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What is Stoicism? Answers From Guests (Episode 108)
687 Plays11 months ago
(00:11) Scott Aikin
(03:35) Massimo Pigliucci
(05:08) Donald Robertson
(07:09) Brittany Polat
(10:29) Tim Lebon
(14:34) Chris Gill
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoicism
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. In this podcast, we collected answers to the question, what is stoicism from Stoa Conversations guests? As you listen, think through what your answer may be. Our first answer comes from Scott Aiken from episode 32. Scott is a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University and the co-author of Epictetus in Caridian, a new translation and guide to stoic ethics with William O. Stevens.
00:00:25
Speaker
Well, stoicism is, on the one hand, it's an ancient philosophical view, but it's also an updated philosophical view. I'm going to say something that might already be a little controversial. We're the Stoics now, and the ancient version of the philosophical view was a view about
00:00:42
Speaker
the universe and how it's structured and how reason is structured and how value in light of those two things is structured. And so the universe is a rational whole. Our human reason traces the causes and purposes of the rationality that comprises that whole. And value is comprised and determined by what is
00:01:09
Speaker
appropriate for us as the creatures we are in light of how reason determines our place in the whole. And so much of what we see as stoic ethics are received in is the value theory that arises from the confluence of the application of human reason to this rational whole that is the universe.
00:01:31
Speaker
And so stoicism comes as a big package according to the ancients, and that's a pretty compelling line
Modern Ethics in Stoicism
00:01:38
Speaker
to take. It's a big systematic philosophical view. But the part that's the one that everyone seems to be the most interested in, at least now, I'd say the modern stoics, I'd say we're the stoics now. A lot of that is the ethics that we live in light of, we've inherited from the ancients.
00:01:55
Speaker
And that ethics is an ethics that, on the one hand, identifies what's valuable as what's under your control, the things that you should care about, the things that direct your attention and concerns towards. But the other part of that ethics is also an ethics of duty, an ethics of maintaining connection, because again, we are parts of a rational whole.
00:02:19
Speaker
And it's about maintaining the rationality of that whole and seeing the rationality in all instances. And so seeing ourselves as part of a larger, as larger parts of larger communities and seeing ourselves as playing important roles in our family units and in terms of our civic units, it's a philosophy of duty and a philosophy of active.
00:02:46
Speaker
And that's an important part of it. It's not just about a kind of a mind hack or anything like that. It's a chin directed duty directed. You've got, I've kind of got a checklist and it's a kind of way for you to manage your mind so that you can get the things done that you need to do for the world to be the world or the things to kind of be as they need to be.
00:03:11
Speaker
So it's a lot. And again, that seems to sort of import things back from the old Stoic story, the ordered whole, the rational whole. And that's in fact one of the challenges for a modern Stoic is to answer all those questions about like, what's the connection between the ethics and the theory of reasoning? What's the connection between the ethics and the theory of the whole? That's the challenge, I think.
00:03:33
Speaker
contemporary stoics need to be wrestling with.
Character and Virtue in Stoicism
00:03:36
Speaker
Our second answer comes from Massimo Piliucci from episode 13. Massimo is a professor of philosophy at the City College of New York and author of numerous books such as The Quest for Character and What is Stoicism?
00:03:49
Speaker
You know, it's a more difficult question than one might think. But fundamentally, Stoicism is, of course, an ancient Greco-Roman philosophy that evolved between the fourth century BCE and the third century of the modern era.
00:04:05
Speaker
And it focuses on character. That is, the fundamental thing for a stoic is that it's virtue, which is a set of character traits. And therefore, the most important thing in life for a stoic is to take care of your character, to be the best person you could possibly be.
00:04:20
Speaker
In fact, the word for virtue in Greek is arete, which really means excellence. So you want to be the most excellent human being that you can be. And what does that mean? It means two things fundamentally. One, trying to think and act as rationally as possible because we are rational animals.
00:04:39
Speaker
And two, try to think and act as pro-socially as possible, as cooperatively with other people as possible. Why? Because we are social animals. In fact, the Stoics often summarized their philosophy by saying that we should live in accordance with nature.
00:04:56
Speaker
by which they meant human nature. And human nature is exactly, according to the Stoics at least, is exactly founded on what I just said, rationality and cooperation, social cooperation.
Socratic Roots of Stoicism
00:05:08
Speaker
Next we have Donald Robertson from episode 11. Donald is a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist and author of a number of excellent books such as How to Think Like a Roman Emperor and the upcoming Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor.
00:05:22
Speaker
I mean, one is in terms of the history of it, but in terms of the content of the philosophy, first of all, I tend to explain to people, actually, I've changed my mind about this a little bit over time. Now, I'll often introduce it to people by saying it's a branch of Socratic philosophy, it's heavily indebted to Socrates. And I mentioned that just because most people are kind of more familiar with the name of Socrates, at least, it kind of gives them a bit of a reference point.
00:05:51
Speaker
And it highlights that it's part of a broader tradition, which I think helps in some ways. But the central doctrine of Stoicism, as far as I'm concerned, is based around the slogan that the goal of life, or the meaning of life, if you like, is living in agreement with nature.
00:06:06
Speaker
And what they mean by that is that we should actualise our potential, fulfil our nature as rational beings. And to live rationally, to the best of our ability, would be to live wisely. And so the goal of Stoicism is a kind of moral wisdom which we also call virtue or arity.
00:06:27
Speaker
And then I'd add to that Stoicism is an ethical doctrine, but it has a really important and really obvious psychological consequence. And that is that if someone believes that virtue, which is a character trait,
00:06:43
Speaker
is the only truly good thing in life. That would follow from that, that they think external things like health, wealth and reputation are at best of secondary value. And it would mean that they would be less perturbed if they were denied those things. So they would have a kind of psychological resilience and stoicism is known therefore for being associated with psychological resilience.
Virtue and Happiness in Stoicism
00:07:09
Speaker
Our fourth answer comes from Brittany Paulette from a conversation available on the Stoa app. Brittany Paulette is the co-founder of Stoicare, author of Journal Like a Stoic and writes at Stoicism for Humans. The hardest question of all. Yes. Well, obviously it's a philosophy of life and that covers a lot of different things. So one thing it does for us is it gives us a kind of values classification system. It tells us what we should value in life and why.
00:07:36
Speaker
And it also tells us what kind of person we want to be, why we would want to be that person, and kind of gives us some clues and some spiritual guidance for getting there. So I think one of the most important things that you have to accept if you're going to be a Stoic is that virtue is the only good. So a lot of the ancient schools were debating about what is the good. Some schools said, well, they all agreed pretty much that virtue is one of the goods.
00:08:06
Speaker
Stoicism was one of the few that said virtue is the only good. If you're going to be a Stoic, you have to accept that virtue is necessary and sufficient for happiness. If you're a virtuous person, you are going to be happy. If you're not virtuous, then you're not going to have that complete sense of happiness that they call eudaimonia, which is quite different, of course, from how we usually mean happiness.
00:08:31
Speaker
So eudaimonia is like a sense of fulfillment. It's living a complete excellent life as a moral person, having an understanding of where you fit into the universe, your place in the world. So it's much broader than our current understanding of happiness in English most of the time. So if you are a virtuous person, you're also going to find this deep sense of happiness. And stoicism also tells us
00:08:57
Speaker
if we want to reach this level of virtue and happiness, how we need to live. So back to the values classification idea. As you mentioned, we're always making decisions. So sometimes we have big decisions such as what kind of job am I gonna have? Who's my life partner gonna be? That kind of thing. But we're also making decisions at every moment throughout the day, whether you realize it or not. Some of them, a lot of them are subconscious actually.
00:09:24
Speaker
which is one of the challenges, I think, with stoicism because we tend to think about our rationality as being kind of this conscious control that we have over ourselves. And a lot of our decisions, I mean, modern neuroscience says that a lot of our decisions are actually subconscious. They're below the level of consciousness.
00:09:43
Speaker
So becoming a stoic is partly about building good habits so that we don't have to always have a battle of the wills with ourselves. Oh, no, I shouldn't get angry. I shouldn't get angry. You're building those habits so that you become the kind of person who just wouldn't get angry in that situation. So that you're actually doing a lot of the hard work
00:10:05
Speaker
by building up those really good habits of ways of seeing your perspective on the world. And there's a lot less of the kind of power struggle within yourself. So I found that that really helps to make the stoic life a little bit easier, focusing on kind of doing the hard work before you actually get to that moment where you're having to do battle with yourself.
Three Pillars of Modern Stoicism
00:10:29
Speaker
Our fifth answer is from Tim Levin. Tim is a CBT psychotherapist and author of 365 ways to be more stoic. This one comes from episode 17. So it's a good question because I'm assuming that the.
00:10:44
Speaker
most of your listeners will have an idea of what stoicism is. Because if they didn't, then I would talk about what it isn't, which I'll say anyway, just in case there's some people who are just listening to hear about stoicism the first time. So what it isn't is the stiff upper lip. It's not about sucking it up. It's not about being isolated or passive. That is lowercase stoicism.
00:11:09
Speaker
but more interestingly is what it is. And again, I'd probably want to draw a little bit of a distinction between ancient Stoicism, which I think, well, it was a whole philosophy, wasn't it? Including ideas about physics, ecology, the world at large, ethics, just about everything. And modern Stoicism,
00:11:37
Speaker
There isn't general agreement amongst modern stoics about exactly what it is, but
00:11:43
Speaker
My take on modern stoicism is that it's focusing mainly on the ethics and drawing on psychological insights of the ancient stoics, like Seneca had some, his essay on Angula is absolutely brilliant, for instance. Epic Tetus, they teach CBT therapists Epic Tetus in the very first week of CBT 101 kind of thing.
00:12:10
Speaker
So some of the psychological insights are so brilliant. The ethics is really helpful, but less of an emphasis on some of the physics and worldview in my opinion. So again, that's not necessarily a particularly helpful answer because you want to know what your listeners want to know. Yeah, but what is it about the ethics and the psychology? So if I could dive into that a little bit, then
00:12:39
Speaker
I guess I'm coming to see it more and more as there being three pillars of modern stylicism. And those would be, number one, the dichotomy of control, the idea that there are some things under your direct control, some things not under your direct control, and you're better off focusing on those things directly.
00:12:58
Speaker
under your control, that's number one. Number two is the idea of character, the importance of character and related to that being the best version of you I think is quite a nice way of putting it, developing the virtues, the cardinal virtues, wisdom, courage, self-control and justice and bearing in mind that those four virtues need to be
00:13:21
Speaker
thought of very broadly. So justice includes compassion, for example. So that's the second pillar. You've got dichotomy to control and you've got a whole idea of character.
00:13:37
Speaker
and developing virtues. And I think connected with that would be the idea that that's the most important thing you need to do in life, that the virtues are more important than anything else. And the third idea could be called stomach mindfulness and therapy. I mean, that's what I'm, I think it's helpful to call it that because it's kind of applying those things in the moment. What is going on right now?
00:14:04
Speaker
and what are my interpretations of it? And what should I do about those interpretations? Are they wise? Are they helpful? Or should I kind of ignore them? Or should I challenge them with more rational and helpful ways of looking at things? So those three things individually are all really valuable. Put them together and I think you get a magic brew of monostoicism.
Stoicism and Personal Growth
00:14:34
Speaker
Finally, our last answer comes from Dr. Chris Gill from a conversation available on the Stoa app. Chris Gill is the Emeritus Professor of Ancient Thought at the University of Exeter. Enjoy. Well, I think I'll just give you the coordinates of ancient Stoicism, which I think are also the coordinates of modern Stoicism, or should be. So first of all, there's the idea that our happiness is up to us. It doesn't depend on
00:15:05
Speaker
acquiring lots of money or other external things. It's something that we have in our own power. It's something that's up to us, and we become happy by developing the virtues, virtues like wisdom, courage, justice, self-control.
00:15:23
Speaker
Another point, this will take a while just to run through these, so you can interrupt at any time. So that's one, the basic one, I think. The second one is the distinction between virtue and what the steaks call indifference. By indifference, the steaks mean things like health,
00:15:45
Speaker
material wealth, but also the welfare of our families. Now, these are not indifferent in the sense that they just don't matter. They do matter.
00:15:54
Speaker
and everyone naturally wants to have these rather than their opposites, but the Stoics call them indifference because they don't make the difference between happiness and misery. What makes the difference between happiness and misery is whether or not you use the indifference
00:16:16
Speaker
Virtuously or not, whether you acquire or lose things is done with virtue or not. So virtue is the decisive factor always in what the stakes mean by happiness.
00:16:34
Speaker
A third core tenet, as I see it, is their ideas about development or what they... some of their ideas about ethical development. The Stoics believe that it's natural for all of us to have certain core instincts or motives. One is to look after ourselves, and the other is to care for other people. And both those things, they think, are equally natural. They're equally part of what it is to be human.
00:17:02
Speaker
And in both cases, development is a matter of beginning with those primary instincts, primary motives, and then developing them to the point of acquiring and exercising virtue. So there's two strands in development. One is coming to know better how to choose between indifference, how to select indifference, and how to act virtuously.
00:17:30
Speaker
The second strand in development is going from a kind of primary care for other people, which we all naturally have for, say, our children or those close to us, and developing this so that we have
00:17:47
Speaker
a fully mature attitude to social relations. Generally, we can relate to our community. We can play a role in larger contexts. And one very important aspect of this is coming to realize that all human beings as such are part of a brotherhood or kinship or citizenship.
00:18:11
Speaker
So there are these two strands to ethical development, and these are important in themselves, but another, going along with that, is the belief which the Stokes have, that everyone is capable of ethical development. It's not just a few people, it's not just the select philosophers, it's human beings as such.
00:18:35
Speaker
that are capable of this and they remain capable of it throughout their lives. So they have a very strong belief about the possibility of developing in this way.
00:18:48
Speaker
And finally, the final core tenet is also relating to development, and that is the belief that we can all develop emotionally in ways that I can go into a bit more later on. We can all develop emotionally, and this emotional development is closely bound up with the ethical development, which I was just described, just outlined.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:19:15
Speaker
So there you've got five elements about virtue and happiness, virtue and indifference, about ethical development, social development and emotions. And if you look at the ancient accounts of stoic ethics, those are always part or nearly always part of what they pick out as key elements in stoic thinking.
00:19:39
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to Stoa Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to practice stoicism with Michael and I as well as others walking the stoic path, we are running our three-week course on stoicism applied. It'll be live with
00:20:05
Speaker
a forum, interactive calls, that I think will be an excellent way for a group of people to become more stoic together. So do check that out at stomeditation.com slash course. And if that's not to your fancy, you can find links to the Stoa app as well as the Stoa Letter, our newsletter on stoic theory and practice at stomeditation.com. Thanks for listening. Until next time.