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Scott Aikin on We Are the Stoics Now (Episode 32)
679 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
I speak with Scott Aikin, a philosopher at Vanderbilt University. This marks Aiken's third appearance on Stoa Conversations.
During this episode, we delve into significant philosophical challenges to Stoicism, including the foundation of virtue, the impossibility objection, and issues arising from Traditional Stoicism. These topics hold theoretical importance, but they also influence our practical lives. Especially it comes to issues like reframing obstacles and determining the degree to which Stoics should adhere to tradition. Scott, and another Stoa Conversations guest, William Stephens, are publishing Epictetus’s 'Encheiridion': A New Translation and Guide to Stoic Ethics this summer.
(02:38) What is Stoicism?
(07:13) The Stoic View of Virtue
(22:29) We Need People To Depend on Us
(27:34) Is it Possible to Be A Stoic?
(46:51) Traditional vs Modern Stoicism
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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Introduction and Anecdotes
00:00:00
Speaker
So, whenever Marcus Aurelius tells the story of the filernean wine, he can't say, I don't like the taste of this noble vintage, right? You have to kind of come at yourself sideways and you have to describe the filernean wine as rotten grape juice. See it for what it really is, right? Like, well, that's one way to describe it, rotten grape
Podcast and Guest Introduction
00:00:25
Speaker
juice.
00:00:25
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
00:00:42
Speaker
And in this conversation, I speak with Professor Scott Aiken. Scott is a professor at Vanderbilt. He, along with William O. Stevens, another Stoa conversation's guest, are publishing Epictetus and Caridian, a new translation and guide to Stoic ethics. This is his third appearance on Stoa Conversations.
Philosophical Objections to Stoicism
00:01:06
Speaker
And in this episode, we go deep into three philosophical objections to Stoicism, the problem of grounding virtue, the impossibility objection, and challenges from traditional Stoics. Each of these are important theoretical issues, but they also impact practical life.
00:01:27
Speaker
from how you think about reframing obstacles to what extent a stoic should see themselves as following and belonging to an ancient tradition. Once again, this is a new podcast, whether it's rating or subscribing in your favorite podcast player or reaching out with any feedback, comments, we'd greatly appreciate it. And here is our conversation.
Defining Stoicism with Scott Aiken
00:01:55
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros, and today I'm speaking with Dr. Scott Aiken. Scott is an associate professor at Vanderbilt. He's written on politics, pragmatism, ancient philosophy, and with William O. Stevens, another Stoa Conversations guest. He is publishing a version of the handbook.
00:02:19
Speaker
a new translation, and a guide to Stoic ethics. That's Epictetus's in Caridian, and that'll be out this summer. I've had a look at it and I've went from what I've read. It's very good. Thanks for joining. Really happy to be here, Caleb. Thanks for the invitation. Always super to have a conversation with you and hello to everyone there in Stoic land. Perfect. Well, let's start with a broad question. How do you define Stoicism to people these days?
00:02:45
Speaker
Well, Stoicism is, on the one hand, it's an ancient philosophical view, but it's also an updated philosophical view. I'm going to say something that might already be a little controversial. We're the Stoics now, and the ancient version of the philosophical view was a view about the universe and how it's structured and how reason is structured and how value, in light of those two things, is structure.
Integrating Value Theory in Stoicism
00:03:10
Speaker
And so the universe is a rational whole. Our human reason traces the causes and purposes of the rationality that comprises that whole. And value is comprised and determined by what is
00:03:29
Speaker
appropriate for us as the creatures we are in light of how reason determines our place in the whole. And so much of what we see as stoic ethics are received in is the value theory that arises from the
00:03:45
Speaker
confluence of the application of human reason to this rational whole that is the universe. And so stoicism comes as a big package, according to the ancients, and that's a, that's a pretty compelling line to take. It's a big, systematic, philosophical view. And, but the part that's the sort of the one that everyone seems to be the most interested in, at least now, I'd say the sort of modern stoics. I say we're the stoics now. A lot of that is the ethics that we live in light of, we've inherited from the ancients.
00:04:15
Speaker
And that ethics is an ethics that, on the one hand, identifies what's valuable as what's under your control, the things that you should care about, the things that direct your attention and concerns towards. But the other part of that ethics is also an ethics of duty, an ethics of maintaining connection, because again, we are parts of a rational whole.
00:04:39
Speaker
And it's about maintaining the rationality of that whole and seeing the rationality in all instances. And so seeing ourselves as part of a larger, as larger parts of larger communities and seeing ourselves as playing important roles in our family units and in terms of our civic units, it's a philosophy of duty and a philosophy of active.
00:05:06
Speaker
And that's an important
Virtue and Indifference in Stoicism
00:05:08
Speaker
part of it. It's not just about a kind of a mind hack or anything like that. It's a chin directed duty directed. You've got, I've kind of got a checklist and it's a kind of way for you to manage your mind so that you can get the things done that you need to do for the world to be the world or the things to kind of be as they need to be.
00:05:31
Speaker
So it's a lot. And again, that seems to sort of import things back from the old stoic story, the ordered whole, the rational whole. And that's in fact, one of the challenges for a modern stoic is to answer all those questions about like, what's the connection between the ethics and the theory of reasoning? What's the connection between the ethics and the theory of the whole? That's the challenge I think that contemporary stoics need to be wrestling with.
00:05:56
Speaker
I hope to get to some of these issues of making sense of the Stoic system today, how we make sense of tradition. I think in general in this conversation, we'll try to touch on some of these problems. They can be phrased as objections or questions about the philosophy to explore what Stoicism is. And as you say, Stoicism is not just a level of life hacks or even a matter of
00:06:22
Speaker
different, even steep psychological tactics. It's another level deeper where it's a life philosophy, a view of what the world is, who we are, and how to be in the world as it is.
00:06:34
Speaker
So with that in mind, one objection people have had to Stoicism before is, one way to put it is, so Stoics have this contrast between what are indifference and what actually matters. And Stoics were well known to say, the only thing that actually matters is virtue. It's our character. Everything else, wealth, status, pleasure, these are indifference. They might be preferable, but they're not actually valuable.
00:07:04
Speaker
And there's one problem that some philosophers had, which is typically when we do an action, it's to achieve something good or it's in the purpose of some good thing. You're trying to bring about some good state of affairs and prevent some bad thing. But if things like pleasure aren't good, if pain isn't really bad, you know, what is really driving the stoic view of virtue?
00:07:33
Speaker
Yeah, we get a version of stoicism with this, right. This kind of the Cicero called the stoic paradoxes. That just means surprising or counterintuitive theses. And one of the stoic paradoxes is that virtue is the only good. And, and you can then see how that affects the way the grand division or the fundamental divide between what's up to you and what's not virtue lives and what's up to you. And that's where you exercise your virtue. So.
00:08:02
Speaker
You can see those teeten version and then sort of the earlier stoic accounts of the virtue being the only good being being upstream from that in terms of value theory. Another way to put that challenge is to just say something like virtues are kind of second order values. What makes a virtue valuable.
00:08:22
Speaker
is that it's a reliable and consistent producer of some other good. Honesty is valuable because of the fact that it is the way that we identify people who are sources of truth. The reason why bravery is valuable is because of the fact that it's well related to good outcomes and cases of danger.
00:08:45
Speaker
The reason why justice is valuable is because of the fact that it stably produces equitable outcomes. And so we can do that for pretty much anything that looks like it's a virtue. The thing that makes the virtue of good is the thing beyond which the virtue points out. And so that's a reasonable,
00:09:11
Speaker
thing, that's a reasonable attitude to have. And so the stoic view that virtue is the only good is not just a paradox because it denies that wealth is good and all the other things that we might sort of actually inclined to think it's good, wealth and status and power and good looks and things like that. But it also looks like it denies the things that make virtues good are good.
00:09:41
Speaker
That's a harder paradox, I think, because all of the things that it looks like motivate one and direct the virtue as virtues are ones that are directed towards the values beyond which the virtues are virtues.
Paradoxes of Stoic Virtue
00:10:00
Speaker
So the reason why and the way that you would try to be honest
00:10:06
Speaker
is that you value truth and true sayings and people believing you as the believing truths that you said. The reason why you should be brave is because of the fact that it looks like you are trying to achieve the ends of brave actions under conditions of danger.
00:10:25
Speaker
The reason why being reliable is a virtue and what you're trying to do when you are reliable is to achieve the things that are on the other side of your reliability, which is showing up on time for things and people not waiting and all these other sorts. So the virtues, it looks like point outside of themselves for the values. So there's a kind of double incoherence with this stoic value theory that makes it doubly paradoxical.
00:10:54
Speaker
And I think that Stoics need to be able to address both forms of it. The first form of it, which is, hey, we're denying that all these things that look like they're externals and we're denying that wealth is really valuable or good looks and things like that. I think that we can already kind of grasp where that goes. The challenge is being able to tell the story of how virtues are valuable, even when the things outside of which the virtues aim are not.
00:11:21
Speaker
And here's one way to kind of make sense of that. Think of stoic virtues as virtues of maintaining the skills that are aimed at certain things, but the value is still in the skill. So for example, imagine that I'm shooting an arrow at a target.
00:11:43
Speaker
The virtue of me being able to aim the arrow and to judge things given the way that things are, the distance of the target and so on.
00:11:52
Speaker
That's a kind of skill, and that's a skill that itself is a good. And so I can master that skill, but I can still fail for that skill to actually be successful. Gust of wind could come over, the target could fall over, someone could snap the bow out of my hand before I make the shot. The stow-in view is that, look, the good is still in you mastering the skills of being able to draw the bow properly, to aim, and to take all of these things into consideration. It's not about hitting the target.
00:12:20
Speaker
It's about having all of the things that are leading up to. And then everything else on the other side of that is still beyond your control and not something that is part of the value. So we might call that the sort of, there's the skill side and the you being the best version of you that you can be. And then there's everything else that's luck.
00:12:43
Speaker
And it turns out that luck is not a moral category. The difference between an excellent shot at archery that hits the target and the excellent shot at archery who had the bad luck of having a gust of wind come and blow the target over, those two people are equally excellent.
00:13:08
Speaker
They instantiate exactly the same admirable properties, and we don't say that one is a better version of the archer than the other because luck is not a moral category. We don't say one is better than the other. That deep thought that you might call it the anti-luck ethics is one of the things that drives the stone.
00:13:34
Speaker
The stoic is driven by the thought that luck is not a moral category. Being lucky does not make you a better person, and being unlucky does not make you a worse person.
00:13:52
Speaker
It's maintaining as rigorous a commitment to that thought as possible is what drives a good deal of Stoic ethics and is what's behind that Stoic paradox that only virtue is the good.
00:14:08
Speaker
Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's very helpful. I wonder if we push the objection a little bit more. So someone might be say, well, what it is to have a good strategy in a game of chance like poker, you know, in poker, you can play the optimal strategy and many times you'll do that and you're still not guaranteed to win. The best player might lose. And you can certainly grant that luck isn't what determines a good poker strategy from a bad one.
00:14:38
Speaker
per se. But what does determine a optimal poker playing strategy is that probabilistically, this strategy is the one that would lead to the most amount of wins. If you're just trying to maximize your wins, your bank account, whatever, the best strategy is the one that were you to play this in the very same strategy over millions of hands, you would come out ahead.
00:15:01
Speaker
And behind that picture is this idea that it actually is good from the poker player's perspective. To be a good poker player is to maximize your expected bank account as it were. So now when you might think about this when it comes to virtues and as skills, then it seems like, you know, why doesn't the stoic say the same where what it is to be virtuous is to
00:15:24
Speaker
do you know do the sorts of thing which is expected to achieve the goal even if it's not and then that sort of almost seems to put some value in the goal so i wonder what the you know what a stoic would say about that so it's a nice and i think that this is exactly the kind of the kind of rebuttal i think that the the stoic needs to to manage because uh and we can do this with we can do this with the games we can do it even with parenting so like we'll just say like reliable parent is another one like well
00:15:54
Speaker
These externals don't really matter. What matters is that you're just good at being a virtuous parent. And so we've got this sort of this external, namely your child's health and welfare. That's an external, but will act as though it's valuable. That seems like a sort of a weird double-mindedness. It seems almost like it's something that would be almost too much to think, which is.
00:16:14
Speaker
Here I am being a good parent. I'm acting as though my child's welfare is what valuable, but the objective is actually to just do what's most probable in order to do that. And that's me just managing what's up. Now, I think one, one reply is, is to identify a couple of things.
Stoicism in Parenting and Obligations
00:16:37
Speaker
One of them is a sort of.
00:16:39
Speaker
One of them is a slight modification of stoic value theory. I'll come to that one in just a moment and it'll be a familiar one to anyone who knows stuff about stoic. But I think that there's another one, you might say sort of keeping the hard line and it will sort of soften more. I think that keeping the hard line with stoic value theory is to say, you're right that every being in the universe has got a place
00:17:07
Speaker
And the place of those beings is the care of other beings. And that care is something that, on the one hand, is part of just what the kind of being that you are, that you should just be doing these things. And what it is to care for those beings depends on
00:17:29
Speaker
what those beings are. So you've got human beings, they as a consequence deserve certain kinds of care for you. Why? Because of just the relations that you've got. The universe in some ways has sort of cast you in a role where they're dependent on you and rely for food, for shelter, for education. And so
00:17:54
Speaker
that flourishing that's on the other side of it does determine what kinds of actions that you need to perform, right? It's like if they were built differently, you should maybe be stuffing rocks in their mouth instead of peanut butter jelly sandwiches, right? If that were the case, then that would be the appropriate result. So what determines
00:18:16
Speaker
the acts of what determines the acts comprise the virtues of you doing your duty or what comprises what the duties really just are, which is feed them and feed them food that's healthy. You're like, well, does that make their health the value? And the answer is no.
00:18:37
Speaker
Your job is to promote their health. That's what you're doing over here on this side. There can be other things that get in the way that still doesn't touch whether or not you've done this. So I think that the hardcore version of this is supposed to still say, there are things that you owe to them. They may not even be goods in the sense in which they're not virtues and they're not these. These are just things that are places of the rational obligations that these beings have to each other.
00:19:06
Speaker
And I think that you push this again and say, well, what's the ground of the obligations? I think we can probably have this. Look, we've got an obligation that just comes from the fact that you're a parent. And I think that that's the only, I think that that's, again, as deep down as these sort of stoic theories are going to go are going to just say, look, you've got a relation. That's the source of the obligation.
Practical Stoic Strategies
00:19:29
Speaker
The weaker version of this is to go the Chrysippian route and say, we've got preferred indifference. There are preferred outcomes. We know what certain kinds of preferred outcomes are given the relations that we've got. You know what the preferred outcome is whenever you've got children, and they've got preferences. And as a consequence, you have the obligation, given your relation to them, to help them achieve
00:19:58
Speaker
their ends also. And so every being, again, sort of given the old stoic theory of oikiosis, that every being is sort of built to sort of perfect itself, to perfect its relationship to the world, you as a parent are given that obligation to help them do that. And so as a consequence, you do have, there is a kind of a good outside of you. There is a kind of a good outside of you, but it's a preferred and different, but you nevertheless have an obligation to help them pursue it.
00:20:26
Speaker
So I think that there are sort of, there's the hardcore version, which is, hey, you've got relations, the relations are so generic, given the kinds of beings that we are, and those give us obligations and those give us the duties, and there's nothing outside of that. There's another one that says, well, those things are actually, some of these things are actually got some preferred indifference. They're not goods or bads, they're just things that are preferred, given the way that the preferring difference are arranged.
00:20:49
Speaker
you've got certain kinds of duties to them. Those who rely on you, you've got obligations to them to help them pursue. You kind of got two answers. Admit that I kind of prefer the hardcore answer, but I think that the ancient Stoics had a number of answers. Right. Very good. Yeah. So we're starting to get a little bit deep in the Stoic theory and just maybe to explain why this might matter is
00:21:13
Speaker
Often, of course, in our ordinary lives, as a stoic, you'll run into an external, and there's a question, okay, I'm experiencing pain as a result, should I think this pain is bad or dispreferred? And these two different strategies sort of give you two different ways to think about that pain. One is just that
00:21:31
Speaker
sort of like the line that Marcus Aurelius might use multiple times, which is, you know, I am a rational being, my job is not to sleep in, I have this role, and that is all that matters. And then another one, that's the one strategy, I think what you call the hardcore strategy, then the other one is, look, this pain is maybe dis-preferred, but what matters ultimately is how I use it, if I can get rid of it.
00:21:57
Speaker
by expressing virtue, then I should do that. But if getting rid of this pain is just going to be a fact of life and there's no way I can virtuously address it, then so it is, and I'll continue on. So that's sort of how I see practically these two different strategies, realizing themselves in a life, if you will. Well said. I like the two glosses on those approaches. That's very useful.
00:22:25
Speaker
Awesome, excellent. Was there anything else you'd like to say about this issue?
00:22:30
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, again, I want to pause and just say, Caleb, I think that this is a profound challenge to Stoicism. I think that the view that virtue is the only good has got, on the one hand, something a little counterintuitive about it. But I think that this sort of second order being hung in the air problem, namely that virtues are virtues because of the fact they produce something good outside of themselves, is a serious objection to Stoicism.
00:22:59
Speaker
And I think that in thinking about what your duties are, about how we pursue our duties, and what even comprises our duties,
00:23:10
Speaker
requires that we kind of get clearer on what the source of our obligations are. If virtue is the only good, and we're virtuous only insofar as we do our duties, we have to be clear as to what our duties are. We have to figure out what the source of our duties are, what comprises them, what gives them the physiology that they've got. And that, again, looks like that pulls us not just to kind of, it's not just ethics now.
00:23:38
Speaker
It requires that we have a kind of a more robust conception of the world and human relations. It's not just us. It's a lot of folks around us and maybe the entire universe. It's got cosmic real fast, but that's, I think that that's the only way to be able to do this without a sort of a crushing paradox for stoic value. Yeah, yeah. Could you say, just add a few words on why this problem might get cosmic for
00:24:07
Speaker
Well, you know, I mean, so yeah, why does it get cosmic? And I think that the answer is being, because if, if our duties are about the relations that we've got to others and others and their dependence and others and their expectations and what, and what they owe to us and what we reciprocally owe to them, one of the things that we start to see is not just that we need others and others need us.
00:24:34
Speaker
We need to be needed. And again, this is one of these weird extra, like it looks like we pushed certain kinds of things outside of us. But think about the ways in which you can't be honest unless others need the truth from you. You can't be reliable unless somebody relies on you. And again, we've got this weird puzzle that on the one hand, it looks like a lot of, that makes us really,
00:25:04
Speaker
That makes us super external, like it makes the externals look like they're the source of the goods. The answer here though is that, but the world provides relations. We're thrown into a world where we've got relations all around us. And so we need to be needed, we're already needed. We need folks to rely on us, folks already rely on us. If you're a human being, someone's relying on you.
00:25:29
Speaker
someone needs something from you. And the same thing goes with so many of these other virtues. The virtues are ones that themselves are built to be met up. And it gets cosmic because of the fact that like, to even use the Marcus Aurelius analogy that you had made up for the waking meditation, it's not just others that need us, it looks like our environments need us.
00:25:57
Speaker
our economies need us, our states need us. In some ways, the world to be set in order, right? So Marcus is like, yeah, you've got the spiders put the world in order, right? Given the kind of beings they are. That's what we are. We're just monkey versions of that spider analogy. That we put the world in order, depending on the kind of beings that the world's waiting for us to put it in order. And sometimes that means leaving it alone,
00:26:27
Speaker
Protecting it from the bad order that the other humans are bringing. Sometimes it means helping bring some order to your own life. Sometimes it means just doing the goddamn dishes. Our worlds depend on us. The worlds are built for us. We've built a world in some ways for ourselves that depends on us maintaining it.
00:26:50
Speaker
So is that cosmic? Not totally. But again, if we want to push it out further out, we can. We can. But we're put on this earth. We're on this earth, and we've got a rule on it. So don't sleep in.
00:27:05
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, one of the core views is to live according to nature and that needs some account of what nature is, nature of the capital N. And, you know, what's the purpose of this thing, of this whole and...
00:27:21
Speaker
you need, arguably, if you have that kind of view, you need an account of that to make, you need an account of the whole to make account of the parts. It's abstract way to put it. Yes, you need to know what's good for the hive in order to know what is good for the bee. So another objection that I think is worth talking about is just this idea that being properly stoic is impossible. Could you motivate why someone would give this, why people have given this objection to stoicism?
00:27:48
Speaker
Yeah, assuming that stoicism is a good life philosophy, we should at the very least, and part of the appeal of stoicism, we're going to just pull back and say, okay, it's a good life philosophy, so it should be, the goodness of that life should be accessible minimally. One of the other appeals of stoicism is that it kind of breaks the elitism of the classical period. Again, putting this in an ancient period context is one, that it breaks the elitism of so much of the other ways that we think of what a successful life comes from.
00:28:17
Speaker
Contrast with Plato and Aristotle with contrast with today. With Plato, it looks like, look, you know, you have to be good at math, you have to be good at geometry, you have to have the right and you can have your mind screwed up by having the wrong, the wrong kind of poems told you to you whenever you're little. And then, and then your life is pretty much just garbage on the other side, because your values are upside down.
00:28:35
Speaker
With Aristotle, it looks like your life can be garbage if your children are bad, if you don't have enough money, if you're ugly, if you don't speak Greek, if you're a woman. I mean, there's a lot of ways for your life to kind of not go right and not have the most excellence and the opportunities because in the Aristotelian line,
00:28:59
Speaker
What's the, what's the point of life is to be the best, to live the best and to have the best things and to do the best things and to instantiate the best, instantiate the best in humanity. And what was that? Well, what do you have to have for that? Good looks, connections, money, all that other stuff. And so both of those lines are just like really super elitist. I'm not saying that that's wrong or anything like that. I am saying it's wrong, but like it's super elitist.
00:29:25
Speaker
Only very, very few people get to have that. That's what the good life is. Those are both stories. The platonic story is only nerds are happy. It's like the nerds win. Aristotle's like, no, no, no. It's not exactly a jococracy. It's like the rich jococracy. Both stories are like happiness is only for the winners. They just disagree as to what it is to be with.
00:29:55
Speaker
Stoicism isn't that view. Stoicism is a view that happiness should be available to everyone and that the capacities for our happiness are within our hands and we just need to master ourselves to master faith.
Inclusivity and Accessibility of Stoicism
00:30:08
Speaker
That's amazing, right? So again, I just want to, before we talk about this problem and the possibility of being stoic, I want to make sure to just sink the hook on the great irony of this. The whole appeal of stoicism is that it's supposed to be something where it's like happiness is like right there, right? You just need to exercise a couple bits, you know, like a couple bits of this and control yourself and then you, right, you master faith. That's amazing.
00:30:37
Speaker
So appreciating that contrast, I think is really important. So the impossibility objection, it like really is a kind of, should be a kind of significant challenge to the stoics given you might say the contrast with the other forms of life. And it's not hard to see that with many other ways in which we consider think of good lives these days, right? If you think of life as
00:30:59
Speaker
The pursuit of pleasure, the pursuit of status, or the pursuit of money, all of those other sorts of things. Just even the pursuit of certain kinds of excellences and so on. Those lives can be disrupted by all sorts of terms of faith.
00:31:17
Speaker
Stoicism in some ways is supposed to be a really deeply egalitarian program, and that's great. So again, a long-standing story is to say, hey, not just a slave, but an emperor, right? Not just Epictetus, but Marcus Aurelius, and everyone in between. But here's the problem. We'll just go with the Epictetus, fundamental divide, grand division, what's up to us and what's not. But the list of what's up to us is pretty controversial.
00:31:45
Speaker
Our desires directly, so like the criterion for what's up to us is if you decide a certain way, if you make a judgment a certain way, it'll change. If your volition goes a certain way, it'll change. But there are lots of desires that I don't wanna have. My desires are actually not malleable to my will. Anyone who's been in love with someone that they know that they shouldn't be, I don't wanna love this person, right?
00:32:15
Speaker
Your desires are not up to your will. They're not up to your inclinations. You don't get to say no to your desires. They don't go away whenever you do that. So your desires are not up to you. Think of it. Neither are your beliefs. Your beliefs are not up to your will. There are lots of things that you know you shouldn't believe, right? And you wish that you didn't believe.
00:32:41
Speaker
Anytime that you, for example, caught your love or cheating, it's like, I wish I didn't believe this. Sometimes you wish you weren't true, but sometimes you can just be like, look, I just wish I didn't believe it. So we go back to this. I wish I just didn't believe you were a terrible person. Your beliefs are not. Neither are even many of your perceptual states. Your perceptual states aren't up to you. You don't change what you see whenever you look out in the world. Neither are even the things that you consider.
00:33:10
Speaker
don't think of a pink elephant. You just did. There's so much of your mind that you're actually not in control of. The first place to just start is the grand division is not really that grand. There's not a lot that's actually up to you aside from just where you direct your attention. One of the first challenges of stoicism
00:33:36
Speaker
is that is really to start acknowledging that the whole reason why stoicism, stoicism isn't just antecedently true of you. You don't have direct control over most of the things that are in your own mind, but we do have indirect control over those. You can direct your attention. You can direct your volition.
00:34:03
Speaker
And what you can do is do your homework. You want to control your beliefs? Do your homework. Gather evidence. That's how you control your beliefs. You want to control your desires? Control what you're exposed to. Control what you think about them afterwards. Control where you direct your attention after getting the thing that you know that you shouldn't desire.
00:34:29
Speaker
And what happens is that you start to gain, not direct control, you never directly control your desire. What you do is you begin to gain indirect control of your desire. You can, by way of being indirect with your beliefs, by way of being indirect with where your desires are, by way of being indirect as to what sorts of things maybe even give you pleasure, because you can start trying to cultivate certain kinds of tastes
00:34:59
Speaker
Those are things that are indirectly under your control. But here's the problem. If the fundamental division, the grand divide between what's up to us and what isn't is really an aspirational story,
00:35:14
Speaker
is one that instead of something that is given to us and we merely manipulate in light of what nature has given us, that we've got a mind that we control over here and then there's the rest of the world. It's like no, the reality is that the rest of the world's not under our control and as a consequence, little of our mind is too.
Aspirational Aspects of Stoicism
00:35:33
Speaker
Stoicism as a consequence must be an aspirationalist program. We are constantly struggling with ourselves, with our own minds to maintain control
00:35:43
Speaker
That's the challenge of stoicism. And the challenge, of course, is even with a stoic, even with a practicing stoic, don't think of a pink elephant still pops a pink elephant into their mind. We will never, ever have the kind of control. We just are not built, though, to have the kind of control of our own minds and our own desires that the stoic sage, as a kind of a north star,
00:36:14
Speaker
stoicism is not practical. Stoicism is not, despite the fact that I started off with this contrast saying, stoicism is right there in your hand, anyone can do it. But you can't be successful at it. It's a kind of lifetime process, an aspirationalist program that has the end goal beyond where human beings can get
00:36:43
Speaker
It's like the, it's the difference between the North Star and the North Pole. You can get to the North Pole, but you can't get to the North Star. And the question is whether or not that, how stoics really manage that objection. Some stoics say, yeah, yeah, yeah, there really were sages, right? Like Seneca might be read as saying like, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe there were real sages. Maybe there were a couple of them. They're very rare.
00:37:09
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. They're a handful. Maybe Cato. But I think that, you know, I think that being sober about this is the right way to go is to say, look, this is an aspirationalist program in the same way in which many other philosophical and religious programs are set up. When Christians wear these little, you remember maybe back in the late 90s, early 2000s, there were these little plastic armbands, WWJD, what would Jesus do?
00:37:37
Speaker
But the project of imitatio dei is hopeless. You can't be Jesus. You can't do what Jesus would do so consistently. Maybe you could do it like one out of every 10 times. But the project of imitatio dei for Christians is not that you're going to successfully be like God in all cases.
00:37:59
Speaker
It's to take him as a North Star and strive to be better and to always be able to see that you can do better. That wisdom in this regard is being able to look at yourself critically and not be self-satisfied. The same thing goes with the skeptical program. The skeptics always said, the skeptic does this, but they never named it that skeptic. Why? Because the skeptic said, look, the objective here is to not be fooled by illusions and the bullshit that we pull over our own eyes. And so the skeptic says, look,
00:38:29
Speaker
Well, we'll never maintain the rational self-control that skepticism is out. What we're trying to do is strive towards that. And I think the stoicism is a similar kind of aspirational striving ethical program. That the good that we try to achieve is actually beyond our capacities. Ought does not imply can for the stoics, but ought implies aspire, ought implies try, but that doesn't mean you're going to succeed.
00:38:59
Speaker
And this means that we're all in that third category between sages and idiots, sages and failures, sages and the NY's. We're progressors and we're doing better and trying to do better. So is that an objection to stoicism? Yes. Do the stoics have an answer? Kinda.
00:39:20
Speaker
Kind of. That's funny. It depends on whether or not you think that this aspirationalist program is a reasonable program. But it looks like it breaks a promise. And I think that everyone who's a practicing stoic needs to make peace with the promise that's broken.
00:39:39
Speaker
which is that stoicism is supposed to say happiness is within your reek in a way that the Aristotelian and the Platonist aristocratic non-egalitarian programs deny. But the stoic then snatches it out of your hand and says, yeah, but it's an aspiration. You'll never really, truly reach it.
00:40:05
Speaker
And I think that there's something inspiring about that story, but also something tragic about it. I think the way a number of people talk about the key idea in the beginning of Epictetus is in terms of dichotomy of control.
Mental Skills and Desires in Stoicism
00:40:20
Speaker
But talking about it, as you do, as a fundamental division of what's up to us and what's not is clear. The question is maybe not so much of direct control. What can I do at the snap of my fingers?
00:40:35
Speaker
Because quite often, you know, as we say, mental thoughts will arise without us having anything to do with it. Desires will be at the moment, perhaps impossible to bunch, but there are particular things that are up to us. It seems like we have
00:40:51
Speaker
nearly always direct control of our attention, our will, the ability to make decisions, even if not always follow through on them. And that these sort of decisions can now shape who we are over time. So this is now a much longer project. Okay, what's up to us, our desires, our desires, the sorts of things that I have immediate control over, perhaps not. But you know, if I find myself a particular desire, I can
00:41:19
Speaker
make decisions now to shape myself into the kind of person who, if it's a desire I want to have, has that more strongly. If it's something that should be averse to, perhaps I'd become averse to it if it's a vice or what have you. So that framing I think is useful and it does make it into much more of a long-term project than just this idea that I can be stoic right now at the stop of my fingers.
00:41:47
Speaker
I believe that's right. I think that recognizing that the stoic exercises that we perform when we prepare for challenging experiences, even when we prepare ourselves for pleasurable experiences, I think that that's really important. That stoics don't just need to prepare themselves for the bad times. They need to prepare themselves for the good times because good times are going to affect you in other ways too.
00:42:15
Speaker
But those are ways of looking at your desires and your preferences sideways. It has to be an indirect kind of approach to them. So whenever Marcus tells this, and Marcus Aurelius tells the story of the filerian wine, he can't say, I don't like the taste of this noble vintage.
00:42:38
Speaker
Right? You have to, you have to kind of come at yourself sideways and you have to describe the filernean wine as rotten grape juice. See it for what it really is. Right? Like, well, that's a, that's one way to describe it, rotten grape juice. And the same thing with sex. It's like, well, it's just some rubbing of genitals and then a seizure. You're like, well, that still even under that description, I could see that being distracted. But the objective is supposed to kind of come at your desires to come at yourself sideways.
00:43:08
Speaker
And to not change them directly, you can't just be like, you know, stop desiring that. You can't do that. You have to come at yourself sideways, re-describe them, describe yourself whenever you're desiring them. And that changes your relationship with the objects of desires or you or you or yourself with yourself in the midst of those desires. And you can establish the control.
00:43:35
Speaker
But again, it's never direct. It can only be indirect. It's the only way that it works. But if that's the case, we're constantly working on ourselves.
Stoicism and Meditation
00:43:43
Speaker
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00:44:02
Speaker
I'm new to Stoicism and wanted to dive deeper with guidance. This is it. I love the meditations. I've practiced meditations with other apps, but this just seems to be more impactful. Life changer. With Stoa, you can really get a sense of how to take yourself out of your thoughts and get a sense of how to handle different difficult situations. Find it available for a free download in the Play Store and App Store.
00:44:29
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Anyone who's meditated for a period of time has discovered that their mind is perhaps not completely under their control, right? You'll sit for a while to try to focus and then all these thoughts will come up. You'll forget that you're even meditating is a very common experience.
00:44:46
Speaker
But you're still able to notice that happens. Catch yourself and then return your attention back to the meditation and then continue doing this over and over again. And advanced meditators will be able to hold their attention for longer periods of time. And that I think is the same sort of project we have with
00:45:05
Speaker
so many other mental skills is noticing when things go awry and then turning your attention back to shaping yourself, making the decisions, making the judgments that shape yourself into the person that you want to be the more virtuous person. I do like the term shaping yourself. There's a kind of self-construction that
00:45:30
Speaker
is diachronic over time that we as practicing Stoics have to be attentive to. But again, the reality is that it's always a house that we're...
00:45:47
Speaker
Anyone who's been a homeowner knows that like anytime that you fix the roof, you know that something's going wrong on the foundation. It's a house that you're always having to fix because your attention can't be everywhere. But it turns out that your desires leak out and find all sorts of ways or your beliefs are never not entirely under your control because there are people around you talking all the time and they affect you. And that's just another reality about the fact that we've got relations.
00:46:13
Speaker
The things they say affect us, even whenever we're exercising critical thinking. It's a reality of the, and especially given the fact that we live in media environments that we're just awash in information that is in some ways meant to manipulate us to buy things, to go to other sites. We are, we are pushed in all sorts of ways, cognitively.
00:46:37
Speaker
that even the most attentive critical thinker can't keep up with it. And we do our best, but we recognize that it's a job that is truly Herculean.
Modern vs. Ancient Stoicism
00:46:52
Speaker
Absolutely. So the last topic I wanted to touch on is this idea of tradition and the system of stoicism. So of course, when you ask questions like we touched on in the beginning, and of course, when you ask questions like what is stoicism?
00:47:08
Speaker
There's this question that always arises, sometimes it's made explicit, sometimes it's just in the background. How do you link what we're doing today as Stoics to the ancient Stoics of Greece and Rome? So really broadly, how do you think about this issue?
00:47:25
Speaker
Yeah, so I've got, I guess by sort of contemporary stoic standards, maybe a little bit practicing stoic standards, maybe a little bit of a controversial view. And so I'm going to kind of do my best to lay it out and be fair to the, be fair to the other side. Hopefully the other side will be fair to me, but that's up to them. So on the one hand, we've got an ancient version of stoicism that we get through a number of sources.
00:47:46
Speaker
that presents us with a, you might call a systematic view. And from Diogenes Laertius, we get stories about like, okay, the Stoics see their view as kind of got three parts, and they're all interrelated, and they kind of form an organic whole with the ethics. You got the logic, which is the theory of reasoning and rationality, and then you got the physics, theory of what the world's like.
00:48:08
Speaker
and they all fit together so and we get a number of analogies they're like an egg like the shell the yolk and the white it they fit together like a fertile field there's the the boundary the field and the fruit it's like an animal it's the soul and the sinews and the bones all of these are kind of organic you can't have one without the other they all kind of come as a big
00:48:34
Speaker
And so the challenge for us is that I, as a practicing stoic, think the ethics is pretty good. There are parts of it that I think that I'd like to see it managed because there are new objections. So the objection that I posed about virtue being the only good
00:48:59
Speaker
is best posed in a contemporary voice. And so there's no evidence that the ancients really thought about that object. So our Roman and Greek forebears really never thought through that. So we have to answer that if we want to be stolen.
00:49:18
Speaker
That's first problem. It's just like, yeah, they just didn't think of stuff. And that's just in the ethics. The problem is that the physics is weird. The physics is kind of a quasi Heraclaitian view about the base features of the world. They've got to think that there's a kind of a.
00:49:36
Speaker
A purpose to it all, contemporary materialism has not got that. It doesn't look like it's quite as scientifically literate by contemporary standards. So stoic physics looks like it's, and you've got other theses of stoic physics that everything kind of comes together at the very end and a great sort of ball of fire, the ecclerosis. That doesn't look very scientifically plausible or at the very least, at the very least it wouldn't be for stoic reasons that we think that that would be the case. So stoic physics doesn't look like that's in great shape.
Revising Stoic Logic and Knowledge
00:50:04
Speaker
Stoic logic is also by some folks standards at the very least incomplete, maybe have certain deep problems with it. It's good for, it's good for what it does, but it's not great for all the other things that we need to do. And there are other features of stoic theory of knowledge that looks like it's highly implausible. It opens up, opens us to sort of significant skeptical challenges that maybe need just needs to be revised.
00:50:29
Speaker
So stoicism comes as a system is the big, big problem. If stoicism comes to a system that you don't get the, that the ethics, the physics and the logic all have to come as a package and you don't get the ethics unless you get the physics and the logic right. The physics and the logic don't look right. And the, and it looks like, it looks like the ethics needs some, needs some fix it. So one question is, can we just get the ethics without them? Right? Can you just be like, look, I want the ethics. I'm not interested in the physics and I'll take, I'll take a little bit of the logic, but not all of it. Or maybe take none of it.
00:50:59
Speaker
Can I just do stoic ethics? Can I just pluck it right out? The other one is like, even if I pluck stoic ethics out, do I get to change it, right? So it's like, look, there are all sorts of objections that the ancients didn't anticipate. And it looks like I may need to do a little bit of revising to the ethics to be able to answer these questions. Do we get to do that? Do we get to do that? And first answer is, yes. Why not?
00:51:28
Speaker
We're practicing Stoics. We're rational creatures. We're trained philosophers. We're taking this seriously. We're the Stoics now. We're the Stoics now. If you bridle at that, then you're just playing Roman. Then you're just playing Roman. Then you're just like, then you want to practice a philosophical program.
00:51:56
Speaker
that you know has got a devastating objection to it and you're not going to fix it. Why? Why? That seems so deeply intellectually incurious and irresponsible, I can barely even stand it. So that's one track to go, which is we're the Stoics now. And if the program needs revision, the program needs revision.
00:52:23
Speaker
And in this regard, I've grasped that horn of this dilemma, which is I don't think that stoic physics is revisable to be able to be kept. So chuck it. I don't think that we can, we, presumably we can do stoicism without the physics. I think that you need the law. I think that you need stomach logic. It just needs to be supplemented and it needs to be approved.
00:52:47
Speaker
I have a whole other program of like, hey, I've got a kind of a neo-stoic program in philosophy of knowledge, trying to make a stoic theory of knowledge seem non-crazy and concede places where the critics have got it. And the same thing goes with stoic ethics, that we need to be revisionists with regards to stoicism, if stoicism is going to be a live philosophical program.
00:53:11
Speaker
Live philosophical programs are those that change in light of the circumstances, change in light of the objections that come, that the changes are minimal revisions, trying to keep what's worth keeping in those programs. Now, this tradition, this move that I'm making, the we're the Stoics now, opens me up to an objection that I recognize is perhaps devastating, but I think I've got a good answer.
00:53:38
Speaker
And it's the following. If you get to revise these traditions, then what do you keep? Is there anything in stoicism that you wouldn't revise? Are you going to revise the fundamental divide?
00:53:52
Speaker
Are you going to revise the core feature of stoicism between what's up to us and what isn't? And my answer is, yeah, I just fucking did. Remember my last answer, which is, yeah, it turns out that when you start out, there's almost nothing on the other side. It's actually not a division that's in nature. It's one that's actually established by a lot of work and actually is not something even remotely stable. I think that that's a responsible revision.
00:54:17
Speaker
So what's in stoicism worth keeping? The stuff that reason, the stuff that satisfies our rational scrutiny, that's what's in stoicism worth keeping. And the answer to that is, hey, I've got answers as to what satisfies it now. Okay, now the alternative I think is to go with tradition. And I think that there is something really appealing about, so I think that I'm right in this debate, but I do want to give my opponents in this debate their due.
Balancing Rationality and Tradition
00:54:48
Speaker
And it's the following. Stoicism is what it is because of its connection to historical periods,
00:54:58
Speaker
and thinkers and the situations that they were facing and that it's got the resonance that it's got because of the fact it's something that survived many, many, many years and many, many, many big brains thinking it through and living it and living as practitioners of it and finding meaning and happiness in it and thinking
00:55:26
Speaker
that here I am, one 21st century flat-footed liberal gets to sort of knock all that down, is a kind of intellectual hubris that's inappropriate. And who am I to Seneca? Who am I to Marcus Aurelius? Who am I to Chrysippus? Who am I to Zeno? And there is something to that thought.
00:55:49
Speaker
There is something to the thought that stoicism has got to have an historically robust causal connection to its originators and that breaking that causal chain and breaking that, breaking in some ways the sort of the lineage of respect is a way of destroying a tradition and making the term not mean anything. So I think that there's something to that.
00:56:15
Speaker
So again, I'm honoring my objective that we're the Stoics Now program. But my response regularly is, but you can do that with any permission. Again, you could just say something like, look, what distinguishes stoicism from Pythagoreanism then? Is it just the fact that stoicism is cool now?
00:56:38
Speaker
Is it just the fact, like, why be a Stoic then? Instead of just like, why not be a Roman Republican? Why not be a practitioner of the cult of Zoroastrian? Why not be, there's so many old ass things, right, that survive in some fashion, in some small way. Why not do those? And the answer has got to be, there's something right about Stoicism. And you say, then you're back on my side.
00:57:07
Speaker
Well, I think my general impression would be to take a hybrid type approach where you say something like, yes, you have these views of your own ability to reason and come up with particular answers. But one output from that is that, you know, traditions can be
00:57:23
Speaker
And of course, you have this problem of how you choose tradition, but then you might side with tradition even when your judgment comes to the opposite conclusion just because you're not that confident in that conclusion and you're reasonably confident in the tradition. Of course, there are many different cases even outside of the philosophical domain where
00:57:42
Speaker
A culture might evolve to come up with this elaborate ritual of cleaning out some shellfish and it has all this nonsense added to it, but it turns out that one step is actually crucial to avoid poisoning people from removing this poison from the shellfish or something like this.
00:58:00
Speaker
So there's some amount of trust you have in a culture, even if it is a black box. And weighing that, how to weigh that with your own individual judgment is a serious problem, both, I think, in stoicism, but more generally when it comes to any question about politics, economic, society, such as a tricky issue.
00:58:17
Speaker
I think you laid that out very nicely, that these two. Yeah. Let me say one quick thing about the hybrid view that you got out, which is there are two questions, and I think that you acknowledged them, but I'd like to just highlight what you had said, which is there's the choosing tradition and then deferring to traditions, right? So it looks like we've got a sort of, my thesis is that if we use reason to choose a tradition,
00:58:46
Speaker
We chose Stoicism over Epicureanism. Epicureanism is just as alive these days, right? We chose Stoicism over a lot of other things. Was it just taste? Was it something that wasn't reason that chose that? That seems weird for me to... But then the thought is, then why did... It looks like then it needs to be something that informs the way that we inhabit the second part, which is inhabiting the tradition that we're in.
00:59:12
Speaker
And the last part that I want to, again, highlight, and again, I think that there's a way for us to be reasonable hybrids on this. I still cite Marcus Aurelius, even if I say that we're the Stoics now. I'm not just citing John Sellers and other active Stoics and Bill Stevens. I'm citing our Roman forebears and so on. But the important thing is that even Stoicism in its formative years was a kind of debate society.
00:59:42
Speaker
Chrysippus just didn't maintain Zeno's view. Chrysippus developed them. By the time that we get to the Imperial period, we see all sorts of new concepts banging around, like Progressive.
00:59:58
Speaker
And then by the time we get down to Marcus Aurelius, again, not one of the sort of the central players in the stoic debates and even arguably sort of on the outside, but even with Marcus Aurelius, we see him saying things like, maybe, you know, Adams or Providence, but either way still be a stoic. Marcus Aurelius is somebody who's even considering the possibility that maybe the ethics is detachable from physics. So the stoics themselves were revisers also of their system.
01:00:27
Speaker
I'm carrying on that tradition. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for coming on. This has been great. Caleb, thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to Stoic Conversations.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:00:40
Speaker
If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
01:00:53
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.