Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Best Practical Philosophy Ever with Massimo Pigliucci (Episode 13)
987 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this episode, Caleb Ontiveros speak with Dr. Massimo Pigliucci.
Massimo is one of the key figures behind the Renaissance of modern stoicism. They discuss how Stoicism has made a difference to Massimo's life, Stoicism and politics, and end with a discussion of the proper attitude towards social media.
This is an excellent conversation for thinking about how Stoicism can fit into a life – and why there open questions with the philosophy even if it is the best practical philosophy available.
•••
Stoa Conversations is Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay’s podcast on Stoic theory and practice.
Caleb and Michael work together on the Stoa app. Stoa is designed to help you build resilience and focus on what matters. It combines the practical philosophy of Stoicism with modern techniques and meditation.
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Caleb Ontiveros has a background in academic philosophy (MA) and startups. His favorite Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/calebmontiveros
Michael Tremblay also has a background in academic philosophy (PhD) where he focused on Epictetus. He is also a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His favorite Stoic is Epictetus. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay
Thank you to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Stoicism: A Global Practical Philosophy
00:00:05
Speaker
I am still convinced that stoicism is by far the best practical philosophy ever, not just in the Western world, but across the globe. I think it beats the crap out of everything else in terms of utility and coherence. But that doesn't mean the modern stocks don't have some work to do in order to try to figure out how to apply to the 21st century outside of their own sphere.
Introduction of the Podcast and Hosts
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. 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.
00:00:47
Speaker
In this episode, I speak with
Massimo Pilucci on Stoicism's Modern Relevance
00:00:49
Speaker
Dr. Massimo Pilucci. Massimo is one of the key figures behind the renaissance of modern stoicism. We discuss the meaning of stoicism, stoicism in politics, and end with a discussion of the proper attitude towards social media. This is an excellent conversation for hearing about how stoicism can fit into a life, from helping us manage tragedy to thinking about politics or our relationship with Twitter.
00:01:17
Speaker
Here is a stoic conversation with Massimo Piliucci. Today I'm speaking with Massimo Piliucci. Massimo is the professor of philosophy at the City College of New York. He's the author of How to Be a Stoic, The Quest for Character, and I believe authored or edited about 11 other books. He's one of the key figures in thinking about how to integrate
00:01:42
Speaker
ancient philosophy into our lives today. So we're very fortunate to have him back for another Stoa conversation. Thanks for joining. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Let's start with a broad question that's always worth revisiting.
Core Principles of Stoicism
00:01:59
Speaker
How do you explain stoicism to people these days?
00:02:03
Speaker
You know, it's a more difficult question than one might think, but fundamentally, Stoicism is, of course, an ancient Greco-Roman philosophy that evolved between the fourth century BCE and the third century of the modern era, and it focuses on character.
00:02:21
Speaker
that is the fundamental thing for a stoic is that is virtue, which is a set of character traits. And therefore, the most important thing in life for a stoic is to take care of your character, to be the best person you could possibly be. In fact, the word for virtue in Greek is arete, which really means excellence. So you want to be the most excellent human being that you can be. And what does that mean? It means two things fundamentally. One,
00:02:47
Speaker
trying to think and act as rationally as possible because we are rational animals, and two, try to think and act as pro-socially as possible, as cooperatively with other people as possible. Why? Because we are social animals. In fact, the Stoics often summarized their philosophy by saying that we should live in accordance with nature.
00:03:10
Speaker
by which they meant human nature. And human nature is exactly, according to the Stoics at least, is exactly founded on what I just said, rationality and cooperation, social cooperation.
Stoicism's Historical Resurgence
00:03:22
Speaker
Why do you think Stoicism has seen such a large resurgence over the past two decades or so?
00:03:30
Speaker
That's a good question. One can only speculate, at least I'm not aware of any sociological research on why stoicism has become so popular. We can only guess. I think there are multiple reasons for it. First of all, it is never really gone away. Even though the school itself, the store, basically cease to operate as an independent school in the second or third century,
00:03:56
Speaker
Stoic ideas permeated Christianity, which means that they were then carried on for the entire Middle Ages into the Renaissance. During the Renaissance, there was, in fact, a revived interest in stoicism, something sometimes referred to as neo-stoicism.
00:04:13
Speaker
And then stoic ideas, some of the stoic ideas were in fact part and parcel of the Enlightenment. The founding fathers of the American Republic were influenced by a lot of the stoic authors. For instance, most of them like Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, they all had their personal copy of Epictetus and Caridians. But stoicism has never really gone away. That's one way to look at it.
Stoicism in Personal Crisis
00:04:38
Speaker
Another one is that Stoicism is a philosophy for everyday life, but particularly for hard periods in your life, right? So somebody once jokingly said that Stoicism is a philosophy for people who are on an airplane and the plane is going down. I don't think that's quite true. I think Stoicism is a philosophy for pretty much every phase of life, the good and the bad, but certainly it becomes particularly useful when people go through crisis. Now,
00:05:05
Speaker
the 20th and 21st century had been one crisis after another at a global or international levels. We had two world wars. We have lived for decades now under the threat of nuclear annihilation. We're now living under the threat of
00:05:22
Speaker
catastrophic climate change. We were just hit by a pandemic. I mean, there's lots of reasons to be stressed out. And those were the same kind of very similar situations to the Hellenistic period, which is the time Christos came about. And even at the time, similar thing, the Hellenistic period
00:05:43
Speaker
is defined usually as the period between the death of Alexander the Great and therefore the collapse of the Macedonian Empire, and the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE where Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra, does
00:06:02
Speaker
beginning the Roman Empire. Now, during that period, major turmoil at a social political level, people's lives were changed overnight and people didn't know how to deal with it. So it makes perfect sense to me that there is a resurgence of stoicism under conditions that are not that dissimilar in terms of social upheaval and stress as the ones under which stoicism evolved in the first place.
00:06:27
Speaker
But then there are also more 21st century or late 20th century kind of reasons. For one thing, the pivotal work of Pierre Hadeau, who was a French scholar who put back on the map the whole idea of practical philosophy and philosophy as a way of life, which again, had been lingering in the background.
00:06:46
Speaker
for a long time, but he, you know, he wrote three major books that eventually were translated in English and sort of spurred this new movement and used this new interest. And although Hadeau was interested in all of the Greco-Roman philosophies, a lot of Eve's emphasis was on stoicism because stoicism is a very practical one. It literally comes with exercises and practices. So I think that all of these factors together help explaining the resurgence of stoicism.
Massimo's Journey to Stoicism
00:07:15
Speaker
What brought you to Stoicism or ancient philosophy more broadly to begin with?
00:07:21
Speaker
midlife crisis, which is what a lot of people go through. And in my case, it happened a number of years ago and it was triggered by a few events that were individually not very unusual, like an unexpected divorce, for instance, or my father dying and all that. But they all happened in a span of like three months. And so it was kind of hit all of a sudden, my life was going just fine up to that point. And then all of a sudden it's like, whoa, wait a minute, hold on.
00:07:46
Speaker
one, two, three punches in a row. It's like, what am I doing here? What am I supposed to be doing? And I asked myself that question. How do I react to these situations? How do I handle it in a good way? And my first instinct was to reach for what I thought was my philosophy of life, which is secular humanism. So stepping back for a minute, I grew up Catholic in Rome, in Italy. And then I left the church when I was a teenager.
00:08:16
Speaker
because it didn't make a lot of sense to me. And I embraced ever since I embraced the philosophy known as secular humanism.
00:08:25
Speaker
Now, secular humanism is about a number of ideas that I still believe in. It's about using reasoning science to navigate life. It's about human rights. That's great. But when you're hit by divorce and father dying, you know, human rights and science and reason are not particularly helpful, at least not in those genetic terms that secular humanism casts them with. So I was left a little bit in
00:08:52
Speaker
strange situation. In the meantime, in terms of my career, I had actually began my shift to philosophy. My original training, academic training, is in evolutionary biology. So I was a biologist for about 20 years. And so I had actually decided to go back to school and get a PhD in philosophy. So I thought, okay, well, here must be useful, not just academically useful, but useful in practice. If I don't find the answer in philosophy, I don't know where I'm going to find it.
00:09:21
Speaker
And while I was looking, I started looking more or less systematically at a number of philosophies, beginning with Buddhism and continuing with a number of virtue ethical approaches within the Greco-Romans, so Epicureanism, Aristotelianism, stuff like that.
00:09:38
Speaker
But none of that was really clicking. Like, yeah, that sounds interesting, but not really quite making me jump up and paying attention, right? And then one day I got a tweet that said, from the Modern Stoicism group, the one that I mentioned a minute ago, saying, help us celebrate Stoic Week. And I said, the hell is Stoic Week? And why would you want to celebrate the Stoics?
00:10:01
Speaker
Because of course at the time I thought of the stoics like most people do as these kind of spark-like individuals who live through life with a stiff upper lip and suppressing emotions, stuff like that. It's like, why would anybody want to do that?
00:10:16
Speaker
But then I started looking into it because I immediately realized that, first of all, Stoicism also is a kind of virtual ethics, so it's in the ballpark of what I was looking at already. But also I remember, wait a minute, the Stoics, that includes Marcus Aurelius, and I actually read the meditations when I was in college.
00:10:35
Speaker
And the Stoics also includes Seneca, which I actually translated in high school when I was practicing Latin, but somehow I never actually put the two together. So I was curious. I joined up and I did one of the first Stoic weeks. And that year the material was all based on Epictetus. And interestingly, I had never heard of Epictetus before, even though I had taken
00:11:01
Speaker
you know, graduate level courses in ancient philosophy, I never heard of Epictetus. It's like, how is that even possible, right? It turns out to be one of the most influential philosophers of all time in the Western tradition. So it's like, how is it possible that this guy is not taught in graduate school or even at the undergraduate level?
00:11:20
Speaker
I got a single lecture, a single lecture on Epictetus. And you were lucky, you were lucky. I never even heard the name. And the reason I think is because Epictetus is a practical philosopher. He doesn't spend any time at all about logic or metaphysics or epistemology or all that sort of stuff that philosophers, academic philosophers tend to be interested in. He just tells you how to live your life. And that's not the kind of thing you learn from philosophy departments these days.
00:11:47
Speaker
But Epictetus did strike me immediately as the right
Developing a Systematic Stoic Practice
00:11:52
Speaker
path. As soon as I started reading him, he resonated with me. I said, whoa, this guy really got something interesting to say. And he's saying it in a way that I like. He's very clear. He's very accessible. You don't actually need a background in philosophy to understand what Epictetus is talking about. He's also very frank. He uses a sense of humor that borders on sarcasm, which again resonated with me. And that's it.
00:12:17
Speaker
Once I got into a spectators, that was the beginning.
00:12:21
Speaker
Yeah, very good. How has your practice over time changed or have you at all changed how you apply stoicism in your daily life? Yeah, it has changed because, so initially my practice was based mostly on one of Don Robertson's early books, the one about cognitive behavioral therapy and practical philosophy. He actually goes through some exercises there, you know, like the meditation on death or the view from above, you know, those kinds of things. They're mostly based on Marcus Aurelius, in fact, as it turns out.
00:12:49
Speaker
But then when I got more into it, I wanted to develop a more systematic approach based on the ancient text. And so with my friend Greg Lopez, we sat down and wrote together this book called The Handbook for New Stoics that actually has 52 exercises grouped according to the three disciplines of Epictetus. So there are some exercises that deal with desire and aversion, that is, with reorienting our priorities and our value system.
00:13:15
Speaker
Some exercises deal with the discipline of action, which has to do with how to actually act in the world toward other people. And then a third group of exercises has to do with the discipline of assent, which is about improving our judgment. Because according to Epictetus, our judgment is pretty much the only thing that really truly belongs to us. And so we may as well want to take care of it.
00:13:39
Speaker
So most of my practice has been around the three disciplines of the spectators, and I change exercises depending on what I feel I need. Sometimes if I'm going through a period, for instance, where I feel irritated or I feel like I get angry about things, then I focus on exercises that are specifically about anger. When I find myself paying too much attention to what the Stoics call externals, so things like
00:14:04
Speaker
fame and recognition and money and stuff like that, then I shift to exercises that deal with that sort of stuff. So the practice has changed, but not the fundamentals, but the specific kinds of exercises and the way to think about it has shifted a little bit. Do you think there's something that you might highlight as something that people who are familiar with the philosophy of stoicism, at least moderately familiar with, currently under rate or under value in the philosophy?
Political Action and Stoicism: A Critique
00:14:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. I think there are some
00:14:40
Speaker
There's one negative thing about, one deficiency, I think, of stories, isn't that practitioners tend to underrate. And that is the fact that stories are really not that concerned with political action. And that might surprise some people, because typically the topic of political action, structural changes and stuff like that, comes up. Some of my colleagues even will bring up examples like the famous historical position, right? So the historical position was a number of philosophers and senators
00:15:08
Speaker
under the reigns of the emperors Nero, Vespasian, and Domitian, who stood up to the emperors because they thought that those emperors were tyrants. Some of them were sent into exile, including Epictetus himself, in fact, and including Epictetus's teacher, Muzonio Shufus.
00:15:25
Speaker
Some of them were actually put to death. And the potatoes talks about some of these people in the discourses. So, you know, whenever the topic of stoicism and politics comes up, people tend to point in that direction. However, this scholarly literature is pretty clear, I think.
00:15:42
Speaker
That stoicism per se does not actually have a political program of any sort. For the stoics, the political system that we live under is a dispreferred or a preferred indifferent. That is, it's something that does not affect, of course, who you are as a person because it doesn't affect your character.
00:16:02
Speaker
Therefore, it's something that you take or leave, and it's something that actually allows you to exercise your virtue. It's just like poverty or wealth. If you're wealthy, yeah, that's okay for a stoic, but nothing to be too excited about. The question is how you're going to use that wealth. If you're poor for the stoic also, you're nothing to be particularly exercised about. The question is not whether you're poor or not. The question is how you handle your poverty.
00:16:30
Speaker
Well, that is, of course, one of the major strengths of Stoicism, the fact that it puts a lot of responsibility on the individual and empowers the individual to deal with pretty much everything. You can be a Stoic emperor like Marcus Aurelius and having to deal with things like
00:16:45
Speaker
rebellions and wars and floods of the Tiber River and pandemics. And at the opposite extreme, you can be a slave like Epictetus, who has essentially no freedom of doing almost anything of his own. So that is the power of stoicism. But it is also one of the limitations, because if taken too much to an extreme, it kind of blames the victim, right? So it doesn't recognize that there are structural issues, that slavery
00:17:14
Speaker
It's not just a mental thing, as the pictures says. It's an actual thing, and it's not a right thing either, and therefore we should be fighting against slavery, actively fighting against slavery, not just saying, well, you know, it is what it is. So I think that is one aspect of Stoicism that practitioners tend to underestimate or not be
00:17:33
Speaker
sort of sufficiently cognizant of, and one of my favorite stories is in a paper by David Sadley, who is one of the major scholars these days of Stoicism. He wrote a paper a few years ago on the ethics of tyrannicide, so killing tyrants, and particularly on Brutus, who was of course the major conspirator against Julius Caesar. And sadly there, interestingly, presents a recanter and anecdote, which is kind of telling.
00:18:01
Speaker
At some point, Brutus and his friend Cassius had to figure out who to try to get into the conspiracy. They couldn't do it by themselves. Two people was not enough. They needed support from a larger number of senators. Then the question is, well, who are you going to approach and say, hey, would you like to be in a conspiracy to kill the tyrants? Because that could be very dangerous. That could be the kind of thing that can get you killed.
00:18:26
Speaker
So what kind of criteria are you going to use in order to approach people? And Brutus came up with a number of ideas, but one of which was, let's not ask the stoics. So he excluded everybody that he knew that was a stoic.
00:18:43
Speaker
And why did he do that? Because he thought that for a stoic, living under a tyranny is a dis-preferred indifference. So even though the stoics might in fact agree that Julius Caesar was a tyrant, certainly some of them did, Cato the Younger, for instance, obviously did, they might not be actually prone to participate into an actual conspiracy because they would say, well, there's just one more way in which I exercise my virtue.
00:19:10
Speaker
I think Brutus went a little too far because, for instance, the example of Cato makes clear that some Stoics did, in fact, take arms against Julius Caesar. He actually led the Republican army against Caesar and famously lost and then committed suicide. Brutus might have been a little uncharitable to the Stoics, but I think the point is still valid. The Stoicism is great in terms of personal responsibility and
00:19:37
Speaker
putting the emphasis on agency of the individual. But when it comes to structural issues, there is a deficiency there, and a deficiency that we don't find in other Greco-Roman philosophers. For instance, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, all three of them, were very clearly interested in politics, and all of them
00:19:55
Speaker
wrote about different systems of garment and what is good about it and what is not good about it. So far as we know, the Stoics didn't. The only exception is Zeno's Republic, which is a lost book by the founder of Stoicism. But apparently, that book wasn't that good. And for later Stoics were kind of embarrassed by it.
00:20:16
Speaker
And it was not a political program anyway. It was really much more of a utopia that envisioned a society of sages that go around without needing any laws or any structure because they're all rational and they're all agreed among each other and they all discuss things rational. It's like, yeah, okay, fine. But that's not the real world. I'm sorry. That's not going to help. That's not going to help.
00:20:44
Speaker
So here's how I would put it and you can push back or agree if you think this is correct or not.
Role Ethics in Stoicism
00:20:51
Speaker
So I would say that stoicism is of course a virtue ethics. And one way to make sense of virtues is in terms of different roles. So Epictetus has this role ethics, which is sort of an action guiding principles. And one of those roles are being a citizen. What is it to be a good citizen for many people?
00:21:07
Speaker
And that is an important part of Stoicism. But what the ancient texts don't give us, or don't give us that much detail on, is the answer to that question, of course. What is a good citizen? And in some cases, it might be a more broadly conservative approach, maybe in the case of Brutus you mentioned. In other cases, Stoic saw being a good citizen as a matter of restoring the Republic and overthrowing the tyrant emperors. But there is no
00:21:37
Speaker
apart from perhaps some anti-authoritarian tendencies, some egalitarian cosmopolitan tendencies, there certainly is no fleshed out political philosophy or agenda that I think all Stoics would agree to, which can be both the strength, I think, in the sense that it can bring people together. We have different political leanings, but it's also weakness if you're looking for some action guiding principles in the political sphere.
00:22:05
Speaker
I think that's exactly right. It's always dangerous to say the Stoics didn't write about this or that because, as you know, we lost most of what the Stoics wrote anyway. It's always a very dangerous proposition to say, oh, well, I never wrote about this. But at least in the extant literature, and we do have quite a bit. We have a significant amount of writing from Seneca, of course, especially we have
00:22:27
Speaker
half of Epictetus' discourses, we have the meditations by Marcus Aurelius, we have Muzonius Rufus' lectures, and, yeah, nothing there smells even remotely of sort of political structural issues, right? And not only that, but I think the contrast there is with Cicero. So Cicero, who was very friendly toward the Stoics, he basically, his ethics was, in fact, essentially Stoic. And yet he was also critical of other parts of other aspects of Stoic philosophy.
00:22:56
Speaker
And Cicero wrote a number of books. On the other hand, they're explicitly political, right? So he wrote Dada Publica, which was a response to Plato's Republic. He wrote the Legibus, which was a response to Plato on the laws. And he wrote On Duties, where he answers exactly the question you just posed. That is, what does it mean to be a good citizen, right? And he actually spells it out.
00:23:18
Speaker
in quite a bit of details from the point of view of a virtu- a virtuatic. Interestingly, it does say that on duty was inspired by Panetius, who was a middle stoic.
00:23:30
Speaker
And so perhaps we can see what a stoic might have thought in terms of how to be a good citizen through Cicero, indirectly through Cicero's on duty. But the caveat there is that Panisius was a middle stoic. So in other words, he was active between the early store, which was based in Athens, and the late store, which was based in Rome.
00:23:52
Speaker
But Penicias was also known for being an eclectic stoic. He was out of the mainstream. He was a little bit out there. He was an unusual stoic, in a sense. I think you're correct that not having a political program, of course, makes stoicism a broader tent than it might otherwise be.
00:24:09
Speaker
But at the same time, some modern critics of stoicism correctly asked the question, so was the stoic take on environmental problems or diversity or misogyny or things like that?
Adapting Stoicism for Modern Challenges
00:24:24
Speaker
Well, it's hard to come up with an answer because there is no stoic answer to at least that we can know of to those questions. And that is, I think, a deficiency. Now, that said,
00:24:33
Speaker
I am still convinced that stoicism is by far the best practical philosophy ever, not just in the Western world but across the globe. I think it beats the crap out of everything else in terms of utility and coherence and other things. But that doesn't mean the modern stoics don't have some work to do in order to try to figure out how to apply to the 21st century outside of their own sphere because one of the problems
00:25:01
Speaker
with too much emphasis on individual agency is that then stoicism becomes a little bit sort of a life hackery kind of thing. That's why it's so popular with big corporations and Silicon Valley and stuff like that. We should ask ourselves, why is it that Silicon Valley, for instance, is so interested in teaching stoicism to their employees? And one answer might be,
00:25:28
Speaker
Because that way, they're basically telling their employees, tough it up. No matter what the external situations are, your virtue is up to you. So you can, you know, you can be fine. And that way they get away without, you know, increasing minimum wage or allowing toilet breaks or something like that. So it's like, you know, there is a, there is an issue there and we need to be careful of it. That's not to say, that's not a reason to reject soil systems, just a reason to improve it.
00:25:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. So of course I'm in the Bay Area, so I want to defend Silicon Valley to some extent and say, yeah, my impression is that the bulk of people who are interested in stoicism here tend to come at it from more of a bottoms
Stoicism in Silicon Valley
00:26:13
Speaker
up approach. They find someone like Ryan Holiday or yourself through the internet somehow and that's how they pick it up. And there's not a concerted effort to preach stoicism to
00:26:23
Speaker
employees, if you will. There are some broader trends around what people sometimes call hustle porn or having this ethic of working extremely hard in order to get some business outcome, which has its cons. And you can certainly see if a company is shaped in a certain way by what their execs promote. And of course, if it's something like that, then that can have the effect you suggest.
00:26:48
Speaker
There is certainly what you're talking about is certainly true. I mean, there are a number of people in that area who find stoicism, as you say, bottom up. But it's also true that there are a number of people who make a significant amount of money when they're hired by corporations to teach stoic-like philosophies. And that's where I get a little bit worried that, you know, why exactly is the corporation doing that?
00:27:12
Speaker
I mean, it's a fraught kind of topic, right? On the one hand, you want businesses and governments to encourage their employees and their citizens to get into philosophies, philosophies of life, especially philosophies of life that are very useful and based on increased agency, et cetera, et cetera. But at the same time, I'm also very skeptical of when the thing comes top down instead of bottom up. And when it's the authority that sort of says, oh, this is a great idea, guys. Why don't you do it?
00:27:42
Speaker
We'll see. I mean, it's still very young. I mean, the whole field is still very young. So we'll see where it goes in the next few years or decades. What I've started to see a little bit more of is companies not promoting stoicism so much, but mindfulness or therapy to their employees. So whenever anything particularly bad happens, there'll often be some post or some minor speech about something bad happened. We're sorry. We have all these resources for you.
00:28:09
Speaker
which is not exactly the stoic approach to it and has a bad outcomes. So instead of fixing whatever it is that went wrong, here's the therapist, you know, go there and fix yourself, which is like, all right.
00:28:24
Speaker
Yeah, so there's that. One other thing I wanted to talk about that we didn't touch on our previous chat is you spend some amount of time talking about political realism.
Virtuous Leadership in Politics
00:28:36
Speaker
And since we're broadly talking about politics might be interesting to say a little bit more about that. So could you say something about what you take that term to mean and why you thought it was important to address in your book on character and leadership?
00:28:50
Speaker
Yeah, so as you know, I just wrote a book on – published a book on character and leadership, the quest for character. And there, one of the fundamental questions is, what does it mean to be a virtuous politician, right? And there have been typically –
00:29:07
Speaker
two answers, two opposite answers and incompatible answers. Part of the project of the book was actually to emphasize the notion that there is a third way that has been proposed and that might be the most useful one. On the one hand, you have Socrates. Socrates is essentially all about virtue.
00:29:27
Speaker
If you're not virtuous in the middle, don't get into politics. That is the message that he gave to his friend, Alcibiades. That's a very well-known story. Alcibiades was a greater-than-life character who eventually made a mess out of both his life and Athenian politics. He was also, however, a student and a friend of Socrates.
00:29:47
Speaker
As a young man, he goes to Socrates and says, you know, do you think I should get into politics? And Socrates, after short conversations, says, don't do it. You just don't have what it takes, not in terms of skills, but in terms of characteris, was a narcissist, it was self-centered, it was into self-chlorification. Exactly the opposite of what Socrates thought a good politician should be.
00:30:09
Speaker
What is less known, and I explore a little bit in the book, is the story that Xenophon tells us about Socrates. Xenophon was another student and friend of Socrates, and he wrote a number of dialogues about Socrates, the most famous one of which is the memorabilia, which incidentally is the book that inspired Zeno of Cytium to study philosophy and eventually established stories as a new philosophy.
00:30:36
Speaker
Well, in the memorabilia, we find several episodes where Socrates talks to a number of people who want to be politicians and tells them, don't do it. And then talks to other people who don't want to be politicians and says, actually, you're the right person. You're the kind of person that should actually do it. So it turns out that this was a part of Socrates' mission in life to essentially advise people on the basis of their character about whether to get into public affairs or not. So that's one
00:31:06
Speaker
model. It's unless your virtues don't be a politician. Now, during the Renaissance, famously, we have the articulation of the opposite model, and that is Machiavelli. Machiavelli was himself a politician. He was a diplomat in Florence during the Renaissance, and he saw how things actually worked. He saw from the inside, remember that Socrates was never actually a politician himself.
00:31:34
Speaker
Machiavelli saw how the sausage was made and it was disgusted. It said, whoa, this is really horrible. Everybody keeps talking about virtue, and I'm virtue here and virtue there. But in fact, behind the curtains, they're going to do a lot of backstabbing and betraying and all sorts of unethical and unvirtuous things, including popes. So at the time, remember, we're talking about a time where
00:31:57
Speaker
It was not unusual for a pope to mount on a horse with a sword in hand and go and slaughter people. That's not exactly what we think of as the Christian thing to do. Machiavelli's advice at the end in his famous book, The Prince, was to do exactly the opposite. He said, forget about virtue. You might want to pretend, officially, that you're virtuous because people like that kind of stuff. But in fact, you need to be as ruthless as possible.
00:32:24
Speaker
With the objective of creating a functional society, I mean, Machiavelli was not in favor of a tyrant for a tyrant's sake. He thought the ultimate goal was to build some kind of functional society, but he thought that a leader, a statesman, would be completely ineffective if he actually started acting on the basis of virtue. He was kind of the anti-Socrates in a sense.
00:32:49
Speaker
And the term real politic or realistic politics refers to what Machiavelli was talking about.
00:32:55
Speaker
However, the problem is that real politics also has a lot of problems. I mean, if you just think about some of the people that practice real politics in the 20th century, you get people from Stalin to Mao to Henry Kissinger, not exactly a gallery of people that I'd like to have dinner with. So it's like, okay, now we got these two models, the extreme virtuous model Socrates, the extreme anti-virtuous model Machiavelli.
00:33:21
Speaker
Is it possible to have some something in between that makes more sense? And I mean the answer is yes, and I sketch it
00:33:29
Speaker
very quickly in the book, although I'm working on a new project specifically on
Balancing Virtue and Pragmatism in Politics
00:33:34
Speaker
this. And the answer came from Cicero, as I mentioned before, especially On Duties, the book that we talked about briefly a few minutes ago. In On Duties, Cicero takes the intermediate approach. He says, look, of course you want the politician to be virtuous. You want a person or character to be a politician or a statesman because otherwise all sorts of bad stuff is going to happen.
00:33:55
Speaker
However, that person also needs to realize that we're talking politics, not philosophy. Therefore, you need to be able to compromise. What virtue does is it allows you to keep in mind your overall goal, your distant objective. But on a day-to-day basis, you do have to compromise. Otherwise, you're not going to get anything done, and you're probably going to get killed.
00:34:20
Speaker
In fact, he wrote this beautiful little passage that I quote in the book. At one point, Cicero was really frustrated with Cato the Younger, a stoic senator, because Cato was an ally of Cicero in the Senate. They were both trying to preserve the Republic and trying to not let it slide into tyranny.
00:34:41
Speaker
But Cato was also very much into the Socratic model. It's virtue at all costs. I'm never going to compromise no matter why. I'm going to die before compromise, which in fact is exactly what he did, what happened. And Caesar got frustrated with Cato because Cato really got in the way actually sometimes of making progress out of his stubbornness and of his sort of purity of intentions that has to match the purity of action.
00:35:09
Speaker
At some point, Cicero writes to his lifelong friend, Atticus, and he's frustrated. He says, about Cato, nobody loves him more than I do, but sometimes he talks and votes as if he were in Plato's Republic, not in the scum of Romulus, which is a wonderful term of phrase. It tells you that Cato thought that he acted as if he was in Utopia, basically, Plato's Republic.
00:35:39
Speaker
not realizing that in fact he found himself in the scum of Romulus being of course the legendary founder of Rome. So you need to get dirty, you need to get into the mud.
00:35:48
Speaker
with good intentions and with virtuous outcomes in mind, absolutely. But sometimes you do need to do a little dirty trick to get your stuff done here and there. And Cicero did. He tried very hard to stay the course in terms of general objective, but when he had to compromise, he had to compromise. At some point, he realized, for instance, that
00:36:12
Speaker
the only hope to counter Julius Caesar was to ally himself with Pompey the Great. And Pompey was not a character that was much better than Caesar. He was like the last set of two evils, right? But at that point, he had no choice. You know, Caesar realized like, well, it's either this,
00:36:28
Speaker
Or we're just going to give up, and giving up is not an option. So for now, we are going to go and swallow our pride and ally ourselves with people who we find unsavory otherwise. And then later on, when things hopefully are going to be better, we'll try to improve the situation. So I think that is a good model.
00:36:48
Speaker
So the Virtuous Compromiser, I would call it, is probably a good model for a statesman. You don't want somebody pure. This actually has application to modern politics, if you think about it. I mean, it's not much of a stretch. So I consider, I'm going to put my cards on the table, I consider myself a progressive liberal, politically speaking. So definitely not a conservative, not a libertarian, none of that sort of stuff.
00:37:13
Speaker
Nevertheless, I get upset with some of my own friends and colleagues who are on the same side of the political spectrum because sometimes they take positions that are so pure and so intransigent that they undermine themselves. Former President Obama referred to this as liberals shooting themselves in a circular firing squad. Instead of shooting at the enemy, you've got to shoot at each other.
00:37:36
Speaker
And that doesn't seem like a good thing to do. And Cicero would have looked at us and say, what the hell are you guys doing? It should be making common front against the enemy and trying to make progress by compromising sometimes because that's just the way the world works. You can try to ignore it, but it's not going to go away. And that actually is a very stoic
00:37:59
Speaker
If you think about it, it's a very stoic lesson, right? I mean, the stoics are all about taking the world as it is, not in an imaginary world that you would like to be. It's like you need to deal with the situation as it actually is on the ground, not as you would want it to be.
00:38:17
Speaker
That's right. There's a reading of the late Republic where what Cato does is upholds his virtue, but by doing so pushes all the vicious people into one corner because they can't work with him anymore, which shortens the lifespan, whatever lifespan the Republic had. Right. That's right. Exactly. How do you think if you wanted to defend the Cato-like position, one might ask, well, where do the compromises
00:38:47
Speaker
stop. Is this just a political matter? Is this something we need to start thinking about in our personal lives as well, making compromises in our relationships, whether they were family members, friends, and not just compromises on the sort of selfish sense, but our principles and we think what really matters.
00:39:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. And Epictetus actually gives you an answer very clearly. In the discourses, there is a bit where he talks about what you referred to early on as role ethics. And so Epictetus says that we have different roles in life. The most important one that we all share in common is role as a human being, as a member of the human cosmopolis.
00:39:25
Speaker
And then there are roles that fate gave us, right? So you're somebody's son. That's not something you chose. It's, you know, it's just happened. And then there are roles. There's a third group of roles. Those are the ones that we choose given our circumstances, right? So I chose, for instance, to be academic professor and stuff like that. And within my certain set of circumstances that worked out. Now, Epictetus says you need to work compromises between these three roles.
00:39:56
Speaker
You always want to keep in mind that the most important one is the role of a human being, which means you don't want to do, if possible, anything that undermines a human cosmopolis, anything that hurts other people, essentially, or that puts other people at a disadvantage. But within that general framework, it's up to you to compromise.
00:40:19
Speaker
And he says, you know, you are the only one that can make that decision of where to stop or where to draw the line, just draw it as high as possible, right? So just, he says, he has this beautiful turn of phrase where he says, you know, at some point we all have to sell our will, just don't sell it cheap, right? So raise the bar as much as possible. He gives however an interesting example, in your practical example, he talks about two slaves
00:40:47
Speaker
both of whom were asked by their master or ordered by their master to hold the chamber pot, basically, while he was doing his things, his nature called. And that's disgusting, of course. No human being wants to hold the chamber pot to another one. And so one slave says, no, I'm not going to do it. I'll face the consequences, whatever they're going to be, whether I'm going to be beaten by my master or even killed.
00:41:15
Speaker
And the other slave says, you know, this is disgusting, I recognize this is below the dignity of a human being, but on the other hand, my family is important, my life is still worth it, I'm not gonna challenge. And interestingly, Epictetus doesn't criticize either one of those slaves, nor does he praise either one of those slaves, just says they made different decisions under the same circumstances because they were different people and they value different things. And his advice is simply to
00:41:45
Speaker
that nobody can tell you where to draw that line. You have to come up with that decision. Just make sure that you don't rationalize things so that you cut yourself too much slack and so you're not going to make an effort. So long as you're making the best effort. Now, in terms of politics, as you were saying a minute ago,
00:42:07
Speaker
I'm sure each one of us can draw the line somewhere. There will be some things that we're not going to compromise about, but where I draw the line might be different from where you draw the line. I might be willing to compromise on things and you're not willing to compromise or vice versa. And of course, if we are asked by friends or relatives or constituents or voters or whatever, well, why are you drawing the line there? Presumably, we'll have some arguments. We'll have some reasons why we're doing that. So it's not that there is going to be a universal answer to it.
00:42:36
Speaker
But at the same time, we need to be aware of the notion that never to compromise because otherwise, once you begin to compromise, you know, where do you stop? That's actually a slippery slope argument, right? So it's logically fallacious. Just because there's a continuum, that doesn't mean I cannot stop at some point.
00:42:56
Speaker
In fact, we all do it all the time in day-to-day life. I mean, there is, we're faced with always with complex situations along a continuum of possible outcomes. And then at some point we say, no, here and no more. And we need to just make sure, according to a pictetus, that we draw the line in a place that is reasonable and defensible and of course, especially virtuous.
00:43:19
Speaker
Right. You make the choice, then you stick with it. He advises that someone, if you decide to hold the chamber pot, you know, don't be thinking to yourself, you know, why did I do this simply and stick with it? Yep. That's right. Do you think more people should leave social media platforms like Twitter? Absolutely.
00:43:40
Speaker
I think I left Twitter some time ago. I also left Facebook for a long while, for about five months. Now I'm back on a moderate fashion simply because many of my friends and family were screaming bloody hell that day that I wasn't there.
00:43:55
Speaker
But yes, and this is not just my opinion, there is an increasing amount of research that shows that social media overall is a negative technology. Jonathan Haidt, who is a social psychologist at NYU, at New York University, is actually working on a book, apparently, on this thing.
Social Media's Impact on Society
00:44:12
Speaker
He published an interesting article in The Atlantic magazine a few months ago arguing that social media is far worse than we normally acknowledge.
00:44:20
Speaker
And for a long time, I thought to myself, well, it's a technology, so it's neutral. It's not bad or good per se intrinsically. It's just what people do with it.
00:44:34
Speaker
But the fact is there is increasing evidence that's just not the case. There is a book that came out very recently entitled Exactly, Technology is Not Neutral, where the author recognizes that for all sorts of technologies, not just social media, that technologies cannot be neutral because they're designed by human beings. And human beings have agendas and pursue certain objectives rather than others. So to give you just a very simple example,
00:45:00
Speaker
You may remember a time not long ago where Facebook only had one like button. There wasn't a series of possible options that you had. There was only like or nothing. Then Facebook engineers discovered the infamous angry button. They discovered that if they put up the possibility of an angry response,
00:45:22
Speaker
People will start posting a lot more things that will make people angry, and those people would respond by pushing the angry button constantly, like 10 times more than the like button. And of course, what does that do? That drives traffic to the site.
00:45:40
Speaker
and therefore advertisements and therefore user information, which are the two sources of revenue on which Facebook is based. So the engineers at Facebook discovered this thing and what did they do? They immediately incorporated the angry button into the options available to the public, to the users. Now you can still say, yeah, but it's still up to me whether to push the button or not. Yeah, true.
00:46:05
Speaker
But that's like saying to a drag addict, you know, hey, here's some heroin.
00:46:11
Speaker
It's up to you whether you want it or not. I'm just putting it here. That's a neutral thing. It's not doing anything, right? Well, that's very disingenuous. It's obviously doing something. It is obviously, you know, these technologies are designed to manipulate people and they're very effective at it. They're based on researching social psychology on how to manipulate people. So I think that overall they have had so far a really bad effect.
00:46:38
Speaker
I don't know whether the situation can be improved in the long run, but typically there are two ways to improve these kinds of things. One is regulation. That's the approach, for instance, that especially the European Union is pursuing at the moment. For instance, they just slapped Facebook with a 15 million euro. Fine. I think that's the right amount for precisely engaging in practices that are considered not fair, not market fair.
00:47:05
Speaker
So that's one way to do it. You can have more regulatory agencies that essentially limit what these platforms can do. The other one is to go the opposite, essentially. So the code decentralized, right? So there are some alternatives to Facebook and Twitter that are based on an idea of decentralization. So there is no central company that controls anything. It's a bunch of independent servers that work essentially semi-autonomously.
00:47:32
Speaker
And that may or may not work. I don't know. I tried a couple of these platforms. The problem right now is that nobody's there. They're not very popular. And so sure, in theory, they might work. But in fact, at the moment, the advantage, the market advantage that Twitter and especially Facebook
00:47:49
Speaker
have is just too great to, you know, I tried a couple of times, you know, two or three years ago, in fact, before the pandemic, I tried to convince some of my followers and relatives and friends to move to another platform and they're like, a few of them did. And then you start to find yourself talking to nobody. So that kind of defeats the purpose.
00:48:08
Speaker
Right, right. They certainly change the reward structure of our environment to be social media platforms. It was striking to me that last week I had my best performing tweet of all time and it was simply dunking on Jordan Peterson. So of course that incentivizes dunking on people, which is what you see in the platform.
00:48:29
Speaker
Yes, I discovered some time ago that I used to have a reasonable number of followers on Twitter. I discovered by chance initially, but then I have a scientist, I did experiments over time to see whether this was actually a repeatable effect or not. I figured that every time I would criticize libertarianism, particularly in Rand,
00:48:52
Speaker
Jordan Peterson or Sam Harris, my tweets will spike. Or there's a magnet. It would be 10 times, 20 times, 30 times the normal response. It's like, okay, but that's easy. What does that do, however? That's the problem. You're now triggering a lot of angry people to respond, which of course triggers the counter response from my followers because they get angry.
00:49:17
Speaker
And then at the end of the day, what have we done? We've simply created a lot of anger. We certainly not understood each other any one iota more than we did before. And so I moved away from that. So now I have a group on Facebook that I managed that is devoted to practical Greco-Roman philosophy, but it's a private group. So it's small. You cannot look at what we publish from the outside. You have to join.
00:49:43
Speaker
And the conversations are much better. The quality of the conversation is much better, but of course the number of people is much smaller. That's fine. That to me is a more than acceptable trade-off. Yeah, that's right. The Epicureans were onto something with the walled gardens. That's right, exactly. The Epicureans were onto something on that one.
00:50:04
Speaker
Well, last question, there's always so much to read. So a question that we get quite often is, you know, how do you think about choosing what to read next?
Choosing Quality Reading and Media
00:50:14
Speaker
Do you have any principles or tips on, you know, if someone's curious about stoicism, what's the next step?
00:50:22
Speaker
That is an excellent question. I think there are a couple of things that I do. First of all, I don't listen to random opinions about what to read. So plenty of people write, believe it or not, plenty of people write to me, you know, they email me or they message me or something and say, hey, you should read this.
00:50:37
Speaker
Seriously? Who are you? I mean, you may be right, but I don't know. You know, reading a book, it's an investment of time. So I'm not just going to follow random suggestions. So I'm actually going back to the idea of gatekeeping. I read book reviews by people who I trust. I read book reviews in New York Times or the New Yorker or, you know, other outlets that I know, or by people who I trust because I know from experience that they have had, you know, that they've come up with good suggestions. So that's one
00:51:06
Speaker
one way to do it. The other criterion is actually found in Seneca
00:51:12
Speaker
There's a letter that Seneca wrote to his friend, Lucille, where he says, don't read a lot of different authors. It's a waste of time. You're going to just spread yourself thin and you're never going to come up with anything. Choose a smaller number of authors and read them over and over. And because you want to meditate on your readings, not just read it for the hell of it. You know, one of the things that annoys me is, for instance, you might notice that I don't have a lot of books in my library because I live in Brooklyn and so the space is limited.
00:51:40
Speaker
What I do have is a large library of electronic books. But one thing that annoys me of electronic books
00:51:48
Speaker
platforms is that they make even that into a competitive game, right? So you can look up statistics. Oh, you are on a streak. You've been reading for 80 days straight. Oh, you've been reading for X numbers of hours. You're number 10 among your peers. Who cares? This is not a competition. This is not a thing that one should be stressed about. You should be reading for pleasure and for learning, not because it's a competition with other people. So I would say these two things. On the one hand,
00:52:19
Speaker
Find a small number of outlets or people who you think give consistently good suggestions about what to read and take a look.
00:52:32
Speaker
Don't read just all over the place. Try to focus on things that are really interesting to you and really important to you. I guess there is a third one, which is read mindfully, not as if it were a competition. Just read by paying attention. Take notes. I take notes every time they read a book, it's just full of notes and highlights and stuff like that. Because otherwise you don't.
00:52:58
Speaker
You just like, it goes through and then it goes to the other side and you just lose it and that's it. All good tips. Is there anything else you'd like to share or add? Actually, one more thing about books now just occurred to me and that is I learned a few years ago that it's okay to start a book and not finish it.
00:53:19
Speaker
See, when I was young, I was kind of obsessed with, oh, once I start, I got to finish it. And of course, what that means is there's a lot, you're going to end up reading a lot of crap because you realize that a book may have been, you know, interesting or superficially or initially. And then you go into like, you know, 50 pages and say, yeah, this is not going anywhere.
00:53:40
Speaker
Now I am okay. I'm at peace with closing a book and say, this isn't worth going all the way through. It's okay. I'll set it aside. Maybe I'll come back to it later. Maybe not. I'm fine with that. So have the courage and the peace of mind of not finishing a book. If you don't think it's interesting. Yep. I agree with that 100%. Well, anything else you want to say or add or any pointers to your work?
00:54:07
Speaker
No, I think that's good. If people want to find my work, they can go to MassimoPilucci.org and there you'll find links to essays, books, podcasts, videos, you name it. Perfect. Well, thanks so much for coming on again. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.