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Aiste Celkyte on the Stoic Theory of Beauty (Episode 106)
635 Plays11 months ago
In this conversation, Caleb speaks with Aiste Celkyte about the Stoic theory of beauty. They cover what the Stoics saw as beautiful, how their aesthetics expresses their ethics, and the practical application of this neglected topic.
Aiste Celkyte is a professor at the university of Leiden and author of The Stoic Theory of Beauty.
(00:57) What Is Beautiful For The Stoics?
(06:51) Ancient Sources
(09:55) What Makes Stoicism Different
(18:18) Beauty And Morality
(28:00) Practical Application
(30:43) Convential Beautfy
(39:24) Moral Responsibility
(43:33) The Most Important Insight
***
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoic Aesthetics with Aiste Chelekite
00:00:00
Speaker
Ultimately, the Stoics think, well, the art can be very useful as an illustration, as an attractive way of teaching philosophy even. But it's not the kind of thing that can genuinely affect your moral standing. So agency always remains with a listener or a reader.
00:00:30
Speaker
audience. So it's always up to the person. Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros and today I am speaking with Aiste Chelekite, a professor at the University of Leiden and the author of The Stoic Theory of Beauty. Thanks for joining. Very happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Exploring Stoic Ideas on Beauty and Aesthetics
00:00:57
Speaker
So today we're going to be talking about the Stoic ideas about beauty, their philosophy of aesthetics, uh, an underrated topic. Um, but let's start with this first question. What is beautiful for the Stoics? So before we get to the theory, what sorts of things do the Stoics point out as examples of beauty in the world?
00:01:24
Speaker
Okay, so if we are talking about the early Stoics, they mostly talk about conventional things. I think that that would be fair. So for them, the beauty of the world is very important. And they also talk about the beauty of people. So again, conventionally attractive people. So all kinds of examples of visible beauty.
00:01:54
Speaker
At the same time, they also talk about what we might call abstract beauty or maybe better moral beauty. So they also talk about the beauty of the sage and the beauty of virtue.
00:02:10
Speaker
A rather interesting case is Marcus Aurelius, who in the book, three of his meditations, he has this list of nature's byproducts. He talks about the attractiveness, the appeal and beauty of these things. Some of the examples are the crust of bread that splits in baking.
00:02:37
Speaker
overripe things that gape over, olives that are extremely ripe to the point of being nearly rotten.
Nature and Art: Stoic Perspectives
00:02:48
Speaker
He also has an example of ears of corn bending down, eyebrows of a lion, an interesting example, and foam dripping from the mouth of a boar.
00:03:04
Speaker
So he comments that these things are part of nature's process and therefore they are beautiful and pleasing.
00:03:14
Speaker
He adds that to a person interested in nature. The gaping jaws of beasts will be as beautiful as sculptures that imitate them. This is a really nice little reference to Aristotle's poetics. Aristotle argues that humans are the most imitative of all the animals,
00:03:38
Speaker
And that we learn through representation and imitation. The Greek word here is mimesis. And it's notoriously difficult because it's used in different senses. But it basically talks about representational art. And so Aristotle supports this claim by pointing out that we enjoy very detailed representations of things that repulse us.
00:04:07
Speaker
And one of his two examples is, in fact, the most terrible wild beasts. So Marcus Aurelius is really responding to this and saying stoics don't need the filter of art. All nature's works are beautiful. And I think this is perhaps the best kind of answer to the question is natural things and nature's works.
00:04:34
Speaker
are the best examples of beauty for ancient Stoics. I suppose on one hand, these sorts of things are beautiful as a
Texts and Critiques on Stoic Beauty
00:04:44
Speaker
whole. You know, the flex of foam, that's just a part of the boar and the boar's part of an even larger ecosystem, which is a part of a world. So you have this idea of
00:04:57
Speaker
process and there's a kind of beauty to that, the parts when it's understood from the perspective of the whole. So there's that, but there's also sort of the remark that, you know, the shadow of decay gives the ripe figs a kind of beauty in themselves. So they're almost beautiful and taken individually as well. There's that perspective. So I suppose I'm curious, do you think that the Stoics are
00:05:23
Speaker
pointing at both things taken individually and taken from the perspective of the whole? Or is it mostly just the picture of the whole that's driving the evaluation that these sorts of things are beautiful?
00:05:39
Speaker
I think it's definitely Bo. When he describes the bread, the bread that's split open in the baking, he makes this little comment that it's very appealing in itself. It's very inviting. So that suggests, together with some other comments, that it's really Bo that
00:06:08
Speaker
you'll find something beautiful just through perception and reflecting on it, seeing the whole
00:06:24
Speaker
also adds to that beauty. I think a lot of Stoics would agree that reflecting can make things seem beautiful, even if they might not have seemed like that before. But it's also about just appreciating a thing in itself, in its own right. Got it, got it.
00:06:52
Speaker
So what do we have in terms of texts from the earlier Stoics, the earlier Greek Stoics or Roman Stoics who came before Marcus Aurelius? You mentioned that they note beauty usually in a more conventional sense, but what is sort of the text or tradition we can point to in making sense of what they say about beauty?
00:07:16
Speaker
Okay, so as ever with the early Stoics, the textual evidence is a problem. So we basically have two sources here, doxographical collections and critical accounts.
00:07:32
Speaker
So doxography is a genre of philosophical writing and antiquity. It consists of collecting the views of philosophers, usually very famous philosophers or notable philosophers, and organizing them in some way. For example, by school or by topic.
00:07:51
Speaker
And for the Stoics, one of the most important doxographical collection is the one compiled by Diogenes Laricius. I think anyone who is interested in Stoicism probably heard that name before. He writes a collection called Lives of Eminent Philosophers, and it contains many key claims about beauty. So this is really a summary of the best hits
00:08:21
Speaker
sort of a type of situation. Another important source for the stoic views of beauty are critical accounts. So for example, Sextus and Birgus, who was a Peronian skeptic himself, recorded many stoic views in order to criticize him. And he has a little bit on beauty too.
00:08:48
Speaker
An even more important source is Plutarch. He was a Middle Platonist, and he spilled much ink to show that Stoicism is incoherent and idiosyncratic.
Symmetry and Functionality in Stoic Philosophy
00:09:01
Speaker
But thanks to this effort, we actually have a pretty good record of the views that he tried to refute. So we owe him a lot.
00:09:12
Speaker
Finally, another very important source for Stoics and beauty is Cicero. Cicero is an academic skeptic. He's also not very friendly to the Stoics, but he's a gentle critic. He was really interested in
00:09:33
Speaker
all kinds of philosophical accounts. And so we owe him a lot of evidence from clientes and the claims about the beauty of the world, for example, the important arguments about the beauty of the world all come from Cicero's On the Nature of Gods.
00:09:55
Speaker
So if we're thinking about what makes the Stoic views of beauty distinct from their ancient rivals or ancient philosophical counterparts, what sorts of features would people like Cicero or Plutarch pick up on? So these more critical accounts often pick up on the
00:10:22
Speaker
more idiosyncratic views. They often, especially Plutarch, is very keen on criticizing the Stoics for saying that the most beautiful person would be the sage, the perfectly rational person.
00:10:42
Speaker
Cicero records a lot of cases, quite a few cases of Stoics defining beauty and explaining various arguments to do with beauty. I mentioned Cleantes. He's a great example. Yeah, yeah. So maybe we could dive into that a little bit more by asking what sorts of
00:11:10
Speaker
properties the Stoics picked out as beautiful. So forcing the conventional account, what's beautiful? Maybe the first step, the common sense account would be to pick out particular physical properties of people or of nature. But of course there are more abstract accounts of what beauty consists in as well in different ancient traditions. But what are those properties that matter to the Stoics? What does beauty consist of?
00:11:42
Speaker
So I think the best way to answer this question is to look a little bit at the stoic definition of beauty because it concerns certain properties that are really crucial. So beauty is defined as symmetria of parts with each other and with a whole.
00:12:07
Speaker
And the key word here is subetria, a popular term in ancient philosophy. It was really popularized by a sculptor, Polyclitis, who figured out what proportions can be used to depict the human body in a beautiful way. So he's really an artist interested in depiction of
00:12:35
Speaker
body, and he really only cares about making beautiful statues. We have no reason to think that he was necessarily a philosopher. But philosophers
00:12:48
Speaker
pick up this term, and they use it quite broadly. So whereas polyclitis is interested in finding proportions that will make a statue beautiful, philosophers are interested in this very idea that proportions can create the property of beauty. So the symmetria is all about proportionality for the stomachs and for other philosophers.
00:13:18
Speaker
Okay, now there is a sort of second aspect to the Stoic understanding of beauty. In my work, I have argued that the Stoics understand symmetry functionally too. So something is beautiful if it's proportional for the kind of an entity that it is.
00:13:42
Speaker
So in other words, if it's functional. So functional beauty can be a little bit of an odd idea, but it goes hand in hand with the Stoic idea that good things are in accordance with nature, of course. So I already mentioned the sage, the very controversial case.
00:14:04
Speaker
And the sage is most beautiful because it is inhuman nature to be rational, right? That's our function according to the Stoics. And a perfectly rational person would have, of course, coherent beliefs that would be very harmonious and fit each other, so there is proportionality. But this is also in accordance with nature.
00:14:33
Speaker
There is the functional aspect here that is quite important and it permeates the stoic thought on aesthetics.
00:14:47
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah, so we have these two parts, as I understand it. First, we have almost a mathematical sense of symmetry, right? And those sorts of things can be beautiful, a matter of proportion, things being properly ordered, having a good structure in some sense. And then the second aspect is, are things
00:15:12
Speaker
shaped in the right way for their purpose? Are they functionally proportional in that sense? I would just add that we can separate them for analytical purposes. But I think they are really supposed to go together, sort of good proportion
00:15:33
Speaker
is determined by function. The reason why certain proportion is good is because it fits the function of whatever entity we are talking about. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So with that sort of
00:15:56
Speaker
definition of beauty in place, how can you use that to better understand what Marcus Aurelius is talking about when he notes the beauty of the stocks of wheat bending under their own weight, the bread, the figs, the olives, and so on?
00:16:18
Speaker
So this is a very good question because on the one hand, he seems to be talking about also in his list about things that are not entirely functional. I think the split love of red, you might think, well, this is not how things are supposed to go. But I think it does actually
00:16:46
Speaker
his ideas too because it's about the function of nature and the
00:16:55
Speaker
overall purpose so that things are a certain way because it is for the best. I mean, the, the, the, the, the, of course, uh, determinists about everything and natural processes, especially for them, um, part of the rational design and part of the, and so part of the function.
00:17:26
Speaker
So I guess it's something like if you knew the true workings of nature, then you would see how they are beautiful.
Moral vs Physical Beauty in Stoicism
00:17:38
Speaker
Then you'd have a much comprehensive sense of how they are beautiful.
00:17:44
Speaker
given that that's the case, if you have that pre-existing belief that things are ordered this way, then even if you can't see the exact account of what makes these sorts of things beautiful, you can nonetheless appreciate them as beautiful since you are confident in nature having a purpose, as it were.
00:18:04
Speaker
Yes, that would be definitely a good way of looking at this list and making Markus Aurelius coherent with what we know of the early stuff.
00:18:20
Speaker
One sort of issue that comes up with these sorts of things is if you think about the platonic list, the true, the good, and the beautiful, there's always that question. Are those the same different aspects of the same thing? And then we can also extend that kind of question to the Stoics thoughts on beauty.
00:18:37
Speaker
There's the beauty of the sage, the morally excellent person, the person with excellent character. Is that the same kind of thing as their moral goodness? Are beauty and moral goodness really just either descriptions of the same thing, different aspects of the same thing? What's your sense of how the Stoics thought about this issue?
00:19:05
Speaker
Okay, yeah, so I think it is important to distinguish for the Stoics between moral beauty and other types of beauty. And they do so in the definition of beauty, they talk of the beauty of the body and the beauty of the soul.
00:19:28
Speaker
ordinary beauty, bodily attractiveness, for example, is definitely a very different thing from the good, the moral thing. The moral, sorry, morally beautiful things
00:19:51
Speaker
But when it comes to moral beauty, it is definitely very close to the good because virtue is definitely described as beautiful by them. I think it's important for the Stoics that virtue is beautiful,
00:20:18
Speaker
because it explains why we feel admiration and attraction towards certain noble actions and noble character traits. And when we find them beautiful in those cases, beauty is coextensive with the good.
00:20:39
Speaker
So, do you think it's useful to distinguish between we have beauty as an indifferent, physical attractiveness, the attractiveness of art, perhaps even nature, and then
00:20:57
Speaker
beauty as something that represents or comes with what is morally good. And maybe you wouldn't think of that kind as necessarily an indifferent, or at least it's not that informative to do so. What do you think about that? Yeah, that I think is a nice way of distinguishing things.
00:21:25
Speaker
We haven't talked much about the indifference, of course, but that is really the crucial point when it comes to the Stoics, to say that ordinary cases of beauty, visible beauty, is supposed to be just the indifferent. And when it comes to moral beauty,
00:21:52
Speaker
it's really very important to them that virtue is beautiful. And it is definitely very, sort of, it's the distinguishing feature
00:22:09
Speaker
of the proper good that really leads to happiness. I think Seneca has some interesting things to say about this in his letters where he says, well, there are all kinds of goods that people think will make them happy. They might be
00:22:35
Speaker
Well, they might be a reputation, but really the proper good is the one that is this morally beautiful thing. It distinguishes the virtue among all other goods as the true good, the proper good.
00:22:54
Speaker
This is also a claim that's evident, the commitment that the Stoics make in other sources as well. This is definitely a very important thing for them.
00:23:16
Speaker
But would they say that the kind, I suppose someone might be confused and say, would they say that the beauty in the sage is the same kind of thing as the beauty in say, I don't know, a well ordered house or someone who's exceptionally healthy? Is that the same kind of beauty or are we just using the same word to describe different things for the stoics?
00:23:44
Speaker
Okay, so I think that's a very good question. And I think this is where functionality, again, kicks in and becomes a really useful tool to make sense of these things. So the different cases of beauty can be differentiated
00:24:10
Speaker
according to how functional they are for us as human beings. And so because it is our nature according to the Stoics to be rational and virtuous, when we are in that state, which is of course very hard to achieve, it's very rare,
00:24:34
Speaker
that's really the best kind of beauty, sort of the proper beauty because it is in our nature. We are fulfilling something in our nature and therefore it's really an excellent version of any kind of aesthetic manifestation.
00:24:59
Speaker
Whereas things that are preferred indifference, let's say the house, I think you mentioned the house, right? It has a place that there is function for it. It's natural for us to live in the houses, but that's not really the point of being
00:25:22
Speaker
a human being, right, that's relevant. You might want to have an orderly house, clean house, all that kind of thing, but it's lower on the scale of value.
00:25:37
Speaker
Yeah, so I suppose you can connect this to, in this podcast we've talked a little bit about Musonius Rufus, and Musonius Rufus has a set of lectures on very practical matters like furnishing food, and usually he asks, you know, what's the purpose of something like food? And for him, food is just fuel, it's nutrition. And perhaps you can add to that.
00:26:01
Speaker
Yeah, maybe there's a social role too. There's some amount of social convention or social meaning that's attached to what we eat. Say similar remarks about furnishings, how houses are ordered and so on. So then the question is, you can think about some of these more conventional forms of beauty perhaps in a similar way. They're beautiful insofar as they
00:26:24
Speaker
serve their ordinary purpose for physical beauty, maybe there's some amount of social meaning, there's some amount of health that might be communicated, but it's not the sort of thing that one should overindulge in, otherwise it becomes overindulging in food for getting the purpose of a human life isn't to look beautiful in this sort of conventional sense, it's to have a beautiful character. So I suppose that's my stab.
00:26:52
Speaker
try thinking about this from Musonius Rufus as examples, maybe somewhat useful too.
00:27:00
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. That's a very nice connection, I think. And of course, maybe we could add, it doesn't mean that we should abandon these things, right? It doesn't mean that we shouldn't eat or we shouldn't take care of our environments or of our bodies. It's all about putting value on
00:27:26
Speaker
the right place of our value system. I like to think of it as a ladder, and the kind of things that bring us to flourishing, to happiness, has to be on top, and that's really virtue.
00:27:50
Speaker
And that also corresponds to the most beautiful kind of state that a person can be in. Right, right. So I suppose the clearest way in which you think about, okay, so what's the practical upshot of the stoic thoughts on beauty, the
00:28:11
Speaker
maybe the most fundamental one the most obvious one is the stoics thought that having an excellent character was the most beautiful it's at the top of the ladder if you will so insofar as you uh are a stoic or aiming to live that kind of life you'd want to be adept at recognizing people with excellent characters seeing that as beautiful and then trying to
00:28:36
Speaker
be show that beauty in your own actions. That seems like the most important practical upshot
Virtue as Beauty in Stoic Living
00:28:43
Speaker
from this. What do you think? Yeah, I think that's right. There is a very interesting passage in which Zino describes a beautiful boy, what a beautiful youth would look like. And he describes all kinds of properties that seem bodily.
00:29:06
Speaker
But on closer inspection, we can see that it's not so much the shape or, I don't know, the complexion, but rather the bearing of the boy. So he's a keen listener to the argument and he's a dentist.
00:29:27
Speaker
And all of these properties seem to show readiness to learn for readiness to develop character, interest in virtue, and
00:29:44
Speaker
It's exactly as you say, this is sort of an interest in developing virtue and character that's really important to the Stoics.
00:29:59
Speaker
Right, right. I suppose there's a, there's a line from Epictetus where something's the effect of as a human being, you are not a body, but pro high recess or that faculty of choice or will. And if you make that beautiful, then you will be beautiful, uh, in the discourses. And I think that captures well, how that's fundamentally think about, about beauty.
00:30:27
Speaker
Epictetus is really good at just putting everything in a nutshell. Yeah, yeah. He's a good teacher, probably. He would be a good teacher. I imagine. For some students at any rate. For the students who had the, I guess, the ability to withstand his abuse or motivational speeches at any rate.
00:30:57
Speaker
Yeah. So how would, so how would Stoics think about approaching questions? We've touched on this a little bit, but how would they think about approaching questions like how important are the aesthetics of my house or how important are the aesthetics of what I wear and so on? I think the
00:31:22
Speaker
notion of preferred indifference would really be the guiding principle here. So I think the Stoics would be, again, not entirely averse to finding beauty and making things more appealing in the environment.
00:31:53
Speaker
But at the same time, I think it would definitely be very important not to make that an objective of any sort. I mean, it always boils down to the same thing that whenever we take
00:32:14
Speaker
bodily things, external goods, anything like that as the good, as a thing that would constitute a happy life.
Art's Role in Moral Education
00:32:26
Speaker
We are making a mistake. In any case, I think the stoic approach to these things would be moderate.
00:32:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's always a good, I think, slogan answer to any question about the Stoics. The Stoic approach would be moderate.
00:32:51
Speaker
Well, with that in mind, how would you think about art then? So of course you have poetry, painting, music. One argument for these sorts of things is that they represent the morally good, or at least they can at their best, they can represent the morally good or help us develop our character. How do the Stoics think about this sort of issue when it comes to the arts, broadly speaking?
00:33:20
Speaker
So I think the Stoics have a really interesting attitude towards art, even if it's perhaps not very exciting. It's a little bit make what you will. So they definitely think that art can be an important part of our moral life.
00:33:49
Speaker
and moral education. They like engaging with arts. So Christ Sippus loved citing literature. He loved citing Medea, especially the tragedy. And of course we know that Cleanthes wrote poetry himself. We still have him to Zeus as an extant poem.
00:34:20
Speaker
But the interesting thing about the Stoics is that we never find the censoring art. So when ancient philosophers think that art can affect us morally,
00:34:41
Speaker
they can be quite serious about it and say, well, in that case, we should avoid the kind of art that can impart improper character traits.
00:34:58
Speaker
This is usually connected with emotions and excite very strong emotions that are unreasonable and immoderate and so on and so forth. Interestingly, we have very little or none at all of that in Stoicism.
00:35:20
Speaker
So it seems that ultimately the Stoics think, well, the art can be very useful as an illustration, as an attractive way of teaching philosophy even. If we think about Cleanthes, that's a way of teaching philosophy.
00:35:41
Speaker
But it's not the kind of thing that can genuinely affect your moral standing, right? So agency always remains with a listener or a reader or audience, depending on what kind of art we're talking about. So it's always up to the person to determine how art will affect them.
00:36:09
Speaker
They can allow emotions, of course, to be excessive and overtake them, but they can also look at very emotion-inducing play such as Greek tragedy and inspect it and use it for moral improvement.
00:36:36
Speaker
Yeah, so many ancient philosophers are thinking about, of course, the central example would be Plato, like what's the optimal goal of arts in terms of educating a person, educating a city. How do you shape yourself with art? But the argument you're making is that the Stoics will say, yeah, maybe art can have some impact on shaping your character, but there's always the listener, there's always the viewer, and they have that decision.
00:37:05
Speaker
how to respond. Art's just one other impression you're going to be faced with, I suppose, amongst the sea or cycle of impressions you'll face during a life. And some individuals might find art, particular artworks, essentially useful for developing themselves. Others, others may not. One example of this is you have Marcus Aurelius sometimes reminds himself to throw away his books.
00:37:29
Speaker
which you can see, yeah, he's on campaign. Maybe he's tempted to go back to some, I think he was maybe thinking about writing some ancient history of Rome or he certainly has a philosophical bent. So he's tempted to read some great works of philosophy, but there he's writing himself, I take it, to pay attention to what matters in front of his duties as an emperor.
00:37:54
Speaker
But you could equally imagine him in a different context thinking it's important to dive into those books to learn more about them, learn more about whether it's philosophy or history, depending on someone whose ever role is under consideration. So I think that's what that's well put.
00:38:14
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. In the passage that we discussed at the beginning, where he talks about oddly beautiful things, he references Aristotle. He must have read it and reflected on it and found it in some way useful. But at the same time,
00:38:44
Speaker
always the person that has to make that decision. The moral agency is clearly very important for the Stoics, and it's also perhaps evident from the fact that later philosophers, for example, Neoplatonists,
00:39:09
Speaker
really pick this up and adopt the stoic formulations about personal agency and that these things are up to us and always in our power.
00:39:25
Speaker
Right, right. I think there's both maybe some insight and some danger in that stoic strategy. So one example of that is Seneca talking about the gladiatorial games, where he criticizes the mob of people who enjoy the violence, the spectacle.
00:39:44
Speaker
But also notes that the games they can be great examples of courage Bravery either in the arena or in on anger. He has a list of gladiators who he admires for committing suicide uh instead of instead of entering combats, but perhaps that focus on reaction obscures His reflections on the games in general like whether there should be
00:40:09
Speaker
gladiatorial games. So maybe there's some, at least, don't mean to be too hyperbolic, but at least there's a potential risk in that thinking pattern of focusing on reactions. What can you learn? What sort of acts are possible that might obscure the object itself? And this, in this case, might be a useful one. Sure, of course it's true that you can see virtue in slave combat
00:40:37
Speaker
But you can also see if you focus on that, you might be blinded on the device of the organizers. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the agency, the moral responsibility is a two-edged sword. It always means that
00:41:03
Speaker
we are responsible for, or we are liable to make bad judgments and bad decisions and ascend to wrong impressions, to use the Stoic term. Yeah, that's right. So I suppose on one hand, the Stoics do have a more permissive view of art, one that's more context sensitive, but they do note that
00:41:33
Speaker
it is up to us how we make these judgments about these different artworks and the judgments do matter. So it's, perhaps it's not purely what you might see as some more permissive views of art might be, you can consume whatever you like, respond to it in whatever way you like. And that's not, that's certainly not the stoic view. No, they are not, they are not relativists in any sense of the word. I think the,
00:42:03
Speaker
a good parallel to contemporary world would be this discussion that's still, it's a pretty interesting issue in aesthetics. Modern aesthetics is the case of video games causing people to be more violent, allegedly. And so if we take that
00:42:33
Speaker
as a sort of case study. So someone like Plato would be in agreement that, yeah, there are certain kinds of artistic expressions that can make people more violent, for example.
00:42:51
Speaker
Whereas the Stoics would definitely be very skeptical about this, or just outright denying this, saying that, well, it's really not up to video games to make anyone more violent.
00:43:16
Speaker
these things don't have that kind of power. We have to focus on the person, and it's always the person that makes these decisions, not object, not artistic object.
Modern Views on Stoic Aesthetics
00:43:38
Speaker
I suppose maybe there's a two-part question, two parts to this. On one hand, what do you think is most insightful from the Stoic theories, thoughts on beauty? Perhaps something we've already covered. And what do you think is something they might get wrong, or if not wrong, a place where the theory could use additional detail? So I think
00:44:04
Speaker
The functional aspect of the Stoic Fort is really exciting because functional aesthetics has been out of fashion for many centuries and it's coming back. There's been a few very interesting
00:44:27
Speaker
monographs recently on modern notion, on functional aesthetics, and philosophers tried to show how it's a really powerful idea. And so I think that's really nice to explore this through stoicism.
00:44:46
Speaker
The Stoics were not the only functionalists in the ancient world. This was just one of the ways of thinking about aesthetic properties, but they really make it very precise, very robust, I think, by integrating it so well into their moral philosophy and, well, also metaphysics, really.
00:45:14
Speaker
So that, I think, is something really interesting and very nice, I think, about stoicism. The thing that they get wrong in terms of aesthetics, right? Right, right, yeah. Of course, it can be connected to the larger philosophy. Okay.
00:45:40
Speaker
So I think probably the toughest case for a lot of people reading stoicism today is their commitment to intelligent design.
00:46:01
Speaker
So they use the argument that the world is so beautiful that it could not possibly come about in a way that's not rational.
00:46:17
Speaker
Well, I know that some people really struggle with this. We like to think a lot of people these days think about creation of a natural world in a very different way, and that argument I think comes across as a little bit heavy-handed.
00:46:43
Speaker
I think it could also be said that it's a kind of argument that could be made in a more elegant, more sophisticated way and clientes at least
00:47:07
Speaker
in the decks that are extant, that are preserved by Cicero does this job in sort of a little bit loose way. Got it, got it. Do you think there's someone who has written a better example of this kind of argument or is it outstanding work to do? Oh, okay.
00:47:33
Speaker
I'm not sure, actually. That is a really difficult question because this argument has immense history. There are so many versions of the same idea argued in many different ways.
00:47:53
Speaker
I'm not sure what would be a sort of a really good example, not off the top of my head. Sure, sure. Two excellent examples already or two excellent points in the last question. All right.
Conclusion and Resources for Further Exploration
00:48:10
Speaker
Excellent. Is there anything else you'd like to add or anything that you think we missed? No, I don't think so. Perfect. Well, thanks so much for coming on.
00:48:24
Speaker
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.
00:48:53
Speaker
a forum, interactive calls, that I think will be an excellent way for a group of people to become more stoic together. So do check that out at stomeditation.com slash course. And if that's not to your fancy, you can find links to the Stoa app as well as the Stoa Letter, our newsletter on stoic theory and practice at stomeditation.com. Thanks for listening. Until next time.