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Everything You Should Know About Ancient Stoicism (Episode 59)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this podcast, Michael Tremblay discusses everything you should know about ancient Stoicism in 1 hour. Consider it a Stoic speed run.
(01:54) Introduction
(04:46) The History
(13:48) Stoic Ethics
(19:35) Psychological Claims
(26:49) Stoic Epistemology
(33:09) Stoic Metaphysics
(42:05) Stoic Exercises
(52:09) Objections
(56:58) Last Challenge
***
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Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Format
00:00:00
Speaker
But really where Stoicism shines is to say, okay, well, that's all good and fine. That's that system. How do you put that system into practice? How do you achieve that transformation? 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 will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
Stoic Resources & New Series
00:00:26
Speaker
And today we have a Stoic speed run by Michael. But before we get into that, if you're new to Stoic conversations, check out our back catalog. You may also find the Stoa Letter, that's stoaletter.com, of interest. We send out two emails, two weekly meditations on becoming more Stoic.
00:00:50
Speaker
And if you want to dive deeper still, we have the StoA app. Just search StoA in the Play Store or App Store to find that. We have hundreds of study exercises, meditations, and lessons. We just uploaded a new series on crisis meditations. These are exercises that are meant in the ancient sense of the word crisis.
00:01:13
Speaker
to help out when you're at the crossroads, when you're facing a decision, whether you're dealing with a negative emotion like anxiety or anger, or preparing for an important event.
Stoicism Essentials Overview
00:01:26
Speaker
These are short meditations meant to ground yourself, provide structure, and ultimately a way to act well in the face of what life throws at us.
00:01:39
Speaker
And now, time for the conversation. Today, we are going to be covering all of stoicism. So this is going to be Michael's take on the most important aspects to know about stoicism in a short period of time. It is a large task. I'm kind of pumped up. I'm going to have to go up pace here. But yeah, what I wanted to do in this hour is I wanted to do a real stoicism 101.
00:02:06
Speaker
And I kind of treated it as an exercise, which is to say, look, if we limit the amount of time we have to talk about things, but we're going to try to cover all the important parts of stoicism. What are really the essential parts that get left over? And so there's, there's.
00:02:21
Speaker
Let me go over a couple of categories. So going to start with a history of stoicism or at least the, you know, a bit of its intellectual background and major inspirations, then go over its key claims, ethical claims, psychological claims, epistemological claims. That's, you know, how we know what we know. It's metaphysical claims as well about the nature of the universe.
History & Evolution of Stoicism
00:02:41
Speaker
So the key claims in those four areas. Then I wanted to go over some of its key exercises. So the tools, the stoic tools for self-transformation, for self-improvement.
00:02:51
Speaker
then the major types of stoicism so the way that stoicism has manifested into modern schools and then some common objections so trying to just do an overview of the whole thing my goal is you know listen to this one hour and you'll have a
00:03:10
Speaker
thorough understanding of at least each separate part of stoicism and a good sense of where you want to dig deeper. Or maybe, you know, maybe this is, this is all you need. It is self contained. So that's, that's doubtful, but at least a good enough overview to either refresh people's memory, get people started or, you know, test people to see, you know, if they agree or disagree or think they would have added anything else as being essential or they would have taken anything out. So that's my goal with this episode.
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's always useful, whether you're familiar with the philosophy or not, to try to summarize things briefly, revisit what your elevator pitch for a philosophy is, and to some extent we'll be doing the longer version of that. But I think it'll be useful, of course, if you don't know much about stoicism to get this one hour or so download. And then if you do have some background in stoicism to compare
00:04:09
Speaker
what you would state some of the key claims, key exercises are with the philosophy and how they might differ or not with what we're going to chat about here. Yeah. And so if there's an elevator pitch, this is more like a train ride pitch or a. Yeah, that's right. A long high pitch of stoicism.
00:04:32
Speaker
I guess maybe a short hike. I'm just not a good hiker. You just don't go hike. Long hike for me. One hour, that's enough. I'm going home. Cool. So anything else or I'll jump into it.
Core Stoic Philosophy & Ethics
00:04:44
Speaker
Let's do it.
00:04:46
Speaker
Cool. So let's start off with the history of Stoicism, a bit of its intellectual background. So Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in 300 BC or around 300 BC. There would be, Stoicism is a school of ancient philosophy that has a number of heads of the school over time, but Zeno was
00:05:10
Speaker
Nozino was the founder, was the first one. You often talk about Chrysippus. He's the third founder or another really important figure in terms of unifying or writing down the Stoic theory. That's the early school of early school of Stoic philosophy. And then Stoicism
00:05:27
Speaker
exists in varying degrees of popularity in ancient Rome and Greece and that part of the world until around 150-200 AD when it becomes superseded by Christianity as kind of the dominant cultural
00:05:45
Speaker
philosophical or religious outlook on how to live. Even though Zeno was the founder, we often hear a lot from the late Stoics, that's Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus. We hear about them a lot because
00:06:02
Speaker
A, we have their writings preserved, we just don't have a lot of Zeno's writings anymore, Chrysophes' writings anymore, Cleanthes' writings. And B, because they really focused on the ethical parts of stoicism, so the parts that I would say are most accessible to normal people or non-stoics. And I would say C, there's kind of a historical interest as well in the late Stoic Seneca
00:06:25
Speaker
advisor to Emperor Nero, very historically relevant Roman Marcus Aurelius,
Stoic Psychology & Knowledge
00:06:32
Speaker
Emperor of Rome, hepatitis, maybe less historically relevant, but he was a slave is kind of this interesting story as a character. And so there's a bit of a cause and effect there where
00:06:43
Speaker
because Marcus Aurelius was famous, we have his writings, but then because we have his writings, Marcus Aurelius is famous. That kind of goes on and really puts up these late Stoics. That's why people often talk about them or refer to them. Stoicism didn't happen in a vacuum. It had a lot of
00:07:03
Speaker
philosophical inspiration. So you can talk about the development of stoicism historically, but I as a philosopher often think of it as a kind of a story of ideas or a story of philosophies or ways of thinking about the world.
00:07:17
Speaker
Its main philosophical inspiration is that of Socrates and Socrates was an ancient Athenian. You might have heard of Socrates as the Socratic method or this very, you think, well, he's quite famous for always going around questioning people or always pestering people.
00:07:36
Speaker
But he was a really important person in the history of Western philosophy, so much so that, you know, before Socrates, you have pre-Socratic philosophy and
Metaphysics & Role of God
00:07:46
Speaker
then you have, you know, philosophy after Socrates. So he hit this kind of breaking point in the history of Western philosophy. And Socrates, this is something we talked about a lot on this channel, Socrates ended up being accused of corrupting the youth. He was put on trial and eventually put to death.
00:08:03
Speaker
And in that moment, I think he was seen by a lot of philosophers as a martyr.
00:08:10
Speaker
a lot of philosophers as an admirable figure because part of the reason, at least part of the reason he was accused of corrupting the youth was because he was going around having philosophical discussions with people. He was questioning common ideas. He was questioning the popular notions of gods and things along these lines and trying to get to the truth of the matter. And so in his role in doing so, I think he was really seen as a martyr by a lot of the philosophies that came after them and really as a kind of a sage
00:08:40
Speaker
or a guiding philosophical light, it would go, that's what a good person is, that's how a good person acts, and that's what we should aspire to be like.
00:08:50
Speaker
I also talk about him as being kind of almost a Christ-like figure in this sense because he died, he had followers, and those followers kind of broke off into sex that disagreed about what Socrates' key teachings were. Some of those people were skeptics, some of those were the cynics, and some of those were the Platonists, were Plato's followers.
00:09:11
Speaker
I would say that's the second major philosophical inspiration of Stoicism is actually cynicism. Diogenes was one of the most famous cynics. He was very famous for sleeping outside, for sleeping in a barrel. There's that famous anecdote of him.
00:09:29
Speaker
famously mocking Plato's definition of man as a, you know, let's say hairless bipedal animal and he plucks a chicken and holds up a chicken and goes, you know, behold a man. This really extreme philosophy as embodied by Diogenes. And you can look at stoicism in a way. So if cynicism is about living in accordance with your nature, pursuing truth, pursuing freedom,
00:09:54
Speaker
And for cynicism that looks like not being corrupted or distracted by social convention, not following what others say just because they say it, not being intimidated by reputation or the demands of others, that's how that manifests in cynicism.
00:10:14
Speaker
Then stoicism comes along and says, look, we're going to conceive of what it means to be a person a little bit differently, what it means to live in accordance with our nature a little bit differently, because we're going to think that stoicism is going to say that we're social animals. We have certain social conventions.
00:10:29
Speaker
their certain benefits to sleeping in a house instead of in the street, to wearing clothes, to maintaining good social relationships with friends and neighbors. So on one hand, you could look at cynicism as kind
Ethical Practices & Exercises
00:10:45
Speaker
of deluded cynicism.
00:10:47
Speaker
And you could also look at cynicism as a middle ground cynicism, a cynicism that gets things right. It's the right mix between the extremism of cynicism and the kind of cowardliness of doing what you're told, following the crowd, not standing up for what's right. And so those are those inspirations of Socrates. We have cynicism and I would say the third main historical inspiration was Aristotle's approach to ethics.
00:11:14
Speaker
What Aristotle did is Aristotle really defined the Hellenistic period of philosophy, of which stoicism is a part, along with Epicureanism, Cynicism, and Skepticism. And Aristotle said, look, the point of philosophy is to achieve happiness, is to achieve cornea.
00:11:31
Speaker
And we now need to define what that means. What does eudaimonia mean? What does happiness mean? What is it comprised of? And then all of these different Hellenistic schools then had different answers to that question. Stoicism.
00:11:46
Speaker
then was inspired by Aristotle because it looked at ethics like this. It looked at ethics as a question of how does a person become happy? How does a person become excellent? And that is the key ethical question. And then it just came up with a different answer to that than Aristotle did.
00:12:03
Speaker
So those are the three, I would say the three key philosophical inspirations after that led to stoicism in its form. Yeah, I think that's, that's well put, Michael. So if you think about when the world in which stoicism emerged, you had the pre-Socratics, people who were
00:12:19
Speaker
really gesturing at or beginning to think in a range of different ways about some of these central questions. And they were really a mix of mystics, rhetoricians, poets, philosophers, and you didn't have
00:12:36
Speaker
philosophy crystallized into a single thing until Socrates came along and particularly the biographies of Socrates. And then you have, of course, Aristotle coming along and making things even more systematic.
00:12:51
Speaker
And that's the point where these Hellenistic philosophies like Stoicism, Epicureanism, and so on emerge into the picture and start answering these key philosophical questions. What's going on in the world? How do we know anything at all? And who should we be?
00:13:11
Speaker
That's a good way to put it. Stoicism is following a system of philosophy defined by Aristotle and to some extent Plato, and then their answer to that system is inspired by Socrates and Diogenes, although they're coming up with something or cynicism and broadly Diogenes, and they're coming up with a different answer based on that inspiration. That's a good way of putting it.
00:13:36
Speaker
So next part
Traditional vs Modern Stoicism
00:13:38
Speaker
then, so that's where stoicism came from. You know, what is stoicism? What are its key ideas that separated from those other philosophies that are also trying to answer these questions?
00:13:48
Speaker
So starting with the ethical claims, so the claims that stoicism makes about how to live, I would say there are three main ethical claims that stoicism is committed to that separates it from other schools. So the first is that virtue is the only good and both necessary and sufficient for a happy life.
00:14:08
Speaker
That's number one. I think even when I talk to people today, we talked about an episode on six types of stoicism. There's a lot of different debate about what makes a stoic, what doesn't. I think that's the key thing. That's a, that's a yes or no. If you don't think virtue is the only good, then you're not a stoic. I would, I would stay committed to that claim. Although I think there's other disagreements you can have and still be stoic, but not in that. And so what's meant by that is that virtue is, is a personal excellence.
00:14:38
Speaker
You know, a kind of, a kind of, cause I don't want to define it yet, but, but virtue is, is a kind of, uh, you know, excellent action, the excellent embodiment of what it means to be, to be a good person and to, to, I suppose, you know, behave in the way humans should behave.
00:14:56
Speaker
And so the implications of that is that it means that if you act properly, if you possess that virtue, then if it is sufficient and necessary for a good life, then no matter what else happens to you, your life cannot go poorly.
Common Objections to Stoicism
00:15:11
Speaker
And so the Stoics were famously committed to the view that you could be happy on the torture rack, which means that if you were a good person, if you were virtuous,
00:15:19
Speaker
Then even if you were being tortured, even if your house burnt down, even if your family died, you were still flourishing. You were still living an excellent life, which is a pretty controversial claim, but is there a key ethical claim?
00:15:32
Speaker
And so then what does virtue look like? Because there's lots of things that virtue could look like. It could look like having correct desires. It could look like wanting the right things over others. It could look like being totally courageous. There's lots of debates about what this might be. But for the Stoics, virtue is a knowledge of how to live in accordance with nature. So two points there. Virtue is knowledge. Knowledge of what? Well, how to live in accordance with nature.
00:16:02
Speaker
And so that's important because it means that excellence is an intellectual achievement. Virtue or personal excellence is an intellectual achievement. Correct action is an intellectual achievement because it is knowledge. And the other point there is that it is how to live in accordance with nature. This is understood as your nature and a greater cosmic nature.
00:16:24
Speaker
So when we act unvirtuously, that is when we act not in accordance with our own nature or not in accordance with cosmic nature. And an implication of this, say a third key ethical claim is that all vice is because of ignorance or a misunderstanding of our nature or our place within nature. And that's just the follow up from the claim that virtue is knowledge. If virtue is knowledge, then vice is ignorance.
00:16:54
Speaker
And this is a really intellectual way of looking at virtue, whereas someone like Plato might look at virtue as the controlling
Recap & Practical Applications
00:17:04
Speaker
of the irrational animal parts of ourselves. The Stoics are looking at, you know,
00:17:11
Speaker
The excellent people are the people that just, they just know what to do. They've got it. They know what's right. They understand why it's right. And they understand why that right action or that way to live fits within the bigger picture of the world that they're within. And they know who they are and their role within that world. Anything you would add to that ethical picture?
00:17:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's useful to think of virtue as a skill, as being excellent and that involves knowledge because many sorts of skills are at the end of the day captured in knowledge as well. So, the ability to do
00:17:50
Speaker
something well, means you know how to do it, you know the variety of different principles involved in your performance. And for the Stoics virtue, it is sort of the ultimate skill, knowing how all things come together in your life, given who you are.
00:18:11
Speaker
position in time that you happen to occupy and then doing these things whether they're ordinary or extraordinary for the right reasons at the right time and doing them excellently.
00:18:25
Speaker
Yeah. And I think this is also helpful. You know, I'm going to try to keep a, keep a move on cause we got a lot to cover, but I think this is also helpful in terms of dividing the, you can also understand this picture negatively, what it is not. So happy life is not having lots of pleasure. A happy life is not having lots of possessions. Happy life is not having a great reputation.
00:18:45
Speaker
Nor is a happy life one where you're a bad person, but are very successful. None of these things are sufficient for a good life, nor are they necessary. So you can go without all of them and still have a good life if you have virtue and you don't, without virtue, none of them add up enough for a good life. That's the, that's the key ethical claim.
00:19:10
Speaker
something that the Stoics and no other school agree with really sets them apart from everybody else and as you said yes virtue is this kind of it's knowledge but knowledge is a kind of action as well a kind of
00:19:24
Speaker
It is a state, but it's a state that then interacts with the world successfully. So it's kind of a knowledgeable person adeptly navigates their surroundings. The next part I wanted to get into is the key psychological claims. So if the ethical claim is that virtue is the only good, necessary and sufficient for a good life, then there are some key psychological claims that explain this and also situate an interesting and unique stoic psychology that helps the way we think about our emotions. We think about how we navigate the world.
00:19:55
Speaker
So one psychological claim is that our emotions are the results of our judgments. That's really important. So the idea that our emotions are rational, they're not irrational.
00:20:07
Speaker
They are either or directly are our judgments or are the results of those judgments. So when I feel angry, it's because I have judged, you know, somebody else to have harmed me and that they're deserving of vengeance. If I feel sad, it's because I thought something bad has happened because you might say, look, virtue is all good and fine. But what about, you know, my emotions, my feelings, my subjective state? Well, the stoic say, look, your emotions are the results of your judgments.
00:20:36
Speaker
If you have correct judgments, you will have a good emotional life. You will have both a stable emotional life because most of the extreme emotions come from false judgments, but you also have a pleasurable emotional life because you will also lean into the good emotions, but in ways that are sustainable.
00:20:54
Speaker
and you will avoid the distorted judgments that lead to extreme suffering. So that's one part. A second important stoic psychological claim is that we and our essential identities rest in our ability to make choices. So we are not our bodies, but our minds. Because this maybe could also be a metaphysical claim, but I think it kind of points to the importance they place on psychology. And Epictetus has this famous quote,
00:21:21
Speaker
where he imagines a tyrant threatening to throw him in jail and says, I'll chain you up. And Epictetus says, you won't chain me up. You'll, you know, you'll chain my leg, but not even God, you know, has control over my mind or me, you know? And so there's this idea that who we are, what we essentially are rests in our mind and not just our mind, but our capacity to make choices, that part of our mind that reflects on situations. They would call this reason, a reflection and a sense to situations.
00:21:50
Speaker
So something, if something bad happens to our body, this is not a harm to us because we are not our bodies. Instead, it's a challenge for our minds to navigate. Well, how do I overcome this adversity? How do I turn this challenge into kind of an opportunity to exercise my good character? And so, so that's another important psychological commitment.
00:22:14
Speaker
Then the next thing I want to get into in their psychology is the four main psychological processes that they believe occur. So all of our actions to Stoics, because we are just our minds, this decision-making part of our minds, all the things that we do are reducible really to four key psychological processes. That is impression, so our first impression of a situation, reflection, when we reflect upon that situation,
00:22:40
Speaker
We consider if that impression is true or not. If we agree with that first impression, a sense when we agree to that impression, or we either say that impression is true or false and impulse, which is the kind of psychological response that happens when I think an impression is true and it has something to do with value. You know, so.
00:23:00
Speaker
If something, I'm walking in a path at night and something jumps in front of me, there's an impression. Well, something's coming, something's come in front of me. I think it might be, you know, I think it might be a snake. I reflect upon that and I assent. And if I say, no, it's just a twig falling out of a tree, I don't feel anything. If I say, yeah, it is a snake, I feel, and you know, that snake is dangerous. I feel kind of a psychological response to run away and avoid it.
00:23:27
Speaker
And so those are the four processes. That's really all you are. And that's all you're working with in terms of improving your life. Right. So knowledge looks at, knowledge just means correctly assenting to true impressions. Just means, as Epictetus says, making correct use of our impressions.
00:23:47
Speaker
So carefully reflecting upon impressions, only assenting to the ones that are true is true and either suspending our judgment or, you know, dissenting against the ones that are false is false. And so an important psychological part of stoicism is this space between impression and assent.
00:24:05
Speaker
That space between first impression and what we choose to commit to or believe, that's the most important space in stoicism. That's where we make choices. That's where we have our freedom. And that's where we really craft our character. So those are the four psychological commitments I wanted to go over. Our emotions are the results of our judgments. We are our minds.
00:24:28
Speaker
We have four psychological processes, impression, reflection, ascent and impulse, and then the space between impression and ascent. That reflection, that's the most important part. That's really where we can change our character.
00:24:42
Speaker
There's a line from Marcus Aurelius, take away your opinion and then there's taken away the complaint, I have been harmed. Take away the complaint, I have been harmed and the harm is taken away. And that shows a number of aspects you just mentioned. If you have taken away the belief, the judgment that you've been harmed
00:25:04
Speaker
you have not been harmed. This sense of grievance is caused by the judgments that you've been harmed. And then our primary order of business is our judgments. What we are sent to, what we agree to, that is the focus of the Stoics life, in a sense, when you think about your life as an individual.
00:25:33
Speaker
Of course, you are also a part of a much greater whole, but when you're just thinking about the stoic individual, the stoic worldview, it's that life happens inside. You're given all these impressions and then the question is, what are you going to agree to or not that the world gives you? And that's, as you said, where the stoic finds their freedom and they shape their character.
00:26:01
Speaker
Yeah. And on the show, just to add to that Marcus Ray's quote, you know, don't think you've been harmed and you haven't been. It's not just a claim about the subjective experience of being upset. It's also this claim about ignorance, right? If I think I've been harmed when somebody's insulted me and they haven't actually harmed me, not only do I feel upset, but I've also just believed something that was false. I've moved further away from virtue. And in that sense, as a mind, I have harmed my mind.
00:26:31
Speaker
You know, maybe my reputation was harmed when I was insulted publicly, but I've harmed my own character when I choose to believe something false. Namely that, you know, my life has gotten worse just because somebody said some bad words about me.
00:26:45
Speaker
So keeping this pace going, this is kind of a fun challenge. So next I want to talk about the key epistemological claims. So we've gone over the ethical claims, the psychological claims, now the epistemological claims. Epistemology, that just comes from epistemic, Greek word for knowledge, means you know, how do we know what we know? Because we've already said, you know,
00:27:05
Speaker
Virtuous knowledge is pretty important to know what knowledge is. So what is the stoic view on that, especially pushing against some skepticism, which was an important philosophical movement of their time? So stoic epistemology, I'll try to summarize it again in four key points. First, everything we encounter leaves an impression on us or a kind of stamp of how it seems. So the stoics were materialists, they thought are
00:27:31
Speaker
thought our minds were physical. So literally when I saw when I see something, it literally, in their view, leaves a stamp, a kind of a physical impression on our minds. So we then reflect upon this stamp, right? And a belief is just an assent to an impression. This is when our mind accepts that impression as true. So we come to believe something when we
00:27:59
Speaker
make a judgment, we accept that stamp as representing the world as it is. That belief though, that belief that the stamp is true. So, you know, let me just do an easy example here. If I see a tree that leaves a stamp on my mind of a tree, I don't have any belief yet. I just have an impression. I think, yeah, that is a tree. That's a belief. So that a sense says, yeah, that stamp accurately reflects the world. I actually think there is a tree over there.
00:28:28
Speaker
That belief is true in the Stoic view when the impression we assent to is an accurate representation of reality. So it's a correspondence theory of truth, right? If I believe there's a tree over there and there actually is a tree, well then that belief is true. That's what determines it, is whether or not my belief corresponds with reality.
00:28:50
Speaker
And there's some interesting kind of stoic thought experiments here because different people can have different impressions depending on their level of expertise, right? If I look at a car engine, I just see an engine. If a mechanic looks at a car engine, they see a problem or they see, you know, a 1995 Ford engine where I just see it, you know, a block of metal.
00:29:12
Speaker
So what the, the impression it leaves can be different depending on my type of expertise. And, but my belief is true if it corresponds to the world. So it's still, it still is an engine. If I believe it's an engine, that's still true. That more the expert impression. That's still true if it corresponds with reality.
00:29:30
Speaker
And so the important gap for this kind of skepticism is say, well, you know, how do I ever know my belief corresponds with reality? Isn't there always a gap between the thing leaving the stamp, the stamper and the stamp, my impression, how can I ever know that those two correspond? And the Stoics think that we were capable of having confidence in our beliefs because of cataleptic impressions.
00:29:53
Speaker
And what can elliptic impressions mean is that's just the term for a type of impression that is incredibly strong or incredibly dead in. So.
00:30:07
Speaker
You know, again, to use a physical example, because that, those are less complicated. If it's kind of foggy out and I don't know what I see and I see something in the distance and I think it might be a tree. That's not a cataleptic impression. That's kind of a foggy muddled impression of a tree. Whereas, you know, if I, if it's a sunny day, I'm, I'm, I walk up to the tree, I have my hands on it. I can, you know.
00:30:26
Speaker
touch it with my hands, I can see it, I can smell it. That's a cataleptic impression. The intensity and the veracity of it is of a different sort. So the stoic advice is a very kind of common sense advice, which is, look, don't assent to anything unless it's a cataleptic impression. Don't assent to anything unless the truth of it is very intense. And you have to kind of train that in yourself, right? And Bictetus makes this metaphor to kind of biting a gold coin.
00:30:53
Speaker
and saying, look, test it first. But if you've tested it and it's passed the test, then it's okay. Obviously, the skeptics are not going to be happy with this. They're going to say, that's silly. It doesn't get around the kind of circular problem. How do you know the capital? Catalyptic impressions are true.
00:31:08
Speaker
The stoic response is going to be, well, you know, God has constructed us in a way to make us capable of knowing reality. That's not going to satisfy the skeptics. I don't know if there's any way to get over that kind of skeptical claim, but the, the stoics are going to provide a very common sense answer and they're going to have, you know, common sense rebuttals of this. Evictetus talks about, you know, if I throw a pot of boiling soup at a, at a skeptic, they're going to duck.
00:31:35
Speaker
They're going to have the cataleptic impression that some hot water is coming their way and they're going to get out of the way. There's this really common sense approach to epistemology or knowledge in the Stoic view because the Stoics don't see us as being at odds with nature. They see us as being a part of nature and nature has equipped us with the tools to understand it. We just have to be careful that we do it right and do it carefully. Thoughts on their epistemology?
00:32:05
Speaker
Yeah, well, as you're chatting about in the ethics section and ethical claims, one of the key ethical ideas is living in accordance with nature and the stoic epistemology is the same right to a rational
00:32:23
Speaker
beings, so what we want to do is ensure that we understand nature, understand reality as it is and come to true beliefs however we may. And if you go, you know, deeper down into the static metaphysics, which you might want to cover the next few claims, you can understand the human mind as
00:32:50
Speaker
attempting to reflect via fragment of nature itself.
00:32:57
Speaker
When you have true beliefs, then you're accurately reflecting the structure and reality of the way things are, capturing that order, capturing the purpose of things. Great. Good summary. Now, we've covered ethics, psychology, epistemology. I want to get into metaphysics, so their view about the way the world is. One key claim, metaphysical claim, is that the universe is rational, providential, and good.
00:33:27
Speaker
a lot of stoic opinions, a lot of the stoic views or arguments click into place when you understand this or are sent to this, the universe is rational because it is intelligent and in the sense that it, not in the sense that it is anthropomorphized, it's not
00:33:47
Speaker
a person looking at you or debating things, but it is imbued with what they would think of as intelligence, which is a kind of rational governing principle that orders things and it moves towards its own ends. And its own ends is a good end. It is moving towards the way things should be in a better way of being. That's its providential nature.
00:34:12
Speaker
And it's good. I think the good part here is a controversial claim, or I guess a tough claim, but it's good in the sense that it couldn't be bad because our sense of goodness derives from nature. Our sense of goodness derives from things being the way they're supposed to be. Nature is the way it's supposed to be.
00:34:34
Speaker
We live well when we live in accordance with that. We understand that plan. We understand that providential nature. We understand that progress.
00:34:44
Speaker
So there's quite a actually robust metaphysical picture here behind the ethics, the psychology, and the epistemology. Another interesting thing, so that was a lot of discussion that can sound very mystical, but there's this other interesting point here that the psoas are committed to, which is that everything, including our souls, is material as well. So even though the universe is rational, providential, and good, the universe is also material, which means that the only kind of things there is is matter.
00:35:13
Speaker
There is nothing that's immaterial like a mind. So, or even a soul, right? And so our minds and our souls are material, I should say. They're not, they're not immaterial in the way somebody like a day cart or a duelist later on might think they're different kinds of things. Right. They're the same kind of thing, just maybe arranged in a slightly different, different way. So the still extent of our soul is a Numa, a kind of a, a very fine material.
00:35:44
Speaker
where something like a rock might be a more dense material, but it's all material all the way down. And so virtue is just a certain kind of, when we achieve virtue, we achieve knowledge. And as we move towards virtue, there's actually a material change. The material kind of consistency of our soul changes as we move towards virtue. And virtue is described by the Stoics as a certain kind of consistency or tenor of the soul.
00:36:12
Speaker
So there's an actual physical transformation going on as you develop virtue, which I think is a cool thought. The third point, you know, I talked about the universe, I talked about materialism, but the third point is that God or the divine, it first of all, it exists and it is an active rational principle that imbues passive matter with movement, form and intelligence. So.
00:36:36
Speaker
There is, everything is matter, but if there wasn't a God, there would be no shape, there would be no movement, there would be no perception. So God is this active principle to matter, this rational principle that imbues all matter.
00:36:55
Speaker
and gives it shape, movement, growth, the faculties of the human mind. All of these things come from God, or at least this is actually what they view as God. So God doesn't give us a mind. They view our mind as
00:37:10
Speaker
being divine in this sense as being imbued with the same principle as the stars, the same principle as the water, as everything is imbued with this part of God. So we're all connected in this way. It's not, God is not something that sits outside of us. We're all part of this.
00:37:28
Speaker
And one thing that I like is they talk about this active element is taking on different forms. So in rocks, it just makes their shape, just stops the matter from being amorphous. In plants, this active principle causes growth. In babies and animals, it allows for non-reflective decisions, kind of impulses or instincts. And then in idle humans, it takes on its purest form, its most divine form, which allows for rational thought.
00:37:57
Speaker
And Epictetus is exposed about this. He says, you know, you have a part of God inside of you. You have a part of the divine inside of you. That's your capacity to make, to reflect and make rational choices. Epictetus even says, you know, this part is on par with the divine. It's not like there's a type of intelligence that even supersedes this. This is the finest the divine gets in reality. And that's why, you know, nothing can control that because there's no kind of finer or more rational thing out there.
00:38:26
Speaker
That's a lot. It has a lot of metaphysics in, you know, five or seven minutes or however fast I did that. So a lot of complexity there. One thing with Stoicism, you know, you can take it or leave it, the metaphysics, you can approach it at whatever level you want to approach it at, but that was the ancient Stoic view. It was not atheistic. It believed in a rational, providential universe imbued with the active principle that they identified as God. That was also material. Anything to add to that? Cool.
00:38:56
Speaker
Yeah, I would say just really briefly summarizing from the ethics, some of the key ideas that stick out to me for what you've listed here are virtue is the only good. It's both necessary and sufficient for the human's best life, for obtaining our deepest good. We need to be virtuous. The rest of the Stoic system supports
00:39:23
Speaker
that claim. We have this account of what a virtue is. It involves knowledge and that matches nicely with what humans are, right? We are decision-making creatures. We are rational and happily can know about the world and decide to assent to our impressions, agree to our impressions or not. And then
00:39:49
Speaker
I suppose from the metaphysics we have this systematic picture that grounds the rest of the system, this idea of, okay, well, what does the rest of the world look like ultimately? What's the foundational grounding force for the Stoics that provides meaning to their philosophy?
00:40:10
Speaker
And that's my summary. I suppose if you were to take one thing away from it, you know, this account of stoicism really is ambitious in the sense that it's providing these ultimate answers to questions about the nature of the universe, about the nature of humans and how we ought to live. Yeah, there's one thing to take away. Stoicism is meant to be an all-encompassing philosophical system, as you said, that covers everything from
00:40:40
Speaker
the theory of knowledge, human psychology, ethics, the nature of God and the universe. So is meant to answer all of these questions, which you might not always see if you come at it from just an ethical perspective. And it was also thought to be
00:40:57
Speaker
Of all philosophical systems, it was the one that was most compared to kind of an interlocking system, which means that each part was thought to be dependent on itself. I don't know. I was thinking it may compare it to a Jenga Tower or something, but Jenga Tower is bad because the point of a Jenga Tower is you can pull something out and it still stands. A very sensitive Jenga Tower of one blocky.
00:41:16
Speaker
The idea was that if you pulled something out, it would fall over. The Stoics were convinced that you couldn't take away any of these claims and still be left with anything else. They were all inter-entailing. Lots to dig into there, a really interesting way of thinking about things, pre-Christianity, a different way of approaching these fundamental questions.
00:41:40
Speaker
So that was a swing at the key ethical, psychological, epistemological, metaphysical claims. Now I'm going to run it over. Let's focus on the ethical because this is stoicism applied. So we want that philosophical foundation, but we also want to focus on how can this help us live?
00:42:01
Speaker
And to achieve this ethical goal of knowledge and virtue, the Stoics developed a number of exercises to help us, I would say really see the world clearly, as opposed to coming to promote true beliefs, as opposed to false beliefs, and thus a healthier emotional life and a healthier perspective about the world around you and your place within it. And so some of the key exercises
00:42:28
Speaker
which will be familiar to many of you, but I'll go over four of the most important ones. First is the dichotomy of control. That's the distinction between what is up to you and what is not up to you, and the claim that you should make that distinction and then you should focus on what is up to you. And what is up to you are those four psychological processes I mentioned earlier. Well, impression, to a certain extent, reflection, ascent, and impulse.
00:42:54
Speaker
So really what is up to you is those choices you make with the impressions you're given, how you make use of those impressions. Do you come up with a true belief afterwards? Do you suspend judgment or do you come up with a false belief and maybe fall into a passion and suffer from viewing the world incorrectly?
00:43:14
Speaker
That's the dichotomy of control. One of the most famous ones, because it's really easy to apply. And it is, I would say applicable, but even if you don't agree further down that line, we got into the epistemology, we got into the psychology, the metaphysics, even if you throw those away, just like, Hey, you should probably focus on what's up to you in this moment. Just strikes most people as good advice and helpful advice. So as far as we look at the dichotomy of controls and exercise, it's.
00:43:40
Speaker
actively distinguishing between what's up to you and not, and then remembering to focus on what's up to you and practicing the shrinking of your attention, if you will, your focus onto what's up to you. Another exercise is the view from above. So this is the exercise where the Stoics
00:44:00
Speaker
pull out their perspective from their individual perspective and imagine themselves as floating among the stars looking down at the worlds below them.
00:44:11
Speaker
And because virtue is knowledge, all of these exercises are going to be ways of achieving a different kind of knowledge. So the dichotomy of control is a way of remembering what's up to you and what's not, and preventing the kind of suffering that comes from failing to correctly make that division. The view from above is a tool for pulling ourselves out of a kind of
00:44:32
Speaker
bias towards our individual lives and our individual perspectives, a human tendency to overemphasize what's happening to ourselves and to overemphasize temporally what's happening in this moment. It's a way of pulling out our perspective.
00:44:49
Speaker
Knowledge is also about living in accordance with nature, and that means your nature is an individual, but nature is a whole. So the view from above is also a way of situating ourselves in broader nature, seeing ourselves as part of a universe, one of many animals, one of many humans, one of a broader ecosystem.
00:45:07
Speaker
And that helps us stop the cognitive distortions from thinking, well, my life's the most important or what happens today really, really matters in the grand scheme of things. These are kind of cognitive distortions that you from above can help avoid. Another exercise is the contemplation of the sage. This is where you pick an ethical role model and you imagine what they might do in that situation. Epictetus recommends Socrates, maybe Diogenes.
00:45:31
Speaker
those two inspirations we were mentioning, but really anybody will do that embodies characteristics that you want to live up to. And the intellectual benefit here is one, it reminds you of what's possible. And two, it kind of proves what's possible. Well, look, I could navigate this insult with grace because I know my good friend would handle that insult well. And so he or she has shown me that I can do that well.
00:46:00
Speaker
That's what contemplation of the stage is useful for, at least one of the things it's useful for. The last thing I would say is negative visualization and or memento mori. So negative visualization is the premeditation of bad events before they occur, the kind of anticipation of them. And this prevents the cognitive distortion or mistake of a kind of naivety, of forgetting the breadth of things that are available, such as the fact that you could lose your job,
00:46:29
Speaker
You could become ill, you could get physically injured, someone you care about could get ill or pass away. When we forget these things, we're making a psychological mistake, an intellectual mistake. We ignore their possibility and then we're caught off guard by them happening. Memento Mori is similar, but it's focusing on death, either your own death or the death of other people. And when we forget that we're human and we will die, we can be sensitive and ill prepared for death, but we can also
00:46:58
Speaker
fail to act in the way that we would act if we recognize that our time was limited. Maybe that means being more courageous. Maybe that means living more in accordance with your own wishes than the wishes of others, for example. So those are some key exercises. We have stoic conversations on three of those key exercises. So if this speed run is too speedy for you, do check out our episodes on that economy control, view from above, and contemplation of this age.
00:47:28
Speaker
Yeah, totally. Again, all of this deserves getting further detailed into just hitting that at a high level, as much as it pains me to try to get through it so quickly. But, and what those exercises make up is it's a, it's a toolkit, right? It is to say our, our ethical goal has these really weighty philosophical foundations, but at the end of the day, what we care about says Stoics is being good people. So we need to train ourselves. We need to practice. And these are ways to practice that.
00:47:58
Speaker
So those are, that's what the key exercises are. And then I think is what sets stoicism aside from some other things, you know, you can read Aristotle and Aristotle has just as good things to say, I think on the metaphysics on the epistemology thing. Many people would say he has better things to say on that. The ethics.
00:48:14
Speaker
But really where stoics shine is to say, OK, well, that's all good and fine. That's that system. How do you put that system in practice? How do you achieve that transformation? And the stoics have a really wonderful set of tools. And that's where those exercises shine.
00:48:30
Speaker
So we have the key commitments, the inspiration of stoicism, their exercise. Last two parts are the major types. So what are the major schools of stoicism or if you want divisions between types of stoicism. And then finally, we'll end with some common objections. So the major types, we did do a longer episode on this. This was the six types of stoicism, but I'll go through, I think the three most common types or the three kind of genuine types of stoicism you see today. The first is ancient stoicism. So the first is, you know,
00:49:00
Speaker
reading about ancient Stoicism, understanding it as a cultural artifact.
00:49:05
Speaker
You're taking a brush and you're brushing off the thing covered in sand to try to understand it as it was. That's the first type of stoicism you can talk about. What was Chrysippus Dino talking about 2,000 years ago? Forget me today. Forget what was true. Forget the way the world really is. What is this interesting philosophical artifact that may have had a large inspiration on the way we think about things today? That's ancient stoicism.
00:49:33
Speaker
But now moving into today, I would say there's two types of contemporary stoicism. There's two ways that people embody stoicism today or practice it today. And that's traditional stoicism and modern stoicism. Traditional stoicism is the view, you know, we have an interview with Chris Fisher on traditional stoicism. I would say he's the person to talk to about this movement.
00:49:56
Speaker
And traditional stoicism is the view that stoicism to work as an ethical system requires that metaphysics we talked about, requires that conception of God, a divine providential universe.
00:50:09
Speaker
And that without that, you're not doing stoicism. So I remember when our discussion with Chris Fisher, Caleb, he said, you know, I really wish we could just call a traditional stoicism stoicism because we're just continuing to do stoicism. And maybe we update some things. Maybe we change some of the metaphysics to, to.
00:50:27
Speaker
be consistent with modern science, maybe change some of the psychology to be consistent with modern science, but you can't have stoicism without this idea of a providential universe, you know, directed by a divine force, energy, God that is ultimately good. And then I would say then if that's traditional stoicism, then what modern stoicism is, is it's a movement that says, look, there's a lot of really good points here in stoicism about ethics. There's a lot of really good points here about
00:50:57
Speaker
modern psychology that people could benefit from, but they get this God stuff wrong, or this God stuff is very difficult to prove and is ultimately unnecessary.
00:51:09
Speaker
So what we're going to do is we're going to either discard the divine aspect of stoicism, or we're going to rely on it as little as possible and lean into the ethical commitments of stoicism, namely that virtue is the only good, that virtue is necessary and sufficient for a good life, and that virtue is a type of knowledge, a type of knowledge about who you are, about the way the universe actually is. But when we look at the way the universe actually is, we have very little reason to believe in
00:51:39
Speaker
if not a god at the very least, a stoic god. And so we will, but we still think we can get away with the ethics without that part. And so just as a refresher of three major types, ancient stoicism, traditional stoicism, and modern stoicism. Anything to add on those three types? As we were saying, we have the podcast on the six types of stoicism, if you want to dig into those in greater detail. No, no, I think that's great.
00:52:09
Speaker
Great. Okay. Whoo. I had, you know, stretching out here. I've been going, I've been, I've been running through it. And now to kind of to round things off, I want to talk about the common objections to services. Um, or, you know, if you're not super sympathetic to it, some things you often hear about it when it gets wrong or what's kind of stupid about it.
00:52:29
Speaker
So, first objection, Nietzsche. Nietzsche would say stoicism is a psychological crutch to avoid the painful nature of reality is how I would put Nietzsche's argument against it. Nietzsche was an 18th century philosopher and existentialist. We have an episode on Nietzsche and he talks about how
00:52:49
Speaker
The Stoics talk a lot about living in accordance with nature, but how could you not live in accordance with your nature? You're always living in accordance with your nature. And so what the Stoics are doing is they're constructing some kind of myth about nature, about your real nature in air quotes that kind of obscures reality, blinds us from reality, especially as we start to rely on this providential or good universe. I think Nietzsche would say something about how absurd it would be that,
00:53:18
Speaker
while you're not living in accordance with nature unless you believe in a divine, providential God.
00:53:25
Speaker
Nietzsche would say, you know, that, that seems to be a bit fishy. It seems like that's a bit of a crutch and seems to be getting away from the truth or getting away from the, especially with stoicism says something like cataleptic impressions, believe, you know, the world as it is before you, no need to be skeptical about a desk. You're in front of a desk, you know, just believe that. But then they add these other things about God, about metaphysics and Nietzsche will kind of push back against that. Second objection. So that's one objection. It's a psychological crutch.
00:53:54
Speaker
to avoid, you know, the painful realities that sometimes lives just go bad. Sometimes people just get unlucky. It's not all about virtue. It can also be about, you know, luck or the situations you're born into. The second argument, second objection comes from Aristotle.
00:54:10
Speaker
Although Aristotle was writing before Stoicism, Aristotle would say, we are not just our minds, we're also our bodies, we're also our social relationships. So what it means to be a person is means to be something more than just a decision-making being. So what it means for our lives to go well is to not just make good decisions, not just to have good character, it's to have good character and other things too, like good friends, a healthy body, a roof to sleep under.
00:54:37
Speaker
And so to act like you're happy on the torture rack, when clearly you, in Aristotle's view, you just be a person who's doing very well in one sense, in your character, but very poor in another, your physical well-being. And so that person is not happy. That person is very unlucky. So in Aristotle, object to stoicism by kind of expanding our conception of what a person is.
00:55:01
Speaker
Then there is the Epicurean argument against stoicism. And so the Epicurean argument is that what matters in life for human flourishing is the psychological sensation of happiness understood as the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain. Stoicism is helpful because it makes us feel better.
00:55:21
Speaker
It is it is not so virtue is good stoic understanding of reality its tools. These are good things. Yes, but they're good because they stop our psychological suffering.
00:55:33
Speaker
The goal of life is not virtue, the goal of life is to minimize our pain, maximize our pleasure, and we do that when we're virtuous people with minimal desires, who don't want revenge, who aren't overly anxious or fearful or petty or sad or angry.
00:55:54
Speaker
Virtue isn't the end goal, it's a means to an end of a kind of sensation of happiness. And so again, clearly we're not happy on the torture rack.
00:56:05
Speaker
Final objection, I would say, is the nihilist one. We would say the Stoic God is not true, or it's unprovable, and without the Stoic God, we have no reason to believe living in accordance with nature is good. We have no reason to believe that nature is good. And so, living in accordance with nature, understanding the world as it really is, maybe that's an epistemological goal, maybe that counts as knowledge, but what makes knowledge good?
00:56:30
Speaker
Why is it good to, to, why is it better to live in accordance with nature than out of accordance with it? No reason for any of this, because there's no kind of external grounding that stoicism can provide without relying on a God, which isn't true, I would say. And then in the nihilist picture. So there's some, some common objections or at least, you know, historical objections, I would say to, to stoicism from Nietzsche, Aristotle, Epicureanism and nihilism.
00:56:59
Speaker
Nice, nice. If you just had to boil down some of the key claims, key exercises, objections that you take most seriously, maybe one objection you take most seriously, what would that be? Three, just limit yourself to three claims, two exercises, and one objection. Okay, so key claims are virtue is the only good. Our identity is our minds.
00:57:28
Speaker
as decision-making beings, and knowledge or making good decisions that results in knowledge is the way that we achieve virtue. So those are the three claims. I think the most important exercise of that economy of control, because it's an exercise that identifies we are these things, we are these parts of our mind, those are what matter. The exercise that builds in those ethical claims I just made,
00:57:55
Speaker
And these are the things, our possessions, our body, these are things that aren't eyes, they're the things that don't matter. And then I would also say, I would think the view from above is the more important exercise. Now I'm breaking my rule here, your rule of two. The view from above is more important because it situates us in our broader nature, but I think the contemplation of the sage is the most practically effective. And then in terms of the key objection,
00:58:20
Speaker
I think I'm most partial towards Aristotle's objection. I think it depends if we're going to view if stoicism is a type of teleology.
00:58:31
Speaker
where we're happy when we actualize our human nature, then we have to have an answer for what our human nature is. And I don't know if the Stoics have a good way of getting around without appealing to God and the fact that our minds are the most divine aspect of us in this conception of God. I don't know how they have a way of grounding human nature in just our minds, not also our body, not also our social connections.
00:59:01
Speaker
Got it. Awesome. Awesome. Nice. Well, well done. We went through, we got pretty deep really in a relatively short amount of time. We talked about cataleptic impressions, the four main psychological processes, lots of good stuff, as well as some of the key exercises and challenges, of course, for people thinking about applying stoicism.
00:59:27
Speaker
Yeah, that was a sprint. As you said, we have lots of other episodes to dig into particular aspects of that. If people find this helpful, I would find it, I think it would be kind of useful as maybe a primer, maybe a refresher if you're more advanced than your stoicism, but also maybe something to come back to if you're starting stoicism and say, well, maybe I understood about
00:59:49
Speaker
half of that or half of that resonated with me or I've heard half of that before and then maybe come back and listen again and see if more of that made sense or resonated with you or maybe there's even parts of that you object to now or think that I got wrong or could have represented differently. I think it could be a fun exercise.
01:00:09
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, let us know what you think of, what you think of this. I hope you all find it useful either as a, you know, your first, first, one of your first few stabs at stoicism or refresher, as you say. And until next time.
01:00:23
Speaker
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01:00:53
Speaker
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01:01:16
Speaker
And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.