the Stoics, you would also, within logic, study what we today call epistemology, which has to do with how you know what you know, right, knowledge, as well as philosophy of language. So we'll talk about that in a little bit.
00:12:11
Speaker
And last but not least, you study ethics, of course. And for the Stoics, ethics means not only ethics, right, how you should live, how do you live the good life, but also what we would today call moral psychology.
00:12:25
Speaker
So we'll look at all this in a little bit. Let me give you a little metaphor for why you study these three fields of inquiry. So this metaphor comes from, of course, who else? Chrysippus.
00:12:38
Speaker
And it's the metaphor of a garden. So in this metaphor, the flowers are the virtues, right? The whole goal of the garden is to grow some flowers, right? You want to grow some virtues.
00:12:54
Speaker
You want to develop the virtues. So you, of course, have to study ethics. But... You can only grow the flowers if you understand you know the soil, right the world around you.
00:13:07
Speaker
So that's where the study of physics comes in. And so in this metaphor, physics is the dirt and the environment that the flowers grow in. You have to know you know how much sun they're going to get and how much water to give them and all that.
00:13:22
Speaker
So that's why you study physics. By the way, you also need to protect your garden from, you know, intruders and pests and rodents or whatever. So you put up a fence.
00:13:36
Speaker
The fence is logic. And the point of logic is to guard you from faulty reasoning, from making careless inferences. Right. So that is the metaphor. The flowers are the virtues.
00:13:51
Speaker
The dirt is physics and logic is the fence. Out of these three fields of inquiry, the first thing you will learn about is logic. In other words, the first thing you have to do is build your fence.
00:14:06
Speaker
So let's move into that now.
00:14:32
Speaker
As I mentioned earlier, logic in the Stoic sense includes various subfields, what we would today consider entirely separate fields. For the Stoics, logic included logic itself, but also epistemology and philosophy of language.
00:14:50
Speaker
Let's begin with Stoic epistemology. and I'm going to teach you about two terms in particular which are going to sound kind of scary at first but don't worry it's just a ah complicated non-english word that you'll get comfortable with pretty soon don't worry the two terms are and cataleptic impressions and non-cataleptic impressions okay so what's all this about well As we go through our lives, we you know form impressions about what's going on, sort of like beliefs, right?
00:15:28
Speaker
Thoughts come to mind and we say, oh yeah, that's what's going on. Those are impressions. Well, those can come in two types. You can have an accurate representation of what's going on, or you can have an inaccurate representation of what's going on.
00:15:49
Speaker
So in other words, maybe you see something that exists and you form correct ideas about how to represent that existent thing, that thing that exists.
00:16:00
Speaker
Or maybe you form some kind of belief, but it's about something that doesn't really exist or it does exist, but you're not really capturing the content of it very accurately.
00:16:15
Speaker
Well, basically you have accurate beliefs that accurately represent the world and inaccurate beliefs that in some way are misleading. The first of these are cataleptic impressions, right? It's something that exists and your belief is in accordance to that existent thing.
00:16:33
Speaker
The other kind are non-cataleptic impressions. You have some belief about either something that doesn't exist or... something that does exist but you're not really capturing it correctly with your with your mind's eye so that's what cataleptic and non-cataleptic impressions amount to but let's think about why this is so important to the stoics in other words why is it so important if you're trying to live the good life well i'm going to put it to you fairly bluntly
00:17:07
Speaker
right away the first thing that the stoics are teaching you is that you can't trust all your thoughts to be true sometimes you get a thought and yeah you know what it turns out it's accurate but other times we get you know some thought comes to mind And it's not really true. It's misleading in some way, or sometimes this is blatantly false.
00:17:36
Speaker
And so we have to be careful. You can't trust all your thoughts. Thoughts, in other words, are so unreliable, you can't blindly accept that all of them are true.
00:17:50
Speaker
Maybe you can try to take a moment here to think about a thought that you've had that you eventually realized was not true. How long did it take?
00:18:01
Speaker
Hopefully not very long, right? But in some cases, you know what happens. Some people after years say, oh, you know what? I guess it's not really true, right? This is kind of a big deal here. So this is how we're going to start.
00:18:15
Speaker
And for the Stoics, this is very important because when you assent to an impression, in other words, when you accept some thought as being true, as a belief, you then this typically leads to an impulse to action.
00:18:32
Speaker
in other words, your beliefs tend to lead to some behavior. And so that means that you really have to be careful about what you believe. You can't just passively accept every thought that comes floating by.
00:18:48
Speaker
You have to, through your rational guiding principle, right, your through your reason, you have to decide which thoughts to assent to and which thoughts to withhold assent from or reject right so that's our entry point to stoic philosophy
00:19:10
Speaker
Let's move on now to Stoic philosophy of language.
Logic and Language in Stoicism
00:19:14
Speaker
By the way, this is still within the greater area of inquiry of logic. Don't forget that. But this is kind of groundbreaking here. The Stoics made some novel contributions across all of philosophy, basically.
00:19:29
Speaker
But philosophy of language is one of the more notable ones. And I'll mention two other very notable ones later on. But the Stoics were either the first or among the first to distinguish between couple of different things here.
00:19:45
Speaker
The Stoics distinguish between the physical utterances that we make, right? the The noises that we make with our faces. the thought behind those statements, and the object that those statements are referring to.
00:20:03
Speaker
So there's names for all of these things, but just think about this way. The noise we make, the thought behind the noise, and the thing in the world that we're trying to describe.
00:20:16
Speaker
So let's get a little bit more technical here. The noises that and we make with our face, that's those are called utterances and we won't think about them too much. Let's think about the thought behind our statements.
00:20:32
Speaker
The word that we use today in philosophy to refer to this is called the proposition or the propositional content of our statements. The Greeks, by the way, would call them sayables or I guess the Greek term is lekta, but we'll call them propositions here. so what is a proposition?
00:20:50
Speaker
Well, a proposition is the thought expressed by a sentence which can be either true or false. The thought expressed by a sentence which can be either true or false.
00:21:05
Speaker
If you think about it, not every sentence can be either true or false. Basically, let's think of the types of sentences here. There's questions, right? There's exclamations, there's commands, there's other stuff.
00:21:18
Speaker
And there then there's declarative sentences. Questions can't really be labeled true or false. For example, if you ask someone, hey, what time is it? And they say false.
00:21:31
Speaker
They kind of don't understand what the label false applies to, right? That's not quite how you're supposed to answer questions. The same thing goes with exclamations. If someone says, go Lakers, you don't say true.
00:21:47
Speaker
You might agree, but agreeing is not the same thing as saying true, right? and there's commands, hey close the door, false. That doesn't make any sense either. and The only types of sentences that can be either true or false are declarative sentences because declarative sentences describe some state of affairs. So you probably want some examples. Let's give you some examples. Here is an example of a proposition.
00:22:18
Speaker
Snow is white. That is a declared a sentence, right? It describes some state of affairs. It can be either true or false.
00:22:28
Speaker
By the way, it is true. And it's the thought behind some sentence. What do I mean by that last thing? Well, the fact is that I could have said snow is white in quite a few different ways.
00:22:42
Speaker
I could say snow is white. I could say all snow is white. It's a slightly different sentence. I hope you can notice. I could have also said, everything in the category of snow is white.
00:22:54
Speaker
That's a very long, choppy sentence, but that still is the same thought. I could have also, by the way, said it in Spanish, la nieve es blanca. Or French, la neige blanche.
00:23:07
Speaker
Or Italian, la nieve es bianca. I think I said that correctly. I'm not sure, to be honest. German, der schnitt ist weiss. I'm not even sure how many types of sentences I said right now, maybe five or six, but those are six different sentences But that was all one proposition.
00:23:29
Speaker
Can you see how the proposition is the thought behind the sentence? So the proposition is either true or false. And I've given you one that is true, Snow is white.
00:23:42
Speaker
Here's another proposition. Los Angeles is the capital of California. That is a proposition. I know some of you might be thinking to yourself, that's not a proposition.
00:23:54
Speaker
Yes, it is. It can be either true or false. So, yeah, that counts as the thought expressed by a sentence that can be either true or false. It happens to be false, right? So propositions can be either true or false. That's the whole point of a proposition.
00:24:12
Speaker
There is a label that we place on this feature of sentences, which can be either true or false. We say that they are truth functional. So propositions are truth functional. And what we mean by that is that they can be true or false.
00:24:28
Speaker
What is the take home message of all this? Well, Whenever propositions arise in our minds, in other words, whenever we have a thought that is truth functional come to mind, we should take note.
00:24:49
Speaker
We should say, ah, here is a truth functional moment. And I have to be very careful here. I should only assent to this thought if it is actually true.
00:25:03
Speaker
What you should do then is once you notice some kind of propositional content and into your mind is look for truth makers. This notion of a truth maker is very useful.
00:25:17
Speaker
Basically, you have some thought that is truth functional come to mind. For example, Los Angeles is the capital of California and you search for a truth maker. Does anything make that true?
00:25:29
Speaker
No, nothing makes that true. Nothing that exists, at least. And so you say, well, I withhold assent from that proposition.
00:25:41
Speaker
Here's another thought that might come to mind. Sacramento is the capital of California. Does that have a truth maker? Yes, there's ah some document open Sacramento that says, yes, in fact, Sacramento is the capital of California.
00:25:55
Speaker
So that does have a truth maker. And so in that case, you ascend to it. So there you go. Some Stoic philosophy of language that helps you put some labels on the thoughts that might arise in your mind.
00:26:11
Speaker
This takes us right into Stoic logic. As I mentioned earlier, Stoic logic resembles modern propositional logic. So if you take a course in symbolic logic, for example, with me, you will learn a little bit of Stoic logic.
00:26:30
Speaker
Symbolic logic, by the way, is far too complicated for me to really get into in this short lesson on Stoicism. But let me just say this.
00:26:41
Speaker
The Stoics would... memorize valid argumentative patterns, basically patterns of reasoning that always seem to work, that have this feature where the evidence leads to the conclusion, right? Where certain sentences support some other sentence. So they would memorize when arguments work and they would memorize patterns where arguments don't work.
00:27:12
Speaker
And so they always knew, oh this argument is valid. This line of reasoning is valid. That line of reasoning is not valid. They can just kind of recognize it. And so we'll try to do a little bit of that in a bit.
00:27:26
Speaker
But the main point of doing logic for the Stoics is that they believed it helped them distinguish between cataleptic impressions, right those true, reliable perceptions or thoughts that we get, and non-cataleptic impressions, the false or unclear impressions that we sometimes form.
00:27:48
Speaker
And so that was the point. They would rigorously analyze their thoughts and their impressions. And it was all to attempt to avoid deception, I guess self-deception, and always align their beliefs with reality.
00:28:04
Speaker
So through logic, in other words, here's let me put this as simply as possible. Through logic, they would challenge irrational fears and irrational desires and just irrational assumptions in general.
00:28:20
Speaker
Let me give you an example of this here. let me begin with a somewhat ridiculous example but sometimes you see someone kind of have this train of thought they'll say so and so doesn't like me well if so and so doesn't like me no one will ever like me okay we can see this is a little bit of you know catastrophizing in this person's thought Maybe it is the case that so-and-so doesn't like you, but does that mean that no one will ever like you?
00:28:58
Speaker
What the Stoics are pointing out here, using their logic of course, is that you can't go from the first sentence, so-and-so doesn't like me, to the second.
00:29:09
Speaker
If so-and-so doesn't like me, no one will ever like me. You don't have enough evidence to really establish that conclusion. And so what the Stoic would say is that this is an invalid way of arguing.
00:29:23
Speaker
You cannot make that jump from the first sentence to the second, which means that second impression, if so-and-so doesn't like me, then no one will ever like me.
00:29:36
Speaker
That is a non-cataleptic impression, an inaccurate thought. And so to that one, you withhold the scent. You just let it go. just say, I don't believe you.
00:29:49
Speaker
And that's how logic helps you challenge irrational assumptions. Let's do one more so you can kind of really sink your teeth into this.
00:30:00
Speaker
Maybe maybe you did a thing to someone, right? I did such and such to so-and-so. Therefore, so-and-so will never forgive me. Now, this might also seem like an exaggerated thought that no one would ever have.
00:30:18
Speaker
But then again, some of you have had this thought.
00:30:23
Speaker
In fact, whenever I talk about this example in class, people usually say, yeah, yeah, you know, I don't like to admit it, but I kind of do think like that sometimes. Well, here is where Stoic logic would come to the rescue.
00:30:40
Speaker
It may be true that you did something to someone, right? Does that necessarily mean that they will never forgive you? Well, you don't know.
00:30:54
Speaker
The answer to that is a big old question mark, right? It might be the case that they won't forgive you or, well, you know what? Sometimes people are in a forgiving mood. And do you know what would help your chances that they might forgive you?
00:31:08
Speaker
If you do something about it. So Stoic logic here comes in and says, well, you should withhold dissent from that conclusion, from that idea that they will never forgive you.
00:31:19
Speaker
And by not letting that turn into a belief, that actually starts a little causal chain so that you end up doing the right thing. By not...
00:31:31
Speaker
holding on and gripping to that belief that they will never forgive you, you actually allow yourself to do those things that will get that person to forgive you. You go up to them and guess what?
00:31:44
Speaker
You apologize. You say, yeah, you know what? I suck sometimes and I know it and I'm working on it. I'm sorry. And maybe by, you know, doing some act of contrition of some sort, that person will eventually forgive you.
00:32:00
Speaker
But the key to all this, according to Stoics, is to not believe these irrational things. They will never forgive me. That is catastrophic thinking.
00:32:11
Speaker
And you should challenge that belief. And by challenging that belief, that is what allows you to end up doing the right thing and taking the right steps to making amends.
00:32:24
Speaker
In short, then, you can kind of see that for the Stoics, Logic was a kind of philosophical talk therapy, right?
00:32:36
Speaker
And so you have to get out of your head this idea that talk therapy began in the 20th century with Freud and all that. We can actually see philosophical talk therapy way back maybe in the work of Socrates when he used his Socratic questioning to sort of challenge false beliefs.
00:32:56
Speaker
Maybe even earlier in the work of Democritus. The general idea here though is that we can use philosophy to challenge those beliefs that maybe bring us harm, emotional harm.
00:33:09
Speaker
And that's what the Stoics were doing.
00:33:33
Speaker
Okay, so you've made it through the study of Stoic logic and you want more. Okay.
Nature and the Universe in Stoic Thought
00:33:40
Speaker
The next area of inquiry is physics.
00:33:44
Speaker
As I mentioned earlier, physics for the Stoics includes not only natural philosophy, what today we call science, but also cosmology, nature of the universe, maybe like theoretical physics, that kind of stuff, ah but also theology and metaphysics, right? So why theology and metaphysics?
00:34:04
Speaker
Well, will become abundantly clear very soon, actually. So let's just get into physics and cosmology, and then we'll bring in the theology and the metaphysics. So let's begin with this idea. So the whole purpose of studying the natural world for the Stoics was to enable you to live in conformity with nature, in ah accordance with nature is a good way to put it.
00:34:34
Speaker
What does that mean? Well, I'll come back to this idea in a little bit. Let me just say that that's a starting point for the physics, right? You want to live in the way that nature recommends that you live. Okay, well, we'll come back to that.
00:34:52
Speaker
What's next? Well, everything that exists, according to the Stoics, is the word I'll use here is corporeal. What that means is that it's a physical body.
00:35:06
Speaker
If this sounds suspiciously like the atomistic philosophy of the Epicureans that believe in only Adam's void and the swerve,
00:35:18
Speaker
Not quite. It is true that the Epicureans believed that everything that exists is physical, and it's sometimes called materialism. And I guess the Stoics were also materialists, but they wouldn't agree with the general Epicurean view of atoms as entirely separate.
00:35:40
Speaker
So for the Epicureans, The atom over here is completely unrelated to an atom somewhere else in the cosmos. The only time that atoms affect each other is when they crash into each other or when compounds crash into each other.
00:35:57
Speaker
But beyond that, atoms are completely unrelated and you know don't even know about each other. they don't There is no connection between them. However, the Stoics believe that there is a radical unity and cohesion to the cosmos.
00:36:18
Speaker
In other words, for them, the whole cosmos is like a living being, like an animal. And it is characterized by a seamless radical continuity A piece of the cosmos over here is connected to a piece of the cosmos all the way over there.
00:36:42
Speaker
How? Well, it's because of divine reason, to put it in a nutshell. There is... an order to the cosmos. Everything is organized in this radically continuous way, and it's all organized by a all-encompassing divine reason.
00:37:04
Speaker
Maybe another way to put this is that the whole organism the God. The whole universe is God.
00:37:16
Speaker
And everything in the universe is there doing what it's doing because the mind of God, divine reason, is controlling it so that it does exactly what it's doing.
00:37:32
Speaker
The thoughts of God, in other words, are the ruling principle, or maybe a better way to put it is the laws of nature, and they govern everything that's going on in the cosmos.
00:37:46
Speaker
The name that we will use for this view is vitalism, and it's basically this. God is a universe, and the thoughts of God are the laws of nature.
00:37:59
Speaker
Now you can see why it is that theology comes into the picture when you study physics. After all, God is the universe. So there's a connection right there.
00:38:14
Speaker
Now we get to use a term that we were introduced to way back when in unit one, archae. If you recall, archae means something like that which from all other things flow, right? that That first principle out of which we get everything else.
00:38:34
Speaker
And maybe you'll recall Thales of Miletus who believe that water is the archae and everything else comes from water. Well, the Stoics posited two archae,
00:38:48
Speaker
there is the active principle and the passive principle the active principle we've already we've already talked about that's divine reason that's the thoughts of god that govern everything in the cosmos what's the passive principle that's the substance that god's thoughts are governing So the active principle is divine reason and the passive principle is all the physical stuff around us that has its movement orchestrated by the divine mind.
00:39:24
Speaker
Just as with Thales and all the Milesians really, the Arche, according to the Stoics, cannot be destroyed. They they will always exist.
00:39:36
Speaker
even during something that they call the great conflagration. So let's get into this thing called the great conflagration.
00:39:49
Speaker
Much like other philosophers that we've covered, especially in the pre-Socratic tradition, the Stoics believed in the cyclical destruction of the world.
00:40:01
Speaker
So we have the world as it is right now. Then everything is consumed by fire. And that period is called the Great Conflagration. We get this little period of fire for a bit and then things simmer down, literally, and ah new world arises and then we get the world again and then comes as a fire again, right? It's all a big cycle that happens over and over and over again.
00:40:30
Speaker
A couple of comments here about the great conflagration. During the phase of conflagration, when it's all fire, and that is the deity in its purest form, right? The Arche, the divine mind, that is fire, essentially. That's what represents it.
00:40:49
Speaker
So when everything is fire, that is the active principle of the divine mind, you know, basically manifesting itself as purely as it can.
00:41:01
Speaker
And of course, after some time, a new world is created. But here is a second very important detail about this you know doctrine of cosmic cycles.
00:41:12
Speaker
When the new world is created and things start to happen again, you get humans again and all that, Everything unfolds exactly the way it did the time before.
00:41:25
Speaker
In fact, every time we get a new world, everything happens exactly the way that it always does. Nothing new ever happens.
00:41:38
Speaker
The same thing happens over and over and over again. Well, well The unfolding of events, just like every other physical substance in the cosmos, is governed by the divine reason, right? Guided by the thoughts of God.
00:41:59
Speaker
And of course, God doesn't make mistakes. So the way it happened the first time is already perfectly rational. And any deviation from that would be irrational.
00:42:13
Speaker
So it keeps happening again and again and again in the exact same way, always guided by rationality. That's why we get everything happening in the exact same way over and over again.
00:42:27
Speaker
There is a philosophical label for this state of affairs. And if you have dabbled in philosophy before, you probably know this term.
00:42:39
Speaker
This is known as determinism. If you want to get more technical, it's causal determinism. And this is the view that every event is caused by prior events in conjunction with the laws of nature.
00:42:55
Speaker
In other words, everything that happens is forced upon us by the way things are and the thoughts of God in the case of the Stoics or the laws of nature is another way to put it.
00:43:10
Speaker
Put in a very pithy way, everything happens by fate. Everything that happens has to happen.
00:43:22
Speaker
This is a massive deal in the history of philosophy. This is, in other words, the first time that anyone had made this particular philosophical claim and given birth to a particular type of monotheism.
00:43:42
Speaker
So I want to kind of make this really clear to you by juxtaposing this stoic kind of monotheism, where literally God is the universe, and Judaism.
00:43:56
Speaker
By the way, I'm getting this from a book by Christine Hayes called What's Divine About Divine Law. And there's a really sharp contrast to be made here between these different kinds of monotheism.
00:44:13
Speaker
So let's let's start to do this a little bit by by talking about Judaism, and then I'll tell you what the Greek or the Stoic version of monotheism, where it differs from the from the Judaic version.
00:44:25
Speaker
So I hope that this will make it very clear that there's many ways to be a monotheist. Okay, according to Judaism, God is transcendent. What that means is that God is ah above and beyond the universe. God is separate from the universe. God, in fact, created the universe, right? So God is very much not the universe.
00:44:52
Speaker
According to the Stoics, though, God is literally the universe. Zeus is the cosmos, right? That's what they believe. Not in a metaphorical way, in a literal way.
00:45:06
Speaker
So there is one very big difference between Judaism and Stoicism. Here's the next one. According to Judaic monotheism, God is a self-aware person.
00:45:21
Speaker
If you read the Old Testament, what the Christians call the Old Testament, you can see that God is a person, a person that's you know angry half the time and you know wipes out all of humanity, almost all of humanity, you know, in one event and gets upset because his chosen people aren't worshiping him in the right way. And sometimes he's happy and he gives you a rainbow.
00:45:46
Speaker
And so God is a person. This is so unlike what the Stoics believe. For the Stoics, God is a causal force.
00:45:59
Speaker
The thoughts of God are literally the laws of nature. So God doesn't have feelings or anything like that. God is just a force that governs reality.
00:46:13
Speaker
God is the universe and God's thoughts govern reality. And it's all a radically cohesive and unified whole. There are no parts here.
00:46:24
Speaker
It's all part of the same big thing. So there's another difference. Moving on. For Judaic monotheism, God's law is local.
00:46:36
Speaker
What I mean by that is that if you you know read the Old Testament, God gave his commandments specifically to the Jews, his chosen people. And he says, yeah, other people are going to do different things. You're supposed to do this.
00:46:52
Speaker
And so the divine law coming from God doesn't apply to everyone in Judaism. That is not what's going on in Greek monotheism or Stoicism.
00:47:05
Speaker
For the Stoics, the divine law, the way that God has ordered the universe is universal. It applies across the whole of the cosmos because God is the whole of the cosmos.
00:47:19
Speaker
So God's commands aren't just applied to certain people. That's called particularism. It applies to everything, not just everybody, everything That's universalism when it comes to divine law. So there's another difference.
00:47:38
Speaker
Back to Judaism, God's law is mutable. It can change. You can actually see this. um I don't know if this ah obnoxious to talk about, but when you read Exodus, it's There's a story of how Moses goes to get the Ten Commandments up on Mount Sinai.
00:47:59
Speaker
And he comes down and, you know, the book tells you what the Ten Commandments are, right? what it says on those slabs of rock. But then he sees what the Jews are doing and they're, you know, doing some pagan stuff and he gets mad, Moses does, and he throws the rocks on the ground and the whole thing happens.
00:48:22
Speaker
Eventually though, he goes back up to get the Ten Commandments again. And so what do you expect to be written on the Ten Commandments, the the second version of them, right? The second pair of slabs of rock.
00:48:36
Speaker
You would imagine that what, you know, just copy and paste it, right? The same commandments again. But no, there's slight differences in there, right? There's two types, two sets of commandments, two sets of 10 commandments.
00:48:50
Speaker
What's the deal here? Well, divine law can change. If you read more into the Pentateuch, the first ah books of the Bible, you can see that the feeling on, for example, slavery changes over time.
00:49:06
Speaker
And so the divine law as set by God can change. is When God changes his mind, he can change the law. That's what it means, right? That's what you we read in and the Old Testament.
00:49:20
Speaker
Well, for the Stoics, divine law is immutable. It does not change. In fact, after every period of conflagration, after every time that we hit the reset button on the world, everything happens exactly the way it did the time before.
00:49:40
Speaker
That means that the laws of nature do not change. Everything happens exactly the same every single time. God's law does not change it will always roll out and take its effect on the physical bodies of the cosmos in the exact same way no changing going on here and here's one last difference between judaism and stoicism both types of monotheism let me stress that again In Judaism, the divine law, God's law, is an expression of God's will.
00:50:16
Speaker
God is a person and he's telling you, hey, i want you to follow these commandments. In Stoicism, God's law is not God wanting you to do a certain set of things.
00:50:29
Speaker
The divine law is divine because it is rational. Rationality gets elevated to you know a certain divine position.
00:50:41
Speaker
And so the divine law is not just Zeus wanting you to do certain things. It is rationality itself, right? So that is another big difference between Greek monotheism and Judaism.
00:50:55
Speaker
The whole point of this, here's the punchline, if you want to put it that way. is that no one had quite expressed their monotheistic beliefs in this way before.
00:51:07
Speaker
And so no one had quite expressed belief in causal determinism
Human Responsibility and Emotions
00:51:13
Speaker
before. Not like this, right? And so the Stoics said this, and right away they came face to face with the problem of free will.
00:51:26
Speaker
If everything that happens has to happen, That seems to include human actions, human choices. Well, doesn't that mean that we don't have free will?
00:51:41
Speaker
And so I said earlier that there's three massive landmarks in Stoic philosophy for the history of philosophy in general. I've already mentioned two of them.
00:51:52
Speaker
Stoic logic and in particular their philosophy of language is a big deal. And Stoic monotheism is a big deal in particular because it led to their belief in causal determinism.
00:52:05
Speaker
Well now here is a third landmark moment in the history of philosophy coming courtesy of the Stoics. we also get from Stoicism the first explicit positing of something that we call compatibilism.
00:52:24
Speaker
So here's the idea. the Stoics wanted to make some kind of room for human responsibility. So they sort of added ah little bit of a twist to their doctrine about deterministic cosmic cycles.
00:52:44
Speaker
They posited that assent to impressions, choosing which thoughts to accept and reject, that is entirely up to us.
00:52:57
Speaker
So even though everything that happens has to happen, at least when it comes to our thoughts, it's up to us we whether we accept them or reject them. That part is a genuine human choice.
00:53:14
Speaker
So you might be wondering how can that work? Let me give you a little bit of the backstory and see what you think. So all living organisms, let me begin with this, have something that the Stoics call pneuma, which is, i guess, a combination of air and fire.
00:53:33
Speaker
However, humans have the purest form of pneuma. And that's essentially reason or pure fire. Remember, when the universe is in its phase of conflagration,
00:53:47
Speaker
All there is is pure fire. That is the archae in its purest form, right? Zeus in its purest form. So that's what humans have within them as well. They have a little spark of the divine within our minds, I suppose.
00:54:03
Speaker
And it is thanks to this, let's call it an inner pneuma, that each of us has this power for either assenting to an impression or withholding assent.
00:54:18
Speaker
In other words, each of us within us, we have this rational guiding principle and we can either allow ourselves to be steered by this rational guiding principle or not.
00:54:31
Speaker
And the way we do this is by only assenting to what is true. The Stoics call that moral virtue. And we fail to live rationally whenever we ascend to what is false.
00:54:46
Speaker
And the Stoics, by the way, call that moral vice. So to recap, the only thing that is actually up to you is whether or not you accept a belief.
00:54:59
Speaker
And when you accept accurate representations of reality as true, you are living rationally, which means you are living in accordance with nature. That's what that means, which means you are being morally virtuous.
00:55:15
Speaker
And if you accept beliefs that are inaccurate, you You are being irrational and that is called moral vice. You are living in disagreement with nature.
00:55:29
Speaker
To kind of sum it up for you then, the only thing that's up to you is what thoughts you accept. And if you accept the true ones, you're living virtuously. In other words, virtue is a form of knowledge.
00:55:43
Speaker
That's what we call moral intellectualism. And if you accept untrue things, you are living viciously. That's moral vice. Before I lose this thread, then let me just recap that this is the first declaration of belief in compatibilism.
00:56:04
Speaker
The view that somehow... Causal determinism is compatible with human free will. and In other words, even though everything in the universe has to happen the way it happens, there is still some way in which humans can be said to be free.
00:56:22
Speaker
And so that depends on how you define freedom, if you think about it. But that was the first time in the history of philosophy that this view was explicitly stated. And so very, very big deal there.
00:56:36
Speaker
Well, to round out our discussion of the field of inquiry of physics for the Stoics, let's close off this section by talking about theology and metaphysics.
00:56:49
Speaker
Now, it's pretty clear why theology was a part of physics because Zeus is the universe, right? So, when you study the universe, you study Zeus, right? So, that's theology.
00:57:02
Speaker
Okay. Well, I won't get too deep into Stoic theology. i will say that the topics that they covered are pretty standard for theology in the Greek world.
00:57:16
Speaker
For example, they talked about the existence and nature of other gods. So even though Zeus is the, you know, the main God, I suppose, there's other manifestations of Zeus.
00:57:30
Speaker
And so Zeno, for example, argued that the stars and even time, like years and months are gods And if this sounds a little bit like polytheism to you, it's not quite.
00:57:43
Speaker
ah Chrysippus is the one that clarifies things for us. You can see why he's called the second founder of Stoicism. He kind of cleans up the doctrine a little bit. But the difference between God, and Zeus, right, the universe, and all the other gods is that all the other gods are perishable. They're just temporary manifestations of the one real god, Zeus.
00:58:07
Speaker
And in fact, they will perish during the great conflagration. So when everything is fire, everything else dies. All the manifestations of Zeus die.
00:58:18
Speaker
And only Zeus, the one god, the eternal one, the archae survives, right? Zeus is the fire, right? So it really is still a monotheism, but there's just different manifestations of the gods. And that's one thing that you would talk about in Stoic theology.
00:58:38
Speaker
They would also discuss arguments for God's existence. I won't get into these here, but these will kind of resemble arguments that you hear even today, right? There's an argument from design and there's an argument from the unacceptable implications of atheism.
00:58:58
Speaker
Basically, it accuses atheism of being self-contradictory. So these kinds of arguments were seen in Stoic theology, What I want to talk about here to round out this discussion of Stoic physics is Stoic views on piety.
00:59:17
Speaker
Now I'm going to pick up a thread that I laid down early on in this lesson. I talked about how Zeno was trying to essentially rescue traditional Greek ideas, but marry them somehow with newer philosophical ideas.
00:59:35
Speaker
Well, that's what you would learn in you know in the Stoic curriculum when you're covering theology. How to be pious, how to do all the traditional religious practices and rituals from the Greek world.
00:59:52
Speaker
So what does this mean? Basically, the Stoics followed all the conventional practices from traditional religions the sacrifices the divinations we'll talk more about those in a second they would go to oracles all of those things make their way into stoicism basically the way that i think about it is that the epicureans challenged all traditional religion and the stoics accepted all traditional religion they just kind of brought it all into the fold
01:00:29
Speaker
The only thing I should add here, I guess, is that the Stoics accepted all traditional religious ideas, but they sort of gave them a new philosophical justification.
01:00:41
Speaker
And that's that story that I said earlier about, you know, Zeus is a real god, but there's different manifestations. And so they followed all the practices, but they kind of, you know, in their minds had a different idea as to why it's acceptable to follow all those practices.
01:00:58
Speaker
So in this way, they're kind of conservative, right? They're just doing the things that everyone else does, but they have, I guess, a different framework in which they justify why they're doing it. And this is a little bit like the skeptics, right? We covered the Pyronian skeptics and they just went with the flow too. They just said, well, you know, it's what everyone else does. I'll do it too.
01:01:19
Speaker
Even though in my mind, I'm suspending judgments as a skeptic, right? So I don't really believe it, but I'm going to go with the flow. That's kind of like the Stoics. They would go with the flow, even though the way they justified their practices differed from, you know, the regular Joe on the street.
01:01:38
Speaker
Let me speak now briefly about divination. Divination in the ancient world can take many, many different forms. My favorite is probably birdwatching.
01:01:51
Speaker
So when you birdwatching or any kind of, you know, interpretation of animal behavior, What you do is you have this, you know, whatever it is that you're wrestling with, you have that in mind.
01:02:03
Speaker
Should i go to war or not? Should I become a soldier or not? So you have that in mind. And then you look at the birds or whatever animal you're looking at.
01:02:17
Speaker
And based on their behavior, that is what the gods want you to do. So that's one kind of divination. There's also the interpretation of dreams.
01:02:30
Speaker
There's interpreting entrails. So that's when you get a sacrificial animal and you get their guts and you look at their guts, you burn them a little bit, you see what happens.
01:02:41
Speaker
Another type of divination is basically getting some sheep knuckle bones and using them as dice.
01:02:53
Speaker
There's also astrological analysis going on, so astrology. All of these are forms of divination in the ancient world. And the Stoics accepted, i think, all of them.
01:03:07
Speaker
As far as I could find, there wasn't one that they said, oh, not this one. Moreover, the Stoics believed that divination was a kind of science.
01:03:18
Speaker
In other words, engaging in bird watching or interpreting entrails or whatever, these are ah potential avenue by which you can discover the observable order of the cosmos, right? The thoughts of God, the way things work.
01:03:39
Speaker
And so the Stoics really almost elevated divination beyond mere superstition into a genuine science. But of course, they justified this with a fairly robust bless philosophical worldview, right? This whole talk of cosmic cycles and everything else that we talked about earlier, this all gets utilized in justifying these practices.
01:04:09
Speaker
And so we can see that Stoicism is ah mesmerizing amalgam. of the traditional and the modern, right? They took all these ancient practices and rituals and beliefs and they fused it somehow with Socratic philosophy.
01:04:31
Speaker
Oh, and by the way, in the process, invented cognitive therapy.
01:05:00
Speaker
Okay, you've made it through the study of logic and physics. Let's move on to the final area of inquiry for the Stoics, ethics.
01:05:14
Speaker
I'll be focusing here on the moral psychology of the Stoics. But before I do that, let me give you a bit of a recap of Stoic philosophy in general so we can make the moral psychology a little bit clearer.
01:05:30
Speaker
So we get impressions, right? Thoughts, and we can either assent to them or withhold assent. So we can say, yes, this is true, or um no, this is just a thought. just an impression, a mere impression.
01:05:45
Speaker
And I don't think it adequately represents the world. So you get a choice there. and that is a genuine choice. Even though the rest of the universe is deterministic,
01:05:56
Speaker
you do get to choose what you accept as true and what you reject. Once you assent to an impression, you typically initiate a causal chain that will result in an action, right? So it matters what you assent to.
01:06:16
Speaker
So if you always assent to accurate judgments, to cataleptic impressions, then you are being virtuous. On the other hand, vice is assenting to non-cataleptic impressions, inaccurate judgments.
01:06:33
Speaker
And this is a form, of course, of moral intellectualism because virtue here is a form of knowledge. Virtue is being able to recognize which thoughts accurately represent the world and which thoughts don't.
01:06:49
Speaker
And your job, of course, is to only be rational and only accept thoughts that accurately represent the world. Now, I haven't mentioned this part before, but according to the Stoics, virtue is the only intrinsic good.
01:07:07
Speaker
In other words, if you look at the bucket where all intrinsic goods are, the only thing you're going to find in there is virtue. In other words, the only thing that's actually good is only accepting accurate representations of reality.
01:07:23
Speaker
And by the way, the only vice... is accepting inaccurate representations of reality. So only vice is bad.
01:07:34
Speaker
Everything else, the Stoics say, is indifferent, neither really beneficial nor harmful. So what is this everything else? Well, literally everything else.
01:07:47
Speaker
It includes what Aristotle would call external goods, things like health and life and money and honor and political power and comfort, all those things.
01:07:59
Speaker
Those are indifferent. They seem like they're good, but the only real good is virtue, right? Having accurate beliefs, only assenting to cataleptic impressions.
01:08:14
Speaker
So how can I summarize this? Basically, according to the Stoics, there is pan pandemic error in the general population when it comes to matters of evaluation.
01:08:27
Speaker
We, you and me, along with our cultures, our laws, our institutions, we routinely judge that in different things, things like health and money and affection, honor, comfort, we think that those are good and that their opposites are bad.
01:08:49
Speaker
But all of those judgments are false. Only virtue is good and only vice is bad. Everything else is indifferent.
01:09:03
Speaker
So given that little recap, We know that the main thing for the Stoics is to make sure we only assent to cataleptic impressions because only that way will we generate rational impulses to action, will we act in accordance with nature.
01:09:24
Speaker
And this brings us to Stoic moral psychology. Basically, depending on whether you recognize virtue as the only good,
01:09:35
Speaker
or not that would generate different kinds of impulses to action let's talk first about the bad kind of impulses the impulses that us non-sages right the stoics argued that you should try to become like a stoic stage that always only ascents to cataleptic impressions Well, that's easier said than done, right? So that's actually just theoretical. It's kind of aspirational. You're trying to become like that, but it's maybe impossible to actually be like that.
01:10:09
Speaker
So all of us are non-sages. We are just mere humans attempting to be good Stoics, right? But we're having a hard time. So let's focus on us first, and then we'll look at some other types of impulses.
01:10:23
Speaker
So us, you and i non-sages, We routinely make errors of judgment, right? We, in other words, routinely engage in vice, vicious behavior.
01:10:36
Speaker
And we do that when we are sent to inaccurate judgments. So what kind of inaccurate judgments do we make? Well, the Stoics call these, and this is going to take you for a loop, the Stoics call these emotions,
01:10:54
Speaker
Emotions for the Stoics are vices. You're not supposed to have them. And let me tell you why that is. So according to Stoics, there's four main species of emotion.
01:11:10
Speaker
There is desire, fear, pleasure, and pain. And all of these, by definition, the way that the Stoics conceive of them, include some non-cataleptic impression, some inaccurate representation of reality.
01:11:29
Speaker
So let's start with desires. For the Stoics, desires are the attribution of goodness to some future state. So imagine that you're on your way to crumble cookie to enjoy delicious treat.
01:11:45
Speaker
And you're saying to yourself, this is going to so awesome. I love cookies. This cookie is amazing. It's so good. This cookie will be the best thing that ever happened to me. So you're having that thought, right? Well, that would be, of course, inaccurate.
01:11:59
Speaker
A cookie is, to the Stoics, indifferent. Maybe it's a preferred indifferent. It's nice to have, but it's not a true, genuine good.
01:12:10
Speaker
What's the only good? Virtue. Virtue is the only good. So by thinking that a cookie is good, I'm having a non-cataleptic impression.
01:12:21
Speaker
So desire is a vice. That would be wrong for the Stoics. Let's move on to fear. Fear is an apprehension to a future evil, some kind of avoidance of something that's going to happen in the future. So for example, because I eat too many cookies and candy and whatever, and just said that I have a bunch of cavities and I have to go tomorrow to the dentist to take care of my cavities.
01:12:52
Speaker
And the dentist is going to do all kinds of painful things to me. And so I'm afraid. I'm saying, oh no, it's going to be so awful. It's going to suck. That once more is a non-cataleptic impression because all those awful things that the dentist is going to do to me, that's indifferent.
01:13:15
Speaker
It's a dispreferred indifferent. I wish I didn't have to do it. But I have to do it. And so to call that experience evil or bad, that is a non-cataleptic impression. The only evil in existence, of course, is vice, non-cataleptic impression. So...
01:13:38
Speaker
Fear is also not something that you're supposed to have, according to the Stoics. The same goes for pleasure and pain. Pleasure is saying that whatever is happening to you right now is a good.
01:13:52
Speaker
Well, if what's happening to you right now is that you're eating that cookie... well, that would be a non-cataleptic impression. Remember that cookie isn't really good. It's a preferred indifferent. The only good is virtue.
01:14:04
Speaker
Or let's just say now that I'm in the dentist chair, I say, oh, this is pain. This is awful. That's an attribution of evil to a present state. But again, that discomfort that I'm feeling, that's not a real evil. Only vice is evil. So I'm having a non-cataleptic impression.
01:14:23
Speaker
In other words, I'm messing up. So those are the four kinds of emotion, according to the Stoics, and they're all a mistake. They're all forming non-cataleptic impression.
01:14:35
Speaker
And they all have embedded within them a belief, as you can see, a belief that something other than virtue is good or something other than vice is bad. All other emotions, by the way, are subspecies of these four. So they can basically account for all of them, they say, with these four.
01:14:54
Speaker
Well, that's us non-sages, always having emotions, right? Beliefs that we're not supposed to be accepting. What about the sages? What do they have? Well, that's another class of impulse. If you ever get to be a sage, according to the Stoics, you will never make a mistake. That's what, by definition, it means to be a sage.
01:15:16
Speaker
You will only assent to cataleptic impressions, never to non-cataleptic impressions. This means that sages don't have emotions.
01:15:29
Speaker
what they have is eupatheiae. Now that is a word that I won't use very often here. ah Let's call these good emotions, right? They're a different kind of emotion because whenever sages have these, they consist in an episode of knowledge. They are accurately representing reality.
01:15:51
Speaker
Only virtue is good, only vice is bad. So when they are, for example, currently being virtuous and they're only assenting to cataleptic impressions you might call that pleasure but no pleasure of course is an emotion what the stoics call when a sage has this positive feeling from doing good things in the moment the stoics call that joy So you might say here then that the Stoics are just playing with words.
01:16:26
Speaker
Well, not exactly. i mean, maybe. But they're defining their terms. They're stipulating, hey, when I say emotion, I mean that it's bad. And when I say eupatheiae, or a good emotion, I mean that it's good. And sages have those.
01:16:41
Speaker
And non-sages have emotions, right? So they're just being very careful with how they define things. And it might not be the way that you define things. But in order to become a Stoic, you have to sort of accept this way of looking at the world.
01:16:55
Speaker
Now, maybe I can foreshadow something that we will cover in the next lesson on Stoicism, but there is a benefit to this way of looking at the world.
01:17:08
Speaker
Some scholars argue that Stoicism is the beginning of cognitive behavioral therapy. So by sort of applying this framework to your mind, you can more easily sort of wrestle with your thoughts and and challenge the irrational ones and sort of embrace the more rational ones. so there is a benefit to this, although we won't get to see it until another lesson.
01:17:35
Speaker
In any case, that is the second class of impulses. the The feelings that sages get, again, the term for that is eupatheiae. And the feelings that us non-sages get, those are emotions. or Emotions are bad.
01:17:50
Speaker
Eupatheiae the good emotions. There is a third class of impulses, and these are had both by sages and non-sages.
01:18:03
Speaker
And the only label I can find for this is selection value. That doesn't sound like anything. So let me try to explain what that is, and maybe we'll come up with a different term.
01:18:14
Speaker
But these impulses are all about the accurate representation of the planning value or disvalue, I guess, of indifference. So food is an indifferent, right?
01:18:28
Speaker
It's not a good, it's not a bad. Only virtue is good, only vice is bad. But food obviously has some planning value. You need food to not die.
01:18:41
Speaker
So it's good to have a around. well i shouldn't use that word good. It is a preferred indifferent. It has some value other than moral value.
01:18:53
Speaker
It is good for the organism. So it has that kind of value. Sickness is a dis-preferred indifferent. It has dis-value for the organism. Sickness can kill you if you don't take care of it, right? So whenever you recognize preferred indifference as either having value or dis-value, that's what this kind of impulse is, this selection value impulse.
01:19:22
Speaker
And it happens, I think, quite naturally, right? If I show you some money, you say, oh, I can use that for something. Or if I show you ah picture of someone in severe poverty, you'd say, oh, that's probably not a good condition to be in. There's a lot of disvalue in that.
01:19:40
Speaker
So that's the general idea behind this class of impulses. And so you want to be able to recognize always preferred indifference as having some kind of value and dispreferred indifference as having some kind of disvalue.
01:19:58
Speaker
Okay, almost done here with the moral psychology. Let me introduce you to one last important term from the Stoics. The Greek term is propatheiae.
01:20:11
Speaker
I will not use that term. I'm going to call these pre-emotions. So what are these pre-emotions? Well, pre-emotions don't involve any assent on your part.
01:20:25
Speaker
So when you have an emotion, there is a belief attached to that emotion. Let's just say that you believe that having a lot of money is good. Well, that is not true.
01:20:38
Speaker
according to the Stoics, having a lot of money is a preferred indifferent for the Stoics. So if you have that belief, you are experiencing what the Stoics label as desire, right? That's an emotion and that's actually a non-cataleptic impression. You're not supposed to be having that.
01:20:58
Speaker
But you notice that this emotion, desire for a lot of money, that involves a belief that money is a good. But pre-emotions, those don't involve a belief.
01:21:12
Speaker
So what the heck are pre-emotions then? Well, These are automatic physiological reactions that are, in some cases, precursors to emotion.
01:21:27
Speaker
So, in the lesson on Epicureanism, I call this kind of thing hedonic tone. There is just a positive coloring that you get sometimes or a negative coloring that you get sometimes, for example, when you're hangry.
01:21:41
Speaker
And this is the closest thing to what the Stillworks are talking about. Well, let's look at an example. in the stoic framework of this. So let's just say that you're driving around and someone cuts you off violently to just real mean snake deal, right?
01:22:00
Speaker
Automatically, you will have some negative hedonic tone generated. Maybe your heart will start racing. Your face will flush.
01:22:12
Speaker
There'll be some tension in your muscles. Maybe, at least in my case, I feel heat on my shoulders. I'm getting hot, right? This is pre-emotion.
01:22:24
Speaker
There's no belief yet. It's just the physiological response. But it can turn into emotion if you allow this negative hedonic tone to generate an impulse, a belief, a plan of action.
01:22:43
Speaker
so let's just say that you feel all these things, this negative hedonic tone, and then you think to yourself, I'm mad and I should be mad.
01:22:55
Speaker
Boom. That's a belief. And you just let that negative, hedonic tone turn into a full-blown emotion. And then you might even go further. I'm going to cut that guy off back.
01:23:08
Speaker
Now that's a plan of action. So that turned into an impulse to action. See how that worked? It was just a pre-emotion, a feeling, a mood.
01:23:19
Speaker
But by pairing it with a belief, i I'm right in being mad. And a plan of action, I'm going to cut that person off back. Now you let it turn into an emotion. And that's not what you're supposed to do.
01:23:36
Speaker
You're supposed to perhaps acknowledge what happened and say, that happened. And then if you are a Stoic sage, you say, well, getting cut off is a dis-preferred indifferent. I would rather have had that not happen, but it happened.
01:23:53
Speaker
And so life goes on. Well, that's easier said than done. So how is it that we can train ourselves to not let pre-emotions become emotions?
01:24:09
Speaker
How do we, in other words, become more like a Stoic sage?
Stoic Ethics in the Roman Era
01:24:14
Speaker
That is exactly what Stoic ethics is all about. These are methods for combating the emotions.
01:24:25
Speaker
But I am saving that for another lesson on Stoicism, one that will take place in the Roman era. Why are we waiting until the Roman era? Well, for one, this lesson is already too long and there's more time for Stoic ethics here.
01:24:44
Speaker
But the main reason is that it is during the Roman era that we get the most famous and explicit writings on Stoic ethics.
01:24:55
Speaker
I'm talking about people like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. The Roman era is a time period when they're writing. So maybe that's a bummer to you. You wanted to get into Stoic ethics now, but don't worry, you won't have to wait for very long.
01:25:12
Speaker
You hear that?
Conclusion and Historical Context
01:25:14
Speaker
Those are the legionnaires, the Roman foot soldier, and they're on campaign. They're headed to Greece, actually.
01:25:25
Speaker
What are now the independent Hellenistic kingdoms of the Hellenistic world, all those kingdoms that arose after the death of Alexander the Great, they're all about to get consumed by the Roman military machine.
01:25:44
Speaker
If you look at a map around this time period, Rome's conquests look like ink spilling on a map. And so that's the time period we're moving into now.
01:25:57
Speaker
Rome is on the march.