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Brittany Polat on Living as a Stoic (Episode 60)
793 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this conversation, Caleb speaks with Brittany Polat.
She’s has done excellent work teaching and promoting the ideas of Stoicism through her books, blog, and Stoicare, so we’re always happy to have her on. In this conversation, we talk about what we can learn from monasteries, how to think about Stoicism & accountability, what Epictetus believed about the Cynics, and the Stoic attitude towards beauty.
(01:41) Introduction
(03:11) Ethical Development
(09:15) Determinism and Accountability
(16:55) Learning From Medieval Monks
(21:19) Medieval Monks on Meditation
(29:40) Beauty
(33:39) Epictetus on the Cynics
(38:54) Devotion
(42:56) Learning To Live Naturally
***
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Transcript
Societal Values: Change vs. Daily Goodness
00:00:00
Speaker
what kind of a society could exist without good, decent citizens, right? Not everybody can change the world.
00:00:07
Speaker
but we can all be a good person every day. So I think as a society, we place way too much value on both monetary and status value on changing the world.
Introduction to the Podcast and Stoicism
00:00:19
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
00:00:36
Speaker
In this conversation, I speak with Brittany Polat. Brittany is a repeat guest. She's done excellent work teaching and promoting the ideas of Stoicism through her books, blogs, and organization Stoicare, so we're always happy to have her on.
Episode Overview: Brittany Polat and Monasteries
00:00:56
Speaker
And in this episode, Brittany and I talk about what we can learn from monasteries, how Stoics should think about accountability, what Epictetus said about the philosophy of cynicism, and the importance of beauty. Here is our conversation. Welcome to Stu Conversations. Today I am speaking with Brittany Polette,
00:01:22
Speaker
Brittany is the author of Journal Like a Stoic, co-founder of Stoic Care and Rights at Stoicism for Humans. Thanks for coming back. Thank you for having me on, Caleb. It's always a pleasure. Let's start with this broad question. What's your story?
Brittany's Personal Journey into Stoicism
00:01:41
Speaker
Oh, my story as a human and as a stoic, I guess would kind of come together because about six or maybe seven years ago now, I found myself in kind of a crisis, a crossroads in my life. I had pursued
00:01:56
Speaker
kind of a career up to that point and it just wasn't meshing well with my family. I was at home with three young kids. I didn't really know what to do. I had lost my sense of direction. I knew I needed some kind of system of guidance both for myself and to make sure I was
00:02:15
Speaker
educating my children in the right way and providing them with a good direction in life. And so I started reading widely about different types of wisdom traditions, different life philosophies, this kind of thing. And nothing really spoke to me until I read William Ervin's A Guide to the Good Life.
00:02:34
Speaker
And all of a sudden, everything made sense. And I thought, wow, why didn't I know about this before? This is amazing, this stoicism thing. So I kept on reading. I read Seneca. I read Pierre Haddow. I read Donald Robertson's book and just kept going and found that stoicism in the intervening six or seven years has really put me on a good path and has helped me to be a better parent, too, and helped my children develop into the direction that I want them.
00:03:03
Speaker
and hope for them to go. So since then, I've tried to share stoicism as widely as possible.
Ethical Development and Personal Agency in Stoicism
00:03:11
Speaker
Excellent. And something you've written about is stoicism as a system of ethical development. There are these ideas that the Stoics had about how humans develop over time. And I wonder if you could say more about that and how that shapes how you see stoicism.
00:03:30
Speaker
That's right. That's one thing that I absolutely love about stoicism is that it's seen as a lifetime process, a lifelong ongoing developmental process. So you have some philosophies such as Aristotelian virtue ethics, which really emphasize the formative years. So it posits that the education you receive as a child, the environment you grow up in,
00:03:53
Speaker
is really crucial for setting you on the path to your ethics as an adult. And of course, I would never argue with the idea that our ethics, the ethics that we receive in childhood and the environment we grow up in are certainly very influential. But what stoicism does differently is it says, well, no matter what you had in your past, no matter what happened to you, no matter what you did, no matter how you grew up, no matter what culture or environment you were raised in,
00:04:22
Speaker
As an adult, you have agency. You have the ability to steer your life in a different direction if you choose. Stoicism provides the tools for us to do this. As mature humans, as adults, we're able to step back and assess our lives and say, wait a minute, is this going the way I want it to? Am I happy? Am I fulfilled? Of course, there are all different kinds of ways of feeling happy.
00:04:49
Speaker
But what stoicism thinks that we will do is that, as humans, we'll say, you know what, this short-term happiness that I get just from being on the hedonic treadmill, earning more money, buying more stuff, having short-term pleasures, this isn't really meaningful. This is not fulfillment at the deepest level that I want for my life. So how do I get that? And so then the next step is to look around and figure out how we can reach that by doing research, maybe looking to role models,
00:05:17
Speaker
and figuring out a better path for ourselves. So what I love about stoicism is this ongoing idea of development and agency, and it's very empowering so that no matter what we've done in our past, we can have a better and more fulfilling future.
00:05:34
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Yeah, that's right. The Stoics offer a model for humans to transform themselves over time through childhood to the end of life, wherever that may be. And there's this idea that there's a fundamental divide between
00:05:53
Speaker
what is up to you and what is not. And there's an immense amount of power or agency, I suppose, in the idea that you have control or at least your thoughts and judgments are fundamentally up to you. And because of that, you can steer the ship of your life as it were.
Agency vs. Control in Stoic Life Path
00:06:15
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I think this is why stoicism is a lot more popular than many other philosophies because it does put us in the driver's seat of our own lives. Whereas a lot of other philosophies might emphasize the environment or the things that happen to us or how we're not actually in charge of our lives. This is very constraining and limiting and it makes you feel like, well, there's no point in really doing anything if my basic impulses are guiding me and my
00:06:45
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conscious rational mind can't do anything. So I think Stoicism for a lot of people is really kind of the answer we were looking for of creating that agency. And I really liked the term agency, maybe in addition to control or maybe more than control because control can be misconstrued.
00:07:05
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that we're able to control every thought that we have, for example. So the dichotomy of control says there's something that we can influence in our lives, there's some things
00:07:16
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that we actually have our control over, and it's our internal thoughts and our character. And I think this can be a little bit confusing in some ways, as if we control every single thing that happens in our head. And I don't think that's actually the case. I think that thoughts can arise spontaneously, but what's up to us is what we do with those thoughts, whether we assent to those impressions or not.
00:07:39
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So I like the idea of agency and being able to, you know, kind of respond in our own way. So control, again, it can be a little bit of a tricky word, but as long as we think in terms of agency, maybe in addition to control, I think that's very helpful.
00:07:56
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Yeah, that's right. Another point here is that the Stoics don't think you can in an instant, at least most of us cannot in an instant completely change who we are because our character is made up of all of these past decisions.
00:08:11
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past experiences and judgments we've made. And those are going to shape the very impressions we're faced with. So changing one's character is going to be much more of an incremental matter than a matter of completely jumping onto a new track. Although one can have experiences like that from time to time. In general, it's going to be a slow and steady matter.
00:08:36
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Exactly. Seneca says that this virtue cannot be expected in a child or even a youth, not even a young person. And that at old age, you're doing well if after much study and a lifetime of experience, you have reached a somewhat virtuous state. So yes, the ancient Stoics were certainly realistic in their assessment of what we can do and how long it might take us to reach this point.
00:09:02
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but I still find great beauty in the aspiration and having a compass and having a direction. So I think even though we're not going to become virtuous overnight, it's still wonderful to have a goal to strive for. Absolutely. So how do you think about this idea of
00:09:20
Speaker
fate or the determinism. So I'm more interested not in so much the academic answers like what the ancient Stoics thought about this matter, but since you think about teaching Stoicism to people who may not have as much of a background in it, is that an idea that you discuss or how do you think about that personally? Yeah, well, obviously that's a very tricky issue and it's not my area of expertise. Just as a person,
00:09:48
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I think about this in terms of how we build our character.
Determinism and Character Formation in Stoicism
00:09:52
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So for example, someone who came from perhaps a background where they were not raised in an ethical situation or they experienced a certain level of trauma.
00:10:02
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or all the people around them are acting selfishly, for example, and they didn't have good role models, these kinds of things, that certainly going to influence who they become as an adult is going to have an adverse influence on their character, on their chances of finding the right path. And so I think about this a lot in terms of
00:10:22
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how far do we hold them accountable for their own actions if that's all they've experienced in the world? I think this gets to your point about determinism, how much responsibility, maybe how much moral accountability do we have for our own actions?
00:10:38
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The Stoics said that there is a causal chain of things that goes all the way back to the beginning of time. We might say today back to the Big Bang Theory, everything was linked and everything has an antecedent cause and then something that happened after it, so it's all connected.
00:10:57
Speaker
So I think, I mean, I find that the stoic position on character makes a lot of sense. So going back to the cylinder analogy that Chrysippus used, so he compared our character to a cylinder. If you push a cylinder, it rolls, right? Because it has shaped a certain way, it's going to roll. The push is what actually causes it to roll, but because it shaped a certain way, it rolls. If you pushed a cube, for example, it would not roll.
00:11:27
Speaker
So the push is the actual cause of the movement, but also the shape of, you know, we're using this analogy for character. The shape of your character is what causes you to actually do something. So this makes a lot of sense to me in that as human, you know, just the type of creature we are, we do have a rationality and an agency. And of course, here I'm referring to a normally functioning human. There are some types of disabilities
00:11:56
Speaker
or in capacities that would not permit someone to have full human rationality. And obviously, that's a different case. But for a normally functioning human, we have the capacity to reflect on things and to actually take agency in our own lives. So even if the deck is stacked against us, so to speak, even if we did not receive moral advantages or we don't have moral luck, to use a phrase that ethicists sometimes use,
00:12:24
Speaker
There is still an element of accountability for ourselves that we have to try at least, or to recognize that a change is in order. At the same time though, the Stoics were very careful not to have harsh judgments against people, not to blame people. A crucial element of the philosophy, especially when we start talking about accountability, is that we don't blame people for a lack of
00:12:53
Speaker
progress, for example, because we don't know how hard they're trying. We don't know what their intentions are. We don't know what their backgrounds are. People are definitely starting from different places. So at the same time that we want to try to improve our own lives, at the same time that we want to help others to find meaning and happiness, we do not want to blame people if they have not reached a certain level. So it's more about
00:13:20
Speaker
a desire to help rather than a desire to blame because no one is perfect. None of us have reached that perfect pinnacle of virtue. We're just at different places along the road. Some of us may have done it a little bit longer. We may have found a better way to get there, a shortcut. We may be taking a better route, but we're all on that same road. And so if somebody isn't as far along as we might expect them to be or we might want them to be,
00:13:48
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We have to be patient. We need to show compassion and just try to find a better way to kind of bring them along. So even though there is accountability, there is also great compassion.
00:14:00
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I think that's a great point. The Stoics are very careful about not judging others, not distracting ourselves with thinking about how good others may be or not, and keeping the focus on whether we are on the right path towards being a sage.
00:14:23
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will involve holding people accountable, but what that looks like could depend on the circumstance. But it certainly doesn't involve a preoccupation with blaming others or ranking others against our own progress. Right. I think you can hold people accountable for reaching a standard without blaming them.
00:14:45
Speaker
for not reaching it, if that makes any sense. So I think we do need standards and we do need to recognize that some lifestyles are more conducive to flourishing than others. But as I see it, it's more about lifting people up to the standard rather than blaming them for not reaching it. So it's a quite different attitude. It's a very different approach.
00:15:10
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. There's an amusing story about Zeno and one of his servants and Zeno's servant steals, I believe, one of Zeno's shoes or something of this sort and Zeno reprimands him and his servant says, look, I was fated to do this. Don't be, don't punish me. And then Zeno says, no, I was fated to punish you who steal my shoes or something of that sort.
00:15:33
Speaker
Oh, that sounds like something my kids would say. That's funny. Which, apart from being amusing, that story opens the possibility that there is a distinct difference between holding someone accountable, doing what's required to fulfill our social rules, keep our community together, while not purely blaming them or
00:16:01
Speaker
seeking to punish merely for the sake of punishment or something of that sort.
Accountability in Community Settings
00:16:08
Speaker
Right. I think accountability can actually be a way of shaping character or shaping behaviors. You know, if people know that they are going to be responsible to other people for a certain action, that really encourages them to fulfill their role, for example. So if my kids know that they have a part in our family, they have to take the trash out, for example,
00:16:31
Speaker
or we face a mound of smelly trash for the next week, that encourages them to fulfill their responsibility.
00:16:40
Speaker
I think accountability is actually really important. Whenever you're living with people, more than one person, you're accountable to each other. So I think just by the nature of how humans are, our psychology, we're made in that direction. Yeah, that seems right to me. So what can Stoics learn from medieval
Lessons from Medieval Monastic Life
00:17:00
Speaker
monks? Oh, yeah. So I recently read a book called How to Live Like a Medieval Monk.
00:17:06
Speaker
And it's very appealing to me partly because it has beautiful illustrations and photographs of illuminated manuscripts and things like that, which I love. I'm fascinated by the medieval period. But I also love the idea of living in a community together, a community of virtue, which is, you know, that's an appealing idea for a stoic. And that's essentially what the monks were trying to do. Of course, they had a very different religious viewpoint, but they came together as a community.
00:17:36
Speaker
and they tried to find ways to live in harmony together, which of course is something that a stoic would do in a community of the wise. I recently had an opportunity to see the monastery of San Marco in Florence, Italy.
00:17:51
Speaker
And there are beautiful frescoes there by Fra Angelico. But when you go there, there's such a feeling of peace and serenity in the whole place. It's built around a central courtyard, or in this case, multiple courtyards. And in the center, there is a kitchen garden, or at least there used to be. And I could just picture everyone out there working their kitchen garden, harvesting their herbs for their medicines, getting the food for them to cook together.
00:18:19
Speaker
And I like the idea, of course, in a monastery, there was a hierarchy, but in Stoicism, we would say there isn't really a hierarchy of, you know, there are no levels of virtue. There's just virtue and non-virtue. So I love the idea of an egalitarian approach to living together and figuring out, you know, when you have wise people living together, according to kind of what we think Zeno might've written in the Republic, which is no longer extant, you know, people,
00:18:49
Speaker
hold things in common. There isn't all the squabbling over mine and yours. Everyone is trying to benefit everybody else. So I love the idea. We no longer have a lot of what remains from the ancient stoa. And so I love the idea of seeing how this might have been applied in a different context that is closer to us in time. We do have more physical remains of medieval monasticism. So I think we can actually learn a lot about
00:19:17
Speaker
living together in a community of the wise or striving to do so from what remains of that tradition. Right, right. What do you think is the closest modern analogy to that today?
00:19:33
Speaker
Well, I don't know every community out there, but I would be really interested in visiting Plum Village established by Thich Nhat Hanh and seeing how that functions. That might be kind of an analog. Obviously, Buddhism has some close parallels to Stoicism, so a functioning Buddhist monastery.
00:19:58
Speaker
in a Western context since that one is established in France. I think that would be interesting. You know, there are Buddhist monasteries in the United States, different places in the world. And of course, there are Christian monasteries as well. So it could be interesting to think about how in a contemporary context that people might still be trying to do that today. Right, right. There's a book by Zena Hitts called A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life.
00:20:28
Speaker
She also wrote a book called Lost in Thought, and there's earlier still a conversation about that book. It's about the merits of intellectual
00:20:39
Speaker
pursuit for its own sake. But a philosopher looks at the religious life as her story about going to serve in a religious community and living with other sisters who are solely focused on serving the nearby community and becoming closer to God. I thought that was a very well done and challenging book about
00:21:09
Speaker
the religious life in the modern world. I love that. I've written that down to read later, so thank you for that recommendation. Yeah, hopefully we'll have a conversation about Zeno with that as well. But what about in terms of the medieval monks and their practices around concentration or meditation? Does anything stick out to you there?
00:21:35
Speaker
So there's an excellent book by the historian Jamie Kreiner called The Wandering Mind. And she looks in detail about the specific psychological practices that took place in late antiquity and early medieval period. So we're talking about from around 300 AD, maybe until about 900 AD. So the end of the Roman Empire and then what happened after that, what came next.
00:22:02
Speaker
And of course, it's already been established by historians such as Pierre Hadeau that a lot of the practices from Greek philosophy found their way into early Christianity, especially monastic practice, not exclusively monastic practice, just into Christianity in general, but they were concentrated in monasteries because of the intensity that a lot of them required. Obviously, philosophy is very demanding. We know Stoicism is very mentally, psychologically demanding.
00:22:32
Speaker
And so a lot of those practices were naturally carried over by the people who were most committed to the intellectual spiritual life, which in this time period ended up being in monasteries. Or I should also add not exclusively monasteries, but the desert fathers. So these were very highly spiritual and a lot of times intellectual people who lived out in the wilderness. They found their calling not by living together,
00:23:01
Speaker
But by living in the middle of nowhere, this was both men and women, desert fathers and mothers, I should hasten to add. And they ended up kind of actually forming a community of their own kind of these in this wilderness area. And they were not completely isolated. They received visitors. They received letters from people. So they were still kind of in interaction with community in some cases, but they carried the tradition on
00:23:30
Speaker
the collapse of the Roman Empire, basically the collapse of philosophy. And at the end of the Roman Empire anyway, Stoicism was eclipsed by Neo-Platonism, which then was eclipsed by Christianity. So you had all of these really interesting intellectual currents that had been around for at least 500 years prior to that. And then they were melded together into early Christianity. So super interesting time period. Jamie Kreiner does a great job in her book explaining this
00:24:00
Speaker
Pirahado also has an excellent essay on these spiritual practices. So a lot of things that kind of made their way from stoicism into monastic practice would be concentration. The idea that we don't want to be distracted by worldly things, which takes a different tone in Christianity than it did in Greek philosophy. But it's this idea that we need to concentrate on the good and shut out or ignore all of the other things that could distract us.
00:24:31
Speaker
are the most important things in life. And so you have practices like meditation, prayer, writing, either copying things down or writing how your day went, things like this. There were some practices that I believe were specific to this period, such as biblical quotations. You would have monks who are very well versed in the Bible and kind of just
00:24:57
Speaker
freestyling these different biblical quotations on a certain theme together, either in a written form or just in a meditative form. So this tradition very interestingly was carried on from late antiquity through the early medieval period. And from there, of course, the current persisted through the monastic tradition into our early modern period. So very interesting, highly recommend it. Yeah, and there's, I think, some instructive
00:25:28
Speaker
tips, if you will, or practical insights on how to do some of these spiritual practices that one can get from people who have spent years and years solely focusing in a way that someone engaged in religious practice or deep meditative practice has done.
Memorization in Stoic Practice
00:25:53
Speaker
Right. Did you have any favorites you wanted to talk about?
00:25:57
Speaker
Well, the focus on memorizing aspects of the Bible has some interesting analogies with the Stoics. Of course, Stoics tend to memorize maxims or at least keep them on hand in a handbook. Today, we see people do that either by writing sticky notes, keeping notebook on hand or reminders in their phone.
00:26:26
Speaker
But the ability to memorize these, I think, is underrated just because for perhaps some reasons, you know, our educational institutions overrated memorization. But now they're, my general sense is we're making the opposite mistake today, where
00:26:48
Speaker
there is a real benefit to being able to memorize a poem, a text, and have it on hand internally without needing some external hint, as it were, and sort of embody it in a way by reciting it. So this would be another point is that often in religious practices there is some recital either through chanting or
00:27:15
Speaker
other means to ingrain these sorts of messages in an aesthetic way. Experiencing these through maxims, through reading, or a poem through reading is quite different from hearing it being read aloud or reading it aloud oneself. So that's something that I suppose stuck out to me. There's this thought about in general memorization.
00:27:42
Speaker
is important and it's something that comes with being able to spend so much time focused on these practices and then also
00:27:51
Speaker
reciting what you've memorized or at least interacting with it in different ways gives you a new way to see what some of these lessons might be. And of course you have in the ancient Stux, there were ancient hymns that people would have in addition to the poetry and the focus on rhetoric, saying things in a particular way that would sound good when spoken aloud.
00:28:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're right.
Stoicism, Beauty, and Virtuous Living
00:28:20
Speaker
I think there is a lot to be said for you said experiencing these ideas in different modalities. And I think there's really something behind that. You know, I've tried before to incorporate stoic principles into my yoga practice. For example, you know, if I'm doing tree pose, I might call to mind Seneca's quote about a tree being stronger when it's buffeted by strong winds and kind of connect the physical movement to the philosophical principle.
00:28:48
Speaker
Because I think we are embodied creatures. I don't think we should ignore that. I don't think it's anti-rational or even a-rational to use what we know about our physical embodied sense in order to make ourselves more philosophically productive or philosophically aware of things. So I love the idea of having music, of having physical movement like the chant
00:29:17
Speaker
Like you were just saying, the hymns, even the physical act of writing, I often will just sit down and copy out by hand some of my favorite quotes. Writing it down on a piece of paper is quite different from typing on the computer because your hand is making the motions and it's a slower process, much more physical process. So it kind of ingrained it more on your mind. So I think you're absolutely right about that.
00:29:43
Speaker
I would also connect that to a strand of thought. I've been thinking about, I know some other people in the stoic community have as well, which is the idea of beauty, linking stoicism to ideals of beauty. It's a little bit complicated because
00:30:02
Speaker
beauty of external things is a preferred and different in stoicism. For example, seeing a beautiful sunset, if you were imprisoned, you would not be able to necessarily see a beautiful sunset. That sunset is external to you. It's not your true good. It's important to recognize that, but at the same time,
00:30:24
Speaker
there are lots of preferred indifference that we do have access to. And if we can harness the power of our human response to a beautiful sunset, for example, or to moral beauty, the feeling of moral elevation that comes when we see other people performing good acts, inspiring acts. I think it makes sense for us to harness all of these, to inspire us and to become more virtuous.
00:30:49
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think the point about beauty is an interesting one. So another book you recently reviewed is Chris Gilles, Learning to Live Naturally. And one point he made explicit in his book is that Stoics did not think virtue was the only good, only that it was the ultimate good for contributing to human happiness. But there are other goods in the Stoic.
00:31:15
Speaker
view. The most obvious one would be that God is good, and God for the Stoics was nature. So there is an angle on experiencing the sunset where you see what's beautiful there is the order inherent in nature as well as the providence, this
00:31:37
Speaker
not mere ordering, but perhaps you could call it providence or some other deeper telos or purpose that might be expressed by something like sunset, the fact that we live in a universe that provides a suitable home.
00:31:55
Speaker
And that's not the sort of good that's necessary for our happiness, but it can nonetheless be recognized as something that is deeply good. Yeah. I think it's absolutely appropriate for us to experience the beauty of the natural world. If we didn't experience that, you know, it would significantly diminish our lives, the quality of our lives. That's, we are part of nature. That's where we come from. That's where we're going back to.
00:32:20
Speaker
So it would be an impoverished life if we didn't recognize the beauty all around us. And I love the quote from Marcus Aurelius where he says, if you're advanced enough in understanding the world, then you can find beauty in anything, even the cracks of bread baking. Or he uses the example of the foam around the mouth of a wild boar, which is something that
00:32:43
Speaker
we might feel repulsed by, but he said, because it's part of nature, it's part of this big, beautiful, amazing world that we live in, we can find beauty in those things. Even microscopic organisms have their own beauty. We all have to figure out how we're going to live. One thing we all do is we experience our homes, our environment. I love having books and pictures around me that show the beauty of nature.
00:33:11
Speaker
It's very, that in itself can be a reminder to appreciate the world and to strive for virtue. So I think all of this can help us to elevate, can elevate the quality of our lives and also help keep our minds in the right direction. We don't have to live in a monastic cell in order to strive for virtue. We can use what's available to us to enhance our lives in that way.
00:33:39
Speaker
Yeah, that touches on another story that you've written about from Epictetus, where Epictetus is discussing the cynic. And Epictetus holds cynics in high regard. Cynics were philosophers. Its name's a school of philosophy. We're not talking about cynic in the colloquial sense. But philosophers usually who stood apart from society and believe that virtue was the only good and rejected the doctrine
00:34:07
Speaker
or at least did not include the doctrine the Stoics had, about indifference. There have been some things that are preferable even if they are indifference, not relevant for virtue. And what Epiketus stated is that the cynic role may be a good one for some people, but not for all, which connects to this idea about
00:34:31
Speaker
the monastic role, different kinds of monastic lives, or perhaps even different roles where people are devoted to business, politics, art. Those may be good lives for some people, but the typical person has a smorgasbord of ordinary roles where they're not devoted to any particular one, but a handful, and the stoic life is
00:35:00
Speaker
very ordinary, but it's ordinary in an excellent, excellent way.
Balancing Virtuous Living and Minimalism
00:35:06
Speaker
Right. I think there's a lot of pressure on many people today to kind of give up everything. I personally, I strive to be as minimalist as possible, but I don't think that you have to give up everything in order to live a sustainable life, for example, or live a virtuous life. So to me, it's all about balance. It's about figuring out
00:35:29
Speaker
what is required of us given our particular place in the world, our particular circumstances, our character, our past experiences, our gifts, what we can offer for the world. It's all part of figuring out using wisely what we have. So yes, for someone like me who has three young kids, I'm never going to be a cynic. There's a certain amount of stuff I have to have, but that doesn't mean that I can't strive for virtue in the way that I am.
00:35:58
Speaker
I may not be able to reach the level of Diogenes, the cynic, or Epictetus, or some other people who are able to live with very little, and therefore are able to devote themselves more to activities for the common good than I am myself. But in our own way, we can each make a contribution. So a few years ago, I read a book called Some Do Care, which I highly recommended, an old psychology book.
00:36:28
Speaker
It's by two excellent psychologists, Colby and Damon. I think it was published in 1992, so it's pretty old by now, but it's a classic because they actually interviewed moral exemplars. They said, okay, we're going to do an empirical study on people who other people look up to. So instead of just doing a psychology study with university undergraduates or something like that, they said, we're going to go to the people
00:36:56
Speaker
who are actually doing what everybody wants to do. And I believe they interviewed about 27 of them, if I remember correctly, and they analyzed the interviews. And it's an incredible book because these are people, for example, Susie Valadez. She raised her children in poverty so that she could cross the border from America into Mexico every day and give shoes, clothes, food to children who were even more poor than her own children.
00:37:26
Speaker
So it's a very complicated decision. What do I owe to the rest of the world versus what do I owe to my family? What are my obligations here? And I don't think there is a clear cut answer. I don't think there is a one size fits all solution. I think different people can make different decisions and they are valid in different ways for different people. But it does raise a lot of interesting questions about how much
00:37:54
Speaker
do I give my time to other people versus to my own family? What is the proper balance to strike? And again, there's no one right answer. I think stoicism can help us make sense of this in our own situation, but it does require judgment. It requires practical wisdom. And so turning to role models, turning to the philosophical principles can really help us apply that to our own lives.
00:38:19
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Michael and I have an episode on role ethics, so we just recorded and I roll.
00:38:26
Speaker
Ethics can give us some direction in making these decisions, but as you say at the same time, many of these decisions are just going to be so context specific and going to depend on personal factors that are only present in the individual's life making the decision. So there's always a judgment call that needs to be made about these kinds of things, even if there are some general rules, general maxims. Right.
00:38:56
Speaker
One other interesting idea on this theme is...
00:38:59
Speaker
As you say, there's a lot of pressure to be devoted or obsessed about a particular thing, at least in some cultural spheres. So I'm in Silicon Valley now, and that would look like being devoted to a startup success, business success, and a prior life in the academy. It's being fully devoted to intellectual success and living in some respects and on
00:39:27
Speaker
balanced life, one might say. And there's certainly something not just in external pressure, but often
00:39:36
Speaker
internal pressure just because those lives can be good ones. The person who devotes themselves fully to some intellectual problem and makes significant progress on it, which results in benefiting scores and scores of people. I think that's an admirable kind of life. But I think one thing
00:39:58
Speaker
that the Stoics note is that when you're thinking about your roles, you need to think about things like what are my talents, what are my innate dispositions, my limitations, and also what are some of my relationships that I have chosen or have naturally. And those sorts of things may mean that even though there are lives that we put up
00:40:28
Speaker
on a pedestal, perhaps sometimes even correctly for being exemplary ones. They are not the ones that are going to be right for you and your life might look much more like an ordinary kind of excellence instead of a heroic one. That's right. I think there's only so much room in any society for someone to, you know, invent the next great vaccine, for example.
00:40:57
Speaker
There's only a few people who can do that or to win the Nobel Peace Prize in a certain area. So I think for most of us, there's a lot of emphasis these days on changing the world, on being that world-shaking person, disruptor.
00:41:18
Speaker
But not everybody can do that. And it's not even good for that to happen too frequently. If there's too much disruption, nobody can live a peaceful life, a harmonious life. So I think we need to start valuing more those of us who just live decent lives every day. There is tremendous value in that. What kind of a society could exist without good, decent citizens? Not everybody can change the world.
00:41:47
Speaker
but we can all be a good person every day. So I think as a society, we place way too much value on both monetary and status value on changing the world, whereas we should spend a lot more time appreciating the everyday.
00:42:03
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's something to that. I think especially when you think about this idea, changing the world, what does that even mean? It sort of becomes like the idea or desire to be rich, where I think if you think about that in the business context, there are some counter examples, but at least when you are
00:42:23
Speaker
trying to build a business on the people who end up becoming rich have some prior interest and something that's much more detailed rather than some vague desire like I want to be rich and I think the desire to change the world is similar in the sense that many people who are effective at doing that sort of thing find themselves with much more
00:42:44
Speaker
specific desires and goals and may end up, for better or worse, changing the world almost as a side effects of what they had, what they had chosen. That's a good point.
00:42:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, this is an interesting topic for sure. I think there's a lot of depth here. But one of the things I wanted to ask you about is, we test a little bit on this, but you recently covered Chris Gill's new book, Learning to Live Naturally. What sort of ideas stuck out from that work that you think are underrated by many modern stoics?
Stoic Cosmopolitanism and Personal Relationships
00:43:22
Speaker
So he does cover environmental ethics which not everybody is aware of and I think that that's very useful for where we are in this time period in the 21st century. He also covers the idea that kind of like we just talked about that you don't have to
00:43:41
Speaker
give up your family in order to be an ethical person and live a cosmopolitan life. So going back to the circles of hierarchies, which I believe your listeners will be familiar with, but this is the idea that stoic cosmopolitanism means that we welcome, we embrace people from all over the world. Hierarchies provided a psychological model for us to do this where we start by thinking about ourselves and our close family members,
00:44:09
Speaker
and how we are connected to them. And then we might branch out to the people a little farther away, our friends, our neighbors, and think about how we can bring them closer to us and feel connected to them and then expand a little bit more to our fellow citizens or the people that we share some kind of community with and then branch out to the entire world.
00:44:35
Speaker
So this is a psychological model for us to realize the stoic aspiration to not have borders and limit between people, but to recognize we're all part of the brotherhood of humankind, sisterhood of humankind, and not put false borders between people. So this is a wonderful model. It's incredibly useful for me personally, and I know for a lot of other stoics.
00:45:04
Speaker
is sometimes a tendency to say, well, I need to think about loving the person on the other side of the world when I'm not really loving the person who's emptying the dishwasher in my house. So I think it doesn't, I think cosmopolitanism doesn't mean that we should privilege people on the other side of the world or in distant spaces from us
00:45:31
Speaker
above those who are closest to us, it doesn't mean we need to get rid of our existing relationships or devalue them. I don't think it's saying that we should have impartiality towards every person in the world. That's obviously it's not possible. You can't treat 8 billion people all the same and it's not desirable either. Humans are built to live in close relationships with certain people, not with 8 billion people.
00:45:58
Speaker
So I think that stoic cosmopolitanism does not mean, does not negate our close relationships, even though it does say, Hey, you don't think that you are more important than other people. You don't think that your family deserves special privileges. You don't think that you're better than anybody just because you're you. It means that you believe everybody is equal and is kin and deserves dignity and respect and to be treated well.
00:46:28
Speaker
But that doesn't mean that you're going to go empty their dishwasher, take out their trash, take their dog on a walk when they're on vacation, right? So we maintain our close relationships while recognizing that other people are just as valuable as our close friends. So to me, this is a wonderful message from Chris Gill's new book. Of course, it's just one of many, but that to me stood out because I haven't really seen anybody else talking about that.
00:46:57
Speaker
Excellent. Yeah. You can check out your review on Stoicism for Humans. Or I should say check out your review posts since you do a post for each chapter on Stoicism for Humans. Is there anything else you wanted to add? Oh, it's been a really far ranging conversation. I've, I'm glad I could share some of my thoughts on just living as a Stoic because I think, you know, I've been practicing Stoicism for six or seven years now and I've thought a lot about, okay, as a Stoic,
00:47:25
Speaker
What do I wear? What should be my approach to getting dressed in the morning? What should be my approach to sustainability? What should be my approach to parenting everything? This has been a great conversation to bring some of those disparate thoughts together. I've really enjoyed this. I might just add, I am embarking on a different kind of project in the future, which is stoic fiction. I haven't really seen many other people doing this.
00:47:55
Speaker
But I'll just put it out there that I'm starting to work on a stoic novel to incorporate some of these philosophical ideas, which can be kind of hard to digest in their regular form, maybe sweeten it a little bit with some action and mystery and things like that. So if anybody else is interested in stoic fiction, I'd love to hear from you and find out more about what you're doing as well. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for coming on again. Thank you for having me.
00:48:26
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to get two meditations from me on stoic theory and practice a week, just two short emails on whatever I've been thinking about, as well as some of the best resources we've found for practicing stoicism, check out stowletcher.com. It's completely free. You can sign up for it and then unsubscribe at any time as you wish.
00:48:56
Speaker
If you want to dive deeper still, search Stoa in the App Store or Play Store for a complete app with routines, meditations, and lessons designed to help people become more stoic. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyre.com. And finally, please get in touch with us, send a message to
00:49:23
Speaker
stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.