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Chris Gill on The Core Tenets of Stoicism (Episode 52)
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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 conversation, Caleb speaks with Chris Gill. It is one of the best explanations from a scholar who regularly interacts with practitioners.
This episode was released previously on the Stoa App. We’re currently running an annual special for our membership in the month of June: https://stoameditation.com/
We discuss the Stoic virtue, the idea of indifference, the Stoic view of emotions, and how to be happy.
(01:32) Defining Stoicism
(06:34) Indifferents
(09:06) Social and Ethical Development
(11:48) Emotional Development
(21:20) Practice vs Theory
(25:23) Epictetus's Advice
(28:25) 3 Disciplines
(37:02) Grounding Virtues
(42:02) Stoic Exercises
(44:34) Open Questions
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Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Stoicism
00:00:00
Speaker
Stoicism gives you a framework for dealing with some of these things because it gives you a whole range of very profound principles and ways of putting these into practice. So they hang together, they make sense. So I think these two aspects then, the mindfulness and developing resilience, are very valuable.
Interview with Professor Chris Gill
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe 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.
00:00:41
Speaker
In this conversation, I speak with Professor Chris Gill. It's a conversation we previously exclusively released on the Stoa app.
Core Tenets of Stoicism
00:00:51
Speaker
Do check out Stoa. We are currently running a special for our annual membership this month.
00:00:57
Speaker
Just search stoa in the play store or app store. In our conversation, Chris Gill explains the core tenets of stoicism. It's really one of the best explanations of the philosophy from a scholar who, through his work with modern stoicism, regularly interacts with practitioners. We talk through stoic virtue, the idea of indifference, the stoic view of emotions, and how to be happy.
00:01:26
Speaker
Here is my conversation with Dr. Chris Gill. Thanks so much for joining. It's a pleasure. So what are the core tenets of the modern Stoic view? Well, I think I'll just give you the core tenets of ancient Stoicism, which I think are also the core tenets of modern Stoicism, or should be.
00:01:53
Speaker
So, first of all, there's the idea that our happiness is up to us. It doesn't depend on acquiring lots of money or other external things. It's something that we have in our own power. It's something that's up to us, and we become happy by developing the virtues. Virtues like wisdom, courage, justice, self-control.
00:02:18
Speaker
Another point, this will take a while just to run through these, so you can interrupt at any time. So that's one, the basic one, I think. The second one is the distinction between virtue and what the Stoics call indifference. By indifference, the Stoics mean things like health,
00:02:40
Speaker
material wealth, but also the welfare of our families. Now, these are not indifferent in the sense that they just don't matter. They do matter. And everyone naturally wants to have these rather than their opposites. But the Stoics call them indifference because they don't make the difference between happiness and misery. What makes the difference between happiness and misery is
Stoic View on Emotions
00:03:08
Speaker
whether or not you
00:03:09
Speaker
you use the indifference virtuously or not, whether you acquire or lose things is done with virtue or not. So virtue is the decisive factor always in what the stakes mean by happiness. A third court in it, as I see it, is
00:03:33
Speaker
their ideas about development or what they, some of their ideas about ethical development. The Stoics believe that it's natural for all of us to have certain core instincts or motives. One is to look after ourselves, and the other is to care for other people. And both those things they think are equally natural, they're equally part of what it is to be human. And in both cases, development is a matter of beginning with those
00:04:03
Speaker
primary instincts, primary motives, and then developing them to the point of acquiring and exercising virtue. So there's two strands in development. One is coming to know better how to choose between indifference, how to select indifference, and how to act virtuously.
00:04:26
Speaker
The second strand in development is going from a kind of primary care for other people, which we all naturally have for, say, our children or those close to us, and developing this so that we have
00:04:43
Speaker
a fully mature attitude to social relations. Generally, we can relate to our community. We can play a role in larger contexts.
Theory vs. Practice in Stoicism
00:04:54
Speaker
And one very important aspect of this is coming to realize that all human beings as such are part of a brotherhood or kinship or citizenship.
00:05:06
Speaker
So there are these two strands to ethical development, and these are important in themselves, but another, going along with that, is the belief which the Stokes have that everyone is capable of ethical development. It's not just a few people, it's not just the select philosophers, it's human beings as such.
00:05:30
Speaker
that are capable of this, and they remain capable of it throughout their lives. So they have a very strong belief about the possibility of developing in this way. And finally, the final core tenet is also relating to development, and that is the belief that we can all develop emotionally
00:05:55
Speaker
in ways that I can go into a bit more later on, we can all develop emotionally, and this emotional development is closely bound up with the ethical development, which I was just described, just outlined. So there you've got five
00:06:13
Speaker
elements about virtue and happiness, virtue and indifference, about ethical development, social development and emotions. And if you look at the ancient accounts of stoic ethics, those are always part or nearly always part of what they pick out as key elements in stoic thinking.
00:06:34
Speaker
Yeah,
Epictetus's Teachings on Control
00:06:35
Speaker
that's useful. So we have this first tenant that happiness is up to us because it's under our power to exercise virtue. And then we have this second tenant, which has to do with the indifference. And I think maybe it's worth diving into that a little bit more since it can be a little bit subtle. I think the point you made just now is that we have these things that are indifferent.
00:07:04
Speaker
things that are not directly relating to the virtues. And one way people describe this is that indifference might be valuable, but they're not ultimately valuable because a virtue is what is ultimately valuable according to a stoic. So if you ever have to make a trade-off, it's better to choose virtue. A subtle point you made is that
00:07:27
Speaker
there's this idea of how you use the indifference that's crucial. And it's not merely just a point about virtue being more important than the indifference. Yes, no, that's quite important, really, because often people talk as if it's a kind of trade-off, you know, either I go for the indifference or I go for virtue. But actually, that's a rather misleading way of putting it because
00:07:52
Speaker
to act virtuously is to make the right choices between indifference,
Ethical and Social Development in Stoicism
00:07:57
Speaker
to select, as the Stoics say, between indifference. So we all have to deal with things like health,
00:08:04
Speaker
the welfare of our family, material possessions. Those are just the stuff of human life. And these are genuinely positively valuable. The hysterics don't have to say, oh, well, health doesn't matter, and these other things matter. They matter, but they aren't
00:08:23
Speaker
the things that fundamentally make us happy or make or create a good human life. What makes the good human life is using them in the right way. So that's the, that's, I think that is what you call the subtle point is very, very important, I think, and somehow often missed. Otherwise it's a bit like a sort of, well, it's an either-or, but it isn't like that really. I mean, it isn't as if you get to, you know, a fork in the road,
00:08:52
Speaker
And you either have a life of virtue or you have a life of indifference. That doesn't sort of make any sense. Life has potentially both in, but they're symbiotic really.
00:09:06
Speaker
So I wonder if we could also spend some more time on the idea of ethical and social development.
Cognitive Models of Emotion
00:09:13
Speaker
Yes. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about what makes them distinct. So the way I'm currently understanding what makes them distinct is that the ethical development is more self-focused and you're thinking about
00:09:27
Speaker
say, cultivating individual bits of character. You know, you have the forest, cardinal virtues, whereas the social development is a matter of seeing your role with respect to your family, your city, your nation, and so forth.
00:09:45
Speaker
I think that's roughly right. I mean, in both areas, there's development, and they're completely interrelated in life. You can't just have one without the other, because there's no context. There's no point in life at which you're just completely, we can't suddenly disappear to a desert island and just, oh, well, I'm just going to cultivate the virtues. I mean, that doesn't ... Anyway, you can't cultivate the virtues without
00:10:11
Speaker
without relating to other people. But just conceptually, as ideas, you can distinguish between these two aspects of development. One is learning about values, learning about indifference, learning how to select indifference, and learning how to act virtuously on the one hand.
00:10:33
Speaker
and on the other relating to other people. And that's how the ancient Stoics divide them. One is developing this primary notion of care for yourself, and the other is developing this primary idea of care for others. And I think just to make another subtle or important point that the Stoics make, that not everyone makes, is they think that both of these motives
00:10:59
Speaker
both the motive to care for yourself and the motive to care for others. These are basic. They actually think that all animals have these too. I mean, they're not quite right about that, but they, so in a way, those are kind of very prime, at a very primary level.
00:11:15
Speaker
So, whereas in the modern world we often contrast, you think, oh, what egoism is now? It's natural to be egoistic, to care for yourself, and then you learn, you are socialised so that you then care for other people. But the steaks don't see it that way. They think that we are naturally disposed to care for ourselves, and also naturally disposed to care for others. And, of course, there's a very strong
00:11:39
Speaker
as a biological reason for thinking that, because it is so widespread among animals, for instance, to care for their young other animals. That makes sense, and it was a useful way to distinguish different parts of development. The last aspect of development you mentioned was emotional development.
00:12:01
Speaker
Just as we're all capable of developing our understanding and developing our social relations, so we're all capable, the stakes believe, of developing emotionally. And these are all interconnected. So emotional development isn't something, again, that happens on its own. Emotional development is bound up with and depends on
00:12:23
Speaker
and depends on getting a better understanding of values and getting a better understanding of relationships. I think we need to sort of get a full grip of that. We need to talk a little bit more about the emotions. We could dive into that now. Let's dive into it, dive into the emotions. Not a very static thing to do, but perhaps it is. Well, the absolutely key thing about emotions, I think, is that there's a contrast between
00:12:51
Speaker
what you might call bad emotions and good emotions. So the stakes aren't anti-emotional. They don't think we can kind of be completely non-emotional. But they do think that emotions, the quality of our emotions, depends on our ethical understanding. So you have different kinds of emotions, different emotions
Epictetus's Three Disciplines
00:13:12
Speaker
and different kinds of emotions.
00:13:14
Speaker
according to whether you are or not virtuous or whether you are or not developing towards virtue. So they think, for instance, that there are four primary kind of what they call bad emotions, sometimes called passions. So we've got these, there's pleasure, by which they mean something that's inappropriate pleasure, which you have in the present,
00:13:41
Speaker
And then there's appetite or desire, which you have for the future.
00:13:45
Speaker
And those are sort of us on the positive side. On the negative side, there is distress. You're distressed by what's happening at the moment, and you have fear for the future. Now, those are the four kind of primary emotions. They may not sound very bad. I'll explain in a minute why they're bad. And then, so those are the, from their point of view, bad emotions. The good emotions, on the other hand, are parallel with them. There are three, not four. I'll explain why there's only three in a minute.
00:14:15
Speaker
So corresponding to pleasure.
00:14:19
Speaker
in the bad emotion column is joy. So the virtuous person, the wise person experiences joy in the present, but not pleasure. The virtuous person experiences wishing when she looks towards the future, but not desire or appetite or yearning. The virtuous person doesn't feel fear for the future, but she feels caution
00:14:48
Speaker
There's no equivalent, they think, for distress because the wise person, the virtuous person, is never in the contact with something bad, because the only thing that's really bad, according to Stokes, is vice, the opposite of virtue. And the virtuous person is always in contact with virtue.
00:15:10
Speaker
Now, this is all sort of terribly schematic,
Relevance of Stoic Virtue Ethics Today
00:15:12
Speaker
but the point the Stokes are making with these kind of schemata are that so emotions depend for their value, they depend for their quality, their ethical quality on your understanding and on how you live and so forth.
00:15:27
Speaker
and the quality of your emotional life changes according to whether you, as you move towards virtue. Now what's wrong with the bad emotions? Why don't we have lots and lots of, you know, acting on what's wrong with, you know, pleasure and desire and fear and so on. Well, basically they are misguided, they rest on a kind of mistake
00:15:49
Speaker
Well, what's the mistake? The mistake is that thinking that indifference are really good, that your happiness depends on indifference. So people, say, who get angry, typically people who think that their happiness in life depends on, say, acquiring status or acquiring wealth or being, you know, things of that kind. I mean, of course, it's very easy to think of examples of that.
00:16:17
Speaker
There are lots of people who get incredibly angry because they think that somebody else is getting more money than them, or getting promotion when they want to, or that they're not getting treated with sufficient importance. In public life we can think of some notable examples of this, and we can also think of specific people and these attendances we find in ourselves too.
00:16:39
Speaker
So, that's one aspect about the bad emotions. The other thing about the bad emotions is that the Stokes think they have a certain kind of subjective register. They're overwhelming, or they can be. They're not always, but they can be overwhelming, intense, conflicted, whereas the good emotions, first of all, are based on correct judgments.
00:17:03
Speaker
they're based on a proper understanding of what's worthwhile in life, of how you need to live virtuously, and how your happiness depends on this. But also, what we often think of as emotional, the subjective register is different. So good emotions are typically calmer, they are less intense, they don't carry your way, and they're not full of inner
Stoic Practices for Modern Challenges
00:17:28
Speaker
conflict. So it's those two aspects of it that are there.
00:17:33
Speaker
And one of the similes, the ancient sexies for this is the difference between running legs. Emotions are like running legs. They carry you away. You can't stop. You're out of control, potentially. And the good emotions are like walking legs that you can say you're under your control in a way. I see. You have these bad emotions, and there are two things that make them bad. One is what comes into play is a stoic
00:18:03
Speaker
cognitive model emotions, where emotions are based on our judgments, our beliefs about the world. And the bad emotions are based off of false beliefs that are mistaken. And not only that, they can distort our decision making. You know, when we are in a particularly, say, angry mood, then we're more likely to be rash.
00:18:29
Speaker
Whereas we have these positive emotions on the other side, which are based on properly valuing and also less
Ongoing Questions in Stoicism
00:18:40
Speaker
likely to distort our decision making.
00:18:43
Speaker
Yes, and not just our decision making, but our whole life, our whole relationships, our actions, the way we feel, the way we act, yeah. Do you think this cognitive model of emotion is correct? I guess another way of asking this is like, maybe like, what do you think is the best argument for it? Well, I think it's, yes, I mean, you've implicitly drawn a comparison between the debate which people have in modern
00:19:13
Speaker
theory of emotions too, that some people have what you might call a cognitive theory of emotions, that emotions depend on beliefs, and other people have the view more that they are kind of visceral reactions, that they're in a different sort of psychological strand or aspect of ourselves, and perhaps go back to a different part of the brain or whatever from the cognitive.
00:19:39
Speaker
And there's many debates on this. I think the Stoic view is similar to that of quite a lot of contemporary psychologists, which stress the kind of interconnected way in which a human psychology works, that you can't draw a sharp distinction between the more irrational and the more irrational part of us, that the brain, even if there are two parts of the brain, nonetheless, they work very closely together.
00:20:06
Speaker
Damasio is a well-known, you know, theorist who thinks along those lines. And I think the Stoics, as it were, got their first in that way. They blazed a trail in terms of thinking about the emotions in a kind of cognitive way. So I think it's a perfectly credible way.
00:20:23
Speaker
It's not something we need to feel, oh, well, old Stoics, they got it wrong, you know, embarrassed about that. But I think, so I think there's a lot of interesting and interesting parallels, both in theory of emotion and also in what you might call psychotherapy between Stoics and modern cognitive approaches. Yeah, I do think that. Yeah, yeah, that does seem right to me. I guess I'm curious what maybe you thought that some of the best arguments were thinking that it was true work.
00:20:53
Speaker
Yes, it's a bold person who says, the truth about human psychology is this or that. But certainly, the Stoics did have a view, and I think it's not any longer. I think in the past, people thought, well, this is just not very credible. But actually, it now coincides with a lot of what at least some psychologists would also want to say. So I think that's good.
00:21:21
Speaker
something that's commonly said in the context of thinking about stoic theory is that stoicism is 10% theory and 90% practice. Do you generally agree with that claim? So are we talking about modern
00:21:43
Speaker
So now we're talking about putting Stoicism into practice, or are we talking about what the ancient Stoics did, or modern Stoics? Or what did you have in mind when you said this 90%, 10%? I suppose I have the modern Stoics in mind. Okay. Although, yeah, of course, in a way, the
00:22:05
Speaker
I think it's fair enough, but actually I think the same questions came up in the ancient world. Let me just talk a little bit about some ancient Stoics who get a lot of attention in modern Stoicism to Epictetus, for instance, who gets a lot of attention and was an ancient Stoic teacher. What he says is that theory does matter
00:22:34
Speaker
And for instance, he says that logic matters, and reasoning correctly matters a lot, and learning how to reason correctly is very important. But it only matters if you put it into practice.
00:22:50
Speaker
So putting it into practice isn't just becoming a better kind of, you know, like a human computer. Using logic better is a matter of building good reasoning into your ethical development, into making yourself a better person, into training, developing yourself into a better person. So they do
00:23:15
Speaker
So, here's an ancient-stack teacher who recognizes the importance of the ideas, if you like, the theory, but who also says, well, yes, theory matters, but theory on its own, theory without practice, without putting it into practice.
00:23:36
Speaker
isn't valuable, because it's not making you a better human being, it's just making you a kind of... I mean, he was a teacher, and he had a lot of show-offy students, and I think they got up his nose, actually, and he
00:23:53
Speaker
He stresses again and again through the discourses that just getting brilliant at doing logic, which they did a lot of apparently, it doesn't make you a better person. He stresses again and again the importance of practice as well as theory.
00:24:10
Speaker
On the other hand, I don't think, yes, 90%, 10%, I don't know really. So, I wouldn't want to put figures on it, but I think they think both are important. Marcus is another interest, Marcus Aurelius, the emperor whose reflective notebook has survived for us the meditations.
00:24:29
Speaker
He's another very interesting case. Of course, he wasn't a stake teacher. He wasn't, if you like, a professional stoic, but he was deeply concerned with stoicism as a basis for practice. He was very conscious of his own intellectual or philosophical shortcomings, and he knows that he hasn't reached the highest possible level in stake logic and in stake physics, understanding of the universe.
00:24:58
Speaker
But he is very concerned to learn, to understand, and to put into practice the core principles as he sees them of Stoicism. So you've got to keep the two together. But if any of them drop away, the ancient Stoics would say, you're no longer leading a stoic life. So I think the same questions come up in modern Stoicism or ancient. Along the same lines, I'm curious what Epictetus
00:25:28
Speaker
mentioned as some of the sort of most common pitfalls for his students. One would be one that we just touched on was maybe spending too much time on theory and not enough on practice.
00:25:40
Speaker
But I wonder if there are other useful things you had to say. I mean, of course, but there are. But, you know, what comes to mind? Well, I think that both, because EpicTitus, I think EpicTitus is very concerned to kind of identify core messages and key things that are going to get people going and help their development.
00:26:01
Speaker
And these are ideas that he stresses again and again through the discourses and that we also pick up in teachings for modern Stoicism. One is the distinction between what's up to us and what's not up to us, what's within our power and not within our power. In the handbook, which is a kind of summary of his discourses, he stresses this very much.
00:26:29
Speaker
and the other another one which he stresses very much is examining what he calls examining your impressions that is looking before you act studying the beliefs that are shaping what you're doing
00:26:44
Speaker
Now, I think these can sometimes be taken and sometimes are taken by modern states as just a kind of formula. This is where you have this, you've got all you need to know. Well, in a way, that's right. I mean, because that's what Epic Jesus is telling us, that if you do these things, at least you'll be moving in the right direction.
00:27:05
Speaker
But I think it's important to know that what I think Epic Teachers was doing here was he was using these practices as a way of encapsulating, of summarizing some of those key tenets that I talked about earlier on. Because the idea of focusing on what's up to you and not
00:27:26
Speaker
is based on. The idea that happiness depends on us, on developing the virtues, and not on acquiring lots, acquiring indifference. It also presupposes or rests on the ideas, stoic ideas about development. I think Epictetus was
00:27:47
Speaker
what he was trying to do here in these kind of recurrent messages which are a basis for practice, he's trying to boil down the theory into manageable elements of practice and distinguishing between what's up to us and not is one of these, because you see
00:28:09
Speaker
What he wants to say is, look, it's it's up to you to be you can be you can make you can move towards a life of happiness. But part of what that means is, is seeing that the indifference are indifferent and seeing that virtue is what you need to develop. I suppose spending just a little bit more time on F.A.T.S. Yes.
00:28:30
Speaker
One thing he advocates is the three disciplines. Yes. Where you have the discipline of desire, discipline of assent or judgment, and then the disciplines of action. Sure. The longest statement of these is in Discourses 3, 2, 3, Book 3, Chapter 2.
00:28:52
Speaker
And as you've just suggested, he thinks there are three of what Adéo calls disciplines, abitages himself to call them just three topics, the first of which is to distinguish between what is up to us and not, what is within our power and not,
00:29:10
Speaker
The second one is to shape our motives so that we are acting appropriately and shape our social development, the way we relate to other people, our roles.
00:29:27
Speaker
And I think that would be the action. And the third one is achieving consistency. Consistency in your beliefs and understanding. So that's the third one. I don't quite know how I'd describe them. But anyway, if you look at Epictetus, that's how he describes it. So it's up to us and not.
00:29:49
Speaker
its motives and roles and its consistency of understanding and these of course relate directly to the again to these core tenets the the because up to us and not is a matter of developing the virtue the way we we develop our motives and our objectives goes back to that and consistency
00:30:12
Speaker
Consistency is very important because consistency is, I mean the Stoics actually think that happiness is fundamentally consistency. And if we are consistent in our beliefs and understanding, and if we're consistent in the way we allow that understanding to shape our lives, then that will, as it were, that's a mark of happiness.
00:30:35
Speaker
So although these formulas don't, on the face of it, look kind of theory-based, they are theory-based. So everything kind of feeds back into the core tenets.
00:30:52
Speaker
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00:31:37
Speaker
I want to make sure I have the right understanding of the discipline of a sense or a judgment. It's this idea that you should be consistent in your beliefs. I suppose it seems like you could be consistent in having but end up with a number of different false beliefs. So I imagine it's not just logical consistency.
00:31:58
Speaker
No, it's not. It's not. The consistency that Epictetus and Stoics are interested in is, of course, the consistency of wisdom, of understanding. Now, what the Stoics tend to suppose is that the only way in which you can be fully consistent
00:32:17
Speaker
in life is by achieving wisdom and virtue. Now the reason I think that is because I think ethical development is natural to us. It's not something that's imposed on us, it's natural to us. So the only way we can become fully self-consistent
00:32:34
Speaker
the way which we can kind of hang together fully as people is by achieving what they see as the truth, achieving knowledge. And that if we, so let's say we've got a sort of, if you like, apparently self-consistent wicked person, someone who has the vices, who has the passions, they don't, the circuits don't think there are such people because they think they always have a kind of latent inconsistency about them.
00:33:03
Speaker
So that the Stokes believe that the only people who can really achieve consistency given what human nature is otherwise is a bit sort of complicated. But it does mean that consistency for them is a virtue because consistency is bound up with truth and wisdom and understanding. I see. Very nice.
00:33:27
Speaker
Well, it's quite complicated, of course, we're rather at the deep end of it. But I tell you, there's a wonderful example of this, and that's Medea. This leads us back to the passions. Medea famously killed her children in order to make her estranged husband miserable.
00:33:47
Speaker
So, Medea forced herself against her own maternal instinct to kill her own children because her husband left her for another woman. Now, she does that, okay, but there's some very famous lines in Euripides where his Medea says, I know that what I'm doing is bad.
00:34:12
Speaker
but anger or passion drives me to it. Now, what the Stokes wanted to say, wanted to show in using this example is that even Medea, now Medea you might think is a paradigm of evil.
00:34:26
Speaker
paradigm of, you know, she's a supreme example of evil. But even Medea, even Medea can recognize that what she's doing is wrong, is bad. And the Stoics think that that's a kind of makes her an exemplar for humanity in general, that all human beings have this capacity for good. And even Medea can recognize where she's going wrong.
00:34:50
Speaker
Now, I think they would have this rather interesting idea that even great tyrants, Hitler, Stalin, at some level are people who could or could have developed in a good way, and that they will always have a kind of inner inconsistency to them.
00:35:12
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. Hmm. It's very interesting. I think it's very, and it's very different from the view that some people have that, you know, that we're good and bad by nature, or that all of us are kind of naturally fallen and have original sin or whatever. It's quite a different, quite a different approach. Yeah, I suppose there's a range of modern views, but the most typical ones that come to mind would be the ones that you just mentioned where we are fallen or
00:35:42
Speaker
have some form of original sin, or there might be the view that there's a very large difference in our natural capacities, both in things like intelligence, but also in things like moral reasoning.
00:35:57
Speaker
So it could be the case that some people's ability to reason morally might just be hampered quite significantly. Yes. I think the stakes would agree with all that. I mean, they know that. I mean, they're perfectly well aware of that. And they know we're all very different as it were levels of development. What they would want to stress is that
00:36:18
Speaker
Assuming you're a normally functioned human being, they're not talking about people with congenital mental defects. They think that there's something fundamental about being a human being that means at some level you have this core capacity.
00:36:37
Speaker
And that's why development is such an important theme for them. It's absolutely central. Life is development. Life is trying to get better. Life is trying to learn ethically, learn to be a better person, learn to be virtuous. So it's a very, it's a very sort of can do positive, forward looking, hopeful philosophy. Yeah, yeah. So one question I have
00:37:06
Speaker
that I know it's quite a big question, and you don't have that much time. But I'm curious what grounds the value of the virtues? Or is it that
00:37:24
Speaker
it aligns with our human nature or something like this and it's our way of, you know. Oh, sure. Yes. No, we haven't talked about that at all. Among the, if you like, core tenets is also the idea, not so much the sort of ethical ideas, which I summarized earlier, but the idea that ethics is, in a way, grounded. It's somewhat complicated, but to live an ethical life is to live a life in accordance with nature.
00:37:55
Speaker
And then you say, okay, so what does that mean? Well, they mean two things, or three things actually. One is that it's to live life according to human nature, because they think that there is such a thing we can call as human nature. That's now become controversial, but anyway, the Stoics thought that. And human nature is characteristically rash, what they call rational and sociable, that rationality and sociability are fundamental to human nature.
00:38:23
Speaker
They also thought that human nature is part of a larger picture, so that there's human nature, there's animal nature, and that those things are kind of part of the framework of what we are, because they also think we're animals, we're part of the universe, we're part of the natural universe.
00:38:45
Speaker
and we need to be aware of that. And they also believe that it's helpful in trying to frame your life, sometimes to model yourself on the best qualities of nature as a whole.
00:38:59
Speaker
which for them are order, structure and wholeness on the one hand and providential care on the other. So they do have quite a number of views about what is natural
00:39:16
Speaker
And the virtues or having the virtues or developing the virtues is a way or the way of living a life according to nature, living a natural life.
00:39:31
Speaker
Now that's, so that is an aspect of their views, which also comes up. And it's quite controversial now, of course, because we may say, well, we just don't believe any of that now. And then you have to sort of have a bit of a debate about whether that's really true or not. But certainly they do see living a virtuous life as leaving the best possible human life.
00:39:57
Speaker
And I think there is good reason for thinking that that's not obviously false. It's become more complicated because our views about human nature and evolution and so on change. But nonetheless, I think there's still a strong ground for thinking that it makes sense. And there are modern ethical theorists who think about that way too, that when we're talking about ethics, we're talking about human ethics. And of course, there's now a very good reason.
00:40:27
Speaker
for thinking, for when we think about ethics, for locating it in the universe and thinking about the environment and realizing that we're part of the world and that we've because we've done terrible things to the world and now we need to correct that and or try to as far as we can. But the Stoics as it were again got there first because they're stressing, look, you're not just on your own, human beings aren't just on their own.
00:40:52
Speaker
as it were, they are part of nature. They're part of the environment. They're part of nature as a whole, and that's something you need to remember and to bear in mind. Do you have any pointers for contemporary defenders of these sort of virtue ethics type of views? I think that stoicism
00:41:12
Speaker
is a very good model for contemporary virtue ethicists. I think it's a very coherent theory. I think Aristotle is wonderful too, but I think Stoicism is much more
00:41:27
Speaker
coherent, it's much more fully thought out, it's a very interesting combination of virtue ethics and theory of happiness, and also what you might call ethical naturalism, a theory of nature. It's fully worked out as a theory, but it's also very good and strong in terms of putting it into practice. So I think it's a very powerful form of contemporary virtue ethics, both for
00:41:57
Speaker
for theorists and also for practitioners, people who want to live a good life. Yeah, I suppose on the side of practice, what do you think are some of the most powerful practices or exercises?
00:42:12
Speaker
So what you might call stoic mindfulness is one practice, which is living reflectively. It's not just about breathing and it's not just about living in the present, it's also living reflectively. That is trying to bring to bear your thoughts, your reflections on the way you live and applying that. So living reflectively, I think, is very important. Another important part of it
00:42:43
Speaker
and then that there is resilience and resilience is a matter really of emotional resilience dealing with circumstances every life has things that go wrong we think they go wrong because that is human life there's change there's people die people we love die we're going to die but stoicism gives you a framework for
00:43:09
Speaker
dealing with some of these things because it gives you a whole range of very profound principles and ways of putting these into practice.
00:43:19
Speaker
so that they hang together, they make sense, but also they can be put into practice by, in some of the things we've talked about, Epictetus's idea of what's up to us and not, the three disciplines. So I think these two aspects then, the mindfulness and developing resilience, are very valuable.
00:43:43
Speaker
idea of trying to think about yourself as if you're from the point of view of the universe, from outside, putting your life into a kind of... seeing it from a different position is very valuable. And another one is the idea of trying to develop your understanding of yourself as part of the Brotherhood of humankind by
00:44:08
Speaker
contracting the circles of relationship in which we live, trying to draw people closer into the circles, thinking about foreigners and refugees as if they're citizens, thinking about citizens as if they're family members, thinking about family members as if they're ourselves. So it's a kind of drawing in the circles. These, I think, are very useful practices, I think.
00:44:34
Speaker
What do you think are some of the most important open questions in Stoic philosophy or practice? Open question. Yeah, if you thought, you know, if you were to advise that more people research particular questions in Stoicism or research particular practices, what are you curious about? Well, I think
00:44:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think at the theoretical level, I guess the question you raised earlier on about grounding and what we mean by grounding, ethical grounding, the relationship between ethics and nature is always going to be big. I mean, it's a problem for any theory that what is it? You can say all these things, but what validates them? I just say it's all a lot of nonsense. What do you do then? I think that's
00:45:24
Speaker
And the whole question of the relationship between ideas of nature, ideas of ethics, I think that's worth thinking more about. It's not a simple one. I think that one possible criticism of Stoicism is it doesn't talk a lot about politics. I mean, it's not apolitical, but it doesn't have a kind of political theory built into it. So I think that's another
00:45:51
Speaker
And yet we all know that the kind of polity we live in is very important and makes a big difference. I think at the level of practice, the challenge is making sure that all aspects of our life are kind of covered. So we're not just focusing on
00:46:12
Speaker
I mean, I think it's easy to perhaps just focus on, oh, well, I'll just focus on emotional control. I won't, you know, at least I'll get that. And then you leave out big areas like social relations, say, you know, think that I'll develop good emotions, but then you've forgotten that a big part of that is having good relations with other people and developing your instinct of care for others. So I think we've got to
00:46:37
Speaker
we've got to sort of keep trying to keep keep keep things together really because lived experience isn't doesn't come in neat neat small bundles and that's a bit of a challenge for stoicism i think and so i think i often when i talk to people engaged in modern practice stoicism that they are very much concerned
00:46:57
Speaker
with the emotional side, but I tend to say, well, hang on, but there's also, we've got to live, remember that we're leading a social life. There are other people and they're part of our life too, and we're part of their lives. So I think that's perhaps a bit of a challenge.
00:47:12
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoa 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. 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.