Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Chris Fisher on Traditional Stoicism (Episode 33)
949 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 episode, Michael and I speak with Chris Fisher. We discuss traditional Stoicism: its religious aspects, the role of the Stoic God, and what modern Stoics miss from the ancient philosophy.
You'll learn what Traditional Stoicism is and why it matters.
https://traditionalstoicism.com/
(01:55) Chris's Background
(09:17) What is Traditional Stoicism?
(19:45) Defending Providence
(29:00) The Stoic God
(40:14) What's the Practical Upshot
(48:50) The Problem of Evil
(57:27) Is Modern Stoicism a Bad Thing?
(01:12:00) What's Missing from Modern Stoic Epistemics?
(01:13:44) Building Habits
(01:18:40) Summing Up
****
Subscribe to The Stoa Letter for weekly meditations, actions, and links to the best Stoic resources: https://www.stoaletter.com/subscribe
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Modern vs. Traditional Stoicism
00:00:00
Speaker
and if the world just adopts some kind of virtue ethics, it's a better place. So it's not that modern Stoicism is bad and wrong, and it's just that it is a dramatic departure from what Stoicism is, and I just argue that that needs to be openly acknowledged. Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of Stoicism.
00:00:21
Speaker
that in this episode you have something a little bit different. Michael and I speak with Chris Fisher. Chris is the skolark of the College of Stoic Philosophers.
Meet Chris Fisher: A Stoic Scholar's Journey
00:00:32
Speaker
We spend some time talking about Chris's background and then move to defining traditional stoicism, talking about the religious aspects of stoicism, the stoic god, what modern stoics leave out from stoic logic,
00:00:47
Speaker
and how traditional and modern Stoics should relate to each other. Michael and I's goal here was to give traditional Stoicism a fair hearing. What is it and why does it matter? And that's what you'll get, whether you have any background in these issues or not.
Life Experiences and Stoicism
00:01:07
Speaker
This is an excellent conversation for understanding what traditional Stoicism is and the philosophical and practical support for the view.
00:01:16
Speaker
Without any more words of introduction, here is our conversation. Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. I'm here with Michael Trombley and Chris Fisher. Chris is the scholar of the College of Stoic Philosophers. He's a manager of the traditional Stoicism website and creator of the podcast, Stoicism on Fire. And we are very honored to have him to chat with us today.
00:01:45
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for having me guys. I'm sure it'll be a fun conversation, interesting conversation. So let's start with this broad question. Yeah. What's your story before we hop into it? How would you, how would you answer that question? We'll skip your childhood because I could argue that a lot of events from my childhood, I think, heard me.
00:02:02
Speaker
or prepared the soil to be receptive to something like stoicism. But where I was first introduced to anything like what I would consider stoicism was in, well, I should say that some of the misunderstandings of stoicism was in the United States Marine Corps. I spent six and a half years in the Marine Corps, in the presidential helicopter squadron. And there's a flavor of stoicism, the stiff upper lip, suck it up buttercup version of stoicism, which isn't real stoicism, but it's
00:02:29
Speaker
a part of the culture. From there, I went into high technology in Silicon Valley, spent 15 years in Silicon Valley as an engineer, and it was introduced to concepts like artificial intelligence. That was one of my areas of expertise, developing back then what was called an expert system for a program to do something that a human expert was already doing.
00:02:53
Speaker
And then I had a very wonderful career, lucrative career, and in turn of the millennium, cashed it all in and decided to become a cop.
Stoicism in Professional Contexts
00:03:01
Speaker
If you're going to ask me for a rational explanation of that, I can't probably provide a fully rational explanation that most people would understand. But there was something for me to learn, and now looking back, I know what it was.
00:03:13
Speaker
deputy sheriff here in the Tampa area in 2006, was deployed in one, well, the roughest area of the county and quickly got introduced to the human behaviors that I had not previously been exposed to on the street.
00:03:33
Speaker
And that raised a level of curiosity that made me start digging deeper into things like evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, and ultimately came across a book of the happiness hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, which happened to mention stoicism. I read it, I read Irvine's book, I read Becker's book, and then wandered across the, wanted to know more, came across the College of Stoic Philosophers and thought, okay, here's an online course.
00:03:58
Speaker
And that was it, completed that course, completed the Marcus Aurelius program, which is a year-long program at the college, became a mentor there. And then in late 2015, started the traditional Stoicism blog. And then early 2018, started the podcast.
00:04:16
Speaker
And then in late 2021, when my mentor Eric Weigart decided to retire, the board approached me and asked me to come back to the college and be the scholar of the
Stoicism and Law Enforcement
00:04:28
Speaker
college. So that's it in a nutshell.
00:04:30
Speaker
So, I mean, it's such an interesting story because, you know, when we see these stoicism movements, we see it in stoicism in the military. We see that discussed. We see stoicism as prominence of popularity in Silicon Valley and kind of in the tech space, and then stoicism with first responders. So it's almost like before you, before you dove into stoicism, you walked a lot of these paths that are, that really resonate or people end up attracted to stoicism within those.
00:04:57
Speaker
But I'm interested in that police officer aspect. Seems like what attracted you to stoicism was almost the behavior of other people rather than, you know, how can I do this difficult thing? Something like being in the military or professional career. It was actually this, if I was understanding correctly, actually the behavior of other people that drew you to asking these questions or looking for answers to these questions. I'm wondering if you could dig into that a little bit.
00:05:22
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that's not what attracted me to law enforcement. The attraction to law enforcement is to go back into public service, as I had been in the Marine Corps. But then once I was there, I was confronted with this behavior. And you try to find, as a law enforcement officer, you try to find a reason to understand what you are seeing. You're seeing this level of violence. You're seeing this level of interaction between humans that you say, this is not
00:05:48
Speaker
conducive to normal society. This is not how people should be getting along. Someone disrespects someone so they stab them or shoot them. The things that people do just to survive, the drug addictions and so forth. So there was on my part an attempt to try to understand
00:06:07
Speaker
human behavior. Where is this coming from? Which led me into a variety of different fields from reading, again, evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, Nietzsche, just trying to get a grasp on all of this. But secondarily to that, once I came to stoicism, my early exposure with stoicism was
00:06:26
Speaker
this idea of Socratic intellectualism, which that nobody does wrong knowingly. And of course, as a cop, my first response, well, that's ridiculous. I deal with people who do wrong knowingly every single day. That's who I arrest, because I didn't fully grasp what Socrates was teaching or what the Stoics were teaching from that. And when I came to understand what they were teaching, it put me in a different place because by that time I was a detective and now I had to
00:06:54
Speaker
engage in these in-depth interviews with people who had committed crimes. And that's when I went back and rewrote Meditations 2.1 for me, and I had posted it on my blog years ago, but the idea that when I'm sitting across dealing with someone who's committed a criminal act, I can't see them as a criminal. They've committed a criminal act, they've stolen something, they hit somebody, they hurt someone, they shot someone, they stabbed someone, whatever the case might be. But the recognition that A,
00:07:21
Speaker
They did that because of their own ignorance. It's not because they know good from bad and they chose bad over good. They think the bad is the good and they're just pursuing what they perceive to be good, which we would argue is not good. But people want to say, oh, criminals are stupid.
00:07:44
Speaker
I can't tell you how many times I sat in an interview and I would look across the table and I'd say, man, if you took your intelligence and you applied it to something productive, you could be extraordinarily successful, but you're choosing criminal activity instead. But the creativity, the rational thought that goes into committing a lot of these crimes is far beyond what, I mean, admittedly, the average person goes through just going to work day to day in an H-5 job. They're very creative. They have to be in order to do what they do.
00:08:11
Speaker
But ultimately, I had to come to the place where I could see them as something other than just a criminal, which is, okay, this is a human being that shares, as Marcus says in Meditations 2.1, a fragment of the same divine mind that I share in.
Defining Traditional Stoicism
00:08:25
Speaker
And that distinguishes them
00:08:28
Speaker
from the pit bull that bit somebody, you know, which I had to deal with as, as a cop or, you know, any other animal or, or truly insane person who has no longer in any way a control of the rational faculty. So I hope that answers your question. Yeah, great. It's very insightful.
00:08:47
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I think the main reason we wanted to kick off this conversation is because Michael and I had an episode a few weeks back called Six Kinds of Stoicism, and we chatted about traditional stoicism, which you have been one of the foremost proponents of, and we thought it'd be excellent to get you on to chat about what you thought about
00:09:10
Speaker
what people should know about traditional Stoicism and what value they could get from that position and have a discussion about where people misunderstand each other, where modern Stoics and traditional Stoics might disagree today. So that's the primary purpose. But before we hop into that, of course, we need to understand what is traditional Stoicism? How would you characterize that view?
00:09:35
Speaker
Well, I'll say first of all, I did listen to that podcast and found for the most part, not that much to disagree with. I mean, you guys, I thought articulated traditional stoicism fairly well as well as probably anybody standing outside of it can understand it. I guess, let's go back to the beginning. Because the actual term traditional stoicism as we use it was created in 2015 when I started the blog.
00:10:01
Speaker
And I would argue that prior to the advent of what we now call modern stoicism, there was no need for this label called traditional stoicism, because everybody would have just said, well, that's stoicism. With the advent of modern stoicism, stoicism started to shift in the popular mind what stoicism is. So we had, in effect, coined a term, just like Irvine did with dichotomy of control. We coined a term that said, okay, well, this distinguishes
00:10:28
Speaker
what was just called stoicism and what, Michael, when you went to college and got your PhD, what you studied as the academic works that tell us what stoicism is versus what people like Ryan Holiday, Irvine, Becker, go down the list, are writing about in the popular culture.
Providence and Ethics in Stoicism
00:10:48
Speaker
And so that was the coining of the phrase. What is the distinction? Well, it's not a distinction that was created by me. In fact, I can point you to three very good sources. If you go to my Facebook page, you'll see that I have an initial post of what is traditional stoicism.
00:11:04
Speaker
And I'm quoting actually, interestingly, a podcast by a guy named Peter Abramson who does the history of philosophy without any gaps. I don't know if you're familiar with it. Great podcast. But he does, I can't remember the exact number, seven to nine episodes on stoicism. And in one of those, he invites David Sedley.
00:11:21
Speaker
Well, anybody that's been around stoicism knows who David Sedley is. He is a renowned stoic philosopher with A.A. Long wrote the highly referenced set Hellenistic philosophy. But anyway, Abramson had, I think, a very poignant and interesting question that he posed to David Sedley. And he said,
00:11:40
Speaker
We have all these ancients that we look to and we call them stoics, but are we right to call them stoics? Was there really this thing called stoicism? Because these guys all seem to disagree with each other on so many different things.
00:11:54
Speaker
And sadly said, that's true. They did disagree on a lot of things. He said, but there were three fundamental things that they agreed on, they all agreed on, that distinguished them from the other schools at the time. And this is quoting from him, in physics to be a stoic was to believe that the world is a supremely rational, good, and indeed divine organism.
00:12:16
Speaker
In epistemology, all Stoics agreed that there is a kind of infallible grasp, which we can call a cognitive or catalytic compression. And in ethics, that you could not be a Stoic without holding that the only good is virtue. So he outlined it very simply, very succinctly, three doctrines that all the Stoics agreed on. They disagreed on a lot of things.
00:12:37
Speaker
We could turn to John Cooper. John Cooper in a lecture at Princeton University, which as one of the John Locke lectures from 2011 said, in order to understand properly the stoic way of life and its philosophical basis.
00:12:50
Speaker
we're going to have to learn a great deal about their metaphysical and physical theories into which, as I've said, their ethical theory is set as the centerpiece of their whole philosophical system. And then you go back to the presentation by A.A. Long in 2018 at Stoicon, where he laid it out again. These are the three doctrines. He said Greek and Roman Stoics were in complete agreement about three reciprocal doctrines. One, the rational and providential structure of the universe,
00:13:19
Speaker
Two, the special status, responsibility, and challenges of being a human. And three, our innate potential and goal that we live together in all circumstances. So he phrases them a different way. But he's also the person that argues that when you remove the determinism and the providence from the holistic system, you end up with a system that using his language is quote, broken back. So I didn't create this concept. I'm not a scholar. I don't have a PhD like Michael does. I don't read Greek. I don't read Latin.
00:13:48
Speaker
I am 100% solely and wholly dependent on credible scholars to tell me what stoicism was. Apart from them, I would be relying on picking up the stoic text and just kind of interpreting it for myself, which has the same effect of someone picking up the Bible and reading it for themselves. You can come up with all kinds of misinterpretations if you just turn to the texts of the stoics. So I looked to the scholars. The scholars said, this is what stoicism is.
00:14:17
Speaker
And then the next logical question is, over which I think we have disagreement in the modern world, is that viable for modern times? And I think that's where you have the divide between modern and traditional Stoics, because modern Stoics, from my understanding and my engagement with them, look at traditional Stoicism and they say,
00:14:36
Speaker
providential order, the idea that there's some kind of teleology in the universe, that's an antiquated idea. You know, in Massimo Pio diucci's language, it's untenable in light of modern science. It's not a popular idea in what Charles Taylor would call our secular age. We've come to a place where
00:14:53
Speaker
The water that we all swim in today is no longer theological water like it was, you know, even when I was a child, no one walked around in public that I grew up with. And I'm 63 years old, but none of my grade school kids, I wouldn't even up until high school would have said, yeah, I'm an atheist.
00:15:09
Speaker
people would have gone, there's something wrong with you. Now you do the same thing. Yeah, I believe in God. And people go, there's something wrong with you. So we've had a complete switch in one lifetime where the social context of what it means to believe in anything other than a mechanistic, reductive, materialist conception of reality is considered odd. And my argument is, and I point this out in a couple of my blog posts,
00:15:37
Speaker
In fact, Anthony Long points it out when he says that people who make these assertions, he's concerned about them because when he talks to his biology friends at Berkeley, there's a lot of them that point out to him, there's a lot we don't know, even about biology and human consciousness. And you just can't make these blanket statements, which end up being
00:15:57
Speaker
their own metaphysics. People want to come on and say, well, show me the facts. I believe in science. Well, most people, when they say that, they're not believing in science. They're believing in what I think is appropriately called scientism, which is a metaphysical system that comes out of science. It's not science, because what is science? Science is a methodology. Science is not a belief system.
00:16:15
Speaker
and in the same way that someone who can say there is no God can't say that from using science. They have to resort to a metaphysical belief system that denies the existence of a God. So the primary difference between
00:16:31
Speaker
traditional stoic and most modern stoic as I have experienced them is that this willingness to look at what the stoic said about a divine and providentially ordered cosmos and give it real consideration and think that you ask is it possible to translate this into the modern world or do we have to just throw the baby out with the bathwater as Becker did and start with just the ethics and
00:16:57
Speaker
I argue that no, we can make sense of this in modern times, and therefore it's not what a lot of moderns want to believe it is, which is some kind of religious fanaticism. I don't have an altar in my backyard to Zeus. I don't make bird sacrifices of animals or humans. I don't do any of that. I'm not a polytheist, although that was accepted by the ancient Stoic.
Cosmic Order and Ethical Behavior
00:17:21
Speaker
But none of that is entailed by assent to the idea that the universe is in some way rationally ordered and by something larger than us. One of my podcast interviews was a
00:17:40
Speaker
actually a Australian philosopher, Timothy. He wrote a book called, An Anthropocentric Proposivism. The argument is that he's actually, he's a, what we would call more of a Bentham in terms of ethics, but his base argument as a modern philosopher is
00:17:57
Speaker
that if there is no purpose in the universe, as existentialists want to argue, if there's absolutely no purpose and no meaning, then we have no basis upon which to even start to have a conversation about ethics. Because it's basically just makes right, it's a free-for-all, it's your opinion against mine, if there is absolutely no inherent meaning and purpose to the cosmos.
00:18:21
Speaker
Very interesting book. I would very much encourage you to get ahold of it. I lost the dig into their Chris. So listening to that, I think there'd be two ways to frame this. So one, there's kind of this depth. There's this definitional claim, which is to say.
00:18:34
Speaker
Look, if you're not endorsing these three things, the providential and divine nature of the universe, the capacity for humans to understand the truth of things through cataleptic impressions, and virtue is the only good, if you're not endorsing those three things that's saidly laid out, well, then you're not doing stoicism. And that's kind of a definitional divide. And I think I can get behind that. That makes a lot of sense to me.
00:18:59
Speaker
And then there's I would say another claim, which is I do believe those three things as a traditional stoic. And I think those three things are the right things to believe. When the modern stoics are making a mistake, perhaps the modern stoics are making a definitional mistake by calling themselves stoics, but they also might just be making a philosophical mistake by throwing out things. As you said, throwing out the divine too early. So I think the definitional divide is pretty clear, but I'd be interested in your argument
00:19:28
Speaker
You know, understanding that's a big question, but your perspective on the best reasons to endorse, you know, the divine and providential nature of the universe or our capacity for cataleptic impressions, those parts of stoicism that the modern stoics, so-called modern stoics might
00:19:46
Speaker
I just gave you one of them. I don't think you can get off the ground, truly get off the ground with ethics without some reference to nature and the way nature is. That's been a scholarly debate since Annis wrote her book, even within stoic circles. But when you read
00:20:06
Speaker
the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, or you read the discourses of Epictetus, and you see real time this relationship that each of them, and even Seneca, the relationship that they talk about between what they would call the God within, this divine part within them.
00:20:25
Speaker
and the cosmos outside of them and how that relationship between their inner source of the divine and the divine that permeates the entire cosmos affects their understanding of human nature and the responsibility toward humans as a whole and toward the cosmos as a whole. I get that people believe that they can get there by other paths
00:20:48
Speaker
But here's the problem. I read broadly, I read Christians, I read atheists, and try to understand where everybody is coming from. And John Gray, who's a very prominent atheist, what I love about his writings is he's truly honest about what atheism is, meaning that he acknowledges that, yeah, this ultimately leads you to nihilism.
00:21:11
Speaker
how could it do otherwise? I mean, if you really break this down and you say, okay, there is no rational order, there is no separate intelligence behind any of this, and all of this really truly is whatever word we want to put on it. It's not chaos, but it's chance. It's chance combinations of atoms that over a long period of time just happen to come together in the right way that eventually produces this thing that we are so intimately aware of, which is our human consciousness.
00:21:41
Speaker
When you, if you really believe that at your core, that it's all just chance, then I don't know how you get beyond might makes right. And okay, you can have your opinion, I can have mine, but and or even get beyond. Well, it's chance that
00:21:57
Speaker
This race of human beings over here, it's pretty easy to look at them and say, well, they may not be at the same level as our race because chance didn't work the same way for them. There is no divine peace that I can connect to this other group of people. I can otherize them because they don't have the same thing that I have. Interestingly, I didn't realize until I had gone back and looked at Tony Long's 2018,
00:22:25
Speaker
stoic comprehension. He brings up Meditations 4.23, which is what I quote so repeatedly in my podcast when Marcus says, everything in your good time, all universe. Basically, he's acknowledging that he is willing to accept everything that occurs in the cosmos because he's accepting it from a rational order.
00:22:46
Speaker
There's a fundamental psychological difference, a profound psychological difference, which A. Long, I think, points out very adequately between facing the world as a machine that just happens to operate the way that it does, and no matter what happens out there, I've got to bear and forbear, I've got to suck it up, I've got to just deal with it, then looking at that same event and saying,
00:23:12
Speaker
And I don't understand how this plays into some bigger picture. I don't understand how this is supposed to be for the good of the whole, but I trust that it is in some way good for the whole and therefore don't have to, I can have a completely different psychological disposition when I'm facing that event.
00:23:28
Speaker
For me, without going into detail, I came to stoicism as a hardcore atheist. I've made that clear on my podcast. I had read Dawkins, and I had read Dennett, and I had read Harris, and I was an atheist. In fact, I went through the entire SES program. I was into the second term of the Marcus Aurelius program. Before I could finally, when I would see the word God, I would just replace it with the word nature.
00:23:54
Speaker
And it was in that second term of dealing with physics I realized I had a hard choice to make. And the hard choice was I either needed to come to grips with this idea or I needed to walk away from stoicism because it was so integrated into stoicism that it couldn't just be ripped out and leave stoicism the same. Yeah, I could have gone back and
00:24:14
Speaker
you know, read Becker and been okay with that, you know, Becker's ethical approach, but there was something fundamentally different here. And once I did what, I think it's, forgive me if I'm wrong, maybe Kierkegaard, who argued about, you know, to step into the open space, when you step into that and just try it on for a little bit and you say, okay, well, what would the world look like? What would my life look like? If everything really had a purpose, if everything had meaning, what would that be like? Just try it on for a little while.
00:24:42
Speaker
And when I did that and I look back at the things, the events that occurred in my childhood and the sequence of events from going, being a US Marine to going into high tech to becoming a cop on the street. And I look, all of this, all of a sudden instantly kind of fit into this neat little pattern. And I went, okay.
00:25:03
Speaker
This appears to be in some way ordered. There was a reason why these things happened, and it wasn't just random events that occurred. And when I look at it that way, those events that occurred in my childhood that I could say, well, I was a victim of that, those were hurtful, harmful events, I could look at them entirely differently. And I can say those events formed my character in such a way that prepared me for the future.
00:25:28
Speaker
And here I am. So it is a different way of looking at it. And one of the ways that that's very applicable in modern times is what do we do in modern times? I mean, you're nobody today in the 21st century unless you're a victim of somebody or something. You're just nobody. I mean, you don't count unless you're a victim. We teach victimhood and the Stoics would have said, you're not a victim of anybody but yourself.
00:25:52
Speaker
But that view comes from a distinct view of the way that the world is, the way the cosmos is. I mean, let's face it. No one can prove that the world is providentially ordered. It's a metaphysical argument that can't be proven or disproven by science in the same way that
00:26:14
Speaker
Lawrence Krauss can argue all he wants that it happened from nothing. That's a metaphysical argument, a universe from nothing. It's not a scientific argument because there's no scientific methodology that we can apply to demonstrate either one of these. So what are we forced as humans to do? We're forced to follow two paths, and I followed both of them.
00:26:32
Speaker
You follow atheism as far as it goes, and the arguments that support it, and then you follow theism as far as it goes, some form of it, and you say, okay, they both lead me to the same place. I have to make an existential choice.
00:26:44
Speaker
am I going to live my life this way or am I gonna live my life this way? And I think that's ultimately what the Stoics argued is that it has a profound, the ancient Stoics, this way of viewing the cosmos, which is why they argued it so strongly against the Epicureans, has a profound impact on the way we behave, the way we understand things and our lives. It's a big piece to bite off for moderns because again, we live in a secular age where they've been taught that these things are
00:27:13
Speaker
nonsensical.
Modern Skepticism and Stoic Divinity
00:27:14
Speaker
They're old ideas, but they haven't been taught what the Stoics really said about God and providence and logos. They get their understanding of those from Sunday school.
00:27:25
Speaker
from listening to a fundamentalist preacher on TV. And that's not what the Stoics were about. It's something entirely different in the same way that they used a lot of words different, that it's the struggle for the modern to get over their own prejudices. I mean, the word happiness, virtue, how many people are turned off by virtue? I have argued, and I think rightfully so, I would love to have the challenge, say, okay, let's run a little test.
00:27:52
Speaker
want you to stand on, I don't know what's the busiest intersection in New York City, Times Square and whatever, whatever it is. We picked the busiest intersection for foot traffic in New York City. You stand on that corner, we're gonna have somebody else stand on the opposite corner, and we're going to give them everybody the choice. You have one of two propositions. You can either, you can either assent to the idea
00:28:13
Speaker
that virtue is the only good and that you don't need anything else in your life to experience well-being and to be happy. You don't need any money. You don't need any good health. In fact, you could be being tortured on a rack and still experience happiness. You could be imprisoned in jail and still experience happiness. You could be living in a war zone and still experience happiness. Or you can believe that this cosmos that we live in is somehow
00:28:38
Speaker
Cosmically providentially ordered by some kind of an intelligence that we don't really fully understand and I would argue good luck convincing Moderns really what what the stoics meant by the word virtue. You see we kind of pedal that word But how many even modern stocks how many modern stocks really truly say? Oh, yeah, none of this stuff really really matters. I think it would be useful to
00:29:04
Speaker
Let's zoom into what the Stoics meant by these ideas of God and providence, since, as you say, I think a lot of people when they think of these teleological images of the universe, the first thing that comes to mind, especially in the West, is an image of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God sort of ordering things in a particular way. But the Stoic picture is different. It has to do with nature, of course. But how do you describe that picture and how does it differ from what you might call the more
00:29:33
Speaker
machine-like view of the universe where there's a sense in which things are ordered, right? They follow some natural laws of cause and effects, but I don't think we would say that view includes a stoic providence unless and except in perhaps a metaphorical way if you wanted to
00:29:51
Speaker
save Stoicism for a more naturalistic picture. But how would you describe, how would you do it? Yeah. I mean, obviously we see order, we know that the world is orderly. So the argument from the opposite side is, well, it's orderly because it's organized itself into this kind of machine that is now orderly. But anyway, so I think sometimes
00:30:09
Speaker
In the Eastern world, there are some religions that say, you can't put a word on God, you can't define God. And once you do, you misunderstand it. And I think that's to a large degree true of Stoicism too. We, in modern times, we label them as pantheists. A long labels them as panentheists. But those terms are invented a long time afterward. And they kind of fit, but they kind of don't.
00:30:31
Speaker
So I've always said that the easiest way to understand the stoic God is to understand first what it is not. It's not a bearded guy sitting up on the clouds throwing thunderbolts down at people that he doesn't like. It's not a God that intervenes on your behalf because you said the right magic words, you said the right prayer, or that you've lived a life
00:30:53
Speaker
that is good enough for God to intervene for you, dispense with the laws of physics temporarily so that you are somehow treated differently than everyone else in the world. That's not the God of Stoicism. The God of Stoicism is not one that wrote a rule book.
00:31:10
Speaker
Here's the book of rules that you have to abide by. The God of Stoicism is not someone that's going to condemn you to heaven or to hell. So what is it? It's a rationality, literally a mind. And I use that word, that mind, because it's interesting how many modern physicists, astrophysicists and quantum physicists use that word to describe what they see in nature.
00:31:40
Speaker
that there's a mind-like background to the cosmos. This appears to be operating like a mind. I forget who said, when we see all of these astronomical, this fine-tuning, it almost looks like the universe was waiting for our arrival. So we see this, what appears to us to be intelligence, and we have the ability to determine that. So what does that mean in your day-to-day life? Well, it's the difference again between
00:32:09
Speaker
This is an accidental event and it's an event that occurred and may not be in your best interest. And that's the whole point of, it's Tim Mulligan, an anthropocentric purposivism is the idea, his idea goes a little farther than the Stokes because he says the universe has a purpose and the purpose of the universe isn't ours, isn't necessarily ours. It means it has a purpose of its own.
00:32:33
Speaker
we are here. Now, the Stoics go a little farther than that. And they say that the purpose is maybe not the ultimate purpose, but that we are a part of the divine purpose, the divine intention, this teleology. But his argument is that, yeah, it may be, and he contrasts that with atheism on one end and what he calls benevolent theism on the other end. So benevolent theism is the concept that most people have in modern times when they think of God. If I pray to God, if my daughter or son dies,
00:33:02
Speaker
God, why did you take my child away from me? And then the flip side of that is, well, your child wasn't taken away from you. God wanted them in heaven. And we have all of these things where God is interacting in a way that is interventionist in our lives as opposed to. And this is where the stoic
00:33:20
Speaker
conception of teleology can get rather naturalistic in the sense that the laws are created, the world is created in a way to play these things out the way they do with divine intention, but it's not going to change because you don't like it. Now, it's just going to be the way that it is. But here's the distinction.
00:33:41
Speaker
And here's why I don't sometimes like the label pantheist because there are people, in fact, I had one come onto my Facebook group one time and argue that he was a pantheist and an atheist.
00:33:50
Speaker
Okay, well, it's an abusive language. I'd like to see the etymology of that, but the point is that there are a group, they call themselves scientific pantheists. It's what Richard Dawkins calls sexed up atheism. So what is sexed up atheism? It's looking at nature and saying, man, isn't this marvelous? Isn't this wonderful? This is divine. Let's call it God. That's distinct from
00:34:21
Speaker
This is God, therefore it's divine and wonderful. So it's a bottom-up approach, a way of looking at it versus a top-down. And the Stoics looked at it as top-down, which is why they can argue that our rationality isn't
00:34:37
Speaker
a chance combination of atoms, it has a source. And that source is divine, and that is God. And it is, yes, it is nature, but it's not just trees and animals and rocks. It is the intelligence that permeates all of those entities.
00:34:58
Speaker
that makes them what they are. From the rock that has a level of tonus that just holds it together, to the animal which has a level of tonus and a sukei that actually a plant that allows it to seek out and send the soil to the animal which is the next level up that has a soul and can wander around and find its food.
00:35:17
Speaker
to the humans who are distinct from the animals in the sense that we have this other piece that makes us, that we share with God, which makes us truly rational and therefore able to assent or not assent to the impressions that we, our rational faculty presents us with. So the moderns, I mean, the irony is that if, I think if moderns took the time to understand the stoic conception of God,
00:35:44
Speaker
they realize they don't have something to fear by it. It's not some boogeyman in the sky. The hurdle they have to overcome is, and maybe this is where Irvine comes in because Irvine says basically and argues it, but if you're gonna be a stoic, be a closet stoic. Okay, well, maybe you need to be a closet traditional stoic. You don't need to walk around the streets and tell everybody, yeah, I believe in a divine and providentially ordered cosmos.
00:36:09
Speaker
Ironically, how many times do you hear from people who will simultaneously claim that there may be an atheist or agnostics who say, well, everything happens for a reason? Really? What reason is that? If you're going to use the word reason, what reason did these things happen? What reason was there for my child dying? You said everything happens for a reason. What's the reason?
00:36:31
Speaker
If I live in a truly mechanistic universe that has no fundamental, at its basis, no meaning, no teleology, then what could possibly be the reason? It's just another chance event that occurred because
00:36:45
Speaker
My daughter got this particular disease or my daughter happened to be in that car at the time that it entered the intersection that's with the drunk driver and these things happened. Right. So it seems like this model of God, you could call it benevolent panentheism if you want it to be precise. It's probably closer to panentheism than pantheism. And it shares with benevolent theism, this idea that the
00:37:10
Speaker
All these events that happen in the world are for some greater purpose, whether that is the design of God, in the theistic picture where God's some independent entity, of course, or this rational providence. And it's this benevolence that gives you this added frame on the world that, oh, there's something here. Maybe you don't want to call it benevolence, but you could call it reason. There's
00:37:32
Speaker
a reason that you can grasp for why things do occur. And that speech, there's a reason for everything that happens. It's not merely metaphorical in a way it might be for an atheist or someone who's more liberally religious, but it maps onto the way the world actually is.
00:37:52
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And that's the reason. And yeah, I personally, I think probably the best term, which is not a common term is called pandeism. I wrote a chapter in a book on pandeism, Jean pandeists to look at stoicism because the definition of pandeism is that God became the cosmos.
00:38:11
Speaker
It's God one day, it's cosmos the next, chooses to turn into the cosmos. There is language, and I think that's where along comes to that. There's language that would imply the cosmos is inside a void, and so therefore there's got to be something outside that, and that kind of gets you to this panentheism. There's still some God remaining outside of the cosmos. However, the God that remains outside the cosmos still isn't an interventionist God, and that's where
00:38:34
Speaker
When you see Epictetus, Epictetus is probably the strongest advocate for what we might call benevolent theism. He calls God father. He says basically God is involved in everything that he does. But the flip side of that is you don't see Epictetus praying for things to be different.
00:38:54
Speaker
You don't see Epictetus making any kind of claims that he can somehow make a sacrifice and everything's going to change. Any sacrifice that he talks about and he does talk about on occasion is what? A sacrifice of thanks. Thank the God that I broke that habit. Well, go make a sacrifice. He says, if you haven't done this in 30 days, you broke this bad habit. Go make a sacrifice. You didn't go to the altar and ask God to take the habit away.
00:39:17
Speaker
You went to the altar and thanked God that you were able to overcome this, you had the power to overcome this bad habit. That's a fundamental distinction when we get to things like Benevolent Theism. Practice Stoicism with Stoa. Stoa combines the ancient philosophy of Stoicism with meditation in a practical meditation app. It includes hundreds of hours of exercises, lessons, and conversations to help you live a happier life. Here's what our users are saying.
00:39:47
Speaker
I'm new to Stoicism and wanted to dive deeper with guidance. This is it. I love the meditations. I've practiced meditations with other apps, but this just seems to be more impactful. Life changer.
00:40:00
Speaker
With Stoa, you can really get a sense of how to take yourself out of your thoughts and get a sense of how to handle different, difficult situations. Find it available for a free download in the Play Store and App Store. So I wanted to, I mean, Chris, the really, really interesting stuff enjoying this and thinking about it in my own journey, in my own relationship with Stoicism. If we're defining modern Stoicism as
00:40:25
Speaker
kind of the rejection of this theological picture as being false or unnecessary. I wouldn't say I'm a modern Stoic, but I would certainly say that my emphasis has neglected this part of it or the theological divine aspect of Stoicism. I think because, as you say, it can be difficult to put on that cape or it's not kind of the way, you know, it's not the paradigm
00:40:46
Speaker
that I'm raised in, it's one that feels uncomfortable or unfamiliar and one that I kind of have difficulty looking at problems through unless, unless it seems necessary. It's like, well, if I, if I can avoid it, I'm going to avoid it because it seems, it seems uncomfortable and difficult.
Stoicism as a Tool for Growth
00:41:00
Speaker
And that's something I've been reflecting on while you were, while you were speaking to that. But one point I wanted to take it, and I might be missing the point a bit.
00:41:07
Speaker
But I want to think about the experiential benefits of incorporating this divine aspect of the universe into your stoic practice or into the way you look at stoicism. So there's one view, which is, you know, if you're modern stoic, you're missing something, you're not doing stoicism, you're not getting something, you're not understanding something that's important. But then there's another view that would be, if you don't incorporate this part of it, this part into your practice or your understanding of stoicism, it will affect the way you live your life negatively.
00:41:37
Speaker
you will, you will, you know, you will be more difficult to achieve virtue, be more difficult to have equanimity in difficult situations. So wondering in your experience, people that, that go this traditional stuff, some route or incorporate the divine, what the experiential benefits are to emphasizing that in your stoic practice. Yeah. Again, it's, it's viewing, it's the ability to a view, to view the events.
00:42:02
Speaker
that most people would look at in their life as tragic, as unwelcome, that they are victim ofs or whatever, and being able to see them truly as a preferred indifferent, a dispreferred indifferent. Why? Because in some way, we're not going to understand because we only have a fragment of the divine, we don't have the whole piece. In some way, this fits into something bigger and has a purpose.
00:42:28
Speaker
So if you look back at history, we can point to a number of what we could say horrific and tragic events that we can say occurred in history. But you also look at
00:42:41
Speaker
At those times, those events produced a new understanding on the part of humans that changed the world profoundly. We could look at World War II and what Hitler did, and we could say, how many, I don't know, gross estimates, 60 to 80 million people died as a result of World War II worldwide?
00:43:02
Speaker
But look at where we came as a human race as a result of World War II, a new understanding of racism, a new understanding of how the ideas of Darwin could be used in a wrong way if we're not careful to argue that we need to get rid of these weaker human beings.
00:43:21
Speaker
turned into the creation of the Jewish state. I'm sure there's a lot of Jewish people that are very thankful that they have that today because of those events. It'd be hard to argue that you have a Jewish state today if you didn't have World War II. We can look back at things like slavery, how as horrific as it was in the end.
00:43:37
Speaker
it brought us a whole new awareness. Slavery had existed forever in human society. And it really culminates in many ways here in America in the Civil War where you've got brother against brother saying, no, this is wrong. This is something that we need to address as human beings. And now, in theory, we are supposed to be able to look at one another and not see color. That's the whole idea, is that we shouldn't see this other race and think that they are inferior to us or superior to us.
00:44:06
Speaker
in a human sense. All of this is just a different way of looking at the events that occurred in nature. Now we get to your own personal life. You get to look at, again, something horrible happened to me as a child, as an adult.
00:44:22
Speaker
what possible meaning could there be in that event if it did have meaning, if this is supposed to take me to a different place, if it's something I'm supposed to learn from this. I used to come home right before I found stoicism, I would come home to my wife and I had been a guy that
00:44:41
Speaker
that drove a Mercedes to work and wore custom suits and ties in Silicon Valley. And now I'm coming home in a sweaty, nasty uniform and telling her some of the stuff that's going on. And when I was going through the real, I would call the psychological abyss part before I found stoicism, she would say to me, why don't you just quit? Because I still had headhunters calling me, wanting to take me back into the high tech world.
00:45:05
Speaker
And I always had the same answer to her over several years. I said, now there's something for me to learn here. I don't know what it is yet, but there's something here that I need to learn. And I stuck with it long enough to learn that. That's the distinction. Again, I'm not a victim of outside events.
00:45:23
Speaker
These outside events are just indifference, and in fact, if I view them the right way, they're not just indifference, they're now grist for the mill that allows me to develop my own moral character, my own proheoresis, my own rational faculty, and eventually, if you're lucky enough to develop virtue and become a sage, which a whole different topic that I don't hold on to.
00:45:46
Speaker
So there's a fundamental distinction. And interestingly, now we're not talking about Stoicism. I would love to see this study done, but I don't know that Stoicism, Stoics are a large enough body to do it. But in study after study, what do the psychological studies tell us about the difference between people who believe in God and don't believe in God or have some form of religion in their life and don't? The people who do are generally happier. They're generally
00:46:12
Speaker
more well-grounded. They're happier with their lives. That's just a fact. Those are the studies done not by Christians, not by believers, but by academics who are attempting to draw out the truth. So we see that at its basis. I've got a very good article and I can't remember who was written by specifically addressing stoicism and cognitive behavioral therapy. And
00:46:36
Speaker
But it comes out of, I think it's Jurgen Habermas, maybe, who talks about the two models. We have a model of the world and a model for the world. And our model of the world is our physics, our model for the world is our ethics. Basically, the argument is that we all carry around a model of the world, the way the world is.
00:46:56
Speaker
We don't talk about it, we don't talk about it on a regular basis, but inherently we have this model. One part of that model is that the universe is orderly. When I get in my car and I get onto the freeway at 70 miles an hour, I'm trusting that the laws of physics are orderly enough that it's going to behave the same way today as it did yesterday, and my car is going to stay in its lane going down the freeway at 70 miles an hour.
00:47:20
Speaker
So we have this tremendous trust in the way that the world works, and we have a model from which we operate. Where does that model come from? It comes largely from the society that we're raised in. It comes from our family. It comes from the educational institutions. You talk about the idea that you're uncomfortable with it. Yeah, it's socially uncomfortable to go out into the public and say, I believe in some kind of divine order in the cosmos.
00:47:45
Speaker
But I would argue, encounter how socially comfortable is it for you to go out and argue that virtue is the only thing you need to have well-being and that you could be happy being in jail. You could say, you know, those prisoners that have been locked away for the rest of their life, they have just as much ability to be happy as I do. The average person would look at you and think, you're insane to make an argument like that.
00:48:07
Speaker
So we kind of avoid this social uncomfortableness about this idea of virtue because we kind of gloss over it and we say, oh, well, yeah, we're looking for virtue and literally can turn into kind of this virtue signaling, you know, this you've got this magic word that we're aiming toward. But when we really dig down on it, that is I would argue, in fact, more socially unacceptable.
00:48:28
Speaker
If you announced the true meaning of both, that is more socially unacceptable. And if you want to use the word getting canceled, getting shunned, getting driven out of the academic community, whatever the case might be, you make an argument for either one of those. You're probably going to suffer more incoming fire from the idea that you don't need any externals in order to live a happy, ironic life.
00:48:51
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And ultimately as a stoic, you shouldn't mind how much fire you get for whatever view you think is correct. As long as you think you have good reasons to put forth.
00:48:59
Speaker
I'm curious how you frame this. So, you know, there's a classic problem of evil with views about that hold that there's some amount of benevolence in the world. And there's a distinction between, you know, if good things or if bad things happen, why does this all good purpose let it happen? All good purpose, all good God, whatever it is. And there's a distinction between there being a justifying reason for the person for whom the evil occurs.
00:49:27
Speaker
or there being some justifying reason that just refers to something larger. So the idea would be during an amputation, there's a reason that justifies the existence of that bad. You could call it of the amputation that refers to the whole organism.
00:49:43
Speaker
as opposed to me saying there's something bad to have in my personal life, and there's a reason that makes sense for me that I can make sense of in my own life, which a lot of theists might say. So to what extent do you think the study can say not only is there a reason that justifies the existence of these apparent
00:50:00
Speaker
bats or just preferred indifference, whatever they are, that refers to nature as a whole, as opposed to some reason that is relevant to my own life. Or am I just like the leg that's getting amputated for the sake of nature as a whole?
00:50:14
Speaker
Well, I guess you could look at those as both. You could be the leg that's getting amputated, which is kind of an argument that the Stoics make, right? The whole idea is that when we look at good and evil in Stoicism, I mean, Cleanthes famously says that the only evil that exists is the evil that men do and is him to Zeus. And there's an interesting passage in that that I think for me is profound and I think sometimes gets overlooked. And Cleanthes says, but you make the crooked way straight.
00:50:42
Speaker
So I interpret that to mean that in spite of all of the evil that we're able to do to ourselves and to others, somehow there's this within the way that the cosmos exists, the way that it was created, the way that it operates, there is kind of a homeostasis. There is a balance that necessarily always maintains itself so that
00:51:09
Speaker
Hitler can really never become the dictator of the whole world. People like Hitler can come up but there's balance against it and it gets corrected, it gets fixed. You can go off track in your life but hopefully it comes back.
00:51:24
Speaker
I've looked at that from clienthesis, yeah, there's kind of this directedness, again, this teleology that things are gonna go in that direction and you're not gonna be able to veer too far off the path. As far as, you know, we say, well, why do these things happen? Am I the leg that's getting amputated? Why do these things happen? What is the purpose? Well, ask if they never happened. I mean, try to play the mental game for just a minute where we live in a world where everything is preferred,
00:51:52
Speaker
indifference. Everything is good. Everybody is virtuous by nature. God just designed it that way. And we never have any struggles and we live forever. The question would become,
00:52:05
Speaker
How would you develop as a being, how would you develop any moral character without those indifference? Some preferred, some dispreferred. So these indifference are literally, these bad things that happen are literally the grist for the moral mill. They are our opportunity. So why did that happen? Well, I lost my leg in that car crash because
00:52:26
Speaker
You know, it's not God today decided you're going to lose your leg. That's not the whole point of it. The point is I can say that this is the way the world played out and I lost my leg. And now I have the opportunity to learn something new about this that I didn't have. Now I'm how I lost both. Now I'm in a wheelchair.
Stoic Perspective on Wealth and Indifferents
00:52:42
Speaker
I'm always, I don't know, both fascinated and inspired by people who
00:52:47
Speaker
you'll end up as quadriplegics, paraplegics, and overcome that and find a way to still develop, look at what happened to them in a different light. They could be Lieutenant Dan,
00:53:02
Speaker
in Forrest Gump and be angry about it. Eventually he comes around, but he goes through a whole process of cursing God and being angry about it as opposed to you see the people that I forget the guy from the Olympics that you lose your legs and you choose a different life and you choose to say, this is taking me in a different
00:53:20
Speaker
direction than I was going before. It's an opportunity for me to develop my rational faculty, my character, to use a synthesis language, a way for me to develop my cylinder in a different way that I would not have had. So over the course of my life, long before stoicism, there were very few people that knew about my, that I talked with about my early childhood and a few people that I would talk to, they would always, I would always have kind of the same response. Well,
00:53:49
Speaker
how did you make it through that and be essentially a normal human being? And for those that actually do consider me essentially a normal human being, but the point was I always said, here's how I look at it. I look at those events and I say, that happened to me, but I was raised in that environment. So how different is that those events for me in that environment than
00:54:17
Speaker
the 18-year-old girl who's beautiful and has been raised in somewhat wealth and her beauty is everything and she's the pageant queen and it's the night before prom and she wakes up in the morning and she's got a big zit on her nose. That's a pretty tragic event for her.
00:54:32
Speaker
in the world that she lives in. Now we would look at that and we comically say, it's a zit on your nose, it's not that big of a deal. But to her, because she places her values on her beauty, and this is a big event for her, this is tragedy. This is your prom, it's a one-time thing and you've got a zit on your nose.
00:54:50
Speaker
We look at, we don't need to look any further in America than Hollywood. We think, oh, if only I could have wealth and I could have prosperity, everything would be okay. Really? Look at the children of Hollywood stars. How many of them are normal? Not too many. Right. You might not wish it on your best enemies. Yeah. Look at the politicians. Look at the children of people who have money and power. And those are the things that we say are good and we aspire to.
00:55:18
Speaker
But we see they destroy lives. Because why? Again, they're looking for their well-being in things that everybody thinks are good, but the Stokes would say, no, those aren't good. Those aren't goods at all. In fact, one of the decisions, when I said I made the decision to throw it all in and go back into public service as a cop,
00:55:42
Speaker
I was living in a 4,500 square foot custom home in a gated, guarded community in the foothills of California, driving a Mercedes to work every day. I would come through the gates of the community. And this is a guy that grew up, I mean, in Appalachian style poverty, the kind of poverty we really don't see in America today in my early childhood. That's what I grew up in. And I would drive down the streets and I would look at the houses and I would think,
00:56:05
Speaker
This is not me. This is not who I am. Yeah, this is what I've achieved, but this is not who I am at my core. And at Christmas time, we would have just this ridiculous display of presents for our children. My oldest boy, oh, you need a motorcycle? Yeah, we'll buy you a Kawasaki KX90 or whatever it was back then.
00:56:25
Speaker
No questions asked because the money was there. I remember one day my wife and I, my wife grew up not in the same kind of poverty, but she grew up in a lower middle class in Seattle. I said, how do we raise kids with any character at all in this? I mean, how do we do this? Our youngest had just been born and we were both like, I don't know.
00:56:50
Speaker
So I turned their whole world upside down and swore in those to poverty and became a cop. But seriously, my kids were able to develop a lot of character traits as their experience of having a dad as a cop and living in a crappy little house here in Florida than they would a completely different perspective. And I think they're better quality human beings than they would be if I would have raised them in that community in California with all of that wealth. Now, does that make wealth and money bad? No.
00:57:17
Speaker
It's just a preferred indifferent that can go horribly wrong if you don't know how to handle it properly. It's not that those things are inherently bad, they're just indifference.
Logic, Epistemology, and Ethics in Stoicism
00:57:28
Speaker
Yeah, great. This is one of the reasons, I mean, I'm, for those listening to know that I'm a martial artist and I've done a lot of Brazilian jutsu and a lot of part of the fighting community my entire life. And one of the reasons I advocate for that is this is capacity to add difficulty to your life. Even if, even if you're in a relatively strong position, how it has a lot of benefits, selfish benefits or personal benefits. So that, that, that story definitely resonates with me. One thing I wanted to ask.
00:57:56
Speaker
So we've been focusing a lot on the theology and the divine aspect of Stoicism, but we've come up with this idea, you know, it can be difficult, it can be unintuitive, it can seem perhaps unnecessary, but it's valuable and it's essential. I would say you could say almost all those other things about the study of logic, at least from the ancient Greek view about it seems unintuitive, seems difficult, seems today unnecessary, but is essential. At least I think the Stoics would argue. So moving now to
00:58:24
Speaker
away from the physics, the divinity, the conception of nature, moving to the epistemology and the logic, what do you think, I guess, what's your view on that, a core part of the one of the three domains of areas of stoicism? And do you feel also like that's being not emphasized sufficiently in some modern stoic communities? And if so, what is being lost by not focusing on that?
00:58:49
Speaker
Yeah, before we move on, I just want to make one thing perfectly clear because my previous, up to this point, could leave someone with the impression that I think modern stoicism is a bad thing.
00:58:59
Speaker
I don't. I say that explicitly on my podcast. I've repeatedly encouraged the development of a secular version of stoicism. It's a different thing. All I am trying to do is get people to see that it is a different thing and it's still viable. It's just that it's overlooked
00:59:20
Speaker
by modern Stoics and treat it as something that is like some kind of ancient weird religion when it's not. But I'm not opposed to modern Stoicism. I tell my traditional Stoic friends, I say, listen,
00:59:32
Speaker
We benefit from modern stoicism in the sense that nobody would be tuning in and listening to what we have to say. They go to the modern stoics first and then they read the text and they go, there's something missing here. Ryan Holiday is not exactly, I'm not getting the same thing when I read his book and I read Mark's Aurelius Meditations. What's missing? I get letters on a regular basis through my podcast that, thank you, now I know what I'm missing.
00:59:59
Speaker
There is a place for, I mean, let's face it, if we could force everybody in the world to read, I won't go as far as to say, the obstacles away, but a guy did the good life by Irving, the world would be a better place. If people lived the way that Irvine proposed, regardless of the flaws of that book, when we compare it to the ancients, the world would be a better place, a much better place.
01:00:20
Speaker
And if the world just adopts some kind of virtue ethics, it's a better place. So it's not that modern stoicism is bad and wrong. And it's just that it is a dramatic departure from what stoicism is. And I just argue that that needs to be openly acknowledged. Now, regard to logic, you know, frankly, I don't know how there's some benefit in being able to one of the things that's not taught
01:00:44
Speaker
college anymore is logic for the most part. You have to kind of be in a specialized field to even learn how to apply. We don't need to sit around and study syllogisms all day in order to have a basic understanding of arguments, but we should be able to weigh evidence and say, well, this argument is
01:01:02
Speaker
a fallacy because maybe it falls into one of these categories of fallacies. We don't need to be an expert on that, but intuitively we kind of get that arguments don't make sense in some cases. That is something that people can benefit from. I don't see modern Stoics as walking away from that. They don't
01:01:20
Speaker
maybe they don't emphasize, but I've never heard an argument from a modern stoic that says, being logical is just untenable in modern times. I've never heard that. Maybe it's out there, but I think they do teach logic, they do emphasize logic, where I think, partly because it can be difficult to understand is when we get to a subcategory of logic, which is epistemology, and the idea of how we acquire knowledge,
01:01:48
Speaker
You know, the Stoics argued that we are born tabula rasa. We are basically a blank slate. Now they argued that you have, and this would be an argue for an anthropocentric proposivism or providential cosmos, that we do have some innate, what we call predispositions for moral behavior.
01:02:06
Speaker
I think he wrote a book called Just Babies not that long ago investigating this, that children at very young ages have this innate moral sense that they've been treated fairly or unfairly, that you give one one cookie and another one two cookies and somehow innately they know, hey, that's not fair, all of these things. But then on top of that, how do we acquire knowledge? And that's where we get into this
01:02:29
Speaker
misunderstanding of things like control in stoicism, this misconception when people read
01:02:37
Speaker
in Irvine, the dichotomy of control, and then ultimately the false idea of a trichotomy. But when they read the dichotomy of control, when they pick up in Chiridion 1 and they see Epictetus claiming that there's these two divisions, these are things that, this group of things that are up to us in our power, in our control, depending on which translation you want to read. And we have the same argument in Discourses 1. But if you search through the entire book, the word control comes up
01:03:07
Speaker
80 times in the discourses. And it's not always the Greek that's, you know, usually people want to talk of Ephamene. Ephamene, that's not the only Greek word that the translators translate into control. And when the word control comes up in discourses, it's quite often being applied by Epictetus, not the word Ephamene, but other Greek words that are being translated control to that idea that there's a group of things that are up to us in our power and the group of things that are not up to us and not in our power. So,
01:03:36
Speaker
You know, the beauty of stoicism is it's deeply integrated nature. So when we look, we say, as an example, oikiosis, which is the founding principle of ethics. Well, where does the concept of oikiosis come from? This self-preservation. Well, it comes out of the stoic physics. It comes out of their idea, their understanding of nature, and our innate moral character. You know, we get the same thing when we get to epistemology and logic. We're saying that because we have this thing in us,
01:04:04
Speaker
that the Stoics call our rational faculty, our, what is it, dunamis logikae, I think, in Greek? You can help me out here, Michael. I think that's what, basically, it's that portion of us that is, that is able, that is, well, long would call it our self-representation. We might call it ourself. It's kind of akin to the proheresis or will, but there's some subtle distinctions here that we don't need to get into.
Stoic Insights on Assent and Freedom
01:04:27
Speaker
But I have this rational part of me,
01:04:30
Speaker
that is enabled and empowered because it is rational and it's a portion given to me by the divine to look at propositions which are presented to my rational faculty, ironically by my rational faculty, where do those propositions come from? Those propositions come from the event that occurs out there in the world. So I get this impression, the impression that someone has just insulted me.
01:04:57
Speaker
Well, you know, we oftentimes in modern times, and we would want to say, well, that insult, you just called me a moron, that hurt me.
01:05:06
Speaker
Well, the Stokes would say, no, that didn't hurt you. Those are just words. So you created a representation in your rational faculty based upon the person that you are, based upon your beliefs about hurtful words, based upon your past experience with people calling you a moron. You created this idea in your rational faculty that says, someone just insulted me and that's wrong.
01:05:30
Speaker
and you might go on to, you know, I need to do something about it. Well, that's the proposition that gets presented to the, it's created by the rational faculty, presented to the rational faculty to which we get to get this magic word called assent. Really, you know, the easiest way I think for people to apply the word assent is it's a judgment, it's an agreement. So I can look at this and say, someone just assaulted me, is that true or false? I'm either going to agree with it or I'm not going to agree with it.
01:05:58
Speaker
if I assent to it, if I agree that someone has just insulted me, then the stoics would say, well, that's an impulsive impression because my agreement to it is necessarily going to entail an impulse to act, a hormone. I'm going to do something. They've just insulted me. I'm going to run and cry. They've just insulted me. I'm going to insult them back. They just insulted me. I'm going to punch them in the face. We could have a whole different
01:06:24
Speaker
different avenues that a person could take. But the first part is I've assented to the idea that someone has just insulted me. But that's my creation. And it's what even Lisa Barrett-Conan in her recent work, which I think is brilliant on emotions, she's trying to point out that these emotions are not things that happen to us. These emotions are things that we create internally. So when I say your word hurt me,
01:06:48
Speaker
There's no word that came from outside that harmed me. I created from within myself this idea that I've been harmed by this word. But that came entirely from within, not from the outside. So this epistemology now is tightly integrated with moral psychology. So when Epictetus is arguing what is up to us, what is not up to us, really what he's saying is the only thing that's up to you is whether you're going to a sense of that proposition or not.
01:07:17
Speaker
Now out of that, because he also uses language like what's also in your control is your desires and versions and your impulses. But those really all are byproducts of our assent. Well, the reason why you believe that you are hurt by the word is because you've assented previously to the idea that words are hurtful.
01:07:34
Speaker
And so all of this comes down to one thing. I get to look at these propositions and I get to assent to them or not assent to them. And that changes everything because therein lies my freedom, which from a logical perspective, from epistemology brings it all now together, not just my ethics.
01:07:53
Speaker
But the physics, because the Stoics argue that in some way the world is all determined, right? That there's this form of determinism and that we are somehow morally responsible within this world of determinism. Well, that can be misconstrued one of two ways. There are some people, when you read some Stoic scholars, they kind of leave you with the idea that
01:08:12
Speaker
Okay, we got all the way to hard determinism, but you didn't explain any of the freedom that I have, you know, that Paquitas talks about. Or we go the opposite direction. You know, I'm in complete control and, you know, I'm a libertarian idea that, and this is what Michael was arguing against in his article, that, you know, yeah, I know I've been a drunk for 20 years, I've been a drug addict for 20 years, but today I'm going to, I have so much control, I'm just going to decide not to be an alcoholic. I'm going to decide not to be a drunk.
01:08:38
Speaker
I'm going to decide, even though I've been an angry person my entire life, I'm going to decide not to be an angry person. That's not in your control. What is in your control is you got provoked to anger. That one ascent right then is in your control. And you can either feed that angry character that you already had developed, or you can make one ascent
01:09:02
Speaker
to start to maybe unravel that, but that's not going to change instantaneously. That might be years of practice, years of work for you to not become the angry person anymore and a whole lot of a sense. It doesn't just happen. Well, today I'm going to decide not to be a drug addict. I worked with drug addicts. I know that's a fallacy.
01:09:20
Speaker
So I don't think that epistemology is something that's really, I think that it is just so misunderstood in modern stoicism, which is why we get these books, like, hey, are people just saying, yeah, that's outside my control, so I don't care.
01:09:36
Speaker
So you've basically eradicated oichiosis, you've eradicated the concept of cosmopolitanism, because it's not in my control, I don't care about it. And that's the kind of stoicism that Becker talked about that, yeah, who wants that? You're psychotic when you say, yeah, if it's not personal to me, I don't care about it. That's not what the stoics were talking about.
01:09:58
Speaker
They're talking about the control in the sense that it's the development of your rational faculty, your ability to act appropriately. It's literally the shaping of what Chrysippus called the cylinder or the top. So each ascent that we make, each time we ascent to a proposition, we are
01:10:18
Speaker
adding to the bumpiness of that cylinder or sanding it a little bit down, whatever the case might be, depending on how you assent to that. And over time, lots of assents, lots of opportunities to change. I can change the way that cylinder rolls the next time it gets pushed by the impulsive impression that I've just been insulted. And at some point, I can completely change the rational faculty to the extent that I can say, well,
01:10:44
Speaker
I'm sorry, you have that opinion. Have a good day because you realize it's not an insult. It's not harming you at all. And you just walk away and you'll leave the bully kind of standing there in the hallway thinking, what was that about? Why didn't I get what I was looking for? Which is a response from this person by calling them a moron. Yeah, that's right. That's excellent. Very helpful.
01:11:02
Speaker
Yeah, I do think many Stoics come with a respect for epistemology and for logic, but especially new Stoics have trouble figuring out some of what these concepts really mean, especially applying them to specific places in their life, and one can be too quick
01:11:17
Speaker
to say, oh, this is outside of my control, therefore it's okay. Or, you know, I can snap my fingers and make some voluntary change just like this. Whereas I think what you're reminding us is that what the Stokes are ultimately concerned about are assent agreements to these impressions and
01:11:37
Speaker
one needs to be very specific about what one is saying when one has control over a specific situation or when thinking about areas in your own life. There's always different angles on how to think about whether you should try to change someone else's behavior, but that's a different matter to thinking about what you're ascending to really.
01:12:00
Speaker
Yeah, and I think part of what, if I see one missing piece in the popular dialogue is that this idea that, and I think to some degree the fault lies in some of the scholarship because the words, the word fantasia or impression
01:12:17
Speaker
kind of stretches all the way, is used to stretch all the way from the raw sensory impression of the words or the event that I'm used all the way up to and including the development of the representation of that, at which point I can either ascend or not to ascend to it. And I think what sometimes gets overlooked is the fact that this representation of this event also comes from me. It doesn't come from the outside world. So we need to stop and say,
01:12:47
Speaker
Why is it that I even think that I'm harmed by these words? Because that came from me. It didn't come from exterior to me. That's all from me. Why do I think that losing my job is a bad thing? That comes from me, from inside me. It comes from my own rational faculty. It's not an external event that happened to me. The loss of my job is, but the judgment that it's a bad thing was created by me and then presented to me to assent to, yep, it's a bad thing. I should feel bad about that.
01:13:18
Speaker
And that's the piece that I think in stoic epistemology that is just oftentimes overlooked. And again, it's part of our modern culture. People want to be victims of things outside themselves because then they can excuse their own behavior if it was inspired by something outside themselves. I can tell you coming from the criminal justice system, that is the tactic of defense attorneys. Blame it on anything and everything but the person that's the defendant.
01:13:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think you mentioned Lisa Feldman Barrett earlier, and I think her work's very useful in thinking about, of course, you have some, we might call it sensation, initial impression, but that is dealt with concepts. And what are concepts? Well, concepts are things that are informed by your past experience, your past judgments, and those might, if you wanted to
01:14:06
Speaker
One way to put it, you don't need to put it this way, but together those concepts and coming sensations would form some sort of proposition that then you would ascend to. But already you are creating, you're playing a role in what you are deciding on. And that role is determined by all these past decisions that you've made, all these past experiences that you've had. Yeah, she has a very nice line that I like, which is that often it feels like emotions are this river just running through you, but really you are the representsource.
01:14:35
Speaker
you are the source of the river. And at the end of A. Long in his book, Stoic Studies, at the end of his chapter on self-representation has a just, I mean, mind-boggling passage where he's talking about lecta, the descriptions of things, words that we use. And I'd never made the connection before, but his point is that
01:14:56
Speaker
At that point when we're being faced with this proposition that I've been harmed, there's another piece that we overlook, and we see it in the practice of Marcus Aurelius, but I don't think we associate it with the assenting process, is we have the opportunity to reframe or redescribe the event that just occurred. What do you see in Marcus? Marcus could say,
01:15:22
Speaker
Wow, look at that beautiful purple royal robe and imply all of the goodness that would come with that, right? Or he can say, it's just a piece of cloth, died with snail's blood. Look at this beautiful meal that's been laid out in front of me, so well prepared, and it's just some dead animals, it's dead creatures. So in other words, he's reframing the impression so that he can look at it from a different way.
01:15:52
Speaker
And that's where we have the opportunity to do that before we assent, because that is the power. That's the only freedom we have. That's what Epiketus talks about. I call it in my podcast, stop it, strip it bare, and view it from a higher perspective. But when we were faced with that proposition, whether we're to assent or not, we can act like an irrational human or an animal and just assent to it and have an impulse, or we can say, no, stop.
01:16:19
Speaker
As Epictetus says, stop, let me examine you. Let me consider you. Let me go through a discursive process of really evaluating whether this proposition that you have put in front of me is true or not, and I should have sent to it or not. That's our freedom. And it doesn't destroy the causal network, the causal, the deterministic causal network because if I say stop here at time one,
01:16:47
Speaker
and I analyze enough to become a slightly different person and have a slightly rounder cylinder, then at time two, I can make a different decision. Because over here, the Stoics argue, you can't choose otherwise. You've just been presented with a proposition, and based upon who you are, your character at that point in time, you are going to assent to that or not.
01:17:11
Speaker
There is no you could have done otherwise. But what we can do is say stop, maybe modify myself a little bit so that now I'm not doing otherwise here either. I'm just doing otherwise than what I was here. I can do something different over here than I did over here. Why? Because here I'm a slightly different person. Might be just a little bit, you know, again, I'm not gonna, oh, I was a drug addict over here and five minutes later I'm not a drug addict. I was an angry person here and five minutes later I'm not, no, that's not gonna happen.
01:17:41
Speaker
But you might make the decision that day as an angry person not to punch the guy in the face.
Concluding Reflections on Stoicism
01:17:47
Speaker
And that one decision can make a big difference. It doesn't mean that you're not gonna punch him in the face the next time. But now you have a new data point in this cylinder. Hey, I didn't punch the guy in the face and things kinda seem to work out. Or I've got my hand on the door of the liquor store. And for whatever reason today, I'm gonna walk away. I'm gonna get back to my car and drive away from here. Now tonight I might be back at the liquor store.
01:18:12
Speaker
But this today, and this is what Epictetus is talking about, if you go 30 days without buying a bottle of booze, go and make a sacrifice to the gods because now you've developed a new habit. If you've gone 30 days without insulting someone or punching them in the face, well, make a sacrifice to the gods because that's a good thing. You've reformed your will, your rational faculty a little bit. Excellent. Well, Michael, is there anything else you wanted to add? We're coming up towards that time.
01:18:40
Speaker
Yeah, recognize what I'm talking about. There's two things I wanted to jump in on because this has been a fascinating discussion. Chris, I think that idea that the impression that I'm going back a bit, but that the impression that we receive, it's already kind of gone through our filter. We've already produced it in a sense is something that, yeah, something that I think I understand where I certainly do understand, but I don't think I emphasize enough or think about enough in that process. And so for those listening, if it seems unintuitive,
01:19:09
Speaker
The one example I like to think about is the Stellix will talk about this, especially in the kind of techno or craft or mastery, even with non-impulsive impressions. So, you know, if you have a mechanic looked at an engine, what they see is very different than what I see when I look at an engine, because that visual information is going through a very different, is being represented to themselves with, through their knowledge of cars. And they go, wow, this is a real problem. And for me, I think, well, this is a bunch of metal. I don't, like, I don't.
01:19:37
Speaker
or something like that, the beautiful painting. And I'm, you know, I'm, I don't have any art history background. I go, that looked kind of, it looked like nothing to me. Right. So it happens in those cases too. But then that's also happening in the person insulting you. Right. Like it thought the, the, the sage says, well, that's a person just, you know, just saying words to me, who's kind of confused, or maybe as Epictetus says, they're correct. And if they knew all my failures, they would say, even they would say, have more to say. And then the second part.
01:20:03
Speaker
I really love the way you put it, Chris, the way you talk about the space between impression and assent as person one and person two. Because you can think, well, if the world's deterministic, what's this point of putting in its practice? What's this point? I'm going to assent the way I assent. But when you add that tie, as you said, you can reframe, or you can introduce teachings. You can think about it. And I say that person
01:20:26
Speaker
five seconds, one second, five minutes later can be a different person in that space, especially if you've cultivated this habit of contemplating stoicism and testing the oppressions against these stoic principles. So I wanted to flesh out those two things, nothing else to add, but I guess the third thing I wanted to say was that that's great examples of the link then between epistemology, physics, epistemology, and ethics.
01:20:51
Speaker
Because it sounds like we're talking about ethics, about how do you respond to the situation. But if you lose the epistemology and the physics in there, the conception of what's going on, you don't have no way of kind of making sense of the ethical implications in those situations. So wanted to add that, but I think a great way of putting it. No other? Oh, go ahead, Chris. I was going to say, and that was the argument of the ancient Stoics.
01:21:16
Speaker
that all three pieces had to be there together in order for you to understand the whole, which is why they're similes. When we think about them, it's an egg and it's an animal and an orchard. They didn't compare stoicism to a house with a floor and walls and a roof. They didn't compare it to a cart with wheels and a body and a tongue to pull it by. They used three organisms. The difference is we can take the wheels off of a
01:21:43
Speaker
the roof off of a house and still have kind of a structure. You can take the floor out and have a dirt floor. But when you take any part of an organism out, the rest of it goes away. And that deeply integrated nature, which is where A.A. Long is coming from when he says, if you remove these pieces, you end up with a system that he calls broken backed. It doesn't mean, and again, this doesn't mean that it's useless. It just means
01:22:08
Speaker
it's not the same thing as what the Stoics integrated. And you're going to have to come up with a different way of filling in these pieces because without it, it's broken. I think, you know, listeners listen to the past episodes, they'll know that, you know, I'm more agnostic on these questions about the Stoic God. And I think, like, if you can be happy on a torture rack, you could be happy in a godless universe as well. But the idea that you should take it, this thought seriously, I don't think the arguments that
01:22:35
Speaker
The Stoic God is untenable in light and modern science is a persuasive one. So I think just listeners should think through these issues themselves. And we've noted plenty of great resources for them to do that if you want to go into anything else. And then I'll leave you with the last word, Chris.
01:22:54
Speaker
Yeah, again, I think we're in agreement. I'm not opposed to modern stoicism. I think, in fact, I've encouraged it. I think modern stoics need to continue to try to develop a version of stoicism that is appropriate for our secular age. And I'm just asking, don't
01:23:12
Speaker
Don't destroy the old path because the old path is there for a reason. There's lots of people that listen to my podcast who hear this and they say, this is what I'm looking for. I don't like religion. Maybe I was an atheist, but there's something missing and this is it. And the Stoics offer it. It's a viable path in modern times. Both paths can coexist. I wasn't agnostic. I was an atheist. So I understand the difficulty of coming to Stoicism. I read Marcus in the 1990s and put it back on my bookshelf because I couldn't deal with all the God talk in it.
01:23:41
Speaker
Those were trigger words for me. And that's why I think this other path needs to be created.
Modern and Traditional Stoicism: A Harmonious Coexistence?
01:23:46
Speaker
The difference is it's a distinct path. And in your intellectual heritage, Michael, Brad Inwood, has called that, in his language, not mine, he calls that minimal stoicism. He says that basically modern stoicism can trace its heritage, its lineage, back to Aristotle of Chios. And he calls that minimal stoicism. And he calls the other path large stoicism.
01:24:07
Speaker
Now, maybe that language entails one's better than the other and shouldn't, but certainly the language of modern stoicism entails that it's better, right? So somehow we need to come to this place where we can coexist. And that's why I love discussions like this with people like you, because this furthers moderns and traditions to understand one another. We're not each other's enemies. The world's a better place if they're modern stoics, the world's a better place if they're, and they're better people if they're modern stoics or traditional stoics.
01:24:35
Speaker
It's not a battle, it's just that for me, my struggle is to keep the traditional interpretation of Stoicism alive against what I see as an onslaught of modern Stoicism that just wants to squelch it, make it go away, make it as if it's something that doesn't matter anymore. It's irrelevant, it's untenable, all of those words. And I say, no, it's not. It still is tenable in modern times, not for everybody, but I don't make that argument.
01:25:04
Speaker
Excellent. Well, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks Chris. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to Stoic Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
01:25:24
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.