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David Fideler on The Stoic Renaissance (Episode 68)
884 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
Today’s Stoic revival is the second one. The first resurgence of Stoicism actually happened during the Renaissance.
In this podcast, David Fideler and I discuss what Modern Stoics today can learn from the Renaissance Humanists.
It’s a conversation that touches on history, education, and virtue ethics. It should be of interest to anyone who wants to increase the influence of Stoicism on society.
https://therenaissanceprogram.com/
(02:24) Introduction
(08:35) The Birth of the Renaissance
(15:37) What Made Florence Great
(17:49) Stoics in the Rennaissance
(26:57) Stoic Exercises
(30:25) Other Influences
(32:44) What Modern Stoics Can Takeaway From the Humanists
(38:54) Reinventing Education
(46:10) Where to Learn More
Recommended
Transcript
Considering a Stoic Curriculum
00:00:00
Speaker
So what I would say, you know, this is my challenge for people who consider themselves to be modern stoics. Really think about this and take a look at how this was done in the past because there was a curriculum for this for creating better people.
Introducing the Podcast
00:00:16
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with and experts.
Stoicism and the Renaissance
00:00:33
Speaker
In this conversation, I speak with the scholar and philosopher David Fidler. David is a past guest on Stoa Conversations. He and Michael had some excellent conversations about his book, Breakfast with Seneca. It's always good to have him back.
00:00:53
Speaker
In this discussion, we focus on what modern Stoics can learn from the Renaissance humanists. This conversation touches on history, education, and virtue ethics, and I expect it to be exceptionally profitable to
00:01:14
Speaker
Anyone interested in the history of Stoicism and how the philosophy can have a greater impact in society as well as for individuals.
David Fidler's Renaissance Program
00:01:25
Speaker
Two quick notes. One, David is running the Renaissance program in Florence, Italy this November.
00:01:34
Speaker
If you ever wanted to go to Florence, this is an excellent chance to do so. The timing is from November 13th to 17th. The space is limited. As time of recording, there are fewer than 10 spaces remaining, so that's something that sounds interesting to you. Go to therenaissanceprogram.com.
00:01:57
Speaker
Second, Michael and I are looking into running a course on how to be more stoic. Stay tuned on that, but it's something I want to float now so that people have their feelers out and are appropriately excited for it. It'll be running later this fall, early winter as well. Without any more words of introduction, here is my conversation with David Feidler.
Renaissance: A Stoic Revival?
00:02:24
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros, and today I am speaking with David Feidler. I am very pleased to welcome him back to Stoa Conversations again today.
00:02:37
Speaker
Hey, it's great to be here, Caleb. Excellent. So you've recently been talking and thinking about this revival of stoicism today, and you've argued that although we might think of this as the first revival of stoicism, it's probably better thought of as the second revival. And the first was in fact in the Renaissance. Do you want to give us a little bit of an intro to that general pitch?
00:03:07
Speaker
Yes, I think stoicism in the Renaissance is very interesting because there's sort of a little crisis in modern stoicism lurking under the surface like a ghost. And what that question involves is how can stoicism contribute to society? Because the primary focus of stoicism today
00:03:29
Speaker
is on the individual. And that's good. That's perfectly fine because we know that the ideas and practices of Stoicism can help people live better and happier lives. But when you look at ancient Stoicism, it was incredibly pro-social. And we can see this again and again, for example, like in Marcus Aurelius, where he talks about working for the common good of society.
00:03:57
Speaker
We can see it in his memorable little line that what isn't good for the hive isn't good for the bee, and we can see that in Seneca as well.
00:04:05
Speaker
But the interesting thing about this is that while stoicism was incredibly prosocial in the ancient world, I don't think it really had much impact on day-to-day society. And I think that was true of ancient philosophy in general. And while the ideas of ancient philosophy were incredible, they just didn't have much impact. But that really changed with the Renaissance.
The Impact of Stoicism on Education
00:04:33
Speaker
which was literally a rebirth of ancient Roman and Greek culture. It was a rebirth of the deepest values of the ancient world. And after doing several years of research, I've discovered that the ideas of Stoicism inspired the early Italian humanists to actually launch the educational project that resulted in the Italian Renaissance.
00:04:59
Speaker
So I think there should be of interest to modern people interested in stoicism because the Renaissance was probably the largest and most profound cultural transformation in the history of the Western world. And if stoicism and ancient philosophical ideas could inspire this kind of massive cultural transformation,
00:05:21
Speaker
then it shows how philosophy really could impact and change the world, even if that never happened in the ancient world. And it might give us some inspiration today in terms of how philosophy could change the world. And I'll just mention very briefly, and then we can move on to discussing some of this in more depth.
Can Stoicism Change the World?
00:05:40
Speaker
But I did write a really in-depth article about this called How Philosophy Changed the World.
00:05:47
Speaker
and it's on the Living Ideas Journal website. So if someone wants to read this very long article documenting all of this, they can just Google Living Ideas Journal and they should be able to find it. Excellent. So when you say that Stoicism had minimal impact on the culture of the ancient world,
00:06:12
Speaker
is what you mean is that those didn't have quite the impact of a religion of sorts. There wasn't a full rebirth, even though, of course, in some sense, there was quite a lot of influence, given that you had Stoics, statesmen, advisors to emperors, and then, of course, later, emperors. Yeah, there was definitely some influence. And, of course, if you can impact and improve the lives of individuals,
00:06:38
Speaker
in some way, that alone will have some impact on society. But the argument that I'm trying to make is that it didn't really have any far-reaching impact on society like it did in the Renaissance. And one of the reasons for that, I think, is just that the social conditions were not right for that. For example, during the time of the famous Roman Stoics like Seneca and Bictetus,
00:07:07
Speaker
Rome was no longer a republic. There was an emperor or a Caesar. And so the whole idea of having some kind of profound social impact on society in a political system like that would have been very difficult. Now, there was Marcus Aurelius, too, and people were lucky that Marcus Aurelius came into power. But as a rule, I don't think it was really possible under those conditions. I mean, there were some good Roman emperors
00:07:37
Speaker
But it wasn't possible under those conditions to have like a sustained impact on society. The thing that's very interesting though, is that in stoicism, there are all of these seed ideas that were very, very important in terms of creating social change later, but it did take time for that to happen. Sometimes hundreds of years actually. Yeah, it's interesting, I suppose.
00:08:03
Speaker
You want to impact society. You need to ask, you know, what's the structure of society? In some cases, a more elitist philosophy might be better for impact, whether that's better in the ultimate sense, of course, is a different question.
00:08:18
Speaker
And to some extent, Stoicism has a sort of elitist structure, whereas if you think about what impacted the day-to-day life of a typical Roman, it might be something closer to a cult or a particular religious beliefs, it would make more of a difference. I think that's true, yeah. So in the Renaissance, how did we see that this change come about then?
Petrarch and Cultural Rebirth
00:08:40
Speaker
Okay, so actually it's interesting because there wasn't actually a stoic revival in the Renaissance in the beginning because
00:08:53
Speaker
everyone in the Renaissance at that time was already reading Stoicism. There was a Stoic revival in the late Renaissance after the works of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus were published, but that was like the very late northern Renaissance. So what I'd like to do is describe quickly how the Renaissance came into being, because this is something that almost no one has ever taught in school these days.
00:09:18
Speaker
And when people think about the Renaissance now, they always think about art. And of course, art is wonderful. But the Renaissance itself, including much of the greatest art, was inspired by the ideas of Renaissance humanism. And Renaissance humanism was initially inspired by Francesco Petrarch, who is simply known as Petrarch today, who is just a really remarkable character.
00:09:43
Speaker
He was born in the 1300s in the year 1304, and that was long before the Renaissance began. But he was an amazing classical scholar, and he's called the father of Renaissance humanism because his ideas and his life, which was a reflection of his work, inspired the Renaissance humanists who came after him.
00:10:07
Speaker
And it's pretty amazing because there isn't really any idea or approach that you find in later humanism that you can't find in Petrarch. That's how influential he was.
00:10:19
Speaker
And to just give you a short account of his life, he had an incredible love of classical Latin literature and he idolized philosophical writers like Seneca and Cicero. But the 1300s, the time he was living in was quite a bad time. Italy was not a unified land like it had been in Roman times, but it was a collection of city states that were often at war.
00:10:47
Speaker
And some of them were ruled by tyrants. And Petrarch, he was very religious, but he found the church of his time to be corrupt. And he also lived through the plague or the Black Death, which had killed 60% of the population of Florence. So Petrarch believed that he was living in very bad and politically corrupt times.
00:11:12
Speaker
and the things he read about had been much better during Roman times, especially the time of Cicero. And actually, that was probably true. But what was unique about Petrarch is that he was also the first person to actually see that a vast cultural decline had taken place between Roman times
00:11:33
Speaker
and the time that he was living in. And no one had really noticed this before in the way that Petrarch did. And this inspired Petrarch to invent the idea of the Dark Ages to explain this cultural decline. So this whole idea of the Dark Ages came from Petrarch.
00:11:50
Speaker
And he believed that he was still living in the Dark Ages, but that some kind of cultural rebirth was possible. And for Petrarch, the only way to create a better world was to revive the learning and the deepest values and the moral philosophy of the ancient world.
00:12:11
Speaker
And that thought right there, that the only way to improve his corrupt society was by reviving the knowledge and wisdom of the past, was the actual seed that the entire Renaissance developed from, because Renaissance means rebirth, and it was the rebirth of ancient thought.
00:12:31
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose that, how do you, in the paragraph, of course, explain what the Renaissance was? On the surface, a very simple question, but I know it's not an easy one, many assumptions there. Oh, it's actually fairly easy to explain because the Renaissance was a movement that tried to
00:12:52
Speaker
recreate the world of ancient Roman Greece. That's exactly what it was, and that's why they rediscovered and adopted, for example, Roman styles of architecture. And in the Renaissance, you can see this incredible shift taking place from Gothic-style art to what we consider to be Renaissance art, almost overnight, even in terms of
00:13:18
Speaker
the life of a single artist.
Moral Philosophy in the Renaissance
00:13:21
Speaker
It's just unbelievable. And the entire worldview changed. So the way this happened is that they wanted to revive the moral philosophy of the past. And for them at that time,
00:13:36
Speaker
In Petrarch's time and after, like in the early 1400s, moral philosophy meant the ideas of Seneca and Cicero because they were the philosophical writers they had access to in Latin. No one could read Greek yet then. And they were the writers that they loved.
00:13:53
Speaker
And maybe moral philosophy sounds like a kind of imposing term, but it just means developing a better character and also creating a better society. So what I'd say is that in summary, the Renaissance arose in response to a perceived social crisis because it was a belief in the collapse of knowledge and civilized values during the Dark Ages. And this wasn't just a belief that Petrarch
00:14:20
Speaker
held all of the major humanists in the early Renaissance believed in this decline, and they also believed that they could revive the light of ancient knowledge and wisdom in their own time or for future generations that followed them.
00:14:36
Speaker
So it's really interesting because for the first time in history, people became very self-conscious of their own place in time. And it was this desire to restore the knowledge of the past that gave birth to the Renaissance. Of course, there were other factors too, but this was the underlying idea. And it took about two or three decades after the death of Petrarch,
00:14:59
Speaker
But amazingly, The Humanist Project was a major success because when Petrarch was alive, he believed that he was living in the Dark Ages and he was rather pessimistic about things. But just a few decades later, the world had been transformed and the people in Florence embodied
00:15:22
Speaker
the greatest optimism possible about the world they were living in, and they were actually talking quite consistently about how they were living in a new golden age. So, it's a totally amazing cultural transformation that occurred. Do you have any sense of what made that
00:15:40
Speaker
area of the world special apart from a number of figures becoming excited about these classical sources. What else is in here?
00:15:55
Speaker
One thing is that Florence was a republic as opposed to some of the other city-states in Italy, and so there was quite a bit of intellectual freedom there. Another factor was the great wealth in Florence.
00:16:11
Speaker
because it was a center in Europe of international trade. It was the capital of the wool industry in Europe. So there was quite a bit of revenue from that, and it was also a hub for international banking. So the Medici Bank was based in Florence, and they had branches all throughout Europe. So there was that financial
00:16:36
Speaker
aspect as well, which allowed people really to pursue scholarship and also it allowed for the funding of public works and things like that, which you actually see that in all times of cultural thriving, I think, because, for example, in ancient Greece, when Greek philosophy arose, one of the reasons that it arose is because there was
00:17:05
Speaker
quite a bit of wealth in ancient Greece. And the word school or skole actually means leisure. So the people who were philosophers had enough leisure time so that they could pursue their intellectual interests.
00:17:22
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. It's always an interesting question about why you see these intellectual flower rings when you do, and it does seem like wealth is a common factor, as is, of course, some degree of intellectual freedom or at least decentralization, either among cities or within them. Yeah. It's hard to do anything if you're starving and wondering where your next meal is coming from.
00:17:49
Speaker
So how did these figures and the Renaissance realize ancient philosophy as a life philosophy? Did they pick on Stoicism in particular or was there sort of more of an eclectic mix of philosophies that they used to form this humanistic way of life?
00:18:09
Speaker
Well, in early humanism, it was primarily stoicism because the humanists did not like medieval scholasticism or Aristotle. And Aristotle existed in really bad translations in any case, but they had access to Seneca and Cicero.
00:18:30
Speaker
What I'd like to do is just briefly talk about two Stoic philosophers in the Renaissance, just to show how Stoic they really were. And the first one is Petrarch, and then I'd like to just say a few words about Leon Battista Alberti, who was a hundred years after Petrarch, and he's my favorite Renaissance humanist.
00:18:53
Speaker
Basically, when you look at Petrarch, Seneca was one of his favorite authors, and he quotes Seneca often. Petrarch often wrote letters to important intellectuals and leaders all across Europe, and he ended up publishing over 500 of those letters, which we still have access to.
00:19:15
Speaker
And in one of his letters, Petrarch admitted that he was addicted to writing, which is certainly a true description. But his letter writing practice was influenced by the published letters of Seneca and Cicero, who he was emulating in his own unique way.
00:19:32
Speaker
And when he would write these letters, sometimes Petrarch would take an idea or two from Seneca, or Seneca's letters, and then expand upon that idea in his own letters. But Petrarch even went so far as to write a letter to his own intellectual heroes from the past. And so, of course, he wrote a letter to Seneca's ghost as well.
00:19:54
Speaker
And at the beginning of that letter, Petrarch says to Seneca, he says, Seneca, you would not believe how much I listen to your words every day. And what that means is that Petrarch was reading a little bit of Seneca's writings every day. And when I first read that, I was in total shock because I had written a book called Breakfast with Seneca.
00:20:17
Speaker
And the title came from a little ritual I developed where I would read a letter from Seneca each morning at breakfast. So when I discovered that Petra was doing the same thing over 600 years ago, I felt a instant sense of kinship with him.
00:20:32
Speaker
But in addition to his study of Seneca, he also used Stoic practices such as the Daily Review, where you reflect on how you behaved a particular day and whether there was room for improvement. And he wrote a huge work of practical Stoic philosophy based on the ideas of Seneca.
00:20:52
Speaker
And it's called Remedies Against Fortune, both fear and foul, or how to deal with both good and bad fortune. Because if you have enough good fortune, it can actually become bad, as Seneca explained. And if you look at the English translation of this, it's like many hundreds of pages in like five volumes, and it's based on Seneca's ideas.
00:21:16
Speaker
So to skip ahead to Alberti, he was born exactly 100 years after Petra. And when he was a young man, say like around 30, the Renaissance was in full swing in Florence. And Alberti was one of the most brilliant minds of the entire Renaissance. And he was basically the prototype of the idea of the Renaissance man who was an architect,
00:21:43
Speaker
He was a literary scholar, an art theorist, a mathematician, and he was also a philosopher, basically a stoic philosopher.
00:21:52
Speaker
And we can see the fact that he was stoic from at least three different writings of his, including an anonymous autobiography that he wrote. But the most important work of his that proves that he was a stoic is a short book. It's very beautifully written as a dialogue. It's called On the Tranquility of the Soul.
Influence of Stoicism on Alberti
00:22:14
Speaker
And as I'm sure you remember, Caleb, On the Tranquility of the Soul is actually the title of an essay written by Seneca. And Alberti's book On the Tranquility of the Soul reads like it's Renaissance textbook of Stoic philosophy, and it contains hundreds of quotations or paraphrases from Seneca. So there's no question that this is like a Stoic work, and it's very representative of Alberti's philosophical
00:22:41
Speaker
I'm going to write an article about this called The Forgotten Stoic, about Alberti. And people haven't really realized this because this book on the tranquility of the soul, it was just published in German translation about a year ago. So it hasn't been readily available to people.
00:22:59
Speaker
But Alberti also wrote a book of practical philosophy called On the Family, and it contains a lot of significant stoic ideas. And I have a really short quotation here that really sums up Alberti's stoic outlook. He wrote that virtue maintained with constancy and strength far outshines all that is subject to fortune's sway and all that is transitory and destructible.
00:23:26
Speaker
And this whole dichotomy of virtue versus fortune is a key idea in Renaissance stoicism. And it comes straight from Seneca, because this is Seneca's version of the so-called dichotomy of control, because virtue is our inner character.
00:23:44
Speaker
and that is up to us. Well, fortune is chance, which is outside of our control, and it's not up to us. So that's how the Renaissance Stoics would speak about these things using the language of Seneca.
00:23:58
Speaker
But Alberti himself actually made a very significant addition to the Stoic tradition, in my view, because he brings in this idea of work as being virtuous. He was actually a workaholic. But for Alberti, he believed that work gives human beings dignity, and he stresses this idea like many times in his writings. And then what he says is that when virtue is combined with hard work,
00:24:25
Speaker
it will always triumph over fortune or chance over the long term. And in his words, he said that fortune can only defeat those who submit willingly to it. So that's a taste of Alberti's Stoicism for you. Yeah, that quotation is amazing. I think an isolation one would certainly guess that it had come directly from Seneca. Oh yeah, it's 100% Stoics. It's unbelievable.
00:24:53
Speaker
So I have, I had read that Alberti was ambivalent about Petrarch's use of writing and reading as ethical tools or what Haddo might call, I was using them as spiritual exercises. I don't know if you could, you could say more, more about that. Right. I think I, I think I have in mind the article that you may have read and
00:25:22
Speaker
I'm not really sure that's true because basically there were actually some significant differences between Petrarch and Alberti.
00:25:38
Speaker
the writers of the past were so great that no one could really surpass them. But Alberti believed in the evolution of knowledge, and he believed that it was very valuable to study the knowledge of the past, but that it was also possible for people to surpass it. And he saw that happening in Florence all around him, so he was living in a different
00:26:00
Speaker
kind of environment than Petrarch was, which was probably a bit more depressing. But I think, actually, we know the different kinds of Stoic exercises, or at least some of them, that Petrarch and Alberti used. And they're basically all things that you find in, like, Seneca and, you know, the Greek philosophical writings.
00:26:23
Speaker
My guess, and we could talk about what some of these exercises are, but my guess would be is that Alberti and Petrarch, they probably used all of the stoic exercises they could find in Seneca. That would be my assumption because we do have these reports about the specific exercises that they use, but those are just random bits of information. And if they were enthusiastic about
00:26:51
Speaker
the kinds of stoic exercises they talk about. They were probably enthusiastic about all of them as well. Yeah, well, let's dive into some specific ones, especially with focus. Sure. Anything they might say that may be underrated today or that more people can keep in mind when they think about doing these practices themselves. Yeah, it's really interesting because there's further documents like how stoic they were.
00:27:14
Speaker
And basically, one thing that they both had in common is Petrarch and Alberti, they saw philosophy in a stoic way as a way to care for the mind or the soul, and they both write about that. Now, in terms of practices or what we know about them, you know, that has come down to us, Petrarch used the daily review, and he used reading and writing as a philosophical practice, which you referred to.
00:27:41
Speaker
And he also studied historical figures as a way to discover role models, which is another practice he learned about from Seneca. Petrarch and Alberti, they used philosophy and virtue as a way to rise above fortune or chance and as a way to become self-sufficient, so that applies to both of them.
00:28:01
Speaker
And Alberti also learned how to use what we would now call exposure therapy as a way to overcome certain aversions that he had. And for example, he would consciously expose himself to so-called difficult people as a way to develop patients and use that in different ways.
00:28:21
Speaker
But I think they probably both used the majority of historic practices. And I do have this quote, which is really fascinating to show just how stoic Alberti was, because in his book on the family, he describes even the preparation for future adversity.
00:28:40
Speaker
in precise detail. And this is a really good quote. He says that every man finds it hard in prosperity to envisage how in time of need he will sustain the cruel tyrant of fortune and the dangers, injury, and exile that may come.
00:28:58
Speaker
So when you return home from a journey, therefore, think of some misdeed that children or wife may have committed, or of some accident that may have befallen them, for these things happen every day. Thus your spirit will never be overwhelmed by some unexpected calamity. This is a great line. He says, the sword of a man
00:29:21
Speaker
seen ahead of time usually strikes less deep. And then he says, if you find things safe and better than you had imagined, then you will count that as a gain. And that was actually my exact experience when I have experimented with the premeditation of future adversity, because when you think about the things that could happen,
00:29:46
Speaker
you know, that would not be very pleasant in the future. It makes you actually very grateful for the things that you do have. And so Alberti had exactly the same experience.
00:29:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think so much of unhappiness, different forms of suffering is a result of frustrated expectations. Yes, yes. This is a common stoic theme. And if one can adjust one's expectations or even imagine things going worse than what one initially predicts, one can be better prepared against fortune, as it were. Yes, yes.
00:30:25
Speaker
Is there any lesson you took from looking at these figures that caused you to see Seneca in a different light? I'm curious, since you spent so much time with Seneca in particular, and it seems like both Alberti, Petrarch, and others did as well. No, because really they read Seneca very carefully. There were also some, you know, pseudo-Seneca texts floating around, but I think that those were actually based pretty closely on the ideas of Seneca.
00:30:53
Speaker
It hasn't changed my views on Seneca at all because they really followed Seneca quite closely. How did the ideas of Christianity influence how these figures tend to see ancient philosophy, if at all? It didn't really have any impact at all, and basically most of the Renaissance humanists were devout Catholics.
00:31:24
Speaker
Petrarch had this amazing idea which enabled Renaissance humanism to flower forth, and basically what his idea was is that say like Catholicism or religion for him dealt with the timeless salvation of the soul, but these kind of secular and even pagan texts from the past
00:31:49
Speaker
they dealt with how to advance yourself in this life and how to improve society and become more virtuous. So they sort of bifurcated the religious dimension from the secular dimension. And this strategy of Petrarch was really ingenious because it allowed the study of these ancient writings to be totally safe in a very, very religious world.
00:32:19
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I suppose you have the bifurcation strategy or you can claim someone as Christian. You know, you have Seneca as the proto-Christian. You mentioned big letters between Alexander Paul or something of that sort. Right. Because there are the letters, you know, the supposed letters, they're not real letters between Seneca and Paul. And of course that gave Seneca a lot of status in the Renaissance as well.
00:32:44
Speaker
So, what can we learn from this earlier use of the Stoics in this revival of Stoicism today? You know, how do you see the examples of these figures sort of answering that earlier crisis you mentioned?
00:33:00
Speaker
Yes. So I think this is the key question.
Stoicism and Modern Human Rights
00:33:03
Speaker
So we've come back to the very beginning of our conversation. And as we discussed, the Stoics had very pro-social views. They believed it was important to contribute to society, but this is one of the Stoic views. It took a long time to become influential in the world.
00:33:20
Speaker
Partly because the Stoics had no real political philosophy. They had really great ideas. They were the first philosophical school to state that all people are equal, including women and men. And their idea of the cosmopolis said that all human beings were brothers and sisters of one another. So that's a very good start. And those ideas would be developed literally for centuries, eventually contributing to the idea of modern human rights. So I tried to trace that arc.
00:33:49
Speaker
in the Sonica book, there's a chapter about that. But in the ancient world, it was Cicero who was a political philosopher. And Cicero took stoic ideas and he developed them further. And what Cicero really stressed was the idea of civic virtue, so that in addition to becoming more virtuous as an individual, he wanted to know what it would mean to live in a good and virtuous society. And I think that with his death,
00:34:18
Speaker
this idea of civic virtue went into eclipse because he lost his life when Rome was no longer a republic. It was shifting over to, you know, the emperor model.
00:34:31
Speaker
being ruled by a single person with nearly absolute power. And while there were a few good emperors, it obviously went very badly in some cases with like Caligula and Nero and others. But along with Seneca, Cicero was an incredibly important influence on the Renaissance humanists. So there was this massive emphasis in the early 1400s on the question, how could we use philosophy to improve society?
00:34:59
Speaker
And today, this movement is called civic humanism, and Cicero became a model for the civic humanist because he was both a philosopher and a statesman. So Cicero showed how it was possible to be a philosopher and contribute to the common good of society in a very practical way, and how learning and being involved in
00:35:22
Speaker
the political sphere could go together. And if you look at the work of Leon Batista Alberti, who we were discussing, this idea of creating a better world runs all throughout his writings. And he wasn't the only one. This was just a guiding idea of the humanists.
00:35:40
Speaker
And the way the humanists accomplished this was through education.
Humanities and Virtue Creation
00:35:44
Speaker
So they basically created a new educational system, which was designed to create better, more ethical leaders and a better, more flourishing society at the same time. And this educational system was eventually called the studia humanitatis, or humane studies. Or to put it another way, they created what we call the humanities today.
00:36:10
Speaker
And it's somewhat shocking for us today to realize that the original purpose of the humanities was to create better people. So that's really striking because if you go into a humanities department, really none of the professors even know
00:36:28
Speaker
what should just be a well-known historical fact is totally off the radar. But the original studia humanitatis consisted of grammar, which was like Latin, rhetoric, persuasive speaking, because that was very important, and a republic like Florence, because you had to communicate your ideas very well.
00:36:48
Speaker
consisted of poetry, history, and moral philosophy. So there were these five branches. But the ultimate study was moral philosophy, and poetry and history were really subservient to that because, for example, history would be used to study the examples of great people from the past who were morally virtuous. So, for example,
00:37:13
Speaker
Petrarch wrote a book on illustrious men and it was written with this function in mind to highlight what virtuous characters are like. And this comes right from Seneca because he says, you know, you should pick a role model and you should look at how that person, you know, lived his life and you should model your life on the lives of virtuous people.
00:37:35
Speaker
But all of these topics of the studia humanitatis were all things that Petrarch was really deeply involved in studying. So they all really go back to him. And one thing I find to be really wonderful and entertaining as well is that, you know, Massimo Pelucci and probably everyone, you know, listening to this discussion knows who Massimo is. But his last book,
00:38:02
Speaker
the quest for character. At the very end of the book, he creates a curriculum for becoming a more virtuous person, and he hadn't really studied Renaissance humanism. But what is astonishing is that he did obviously study the same sources that the Renaissance humanists were
00:38:23
Speaker
using, and Massimo totally independently reinvented the curriculum of the Renaissance humanists, basically. It was really wonderful to see that. But I think one of the lessons we can take away from this is that if you really do want to change the world, you have to change the educational system and make it better.
Stoic Principles in Modern Education
00:38:44
Speaker
And I think this is some way that stoicism and ancient philosophy could be applied today because I think it's possible to reintroduce the idea of virtue ethics into the educational system, say like through high school or even college, probably not graduate school because once you reach that level, everyone's going to be unvirtuous.
00:39:07
Speaker
That's just a joke. But this can be done in a secular way. And because all of these ideas about virtue from the ancient world are based on rational arguments. And there are actually people doing this in the United States. I've been really astonished to learn about this. For example, there's this whole classical education movement. And there's this one classical education school. It's a charter school system that has 30,000 students.
00:39:37
Speaker
And they have this incredibly wonderful curriculum. It doesn't cost any more than going to a public school, but you get to study Latin. And then by the time you're in high school, you get to read bits of Plato, Cicero, and Seneca, and things like that. And because it's a charter school system, it's totally secular.
00:39:58
Speaker
So it is possible to introduce this kind of way of thinking about the world back into the educational system and create a better school system, I think. And the demand for this is so great that this particular school system can't even keep up with.
00:40:14
Speaker
the demands of growth and finding teachers and things like that. So I think there's a huge hunger for this actually. And we see this actually in the interest in stoicism itself because a lot of people are drawn to stoicism because we live in an increasingly secular society.
00:40:34
Speaker
And the whole idea of, for example, the cardinal virtues just makes innate sense to people. It's very reasonable. It's really actually impossible to argue against the classical virtues like practical wisdom, courage, self-control, and justice. Those are just things that are intrinsic to human nature and
00:41:01
Speaker
principles that we want to base society on as well. So I think that with all of the relativism that has been introduced into the world by, for example, like postmodern thought and things like that, that people have at least
00:41:19
Speaker
a very strong unconscious desire for some kind of way of thinking that's virtuous and something that's actually stable that you could base your life and actions on in a very reasonable way. And for example, the cardinal virtues supply that. And there are other virtues too. Those aren't the only ones. Like Cicero had this idea of humanitas or becoming a more humane individual
00:41:49
Speaker
And that's the idea behind Renaissance humanism and the birth of the humanities. And then there are also the platonic ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful, which are very important in this classical education movement. So I find this to be very inspiring and hopeful.
00:42:07
Speaker
And I think it provides a kind of map for how we might be able to create better people and a better society today, which would actually draw on Stoic thought as well as other Greek philosophical schools. And I don't have any illusions. I mean, it's not like you can do this and wave a magic wand and change the world overnight. You know, that's always, at least in my view,
00:42:34
Speaker
Usually a pretty dangerous proposition, but you know, it's like the situation in the Renaissance with Petrarch. I mean it took 20 or 30 years for
00:42:45
Speaker
his ideas to really become fully embraced and start affecting the world in a tangible way. So I think that if we could improve the educational system, which I don't know what your views are on this, but I think there's been a fairly substantial decline in the quality of education that I think that it would pave the way for a much better world in the future.
00:43:09
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, education is always so complicated topic, but it's certainly true that we see promising new efforts or at any rate, what was old is new again. And some of these classical institutions in the States that I'm familiar with, I imagine there's some elsewhere too, but a number of those have been successful at different levels. Right. Right. And unfortunately, I think
00:43:38
Speaker
In my experience, at least I think that a lot of education is just a wasted effort, and a lot of it is really just...
00:43:46
Speaker
aimed at socialization, because I went to pretty good schools actually when I was a child, but I think that a lot of education is based at socialization and teaching children how to stand in line and obey their teachers and things like that. So I think that there's an incredibly vast potential to do much better in the educational world and to create much better people
00:44:11
Speaker
people who can think in an interdisciplinary way, like the Renaissance polymaths, and that is certainly not encouraged today. And there are just all sorts of ways that the educational system could be improved. So what I would say, this is my challenge for people who consider themselves to be
00:44:31
Speaker
modern Stoics really think about this and take a look at how this was done in the past because there was a curriculum for this for creating better people. Take a look at what these charter school systems are doing. It's quite inspiring really.
00:44:47
Speaker
And I think that would be a way to really have a positive impact on society because there are a lot of people interested in contributing to the world in modern stoicism. And I think of like Brittany Polat, for example, like stoic care, and then people doing things with people in prisons and teaching them stoicism. And all of those things are really great.
00:45:12
Speaker
Obviously, in the school, you can't go in and teach people how to be a stoic or how to be a Platonist or how to be an Aristotelian, but you certainly can teach them what ancient virtue ethics was about, and you can get them to think about it and even experiment with applying philosophical ideas in their own lives.
00:45:34
Speaker
you know analyzing what really is virtuous behavior i mean to lead an excellent life what would it mean for you and you know how would these classical virtues possibly be part of it so if you approach it in the right spirit then i think this could have a profound impact and one thing that i would like to do in the future is maybe do some work on you know creating a curriculum for this using like ancient texts and
00:46:00
Speaker
You know coming up with something like that as a way to contributing, you know Some of these ancient ideas to the educational system today Absolutely. Excellent. Well, is there anything else you'd like to add?
00:46:13
Speaker
No, that's all. I've written quite a bit about this on Living Ideas Journal, so that's one of my websites. And I'm also teaching a course on Renaissance ideas in Florence later this year, and hopefully it will be an ongoing course. And we're having a symposium as well, where we will talk about the impact of Stoicism and other philosophical schools on the Renaissance.
00:46:39
Speaker
The whole idea behind this is that in the morning we're going to talk about the ideas that gave birth to the Renaissance.
Renaissance Course Overview
00:46:46
Speaker
And then in the afternoon, there'll be basically like little field trips or tours to different parts of Florence where people can see like the architecture and the city itself, how these ideas impacted like the civic life in Florence and also how they impacted the artworks. So they'll be like museum visits and things like that.
00:47:06
Speaker
So I think it's a pretty unique offering and I think the combination of combining the ideas and actually being able to see how they were embodied could be a really profound and transformative experience for people. I know that has been in my own life when, you know, I've spent time in Florence and really seen how these ideas were embodied. They're very inspirational. Yeah. That sounds, that sounds amazing. Where should people go to learn more about that?
00:47:32
Speaker
The easiest website is just go to Living Ideas Journal and then on the front page of the website, you'll find a link to the course.
00:47:41
Speaker
Excellent. Well, thanks so much for chatting. Learned quite a lot about the Renaissance and how Stoicism showed up there. Yeah. Who would have ever thought, Caleb? I mean, who would have ever thought that at the very start of the Renaissance that Stoicism, of all things, was a formative influence? I mean, it's really amazing to realize that.
00:48:04
Speaker
Right. Especially the degree to which many of these lines you read sound like our good friend Seneca. Yeah. It's straight stoicism. It's like right out of Seneca and Cicero as well. Yeah. In Cicero as well. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for chatting. Great. It's been wonderful speaking with you.
00:48:21
Speaker
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00:48:51
Speaker
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00:49:14
Speaker
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