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Scott Aikin on Revising Stoicism (Episode 116)
777 Plays11 months ago
This one is for all of you interested in Stoic theory.
In this conversation, Caleb and Scott Aikin discuss objections to Stoicism.
Scott defends a revisionary kind of Stoicism. In some places, Caleb questions how revisionary it is – is Scott just restating things the ancients solved already? In other places, Caleb questions whether it’s too revisionary to work – do we need an account of nature after all? Scott responds.
Listen and work through the problems yourself.
Epictetus’s 'Encheiridion': A New Translation and Guide to Stoic Ethics
Earlier Stoa Conversation on Why What You Think Is Up To You
Caleb and Michael discuss The Impossibility Objection
Scott Aikin on We Are The Stoics Now
(04:44) Fatalism
(12:29) Dichotomy of Control
(18:45) Where Your Control Lies
(20:04) Skepticism
(22:28) Determinism
(31:30) How You Revisionary Is Scott?
(34:38) The Ruin Problem
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
We don't know how our lives are going to end. We don't know how our relationships are in and our relation, all of our relationships will end because we end. And so loving and living and being in these relationships with our eyes open to that and wanting, wanting those relationships to be whole. And so the things are not unfinished is, uh, is in some ways a really mature way. Like that's kind of how grownups really should be doing it.
00:00:25
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Scott Aiken, the Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt, and repeat Stoa Conversations guest. His work has ranged from epistemology, political argument,
00:00:42
Speaker
pragmatism, and of course, several works on stoicism. His most recent work is Epictetus in Caridian, A New Translation and Guide to Stoic Ethics with William O. Stevens, who I hope many listeners are familiar with as well.
Exploring Stoicism: Concepts and Criticisms
00:01:00
Speaker
Well, thanks so much for coming back. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to this conversation. We have many things to pick up on.
00:01:10
Speaker
Yeah, always good to chat with you. And this time around, I thought it'd be interesting to explore, dive deeper on following up on our last conversation, which concerns some of the objections you cover with William O. Stevens in your last book, Two Stoicism.
00:01:27
Speaker
And sort of using that as a starting point to think about, okay, what is stoicism? What are some of these objections? And how do you think about stoicism yourself? And I suppose implication of that for listeners is, you know, how do you think about stoicism yourself, of course, and how one manages these objections, different versions of stoicism, and so on.
00:01:51
Speaker
So a good starting point for that, I think, is just setting up what you think are some of the central tenets for the traditional stoic view, I suppose, with a particular focus on the ones that you might think are most important for either informing one's life or a general worldview.
00:02:15
Speaker
Right. So I think that every practitioner of stoicism, anyone who's curious about stoicism is probably familiar with the fact that it's a highly revisionary philosophical program. It's supposed to kind of shake you out of a lot of the common places that you have as a person who knocks about and has been
00:02:40
Speaker
Culturated especially if you've been acculturated in a society that values standing that values wealth values pleasure that In some ways stoicism requires a pretty radical change ethically in terms of reconsidering what the good is and it also requires a pretty radical revision in terms of how you manage your beliefs and What you think the world is like?
00:03:08
Speaker
And so one of the things that anyone who's been interested in stoicism has had to wrestle with is just how significant a break it is with, you might say, common sense about so many things. And again, we can focus on stoic ethics, but I think that it's connected to a lot of other features of stoic philosophy as a systematic philosophical program. And so.
00:03:35
Speaker
Again, I think that anyone who's done this realizes that you have to be able to answer critical questions as a stoic practitioner. You yourself will naturally ask them, the people in your life will ask them. If you announce yourself as somebody who thinks a stoicism is right, you're probably going to be on the hook for having critical conversations with folks who are going to say, that seems like a pretty wacky philosophical program. You need to be able to answer those questions.
00:03:59
Speaker
And so I think that part of the thing about being interested in philosophy and interested in questions of the good life and wrestling with those means that you're going to have question. And I think that any good faith Stoic should be able to have them and be able to appreciate them as they are and not chase them out of our mind. So that's the first point, which is, look, Stoicism is a kind of an all in philosophical program, but it's not an all in philosophical program that requires that you ignore
00:04:27
Speaker
the critical concerns of the program. It's one that requires that you have answered all of the doubts. And so instead of it to sort of a plug up your ears and pretend like the people who are criticizing you don't know any better or that they're terrible people, that there are places where the stoats need to be able to answer critical questions.
00:04:48
Speaker
So it's in the spirit of, hey, we're philosophers here. We're people who think that critical thinking is important. We're people who would never suppress a doubt if it's pressing. We need to be able to answer them. So the first one is just simply that, look, and this is an old one. So I'll start with some old ones and then kind of build the ones that I think have kind of emerged with sort of new approaches to value theory.
00:05:11
Speaker
But old ones are that, like, look, you know, if you're a stoic, maybe stoicism, given, hey, it's metaphysics, they're fatalists, they're providentialists, things just couldn't happen otherwise, that you don't make a difference, that you're willing, that you're doing doesn't make a difference if fatalism is true.
00:05:28
Speaker
There's another version of this sort of inaction problem that stoicism robs us of our motivation. So effectively that their motivation to really do much of anything, that if all of the externals, if we really think that the fundamental divide or the division of value between what's up to us and what isn't, or the only thing that matters is virtue, the only thing that's of value is virtue, then many of the things that virtue is supposed to be productive of are not valuable.
00:05:57
Speaker
So it's unclear if we're
Stoicism and Determinism: Challenges and Responses
00:05:59
Speaker
kind of doing this kind of stochastic ethics, that it's all in the trying, it's all in the aiming, it's all, but not in the sort of the successful doing. It's unclear how we then are really committed to act. And so these, you might say, you might call this the lazy syllogism problems, inaction problems. They're very, very old. And Stokes had lots of approaches to be able to answer them. But I think that just starting there is a good place to start, which is, well,
00:06:26
Speaker
Stoicism is a pretty radical revision of our values. And the question is that whenever we turn those values inside and say it's the things that are in your motivations, it's the things about how you manage your character, it's in terms of how you thought things through, that the value is there. There's a kind of a question as to, well, why value that one? Doesn't it rob you of the kind of the active life that in some ways stoicism seemed to promise?
00:06:53
Speaker
So do you think any version of that kind of objection is plausible, or is the main force of it just that it brings up this question? Why would you believe this revisionary version of values to begin with? Yeah. Look, I think that there's something to this objection. And I think that Stoics can answer it, but it requires some other revisions. And so again, if the Stoics are going to be down with the revisionary game, they're going to be down with the revisionary game.
00:07:21
Speaker
So with the fatalism objection, a famous strategy that the Stoics had was, well, it's called the co-fatalist answer, which is, hey, if the results of my actions are fated, why should I do the action? And the answer is, well, you're also fated to do the action, right? You're fated to have the action. And again, the puzzle here is, well, then there's a strange phenomenon that happens where then you say,
00:07:46
Speaker
That's, that seems like that is an answer. Right now the, now the actions matter, right? So the doings do matter. So it is an answer, but it requires another revision that looks like it pays that you pay a different kind of price. And it's that, um, is that now your deliberations.
00:08:05
Speaker
What feels like what you're doing is you're looking at a garden of forking paths where you could go down one and you could go down another, and you're kind of deliberating between possibles to make a decision on the actual. That's actually an illusion.
00:08:21
Speaker
from the stoic perspective. The co-fatalist thought is, if the results of your action are faded, then your action is faded. Then what you're doing when you're deliberating is you're actually not deliberating, you are discovering what your action is going to be.
00:08:38
Speaker
And that seems like a kind of a, again, a pretty significant revision, not just of our values, but in fact of kind of the kind of creatures that we are, uh, the structure of the world, um, that you might say that one way that we, that at the very least we're tempted before we start thinking hard about time and possibility that in some ways the future forks and the future has all sorts of possibilities. We think of the future as a place where things are possible and.
00:09:08
Speaker
In some ways, there's really only one possibility from this perspective in terms of the actions that we take. So that seems a pretty significant revision. Again, I think that it comes with a cost because, again, it requires that we kind of rethink what we're doing whenever we deliberate, whenever we think about our futures, whenever we think about what we should do.
00:09:32
Speaker
And I think that Stoics, again, I don't think that it's a refutation, but it is another one of these like, hey, Stoicism is really revisionary. We're going to keep doing the revision or the revision program. But this one is one that requires that you really, really reorient yourself.
00:09:51
Speaker
So again, we're revising what's valuable. We're revising what's possible. We're revising what it is to make a decision. We're revising what it is to be in control of yourself. It's just this really systematic revisionary program that, again, you kind of get all the goods, but they're all changed a little bit. And I think that someone, again, a critic of stoicism might say, yeah, stoicism promised me self-control, but that's a little bit of false advertising.
00:10:19
Speaker
It's not the self-control that I thought that I was getting whenever you were giving me this. Yeah, I suppose it's an interesting question. What is the self-control that people think they're getting when they become stoic? Is it this view of...
00:10:33
Speaker
free will where I have this garden of forking paths available to me and I get to choose who I become in that sense. Or is it something around it's I can build up, I can play a role in becoming an agent or something like that, someone who takes responsibility for what's up to them. That might be more of the stoic type picture, which doesn't mean you get to choose between possible futures in any robust metaphysical sense. You're playing out the story that
00:11:02
Speaker
fates or nature, what have you, gave you, but does mean you can build yourself into someone who is more agentic, might be one way to put it.
00:11:15
Speaker
I like that the way of recasting it to say like what it is to be in control as to in some ways be a full agent and that what you're doing is you're kind of crafting a self and that it's a self that has a different kind of focus that isn't
00:11:33
Speaker
knocked around. I think that a lot of these models of thinking of stoic cells that get constructed by this is kind of like having internal gyroscopes. I like that image. It's again, kind of physicalistic. Notice that it's again, they're all causes here, but in some ways because of the internal guts of a cells, there's a kind of stability that comes out of it. I like that image.
00:12:00
Speaker
And thinking of these philosophical programs as self-crafting and that what you're kind of doing is you're, you don't have, and again, this is another thing about the dichotomy of control or the fundamental divide that, that in some ways bothers me about the Epictetus stuff. And I think that it's sometimes pretty implausible. So we're going to start transitioning to another worry, which is the psychological plausibility of the dichotomy. Um,
00:12:30
Speaker
thinking of your desires is up to you just is so deeply implausible. Like I just can't make myself like mayonnaise. I just like mayonnaise is gross. I can't overcome that. And so I can't make myself desire to have mayonnaise on a sandwich. And there are things that I like that I can't talk myself out of. Taste just kind of works that way.
00:12:56
Speaker
But there are other desires that it looks like you can have some kind of cognitive feedback on them. But notice, by the way, that it's always got to be indirect. You can't say something
Revising Stoic Principles and Practices
00:13:09
Speaker
like, I want not to like this, and I've got good reasons not to like this, but you find yourself still liking it. And what has to happen is that you kind of have to work on yourself kind of in an indirect fashion.
00:13:21
Speaker
Beliefs are this way, desires are this way, that you can't just say something like, I need to have a different belief. You need to start providing yourself with evidence. You need to start deliberating and thinking about the thing that is a desirable thing or an undesirable thing. Think about what the bads are in it.
00:13:38
Speaker
And it's in looking at those things or in looking at the evidence for the truth of something that you actually then achieve the control that you were looking for all along, but it can only be done indirectly. You can direct your attention to evidence, to reasons, but it's in directing your attention that then you can then change your beliefs. But you can't directly change the beliefs. You can't say, I want to have this belief. You can only look at the evidence.
00:14:07
Speaker
And so one of the crucial things that I think is the case about the dichotomy of control or the fundamental divide is that it's really kind of an aspirational program. What you're doing as a stoic when you're performing these exercises
00:14:25
Speaker
is developing more control over those things. Again, it can only be indirect. You don't have direct control over your beliefs. You don't have direct control over your desires. You don't have direct control over what you want to do or even maybe what your will is. What you do have direct control over is your attention and what you pay attention to and what kinds of reasons then can push you around. So again, it's this indirect control.
00:14:51
Speaker
So what we do is we in some ways come at ourselves sideways with these exercises and coming at ourselves sideways with these exercises gives us the skills and gives and crafts us into the kind of the people that we want to be. And so, you know, this is again, the sort of the person crafting model, Chrysopis with the cylinders that roll. What you're kind of doing is you're crafting a cylinder
00:15:18
Speaker
that, again, you can't make the cylinder roll straight unless you've crafted the cylinder. And I think that the same thing goes with us. We work on ourselves so that we know what kinds of bumps we're going to see. And we kind of craft ourselves in ways that we can handle those bumps better than if we hadn't crafted ourselves. But you can't do that in the middle of half of the bump. You can do that only beforehand.
00:15:44
Speaker
So even the stoic, again, I think that the stoic dichotomy of control is an aspiration for stoic. I don't think that that's something that's just given to us, given the fact that we've got lines. I think that we've got indirect control over those things. And that's something that can be only an achievement. And it's not something that's sort of just that we start off with.
00:16:05
Speaker
That's the reason why stoic exercises again are so useful for us that we are not just crafting or crafting ourselves so that we're the kind of beings that we want to be, but we're also crafting ourselves is that we can, we get better at the feedback loops that we create for ourselves. Whenever we think about ourselves, think about the situations, kind of person that we want.
00:16:24
Speaker
In some ways, I like the term the fundamental divide more. I think you and William Stevens introduced that. Yeah, Bill and I tried to kind of revise that thinking that it was supposed to be a kind of a fundamental thing, but then we kind of take it back in the end.
00:16:42
Speaker
Um, so we're in this regard, we might be revisionary stoics. We might like stoicism is revisionary, but maybe we're revisionists. Again, I don't, I don't really have a view about whether or not Epictetus thought it was an achievement or thought it was something read into nature. I think that a lot of the places that we started thinking about the stoics is that Epictetus is saying it's something that we're doing. We're thinking about nature. We're thinking about, uh, and human nature, and you've got this divide and it's fundamental about us.
00:17:09
Speaker
I think that is something we establish. I think it's something that we kind of eke out very slowly.
00:17:15
Speaker
So I would think about it in terms of there's this divide between impressions and then the faculties of reflection and ascent. And then those, of course, can lead to different, the outcome of that can be belief, desires, but it's sort of that little pocket of the, your will, it might be translated as your will or yourself, which involves reflection, ascent. There's that hegemonic on in there. Yes, that's right.
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think, and Caleb, I really appreciate the way that you framed it there, which is what the training ultimately is, is us managing how we respond to impression. They're the way that the world appears, they're the way that things appear to us, they're the way that values appear to us, they're the way that we appear to us.
00:18:07
Speaker
that what we're doing is we're, and the challenge for Stoics is the fact that we've been habituated to take the impressions a certain kind of way. We hastily take impressions to be a certain way. And it's a kind of a cure that we have to have.
00:18:25
Speaker
assenting to impressions or generalizing from them or taking them to be taking them to be ways that we've been kind of again, acculturated to taking them that creates unhappy lives, unjust lives, and errors just about how the how what's at stake for us and what kind of people
00:18:45
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, I think that's right. And it gives you some space to think about, you know, Epictetus is always talking about what's your own, what's up to you. And you can think about this part of the world is up to me, how I manage these impressions.
00:19:00
Speaker
And it is true that many impressions have a very strong force that what he just talks about, you can't just look at the sun and pretend the sun's not out. And there's going to be some cases of desires like this as well that are going to knock you off your feet, either cause a physical response that you have no control over, or perhaps even be so forceful that you'll immediately assent to them.
00:19:27
Speaker
But nonetheless, you can build up your faculty of mind to think better about ensuring that those automatically assent to false impressions or at least impressions that you don't have reasons to believe in.
00:19:47
Speaker
And that way, maybe one's thinking less about control, but simply what's up to you? What can you cause? How can you shape yourself? And that's sort of the picture that I've been coming closer to about stoicism over the past, I don't know, a few years or so. But so one of the things that, and a duty that emerges from this
00:20:10
Speaker
that the place where we control is in that transition zone between having an impression and having an assent or withholding assent or rejecting that a duty emerges, kind of an epistemic or an intellectual duty emerges there.
00:20:33
Speaker
and that the hard line with it, which I think is very plausible, which is this wise person doesn't opine, the wise person doesn't assent to impressions that aren't true and guaranteed to be true, these catalytic impression. And I think that that aspiration, you might say, believing according to the evidence, that aspiration of a kind of an intellectual duty that we have to ourselves and to others,
00:21:03
Speaker
Again, we've got to accurately judge what our relations are. We've got to accurately judge what kinds of duties come along with those relations. We have to see the worry right in order for us to do our duty and to be the kind of virtuous people that we need to be. So we have obligations, again, to ourselves and to others and to our duties to judge accurately. And the last part of this is that
00:21:28
Speaker
That is super demanding. Again, the classic stoic requirement is that the wise person doesn't opine, doesn't really assent to anything but what is knowledge. Consequently, the wise person does not care. The wise person has no false beliefs.
00:21:47
Speaker
And when you think about that, you're like, on the one hand, you're like, okay, that's what the critical thinking program is. That's why stoic logic is so important. That's why stoicism has the kind of the epistemology it's got and the theory of knowledge that drives it, that the theory of knowledge just connects right up with this heavy duty intellectual duty.
00:22:07
Speaker
Yeah, so I suppose there's um, you know, how do you make sense of knowledge in the stoic picture? And then there's the addition of other kinds of duties or epistemic characteristics that maybe they don't get you to that strict form of knowledge where they get you closer to a stoic kind of picture.
00:22:30
Speaker
One question I have going jumping back a little bit is, how important do you think determinism is to someone like the central stoic idea? Um, boy, you know, it's a great question, because in some ways, this is kind of the third hurdle, I think, to being a practicing stoic. So I'm gonna say I've got two answers. So here's the long version, here's the long way that the two answers.
00:22:55
Speaker
According to the ancients, stoicism was a kind of all the above theses, so you're committed to...
00:23:04
Speaker
the metaphysics or you've committed to the physics, the logic and the ethics. And what's that mean? That means that you're committed to the providentialist picture of the world. You're committed to the fiery end and the restart. You're committed to the theory of knowledge. You're committed to the logic. You're committed to the fundamental divide and the ethics. You're committed to the deontology. Committed to all of it. And their thought was that it all comes as a package.
00:23:33
Speaker
that you can't do one without the other. So it all is just one big, one big, one big organic hole.
00:23:40
Speaker
And a lot of the ways that you and I have been talking about this has kind of been proceeding according to that classical layout, which is we were talking about the ethics, and then we talked about the fundamental divide, and then we were talking about the epistemology, and then we were also talking about the providentialism and about how that bears on the ethics. So it's all clear that it all kind of connects up, and that's how systematic philosophy works, and that's a benefit of it.
00:24:04
Speaker
But so the first answer is, yeah, it's intrinsically connected to it because that's the system, right? The problem with system, so that's a benefit of systematic philosophy, which is, hey, my epistemology, my philosophy of mind, my ethics, and my theory of the ultimate good, and my theory of how the world works, are all connected. And they're all, you can kind of spin one out of the other. That's amazing.
00:24:32
Speaker
The drawback to it is that a weakness in any one of those other places is that if they're all kind of connected and one part is garbage, then it's all garbage. And so that's the biggest challenge, I think, which is if you think that stoic determinism doesn't look very plausible, if the arguments for stoic determinism just don't look very good,
00:24:53
Speaker
then there's a problem. Or if you might say, look, if you think that there's a difference between providentialism and determinism, like, well, they're all causally determined versus they're all part of a plan, that looks like that's a different kind of claim, that that's a problem. Or if we say like, well, look, the fundamental divide maybe is a little bit harder to kind of justify, is that a problem? And again, the thought is that if it's a systematic philosophy and the only way to be committed to any
00:25:18
Speaker
One of the views is to be committed to all of the views, then any one bad view brings the whole system down.
00:25:24
Speaker
And a lot of folks, a lot of practicing Stoics are kind of in it for the ethics and not for the philosophy of mind. And they're not in it for the, for the logic. I don't know a lot of practicing Stoics who were like, yeah, I'd really like to learn some developed propositional logic. And I want to, I want a deeper theory of the lecture or right. Stoic, right. Like the theory, stoic theories of rhetoric are not selling like hotcakes, but stoic theories of emotions are why?
00:25:53
Speaker
And the answer should be, if the classical theory were the case, well, because that's where the interests are, but the stoic theory of rhetoric or the stoic theory of matter or something like that should be selling like hotcakes because of the fact that it's connected up with this other stuff. So it does look like, at the very least, from the perspective of practitioners, that you can
00:26:17
Speaker
be practice stoic ethics without being committed to stoic logic. Why? Because there are a lot of people out there who are stoic practitioners who don't know a lick of stoic propositional logic. I mean, that seems very clear to me. I mean, just from reading a couple of them, it's pretty clear that they don't know any logic. Hey, yo, dad, shots fired. I'm not naming names. But the point here is that
00:26:41
Speaker
The proof of many puddings is in the eating. I think that the ancient Stoics wanted to say, it all comes as a big system, it all is one big thing. And maybe stoic ethics is easier to practice if you're committed to the logic and to the physics, if you think that it's all providence.
00:27:00
Speaker
And if you're committed to the infallible theory of knowledge, maybe being stoic, maybe being committed to stoic ethics is easier. Maybe there's a better and smoother on-ramp to stoic ethics. But I don't think that you have to be committed to that stuff. I think that you can be committed to the thought that the world's a place of random garbage, and stoic ethics is the best place to approach random garbage.
Stoicism's Accessibility and Modern Application
00:27:28
Speaker
the world is a place where you have very little knowledge. But you know what, still being a stoic about things is still the best approach there.
00:27:37
Speaker
I think that in that regard, I don't think that you have to be a determinist. I think that you could be an indeterminist and still think that stoic ethics is a good approach. A lot of the things that make stoic ethics more appealing and easier to practice are being committed to the determinism and being committed to the providentialism and being committed to the ways that stoic critical reflection works on the cognitive stuff.
00:28:03
Speaker
But it looks like you don't have to be. I mean, it seems to me that like you can, you can be committed to all the things that make up stoic ethics and maybe some things have to get revised here and there, but you can still kind of have roughly the same approach. Um, and so the, the longest answer is I don't think that you have to be committed to the, I'm, I'm a kind of a stoic minimalist. I'm really tempted by the stoic minimalism minimalist program, which is.
00:28:30
Speaker
Yeah, you can have stoic ethics and not have the logic or the physics. I kind of play with the other one. Like I kind of play with the stoic logic, right? And I'm like, okay, let's see if we can make this stuff work without the junk from the physics. Maybe stuff from the ethics will help, but it's not something that you can't go without.
00:28:49
Speaker
So in this regard, there's something about stoic minimalism that's kind of appealing to me. And again, that stoic minimalism can kind of come in various strengths. But it's that, yeah, you can kind of have parts of the stoic ethics or the stoic logic or the stoic physics and not have to have any of those other parts. Yeah, yeah. I think I broadly agree with that, but maybe think there's always some
00:29:12
Speaker
important points about, how do you think about traditions, cultures, not being too quick to cast aside something purely because it sounds a bit odd. So there's some amount of epistemic virtue in respecting what others thought and understanding why they had these beliefs about, whether it's providence or lecta, what have you, or the void.
00:29:37
Speaker
So there is always something to that, but I don't think there's some strict rule that you need to adopt the best understanding we have of Chrysippus' program and totality in order to be a stoic. I certainly don't think that's right.
00:29:52
Speaker
That again seems like a very mature approach there, Caleb. I have to admit that I am often very brusque with traditions. I'm not somebody who has the default attitude that traditions have got, who has accepted the default attitude that traditions have got and get default status.
00:30:16
Speaker
I'm inclined to think that, again, part of the issue here is like what's in the name, what exactly comes from the naming. I agree that for traditions to remain intelligible, they need to have some kind of same family resemblance over time. There needs to be a kind of a causal and a kind of
00:30:36
Speaker
Certainly a causal and certainly a kind of a content, a continuity there. I do wonder as to whether or not you have that point requires that we can say something like, can big tense stoicism still handle someone who says like me?
00:30:58
Speaker
I'm not really, I'm not really sure that there's a fundamental divide or I'm not really sure that the fundamental divide is really a thing. It's a thing that really, that we can only aspire to. Yeah. Yeah. I don't really think that the wise person never hears. I guess, right. Uh, I'm not entirely sure of that. Do I get to count? Do I get to be a stoic still? Uh, and again, this is the reason why I say like, well, you know, maybe I'm stowish and we can kind of have, have a little bit of a, but you know, uh,
00:31:25
Speaker
wanting to keep traditions as traditions. I totally appreciate that thought.
00:31:30
Speaker
Well, yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious, like how revisionary and minimal are you? Because when I hear you say you're not so sure about the fundamental divide, and I think I agree about there's some interpretations of the word control where you should be skeptical about the fundamental divide, but it does sound to me at least so far like you think there is a split between if you want to take it in terms of this sense of identity or what you're causally responsible for, you can make a fundamental divide in terms of
00:31:59
Speaker
I'm responsible for my faculties of reflection, ability to ascend, and then whatever follows from that, you know, the impulse. I do think, and then I can say that is my own and the proper Epictetus style. Everything else is coming in from me or emerging out from my judgments.
00:32:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think that if we are tracing this in terms of responsibility or ways that we might sort of think of ourselves as being successful at something, yeah, I think that that's right. It's just the point is that the fundamental divide often is put in terms of there being a kind of a direct control. And so I just don't believe in that. And so I think that we can have indirect control and I think we can have successes at it. And so in that regard,
00:32:47
Speaker
Yes, I do think that there is a fundamental divide. I just don't think that it's as the ancients had portrayed it to us or the realist as we might be heavily tempted to interpret them. Yeah. But did Epictetus think that? Because I suppose he does think that there are strong impulses and you're sort of forced to believe them or impressions and so on and desires. You don't have direct control over every. You don't have direct control over everyone. Yeah. That's right.
00:33:16
Speaker
So, I mean, maybe when he's in coaching mode, he's, and it's easily to interpret him as, you know, by the way, that's a, this is another kind of case where it, where it, I think that given the fact that we've got the Enchiridion and then right. And I really liked your expression to coaching mode. That does seem like a real insight there because the rhetoric that he's using there is one that it gives more oratory.
00:33:40
Speaker
that then theoretical and sometimes it's really important to remember that. And I think that the same thing goes with Seneca. I think that Seneca is regularly not always arguing in appropriate persona is often arguing in ways that makes it so that the point is accessible. And, uh, and, uh, there are lots of points like in add Marcia where I'm like, that does that even look stoic? I.
00:34:03
Speaker
Uh, and so the recognizably stoic, I'm unsure. Uh, so, uh, uh, I think that it's important that we as readers recognize, uh, that our, that our, that our forebears had other, had more purposes than just speaking to us. Right. Yeah. I always think that's, yeah, that's important there.
00:34:23
Speaker
And of course, they're always speaking to a particular audience and they might have said something different if they weren't talking to Roman aristocrats or in Marcus Aurelius' case himself. Well, is there any other topic you want to touch on? Last time we talked about something that, and you pressed me on it and I don't feel like I gave a good answer to it.
00:34:46
Speaker
And so I want to try again. So thanks for giving me a shot at getting another pass at it. But if we remember there was this, what I've been calling for years now, the ruin problem that comes along with stoicism. That's the one that I worry about the most. The ruin problem is the one that just bothers me about stoicism.
00:35:10
Speaker
And it's a place where, in fact, again, another intellectual have gone back to this character again, Antiochus of Ascalon.
00:35:19
Speaker
himself was worried about the ruin problem for stoicism too. And I think that there's something really, I don't think that Antiochus solves it. I'm not entirely sure if there is a solution to it. But again, I think the ruin problem is the hardest problem for stoicism. Again, that might be just me patting myself on the back, but I think there's a different kind of problem. And the ruin problem can kind of be stated in two ways. One is a kind of a theoretical one, another one is a kind of interpersonal one.
00:35:45
Speaker
The interpersonal one is that if you kind of go with that epithetus exercise of the jugs, right? Where it's like, hey, I got a jug or I got a mug that I'm kind of pleased with. I remind myself that it's just a mug and it'll break someday so that whenever it breaks it, it doesn't break me. And then you just do that for bigger things so that whenever you're kissing your wife or your child, you remind yourself that they're human beings and that they'll die one day and so that you won't be broken when they die.
00:36:15
Speaker
And, um, and the challenge isn't that. I don't think that it's true that reminding yourself of the sort of the shortness of, uh, your loved one's life makes it so that you don't love them anymore. Think like that. It doesn't ruin, it doesn't ruin that. It's the publicity of that them knowing you're a stoic, uh, them knowing that you are preparing for them to be lost and that you, so that you won't be destroyed whenever they leave.
00:36:43
Speaker
It's that it's so it's that you it's not that it ruins it for you. It's that it ruins it for them. Um, and here's another version of it. So that's the kind of the pre interpersonal practical version of it, that it ruins the relationship whenever it's clear that you're doing that as a stone that you say like, you're kissing your wife or you're kissing your child. And they're like, they're imagining me dead.
00:37:07
Speaker
Right. They're preparing for me to let them down or for me to disappoint them, for me to hurt their feelings or for me to die and not be there for them. And that's what they're thinking about now.
00:37:17
Speaker
And that seems to do something, again, this is the sort of the looping problem of the relationships.
Stoic Value Theory and Personal Relationships
00:37:24
Speaker
And here's another version of, and this is the theoretical version, which is stoicism is the view that only virtue is the good. The problem is that virtues are virtues. It seems to me that virtues are virtues. This just looks, again, this just looks as clear a principle to me as there ever is in ethics, which is virtues are virtues because they're productive of good things.
00:37:44
Speaker
And it can't just be that they're productive of more virtues. It just seems to be kicking the can down the road. The reason why being a truthful person is a good thing is because of the fact that you tell the truth. They're true beliefs or true statements on the other side. The reason why I'm a virtue of reliability is that I come through. The reason why the virtue of being humorous is a virtue is because of the fact that people get a laugh.
00:38:06
Speaker
that there are things outside and beyond the virtues that they're productive of that makes them good. Virtue can't be the only good because of the fact that virtues have got to be in that sort of, I'm in a causal relationship and a reliable causal relationship to something else that's good that I'm productive of and I'm playing a role in making happen. And that just seems like it's just a, like that just looks like that is just an utter and devastating objection to stoic value.
00:38:35
Speaker
that just looks like it's totally, it is such to use some sort of a gamer vocabulary that is such a headshot move on stoic value theory. Like I just, like I just find it a totally devastating objection. And so once you sort of see these two versions of the ruin problem,
00:38:54
Speaker
uh run hand in hand which is being a practicing stoic and being it being public which is hey you're exercising the virtues you're still kissing your wife you're still doing all the nice things for her you're still doing but now it's just it's not about her being happy it's not about you feeling the pleasure in it it's not about deepening this relationship it's about you doing your duty
00:39:16
Speaker
to this person and reminding yourself that this will be the end. And so despite the fact that your duties are comprised by your relations, doing your duties as a stoic ruins the relations. The virtues, if they are not for the things that the virtues are productive of, actually seem to stand in the way of the production of the things that the virtues are supposed to, that make the virtues good.
00:39:38
Speaker
So that, that just seems, that just seems so bad for stoicism. And it's one that it's again, a kind of one of these problems that, that, that, that again, makes me, makes me think that I'm not a stoic, makes me think I'm a bad, like, even though either I'm a bad stoic or not a stoic at all.
00:39:56
Speaker
Not a stoic at all. Well, I do want to say more about that first objection, because I think that's something we haven't touched on as much. And then listeners, go back to our previous conversation for the value problem, because we did dive into that, I thought, pretty clearly in depth.
00:40:17
Speaker
It's sort of interesting because that reminds me a little bit about an objection to some theories of morality that Bernard Williams has. He has this one thought too many objection to say like things like utilitarianism or strict forms of moral thought where, you know, say you're in a loving relationship with someone, but if you're utilitarian, you have this ethical ideal to be maximizing the good.
00:40:41
Speaker
whatever that is and you might come into positions where I know should I betray my romantic partner's trust and then you might ask well is what produces the most happiness or something like that and if you're just always asking that question for ordinary interactions you might think well the best person they don't in one of Epictetus's famous stories he says you know this great person they didn't even deliberate about the matter they didn't even think about whether they entertain Nero
00:41:09
Speaker
Likewise, in your loving relationships, you shouldn't even deliberate about betraying the other person's trust. And these sort of ethical theories give either yourself one thought too many, or in the case of the ruin objection for Stoicism, where they're thinking about, you know, are they less dependent on me, or do they even value me less because of their Stoicism?
00:41:32
Speaker
that is adding this one additional thought. You're always thinking about loss or protecting yourself instead of the relationship that could be potentially corrosive. So that's, I think, an interesting connection there. Yeah. And a really, boy, a great observation that it's got a kind of a one thought too many element to it.
00:41:54
Speaker
And it seems that the Williams line is regularly that it's not just, it feels like it's corrosive to the kind of character that you're trying to build and it's corrosive to the relationship. Like you wouldn't tell your significant other that you did the calculation.
00:42:13
Speaker
One part of the ruin problem is you might say the first personal version. The other one is the second personal version of the ruin problem and I and in some ways I don't think that so I think that the Williams one thought too many days has got a first personal problem that I don't think that the stoic version of the.
00:42:31
Speaker
of the ruin problem as God. I don't think that preparing yourself for the loss of a loved one diminishes your capacity to be present for them in the moment, for those moments that still have significance and salience. So there's one little disanalogy which is that I don't think that the first person, I don't think Stoicism's got the first personal version that the Williams case does. But I think that in this regard, there's a perfect analogy
00:42:57
Speaker
in the second person where they know that you're thinking about it, right? And I think that it's there that you get the aversion of the ruin problem. Now, here's a way that, again, this is more like a band-aid. I mean, this is me doing my best to be like, look, I'm rooting for stoicism. I've been thinking about this problem for a long time. And so I've only got band-aids. I don't have a balm. I don't have a solution. I've only got sort of ways to kind of paper over some problems.
00:43:26
Speaker
One of them is that we might be underselling the reflective seriousness of the people with whom Stoics are in loving relationships with them. So you might say, look, you know, if you have a romantic partner who says, am I just like a joke to you? Am I just a joke to you? That could be a joke.
00:43:52
Speaker
But the thought is that if that thought ruins the relationship, that in some ways expecting that the people that we love
00:44:02
Speaker
to not be that reflective and to not be able to appreciate that thought. It kind of sells them short. Now, again, though it's classically have pretty low opinions of the non philosophers. And so maybe that's sort of par for the course. But I think that if we think of the people with whom we share a lot of our lives as people
00:44:26
Speaker
That if they found out about our stoic, the stoic attitudes that we have and the exercises that we go through, they might understand it. They might be able to see it and they might say like, well, you know, that's, I don't think that that's right, but I think that they may actually have a higher tolerance for that. The, that looping version of the sort of the ruin problem is really based on really low expectations of non-stoics.
00:44:49
Speaker
Yeah, that seems right to me because you were thinking about what is the thought that the other person has in their mind? Is it that they wish the other person was, you know, the stoic was more dependent on them? Then it seems like they're making a kind of mistake. But is it more like the thought that maybe there's some amount of
00:45:09
Speaker
tragedy and the fact that this isn't the ideal story where two people who are destined for each other meet one another and can't have a meaningful life without the fact that they met one another and think fate or nature or whatever have you that they did meet each other because otherwise everything would be terrible and you have sort of this almost cartoonish type version of romantic relationships but also some of our deeper
00:45:39
Speaker
friendships, I think, as well, can can high up this kind of character. But I think there's a sense in which all of us are drawn towards those narratives where we think, yeah, if my wife had ever met me, then probably she would have found someone else to fall in love with and start a family, perhaps. And there is this contingency. And it's something one is coming to terms with, whether one's a stoic or not, I would hope.
00:46:05
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that given the fact that we all know that we don't know how it's going to end.
Conclusion and Reflections
00:46:13
Speaker
We don't know how our lives are going to end. We don't know how our relationships are end. All of our relationships will end because we end.
00:46:24
Speaker
Living and loving and living and being in these relationships with our eyes open to that and wanting those relationships to be whole and so that things are not unfinished is in some ways a really mature way. That's kind of how grownups really should be doing it, not constantly pushing off the, hey, I'm going to be totally present with you as though maybe tomorrow, we don't know what tomorrow is for us.
00:46:52
Speaker
So, um, our lives need to be complete in every moment. Uh, that's kind of the Mark's realize he kind of thought, but you know, uh, that's in some ways kind of what the, what those, what those exercises are supposed to do. So, you know, there, there is a kind of a strategy of seeing this certainly from the first person, maybe from the second person is deepening it. Um, the theoretical version is still one that again, that,
00:47:20
Speaker
If so far that so far this is just about like, okay, we've got, we've got being a stoic pressure practitioner has the possibility, not that now not the guarantee that it can sort of ruin the relationship or change the relationship in being in part of the relationship.
00:47:38
Speaker
The issue still is if the value of doing the duty for the ones with whom you're sharing your life is just for the sake of doing duty. Again, the virtue is just the only good thing. That looks again like it's still not looking out beyond.
00:48:01
Speaker
even the established and deepened relationship, like we were just talking about like, okay, we do these things and we deepen the relationship. And then you say, that's still a consequence, right? That's still looking beyond doing the virtuous thing, right? And it's there that, again, I keep coming back and thinking, man, you know, all the ways that we were just trying to wrestle with the second person version of this,
00:48:27
Speaker
still put it in terms of it establishing some other good beyond the action that we were doing. And maybe that's again, sort of, hey, you get more duties and right, but, but that still looks like it kind of puts things out beyond your control.
00:48:44
Speaker
It requires that the other other people play along. It requires that fate kind of has to kind of play a place of it so that those overtures and those gestures and those, those caretaking things that we do actually are successful. And, you know, anyone who has ever tried to have a date night knows the fate gets in the way of the head all the time. And even when both people want it to happen.
00:49:04
Speaker
And so look, you know, the reality is that all the things that we did to justify them and the second person will look like they actually fail whenever we see it from the theoretical perspective.
00:49:18
Speaker
Again, it kind of anguishes me a little bit that that second part of the problem looks like it's really, really hard to solve. I think that the only way to kind of think of it is to instead of thinking it from the first person or the second person, but to kind of think of it from the third person, from the perspective of nature and saying like, okay,
00:49:37
Speaker
You're in some ways, what your job here is to be the kind of creature that you are doing the things that you do and that's your role and you're doing that, right? And so you play the role that you play and that's the good. Full stop.
00:49:55
Speaker
Now again, that has to require that you kind of play way, way, way, way out and say like, okay, from the perspective of nature, you're playing the role that you need to be playing. And that's the only good that you need to be doing. That's the only good you being you doing the virtue. And so whether or not there are successes or the deepenings that we were talking about from that.
00:50:14
Speaker
uh, from that, the, the ruined perspective from the interpersonal version. Um, and again, that looks like it's a pretty good way of kind of massaging it where you say, okay, look, you have to pull way, way out. See it. Not for me, not from the perspective of me, not for the perspective of us, but from the perspective of that third perspective, like that human being is doing the thing that they need to be doing and try to be the kind of creature that, that it is.
00:50:46
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds, it's, initially you're knocking on the systemic approach and all of a sudden, it sounds like we need stoic physics. What is this? We need stoic physics. We need, right. That's exactly it. You have to, like, I was, I was kind of like, look, I'm kind of a minimalist and a lot of this was kind of working on this minimalist program. But now I said it was like, now from the perspective of nature, now from the perspective of Providence, now from the perspective of God's play that he's cast me in a role, uh, have to do a whole lot of other things that look like things get contextualized from outside the ethics. You are correct, sir.
00:51:16
Speaker
Yeah, I do think there is something to, maybe you don't need the stoic, the traditional stoic picture of providence, but it does seem like one needs some account of nature to ground stoic ethics. And yes, there are non-providential ways to do that, but I think it's something to think through.
00:51:37
Speaker
Excellent. Well, this has been a blast. I feel like I have a better sense of some of these objections, what you think. I hope I pushed back in a useful way and touched on some of our disagreements in a productive manner. Absolutely, Caleb. I really appreciate doing philosophy with you.
00:51:56
Speaker
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00:52:14
Speaker
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