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Existentialism 101 for Stoics (Episode 101)
820 Plays1 year ago
Caleb and Michael engage in a discussion on Existentialism, explaining its essence, distinguishing it from Stoicism, and extracting valuable insights.
Michael underscores the significance of authenticity, while Caleb highlights the ideas of bad faith and radical freedom.
(02:20) Existentialism
(18:20) Stoicism vs Existentialism
(32:17) Existentialism for Stoics
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoicism and Existentialism
00:00:00
Speaker
Many people practice stoicism inauthentically, especially people that are coming to stoicism originally who are looking for an easy way to stop being sad or an easy way to not have to wrestle with what is a complicated emotion or a complicated situation and say, well, a stoicism tells me not to worry about it, so I'm not going to worry about it. So sometimes it's outside my control, so I'm going to be numb to it. But I think the existentialism provides us this language of saying, look, you're not engaging with it authentically.
Existentialism vs. Stoicism: Philosophical Exploration
00:00:28
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros, and in this episode, Michael and I discuss the philosophy of existentialism. We talk about what it is and how it relates to stoicism, its key agreements and disagreements with the philosophy, and what the practical upshots of those are, what lessons we can take from existentialism.
00:00:55
Speaker
Before we hop into it, two announcements. First, I am running a free workshop on stoicism and mindfulness on December 19th. Visit stoameditation.com slash workshop to register for that. Second, Michael and I are going to be running another cohort-based course in January on stoicism applied.
00:01:22
Speaker
This will be kicking off the second week of January, so we'll be taking that time, officially time, of New Year's resolutions and so on to reflect, philosophically learn about stoicism and develop a concrete plan to become more stoic and stay stoic over the course of 2024.
00:01:46
Speaker
This time around, we're going to be including a significant beginning-of-the-year discount. So if Price was an obstacle last time, do check out the course, Stoicism Applied, at stoameditation.com slash course. All right. Well, for this conversation, we in fact lost the first five minutes or so.
Foundations of Existentialism
00:02:08
Speaker
So what you're going to hear is the part of the conversation where Michael started describing what existentialism is.
00:02:15
Speaker
So with that, here is our conversation.
00:02:20
Speaker
So in Stoicism, you have, this was the head of the school that passed it out, you know, Zeno founded it, passed it on to Cleanthes, Chrysippus took up the head of school. That's not going on with existentialism. It's a collection of philosophers who are approaching philosophy in a similar way. So then the question is, what are those similarities? What would I say are the themes that unify all these different existentialists? The first, I would say, is the rejection of an inherent meaning provided by God.
00:02:48
Speaker
And I think I take that to be the starting point of the existentialist question, is this idea of, well, either strong doubt, so I'm not certain that God is real, what do I do now? Or an actual atheism, an actual rejection of God, God is not real, what do I do now? So I would say that's the first thing is this sense of there is not clearly
00:03:14
Speaker
inherent meaning in the world, what do I do? I would say that's part one. The second theme I would say that all existentialists share is a recognition of the absurdity of a world without that meaning. And what I mean by absurdity is this recognition of, let's say, the subjective experience of confronting a world without structure and inherent meaning, and how that is a paradigm shift
00:03:42
Speaker
actually quite an intense thing to recognize if you're used to thinking about the world as being ordered and having an inherent meaning provided by God. And so, yeah, MKL, feel free to jump in any point if you want to add or turn that in a different direction.
00:04:00
Speaker
So there's no inherent meaning provided by God. As a result of that, the world is absurd. The third thing I would say then is this idea that our existence precedes our essence. This is a really important, existentialist idea. Because the world doesn't have inherent meaning, this lack of inherent meaning also applies at the individual level.
00:04:24
Speaker
So as Sartre says, man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world, and defines himself afterwards.
00:04:33
Speaker
So instead of this notion of us having a soul, a destiny, or even a pre-defined nature provided either by God, or you know, we talk about this a lot in Stoicism, a kind of a telos, a purpose or function. In Stoicism, it's provided by nature. You know, the Stoics identify God with nature, but there is a, we have a function. We have a better or worse way to live that is inherent to us.
00:05:00
Speaker
And so the consequence of the absurdity of the world, the lack of inherent meaning is that we don't have that pre-established function. First we exist, and then we have to go about creating our essence. And so that's the other thing. So existence precedes essence, but there is also this view that we have a capacity to construct that essence. We have a capacity to construct our own meaning, a kind of individual or personal meaning.
00:05:29
Speaker
Um, another big theme of existentialism is, is existential angst, or I would say an acknowledgement of the kind of the dread that is produced when you confront this inherent lack of meaning.
Constructing Personal Meaning
00:05:45
Speaker
And one of the ways to counter existential dread is a pursuit of authenticity, which is the responsibility to take seriously the creation of your own essence. Because you just exist, you don't have an essence. There's a kind of existential dread that comes from that.
00:06:03
Speaker
this recognition of the absurdity of the worlds. And we have a responsibility to authentically engage with that absurdity and construct our own meaning out of that absurdity, uh, at least on an individual level. And then I think this connects with the sixth theme, uh, my summary of existentialism is that it's a, it's anti nihilist. It's a rejection of nihilism. It is the same that, you know, even though there's no inherent meaning, that doesn't mean there's no meaning at all.
00:06:32
Speaker
And that often nihilism or a tendency of nihilism can be a, I would say a cowardly way to face the absurdity of the world. And it's a rejection of the responsibility to construct your own essence.
00:06:47
Speaker
Um, and to face your existential angst, it's just an easy out. And so existentialism for me is it's a rejection of that nihilism as I understand it and say, no, instead you need to, uh, produce a personal meaning at an individual level. And even though that's not grounded in God, it's not grounded in the broader universe. That's still, uh, that is still meaningful. That is still, I.
00:07:11
Speaker
your meaning of life in a way, the one that you construct for yourself through your choices and your and your actions and your way of reasoning about the world. So what do you think about that? How's that for a high level summary?
00:07:25
Speaker
I think that's a solid high-level summary. I know one of the first things to always know with existentialism is, as you said, it's not a well-defined school in the sense that stoicism was. There's not some existentialist institution or any sense of that history. And certainly, we've done different conversations with
00:07:44
Speaker
Existentialists on Soda Conversations. Well, I think you've done one with Gordon Marino heavily influenced by Kierkegaard and then one with Sky Cleary who takes Simon de Beauvoir as her starting point and both of those thinkers have some salient differences, but I think
00:08:01
Speaker
at least from a high level, we can talk about these similarities in a useful way. But if you're an Existentialist listener and think we're focusing too much on a specific version of Existentialism, do not just know. So to me, just sort of restating some of what you said, I think Existentialism sort of begins with that.
00:08:21
Speaker
pronouncement from Nietzsche, which that God is dead. And you can also think of Dostoevsky's riff on that, just if God is dead, then everything is permitted. And the existentialist take on that isn't that it's time for some immoral holiday or some, I don't know, now you can do whatever you want to make yourself happy.
00:08:48
Speaker
Instead, I think there is that sense that now there's no meaning in the world. There's no structure to look for, to discover, to determine the path of one's life. What's the point of pursuing selfish ends? What's the point of being immoral at all to begin with? And that's the key idea of
00:09:11
Speaker
the absurd, or perhaps, as Sartre puts it, just this idea that existence precedes essence.
00:09:21
Speaker
There are just things in the world, actions, and those exist before we have attached meaning to them, before we find purposes in them. And that means there's no meaning to discover. A man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That's one of Sarge's lines. And there's also the line,
00:09:48
Speaker
from him. Man is nothing else but what he purposes. He exists only insofar as he realizes himself. He is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is. Hence, we can well understand why some people are horrified by our teaching.
00:10:09
Speaker
Yeah, so that's more or less, I think I'm stating the same thing you are, but I would definitely put the emphasis on the way I think about existentialism in terms of this idea.
Existentialist Themes: Anxiety and Authenticity
00:10:22
Speaker
Existence precedes essence. That's number one. There's a sense of anxiety around that.
00:10:27
Speaker
But we are not just things in the world. We're not objects. We are free, subjective people. And that means that we need to, if we're going to live, we need to manage this sense of absurdity. We need to recognize our freedom. Otherwise we would not be, in your terms, authentic. We want to be living authentically as human beings, but deceiving ourselves in some way.
00:10:55
Speaker
One of the things that I've thought, a couple of things that I've thought about existentialism or brought into my own life, you hit on there. One is this idea of, you know, we're nothing more than the sum of our actions. I think it was the quote. And I think about that in terms of my own life, in terms of the philosophy of life all the time. Like we get up and telling our stories like I'm this kind of person or I'm that kind of person.
00:11:20
Speaker
I think those can be harmful when they're positive because they can make us not reflect on our own failings, but often for me, they're more harmful negative, right? Like, well, I'm a selfish person or I'm a cowardly person. And I remembered it to existentialism as this reminder to say, well, no, like take a step back and like weigh up the actions of your life, right? And do those actions provide evidence for that? And maybe I'm lucky that the actions usually don't provide evidence. Maybe if they did provide evidence.
00:11:46
Speaker
You'd have a different kind of problem. But for me, I think I'm typically harder on myself than the evidence shows or merits. Another thing I think about is this idea of an existentialism is that the strength of existential angst, like this idea
00:12:05
Speaker
People aren't inherently good. There's nothing that's stopping me from going out and killing somebody right now. It's 6.20 on a Monday right now. There's nothing stopping me from going out and doing some sort of heinous crime or jumping off a bridge.
00:12:25
Speaker
leaving the country, I'm totally free to do whatever I want. I have this incredible amount of freedom. And that freedom is actually so terrifying to me that I put myself in a box and I create a kind of, I create a fake story where I say, well, no, I'm this kind of person or I'm that kind of person.
00:12:40
Speaker
I try to define my essence to get away from that angst and to get away from that fear. So I think it's helpful. It's a helpful philosophy in introducing this idea descriptively about how terrifying wrestling with the meaning of life can be and about how to get away from that fear and that anxiety. We can often
00:13:03
Speaker
We can often placate ourselves or come up with stories, myths, whatever you want to call it, either a personal level or at a grander level about the existence of God or the truth of stoicism or something like this. We can tell ourselves these stories, as they might say, to try to diminish this fear or this angst. And I don't think they're necessarily right that all of these things serve that function. I think maybe, you know,
00:13:29
Speaker
they could be wrong about some of their earlier commitments about the meaning of the world and the meaning of life. But I think that descriptively is like a really helpful fact.
00:13:38
Speaker
Right, right.
Existential Freedom and Responsibility
00:13:39
Speaker
I think there's this line from a psychiatrist named Thomas Saws, who sometimes thought of it as an existentialist psychiatrist, which goes something to the effect of we yearn for autonomy when it's taken from us, but recoil from it when it's given. And it's that latter sense that I think the existentialists get at, which is when you realize the extent of
00:14:07
Speaker
your freedom that comes both with the burdens of responsibility. Now you can't point your finger at anything else. And then the second aspect is the fact that the field's just wide open and you feel as if you're floating through an infinite number of possibilities without any sense of being rooted in a specific one perhaps.
00:14:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's scary. And if you don't think about how scary that is, you might not recognize, again, how it's affecting your behavior or how you're coming into some sort of limiting beliefs to try to escape that fear.
00:14:50
Speaker
which I think is cool. I like that. I really like that about existentialism. I like that. I like that kick in the pants. They're like, hey, just make sure you're not latching on any of these ideas because if they were false, it would be sad or scary. Anything else to add on what is existentialism? Maybe one other
00:15:12
Speaker
One other way to put this sense of freedom that existentialists believe in is captured by John Paul Sartre in his essay, Existentialism is a Humanism. The thought that
00:15:29
Speaker
humans we are completely distinct from other animals and because of our subjectivity. This thought to me is very interesting. So one line from that or a few sentences from that
00:15:46
Speaker
lecture or essay, this theory alone is compatible with the dignity of man. It is the only one which does not make man into an object. All kinds of materialism lead one to treat every man, including oneself, as an object. That is, as a set of predetermined reactions in no way different from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table or a chair or a stone.
00:16:14
Speaker
Our aim, speaking as existentialists, is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a pattern of values and distinction from the material world. But the subjectivity which we postulate as a standard of truth is no narrowly individual subjectivism for, as we have demonstrated, it is not only one's own self that discovers it in the cogito, but those of others too. So there's that thought. The cogito he's referring to is
00:16:44
Speaker
the statement by the philosopher Descartes, I think, therefore I am. And that is what separates humans from other material objects, recognizing that power of thought, that power of subjectivity in one cell and in others. And that can be a source of
00:17:04
Speaker
distinction and also a source of potentially connection to other humans, other subjectivities, other free beings in the world.
00:17:24
Speaker
There's always this attempt, I think, in stoicism to both justify what's different about humans, but also ground them as part of nature. And that, to me, read very differently as, well, we need to actually pull out humans as something different, obviously because we have the subjectivity, but almost speaking down about animals or material things, as if humans are a different kind of class of being.
00:17:52
Speaker
Yeah. Interesting point. Yeah. Sort of gets into the alienation point too. Like men, people really are separate from the world in a way. Stoicism, other philosophies, other religions may, may not make them, may not have it. So it's hard to connect with the rest of nature because you're different because you can, you can think about yourself. You can remember that embarrassing thing you did in grade seven. And then it will come back and it will haunt you.
00:18:20
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Well, what do you think of as some of the key disagreements with existentialist love and stoicism then? How would you frame this?
00:18:32
Speaker
Yeah, so I provided six themes to existentialism. We hit on some more, but the rejection of inherent meaning provided by God, recognition of the absurdity of a world without that meaning, existence preceding essence, existential angst, demand for authenticity and a rejection of nihilism.
00:18:52
Speaker
And looking at those six, I think that existentialism disagrees on the first three, but there's a connection for the last three. So I think stoicism, well, I know that stoicism disagrees that there is no inherent meaning provided by God. Stoicism thinks that we have a function. Human beings have a function, have a purpose. We both have a function at a
00:19:19
Speaker
individual level. There's ways that human lives go better or worse and ways that humans should live and shouldn't live. And then we have a function as part of a greater whole, as part of a greater universe. We are the actors in a play. We can be the foot or the hand of a larger
00:19:39
Speaker
the larger being where being a beehive, whatever the metaphor is, uh, we both have a individual role as a human being and a larger role to play in a greater process. So there is no, there is no, that, that fundamental proposition, the stoics, the stoics reject that there's no inherent meaning, uh, provided by God or nature, however you want to think of the stoic, uh, the stoic grounding of meaning.
00:20:09
Speaker
Because of that, there is no absurdity. We can feel absurd when we are out of touch with the meaning around us, when we lose perspective of the meaning that's around us, of our function and our role in a greater play. If you don't recognize you're an actor in a play,
00:20:30
Speaker
or you're part of something greater, it can feel absurd, isolating, alienating. But that's a descriptive fact, but not a true fact of the world. There actually is no absurdness. There's nothing but order, purpose, kind of unfolding of a plan, so to speak. And then this idea that existence precedes essence.
00:20:51
Speaker
In some sense, this is true. In some sense, we can craft ourselves as stoics, but never in a way that transcends our fundamental essence as rational beings, our fundamental purpose and function as rational beings who have commitments to the highest good of virtue and character.
00:21:10
Speaker
And there's some crafting of what kind of job do I want to take up? What particular life do I want to live? But I certainly have an essence that I then try to live up to. That's where I would say the disagreement is. In terms of agreement, I think that the Stoics agree that we face angst when we wrestle with understanding the world.
00:21:34
Speaker
That's something that humans go through all the time in terms of philosophy, religion, or other myths for, or stories for. But that doesn't mean that they're all false, for example. That just means that we face that kind of angst and we try to overcome it through whatever means. The Stoics think that we have a responsibility to be authentic. They agree that we have a responsibility to be authentic.
00:21:55
Speaker
So authenticity is not constructing in essence, but authenticity is actualizing the essence. Authenticity is stepping in, you know, gladly, a more fatty, loving your fate, gladly stepping into this role or purpose. And then I think the Stoics agree that we have to reject the temptation to avoid angst.
00:22:16
Speaker
or struggle by becoming nihilistic. We have to avoid the temptation to kind of step outside the game by saying nothing matters, who cares anyway. They're totally on the same page with the existentialists there. What do you think? So for the disagreements, the first disagreement just, of course, is this idea that one way to think about it,
00:22:45
Speaker
The first three tenets you have here, there's no inherent meaning provided by God. The world is absurd because of the lack of meaning and existence precedes essence. Is that at least the first and the third?
00:22:56
Speaker
amount to the same thing. There's no discoverable purpose for ourselves, for the universe at large, and the Stoics certainly disagree with that. The traditional Stoics think there is an overarching purpose, the way things are constructed.
Key Disagreements: Stoicism vs. Existentialism
00:23:13
Speaker
The universe is providential, or there's some sense of logos permeating everything
00:23:22
Speaker
But even if you don't take that sort of view, modern civics think, well, you can come up with an account of, you know, we're human beings and there are certain things that are good for human beings, we're rational and social creatures, and those facts give us purposes. That means that there's...
00:23:37
Speaker
a kind of life that's suitable for our rational and human nature, and that life is discoverable in a real sense. It's not something that's arbitrary, that is purely subjective or anything of that sort. That is one of the key disagreements between the two schools of thought. And because there is that sense of
00:24:04
Speaker
purpose, meaning in the universe. You might run into senses of absurdity, but as you said, it's not built into the furniture of reality. There's no real deep sense in which the world is absurd, even if particular projects might be. So I guess are there other disagreements you think that I missed or other key gaps?
00:24:30
Speaker
Let's see, I think that there's, I think a lot of this, a lot of the existentialist philosophy has almost a, maybe there are two other disagreements that are less foundational, but might be important when you think about practice.
00:24:49
Speaker
One is related to this thought about purposes, where I think the Stoics have this picture of role ethics, they have pictures of virtue, and the existentialists I think are self-conscious, critical about social roles.
00:25:07
Speaker
they separate themselves from their social roles in a way that Stoics would not. I think Stoics are not as atomist about their lives. In a way, it is an important fact about me that I am a son, I am a neighbor, I am a citizen, and so on. These aren't arbitrary social categories in the way they may be for a existentialist. And they're not necessarily bad or things that one should have negative judgments about.
00:25:37
Speaker
And then there's something just about the philosophy that's almost dark or colored in a pessimistic light that doesn't follow from the logic of existentialism, but seems to come from many of the main thinkers, especially the French ones in the middle of that.
00:25:54
Speaker
the 20th century, Camus, Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir, that I don't think the Stoics have a different tenor to their philosophy and would see the existentialists mostly as
00:26:08
Speaker
putting some amount of their personal neuroticism in the form of passions as a philosophy. If it's not a disagreement and substance, it's probably a disagreement in how the philosophy ends up being practiced. Do you have an example? What do you mean by the passions into the philosophy?
00:26:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, so an example of that is Camus in his article on the absurd talks about I think a cobbler and Something like describing the life of a cobbler someone who makes shoes raises a family Has kids and says this life is absurd and has no meaning clearly But there's no actual there's no argument for that
00:26:54
Speaker
And a lot of people think a life where they have kids, where they work on a profession, where they are married, settle down, have a home is a fine life. And certainly not everyone needs to respond in that way, but if you're thinking about what is the
00:27:13
Speaker
fact of the matter, is that life absurd or not? I think one needs an argument. But typically, I think the existentialists, my sense, at least of the French existentialists, is something like there's a move from life has no inherent
00:27:30
Speaker
meaning to, therefore, these sorts of things are absurd or meaningless, which is right in a sense, but it doesn't need to have a negative color. You don't need to say that there's some sense in which that life is not worthwhile. Those are just entirely different concepts of whether life is worthwhile.
00:27:56
Speaker
whether it's meaningful or not. I suppose it's a line. If life has no meaning, then that line doesn't have any meaning either, right?
00:28:10
Speaker
There is something dramatic about existentialism that maybe is culturally specific to how much people were leaning on God in the past, or a Christian God in particular. I'm thinking back to the Epicureans, and the Epicureans are like,
00:28:27
Speaker
It's great if there's no gods because now you don't have to be stressed about somebody judging you, you know, and you can just enjoy your life of pleasure. And it's like, there's no, the absence of God doesn't, doesn't lead to this necessarily, doesn't lead necessarily to this enormous angst. But for the existentialist that leads this angst and they see this as this, this major problem to get rid of or the meaninglessness of the cobbler's life as this major problem to overcome. So what I'm saying, you just take Caleb is that like,
00:28:58
Speaker
you're adding that in. That's somewhere your fear, your feelings, your passions about that situation are getting built into that to build this up as something big that we have to get over. Is that right? Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's especially evident in Camus. And I know Sartre and de Beauvoir have
00:29:19
Speaker
do have more precise arguments about how they think, you know, there's something, some deep feature of human consciousness that sort of reveals the absurd and there's all these confusing ideas about being for itself and being in itself and so on. But my general suspicion is that
00:29:37
Speaker
It's that line from Epictetus. All you need to say is that he went to jail. The idea that so-and-so went to jail and it is bad, that part is added by you. And there is a suspicion, I think, from the stoic point of view that the negative tenor of so much of this stuff is added by his proponents.
00:30:01
Speaker
Yeah, that's compelling. You're solving a problem you created. Hey, you created. Just chill out, you know? Just stop. Stop getting so stressed. And you wouldn't have to invent a whole philosophy to get around it.
00:30:15
Speaker
Um, yeah, but it is an interesting point and I guess I'm, I'm trying to read it kind of as a historical pattern, which is like the, you know, Nietzsche saying God is dead was like so much more dramatic than it might, that it might be to hear now. Right. Or, or Dostoevsky often gets ripped on for saying, you know, if God is dead, then everything is permitted or like, if God doesn't exist, everything is permitted because.
00:30:42
Speaker
There was this sense in his time that atheism was not just sad or wrong, but actually like a danger, like actually philosophically dangerous and would lead to crimes, a moral perversion of the people. And we've just kind of seen that not to be true. And if you see that also not to be true, if you cut back pre-Christianity, the Epicureans
00:31:13
Speaker
didn't base God heavily into their ethics and they didn't lead them to a life of immorality, for example. So that shock is not quite as strong and maybe that emotion doesn't get as built as much into it now. And as you said, at least, I think that's maybe a criticism more generally, but it certainly would be a stoic disagreement of going, whoa, where's that second part coming from?
00:31:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So maybe we can, just to be on the positive side and say that nonetheless, I think the existentialists do point out, especially when it comes to thinking about the nature of our freedom, thinking about
00:31:53
Speaker
situations where you'll find themselves in analysis paralysis or something similar, that there is something legitimate to that experience of not knowing what to do, feeling some anxiety over how you ought to live, sorting through all your different options that is legitimate and something to be wrestled with.
Applying Existentialist Tools to Stoicism
00:32:17
Speaker
Well, yeah, maybe let's, let's turn now to what might an existentialism for Stoics look like, because I think I want to highlight a bit of what you were just saying there. In terms of how we would combine the two, obviously we can't combine them exactly. There are different ways of thinking about the world, but I think that existentialism, an existentialist approach to stoicism, let's say, or an existentialist bend to stoicism.
00:32:41
Speaker
Looks like recognizing that the existentialists, I think, were expert communicators about the experience of wrestling with the meaning of life, as you just pointed out. They're really sensitive to what it's like to be a progressor, as the Stoics might say. It's very easy to talk about, well, how would the Stoic sage respond while they would understand that they're part of a larger whole and there would be no existential angst. But that's just not the descriptive reality of what most people feel like when they get into philosophy.
00:33:10
Speaker
when most people feel like if they start to question the value system they grew up on, whether that was Christianity or something else, and they start to now transition. You don't immediately jump to sagehood, right? I certainly am nowhere near there. There's a lot of dread and angst and questions that come with that. I think the existentialists were experts at honing on that. And in our quest to be stoics, I think we can look to their tools
00:33:36
Speaker
for actually kind of emotionally punching through that dread and that angst, which is one is this demand for authenticity, this demand to authentically actually embrace the fear and look at it honestly and not turn to stories or solutions that get you away from that.
00:33:57
Speaker
to expect to struggle with angst and as I said previously to reject nihilism or any attempt to avoid this angst through easy answers. I think that is what the stoic is at risk of doing.
00:34:10
Speaker
And I also think that many people practice stoicism inauthentically, especially people that are coming to stoicism originally who are looking for an easy way to stop being sad or an easy way to not have to wrestle with what is a complicated emotion or a complicated situation.
00:34:29
Speaker
or a complicated set of situations, beliefs, life histories, and say, well, stoicism tells me not to worry about it, so I'm not going to worry about it. Stoicism tells me it's outside my control, so I'm going to be numb to it. Obviously, stoicism has grounds for explaining why that's wrong using stoicism.
00:34:48
Speaker
But I think the existentialism provides us this language of saying, look, you're not engaging with it authentically. You're trying to avoid that struggle, that angst by looking for an easy answer and a quick out. And the proper stoic solution is going to be through that. It's going to be through authentically engaging with that complicated emotion, that complicated situation, and not just really numbing yourself to it. So that's what I think an existentialism for stoics look like. That's how I try to practice it as I say, look,
00:35:18
Speaker
There's the same way Seneca maybe quotes Epicureanism. You're always looking for these tools or these specialists to come in and what are the existentialist specialists at? What are they better at than anybody else? I think it's for having this way of conceptualizing the dread and the angst that comes with wrestling with meaning, wrestling with the difficulty of what life is about. And I think we can co-op some of those tools as we wrestle with those questions and stoics. And in a way that doesn't compromise stoicism at all,
00:35:47
Speaker
and actually combines the best of existentialism into our approach to stoicism. I think this focus on avoiding self-deception, so it can take note of, I think is very important.
00:36:08
Speaker
I usually describe a life philosophy as something that has a picture of the good life and then a sense of how to get there. It's sort of interesting because existentialism, I think I would say it is a philosophy of life, but you almost want to reframe it and say it's an account of what life is and how to face it or something of that nature because you don't have this idea of a good life that you're trying to target instead.
Avoiding Inauthenticity with Existentialism
00:36:36
Speaker
the focus is on acknowledging your freedom, acknowledging that so much is up to you and that we deceive ourselves often by thinking of ourselves as things that, we're thinking of ourselves as constrained by what happens to us in a way that is no more than self-deception.
00:37:05
Speaker
Yeah, maybe it's an account of how to avoid a bad life, right? Which is one that's inauthentic, self-deceiving, unfree. And then what the good life will look like is, well, you've got to define that for yourself, but in order to do that, you have to avoid that bad life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Whether or not it works, I think, is debatable.
00:37:32
Speaker
I think that, I suppose, what does it give you in avoiding a good life? It gives you that...
00:37:40
Speaker
tools so that you don't just coast through, you don't just sleepwalk through life, but you face up to making difficult decisions, face up to both the fact that you're exceptionally free and you have an immense amount of responsibility, amount of power. And they share that picture with the Stoics.
00:38:09
Speaker
Yeah, anything else in the combination of those two? Yeah, well, I think there's this idea of both Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir talk about this idea of bad faith that is a useful model for anyone. And the main thought is just that we deceive ourselves by acting or believing as if we were objects.
00:38:39
Speaker
At least that's how I interpret it. Maybe someone else might have another gloss on this concept. That's how I interpret it. We refuse to choose or refuse to acknowledge that we have a choice in many situations. Sartre gives an example of a woman at a date and the man clearly makes a romantic advance and puts his hand on top of the woman as a display of affection and the woman just sort of leaves her hand limp.
00:39:08
Speaker
and instead of either withdrawing and rejecting the advance or embracing the advance. And you think so much of our life is just like that. It's almost as if the hand was just any other object on the table and the woman on that date refused to either reject or accept the advance in a way. And we see this, I think, in many common statements we make.
00:39:37
Speaker
Say, I can't pursue my career because of my responsibilities, or I can't go to that event because I'm too busy. And there are some angles, there are some interpretations of those statements where of course they're true, but they're also hiding the fact that if you really wanted to go to that event, you could probably make it happen.
00:39:55
Speaker
Right? And busyness is maybe a form of politeness, but there's a sense in which we say those sorts of things too often. They become a way of living in bad faith, a way of living where we're constrained by these factors outside of ourselves instead of recognizing that
00:40:18
Speaker
We're free, we can decide how to respond to whatever happens to us. We can decide, to a large extent, how to create ourselves. Yeah, I think the limp hand example is really compelling.
00:40:34
Speaker
Well, this is not as compelling an example, but it is for my own life of, um, not, not, not from one of my dates, but, um, in jiu-jitsu, we, you know, you'd often talk to people, you get trained more and there's always this kind of thing of like, well, I don't have time or just working on general. I don't have time. It's like, man, just say you don't want to do it. Cause when you can't engage with, I don't have time.
00:40:56
Speaker
Like, because that's not an actual argument because you obviously, you have freedom to rearrange your schedule. You obviously have time. Whereas if someone says to you, no, I have, I have priorities that are more important than this to me. Well, okay. Then, then, then now we're engaging authentically. Like now we're having a conversation about how to, where this stands for you. Um, but time, it becomes that kind of cop out. It becomes the limp hand, I think. Um, but it's such a, I do that. We all do that. It's such a good reminder not to, or to try not to.
00:41:26
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, there's this. And if you ever play poker, this is a concept of limping in, which is where you stay in the hand by calling whatever the other person bets. So you don't raise, you don't put more at stake. You just pay whatever the other person put up, which I think is a useful metaphor for how many of us
00:41:52
Speaker
go through life where we, you know, we kind of want to stay and we kind of want to go continue going down the path. We're currently going down, but we're not going to raise the stakes and we're not going to exit when perhaps we should. And so we do like the minimum, when the minimum that's required for, you know, coasting down the same, the same path or whatever. And I think the existentialist would say, wake up, wake up. Yeah. Awesome. Do you have anything else on, uh,
00:42:21
Speaker
Agreements or disagreements that we think we missed No, I think I think that does a good job of it I think that I think that just that idea of like
00:42:33
Speaker
It is difficult trying to be a good person.
Embracing Life's Challenges
00:42:37
Speaker
It is difficult. We can get stuck in this habit of talking about the sage, talking about what a good stomach is like. It's difficult just living. It's difficult just existing and getting that kind of motivation to say, look, it's supposed to be difficult. It's okay that it's difficult. Keep trying, keep struggling with that, but don't shy away. Take it seriously, be authentic.
00:43:01
Speaker
These kinds of tips or ways of thinking about it, these existential things, those are incredible. There's the non-stoics who grab the stoic tools who are like, well, I'm just going to think about the dichotomy of control when I'm doing my job or winning business or talking to people. And you're like, well, you're not really stoic, but you've just done a tool. I feel like I'm almost like that with existentialism.
00:43:25
Speaker
I'm not an existentialist, but those are some nice tools. And those are ones that I have in my tool belts, so to speak. And I don't think there's anything wrong. I think those are totally compatible with stoicism. And that's where I see the existentialist bend to stoicism is more of acknowledgement of how difficult it can be to do this genuinely and how difficult it can be to stay on that progressive path and some encouragement to do so from the existentialists.
00:43:51
Speaker
Excellent.
Further Learning and Conclusion
00:43:52
Speaker
Nice. Yeah. So if you want to learn more about existentialism, you have those past conversations with Gordon Marino and Sky Cleary. I know the Gordon Marino one's on our public feed. The Sky Cleary one may be within the Stoa app. And then there's this essay by Jean-Paul Sartre that we've mentioned a number of times, existentialism as a humanism. And then who also has about six pages or so, a piece called The Myth of Sisyphus. That's usually excerpted in about six pages if you want to learn more.
00:44:21
Speaker
learn more about the philosophy. I think those are fine places to start. Great recommendations. Thanks, Caleb. Cool. Thanks for putting this together.
00:44:30
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to StoA Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to practice stoicism with Michael and I as well as others walking the stoic path, we are running our three-week course on stoicism applied. It'll be live with
00:44:55
Speaker
a forum, interactive calls, that I think will be an excellent way for a group of people to become more stoic together. So do check that out at stomeditation.com slash course. And if that's not to your fancy, you can find links to the Stoa app as well as the Stoa Letter, our newsletter on stoic theory and practice at stomeditation.com. Thanks for listening. Until next time.