Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Spencer Klavan on Stoicism and the Crises of Our Time (Episode 58)
752 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this conversation, Caleb speaks with Spencer Klavan. Spencer is a classicist, author of How to Save the West, and host of the Young Heretics podcast.
Spencer argues that we face five crises and how we respond to them determines who we are as individuals and society. These crises pertain to reality, body, meaning, religion, and regime.
We discuss these challenges, Classical accounts of virtue, and whether Stoicism has what it takes to answer the predicament we're in.
(00:32) Spencer's Story
(06:59) Career and The Hero's Journey
(11:12) Recovering The Good
(16:55) The Unitary Nature of Virtue
(30:30) How to Save The West
(35:00) When was the West at its Best?
(39:11) Crises
(44:11) Is Stoicism Enough?
***
Subscribe to The Stoa Letter for weekly meditations, actions, and links to the best Stoic resources: www.stoaletter.com/subscribe
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
If you try the Stoa app and find it useful, but truly cannot afford it, email us and we'll set you up with a free account.
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 and Overview of Stoicism
00:00:00
Speaker
Aristotle likes to talk about things that are separable conceptually, but not in fact, they're, you know, choristicos, but not really. And part of the claim is that the body and the soul are this way that at least on Earth, you know, is possible to interpret a human body as a purely
00:00:20
Speaker
physical machine, but it's also possible to interpret the human body as vehicle for spirit. And excluding either one from view, it's always crucial to remember that anytime you do that, anytime you perform that charisma of separating off one or the other aspect,
00:00:38
Speaker
You've lost something. You're missing
Introducing Spencer Clavin and His Perspectives
00:00:41
Speaker
the whole picture. 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.
00:00:59
Speaker
In this episode, I speak with Spencer Clavin. Spencer is a class assist, author of How to Save the West in hopes of the Young Heretics podcast.
00:01:11
Speaker
Spencer argues correctly in my view that we face five crises and how we respond to them determines, to a large part, who we are as individuals and a society. These crises pertain to reality, body, meaning, religion, and regime. In our conversation, we discuss these challenges, the classical accounts of virtue, and whether stoicism has what it takes to solve our predicament.
00:01:41
Speaker
I really enjoyed this one. Spencer has a different cut than I do on many of these issues, but he's exceptionally knowledgeable and talented at taking ancient works and applying them to our modern problems and doing that in a seriously rigorous way.
00:01:56
Speaker
And before we get started, I should say, if you'd like to learn more about Stoicism, get a sense of what it's like to apply the philosophy to your life, check out our Stoa app. Just search Stoa
Spencer Clavin's Career and Academic Journey
00:02:09
Speaker
in the App Store or Play Store, or check out the Stoa Letter. That's StoaLetter.com, a free newsletter that goes out twice a week.
00:02:20
Speaker
Here is our conversation. Today I have the privilege of speaking with Spencer Clayvan. Spencer is a classicist and author of How to Save the West. He also has a fine foreword to a book called Gateway to the Stoics, which is a nice collection of writings from the ancient Stoics. Thanks for joining. It's a pleasure to be here, Caleb. Thanks for having me.
00:02:51
Speaker
Of course, so let's start with a broad question. What's your story? You know, the first part of my story is that I grew up in a house full of books. And I think I had to learn that that was weird. It never occurred to me that most kids weren't so lucky as to be surrounded just by these beautiful bookshelves, you know?
00:03:17
Speaker
And I say that because some of my earliest memories are from ranging around my parents' house. I grew up in London, so I guess our apartment at the time, and just kind of pulling things off the shelves.
00:03:32
Speaker
And I think that what that taught me very early on is that to be surrounded by books is to be surrounded by friends. I think as I went out into the world, I learned, realized that a lot of people don't think of old texts as friends. They think of them as challenges, as kind of forbidding objects, as symbols of all kinds of evil hierarchies and
00:04:00
Speaker
exclusive power structures. But in fact, I knew from just my heart that none of that was true. You know, I knew that between the covers of an old book is another mind and it's most of this stuff that we're here to talk about.
00:04:17
Speaker
today, the Stoics as a primary example, actually, these are not there to furnish material for PhD theses. These are not like fodder for eggheads like me to write complicated essays about. They're actually good faith efforts from the heart to wrestle with what it means to be human and how to be good at being human.
00:04:42
Speaker
And that's been the greatest source of comfort and companionship really in my life ever since. You know, my career is an academic career, but it's also quite intensely personal in that way and always has been. So now that I've ended up
00:05:00
Speaker
doing things like this, podcasts, writing books, kind of existing out in the crazy social media world that does kind of remain my North Star is that I think people are really hungry at the moment for something, some sort of richer food than the news cycle can give them. And that is what I think we can get out of the great books and what I try to offer.
00:05:28
Speaker
So you were on the academic path for a while. Was there a point where you knew you might enter the public square, enter the social media realm as a tour? Or was it always a plan to study the great books while you can and then escape while you can as well?
00:05:46
Speaker
Yeah, it's like get out before it's too late. No, it's funny because actually grad school in some senses was a bit of a detour for me. I didn't set out to get a PhD. I thought that I wanted to be an actor. And in college, I double majored in theater and in classics.
00:06:08
Speaker
And that was the theater that really spoke to me as, wow, wouldn't it be cool to go to New York and be on Broadway or try to be on Broadway, you know?
00:06:19
Speaker
And I spent a lot of time, a lot of energy doing that. There's still a lot from that training that kind of sticks with me. But something that I realized actually right before my senior year was that even though I loved being on stage, loved acting, singing, whatever, I didn't actually love the process, the boring parts, the grind, the like hanging lights, memorizing lines.
00:06:47
Speaker
I was happy to do that because it meant that on the other end, I would be on stage, but in itself, it wasn't a great delight to me. And Aristotle and other ancient philosophers talk about intrinsic joys versus extrinsic joys or intrinsic rewards versus extrinsic rewards that if you're doing something for the purpose of something else, that's not quite as high as elevated as excellent as something that is its own reward, that is itself the good of itself.
00:07:15
Speaker
And that's what I kind of realized about scholarship when I was in that, you know, sort of pivotal year, was that I even liked just sitting, you know, what the Germans call zitzfleisch, which is basically parking your butt in a seat and reading. Even if it like, it never goes anywhere, even if you kind of can't get published or whatever, that in itself was a delight to me. And so that's when I kind of decided that I should keep that up, at least for a little longer.
00:07:42
Speaker
But it was never with the certainty that what I wanted was to go be a professor or to do whatever. It was kind of more like, let's follow that bliss as far as it goes. And I fell deeply, deeply in love with Oxford, where I went to do my PhD and with the subject that I was working on, which was ancient Greek music. But at a certain point, yeah, I did start to feel again as if the particular, like,
00:08:07
Speaker
thing that I am, the key that I am or the piece of the puzzle that I am fit best into kind of a more public facing world. And so nothing good is ever lost, right? Nothing that is given to God is ever lost. And so ultimately, I think a lot of that
00:08:25
Speaker
theater training, a lot of that, just relational stuff from my earlier work did come back and it informs in a big way the stuff that I still do. But yeah, I think it was more about, at every point, it was about following bliss. That's the great Joseph Conrad line, or Joseph Campbell, excuse me, is just about the next step in front of you is the one that feels like your deep joy is meeting the world's deep
00:08:53
Speaker
hunger, and that distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goods is kind of what led me along the way. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I suppose mentioning Joseph Campbell just bring to mind the fact that the hero doesn't have a clear career plan. Often they're not trying to
00:09:09
Speaker
you know, have the dark night of the soul at this period of time that reemerge, conquer the beast, what have you, some other time. Yeah, that's one of the kind of core elements, I think, of the hero's journey is that it's given from without rather than determined from within. And I think we're all in that position to a certain extent, even no matter what role work plays in our lives, because, you know, I'm speaking now as somebody whose career
00:09:31
Speaker
and whose life journey or trajectory are very, very tightly aligned. There's not a lot of
Stoic Concepts and Modern Critiques
00:09:37
Speaker
daylight or space between what I love and what I do, which is a great blessing, but I don't think that's the only way to determine your path in life. I think it's actually noble and good, even though we don't
00:09:51
Speaker
We don't have as much of a cultural space for this anymore, but it used to be kind of taken for granted that a lot of people went to work so that they could live, not as their life. And in some sense, that takes the burden off of your work to a certain extent. If you think of yourself as a hero on a hero's journey, but that that journey might not be identical with your career, then decisions about where to work kind of become a little bit less dire, a little bit less catastrophic. And sometimes I find that's a helpful way.
00:10:21
Speaker
to think is like, you have a telos, you have a goal. There's no question, everybody does. You have a path that you are on. But the next step on that path doesn't necessarily have anything to do with your work. It might not.
00:10:35
Speaker
No, absolutely. I think that's a great point. The Stoic Epictetus talks a lot about role ethics. I think if we think about that today, a career is one of the roles, but what that looks like is going to depend on who you are, what your talents are, who you're, what your social relations are, and what community you're in, a myriad of other different factors. And the degree to which it's an important role or not in your life will change over time and be quite different between different persons as well.
00:11:05
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, I think this stoic concept of oikeosis, which is a word that sort of has to do with home, where you're at home, but also can translate into sort of a fittingness or a rightness, an appropriateness. I think this is a really powerful concept. And one way that it's powerful is it helps us to think about ourselves as more than just kind of
00:11:35
Speaker
pure product of arbitrary choice, which is one sickness of modernity I think is to
00:11:42
Speaker
represent people to themselves as these just kind of fully liberated beings that you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want. And that's actually quite paralyzing because it's really hard. Like we want so many things at so many different times. Plato represents desire as a many headed monster. Like we're always pulled in a million different directions.
00:12:05
Speaker
And so asking for yourself what is appropriate in a given relationship, like what kind of role am I filling, what kind of archetype even am I aspiring toward, can be really liberating in some sense. Not that you have to treat that like a straight jacket, not that every husband looks the same as every other or every father looks the same as every other.
00:12:25
Speaker
But just that the position you find yourself in in relationship to others imposes certain obligations on you. And that's a good thing. That's like guidance. That's part of your how you discern your path forward. Right. Right. Absolutely. I mean, it's a.
00:12:40
Speaker
the fact that not all bonds social bonds are chosen as it were is just the realization that there's value outside there already and all you need to do is appreciate it act in the right way with regard to it you don't need to you know say choose between some menu of hundreds of different items that's already already there right yes i think this is
00:13:06
Speaker
something that antiquity can help us to recover in perhaps even a more broad sense. We inherit, I think, from the 19th century, from Nietzsche especially, we inherit this crushing obligation to be the origin and source of value to generate for ourselves the good.
00:13:31
Speaker
and the fundamental fact of so much ancient ethics, Stoicism included, although not exclusively, is that the good is objective and it's outside of you. It may be unique to you. Aristotle talks a lot about this. It might be that what's good for you isn't going to always be good
00:13:51
Speaker
for me, but it's also not arbitrary. It's not something that you can simply pose as like, Oh, now what's good for me is to like, get blackout drunk for a week straight, you know, like, and I'm just gonna call that good. You actually live in this world of
00:14:08
Speaker
hard and fast natural realities. And to me, this is the only way that we can meaningfully speak of virtue. And in turn, virtue is the only way that we can meaningfully seek joy rather than simple pleasure or happiness. When you
Virtue and Knowledge in Stoicism
00:14:27
Speaker
take pleasure in things that are objectively good, then you know joy, even if you suffer greatly, even if you have to strive and struggle. Something as simple as when you wake up in the morning asking yourself the question,
00:14:37
Speaker
Why am I getting out of bed? What's the good on the other end of that action? And can I learn to delight in it? Like not kind of losing that crucial element of like your personal delight in the good is the capstone of ethics. Like it's not simply that you need to do what is right, that you need to love
00:14:59
Speaker
what is right. And this is actually, I think, a much more successful way to motivate yourself as well. Not like, oh, I'm giving up all these fun things, all these tasty pleasures, but actually I'm seeking something that is more richly satisfying. So I'm giving up sleep, another hour of sleep. I'm giving up that last drink. I'm giving up whatever, but what am I getting? I'm getting clearheadedness. I'm getting the feeling of satisfaction that comes from a good workout or more deeply
00:15:27
Speaker
I'm giving up sleeping with everything that moves, but I'm getting the richness of marital fidelity. I'm getting relationships that are more robust and thickened with the tapestry of time. That's when you're really cooking with gas, I think, is when you are not just scolding yourself into the good, but actually loving your way into the good.
00:15:49
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, the Stoics saw virtue as knowledge. So if you're in the position where, you know, you feel like you have some outer imposed obligation, you're doing it because you ought to, but you don't want to think the Stoic view would be there's some feature of that situation where if you really ought to do it, you maybe you aren't seeing it clearly, you aren't seeing it from the right standpoints, because if you if you could,
00:16:11
Speaker
then it would be motivating in and of itself. And they suggest a number of different exercises for doing that or different maxims for coming to see why the virtuous actions would bring joy.
00:16:25
Speaker
Yes. And the concept, another powerful stoic idea, the concept of the indifferent as a noun, not as like an adjective, but that which is kind of irrelevant to your decision making process and your choices. And one indifferent might be pleasure and pain, right? It might be that your momentary experience is not
00:16:46
Speaker
actually doesn't contain useful information for you about what choices you should make. This is, of course, Marcus Aurelius is kind of great. I think his greatest contribution is his repeated return to that concept and his
00:17:03
Speaker
he sort of demonstrates or models what it looks like to recenter yourself in that all the time. And so then, you know, you're again, once again sort of liberated from taking the most kind of immediately, obviously pleasurable or easy route and set free to ask like from the actual possibilities that are available to me, what is the best one? And that will come with all sorts of joys that you maybe can't even yet see.
00:17:32
Speaker
But it won't be getting led around by the nos, by the things that you either can't control or that you didn't ask for, these kind of things that we just wake up every day with a million different competing claims on us. I think that this is like, I'm interested to know what you think actually about
00:17:52
Speaker
along with that concept of virtue as knowledge, there is to me a kind of specter of the unity of the virtues, which is not unique to the Stoics. It's a kind of Socratic idea as well. But is it one of the most complicated questions for me that, you know, there's all sorts of stuff in Chrysippus about like if you become a sage,
00:18:15
Speaker
you become one all at once and you have all the virtues all at once because you have wisdom essentially and contained in wisdom is like all the other virtues. And I can sort of see a sense in which that's true. I also think that we're never really at that point. And this is something that some stoics acknowledge that you can't, there are no sages essentially. The sages are sort of ideal that we're kind of moving toward.
00:18:41
Speaker
But I wonder whether for you, that's a helpful way of thinking about things that actually this is all the good, all the virtue, all the knowledge is all one thing. Yeah, I'd say I think that's helpful. And it's so the, you know, this was a Socratic idea, this idea that, which of course, you know, before the sake of our listeners with that virtue is unitary. And the reason
00:19:09
Speaker
One reason at any rate why people would say this is that in what sense is someone who does something brave but reckless or stupid doing anything virtuous and eventually
00:19:27
Speaker
People came to the thought to the sex came to the thoughts that virtue required knowledge and if it requires Knowledge, there's no sense in sort of breaking up different kinds of knowledge virtues merely the exercise of knowledge Maybe you can talk about courage. That's knowing what to avoid Justice that's knowing what others are owed but there's no deep distinction between different kinds of virtues and hence when you
00:19:56
Speaker
say, admire someone for being brave, standing up against fear. It really matters. Were they doing that for the right reasons at the right time? And if so, you're going to bring into all the other virtues to bear into that judgment. So I think that's useful
00:20:18
Speaker
for me, academic philosophers would always talk about cases like the 9-11 hijackers. Were they courageous? And the classic answer just clearly seems to be, no, they're not doing anything good. In what sense could they be doing something courageous? Of course, there's more to say there, but that intuition is theoretically grounded in the idea that virtue is unitary.
00:20:48
Speaker
You know, this is a topic which, obviously, again, you will know this for our listeners, this is a topic which concerns Plato in the Lakeys. Precisely this, right, is courage, really courage when it is in the direction of an evil.
00:21:06
Speaker
And I think, as I recall, that's a dialogue that ends in a kind of classic aporia that it doesn't actually resolve into a real confident, definite claim one way or another. But the idea that you just described is strongly hinted that that's the right way.
00:21:26
Speaker
One thing that this helps us to see is that when we're using the word virtue, we're actually working with a slightly more narrow concept than the Greek word arate, which begins in Homer as a kind of catchall for valor, like just all sorts of excellence. You can have excellence in foot racing. Horses can have arate, you know, being horses, being steeds.
00:21:51
Speaker
And it's in Aristotle and then in the Nicomachean ethics that these different forms of excellence kind of get parsed. And we ultimately land on what you and I have been mostly talking about here, which is moral excellence, a the K, arate, which is a word that comes from character, so kind of characterological excellence. And it's at that point that you can start to see how this particular kind of goodness that we're concerned with
00:22:20
Speaker
is inescapably knowledge-based, orientation-based, desire-based, that we see people do all sorts of things that we might find admirable, shall we say, or that obviously contain some sort of skill or arate or excellence in the broad sense.
00:22:41
Speaker
but that don't actually qualify in an obvious way for that narrower sense of moral virtue because it's not reflective of good character. And this, I think, for me, also is the crucial distinction when it comes to this question about knowledge. Would perfect knowledge translate to perfect virtue? Because there is a tension
00:23:06
Speaker
ostensibly a tension between that idea and the Christian truth, I think, that we do things that we know to be wrong, right? This is in St. Paul, that which I do, I do not want to do, that which I want to do, I do not do. It's also in Augustine's famous story about stealing pears as a boy, that he did it because it was evil. And so that kind of propositional knowledge, I know that this is wrong.
00:23:34
Speaker
obviously doesn't translate into good action. But if we understand knowledge to be of a deeper kind, that we're talking here about knowing the goodness, like a taste and see kind of knowledge, then I think we can at least say that that sort of knowledge is
00:23:52
Speaker
inseparable from virtue, that when we really do things rightly, we do them because of their rightness. And that rightness isn't just a cognitive knowledge that we have in our head, but is a whole body we really believe, you might say, an ascent to its rightness, which of course is another important stoic.
00:24:15
Speaker
concept, like you have to kind of know that the thing is good and assent to its goodness and then want it as a result or at least do it as a result. Yeah, certainly the early Stoics seemed to have this propositional model of the mind where you that would rule out things like Acresia and the way the mind works is almost like a kind of
00:24:39
Speaker
computer. But what you just said there about the sort of deeper form of knowledge that's not merely cognitive, not merely propositional, does seem to come out, at least in the exercises of the Roman Stoics. If you think about how Marcus Aurelius will often do an exercise of the view from above, look at the stars or look down on yourself, see the coming and goings of empires.
00:25:01
Speaker
In a sense, he's not actually coming to any new propositional knowledge. He already knows that empires have come and gone. But by doing this exercise, picturing the world in this way, maybe coming to a kind of stronger sense of knowledge, you could say, knowledge from
00:25:20
Speaker
from a different perspective in addition to the knowledge that. And then I think once you allow that there are these different kinds of knowledge, you can also talk about embodied forms of knowledge, which aesthetics would be happy to do since they've thought everything was a body. Exactly. It's all soma. It's all corporeal. I mean, that is a great point that kind of implied by Aurelius's exercise is an awareness that
00:25:49
Speaker
propositional knowledge of the purely cognitive kind is really not enough somehow to translate into action. And almost the premise of the whole meditations is that that's true because one of my favorite aspects of the book is how constantly frustrated he is with himself. I think I mentioned in the introduction to Gateway to the Stoics that
00:26:10
Speaker
As I was doing my research, I started ferreting around in r slash stoicism, which is the Reddit board that talks about stoicism. Huge Reddit board, like half a million followers. I came across this post that was quite popular that said something like, I can't believe I failed at stoicism again.
00:26:30
Speaker
And I thought, wow, it's Marcus Aurelius come to life. You know, like that's kind of the thesis statement of the entire meditation that Greek, the Greek title taught ace out on the things that he says to himself to kind of spur himself into right action.
00:26:46
Speaker
And so maybe it's possible to square this circle if we think that all even embodied knowledge has a kind of implicit propositional content that you might say, my head knows that, you know, that courage is good, my head knows that discipline is good.
00:27:07
Speaker
my gut doesn't yet know that. And what would it look like for your gut to know that? Well, it wouldn't look like your gut saying to itself, you know, this is good, but it would look like the corresponding kind of sentiments aroused in you that would only be aroused if this thing were good.
00:27:25
Speaker
And
Stoic Philosophy: Reason, Passion, and the Soul
00:27:26
Speaker
all of this kind of brings me to thinking, I guess, about the parts of the soul, right? Because from Plato on through to Aristotle, you have this tripartite model or even more than tripartite model.
00:27:41
Speaker
which does place propositional logic, reason, logosh at the head in the kind of ruling part, but acknowledges that the head needs to somehow communicate what it knows in an effective way to the gut, to the appetitive soul, so that the desires we follow can be the right ones, and the ones we suppress can be the right ones to suppress. And the kind of communicator in between
00:28:09
Speaker
thought and desire or head and gut is the thumos, is the heart, the spirited part, which partakes in reason, but isn't exclusively rational so that it can serve as that kind of mediator in between the two. And I think this is kind of great to think of ourselves as having a little translator from propositional logic into
00:28:32
Speaker
appetite, desire, self-control, and so forth, that which is voluntary to hakusian. It's not so much that our embodied knowledge isn't propositional. It's just that the propositions aren't coming from the body. They're coming from the mind down or something like that.
00:28:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. So the Stoics, of course, thought the mind was unitary too. So they weren't a huge fan of this picture of the mind. But I think what we're sort of circling around is that in order to make the Stoic picture work, what the Stoics needed to do is say that the strong dichotomy between reason, different forms of passion, desire is, in fact,
00:29:18
Speaker
an illusion. And so if you think about reason purely as a sort of propositional, computational type thing, you might be missing what is in fact going on. So I suppose there's one way of making sense of the stoic picture is to say that yes, the mind is unified
00:29:41
Speaker
But when we think about a heightened state of passion, there is reason there. And that should cause us to change our picture of what reason is. It's not merely some kind of symbolic way of thoughts, but rather symbols. There's just one way of expressing reasoning. Yes. And by the way, that conception is not alien to Aristotle, this idea that we may talk about parts or aspects.
00:30:11
Speaker
By that, we don't mean to draw a real dividing line that cuts to the bone of reality. In fact, we're closer to talking about dunamis, right, to capacities or powers. There's an analog, interestingly, I've never quite thought of it this way, but in Diogenes Laertius, we do get this.
00:30:30
Speaker
description of Stoic theology, which tells us that for the god, for Stoics, there's really kind of only one god. There's Zeus, or the Logos, or the Phnomos, or whatever. But he's called by many names in his various capacities, in his various aspects. And those names include Hera, Athena, that these are actually all. And there are funny little etymological derivations of why those names get applied to those aspects of the godhead.
00:31:00
Speaker
And so, you know, perhaps what you're saying can be understood also as like, you know, the soul is unitary, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't occur to us in all these different ways and therefore require multiple approaches from us. Right. Yeah, absolutely.
Preservation of Western Tradition and Current Crises
00:31:19
Speaker
We need different ways to speak about it and dividing into different parts can be a useful way to do that.
00:31:26
Speaker
Well, when we save the West, what are we saving? Moving on to your work on how to save the West, of course. Oh, sure. That is a great question. I think first and foremost, we are preserving or carrying forth a tradition and.
00:31:44
Speaker
that's not simply an act of regurgitation, although it does involve a fair amount of reading and learning, but it's also an act of continuation and embodiment. So when I talk about the West with a capital W, I'm talking about Athens and Jerusalem, these two sort of great streams of
00:32:05
Speaker
tradition of thought, of conversation. And you and I have spent our time so far together almost exclusively in Athens, as it were, in the kind of spiritual Athens. Athens is not restricted to just that city-state during antiquity, but stands in for the whole panoply of pagan philosophers and statesmen.
00:32:29
Speaker
that we know of and whose words and works are passed down to us. And doing what we've just done, which is sort of seeking wisdom, seeking understanding, seeking to parse out and adjudicate between the different views in that great conversation, that's a big part of being part of the West, of inheriting the West.
00:32:50
Speaker
But we did touch on also the kind of, I like to think of it as a complimentary, although some people would say it's a contradictory tradition, which comes from Jerusalem. And that's when we're talking about St. Paul and we're talking about Augustine. We're really referring and reaching back into the heart of kind of monotheism in the Near East, beginning with Jewish scripture and wisdom literature and then
00:33:14
Speaker
passing through Christianity into the Roman Empire, across the world, building Europe. To talk about the West at all is to kind of make a fundamental claim that that's a coherent story you can tell. It's not a story about only one set of beliefs that people have ever had, but it is a story about
00:33:35
Speaker
interrelationships between participants in this tradition that can speak to one another meaningfully and can internalize and enact visibly these ideas. So a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about here already
00:33:48
Speaker
you or I or people listening to us could go away and wake up and do these things or behave in these ways. And even under, you know, in conditions of extreme duress, you know, I think often of Boethius, you know, in jail, wondering what it means to do philosophy from this highly constrained place, you know, even in our worst moments, and sometimes even especially in our worst moments, these are practices that we can adopt or ideals that we can
00:34:16
Speaker
strive for. And so, I wrote the book because I discerned a fair amount of either indifference to or open hostility towards this whole story. At the beginning of the book, I cite a bunch of people saying, either the West doesn't exist, it's a fabrication, and that fabrication is designed
00:34:36
Speaker
to preserve white supremacy or it is white supremacy or what have you. And I just, you know, going back to my origin story and the, you know, personal connection I have with these texts, I just feel very strongly that that's quite a wrong-headed and foolhardy way of relating to our
00:34:53
Speaker
tradition in part because it is the tradition that allows us to make critiques like this period or these people were insufficiently egalitarian. They were insufficiently fair or proper. I mean, it's from this wisdom literature that we derive our most robust versions of those ideas because we don't get them from ourselves. They don't fall naturally into our lap unless we are preternaturally gifted.
00:35:20
Speaker
So, yeah, we're preserving the tradition. We're keeping the conversation alive. And most importantly, perhaps we are we're living it out. We're discerning what it means to live this way in 2023 under the circumstances in which we find ourselves. At what point in history do you think the West was least in need of saving?
00:35:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, one answer to that is it's always on the verge of collapse. And I sort of say something like this in the book, that the world being what it is, virtue, wisdom are extremely fragile, delicate things. We've already touched on the possibility that nobody actually is a sage. But I think that you can point to certain European
00:36:02
Speaker
nations at their height or even nations of antiquity. I mean, I would say Athens in the fifth century BC is a civilization which, you know, you might say that it hasn't yet, the West isn't yet fully born because Athens and Jerusalem have yet to meet one another. But there you're looking at a really robust active living tradition. And so I would say the markers of like health, Western health are probably
00:36:31
Speaker
A, a strong sense of continuity and connection to the past and to this specific past that we've just outlined. But B, a very vivid and urgent engagement with the past in the present. So I read the speeches, for instance, of Burke to parliament or his letters and obviously reflection of the revolution in France. And I think here is somebody that is really
00:37:01
Speaker
rooted, standing firm in a tradition, even as in other times and places, it's falling right apart. And that's the point of writing the reflections. So that's the first part of what I'll say is that some of those, just like
00:37:17
Speaker
maybe very early Enlightenment or just at the turn of the Enlightenment era, some of the height of the British Empire, these things might look stable to us. The second thing I'll say though is that they probably didn't look all that stable to Burke. It's hard to remember this, but Pericles, for all that he represents the really pinnacle of Athenian
00:37:44
Speaker
glory in some sense, at least his service as Archon straddles this amazing era. I don't think Pericles was waking up every day and thinking, man, we don't have to worry about anything. We don't have to fight. It's difficult, I think, to really say with confidence, this was an unshakable period because there are no guarantees.
00:38:08
Speaker
One illusion I think we might maybe suffer from, I feel that I might suffer from is, you know,
00:38:14
Speaker
I did grow up in the 90s, and the 90s might represent for America a certain apex of cultural consensus, of peace, harmony, prosperity, all these things. And so in passing away from that apex, as I believe we have now done into a period of more turbulence and urgency, we might have the
00:38:38
Speaker
impression that we are uniquely unlucky, that we've been served a really bad hand. And I'm not sure that's true. Nobody wrote us a guarantee at our birth that things were going to be hunky dory and we weren't going to have to really grapple with stuff. We've invented a
00:38:56
Speaker
dramatically unsettling form of technology in the internet, and we've gone through a technological revolution akin to that of the printing press. We've witnessed the failure of a lot of previously successful enterprises at home and abroad. We're in the thick of it for sure, but I don't think that it's any more dire than it's ever been, perhaps is one way of putting it.
00:39:24
Speaker
So you talk about five crises, and I, of course, enjoy how you point out that the word crisis doesn't have the meaning it has for us, you typically today, at least for ancient Greece, at least the way you use it. So do you want to say more about?
00:39:42
Speaker
your use of that word and how you set up the stage for the five things we're facing. Certainly, yes. Crisis is one of the most overused words in the English language. I think in 2023, we have a crisis of almost everything. There's a supply chain crisis, there's a COVID crisis, there's a crisis in the economy. We seem to wake up to a new crisis every day. And many of the things that I just mentioned, in fact, I think all of the things that I just mentioned are very serious issues that require our
00:40:11
Speaker
are devoted attention. But when I use the word crisis, I'm actually referring to something somewhat different, and I would suggest more foundational, more fundamental. As you indicated, the Greek word crino means I judge or I make a decision. And therefore a chrysis, the noun form, is a point of choosing. It's a choice between, as I like to put it, two fundamentally irreconcilable alternatives.
00:40:37
Speaker
And the thesis in some sense of the book or the motivating framework is that
00:40:45
Speaker
digital technology and historical circumstances have created a situation in which we are faced with really rudimentary fundamental first level questions. And those sorts of questions don't have like compromise answers. They may lead us, certain answers might lead us to certain forms of compromise, but when you're up against a question, like for instance, is there absolute truth? One of the things I try to argue in the book is
00:41:13
Speaker
you can't give a halfway answer to that. You have to either believe that there is or not. And so that's a crisis. If you're arguing over that question, you're in a crisis and you need, perhaps most urgently of all, more urgently than any other time, you need guidance from the past because it's the past where you find the richest engagement with these questions.
00:41:36
Speaker
And so we think that our tech has totally transformed the world, and in some sense it has, but in another sense it has dredged up questions that are very, very old. And those are
Theological Debates in Modern Stoicism
00:41:44
Speaker
the five crisis questions. Is there absolute truth, crisis of reality? What's a human being? What's our personhood for? That's the crisis of the body, conflict between body and soul.
00:41:55
Speaker
Does anything mean anything? What's the meaning of life? What's the meaning of our existence? That's the crisis of meaning. Is there a God? That's the crisis of religion. And then finally, what is our regime? That's the crisis of regime. What's America supposed to be? Where are we going? What's going to happen to us?
00:42:11
Speaker
And so the book kind of proceeds by laying those crises out in the beginning of each section and then offering a few kind of points of guidance or resources from the tradition that might help us think through those questions. Right. If you had to make a choice on one of those crises or say solve one of those crises, which one would you choose?
00:42:34
Speaker
So there's a case to be made that like it's the crisis of reality because that's the first, I mean, I start with that one because I think you can't really address any of the other questions until you've talked about, is there anything true or false? But really I think the heart of the book and the deepest crisis of all is the crisis of religion. That's where the book reaches its climax. That's the thing that all of these conversations kind of come back to and
00:42:57
Speaker
It's even difficult to talk about because the minute you say religion, God, people tune right out. This is just really unappealing to be evangelizing or to be thumping a Bible or whatever. One of the things I try to show in the book is it's actually much more basic and fundamental than that. It's almost not even like, is there a Trinitarian God as so much as like,
00:43:21
Speaker
Is there a plane? Is there a mode of existence? Is there a reality that is more than simply physical or material? And I think that Nietzsche's great proclamation that God is dead, which Heidegger interpreted as meaning all transcendental values are debunked. They no longer exist. There is no vertical dimension to reality. I think that
00:43:46
Speaker
conviction, which is really running its course and really, I think, exhausting its possibilities and causing all sorts of problems. That's the crisis. The crisis is can we believe?
00:44:00
Speaker
There's a debate in the modern Stoic community about the role of God, of course, in the philosophy. And on one hand, you have what's often termed traditional Stoics who tend to think that you can not remove God from the picture without seriously damaging the system or perhaps misunderstanding.
00:44:24
Speaker
the system and then on the other side you have many modern stoics which is probably the dominant form many people encounter stoicism through what sometimes is called modern stoicism I suppose or and this is much more focused on the ethics.
00:44:40
Speaker
in order to live a good life, be virtuous. And that's all that's required for happiness without having this picture of God. How do you think about these two different kinds of stoicism? Do you think either of them would be a solution, as it were, to the problem of religion or one of these other crises? How do you think about that?
00:45:02
Speaker
Yeah, I do take a position on this in the forward to gateway to the Stoics because I sort of in my nosing around in r slash stoicism, which contains a lot of representatives of modern stoicism. And I would associate it also with people like Ryan Holiday and Massimo Palucci, although I don't want to attribute to those guys.
00:45:24
Speaker
you know, any particular, I don't know them well enough to know what their kind of theological convictions are. But I do think that there is like a self-help version of Stoicism of the kind that you indicate, which actually is very Roman. I've been thinking about this lately that Cicero and, you know, who was not himself a Stoic, but who had a lot of respect for Stoicism and even just like some of the stuff that you
00:45:49
Speaker
that you get from the kind of Roman nobles that smacks of Stoicism. It has this kind of practical, like, just give me the bottom line. You know, like, how do I run the world? How do I do what's good? How do I seek virtue? And so we have this very American version of this, which doesn't really want to engage with the metaphysics, doesn't want to engage with the cosmology, certainly finds the whole talk of multiple gods.
00:46:14
Speaker
beyond the pale, but really isn't all that comfortable with or interested in the talk of one god either of Dios or Logos or whatever as a conscious mind.
00:46:26
Speaker
And for one thing, I don't think that's going to be strong enough stuff. And my first answer to this is like, I'm not sure that that kind of like, this helps me lead a better life is going to carry quite the conviction that that will be needed in the years to come. But to be a
Theological Grounding and Divine Language
00:46:41
Speaker
little less gloomy and dire about it, I also think you can refer here to a passage in Diogenes Laertes.
00:46:49
Speaker
which reports that many Stoics thought of the three great branches of their philosophy as integrated parts of a whole. So, you know this, you've got logic, which is kind of like, how do you think well? Ethics, how do you live well? And then physics or cosmology, which refers to all this stuff.
00:47:10
Speaker
What is the thin, subtle flame that runs through all of existence and orders it? And how is Penaoma and Pure and Logos, how are these all intertwined? It seems to me that ancient Stoics didn't really think that you could untangle these three modes of thought. And I think that that is a persuasive
00:47:29
Speaker
claim because many ethical claims, in fact, I would suggest all ethical claims are somewhere explicitly grounded in, if not conscious supernatural, nevertheless, in a supernatural in an axiomatic good. In order to wake up in the morning and ask yourself that question, why do I do what I do? What do I want?
00:47:49
Speaker
then you actually have to place an immovable standard outside the changing world of nature. Now, for Stoics, that standard was kind of implicit in nature or threaded through nature. It wasn't strictly speaking more than physical, but it was supernatural or it was spiritual or it was religious, theological in the sense that we now kind of casually use those words.
00:48:11
Speaker
And I just don't know, you know, if the claims about logos governing all of time and space, if those claims are just kind of useful metaphors, then it's hard to see why we should pay any attention to them. It's hard to see why we should live that way when the going gets tough, unless in fact, the divine mind, the ordering consciousness is really
00:48:35
Speaker
in a quite literal sense, the final word on what is true. So I think you need at least a theological dimension in order to make full complete sense out of this and also to sort of stand you in good stead when the going gets rough.
00:48:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's a deep issue, one that I'm personally agnostic on. One of my favorite parts from the book is where you say you're going to tell a story, a story about existence itself as a kind of language, which I think was a fine description, not only of
00:49:12
Speaker
the stoic god, but this idea of how does something like telos get built into the world itself. So I don't know if you could say more about that, because I thought that was a very, very well done, very elegantly put. Thank you. Yes, happily. So this is one of those areas where Athens and Jerusalem, I think, can kind of both contribute to
00:49:34
Speaker
a plausible cogent description of the world that is also theological. Because of course, right from Genesis, language is very closely bound up with the creation of the world. God spoke, said, let there be light, and there was light. And it's also the case that, you know, in this Gospel chapter one, which is to me the most
00:49:57
Speaker
nearly stoic text in all of scripture, we get, in the beginning was, we often hear the word, but really the logos is the logos. I mean, students of stoicism will know this concept, the governing order, the bedrock set of truths and so forth.
00:50:15
Speaker
And so where Stoicism and Christianity differ is where they locate that logos or whether they think that logos is exhausted by the material world or whether it enters into the material world from outside of it or governs over it. And I have my Christian convictions about that, which is that in order to make sense, the divine mind must be more than nature. But either way,
00:50:36
Speaker
What you're looking at is you are looking at a material world which is not full stop material or rather whose physical attributes are not just the brute facts of themselves. They are also formed, shaped in a way that gives meaning, that expresses some kind of ineffable divine reason and order
00:51:01
Speaker
And if that weren't true, then our own minds wouldn't work because man is the microcosm, right? Because we have within ourselves this kind of miniature reproduction of the order that governs all cause, all creation. And so for the world to be spoken into existence to say that is to say that what we do when we do language, that is when we take sounds and we use them as physical tokens of what's ineffably inside of us, that's a little picture
00:51:28
Speaker
of what God does when He creates the world, that the transcendent divine gives expression to Himself in material form, and that material form is the sky, the trees, the earth, but also the laws of nature, the falling rain, and the, you know, the experience of beauty, the truths of the heart. And this is to be found also in the Psalms, you know, that His raiment is the sky, His footstool is the earth, right? That these are not simply themselves, these are just objects.
00:51:58
Speaker
but that they are actual kind of clothing or modes of expression for God. And I think that that's, to me, one of the most profound insights of Christian theology that can also be made to at least harmonize with some of what's said in Stoicism. I think you have a good way of understanding how the picture of
00:52:22
Speaker
Stoicism need not be reductionistic, even though there are only bodies, the way of, you know, what is, isn't merely some amount of atoms bumping around in the void. That's the Epicurean picture. That's right. See, you know, the logos that could, if you're in the agnostic position, like me, and here deeply in the matter of things. And of course, the Christian position, there's more to say about that.
00:52:52
Speaker
Right, and the Stoics do this wonderful thing of opening up a category, a kind of intermediate category between material and immaterial, and there's different ways of interpreting it as maybe supervenient or what have you, but these are sort of the sayables, right? They are the telecta, the things that
00:53:13
Speaker
And the reason they're called sayables is because even if they don't strictly speaking exist, we can still speak of them, things like the meaning in a word. And I think that's quite interesting. I think they do exist. I think the spirit has a kind of fundamental bedrock.
00:53:29
Speaker
reality. But things like time, things like the meaning of words, I think there are four of them canonically in stoicism. And yeah, it's not that these objects, even though they are somata, even though they're a corporeal, it doesn't mean that they're like only corporeal or that their whole meaning is exhausted by the fact of their matter. As you say, that's an Epicurean position.
00:53:55
Speaker
Right, right, right. They either have, you know, maybe perhaps different aspects is one day to speak about it, or there's a, the late philosopher Roger Scruton has a lovely book called The Soul of the World, where he develops a view that I think can go nicely with this, which is he calls it a kind of cognitive dualism, or you can see the world in two distinct ways that are fundamentally irreducible to each other.
00:54:22
Speaker
Yes, absolutely.
Conclusion and Resources for Stoic Engagement
00:54:23
Speaker
Aristotle likes to talk about things that are separable conceptually, but not in fact, they are, you know, choristic costs, but not really. And part of the claim of the book is that the body and the soul are this way that at least on Earth, you know, is possible to interpret a human body as a purely
00:54:44
Speaker
physical machine, but it's also possible to interpret the human body as a kind of vehicle for spirit and excluding either one from view. Even if you're able to do it, it might be useful to think in that way for certain purposes. It's always crucial to remember that
00:55:03
Speaker
Anytime you do that, anytime you perform that charisma of separating off one or the other aspect, you've lost something. You're missing the whole picture until you kind of see it, like a stereopticon, like those two things layered on top of each other. Yeah, got it, got it. Well, is there anything else you'd like to add?
00:55:22
Speaker
Oh boy. Well, no, this has been a really lovely conversation. I hope if people are interested, they'll check out the book, which is also on Audible. If you like listening to stuff as well as Amazon, you can go get the version read by the author. So thank you for having me. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining.
00:55:39
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to get two meditations from me on stoic theory and practice a week, just two short emails on whatever I've been thinking about, as well as some of the best resources we found for practicing stoicism, check out stowletcher.com. It's completely free. You can sign up for it and then unsubscribe at any time as you wish.
00:56:09
Speaker
If you want to dive deeper still, search Stoa in the App Store or Play Store for a complete app with routines, meditations, and lessons designed to help people become more stoic. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyre.com. And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to
00:56:36
Speaker
stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.