Transcript
Speaker: And Seneca has a whole letter where he's like, okay, so this is a, you know, a common Stoic doctrine, but I think this is crazy. And here's why, here's my arguments for it, you know? So I think we've got good models for Stoics that say, yeah, I don't need, I don't think you have to buy everything that our predecessors said. Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Caleb Ontiveros and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism.
Speaker: Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us and the other will be an in -depth conversation with an expert. In this episode of Stowe Conversations, I talk with Gregory Sadler about common criticisms of stoicism by other philosophers.
Speaker: It's a really eclectic episode where we look at how stoicism has been received and treated by different thinkers throughout history, both ancient thinkers like Aristotelians or Epicureans, but also early modern thinkers and modern thinkers such as Hegel, Nietzsche, and the neo -Aristotelian movement.
Speaker: Gregory Sadler is the founder and president of Reason .io, a company dedicated to making resources of contemporary and classical philosophy available and accessible to non -philosophers. He has an MA and PhD in philosophy, and held a tenure -track position before deciding to leave academia to focus on public philosophy. I first encountered Greg through his popular YouTube channel, which has hundreds of videos breaking down the thinking of philosophers ranging from Epictetus and Seneca to Hegel and Hume.
Speaker: Greg really is one of those people who has an incredible breadth in his understanding of philosophy, and I think that comes off in this episode where instead of just focusing on ancient philosophy, Greg's able to show how stoicism has interacted with and been received by philosophers throughout a broad history of time. So I think this will be a fun episode for anybody looking to see stoicism in that broader philosophical context. I hope you enjoy.
Speaker: Okay. Hi, Greg. How are you doing? I'm doing good. And you? No, doing great. Excited to chat with you. Really looking forward to this conversation. So for those listening who might not be familiar with you and your background, I was hoping you could kick things off. Tell us a bit about how you got into stoicism, kind of your journey into the stoic community.
Speaker: Yeah, so I mean, I got exposed to a bit of stoicism back when I was a college student about half of my lifetime ago, but it didn't really stick. And I don't think I was in a proper frame of mind to really appreciate what was going on. You know, we read the N. Caridian because we did an ancient philosophy class. And that was basically all that my professors presented. And it was kind of like,
Speaker: You know, Plato, Aristotle, those are the real show. Now we're going to do this Hellenistic stuff because we have to cover it. And then we'll get past that and get on to cool stuff instead. So they weren't very receptive to it. I did like some of the ideas, but I think I had a hard time wrapping my head around.
Speaker: quite a few of the things that were being said and it might have been because of the translations. And then I read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. I picked it up at a used bookstore and I really liked some of it and then like the virtues talk kind of went over my head and I think there's a lot of things that I just didn't have.
Speaker: anyone who could explain it to me. And I didn't have the background to appreciate it well. And then it kind of, I just dropped it for a while. And when I was in graduate school, I happened to pick up Epictetus's discourses.
Speaker: And I was very interested in not issues so much of free will and determinism, but more about the mechanics. How does the will actually work? How do we form habits? How do we move ourselves either towards the good or away from it, become better or worse people? How do we develop self -control?
Speaker: And I started reading it and I was actually in a bookstore reading it and I was like, holy crap, this is really interesting stuff because I'd been exposed to, you know, platonic and Aristotelian, let's call it philosophical anthropology and psychology and some other stuff. And I didn't know that the Stoics had this sort of approach.
Speaker: And then I started reading more. I was very interested in philosophical theories that pertain to anger and anger management. And I found that the Stoics had a lot of really cool resources for that, including a whole book by Seneca on anger, but good stuff in Marcus and Epictetus and Seneca's other works. And so I just started studying. And I think the thing that actually drew me into the community
Speaker: was before Modern Stoicism became the Modern Stoicism organization, they were kind of a loose association. There was a blog Stoicism Today. There was a Stoic Week class that started in 2012. And I started participating in that. And that's how I got to know people. And then
Speaker: I got invited to become the editor of Stoicism today in 2016. Patrick Usher, the original editor, stepped down and that effectively made me part of the organization and you get invited to give talks and things like that. And so it just kept growing and growing and growing.
Speaker: there wasn't any real plan to it on my part. But I will say this, I'm not, I don't identify as a stoic in the sense of like, that's my made or only thing, I'm an eclectic, where I'll take things from the Aristotelians or the Platonists or the Stoics that I find useful, very much like Cicero, you know, Cicero is a eclectic of that sort.
Speaker: But, you know, I think there's a lot that Stoicism has to offer, and then there's areas where it's superior to other approaches, right? But then there's also, you know, some of the criticisms that we're going to discuss. I think some of them are actually on point, like Cicero, who says that, you Stoics, you really, you got great philosophy, but you're
Speaker: You're not terrible at rhetoric, you just won't do it. And so you're missing all these great opportunities to get your message out there. Why don't you be more like those Aristotelians who, you know, they don't have to dilute their philosophy by bringing rhetoric in. I think some of those things can be kind of on point.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's interesting to me that you described yourself as an eclectic, because I was trying to think of the right word for it. When I think of you as a philosopher, I think of you as somebody who has such a great functional grasp of so much of the history of philosophy. And as you alluded to, what we're going to talk about, we're going to talk about some criticisms of stoicism.
Speaker: I'm interested in your take since, you know, you're as an eclectic, but you're particularly involved in the modern stoic community. What do you think are some of the things that stoicism gets right or does well or what it attracts you in particular to that part of philosophy's history? Yeah, I won't say that the stoic theory of emotions is completely correct, but it's certainly
Speaker: more robust and developed than their predecessors. And I think with stoicism, we also get, let's call them emphases on particular ideas or practices that actually then benefited other schools. Because if you look at, for example, Alexander of Aphrodisias, who's a Aristotelian,
Speaker: he will, he's read the Stoics and he'll engage them, or Plutarch, you know, a little bit later on, if I remember right. He's a Platonist, but he heavily engages the Stoics. And so it's sort of like that proverb, iron sharpens iron, right? If you got good stuff over here with the Stoics, then others, by arguing against them or appropriating some of their stuff, it can be quite good. You know, the emphasis on what we actually
Speaker: do however you want to translate, what's up to us, what we can control, what's in our power, what's our business. Officially, Epictetus is the person formulating that, although it's an Aristotelian concept originally. But you see that in Cicero and Seneca, having a lot of focus on that and then exploring, well, how are things actually in our control or things that seem to be
Speaker: external and indifference, how can we make use of them properly? They're really powerful. This is the stuff that we still have. If we uncovered some treasure trove of lost Stoic texts, because we've lost probably 90 % of what these people wrote, who knows what cool stuff we'd find there.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that point about emphasis, that's one that I think about a lot, which is this idea of there's so much philosophy, there's so much to talk about and focus on, and there's this kind of question of where you draw your attention when you emphasize it, which is a similar point to the point Epictetus is making, right? Which is when you're navigating the world, where's your attention? Where is your emphasis? Is it on what's up to you or on what's not up to you?
Speaker: Yeah. And you know, there's another sense to that too. A lot of times in the history of ideas were like super interested in, well, who did something first, right? Yeah. That's not really that important. It really is about who's
Speaker: really doing something with it. Who's doing something with an idea in a robust way, unpacking it, tying it together with practices that we could incorporate into our lives. So maybe, you know, I just kind of stumbled across the word, but maybe emphasis is something that we should be looking to more often than like who originated some.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's a great point. And I think that's something to be said. I mean, I want to get into our topic of criticisms, but I'm enjoying this. I think that's something to be said about the way that scholarship is done, right? So scholarship is a lot about providing credit. So like in academia, it's a lot about, well, you've got to give credit, you've got a site, you have to source. And so then when you look at the text, you're like, well, you know, who is Epictetus drawing from? Who is he?
Speaker: What's the, what's the, what's the, what are the sources here? And you end up through that perspective instead of, as you said, which I think the Stoics are more focused on. Well, okay. What's the way, what's the way to package this, to present this, or what's the way to actual actualize these teachings, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a whole can of worms with Epictetus, right? And in two major ways. One is that the only reference that he has to Aristotelians is a negative one, where they're not as bad as Epicureans, but they're still on that continuum. And yet, he is the only stoic
Speaker: who makes something out of this originally Aristotelian concept, whatever you want to call it, of pro -racist. I mean, it's not that people don't use that term before. You can find it in Plato. You can find it in some of the writers. But Aristotle turns it into a faculty. And it's not quite as robust in Aristotle as it is in Epictetus.
Speaker: And you're like, well, where the hell did this come from? I mean, we know that the Stoics do talk about prior races, but they don't care much about it. It's just one kind of Hormé or impulse. So there's that going on. And the up to us thing, that's an Aristotle too. So you're like, well, what's going on there? Does he know Aristotle? Does he not know Aristotle? We don't know. I mean, the best thing is to be kind of agnostic about that.
Speaker: And then, you know, he'll reference Stoic philosophers, particularly Chrysippus. So we know that he's read these guys, but he doesn't often cite them. And he'll, you know, he's kind of disparaging about it. He'll be like, you know, you can read Chrysippus. That's awesome if you if you can do that. But that's mainly because Chrysippus is hard to read.
Speaker: It's better that you actually understand what we're talking about and carry out the practices. I think he can afford to get away with that because he has studied this stuff so much, he can be kind of flipped towards it.
Speaker: Totally. At the risk of, if we keep going, I will pull this into a conversation about Epictetus for the whole time. And so I have to stop myself. One of the things we wanted to talk about, so building on that theme of who's influencing who, that relationship between thinkers, one of the things that
Speaker: We thought would be having fun to do in this conversation is talk about some criticisms of stoicism both by their contemporaries and then also of you know later thinkers but people we might still think of being historical like Nietzsche and Hegel and I think first I want to say I think this is a great topic because
Speaker: as you said, iron sharpens iron, just using that metaphor, it really helps you understand what stoicism is when you see other people bump up against it or other ways of thinking bump up against it. And second, I know for myself, I'm just excited to learn from you and talk about this because I'm really focused in this kind of ancient area. So to talk about what people like Hegel think or someone like William James, that's gonna be a different experience for me. So to jump into it,
Speaker: We wanted to talk about what did Hegel think about the Stoics and kind of what was, I mean, maybe at first, first of all, a little bit, who was Hegel? Why should we care what he thinks about the Stoics? And then what does he have to say about stoicism?
Speaker: All right, so Hegel is, we're talking about Georg William Friedrich Hegel. He's a major German philosopher in the early part of the 19th century, and he's called the German idealist, and it's a very loose movement that includes people who hate Hegel's guts, like Arthur Schopenhauer, who has some horribly unfair criticisms of Hegel. It includes a whole bunch of other people. And Immanuel Kant is
Speaker: in large respect, the person who kicks this movement off in the late 18th century. And Hegel's an interesting thinker in his own right. I do a lot of work on him, but I also find him pretty frustrating.
Speaker: to read a good bit of the time because he's not a particularly good writer. So you have to really, you know, some of the times that you have to work it's because the ideas are really complex and sometimes he just doesn't express those ideas well. And he's a creature of his time in many respects. So that like the criticisms of stoicism
Speaker: he makes similar criticisms of Hellenistic philosophy in general. And so to back up a little bit, up into the 19th century, you do see a lot of big name philosophers thinking that not just the Stoics, but also the skeptics and the Epicureans are really well worth engaging
Speaker: with, and also philosophers like Cicero. So if you look at David Hume, who's not that distant in time, he actually has essays. And the essays are on what he considers to be important philosophical points of view. One is the Platonist. OK, Plato is always a big name, right? There's no the Aristotelian, because that's considered just kind of more abundant stuff associated with the Scholastics. And then the others are the Stoic, the Skeptic, and the Epicurean.
Speaker: So there's a lot of people from the Renaissance onward to, I mean, if we want to be very arbitrary and probably wrong about this, let's say, you know, 1800, who are, you know, they may be criticizing these people, but they're taking them seriously as philosophers. And then in the early 1800s, particularly in Germany,
Speaker: There's this set of ideas that all get glommed together. And one of them is that Plato and Aristotle are the real ancient philosophers who offer us something important to grapple with, something with metaphysical depth, something with real ethical and epistemological interest. And then the stuff that comes after them, that's not very interesting.
Speaker: until we get to platitis and then once again we've got great metaphysics going on and then Christianity comes around you've got Augustine and people like that.
Speaker: And sometimes you look at that and you're like, well, how the hell did they come up with that idea? So part of it is tied in, especially for Hegel, with the notion that in the ancient Greek city state, people could develop themselves more than they could in the ways of organizing things that followed. So like Alexander, well, Philip conquers Greece, essentially.
Speaker: And, you know, as a side note to everyone, you know, people who are Spartan fanciers are always like, well, he didn't conquer Sparta. He could. I mean, he just didn't consider it worth his time and he wasn't going to bother with them. They were, you know, like a hillbilly backwater by that time of Greece and have been beaten many times by, you know, like the Thebans and people like that.
Speaker: So Alexander inherits that, founds this gigantic empire which then, after he dies, breaks apart into larger units. And the idea was that, as a human being, you have the greatest potential for development in a small community, where you can see everybody and engage in
Speaker: politics, and then that's always been a silly idealization. It usually didn't work that way. Elites ran just about all of these cities. It wasn't quite so egalitarian as that. But this is the idea that Hegel and other people have. So all these Hellenistic philosophies become reinterpreted as escapes from the crappy situation that you now inhabit.
Speaker: So that goes along with this, eh, you know, Aristotle, Plato, they were able to do the real philosophy. These other guys, eh, it's kind of like second rate. And, you know, Hegel also says, so he adds one other thing to the mix. And this is in the, his lectures on the history of philosophy. He says that
Speaker: We moderns, we can't take on these sorts of things anymore. We can't pretend to be Stoics or even Aristotelians. We're in a new configuration. It's silly to pretend that you could possibly live like a Stoic or an Epicurean or a skeptic. He's not saying throw it all out. You still study it, but it's just not a viable possibility. I mean, if you were to bring him in today and show him the modern Stoic movement,
Speaker: That's developed with, you know, I don't even know how many people, I would say there's probably at least a million people worldwide who are doing something, right? He might have to revise his views or he might be dogmatic and just say, no, no, none of that counts. You know, they're all just diluting themselves. As someone who's very biased the other way, what was the perspective on why it's not viable?
Speaker: He just thinks that human consciousness, and not just individual consciousness, but in societies, has developed so far beyond that, that it would just be kind of silly. It'd be sort of like saying, and again, if we think about the examples that could come to mind,
Speaker: Think about how we do sports today. You know, we have really nice equipment that tends to be lighter and stronger and all that. But if you wanted to like ski with old skis that people might have used back, you know, 2000 years ago, I don't know what skis were invented, but I'm sure it's been a long time. I mean, you could do it, right? It'd be more difficult, but you could do it. And you might even get good at it. Hegel's just, he's got this kind of
Speaker: you know, typical modern mentality of we are so much further advanced and our societies are in our technology and all that that we, you know, you're deluding yourself if you want to go back to an earlier form of social organization and philosophy, what he would call a shape of consciousness, you know, a gestalt is the term that he uses for shape.
Speaker: So, you know, when you look at that, a lot of people bought into that. And it wasn't just Hegel who was saying that. It was, you know, people were doing ancient scholarship and it becomes kind of an unquestioned prejudice.
Speaker: that I think goes all the way through into the 20th century. That's why figures like Anthony Long and particularly in respect to stoicism, Lawrence Becker are so important for academic understanding of these things because they don't buy into that.
Speaker: And it's the sort of thing where if you've been told, don't bother with these people over here, you're not going to bother with those people over there. You're going to trust what the experts or your professors say. And if you do spend time with them, you'll be like, oh, I'm slumming with these second -rate philosophers. Maybe there's something interesting in them. But if you actually look carefully at what the texts have, there's really cool stuff. Same thing you could say with Plutarch, a Platonist.
Speaker: He got dismissed. He's just second -rate. But, I mean, his stuff is amazing, you know? So that's part of what's driving the story with Hegel. And then there's one other element, you know? Hegel, he's got a whole section of the phenomenology of spirit, which is entitled Stoicism. But what he means by Stoicism is this retreat with it.
Speaker: You know, and now think about like, you know, the, the, the trope of the retreat, right? Marcus actually uses that. You've got an inner citadel, right? An acropolis within you. You can take a retreat anytime that you want, but you don't do it to hide from the world.
Speaker: You do it so you can go back out and reengage the Hegel interpret stoicism as this kind of sour grapes reality socks. I'm just going to withdraw into myself where I can find the true, the good, the rational, not like this, this screwy world out here. And, you know, when you compare that to what Stoics actually say in their texts, you're like, how did this guy arrive at this conclusion? Well, he started out with this notion that
Speaker: the end of the Greek city -state was the end of an important way of Forming people, you know, so His criticisms are generally not on point but they are on point I guess you could say for a you know, how like we contrast uppercase s stoicism and lowercase s stoicism They're they're they're right about the lowercase s stuff
Speaker: But I actually think that people like Hegel, as well as others in the 19th century, they're the ones that are actually responsible for there being a lowercase s stoicism.
Speaker: All this talk about stoicism is just stiff upper lip and figure out what matters and the things that don't matter don't matter at all, withdraw within yourself. I think that they're the ones who created within the intellectual culture a caricature of stoicism that a lot of people have bought into down to the present.
Speaker: Yeah, so maybe a good criticism of a misinterpretation, a good criticism of a different philosophy, which is the small estoicism. The other thing I was thinking there, I loved your ski metaphor, even if it was, even if you just made it up, I still really liked it. It might be totally historically inaccurate. But I do have a kind of respect for people who meet, like,
Speaker: Even if they're rejecting Stoic as a bad pair of skis, Hegel's still skiing, I guess, right? Like he's still taking philosophy seriously and just saying, they're just not succeeding. I sometimes get frustrated with, if you look at Stoicism or philosophy as a kind of historical artifact and you're like, wow, I can't criticize it. It's because it's like crystallized, it's pristine. I can't wrestle with it.
Speaker: So I have a respect for people that take stoicism seriously enough to have problems with it if they think it's wrong. Obviously, it's too bad if you're misinterpreting in this kind of rejection of life. It's a good way to put it. That's another way you could frame it. And that's a good one we'll lead in with nature, right? Rejection of life, rejection of the richness of our lives.
Speaker: Well, that's what I was going to say. I wanted to jump over to some Nietzsche because that's the way I understand his criticism of stoicism was kind of being very similar to the way you were presenting Hegel there, which is you were treating to the inner citadel, you're not confronting the world, I guess, bravely, you're actually being maybe kind of cowardly in this rejection of the world as it is. And then Nietzsche has these things, ironically, you call that living in accordance with nature, but you come about maybe as far from it as possible.
Speaker: Yeah, and he's got kind of, so if we only look at that one long passage that tends to be the one that everybody brings up, right? There's a lot of moving parts there. And then when we look at the other things that he says about stoicism, he talks about it in several different books, but I think that, you know, if we stick with just beyond good and evil,
Speaker: At one point, he says, we Stoics. So clearly, he's not rejecting them entirely out of hand. And you've got to say, what's the beef he has with them?
Speaker: And there is the life -denying thing. For Nietzsche, he says, you're tyrannizing over nature. You're making nature look like you're rational, which stoicism does. The logos runs through everything. We can actually understand nature and be part of it. And he's like, no, you're just projecting that onto this messy thing that we actually call nature.
Speaker: And I don't know, maybe there's some parts of that that are actually right when you see stoic arguments for how everything works out nicely and fits together nicely. I kind of think some of us are like, I don't think that's quite true. It's got to be more complicated.
Speaker: But really, what's happening here is Nietzsche, you could reframe it as Nietzsche saying, I've got a different conception of nature than you do. So I don't like your conception of nature. And yours should be more like mine. Now, that's that's not a good criticism at all.
Speaker: And so people who bring that up, there's a lot of people who seem to think that if you can criticize something, it must be wrong, right? Or some famous person has had something to say about it. But what if the famous person's wrong? You got to actually go further with that. And then the other thing that he says that I think he's actually more positive about, talking about tyrannizing.
Speaker: over nature, well, that's what nature thinks we have to do with ourselves, because we are complicated, composite things, so the will to power
Speaker: within our body, or our spirit, which is something that comes out of body, is the best part of ourself, or sometimes the worst part of ourself, running the show. And then we do this in families and societies. This self -tyranizing Nietzsche thinks is something that allowed us to develop as a species.
Speaker: So he's not saying that it's always a bad or cowardly thing. It might actually be necessary for producing a certain kind of human being.
Speaker: So one thing here is this idea that tyranny is maybe not as bad as, you know, we have to be careful when we hear tyranny, we think, wow, this is terrible. But when Nietzsche is using it, maybe, you know, maybe he has some respect for tyrants in a sense. And so I suppose what would then, so I was understanding you to say that Nietzsche is maybe more sympathetic to the Stoics than we would think. What does a kind of sympathy
Speaker: What does that look like? What does a sympathetic Nietzschean reading of stoicism look like? It would have to throw out some things that traditional stoicism thinks are absolutely central, like the notion of the universe itself being
Speaker: I mean, the pantheism to begin with, you know, the universe being one vast organized cosmos, but even having logos running through all of it or providence, right? You know, the stoic commitment, which is not a purely stoic commitment. I mean, Christians, Jews have this as well. You know, the Platonists in a certain sense might buy into this, that things are arranged well, you know,
Speaker: I mean, Nietzsche doesn't. If you were going to try to fuse Nietzscheanism and Stoicism, that would be one you'd have to get rid of. I guess you could also say that Nietzsche would look at the Stoics less as guides for us, providing us with the
Speaker: overall well -worked -out philosophical structure, and he'd be more interested in experimenting. But I mean, that's not missing in stoicism. Epictetus is quite often willing to say to people who are not buying into his stuff, he'll say, well, you go and try it your way, and then after you screw it up, let's have a chat. For example, the guy doesn't want to study logic. He's like, I just need to do exercises. He's like, well, OK.
Speaker: How do you know you have to do exercises? Did somebody convince you of that, right? Maybe you should be using a little bit of logic there, right? So, I don't know. I think Nietzsche probably would be more interested in us just, you know, doing bold experiments, but there's no reason why we couldn't.
Speaker: Let's use that term again. He says, you stoics, you self -tyronize. Well, that's part of what a Nietzschean strong person, or if there is such a thing as the Ubermensch, that's part of what they do, is rule themselves cruelly. I think he'd be cool with that. You just have to do it in a kind of
Speaker: a punk way, maybe a bit more of a silly way. I should say the whole notion of being like pro -social, yeah, Nietzsche wouldn't buy that, right? Yeah. Because that's more like what he calls herd mentality or herd morality. But you know, Nietzsche doesn't want you to be this, you've got all these book covers with the wanderer and you see the guy standing on the mountain looking at the clouds and stuff like that. That's a failed Nietzsche.
Speaker: I mean, Nietzsche's life was not all that happy either, due to illness, but Nietzsche thinks that it's nice to have solitude, einzamkeit, to be by yourself, but you should ultimately have friendships. You should have relationships with other people, just not with those scummy, plebe, herd people. But you can find other people who are into the things that you're into, and I think the Stoics really appreciate relationships and friendship.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I like that. I think also...
Speaker: I think what we're getting here, what I'm connecting between these two examples, the Hegel and the Nietzsche is this tendency of we have to put things in boxes and maybe Hegel's making a mistake when he puts stoicism in a box and maybe we're making a mistake when we take Nietzsche's criticism of stoicism in a box and this ability to kind of embrace the ambiguity or a little bit more broadness here. That's like - Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. Maybe not as immediately satisfying, but probably a bit more accurate too.
Speaker: Yeah, and if you value truth, right? So, again, not a purely Stoic thing, but the Stoics place a really high premium on being in touch with reality, you know, seeing things the way they are, not misrepresenting things. Then, you know, when we're looking at philosophers, we don't want to have crappy pop culture, misses a point, kind of glosses on them. We want to actually read the text and see what it says.
Speaker: And so moving to another thinker, who's William James and what does he have to say about stoicism? Well, he is an interesting guy. We typically call him a pragmatist and we often, in philosophy, forget that he actually held a position in psychology. He straddles both fields and
Speaker: He's not the guy who coined the term pragmatism. There's like this story. Do you know this story about... So Charles Perce, Charles Sanders Perce is prior to him and he's a bit more eccentric than James in some ways. And he produces something that he calls pragmatism.
Speaker: And James kind of copies it, but only certain parts that he likes from Perce, and then he says, I'm doing pragmatism too. And Perce then doesn't like what James is doing. And he changes the name of his doctrine to pragmaticism and says, it's such an ugly word, nobody will steal it from me, right?
Speaker: But they're not totally distant from each other. And some of this might have been more about personalities. So James is a huge advocate of adopting this pragmatic method, which sometimes people say, oh, whatever works is true. It's not quite so simple as that. But there's a really heavy emphasis on like,
Speaker: you know, try to verify things, thinking about what kind of experiments we could set up, thinking about what the cash value of an idea is, to use one of James's famous phrases. And in the varieties of religious experience, he talks about Marcus Aurelius. He doesn't talk so much about Epictetus or Seneca.
Speaker: But he wants to think about the worldview, the way of orienting yourself in the world that different points of view offer. And they could be religious. And he takes Marcus as being a religious thinker.
Speaker: I think he is, right? He thinks there's a God. He thinks that God does things in the universe. He's not a big prayer guy, but, you know, neither is Epictetus, who's even more religious, at least in his expressions, than Marcus Aurelius.
Speaker: And James, you know, he's a very nuanced observer. And these are actually the Gifford lectures, which for a philosopher is sort of like the pinnacle. You know, if you get to give the Gifford lectures, you know, you've really made it. So he's giving these Gifford lectures on what we can learn without buying into somebody else's religious beliefs and practices, what we can learn by looking at what they say and what they do and how things
Speaker: work. And so he's got some pretty sympathetic things to say and parts about Marcus early on in the text. But he also, you know, and I think he's right about this. He also wants to contrast the Stoic point of view against like a committed Christian point.
Speaker: where the Stoic thinks that things are largely fated. And there's no point in praying to God. I mean, if you want to pray, you could express gratitude, but you're not going to engage in what we nowadays in philosophy of religion call petitionary prayer, right? Because second, if it's the right thing to do, God's already doing it. You don't need to remind him or her or whatever. Probably it is better. God's already got that handled.
Speaker: And so he thinks that Marcus is a bit gloomy, which might be right. I mean, when I read other parts of Marcus, he seems like he does have a lot of joy in his life. He can take pleasure. I mean, the guy can take pleasure in looking at the cracks on bread. So clearly, he's not wandering around with his head down, oh, woe is me, or something like that.
Speaker: And he had a, man, he had a rough life, right? I mean, he went through an awful lot. So James is kind of an interesting guy. And you could say, if you think about the culture that James is in here in the States, people read Marcus Aurelius or read Seneca or read Epictetus, but what did they actually take from it?
Speaker: There's this kind of, let's call it not fully intellectual culture, but we had some brushes with stuff. I think a lot of, sort of like me when I was a college student, you could pick up the meditations and be like, oh yeah, I like this toughness stuff and not letting things get to me, but this virtue stuff, and that's not soul. That's too preachy, churchy kind of things. I'm not into temperance. I want to drink as much as I can. I'm a college student.
Speaker: And so I think James is part of this, whether he likes it or not, this cultural movement that produces the lowercase astoicism as an ideal, as the sort of thing that many people have in their mind when they see the word stoic. I don't think he intended that, but I think that was part of the effect of his writings.
Speaker: If Marcus Aurelius is too gloomy, what's kind of the alternative here? What is William James arguing for? Oh, he's not really arguing for. In the varieties of religious experience, he's looking at sort of like a panorama of
Speaker: different religious peoples reporting about their experiences and their mindsets and all of that. I don't think that James wants us to jump in with some sort of leap of faith and take on a more optimistic religious attitude. He's just sort of remarking that this is the case, that this is about as far as a stoic could go.
Speaker: Yeah, so more of a more of a kind of a descriptive, descriptive project. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. And then being like, well, that's too bad. That's as far as the stoic can get. Maybe it's heavy. I will say two games himself could be quite pessimistic at times. He so that we're getting a little bit into the weeds with this, but it could be kind of good to bring it up. He contrasts what calls the tough minded and the tender minded.
Speaker: and their attitudes towards life. And the tough -minded are the people who are less in touch with reality than the tender -minded. And the tender -minded, things get to them more, right? But it's also because they see how things suck.
Speaker: you know, when they do, whereas the tough -minded, they're just, you know, kind of whistling, going along, doo -doo -doo -doo -doo, everything's great, you know. I mean, the limit case would be this cartoon character, Mr. Magoo, I don't know if you're familiar with him, but there used to be this cartoon guy who was like totally oblivious to his environment, and like, he'd always cause accidents for other people, and he's just going along, having a great time. James was himself tender -minded, and
Speaker: I actually, now we're gonna go further into the weeds. I was in a faculty fellowship one summer with Alistair McIntyre and he was leading it and there were several, there were 12 of us faculty members in it. And this topic came up about, you know, depression in the contemporary sense. Are you better off not being depressed at all?
Speaker: or maybe being depressed a little bit as a rational response to the reality that we encounter, and it also helps you to see things.
Speaker: And McIntyre, who himself has, he told us in the session, he's struggled with depression. He brought up William James, and he said, you know, I kind of think, and I don't have proof for this, that being mildly depressed would actually be an advantage for grasping reality as opposed to not having anything like that going on. Because you're attuned to things. Your response is because you actually do see the things that don't hold together or get in each other's way.
Speaker: kind of suck. We don't have to be Pollyannish about that. And I think that's right, myself. And I go by my own experience with depression. You have to be very careful not to impose like a depressive mentality on things and be a downer. But, you know, if you look at the world that we exist in, there's a lot of challenges.
Speaker: stuff like that. And so we might actually be doing ourselves a disservice by trying to get rid of all of our negative emotions or all of our negative responses, which I suppose you could say could be a criticism of the stoicism of Stoics, right? If, if the goal is to get rid of all anxiety, which you wouldn't though, because there's still like rational fear, right? Caution, you love him, but get rid of all, all of the, the, what we call the negative emotions.
Speaker: Well, maybe you would be cutting yourself off from some things that are important. And you notice that some of the Stoics actually do consider that. Like, officially, grief is a bad emotion. But Seneca is willing to say, I'm not going to advise you to grieve, but I'm also not going to say don't grieve at all. Just, you know, don't be like doing the kind of crazy stuff that people do, like jumping on the coffin as it's going into the ground or, you know, crying for three days straight.
Speaker: stuff like that. There's maybe there's something that that that provides us with that we need. So circling back to James, right? James, I think, you know, he would be okay with people being stoics, but he would say you have to approach this experimentally, which I think is a good idea.
Speaker: you know, rather than dogmatically saying, well, if it's in the book, and it's not working for me, I must be the one at fault. Yeah, I think that's, I mean, there's so much interesting things there. I don't want to lose this thought I had. One is that
Speaker: I never heard of the tender mind or tough minded, but that's really nice. I think maybe stoicism is a way for tender minded people to try to become tough minded, or at least it attracts tender minded people.
Speaker: because you wouldn't be going to stoicism unless you were in a position where you were like, I'm feeling a lot and I need some help with how I'm feeling at least not today. The second thing is I value this eclecticism that you have that I don't see as much today.
Speaker: I love that idea of, you know, practice it experimentally. And if it's not working for you, you know, don't point yourself as the problem. And I like that idea of, you know, we, we can have something, we can have something to learn from this, but I'm not going to be reverential towards a certain book or a system. I'm going to kind of have my own participation in that. And that's a lot of what I'm hearing from this. And I guess that makes sense with the pragmatics of it, right?
Speaker: And I mean, that's there in Seneca though, right? He says, I want to say it's in letter 33, you know, we don't have Kings as Stoics. We all have to, you know, interpret it in our own way. And you see examples of this. I want to say it's letter 120 or 121 where the Stoics had this doctrine that I guess was pretty common among them because Arius Didymus also reports it as well, that the virtues
Speaker: were individually living things within the living thing that is our soul. So think of them sort of like almost like the mitochondria in our cells or I mean, it's hard to figure out what the hell they meant by this. And Seneca has a whole letter where he's like, okay, so this is a, you know, a common stoic doctrine, but I think this is crazy. And here's why here's my arguments for it, you know, so I think we've got good models for
Speaker: for Stoics that say, yeah, I don't think you have to buy everything that our predecessors said. We also know about disputes between them. Cicero reports some of these, for example, in on duties where the different school arcs argued with each other. Sometimes in ways that seem kind of shifty. Do you have an example of particularly shifty? Yeah. So this is one I actually use in business ethics. Diogenes seem to be the shifty guy. Diogenes are Babylon.
Speaker: So this is sort of like a test case or a moral dilemma that would come up. So imagine that there's a pretty isolated city, and it's on the coast, and there's a famine going on. There's a lack of grain, right? And this guy's got a ship, and it's totally full of grain. And he's pulling into the harbor, and he knows that there's a whole fleet of other ships behind him, like a day or two out. And they also have grain. So he's got the market cornered.
Speaker: for the time being. Now, does he have a duty to inform the other people in the harbor that he's not the only ship with grade? Because if he informs them, then they're not going to pay super high prices where he could make a fortune. But it seems like it's the right thing to do, to report, right? To say, oh, all is not lost. And then to take a decent price, but not
Speaker: scarcity level prices. So Diogenes said, no, I just need duty to do that. And this is the skull mark of the Stoic school, right? He's like, it's fine. And then I think it's Auntie Potter who came after him. And he's like, no, this is reprehensible. You cannot do that to people. You owe them the actual truth about this sort of thing. What are you trying to do? Just make a buck off of them? I mean, I'm very roughly paraphrasing here. I'm adding some stuff in.
Speaker: So it shows that there's like some serious debates and discussions between these people who are leading the school about precisely what the historic doctrine is, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, and I think that's an important thing to keep in mind, even in the modern stoicism movement as we continue, or as that movement continues to evolve and change and wrestle with the application of stoicism to contemporary life. This thing has some stretch in it, right? It has some, especially when you get into particular cases, like selling your grain out of your boat, as we all have had happen to us once or twice. Telling things out of the trunk of our car. Yeah, that's more realistic.
Speaker: not letting out there's there's more cars coming but you don't have to tell them. The other thing I wanted to hit on follow up on our last on your last on the William James discussion was this experience working with McIntyre or this one thing I want to talk about was this also neo Aristotelian discussion of stoicism criticisms in that area maybe what they get right or wrong in your view.
Speaker: Yeah, and McIntyre is an interesting guy for that, because if you read After Virtue, which is a great book, he gets the Stoics wrong. He essentially says that they're like proto -conscience, and he's pretty dismissive of their point of view. And Anthony Long wrote a really wonderful piece, and this is probably three decades ago,
Speaker: And I don't remember the name of it offhand, but if you type in McIntyre, Anthony Long, Stoicism, it'll pop up immediately in Google. It's got a long title to it.
Speaker: And essentially, Long's position was, OK, you're doing great with explaining all of these things, but you got stoicism wrong. Here's how you actually got it wrong. And as the kind of neo -Aristotelian that you are, this person committed to traditions and looking for correction, I'm sure you're going to welcome this, right? And McIntyre did. And actually, that's not the only thing he's been criticized for.
Speaker: There was an entire book about how he got Kierkegaard wrong with all these Kierkegaard scholars weighing in that presented a thing about how he got Anselm wrong and missed the boat on that. But coming back to Long, the other thing that Long says that's really, really interesting.
Speaker: He says, okay, now there's my negative criticism of you, you got this wrong, this wrong, this wrong. Now, let's think about what you are putting forward as something we should be striving for, something that we want to say is positive.
Speaker: You've got this notion of a tradition constituted rationality, meaning that we learn by being part of a tradition that we join and then participate within. And it's not like we can just read all the books from the outside and jump in. We have to actually be doing it, to be engaged in the community. What you're talking about as Aristotelian applies just as well to the modern Stoicism community.
Speaker: they're doing exactly what you're saying is great about the Aristotelian. So what that means is you have a rival virtue ethics tradition that should be in communication with the Aristotelian tradition and you can build off of each other. And I would even go so far as to say that we can also say this about the Platonist tradition.
Speaker: you know, the other really massive virtue ethics tradition in antiquity, they have some stuff to offer as well. And there are people out there in, it's not as big as, you know, the more academic Aristotelian community or the Stoic community, but there's people out there who are doing group work as Platonists. They get together, you know, every once in a while and contemplate the good and
Speaker: stuff like that. And so, you know, we want to, instead of like saying, ah, you know, we put up our walls here, here's where, you know, Aristotelianism ends, and then, you know, that nasty stoicism begins over here, we should think of it more like things interpenetrating each other, which is the way it was in ancient world, for the, you know, the most part. There were many people who were, if not eclectic, they belong to a school, but they'd be like, oh, yeah, you know, those Platonists, they got something right over there, let's take it, you know,
Speaker: Yeah, well, that brings us almost full circle, right? Because when we started, we had this conception of iron sharpens iron. What's something that's really cool? Well, it's cool because it built up, it strengthened these other philosophies. These other philosophies strengthen them as this really important part of this conversation and this development of philosophy.
Speaker: So I want to ask you, put you on the spot. What are some things that we could learn from played, played mists or Aristotelians, especially for those listening who maybe, you know, only are exposed to stoicism. But before, before you answer that, I did some, some internet fact checking. Well, it it's, it's Greek ethics after McIntyre and the stoic community of reason. That's the, that's the paper you're talking about 1983, which is cool. Yeah. So I'll have to get that one to read after. So that's 40 years ago.
Speaker: Right? That's been out. I mean, that should be like required reading for everybody, I think. It's such a good paper. Now, well, I think, so for one thing, Plato is just the beginning point to the Platonic tradition, right? There's all these great Platonist authors that we can read. In fact, one of them wrote a really cool commentary on Epictetus and Caridius, like, yes, well worth checking out.
Speaker: And what you see with these traditions is, okay, so they've got like a founder at the literature of the founder, but then they continue to develop stuff along the way and they might be developing it in relation to the stoic.
Speaker: So when somebody like Plutarch comes along and says, I'm going to write a whole book about how the stoic conception of general conceptions or preconceptions pro -lape says it's got problems with it, I think stoics ought, instead of saying, well, he's not a stoic. I'm not going to look at that guy. They should look at it and say, OK, maybe this teaches us something.
Speaker: Or, you know, if you think about the way in which we understand the emotions, maybe the Stoics can learn some things from the Aristotelians or the Platonists or even other traditions as well about how to understand and then deal with anxiety or anger or
Speaker: sadness. You can bring things in together, which again is sort of a good practice. Even the Epicureans have things to offer, as Seneca has pointed out. One of the things that is kind of cool that's still happening today in Neo -Epicurean communities
Speaker: as this monthly get -together, I mean, essentially, ostensibly it's to like celebrate Epicurus' birthday, right? But it's basically a communal meal that people have together in order to promote friendship. You know, Stoics could be doing that too. And in fact, you know, many people do.
Speaker: although they don't usually have a communal meal. And you can say, well, what does having a meal bring to the table? Pun intended, I guess. Well, you know, when people eat together, they share more and they bond more. And wouldn't that be a great expression of, you know, the pro -social side of our rationality? I mean, so we could go on and on and on with like interesting things. And
Speaker: Stoicism might even be able to draw things from more explicitly religious traditions like monasticism develops after. Stoicism is kind of on the way, but maybe there's some interesting things to learn from people like John Cassian or the rule of St. Benedict or things like that.
Speaker: Well, I'm thinking that as a general argument in favor of expanding your tastes, expanding your philosophical horizons. If you've only dug into stoicism in the time being, there's other things you can pick and choose. As you mentioned earlier, you'd be following in stoic footsteps by doing so just the way Seneca talked about Epicureanism in his letters, for example.
Speaker: I think that ends us on a good note and as a strong lesson. Greg, the one thing that I want to give you the chance to do is say, what do you have going on for people that are interested in learning more from you or reading or watching some of your work? Where can they find your stuff? Feel free to share.
Speaker: So I'm really fortunate in that there aren't a lot of Greg Sadler's out there and almost all my stuff comes up pretty quickly in Google results. And it sucks for the other Greg Sadler's who are out there, right? There's a photographer, there's a libertarian political candidate, but they're not. If you type in Greg Sadler or Gregory Sadler, I'm the one. My platform's come up the most. So, you know, I've got a YouTube channel. That's probably what I think most people
Speaker: know me for. And I do, for people who are interested in stoicism, I have a playlist that's just about stoic philosophy, and it's got over 200 videos in it. I'll plug as well. I have a radio show with a friend of mine called Wisdom for Life, and we do talk about stoicism occasionally, but we stray into all sorts of other practical topics as well that are informed by philosophy. Writings, people can find me on Medium,
Speaker: For my academic writings, academia .edu or fill papers are, although I haven't been that consistent in uploading sentences, I should be, but you know, it's pretty easy to find. And I do have a company Reason .io that I've started back in the early 2010s and I do philosophical counseling and tutorials.
Speaker: Things like that. And now I'll put in a plug too. If people want it, want me to come speak. I do professional speaking. I'll be presenting at this year's Stoicon. My wife, Andy Shaka and I organized the last two years. And so now I get to just sit back and talk rather than MC and organize. And that's kind of nice. So, and that's probably enough. I mean, it's so easy just to like type in Greg Sandler, Gregory Sandler and Google to see what pops up.
Speaker: Yeah, at the expense of the other Greg Sadler's. I feel bad for them now, but somebody's got to win. I've been battling with a saxophone instructor from Ottawa. Really? For most of my career, we're pretty neck and neck, so I can empathize with the people of the other Greg Sadler's in this situation. But Greg, it's so great to have you on. Really nice to... I mean, we've been...
Speaker: you know, kind of involved in the stoicism community for a while. So super nice to talk with you in person. And I learned, I learned a lot and appreciated it. So thanks again. Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to get two meditations from me on stoic theory and practice a week, just two short emails on whatever I've been thinking about, as well as some of the best resources we found for practicing stoicism, check out stowletcher .com. It's completely free. You can sign up for it and then unsubscribe at any time as you wish.
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 ancientlyer .com.
Speaker: And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation .com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.
