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Will Johncock On Why Stoics Shouldn't Ignore Their Social Nature (Episode 54)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this conversation Caleb speaks with Will Johncock, the philosopher, sociologist and author of Beyond the Individual: Stoic Philosophy on Community and Connection.
Will’s work highlights the deeply social aspect of Stoicism and offers an essential frame for thinking about our own lives, the lives of the people around us, and our world.
Will reminds us that we share our nature with the world and people around us. This provides a source of meaning and guidance.
https://willjohncock.com/
(03:28) The Individual and Social Aspects of Stoicism
(07:54) Being Social
(13:38) Rationality in the Universe
(18:59) Egoism
(29:52) Autonomy Culture
(36:17) Virtue
(38:58) The Problem of Evil
(42:56) Moral Luck
(46:58) History or Life Philosophy?
***
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoicism and Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
And for those people to be courageous enough to truly adopt the philosophy, they're going to have to be open to a world which is threatening, which has potentially brought them to this position to begin with. And yet Stoic philosophy is going to say that very world that seems threatening, that is you have a kinship with that world. And, and so that to me would be an exemplification of the courage that Stoicism requires.
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with and experts.
Interview with Will Johncock on Stoicism and Community
00:00:42
Speaker
And in this conversation, I speak with Will Johncock, philosopher, sociologist, and author of Beyond the Individual, Stoic Philosophy on Community and Connection.
00:00:54
Speaker
Will reminds us that socialism calls us to be free individuals and social beings that thrive in communities, relationships, and nature. The fact that we share our human nature with the world and people around us provides a source of meaning and guidance.
00:01:10
Speaker
Will's work highlights the deeply social aspect of Stoicism and offers an essential frame for thinking about our own lives, the lives of the people around us, and our world. Here is our conversation. Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Vonseveros, and today I am speaking with Will Johncock. Thanks for joining. Not a problem, Caleb. Thanks for having me on the show.
00:01:41
Speaker
Well, let's start with this broad question, which you can answer whichever way you like. What is your story? What brought you to writing the book beyond the individual? So I began studying philosophy at undergraduate level. And before that, I'd been reading philosophy as a teenager. And so that comprised the usual text and the usual eras with Plato and Aristotle.
00:02:08
Speaker
And in the commentaries around those classical works, the Stoics did pop up, but they weren't the focus of the attention.
Stoicism's Social Nature and Human Connection
00:02:16
Speaker
And so then when I went into graduate studies later, I was studying continental 20th century philosophy and a few of my, a few of the thinkers that I encountered there were making references to the Stoics. The spark was made.
00:02:34
Speaker
around 12, 13 years ago. And I think this is at the point when Stellicism is starting to get a lot more of a public profile. And given the my area, my interest in philosophy had been in social questions largely and questions around interrelationship and interconnection.
00:02:52
Speaker
I thought I can see a way to adapt my expertise and my interest in these areas to a series of writings about stoicism which explore aspects of the philosophy which aren't getting a lot of public attention, or at least aren't the focus of that public attention.
00:03:09
Speaker
And so that was how I came to write about stoicism. Excellent. So stoicism provides the means to develop an inner citadel. There's this focus on features like resilience, this idea that only your opinions about things are the source of harms as opposed to the external things themselves.
00:03:30
Speaker
So that's one aspect of the philosophy, and it's one that we promote at Stowe that many other people promote as well. And then you have this other aspect where the philosophy focuses on the virtues that are other-focused. And you have this social aspect. You include what is beyond the individual.
Stoic Determinism and Individual Resilience
00:03:50
Speaker
So how do you put together these two aspects of the philosophy into a single vision?
00:03:57
Speaker
they're both integral and I don't mean in any way to diminish the focus on the self because that is part of the philosophy and that's how it speaks to so many people. I think that that premise that you mentioned that you have the inner citadel and then you have the external features of the world over which you have no control and the question about why we don't have control over these other things is because for the Stoics
00:04:26
Speaker
that external set of phenomena are entirely determined. There's nothing we can do about them. They're already fated to happen as they do. So it's not necessarily that we don't have control over them because someone else does or because our fellow humans have control of them. The stoics are determinist and so they're
00:04:50
Speaker
conception of the universe is of one that is already laid out. And so that's why the resilience is required because there is no other way to be, if you're going to accept that feature of the Stoic universe, there is no other mentality you can have that would be in accordance or concordance with that world unless you were to accept that fate. So that's an integral part of the inner life of the Stoic is to accept that nature, is to accept that world.
00:05:19
Speaker
So then what does it mean to be social? How do I compliment or how do we compliment that inner resilience that you mentioned with this imperative towards being social? Well, what the Stoics mean by social is to recognize that you and I and everyone else shares that relationship with the world. We all have this inner capacity to accept the nature of the world and to accept that we can choose or not to be as
00:05:47
Speaker
happiness is the translated English term, but is to live in a way that is well and to live in a way that as well as to mentally accept that all we have control over is to accept that relationship between our internal mind, which is, which is our citadel, as you mentioned, and this world beyond us, which is already
00:06:08
Speaker
rolling out a chain of sequences, a chain of causes and events. Now the Stoics, when they talk about being social, they warn us not to be too distracted by gossip, by things that people say about us, by what is happening socioeconomically, by a whole range of what they would call external factors of communal living. When people physically live together,
00:06:38
Speaker
And Seneca in particular will warn us about this, Marcus Aurelius also mentions that we should not be too occupied with that aspect of society, of social life. And that's one aspect of the social life that they refer to, but it's not the entirety of it. What they really mean, what our true social nature is, is that capacity to recognize our interconnection.
00:07:01
Speaker
and our capacity to recognize that we are all one and the same, in that we are all fated in the same way, in that we are all pieces of a world system, if you like, that, you know, they talk about us being parts of a whole, we're all fragments of a whole, we're all traces of a
Stoic Philosophy: Roles and Community Integration
00:07:18
Speaker
whole. And so that's our social nature, is to recognize that kinship that we have with each other, because we all share the same constitution.
00:07:26
Speaker
And so it's very important to distinguish the mundane, if you like, aspects of social life from what the Stoics would call our true or essential social nature. Right. So when you say it's important to be social, we're not picking out features of
00:07:43
Speaker
the world that the Stoics might call indifference, things like gossip, someone's reputation or something of this sort, but rather the fact that we are part of a larger whole and part of what it is to be
00:08:00
Speaker
beings like us is to play particular roles in this whole in communities, families, cities, and so on. Exactly. And the part to whole relationship, the individual to the greater system relationship is, is the key to understanding the social function and the social arrangement for the Stoics. And it manifests in really practical ways that I, even though I
00:08:27
Speaker
believe this, this philosophy and I, and I comprehensively have studied it day to day. It's still quite hard to walk around and remember that you are part of an integrated whole and to remember that if you're stuck in traffic, for instance, the
00:08:43
Speaker
The priority is not you. The priority of the system is, is, is, is the system itself and you are an expression of it. You are one part of its overall mechanics and it's very hard to remember that sometimes. And I think that's the challenge the Stoics will ask us to, to rise to when we encounter frustration in, in, in our day-to-day life.
00:09:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. Michael and I had a just recorded a recent conversation on the view from above, which is the practice of looking down, you know, there are different ways to do it. But you can sort of imagine zooming out and imagine picturing your life as it fits in your local community, zooming out further.
00:09:23
Speaker
and enlarging your community to the earth to consider larger spans of time and so on. And I think what that exercise does is it makes salient to you, picks out features of the world that the Stoic sync are of its central importance, namely that you are a part of a much larger thing and you play specific roles within that organism, if you will, if you want to use that metaphor. So I think that's a crucial part of the Stoic practice, absolutely.
00:09:52
Speaker
Yeah, in that regard, I think the view from above is so important and it would be a great thing for people to learn from a young age. And to me it explains why Stellasism is a philosophy of humility. It's about recognizing your status in relation to something bigger than you and the thing that is bigger than you is responsible for you in many ways, for you being who you are to some degree.
00:10:16
Speaker
And therefore, whilst so much of stoic commentary is around strength and resilience, and it should be because that is the effect of adopting and applying stoic principles. Fundamentally, it all, I think, sparks from this recognition of humility and this recognition of yourself in relationship to the entire whole and in relation to, and then you can look at that through, as you said, this view from above perspectives.
Rationality and Universal Order in Stoicism
00:10:45
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Parts of your book remind me of the philosopher Alastair McIntyre. He has a set of lectures called dependent rational animals, which the set of lectures themselves are rather dense. So I'm not sure if I would refer them to you as a listener, but the term I think is very useful to keep in mind.
00:11:02
Speaker
You have this focus on rationality, the Stoics emphasize, many Western philosophers emphasize this part, but there's also the dependency that's fundamental to being human in rather obvious ways, but also some more subtle ways as well, being dependent on people who produce goods on different continents now, being dependent on institutions that have been created over decades.
00:11:30
Speaker
And so I think that's a very useful phrase, at least for me, to keep in mind of what is a human rational dependent animal. Yeah, the topic of rationality has to be central when you're discussing the Stoics, doesn't it? And so in a way, it does dependency.
00:11:49
Speaker
When we think of rationality conventionally, we think of someone's individuality and internality. How do they consistently apply themselves to certain things day to day? How do we see themselves as a recognizable thinking creature? There are all these associations of the individual with rationality. And I think one thing I want to emphasize in the book is that whilst the Stoics are adamant that we have our own rationality and we apply it as best we can for
00:12:19
Speaker
For them, when we look at what our rationality is, it's something that we've inherited. It's something that we've adopted from the world itself. And so we get this very different sense of rationality, which is of a trace of something bigger than ourselves. And so then for me in the book, the key is when the Stoics describe rationality as order.
00:12:40
Speaker
So the way that things are ordered consistently and that's how they'll characterize the universe as rational because it is ordered. When Epictetus talks about the flowers blooming consistently and the planet circling consistently, this for the Stoics is not just, it's not just consistency, it is literally what they call rationality. And so then we derive our individual human
00:13:05
Speaker
idea of rationality from that and therefore you get that dependence that idea of what is our rationality dependent on well it has an origin which is which doesn't begin with ourselves it doesn't even begin with our species it begins with something much bigger
00:13:22
Speaker
So how do you explain that idea that rationality itself has a grounding in something non-human in order? So if you think about many ordered systems, it's not obvious that they have what we often call rationality, which we tend to... I don't know how many...
00:13:41
Speaker
what the most common sociological description of rationality is, but many people might describe it in sort of a human way where you have goals, beliefs, and a rational agent is able to figure out the means to realize their goals given their beliefs, which does not include this other idea of order, perhaps. So how do you make sense of that?
00:14:04
Speaker
Well, with the Stoics, of course, do ascribe intention to the world. It's not random. Things don't happen haphazardly.
00:14:13
Speaker
So, first of all, with rationality for the Stokes, you've got intention. There is a structure to it, let's say. And so when we therefore have our own rationality, we have to be intentional creatures. This goes back to the idea of, for the Stokes, how present are we when we're thinking? And presence therefore will comprise intentionality. And
00:14:37
Speaker
that I think is the grounding of the rationality for the Stoics, is this recognition of our rationality and our thinking as being a component part of a greater rational system, but then also thinking with intention. And what is intention? Well, it's bound up in
00:14:57
Speaker
everything that Epictetus will talk about regarding training, training the mind, the habit that is required, where you get this routine, this again, where we use, I'm using these terms, which are synonymic with synonymous rather with, with a lot of the terms that we're using for reliability and consistency and the plants and the planets. So a lot of these definitions are interconnecting, but
00:15:20
Speaker
Definitely, I think the notion of intention is important, the notion of training and grounding and recognizing that when you think in a way that's rational, you think in a way that is in concert with everything around you. And so that's probably one of the aspects of the book that is important to raise.
00:15:40
Speaker
Being an individual in this regard is not about being standing out from the crowd, so to speak. It's not about separating yourself, but rather for the Stoics. It's like being a rational individual is about being part of the world around you and being, and when you do that, then of course they say your life will be comprised well-being and you'll be living in a flow that is in your nature and is in the nature of the, of everything around you.
Individual Responsibility and Rationality in Stoicism
00:16:07
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you have this idea of the nature as ordered, but not merely ordered, it has an intention, purpose, or providence. And that's the traditional Stoic idea, those two aspects.
00:16:23
Speaker
of order providence give rise to rationality or at any rate you could say, as you do in your book, human rationality is a fragment of that larger or a trace of that larger system that is ordered and has a sense of goal-directedness or providence.
00:16:46
Speaker
Yeah, and this is an important point in terms of the history of Western philosophy, because the history of Western philosophy will typically ascribe human rationality a very different way to everything else that's going on in the world. And for the Stoics, of course, they'll recognize that we have a rationality that is by, let's say, by kind, the same kind of thing as the rationality of the rest of the world, but by degree,
00:17:14
Speaker
therefore indicating it might even be quantifiable, it's quantifiably different to the rationality of our fellow animal creatures, right? So we can look at other creatures in the world who are rationalized in the sense that they are living and operating in consistency with everything around them as part of that aforementioned system. So they're rationalized by the world, but
00:17:42
Speaker
their internal rationality, what the Stoics would call, let's say, they just don't embody rationality in the same way. So the Stoics are setting up this scale of rationality, this idea that humans somehow have a different responsibility to other animal creatures because of the different degree of rationality that we have been invested with.
00:18:06
Speaker
What does that actually mean day to day for the average person? Well, I think it's somewhat of a call to arms to take responsibility for your thought and to realize that you are a thinking reasoning creature. It's, it's an opportunity for you to live a life of great wellbeing. You can analyze what is happening. You can consciously and intentionally live in accordance with what seems to be the best way to live.
00:18:31
Speaker
you're not at the mercy of the world. And why not? Well, for the Stoics, because they will sit us at top of this, well, almost at top of this ladder of rationality.
00:18:43
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, there's one reading of stoicism that someone might take from some works is that, okay, now I have the tools to make myself resilient. I can identify what is up to me and what is not. And that means all I need to focus on are my decisions and judgments that's relevant to my own purposes. And it's that last phrase, my own purposes that would
00:19:11
Speaker
be where the mistake is made, which is that what's up to you isn't merely your own selfish end. So you're not made to pursue your own selfish ends, but are a part of, as we keep on saying, a much, much larger picture. So it's an argument against the egoist type view or the overly individualist view, which usually doesn't show up in such a, the crude way I sketched it out. But, you know, of course you do see people make
00:19:39
Speaker
particular moves and say that this sort of thing is not up to me, so I will leave it be, which may or not
Stoicism vs. Modern Self-help and Community Focus
00:19:47
Speaker
be correct. I think what your book reminded me of is that, no, you always need to step back and ask, is this a social role? Maybe I've inherited, is this something that might be my responsibility even if it's not immediately clear that it pertains to me, just because of the kind of thing you are. Many, you're a part in a much larger system.
00:20:08
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot to say in response to the, this is a great point. First of all, this argument isn't meant to negate the notion of your individual responsibility and your sense of individual self, but at the same time, it is meant to, let's say compliment a whole series of works, which have been published in the public market, which do focus on applying stoicism for self-help reasons, for ways to get to know yourself, all of these kinds of works. And my book isn't meant to in any way.
00:20:36
Speaker
negate those arguments, it's rather just meant to compliment those on the, the bookshelves of the modern stoic libraries. And to say that the thing which you are doing, which seems to be oriented towards their own prosperity, that's fine. But for the stoics, you must always be doing that in a way which is conscious of how, what seems to be your prosperity is also integrated with the prosperity of everything around you and everyone around you.
00:21:02
Speaker
And that's a very counterintuitive thing, I think, to try to embody when you grow up in a country like Australia or the United States or countries which do have an increasing focus on individual outcomes, goals, prosperity.
00:21:20
Speaker
That's the battle, I think. And I think the most commercially successful works that have been written on stoicism do focus on how can you apply stoicism to your own life. And I think some of the more interesting scholarly works, and of which there are many, they do provide a more blended account of the philosophy and they do integrate or contextualize your own prosperity within this greater prosperity.
00:21:46
Speaker
It's a harder argument to sell, right? If there's a book on the shelf in the shop and you're not really acquainted with philosophy, but you're looking for something that you perceive to be deeper than day-to-day discussion,
Stoicism's Popularity and Misinterpretations
00:22:02
Speaker
i.e. philosophy, and you're looking for a way that philosophy can assist you, then you're probably not going to be drawn to the books which are telling you that actually
00:22:13
Speaker
You need to be humble. You need to recognize that you're a part of a whole unit. You're going to look for books that say, here is a way that you can use a two and a half thousand year old philosophy to make your life better, to make you more strong, to make you more resilient. You will not feel pain anymore. All of these kinds of like grand claims. Those are the books which are going to, which are, and will get much more appeal commercially and, and just in the public attention. And.
00:22:43
Speaker
It's arguable that no philosophy in the history of Western philosophy has had more attention in terms of the sheer number of people who are aware of it at any point in time than Stoic philosophy has right now, which is a remarkable thing to think about.
00:22:58
Speaker
If that is true, then with that comes an incredible responsibility from everyone who's given a voice or a platform regarding it to portray it in an accurate way. And I think it's important not just because we want to do service to the philosophy, but also because of the good that can manifest from applying the philosophy.
00:23:21
Speaker
If someone comes to the philosophy and they're riddled with anxiety, if they're having self-doubts and they come to the philosophy and it's presented in a way which says you're an individual, you need to look after the terrain of your mind. You need to rebuff any of the external threats that you encounter day to day. It's a world of you and the rest, and you need to set up that division. I can't help but think that.
00:23:45
Speaker
For the person who has come to the philosophy feeling anxious, feeling worried, feeling self-doubt, that would make them feel more anxious, more self-doubt, and would completely compromise any good the philosophy could provide. And therefore, it's my approach that the philosophy serves people best, even in a self-help regard, if it is portrayed in a way which says,
00:24:09
Speaker
The thing that you're at that you feel alienated by, i.e. the rest of the world, guess what? You share all this stuff according to this ancient philosophy. You're actually in kinship with it. You're part of it. You're a system together. That to me feels like a better way to approach mental health applications of the stoic philosophy than to set up this tense border between you and the rest of the world.
00:24:31
Speaker
Yeah, many people, they first come to stoicism because they've had some emergency or personal crisis. Not everyone. There are many ways people discover the philosophy, but this is certainly one common pattern. And then those who stick with it find that it's useful for addressing that, whatever problem they have. And then they see also there's an entire vision of what it is to live a good life.
00:24:55
Speaker
And that's the self-help aspect. The therapeutic aspect becomes a ladder to a bigger view of what the philosophy ends up being. I think I've seen that both in my own life, to some extent, and the lives of many people who I've interacted with, who are Stoics. Yeah, it's really...
00:25:20
Speaker
remarkable for me in that I've been reading philosophy for 30 odd years now. And to see philosophy mentioned so often in the public sphere and in a way which is really, really like philosophy of lifestyle practical, it's amazing. I don't really know what to say about that. It's quite a novelty that philosophy would be so central in
00:25:45
Speaker
in psychological techniques and not just be bound up in academia and not just be bound up in intellectual exercises. There is that really appealing purchase of it, but then there is also, I think, a lot more underneath that that could even help further in terms of its application to the public.
00:26:05
Speaker
There's also always this rule of equal and opposite advice, I think, where some people are drawn to the individualist parts of stoicism, at least how stoicism is portrayed, and some of those people
00:26:21
Speaker
really do need to draw boundaries around what others have been demanding of them or what they think. Others are owed, whereas other people, they might have the opposite problem. They are too individualist as it stands and what they learn are different techniques for pursuing their own ends. So I think that's always a useful thing to keep in mind, especially when we're talking about things at this level of
00:26:47
Speaker
generality that some person might be to meek or not draw clear personal boundaries. Something like a more individualist philosophy may in fact be quite good for them to hear at the practical level. Yeah. And any of these discussions, as I said earlier, shouldn't in any way try to eradicate the notion of the self or the notion of the individual in many ways, part of the
00:27:11
Speaker
The ultimate practice of stoicism should be to live in a way whereby you are living with a mindset of what benefits you because you're so ingrained to know that what benefits you benefits the whole as
Applying Stoicism in Daily Life
00:27:23
Speaker
well. And so it's not necessarily about being selfless. This isn't a philosophy of complete altruism. It is rather one where there's a real symmetry between yourself and what isn't yourself.
00:27:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. We mentioned the view from above earlier, and I think once you get to that larger perspective, the point of the exercise isn't so much to stay there, but to remember that you are still this particular thing. How do you integrate where the space you occupy with everything else? And it's that, you know, the sage has the integrated perspective of the whole, and so the part that they occupy.
00:28:00
Speaker
I feel like a starting point for people if they were looking to adopt a broader or more expansive view of how to apply the philosophy could just be in moments where you get frustrated or in moments where you get angry with other people, with your fellow humans, to start thinking every, have a habit of thinking every time that happens.
00:28:21
Speaker
I'm not the priority here. So if someone's slowing me down, if someone's interfering with what I wanted to do, but they're not doing it in a way which is necessarily antagonistic intentionally towards me, they're just going about their day as well. How can we rephrase that, reframe that to think, okay,
00:28:40
Speaker
They're doing exactly what I'm doing. They have the same kinds of intentions as I do. They're not trying to slat me intentionally. How can I recognize that this interaction is one that a greater like set of moving parts has to arrange in a way that I might not necessarily always be the primary beneficiary. And also to what extent does what's happening now really affect what I want to do. And the classic.
00:29:09
Speaker
case for me is driving, I find traffic to be quite a frustrating feature of life. And so it is important sometimes to therefore think, okay, if someone is, if someone is, or if a collective set of, you know, conditions are preventing me from getting where I want to go as quickly as I need to, to what extent can I remember that I'm actually not the priority here?
00:29:36
Speaker
So to what extent do you see this as a criticism of autonomy culture? And to say more about what I mean, once I met someone who said they didn't love their parents and they didn't love their parents, not because they are especially abusive, but because they felt like
00:29:53
Speaker
in order to properly love someone, they should be someone who, if they met them at a party, they would be affectionate towards and have enough in common with and want to build a kind of relationship. Which I thought was a very nice way of capturing autonomy.
00:30:09
Speaker
culture, which is that the only social bonds that matter are ones that we would choose in some kind of idealized situations. And bonds with our family, our city, are partial arbitrary things that, you know, now that we're in a more enlightened liberal state, we can see are not important.
00:30:34
Speaker
That's a big question, of course, but do you see yourself as sort of critiquing that worldview? Well, in some regard, it just has to, I guess, but there are going to be qualifications there. If this was questioning any sense of autonomy at all, then yes, in the regard that everything about you that appears to be autonomous is not.
00:31:04
Speaker
In the book, I look at how our mind, for instance, which seems to be something that is really individualized or personalized, is to some extent a fragment of something that isn't autonomous. We therefore then are given a certain control over it, but
00:31:22
Speaker
The conditions for it and indeed the constitution of it is not autonomous. Our bodies are the same thing. Our bodies are these pieces of something that we have derived and the origin therefore of our bodies is not ourselves. So bodily autonomy is also.
00:31:39
Speaker
seriously questioned in the book. The way that we care for ourself in the book is reframed. And for the way of the stoic, say, if you're caring for yourself, it's actually where you are recognizing that how you care for yourself is integrated with how you care for other people. And so it goes on and on and on. And so whether in that regard, the book is a real challenge to questions of anything about us being entirely autonomous.
Loyalty and Community Responsibility in Stoicism
00:32:04
Speaker
I would not be able to disagree with that characterization of the book.
00:32:08
Speaker
This doesn't mean therefore that we have no control over what we choose or what we do. That's a different matter entirely. But if there was a worldview which said, I'm an autonomous creature, everything about me is independent and individualized, and so do you, and we have to respect each other's individual independence from each other, then
00:32:34
Speaker
I would find that probably too reductive. And so yes, the book would challenge that kind of characterization of, let's say autonomous life. Yeah. Yeah. So I suppose we have, in terms of practical upshots, we have reminders to view yourself as a part of a larger system. And then also the idea that you already inherit or are dependent on these things outside of yourself and whatever.
00:33:01
Speaker
It's possible that many people have to individualize a picture. And then my question is, now that you have these two things in mind, what are the correct social roles? Now, if you think about things like, does this mean you have more loyalty to either your family, your city, institutions that have lasted for quite a long time? One way to phrase it would be,
00:33:28
Speaker
Is this more of a small c conservative type picture or not conservative in the way that's localized in many different forms of national politics, but in the sense that
00:33:40
Speaker
both people from right or left have different pictures of having obligations to your community, your tribe, your family in a way that is often opposed to people who have more what might sometimes be called liberal or autonomy focused visions of life where you get to choose. You came into the world with a certain talents and a place, but once those are fixed, you can choose what you do. Whereas someone else might think, no, you came into the world and now you have
00:34:10
Speaker
If not, perhaps obligations, at least part of you is to serve the interests of your family, your city. Yeah, look, stoic philosophy is a practical philosophy. And so we do need at some point to focus on the concrete or material aspects of day-to-day life. And I don't think that always will comprise thinking of your membership of a worldwide community.
00:34:35
Speaker
I think it will more emphasize the fact that you have these people around you who are in your local neighborhood, who are your friends, who are your family, and that's where your first allegiances will lie simply because they're the people with whom you're interacting the most.
00:34:53
Speaker
When we look at the characterizations of this worldwide cosmopolis, as we've come to describe it, through Hierocles, or even when Cicero, who's not a stoic, but when he's laying out the same kind of template in his commentaries on the stoics,
00:35:12
Speaker
They do emphasize that we have all of these responsibilities to people with whom we will never interact, people will never meet. But nevertheless, they do remind us that our most important responsibilities are to those people who are firstly around us and we shouldn't lose sight of those most intimate relations. Because if we lose them, then in a way we lose sense of
00:35:34
Speaker
what it means to be connected to anyone. And Aristotle makes a somewhat similar argument. So there's a long history of recognition of our responsibility to people beyond our local sphere whilst at the same time reminding us that we shouldn't leave us members of a worldwide cosmopolis and forget about our responsibilities to our family members. So there are both sides to the story there.
00:36:01
Speaker
Right, right. How does this picture change if at all how people tend to think about the four virtues? So if you take one, courage, often you could explain courage either in the Aristotelian sense as falling in between the vices of recklessness or cowardice, or perhaps in one stoic sense would be to describe it as the knowledge of knowing what to avoid. How does your work, your thinking,
00:36:29
Speaker
change or enrich that picture of a virtue like courage. I think courage and humility are inherently linked here for the Stoics. How do you live in a way where you can recognize that you are part of this system and that you are always going to have to live in accordance with something which is bigger than yourself? I think that that requires a lot of courage. I think the invulnerability that is sometimes described of the philosophy
00:36:58
Speaker
also has to integrate this recognition that to see yourself as part of a social blob, a universal material blob, which shares characteristics with other people, it actually requires a certain vulnerability. It requires a certain capacity to see yourself as a porous being. And by that, I mean someone who is part of this web, as Marcus Aurelius will eloquently describe, and
00:37:24
Speaker
Therefore, I think courage and it's one of those classic cases where courage and vulnerability have to be mentioned in the same breath. And so it is a philosophy of resilience. It is a philosophy of inner strength, but it is also a philosophy where courage isn't about being the strongest person or exhibiting the strongest characteristics, but rather it's one of recognizing yourself as this creature, which is open. It's open to everything around you, which can be incredibly threatening.
00:37:53
Speaker
If you think about our earlier discussion with the people who come to stoic philosophy after having experienced an emergency, a crisis, a period of anxiety or depression or self-doubt, and for those people to be courageous enough to truly adopt the philosophy in the way that it's intended means that they're going to have to be open to a world which is threatening, which has potentially brought them to this position to begin with.
Courage and Vulnerability in Stoicism
00:38:21
Speaker
because they've been so let's say broken by what is threatening about the world. And yet Stoic philosophy is going to say that very world that seems threatening, that is you have a kinship with that world. And so that to me would be like an exemplification of the courage that Stoicism requires.
00:38:41
Speaker
Right. It's, in some sense, a demanding call to loved ones' fates for many people. That's just where on the surface, even once you've gone past the surface, it seems like there's maybe nothing to love in certain things that's happened.
00:39:01
Speaker
You have this the classic problem of evil for traditional Stoics, just as you have it for many monotheists or religious types. How do you make sense of any idea of providence in a world with so much apparent suffering and tragedy? Yes, and of course they tell us that we will encounter this. We should expect to encounter this.
00:39:30
Speaker
therefore we get this sense of the world being the perfect physical body, right, for the Stoics. My main interest when I began exploring Stoicism comprehensively was the physics, was how they discussed the way that the world physically interacts of everything being bodied.
Suffering and the Problem of Evil in Stoicism
00:39:48
Speaker
And so therefore we do get this
00:39:51
Speaker
overall physical thing which is described as a perfect entity, is described as experiencing happiness or being happiness perfectly. But at the same time, within this perfect system, there'll be moments of imperfection or apparent imperfection.
00:40:09
Speaker
where we will see anger and irrationality manifest, and we will manifest it ourselves. And so we should expect that. And it is indeed through anticipating those moments that the Stoic mantras, the Stoic trainings are meant to be enacted, isn't it?
00:40:26
Speaker
If it was not for those moments, then there would be no need for stoicism to begin with. If it was not for the capacity of people to think freely and therefore to think irrationally, ironically, that therefore we would not need the philosophy to begin with. So the problem of evil, the problem of imperfection within the system
00:40:49
Speaker
is in some way the origin of the philosophy itself. And yeah, without that, it would be this perfectly running, entirely determined system. And so the window of freedom of course, is our minds and our capacity to, to behave rationally.
00:41:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's certainly right for many people in terms of their personal stories about how they end up encountering Stoicism, as well as, I suppose, the stories of many ancient philosophers who encounter it through one disaster or another, their life turned upside down, what their plans of being an exceptionally successful merchant are forced to change, or what have you, as in the case of Zeno, the founder.
Virtues, Intentionality, and Rational Happiness
00:41:35
Speaker
Yeah, even 20th century philosophy explores evil in really interesting ways. One of the more interesting might be Hannah Arendt's characterization of when after the, after World War II, when the main players in the Nazi party, some of them went on trial for what happened during World War II. And Hannah Arendt, who is Jewish, describes evil as being quite banal. And she received quite a backlash from the Jewish community as a result of her characterization of
00:42:04
Speaker
one particular person in the Nazi party, Eichmann, as being a banal, his evil was quite banal, and what she meant, and there were quite a few layers to her argument, but one of the things that she meant was that this is a very ordinary person living a very ordinary life, and
00:42:22
Speaker
The evil that they practiced and exercised was not necessarily that much of a surprise. It wasn't something that was incredibly outside the normal day-to-day structures of life. It was just something that manifested within a system that had that capacity or that potential for it.
00:42:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. One common notion, the Stoics challenge, is this idea of moral luck, where two people might do the exact same thing, but with one person, say it's texting while driving, they end up hitting someone while doing so, another person does the exact same.
00:42:59
Speaker
action, and it's of no consequence whatsoever. And the Stoics, because they don't focus as much on outcomes, but on rather what they focus on, virtues, whether we are embodying what the sage would do, whether we are
00:43:18
Speaker
whether we have knowledge in our planet correctly, they would see those two acts in the same light, if not the exact same light. And that, I think, ties in nicely with what Arendt is up to, in the sense that a lot of contingency is involved in who we end up being, what we end up doing, and the choices that we are presented with in our life.
00:43:45
Speaker
Yeah, there is definitely contingency in the choices that we make in the sense for the Stoics that we have control over them. So there is going to be an element that we have freedom over, let's say, although we have to qualify that term with a much larger discussion. But yes, there is this element of our minds, which is up to us.
00:44:10
Speaker
When the Stoics will argue against luck, for instance, they'll say that happiness is—let's go back to an earlier theme—happiness is intentional. You don't stumble upon well-being, this phrase, udemonic well-being. You don't stumble upon it haphazardly. It's something that is a result of reasoned
00:44:34
Speaker
recognition and recognition of everything we've been talking about today in terms of that systematic aspect of ourself. And so therefore there is no lucky virtue, so to speak. It's all quite deliberate and it's all part of something that's bigger than you that also is quite deliberate. So these aren't matters of sheer lack of sheer chance.
Egalitarianism and Personal Views on Stoicism
00:44:58
Speaker
Yeah, in some sense that is a call for more responsibility. One cannot blame the external world for being unhappy, but it's also an egalitarian view, a view which says happiness is available to anyone so long as they are able to exercise their rational and social capabilities.
00:45:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because in that regard, there's something quite egalitarian about Stoicism. There are aspects which aren't, and we could talk about those, but the general thrust is that as products of nature, we all have the opportunity to live in accordance with nature.
00:45:44
Speaker
Perhaps that part of the philosophy isn't emphasized enough. We live in an era which is highly conscious of notions around equality. And, and in, in some regards, the Stoics do provide a platform, an early voice for this kind of characterization and of, of everyone having the same capacities for thinking. And I know like a lot has been said about Missonius Rufus' discussion around access to education and about whether it was a
00:46:13
Speaker
a prototypical feminist argument or whether it wasn't and there's arguments for and against, but there is a recognition that people that almost all humans, again, there are some exceptions, but almost all humans for the Stoics have this capacity for rational thought and they have the capacity for the same rational thought. And why do they have that? Because they, we are all products of the same system.
00:46:42
Speaker
So one last topic I suppose I wanted to touch on is to what extent does this book capture your views on the world as opposed to the views of the traditional Stoics that you cover? Is it a one-to-one relationship or are there some question marks around the Stoic philosophy for you?
00:47:03
Speaker
I don't think I've ever been asked this question. This is such a good question because a lot of people do write about things, but it might not necessarily cohere or map onto their own beliefs, right? In terms of the physics, yes. The Stoic physics is wonderful. It matches my beliefs entirely in the sense of our relationship with
00:47:25
Speaker
what occurs around us, what is responsible for my origination, my physical origination, the idea that my mind is a body, all of this kind of stuff. The physics is, it directly correlates and represents what I believe.
00:47:41
Speaker
possibly dualist characterizations of the Stoics at times. I'm not entirely sure that I agree wholeheartedly with that, but it's such a complex question about the nature of the, as she said, the inner Citadel. To what extent is that housed off from the rest of the world? I ascribe to the reading of Stoicism, which doesn't necessarily separate it from the world. And in that regard, then yeah, sure. It also maps onto my own impression of the world.
00:48:06
Speaker
Look, I think the applications of it ethically are wonderful. And I think if we taught this in schools.
00:48:13
Speaker
world would be a better place. I think this would be a wonderful way for people to be introduced at an early age to your responsibilities to each other and to the world itself.
Conclusion and Author's Gratitude
00:48:25
Speaker
So whilst there are aspects of Stoicism like any philosophy which just won't entirely match my worldview, by and large it does. I don't necessarily know if I am a Stoic, I don't necessarily know if I practice it day to day to call myself a Stoic, but
00:48:43
Speaker
The philosophy itself, it really does match what I think. Excellent. Very good. Well, is there anything else you want to touch on or cover? Just thanks for the opportunity to chat about it. I've really enjoyed it. I really appreciate the opportunity for more people to become aware of the book. I think it's an important book in terms of the current blend of literature that's available. I think this is something that can sit astride everything else.
00:49:11
Speaker
Alright, thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com, and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.