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Stoicism FAQ: Freewill, Happiness, and Death (Episode 3)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this episode, Caleb and Michael discuss important and frequently asked questions about Stoicism:
- What do the Stoics say about free will?
- What is the Stoic version of happiness? Can we be happy?
- What do the Stoics think about death?
Stoa Conversations is Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay’s podcast on Stoic theory and practice.
Caleb and Michael work together on the Stoa app. Stoa is designed to help you build resilience and focus on what matters. It combines the practical philosophy of Stoicism with modern techniques and meditation.
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com
Caleb Ontiveros has a background in academic philosophy (MA) and startups. His favorite Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/calebmontiveros
Michael Tremblay also has a background in academic philosophy (PhD) where he focused on Epictetus. He is also a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His favorite Stoic is Epictetus. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay
Thank you to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoicism Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. 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.
FAQs on Stoicism
00:00:19
Speaker
Hi everyone, my name is Michael. Today we're going to be continuing the frequently asked questions about stoicism.
00:00:30
Speaker
So we'll kick it off right away, just hop right into it.
Free Will vs. Determinism
00:00:34
Speaker
The first question is, what do the Stoics say about free will? Yeah, great. So this is an interesting one. I think a lot of people that learn about Stoicism
00:00:46
Speaker
think it's very empowering, it's very, I can forge my own path, I can make my own way. It's about emphasizing your freedom and your choice. But the irony is that the Stoics don't believe in free will. And that's, so that's the first thing many people will be surprised by that. The Stoics don't believe in free will, or if they do believe in free will,
00:01:08
Speaker
The type of free will they believe in is counterintuitive or different than what most people think of when they think of free will. At least most people who haven't taken college level courses on free will have gotten this conception of it. When most people think of free will, they think of the capacity to do otherwise, right? They think that they're free to act in the way they want to act. But what the Stoics think is that the Stoics believe in determinism.
00:01:32
Speaker
And so determinism is a conception of the world that whatever occurs is determined by previous circumstances. So one way to think of determinism is you think, if I was to rewind time five seconds in the deterministic universe,
00:01:49
Speaker
things would then proceed exactly as they had before because I didn't change any of the circumstances and what happens unravels exactly from those circumstances. The reason the Stoics believe in this is that they're physicalists. They think that all that exists is physical matter and that physical matter, so even our souls, even our minds, are physical things. That physical matter follows laws of the universe, follows the laws of nature, and if you have physical matter in a certain position,
00:02:19
Speaker
interacting with other physical matter in a certain position, following the same rules, then the output of that will be the same. The output of that will be consistent.
00:02:30
Speaker
Now that's not very exciting, right? Or that might sound really sad. You think there's no freedom, there's no choice, there's no movement. And in one sense, that's the case. We're not free to do whatever we want. We don't make choices in a vacuum, but we do have a kind of free will in what's called, so that was determinism. And what the Stokes believe is what's called compatibilism, which is the idea that free will as they define it is actually compatible or possible in a deterministic world.
00:03:00
Speaker
And the reason they believe that is because what they define as free will is not the capacity to do otherwise. It's not the capacity to make random choices in a vacuum. It's not the capacity to break from the laws of nature when you make decisions. What they think free will is they think a choice that was a free willed choice
00:03:21
Speaker
was one that was only caused by you, only determined by you. So Hume is another philosopher much later than the Stoics and he has a similar position and he describes this really well. He says, look, when we talk about free will,
00:03:36
Speaker
When we talk about putting responsibility on a choice, we're not talking about
Compatibilism and Moral Responsibility
00:03:40
Speaker
could this person have done otherwise? Could this person have made a choice in a vacuum? What we mean is who made the choice, right? So if I go in and I rob a bank because I want money, legal system says, you made that free choice. You're going to be punished. But if somebody.
00:03:55
Speaker
If I get kidnapped and somebody straps a bomb to my chest or somebody has a gun and has kidnapped my family and says, I'm going to hurt your family if you don't rob this bank, then the legal system might be leaning on us. That wasn't a free choice because what caused that choice was not necessarily, was not your character. What caused that choice was somebody else imposing it on you or forcing that on you. Right. So this is the kind of.
00:04:20
Speaker
freedom or the kind of choice and free will that the Stoics are interested in. And this is the reason why the Stoics also think even though determinism is true, we also have moral responsibility. We also have moral accountability. We can judge people because we judge them when something happens. We say was, if you act poorly and we say it was the result of your character, this bad situation was the result of your character, but you're still responsible for that. We're still judging you for that situation.
00:04:47
Speaker
I have one more thing to say on this. For people that think if you're just getting exposed to this idea of determinism or compatibilism or free will in this sense for the first time, I think one thing that helps make sense of determinism or free will is trying to think of how you would even ascribe moral responsibility.
00:05:03
Speaker
in a situation with perfect free will with determinism was false because if there was perfect free will and determinism was false your actions in a sense would be random or you would have a capacity for randomness and that doesn't really seem like a good solution either so I guess what I'm trying to say is
00:05:21
Speaker
When you first hear about determinism or you first hear that the stoics of deterministic, that can be deflationary, can take the wind out of your sails. But I think when you really wrestle with the concepts, it's actually a better way of thinking about things or a way that I prefer to think about things than totally random choice. That idea of free will doesn't make me feel any better or doesn't help me make sense of the world any better than determinism does. Yeah. So on the issues of free, issues of free will are always
00:05:52
Speaker
philosophically thorny, but I think that was a fine explanation of the stoic view and good motivation for the compatibilist picture.
00:06:08
Speaker
Just to add on to that, to make it seem more palatable, one way to think about it, this is not exactly the ancient Stoic view, but is close, is that freedom is a matter of doing what you want without internal or external constraints.
00:06:30
Speaker
So someone is not free when there's some external force causing them to do something, whether that's a person or nature, what have you. And they also aren't free when perhaps there's some internal aspect of their mind that forces them to do something where they've lost the ability to make a decision.
00:06:52
Speaker
But as long as you are doing what you want and reasoning through particular choices, then it seems quite plausible at least to motivate the picture that one is acting freely. So that's it some initial motivation for the compatibilist view and
00:07:19
Speaker
One other aspect to this question that I'm curious about is this matters when you're thinking about how to make sense of the ancient Stoics, but I'm curious whether you think this issue has serious import for how we think about Stoicism today. What about the Stoic worldview hangs on the question of free
Stoicism, Fate, and Human Behavior
00:07:42
Speaker
will? I assume.
00:07:44
Speaker
free will is just an important question to wrap your mind around because I think people can get caught up in this idea of fatalism because there is a sense in a deterministic universe.
00:07:54
Speaker
that the world is just unfolding according to laws and it will just continue to unfold and you will be pulled along with it. And that aspect, that is a very deep aspect of stoicism. I can't remember if it was Seneca or maybe Chrysippus or Zeno has this metaphor, like the Stoics believed in faith, right? They believed in the providential defined nature of the universe. And they have this metaphor where
00:08:21
Speaker
you're being pulled along, you're tied to a cart, and the cart is moving, right? Your fate is going, the universe is unfolding, and you can either cry and be dragged along by the neck by the cart, or you can walk alongside it cheerfully. People understand that the Stoics believed in fate, they believed in this defined nature of the universe to unfold in a certain way, and when you think about external things, it makes a lot of sense, like the kind of determinism of
00:08:47
Speaker
nature, for example, people don't have issues with it. But, or even the determinism of other people, right? When you try to explain the behavior of other people and you say, well, that person had this childhood event, which caused this character trait, which caused them to react this way. I think people are, it's easy to ascribe that to other people or think about that in the sense of other people. But when applying it to yourself, it can be quite demotivating. I think that's the main hump of understanding free will today.
00:09:12
Speaker
or understand the compatibilist position today. Because I would say that even if determinism is true, it should not be demotivating. You still have responsibility, you still have ethical accountability. We can still judge people as being better or worse people. Because as you said,
00:09:32
Speaker
We're judging them for what they want, and people that want good things are good people, and people that want and pursue bad things are bad people. And to have the capacity to change that, even if that capacity is not, even if your soul
00:09:49
Speaker
does not exist outside of causality. Even if your soul doesn't exist as something or your mind doesn't exist as something that is distinct from the laws of the universe like everything else. But I think that's the main thing. I think that's the main thing to wrestle with is I think there's a lot of value to determinism and understanding that from a modern ethical perspective. But I think people don't like wrestling with determinism because it's demotivating.
00:10:14
Speaker
And I think the Stoics have a good answer to get around that with compatibilism. So you have access to both sides of it. If you can wrestle and absorb that conception of that stoic concept, you're free will. But it's also something I see people misunderstanding a lot. So I think it's important for the sake of clarification, but I think the ethical importance was that part I said, which is that you can grapple with determinism without being fatalistic and giving up on self-improvement. Yeah. The Stoics have this pattern.
00:10:42
Speaker
of saying that you have more responsibility than you typically think, but also in a sense you're less responsible. One way to think about that is we are
00:10:55
Speaker
almost purely responsible for our decisions and judgments. We can't blame others for what we decide to do in a deep sense because we are the only source of our decisions. But lots of people would also think you're responsible for the state of your health or you're responsible for all these things that are external to you. And on the stoic view,
00:11:19
Speaker
You are responsible for these things, but they're not things that you have direct control over. And it's always useful to remind yourself that what you're ultimately responsible for, what ultimately matters is whether you're making decisions or judgments that
00:11:36
Speaker
can be expected to promote whatever external aims are worth promoting. Do you have the character of someone who takes care of their health or takes care of whatever other external things are worth caring about?
00:11:53
Speaker
So in that way, there's almost a pattern of the stoic saying that one has at once more control over one's life than one thinks, but also less control. And you see the same thing in the discussion of determinism and compatibilism.
Stoic Paradoxes and Progression
00:12:09
Speaker
where, yes, the prior states of the universe might necessitate future states, but that doesn't mean that you are not the ultimate source of your actions. And it doesn't mean that things are fated to happen in the sense that you can't sit back and wait for the river of events to pass by. You have no choice but to participate in that river and that story.
00:12:36
Speaker
Yeah, these paradoxes. When we were talking about this last episode, these paradoxes, we find them all throughout stoicism. And there was an ancient book on stoic paradoxes. And I think that's got that progression from.
00:12:48
Speaker
beginner to maybe like intermediate or advanced. I don't necessarily want to label it. Like you don't have to customize your engagement with a philosophy, but I would say beginner understanding is really when you, you encounter something like that economy of control, you encounter something like more responsibility and you mold it to fit your preconceptions or to fit your already present kind of understandings.
Defining Happiness in Stoicism
00:13:12
Speaker
And when we start wrestling with these paradoxes of stoicism, that for me is when you're wrestling with stoicism as it really is. Resting with the philosophy as a robust school of thought, not just as ways of framing intuitions you might have already had or ways of things that kind of fit with your preconceptions. It's always a good, I think it's always a good sign.
00:13:33
Speaker
when you disagree with something or you push back against something, you say, that doesn't really make sense to me. I think that's a sign of kind of thinking philosophically and actually wrestling with the ideas rather than just being okay with kind of accepting the first form it's presented to you as. Absolutely.
00:13:50
Speaker
One related confusion that sometimes happens in this area that is worth mentioning is that sometimes people will explain either their own or others' behavior by reference to brain states. So when they do this, these parts of their brain light up.
00:14:11
Speaker
You don't need to be a stoic to come to this insight, but in a way that's not so surprising and you need a much better argument for why someone is either absolved of responsibility or something of this sort. Because on the stoic picture, we are just material beings. So of course, whatever we do, you're going to find some correlation with our brain states or physical states. So merely saying that when people
00:14:39
Speaker
are more inclined to do some bad behavior than you see this region of the brain light up. It does not absolve people of responsibility. Yeah, that's a good point that it's almost when you don't accept our physical nature or you don't believe in our physical nature, then pointing out these physical states it absolves because your sense of moral responsibility hinges upon
00:15:02
Speaker
your mind or your soul or whatever you want to call it existing kind of from causality or distinct from physical laws. But when it's so external that that is all we are. That is what we're judging. We're judging which brain states you have. We're judging which physical reactions you have because that's what determines the quality of your character. That's what it means when we talk about better or worse people, the whole things come together, at least the way that I see it. That conflict is eliminated.
00:15:26
Speaker
Absolutely. So our second question, second big question is, what do the Stoics say about happiness? Yeah. So this is another one where you have this initial sense and then this kind of deeper actually wrestling with the philosophy.
00:15:43
Speaker
Happiness, we want to, I think if you talk to somebody in contemporary Western culture, it's funny for me sometimes because I've been studying ancient Greek. I sometimes understand some ancient Greek philosophy things better than contemporary things. Like sometimes my mind is just immersed in that way, the ancient Greek way of thinking about things. And I understand it's not the way most people think about things or the way that I did before I started studying deeply.
00:16:08
Speaker
But a lot of times when people say happiness, you wouldn't, you would think of happiness, you think of it as a subjective state, right? Like a state of joy and probably a state of like prolonged joy, right? So a kind of prolonged psychological state. The opposite of happiness might be sadness, for example, which is then like a prolonged kind of sensation, one that's sadness being painful, happiness being enjoyable.
00:16:35
Speaker
The ancient Stoics and ancient Hellenistic philosophy, so the other schools, the Epicureans, the skeptics, they didn't really think of happiness in this way. So the ancient term for happiness is you being the word for good, daimon being the word for spirit.
00:16:51
Speaker
And so a good spirit meant you were blessed. This was a person who had a blessed life, right? They had a good spirit with them, watching over them, making sure their life turned out well. And that's the word that's always getting translated as happiness when we're looking at these stoic texts. And so what did it mean to have a happy life under this condition?
00:17:11
Speaker
I think it meant less a subjective state and more a state of excellence. The term I like to use is flourishing, because when we think of flourishing, we think of something doing what it's supposed to do, having the kind of life that it's supposed to have. So when the Stoics talk about happiness, they're talking about what does it mean to flourish? What does it mean to have a great life, to live the way a human is supposed to live?
00:17:39
Speaker
not a subjective psychological state of joy or lack of sadness. It means to have an excellent life. So by that criteria, just by that criteria alone, before we get into what the Stoics thought on this, you could have a happy life. The ancient Greeks thought someone like Aristotle would think that a happy life would have plenty of moments of anger, plenty of moments of sadness, as long as you were living excellently otherwise, right? It was a holistic judgment.
00:18:05
Speaker
Aristotle talks about Eudaimonia, famously talks about, you almost can't even say it. You almost can't call someone happy until they're dead because it's this judgment about life as a whole. So that's the way they think about happiness. And me personally, I think that's a much better way to think about happiness, right? If you end up chasing a subjective state, this is when people can harm themselves. Even if your long-term goal is a subjective pleasurable state, if you put in your short-term priority happiness and you pursue a lack of sadness, a lack of
00:18:33
Speaker
negative emotions in the short term, sometimes you can set yourself up to have a worse life because you don't sometimes engage in difficult things. You don't do work that's hard for you. So I think on one hand, there's that view of flourishing versus just not being sad. And so that's that first thing to clarify. They're talking about flourishing. They're talking about doing what a human is supposed to do. Then the question is, okay, what is a human supposed to do?
00:18:56
Speaker
And the way I often talk about this is I contrast it with other Hellenistic schools. Aristotle says, you know, what a human is supposed to do is, what a human is supposed to do is be excellent at what a human is. So it comes down to this definition of what a human is. And for Aristotle, a human is an intelligent animal, but ultimately still an animal. You have to
00:19:16
Speaker
satisfy your physical needs, you have certain social needs, so you have to have a certain degree of popularity, have a certain degree of family success, and then you have intellectual needs. You should read philosophy, engage with good art, listen to good books, and then there's kind of character needs. These excellences then manifested in the way that you act, the way that you treat others. You act justly, you act kindly, you
00:19:39
Speaker
punish those that deserve to be punished, you reward those that deserve to be rewarded. But for Aristotle, this view of happiness was very holistic and captured a lot of different features. And I think it's a really compelling account. And it's a nice contrast. I often think of Aristotle's ideal of like
00:19:54
Speaker
Batman. He's like, you're like, you're a great person, you're a hero, but then you're also a billionaire and you're also like six foot two and a great at sports. Like you have all the good things. Everything people want. You have all of it. The Stoics had a different definition of what a person was. They think a person is a rational being. They are fundamentally a choice maker. That's what differentiates us from other animals is our intelligence, our capacity to reflect on things and make decisions. So from that perspective,
00:20:22
Speaker
to flourish, to live an excellent life if you are choosing things, to make good choices, to reflect well. And so that's why the stoic definition of virtue is knowledge, right? Because virtue is excellency, excellent characteristics.
00:20:37
Speaker
So for them, an excellent human is just one who knows what to do. And then someone who knows what to do is courageous when they should be courageous, is generous and kind when they should be kind, is cautious and sets good boundaries or stands up to bullies when they should do that. They're the person who knows how to act and knows how to navigate the world. But for the Stoics, you know, if you're dealt a bad card,
00:20:58
Speaker
And it's literally in terms of Aristotle, you're born a woman, for example, in the ancient Greek conception, Aristotle would say, oh, that's too bad. But for the Stoics, that doesn't have anything to do with anything, right? You're still, you still have a mind. You still have a, you know, I'm laughing at that idea because it's dated and it's, I think Aristotle's absolutely wrong here, but the Stoics, it has no effect for them, right? They totally think that women can be sages and excellent. People with physical disabilities has no impact on your capacity to be happy and be excellent because
00:21:29
Speaker
It's about the choices you're making. It's about the kind of rational judgments you're making. So the person that's flourishing in the stoic context, the person that's happy, the person that you can look at and say, that's an excellent person. That's a person who lived an excellent life, is the person who has knowledge, who has virtue and acts incredibly well.
00:21:47
Speaker
Now, a side effect of that, a really pleasant side effect, and one that we don't want to forget, is that it also so happens that the person who has knowledge suffers less. The person who has knowledge isn't upset by things that don't deserve to be, they don't deserve being upset about. They're not anxious about things that don't deserve anxiety. They're not angry about events that aren't actually harmful. So there's this idea of flourishing this eudaimonia, this kind of being an excellent person,
00:22:15
Speaker
And you'll also have that subjective happiness. You'll also experience that joy and that kind of pleasure when you're a good person, when you possess knowledge.
Stoic vs. Other Philosophies on Happiness
00:22:24
Speaker
But it's a byproduct of flourishing. It's not the goal and it's not the priority. So a little bit counterintuitive, but I think a really robust, worthwhile way of thinking about things. What do you think about that, Caleb?
00:22:37
Speaker
The comparison of different Hellenistic philosophies is useful. You can think of the three ways of thinking about happiness or rather virtue as you have the synod conception, the Stoics idea, and then the Aristotelian. So as you said on the Aristotelian picture,
00:22:59
Speaker
Virtue is not sufficient for happiness because you need some other things to go right. Whether that's with your reputation or with your health, you could be robbed of virtue and therefore robbed of living a happy life by things that are outside of your control. Both the cynics and the Stoics disagreed about that. The cynics with the hardcore version of the Stoics where they thought
00:23:29
Speaker
Not only is virtue what you need to live a happy life, it is the only good, preferable thing.
00:23:37
Speaker
Everything else is noise, nonsense, and this is why you have characters like Diogenes who are cynics who end up doing nothing but essentially philosophizing or existing in a virtuous manner.
00:23:59
Speaker
They don't care about material objects. They don't care about their reputation. All they care about is being a person with excellent character. The Stoics struck a middle path and held that virtue is both necessary and sufficient for a good life.
00:24:18
Speaker
But there are many things that are preferable. One could loosely think of it as there are many other things that are good, but there's nothing that ever outweighs the goodness of acting with virtue of having a character.
00:24:37
Speaker
which means they can, like the cynics, be egalitarian about who is a person who's capable of having a happy life.
00:24:49
Speaker
essentially everyone, and Aristotle also make room for things being preferable given our nature and not being so narrowly focused on the life of someone like Diogenes the cynic, but being able to recommend lives that include many things that are preferable, whether that is having an excellent reputation or having good health and so on.
00:25:20
Speaker
Diogenes is a funny guy just to talk about a bit more. Epictetus, Epictetus the Stoic talks about Diogenes, kind of like a role model for him, right? Epictetus says, as you said, it's got the hardcore Stoicism. Not everybody can be a hardcore Stoic. Not everybody can be Diogenes. Most of us aren't that...
00:25:36
Speaker
not that dedicated to virtue and we're caught we have to live these normal lives but he was cynicism comes from the ancient Greek word for just a canine just dog because they would live in the streets they would reject any sort of social norms or social conformity Diogenes in particular he would live in a barrel in the middle of Athens and defecate go to the bathroom in public mock other people like he was really pushing back against social conventions and then as you point out the stoic middle ground there is to say look
00:26:06
Speaker
Don't put social conventions on a pedestal. Don't, for example, bully someone else just to conform, right? Don't be like, well, I want to fit in, so I'm going to have to bully people to fit in. Because that's an example of you being a bad person to fit social conventions. But if all things are equal, don't mock social conventions. Don't reject the community. Don't reject the people you're around. Build that up. Participate in that. Add to that. And I always think that's, yeah, that's a funny direction to go.
00:26:33
Speaker
that's even further than Aristotle like that, or like the other side of that. I like that way of thinking about it. The other interesting one to contrast this with is the Epicureans, which we haven't talked about yet. And so the Epicureans conception of happiness is, so the Stoics have this view that we should live in accordance to our nature. So the question is, what is our nature? As you've already talked about, to be a rational being. And the Epicurean perspective is that our nature is to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. And the Epicureans point to, they point to children.
00:27:04
Speaker
And they say, look, first thing a baby does is seeks comfort, wants to avoid pain, wants food, wants to sleep. And as we age, as we become more complex, we're no different than that. That's all we're trying to do is we're trying to live pleasurable lives. And the.
00:27:24
Speaker
So the Epicureans think that virtue is important. It's important to be a good person, but it's only important to be a good person because that's the best way to get that subjective feeling of happiness. So before I said, look, Stoics just care about virtue. It's a pleasant side effect that virtue also makes you happy. The Epicureans just care about that subjective happiness.
00:27:45
Speaker
And they think virtue is the best way to get there. If you're a kind person, you don't have enemies, so you're not nervous. You have great friends because people want to spend time with you. You don't have robust desires or needs for pleasure or for these kind of crazy wants. If you're very simple in your desires, this ideal is the Epicurean garden where you'd have a few good friends, some potatoes, some carrots. I'm not sure the ancient Greek farming
00:28:12
Speaker
farming traditions, but you have some easy enough food to eat, enough friends to talk to, and that was the good life for them. So I think all these pictures are robust and interesting and ones to think about, but I think we can also focus on, it becomes, in my view, happiness becomes a question of identity, a question of what you identify with. Happiness as flourishing. And we can make simple metaphors to this. A good athlete is different.
00:28:42
Speaker
What it means to be a good athlete is different depending on the sport. It's also different than what it means to be a good artist. Like how you judge something depends on what something is. So for those listening, when, if you're encountering these conceptions of happiness for the first time and you're thinking,
00:28:57
Speaker
Maybe you're thinking, I was pursuing subjective happiness.
Personal Identity and Flourishing Life
00:29:01
Speaker
Now I'm going to think instead about what it means to be, to flourish, what it means to be excellent. I would take some time to think about what it means to be a person, what you think a person is. If you agree with the stoic conception, run with that. If you don't, that's okay too. And, but take some time to think deeply about your identity because what that means to flourish is I think going to be dependent on that.
00:29:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's also worth bringing out the similarities with the Hellenistic philosophies to which come to mind are they all put virtue on a pedestal. It's all exceptionally important even to the Epicureans who don't hold virtue as in a sense intrinsically good. It's only instrumentally good. Nonetheless, like the Stoics in behavior, they're very similar.
00:29:48
Speaker
That's a one very large similarity and not one that one sees in all modern philosophies, this focus on virtue. Many modern philosophies might instead focus on specific actions or situations. You might take, for example, utilitarian approach to the world and think about what decision in this situation does the most goodness or promotes the most happiness.
00:30:17
Speaker
Whereas a more ancient would be to ask, what does the excellent person do in this situation? And instead of thinking about this situation in isolation, you think about what do all the possibilities mean for who I would become if I were to take that route?
00:30:35
Speaker
and so on. So that's one very important similarity across these philosophies. Another important similarity is that happiness is something that one evaluates over one's whole life, not this simple slice of a state. There's a story of an Athenian philosopher, a poet, a statesman type named Solon, who goes to a
00:31:05
Speaker
rich dictator, essentially, Croesus, and Croesus is exceptionally wealthy, and he's showing off all his stuff, all his goods, and he asks Solon who is the happiest person alive, expecting to be named, because he's exceptionally wealthy and is able to rule over many people, has obvious signs of success. And Solon names basically a nobody, an Athenian who
00:31:34
Speaker
lived well, had a good family, and then died in a respectable way in battle. And that was his whole life, essentially, something that was encapsulated in making good decisions and living well as an ancient Greek person.
00:31:50
Speaker
does. And of course, Croesus thinks this is nonsense, but at some point, Croesus is, his army is lost, his kingdom is lost, or rather, city-state is lost, wherever it is, and realizes, oh, there's something to Solon's words. There's something to it both in the sense that what matters is
00:32:13
Speaker
how one acts, everyone's whole life. There's this normative view about what it is to live well is a matter of a whole life, not just a single isolated bit. But there's also this more practical aspect to the question that one doesn't know what will happen. And there is a sense
00:32:36
Speaker
in which calling happiness too early may lead to all sorts of mistakes or complacency. And one should always be wary that whatever can happen may at some point will happen. And one should always be mindful of fortune.
Long-term vs. Immediate Concerns
00:32:59
Speaker
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00:33:20
Speaker
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00:33:51
Speaker
So I have a question for you, Caleb. I feel like I've adopted this kind of long-term perspective that comes from stoicism or atropic philosophy, those things you say they have in common. And I view my life as this long-term project.
00:34:05
Speaker
And sometimes I worry, I guess my question for you is, do you do the same? And if so, I sometimes worry that I prioritize, view my entire life as a project. This is a result of adopting this holistic view to happiness. And I worry that in doing that, I don't properly prioritize the present moment.
00:34:27
Speaker
Is that something you struggled with and is that something that you figured out a better balance for than I? There's this question between near, what's called near mode and far mode. It comes from a psychological theory called construal theory.
00:34:45
Speaker
The main idea is that we have two ways of looking at things. One is this near mode, it's immediate, short term, whatever is in front of you. And the other is far mode. You situate whatever this is in the much larger context and think about it in the context of a much larger space of time or location. And I think a good life is, to some extent, a matter of
00:35:15
Speaker
taking both perspectives when they're needed, being able to see both what is in front of you and what is coming.
00:35:24
Speaker
Pierre Hadeau talks about the sage as someone who is able to see the whole, but that doesn't mean disassociating from the present moment that they are in. And of course there's the sin of being too far in the near mode where it might be too selfish or too ignorant of the longer term effects of one's decisions, but there's also the sin of being
00:35:47
Speaker
too far back and far mode where one becomes too abstract and forgets everyday realities, too disassociated with what's going on.
00:35:56
Speaker
And in terms of how do the actual practical, the practical matter of being able to combine these two perspectives, how do you do it? The advice that Aristotle gives about if you have some vice, the way to approach that is to try shoot for its opposite. So if you think you are focused too much on
00:36:20
Speaker
the mirror mode, then try to shoot for being the kind of person who would be too wrapped up in far mode, as it were, because you're not going to make it there, but perhaps it'll get closer to being in the mean of where you should be between the two versions. And I've always found that advice to be useful. Yeah. What I'm taking from that is that I should party more.
00:36:44
Speaker
that I should should overcompensate and go in the other direction. But I like the Goldilocks solution is often simple like that. Just cultivate the other side of it. As you said, not going to come naturally to me. So it's not going to be it's not like I'm going to go too far the other way. And I'll probably end up somewhere in the middle. Yeah, like that.
00:37:00
Speaker
I also think it's useful to be precise about what is the problem that one is experiencing when thinking about one's life in the whole. And I think in my life, the problems are
00:37:16
Speaker
becoming focused, to focus on longer term projects and ignoring the immediate needs of people around me. So there's an ethical issue, an issue with relationships. And then there's also the problem that when you think about your longer term projects, you don't get as high quality feedback, as fast feedback and you can
00:37:39
Speaker
Be creating a fictional project because there's something you might be getting wrong that you would be able to notice if you are Focused on your day to day more day to day concerns There's a line that something like the days are years and the years are days where what? You know every it's maybe is a somewhat Mysterian way of getting at where you want to where you want to be in the traps you want to avoid Yeah, great. So the last
00:38:07
Speaker
issue since we're thinking about life as a whole is what do the Stoics think about death?
Stoicism and Death
00:38:15
Speaker
What is the Sturg view about death? Yeah. So that was a really great transition. That was, cause I think that's the way, I think that's the way to approach it. The stoic view on death is to understand death as, so to take, to back up one step.
00:38:35
Speaker
The pursuit here is knowledge, right? That's the Stoic goal. Things are going to be solved by knowledge. So if you're relating to death incorrectly, if you're having an incorrect fear of death, so you're approaching death incorrectly, there's some sort of mistake in the knowledge, some sort of mistake in the way you're thinking about things. And the most common one that the Stoics identify, both in the fear of your own death and in grief over the depths of others, is a lack of acknowledgement
00:39:05
Speaker
about its inevitability and a lack of acknowledgement about what kind of things we are, being that we are things that die. We are things that exist temporarily. So there's this famous stoic saying of memento mori, which is to remember death. And the function of that is, as you talked about that kind of Goldilocks solution last time is in our default state, we end up not thinking about death. We end up not wrestling with it.
00:39:34
Speaker
And in some ways that's good. We don't want to be death obsessed. But if we're death ignorant, if we're death ignoring, then we want to practice momentum more. We want to remember death. I'm not obsessed about it. But we want to remember that it exists. Remember that it will happen to us. It will happen to the people that we care about. It will happen to everybody that ever exists. And so the Stoic view is that
00:39:59
Speaker
it is often forgotten about, it's often not engaged with. And when you do engage with it appropriately, you do think about it appropriately, their view is that this softens a lot of the harm that comes from it. Epictetus has a very famous line, which is quite a controversial line, where he says, there's no harm in kissing your child to sleep at night and saying to yourself, you too will die. You too are a mortal thing.
00:40:27
Speaker
And people don't like that because you're mixing in death with the love of your children. But the point there is to remember the nature of your child, to love your child as they are, which is a mortal thing. And it, the point I don't, people that read that negatively will say that Epictetus there is reminding you not to love your child fully. So as to not be hurt if something happens to them.
00:40:55
Speaker
I think that's quite an uncharitable reading. I think what Epictetus is saying, as I said, is to love your child fully by loving your child for what they are. And Epictetus has another story that I think complements this one where
00:41:10
Speaker
He meets a father who's run away from home. And Epictetus says, why have you run away from home? He says, my daughter's sick. I can't handle it. I'm having a mental breakdown. I'm freaking out. And Epictetus says, what did you think your daughter was? Did you not recognize your daughter was a person? Did you not recognize your daughter was a living thing that can get sick? And by not recognizing that, by not thinking about that,
00:41:34
Speaker
you've actually become a worse father. You're actually unable to fulfill your role of fatherhood because you're unable psychologically to confront the fact that your daughter is sick and you're unable to care for her and be present for her in these moments because of your inability to process death. So I think that's the more charitable view and that's what he's articulated and arguing for with this practice of memento mori.
00:42:00
Speaker
So that's the first part of it. The other part of it, another interesting thing about death, again coming back to Epictetus, is it's actually a dis-preferred indifferent. So we talked about indifference briefly before.
00:42:14
Speaker
which is that virtue is this ultimate good, virtue is a really good thing. And then there's everything else. There's some good and bad things, but none of them are really as good or bad as virtue advice. Those are what are called indifference. They're not technically indifferent or not all of them because some of them are preferred. You should choose them if you have a chance. Some of them are dis-preferred. You should ignore them if you have a chance or not engage with them if you have a chance. But one of them is big things is that death is not a bad. It's a dis-preferred indifferent.
00:42:42
Speaker
And what that means, Epictetus has another famous story where he says, the door is always open.
00:42:46
Speaker
And what that means is that if I've never been put in any of this situation, I've never been in a situation like that. We're talking about, I'm talking about a hypothetical here, but if you're forced with a truly awful situation or you're forced with a situation where you cannot continue to live and uphold your character, or you cannot continue to live without doing something terrible, you can always choose death because death, while a dis-preferred indifferent, probably the top of the dis-preferred indifference is ultimately lesser than vice.
00:43:15
Speaker
And F.A.T. is reminds of these role models. He points out these role models. We talked about this in our last episode, but the senators who are willing to be executed rather than concede to the dictators, people like this, martyrs for a cause, people who are able to choose death, Socrates, who was willing to be executed rather than go back on
00:43:37
Speaker
his commitments to cultivating virtue in Athenians, these people Epictetus really admires because these are people who understand what death is, which is a disperferred indifferent instead of a bad. And so I would think those are the two main things. One is memento mori, this process of understanding it, embracing it, recognizing it as a part of your life. And then two, what part of your life is
Appreciating Life's Impermanence
00:43:57
Speaker
it? It's a disperferred indifferent, which means, of course, don't do something reckless.
00:44:02
Speaker
risk your life going on a motorcycle ride for a fun afternoon, but don't be cowardly in the face of death and willing to betray people or be incredibly vicious just to survive either, because then you've made a misunderstanding kind of thing.
00:44:19
Speaker
The Stoics in a way frame their entire philosophy as learning how to die, and it's something that Seneca points out is that one goal of the philosopher is to overcome the fear of death, a fear which has conquered many conquerors.
00:44:44
Speaker
And I think the way you bucket it up into thinking about death as important because it is an aspect of our nature and thinking about it as a preferred indifference are the two important distinctions here. One reason it's important to remember that it is an aspect of our nature and this is
00:45:07
Speaker
In a way, almost another stoic paradox is that we cling less tightly onto things we might value. However, that's our own life or the life of others. We, by seeing things as mortal, do not wish that they were immortal and maybe less surprised when someone's life comes to an end. So in that sense, we cling less tightly
00:45:35
Speaker
but others' lives become all the more important because there is a sense of urgency. We are mortal. There is little time to waste. So those are, that's, I think we're very important upshot of understanding that we are mortal beings. So understanding what you were saying,
00:45:57
Speaker
I framed it as this reduction of the bad, right? If you're, if you understand death, if your daughter gets sick, you'll be less upset. If someone passes away, you'll be less upset. You'll have less anxiety. I framed it as this reduction of bad. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I was picking it up from what you were saying is.
00:46:14
Speaker
It's actually that can also be the amplification of good, this appreciating the moments you have with people close to you, this being present, this loving deeper, being more connected in the moment, both for yourself because I will die and for others because they will. And this is a, as you said, a temporary moment we have with them. I think that's a really beautiful part. Something that I maybe don't emphasize enough in my stoic practice is memento mori as a way to amplify the good.
00:46:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's both a reminder to amplify the good, appreciate what one has while it is there and also inspiration, motivation for being better. There's the Marcus Aurelius line, do not act like you will live for 10,000 years. Death hangs over you while it is within your power. Be good. That's the other aspect to it is that
00:47:12
Speaker
be good while you can be, while you have the chance to be good. You don't know how long you'll get. So there's at once a sense of urgency and also a sense of appreciation. It's a very optimistic way that we're talking. We're ending on a positive note with our death talk, but I really do think it, I do think it is. It does make me feel, does make me feel nice if that's weird. It is, it is a nice sense. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a good way for us to end whenever I'm talking about death.
00:47:41
Speaker
I remember walking with a friend once and mentioning that his grandfather had passed away and I asked him how he was doing, how he felt about it. And he's someone who's well versed in stoicism and he just said he lived a good life. There's no sense in which his death was really that bad for him. And I'm glad that he died well and that he lived a good life.
00:48:10
Speaker
And I'm also glad that you're someone who I could just say that to instead of coming up with some other maybe more socially appropriate story, which I think is something that's always stuck with me is it is possible to have that opinion about both your own life and others.
00:48:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's possible to say that and mean it, not just say that. Because I think some people, again, unshareably look at stoicism as a coping mechanism. Look at stoicism as a kind of a mechanism of numbing pain or removing yourself from life. Nietzsche thought this, but you just need to go on Twitter to see that. No, it's not just Nietzsche. It's lots of people.
00:48:49
Speaker
But that's not the case. You can, as you said, you can say something like that. You can look at your grandfather's death and say, he lived a good life and he died well and, and mean that and take kind of sense of solace and meaning in that. And I think that's a profound good that stoicism offers us.
Conclusion and Reflections
00:49:05
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:49:08
Speaker
And I think it's always a reminder, going back of course to something I said earlier, but always a reminder to take advantage of people while they're around. I interviewed my grandparents and I think it was probably one of the better things I did. And often I'll mention that to other people and they will say, that's a good idea. I should do that.
00:49:26
Speaker
What you should do is pull out your phone or pull out your journal and mark a time. You will do it. Don't just keep on saying that. Otherwise, I think for a significant subset of people, it'll just never happen, unfortunately.
00:49:39
Speaker
Yeah, you caught me because as soon as you said that I went, Oh, that was, that's a really good idea. That's the first thing I thought. Yeah. So there you go. For those listening a homework task to maybe interview someone close to you or important to you or talk to somebody about their life and learn more. I think that's a, I think that's a great idea. But as you said, I have to put the, put my money where my mouth is on that and I just speak to it. Yeah, it's good. We're good. We're giving out homework now.
00:50:05
Speaker
Yeah, great. As always, great talking to you. Hope everyone listening enjoyed. Chat soon. Bye, Mike. Yeah, bye, Kyo. Thanks. Thanks for listening to Stoic Conversations. 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.
00:50:31
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.