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The Intuitive Case for Stoicism (Episode 159)
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Caleb Ontiveros makes the case that Stoicism is more intuitive than you might think. He argues that if minor setbacks don't ruin our lives, why should major ones? This episode explores how Stoic ideas about virtue, happiness, and adversity align with our deepest intuitions about living well.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'An Intuitive Argument for Stoicism'
00:00:07
Speaker
today, I'm going to be reading through an essay from my newsletter, which you can find at calebontiveros.substack dot.com. It's called, An Intuitive Argument for Stoicism, Making a Radical Philosophy More Obvious.
00:00:26
Speaker
And as I read through it, I'll add some additional commentary for listeners.
Feedback Invitation and Essay Commentary
00:00:30
Speaker
As always, if you have any feedback, reach out to us at stoa, at stoameditation.com.
00:00:38
Speaker
We'll be doing a few more of these kinds of episodes, both because we enjoy doing them. We've gotten positive feedback from listeners about them and, well, to be frank, they're easier to create. Again, given the fact that Michael and I both have busy schedules, that is a and good ah thing for us. But that's a little bit too much housekeeping, perhaps. Let's get into the essay.
Stoicism's View on Happiness and Character
00:01:08
Speaker
One of the keys to it claims is that a happy life is just a matter of cultivating excellent character. A virtuous life is a happy one. That's all you need. This frees our lives from the grasp of fortune and places it directly in our hands. Our happiness is up to us and us alone.
00:01:29
Speaker
It's also a properly egalitarian view. Happiness is available to all because external circumstances don't matter. On the face of it, this is a counterintuitive view. So of course, there are several arguments for it. And at this point, I gesture at several different arguments that have been given throughout the tradition. So I can say a little bit more about those arguments here.
00:01:58
Speaker
A classic defense de derives from our nature. The good life for us is determined by what we are, and we are decision-making beings. A happy life isn't found in the pursuit of pleasure or externals, but in excellent decisions and judgments. In other words, virtue.
00:02:17
Speaker
So the central idea of this argument is that if you want to know what is it to live a good life, you should look at the kind of beings and question, you know, what it is to live a good life for. A house finch is distinct from what it is to live a good life, so dolphin, which is distinct from a human being.
00:02:37
Speaker
And human beings, what's essential to us for the Stoics is our rational and social nature.
Rationality: Human vs. Animal
00:02:46
Speaker
A rational nature, that's our ability to make decisions, to think ah and to derive and to come up with judgments about the world. And as such, that using that capability is instrumental for determining what it is to live a good life. So perhaps And one can always add challenges to this view, but the the ancient Stoics would see you know what it is to live a good life for. An animal is just to follow one's instincts. Animals, unlike humans, they receive impressions and then immediately react to them.
00:03:21
Speaker
ah sort of they're sort of like pre-programmed beams. You know, input, you get some output. There's not much going on in between. Whereas for humans, we receive impressions which we can then decide to assent to or not, which we can decide to agree with or not. You know, someone says something to me, I get to evaluate what exactly is going on in this situation. What are they saying? What are they attempting to convey? And is what they are saying true? Does it reflect reality? And that process of reflection and then assent or agreement, that is what triggers human action. And it's something that the other animals do not do.
00:04:08
Speaker
So that's what makes us unique. that's what That's where rationality comes into play. And then the question is, okay, so for beings who have this ability, what does it mean to live a good life?
Stoicism vs. Epicureanism
00:04:20
Speaker
Well, in Epictetus' terms, it means managing impressions well.
00:04:25
Speaker
ah He has an excellent line from the discourses to the effect of, you know, what is it? What is the good for a human life? Nothing more than managing impressions, nothing more than choosing to respond rather than react and respond in the proper way.
00:04:41
Speaker
So that's one kind of defense and you can see how it has, it places happiness in our hands because it's up to us how we reflect what we decide to believe is true. And likewise, and it's an egalitarian view because it applies to all human beings who have realized the ability to reason, who have the ability to reflect on their impressions and decide how to respond.
00:05:08
Speaker
So that's one argument. Another argument comes from the nature of the good. And to say a little bit more about that argument, you can contrast it with the, you can contrast stoicism with the view of the Epicureans. Epicureans, they believe that pleasure was the only good of a human life.
00:05:31
Speaker
And the Stoics challenged that by noting that many people experience pleasure, but there's no goodness in it, which is to say that if you experience pleasure by taking happiness and this be while others are suffering, there's no goodness at all in that pleasure. you know That's not the kind of happiness we care about as human beings.
00:05:59
Speaker
rather the kinds of happiness. what What we're searching for when we're searching for the good is something that is unconditionally good. So Michael and I have talked about this before when we talk about indifference, preferred and dispreferred, indifference, and this idea that the Stoics, when they're talking about the good, they're looking for what's good in any circumstance. And the best candidate for that is virtue. um So that's another argument for their view And then I list one other argument which is the argument from risk management.
00:06:37
Speaker
This is a more modern type argument, and I think you see it, apart from Michael and I perhaps, you see it in the works of Nassim Taleb, who sees stoicism, perhaps not traditional stoicism, but something approaching that philosophy as a way for best handling risk.
Modern Interpretations of Stoicism
00:06:57
Speaker
So if you're interested in that argument, check out the episode Michael and I did on the book Anti-Fragility.
00:07:06
Speaker
I'll continue with the essay, continuing on. and But today I want to explore a different argument, ones whose aim is not to persuade, but to make stoicism more intuitive.
Stoicism on Setbacks and Happiness
00:07:22
Speaker
First, an observation.
00:07:25
Speaker
We're all bothered by minor obstacles, whether it's traffic, career, setbacks, insults, or sadness. These negative experiences interfere with us all. Yet so we recognize, in a real sense, that none of these setbacks are threats to our happiness.
00:07:46
Speaker
If a satisfactory life is achievable at all, it cannot depend on setbacks never occurring. The Stoics, of course, call these things indifference, the kinds of things that don't make or break away. The ancient biographer Diogenes Layerchis includes a helpful list. The Stoics say that some of things, the Stoics say that some existing things are good, others are bad, and others are neither of these.
00:08:14
Speaker
Everything which neither does benefit nor harms is neither of these. For instance, life, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, reputation, noble birth, and their opposites, death, disease, pain, ugliness. You get some level everyone believes in the stoic ideal. Neither the experience of negative events nor missing out on great things ruin a life.
00:08:43
Speaker
The question is, why then grant the power to determine the value of life to larger setbacks? So just to say some more about that argumentative move, no one would say that being cut off in traffic would ruin a life, that spilling one's coffee, or to go to a line of appetitists that spilling one's wine would ruin a life.
00:09:12
Speaker
No one would say any such thing about these externals or a difference. And the question arises then, why then grants the power to determine the value of our life to larger setbacks?
00:09:30
Speaker
That's the move, raising this question. What's the difference? None of us escape death, physical suffering, loss, trials, or dark nights of the soul. Some lives are more or less tragic, but we must recognize that even the best 21st century lives are full of trials. The world we're born into and love falls away. Everything and everyone that we love suffers.
00:09:55
Speaker
All this is put at an abstract level. It doesn't adequately capture the ordinary tragedies of experiencing and watching painful mental decline, personal betrayal, the loss of a child, the recognition that your family line has come to an end, humiliation, and on and on and on.
00:10:18
Speaker
Yet despite seeing such events as challenges to a good life, even still we recognize a happy life is still possible. In this sense, stoicism is intuitive.
00:10:33
Speaker
The argument is simple. It's easy to see that, at low intensity, negative experiences do not destroy life. When adversity becomes more intense, the simple point does not fundamentally change. Happiness cannot depend on excerpts. It cannot be dependent on what happens to us.
00:10:55
Speaker
Just as we recognize that small obstacles cannot prevent us from finding the good, so we should see that adversity and tragedy are, in a real sense, not barriers to living well.
00:11:10
Speaker
The issue for most people is the absolute nature of the stoic claim. No negative event, so long as it is external, is sufficient for unhappiness. As Marcus Aurelius said in Meditations 4.8, take away your opinion then, there is taken away the complaint.
00:11:31
Speaker
i have in horror
00:11:34
Speaker
Take away the complaints. I have been harmed and the harm is taken away. This applies to everything. Death, torture, and tragedy. The list goes on. Many people start with stoicism, but eventually as the pain increases, the possibility of happiness fades away. So we're all stoics when it comes to being caught off in traffic.
00:12:00
Speaker
But at some level, perhaps, we think that something could happen to us that could ruin our life. That's perhaps, I think, one of the most common ah accounts of wellbeing.
00:12:17
Speaker
One way to understand this view is to think of it as balancing indifference. How good a life is depends on weighing up the bad and the good. you know Think of a simple philosophy that defines happiness at some level of the good and calls anyone who ascends to that level happy.
00:12:35
Speaker
Small setbacks matter, but cannot move you into the red. However, that doesn't mean that no setback can. Sufficient tragedy can remove the possibility of happiness for a life by pushing us below the threshold. The difficulty with this reply is that countless people have experienced heart-wrenching pain and achieved a kind of happiness nonetheless.
00:13:05
Speaker
And we find extreme flourishing throughout history, even in the most devastating situations. What accounts for this? How people respond to their circumstances? Not the weighing up of the goods and evils in a life.
00:13:24
Speaker
There's more to say here. I don't think this is a knockdown argument by any means, but I think it's an interesting one because it starts with a simple and intuitive observation.
00:13:36
Speaker
If we recognize that the loss of a jug is no obstacle to happiness, why should the loss of our loved ones be? There are vast differences in the intensity of pain, but no kind of suffering is enough to guarantee unhappiness. Joy is found in what we do and how we respond to what happens, and how we respond to what happens to us.
Defining Happiness: Character over Externals
00:14:02
Speaker
So the essay concludes,
00:14:05
Speaker
Another point that's worth exploring is that this essay focuses on negative experiences, but of course it also applies to positive experiences. No positive experience, something external that just happens to us, is sufficient for happiness. you know What matters is the internal, our makeup, our character.
00:14:33
Speaker
That's what matters for the Stoics. Otherwise, you know, positive experiences, they can just be, this point returns really to the argument against Epicureanism. you know Not all so-called positive experiences are good, especially if they don't, especially if we don't respond to them in the right way. The classic example of this would be, of course, money. It's not always a good thing to be more rich.
00:15:03
Speaker
um But you can also think about it in terms of pleasure, health. In certain circumstances, it's not worse the cost of pursuing additional health is not worth it. Pleasure has its own kind of momentum that can cause us to make serious mistakes. This is also an intuitive observation.
00:15:28
Speaker
no one should disagree with this. And I think the question arises if you're not completely sold on the stoic picture, if you still feel like you need to, if someone still feels like there's some threshold that's required to hit for positive experiences, or is there some threshold of you know good things one needs to live well? The question is, where exactly is that threshold? And what is it about those good things that render a life happy in a way we should care about. There's of course a lot more to say here, but I'll just end with those questions.
Closing Remarks and Listener Engagement
00:16:09
Speaker
Thanks for listening.
00:16:13
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. If you want to dive deeper still, search Stoa in the App Store or Play Store for a complete app with routines, meditations, and lessons designed to help people become more.
00:16:32
Speaker
Stoic. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyer.com. 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.