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Why Study Ancient Philosophy? (Episode 75)
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The best skiers don’t study ancient skiers. The best physicists don’t turn to Ancient Greece in order to push their field forward. So why should philosophers look back at the work of the ancients?
In this episode, Caleb and Michael wrestle with that question. Their answers may surprise you.
(02:11) The Argument Against Studying Ancient Philosophy
(07:00) Who is Actually Doing Philosophy Today?
(16:27) Mining for Diamonds
(25:00) The Motivational Force of Philosophy
(28:17) Communion with the Ancients
(32:08) Caleb on Why He Studies Ancient Philosophy
(35:55) An Aside on Organs
***
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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Merits and Drawbacks of Ancient Philosophy
00:00:00
Speaker
It's the kind of thing where it's like, well, ancient philosophy has some problems, but it did some things right. And in the attempt to innovate, we've lost some of the things that it did right. Then we've gained some other wrong things. And the, the right Oregon, the right set of skis or whatever metaphor you want is going to be the right combination of both of those. And people like us are with podcasts like this, trying to pull things in the other direction a little bit. One of those things might be that orientation towards philosophy as a way of life.
Introduction to Stoicism and New Course
00:00:28
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert. Before jumping into the conversation, I have a big announcement.
00:00:47
Speaker
We just opened up enrollment for a three weeks stoicism applied course. It'll be running from October 23rd to November 10th. We've just had our first few students sign up. It's going to be awesome. Learn more at stomeditation.com slash course.
00:01:06
Speaker
So do check that out if you are interested in becoming more Stoic by taking a three-week intensive course with others deeply invested in that very same project. And here is our conversation.
Relevance of Studying Ancient Philosophy
00:01:22
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Juan de Veroz. And I'm Michael Trombley. And why do you study ancient philosophy, Michael?
00:01:33
Speaker
Yeah. Why even should you study ancient philosophy? That's what we're going to try to answer today, Kale. Great question. I'm glad you asked. I've come prepared for such accusations, which I think, I think anybody who studies philosophy gets these questions and, you know, even if they're just kind of monetary ones of like, what are you going to do with that?
00:01:52
Speaker
as a degree or just like why are you interested in it but I also wanted to actually that's the kind of philosophy more general and I also wanted to think about why study ancient philosophy if you're gonna study philosophy why study ancient philosophy and the reason I had this question or wanted to chat about this with you
00:02:09
Speaker
I was talking to Gregory Sadler for a stoic conversation. Gregory Sadler is a professor of philosophy. He was the editor of the blog at Modern Stoicism, member of the Modern Stoicism Movement. We were talking about criticisms of stoicism, and he talked about a criticism by an 18th century philosopher, Hegel. I might be getting that wrong, but somebody we would consider in the past, but was certainly much more contemporary than the Stoics.
00:02:37
Speaker
The nature of the argument was something like, well, look, what the Stoics were doing was something, what ancient philosophers in general were doing was something admirable, was something worth doing, but it's just an old version of that, right? If you look at
00:02:54
Speaker
maybe architecture or you look at really any craft and the analogy we landed on was actually skiing, which I thought was a funny one. It was like, well, people ski in the 1800s, but that's cool and you can respect skiing and that's valuable and that was great for them. But if you were going to be a skier today, you wouldn't look at people in the 1800s for advice, you wouldn't wear the skis people in the 1800s wore.
00:03:20
Speaker
And in some ways, it's quite a compelling argument because it takes ancient philosophy very seriously. It's to say, look, what ancient philosophy is doing, this kind of craft, this kind of defining the nature of the world, understanding how to live, that's an important goal.
00:03:35
Speaker
But then it's also presenting this counter argument, which is to say that human knowledge, I suppose the argument something like human knowledge linearly improves. And if it linearly or it, it has consented to improve. And if it's intended to improve, why would you ever go back in time? If you were looking for advice about how to live, why would you ever refer to people that lived 2000 years ago, if you're trying to
Arguments Supporting Ancient Philosophy
00:03:59
Speaker
build a craft?
00:03:59
Speaker
you wouldn't wear 200 year old skis to go skiing. You wouldn't learn from 200 year old books on how to ski. So why would you do that for your philosophy, for your craft of how to live? And I thought that was a really interesting question. I thought that was a compelling counter argument because a lot of the counter arguments I see are ones that go, well, that's stupid or that's silly or what's the point of that? And those
00:04:21
Speaker
those seem to me obviously wrong because they don't take ancient philosophy seriously. This one seemed to me to be a counter argument that took it seriously and said, but we've also done better. We have better. We have contemporary philosophy or we have contemporary answers to these questions. Why look to the past? So that's the framing that I wanted to look at it by and wanted to say, well, what would be my counter arguments to that? What would be my counter arguments for the reason why?
00:04:45
Speaker
Even if I want to look at, if I want to have a craft of living, if I want to live the good life, why should I look to ancient Greek philosophy to do that instead of something more contemporary?
00:04:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think that makes sense. That makes sense as an argument. If I could say in my own words, the main idea is that, look, if you're doing cutting edge science to use another analogy, it's unlikely that you're going to go back and read through Newton
00:05:17
Speaker
read through whoever else in order to come up with some physics breakthrough. If you're doing physics, you might not even need to read Einstein. Instead, you can just get up to speed with the current works. And this seems like a similar kind of argument where if you're trying to be good at some
00:05:39
Speaker
craft uh generally you're not going to go back and look at the masters from thousands of years ago but it's sufficient to if mainly pick up from contemporaries and to the extent that you're learning from masters it's likely not as much as the amount of time or investment you might put in as modern stoics or as people interested in ancient philosophy broadly
00:06:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think the science example is really compelling. Again, we wouldn't, as you said, yeah, you wouldn't have to read Einstein or certainly wouldn't have to read Newton. Maybe you stand on the shoulder of giants and you go, well, thanks giants for being there, but now I'm going to stand on your shoulders. I'm not going to stand next to you. I'm going to, I'm going to continue forward. I'm not going to look back. And so why, if that's the objection, why do I think that's wrong or why do I think ancient philosophy is worth studying?
00:06:37
Speaker
And I've prepared a couple of these, you've prepared a couple of these and we'll go through and provide our reasons why we think Stoicism or ancient Greek philosophy in general, maybe ancient philosophy more broadly, stand up to this objection. So I'll jump into it if that's good. Sounds great.
00:06:58
Speaker
Yeah, so my first one, I'm trying to stick to this scheme analogy. The science one works really well too. Just to kind of frame what I'm thinking and to put it in this silly metaphor, but I think it helps unify the arguments. The first one I would say is some sort of variation on this idea that people aren't skiing today.
00:07:15
Speaker
So, you know, this idea of like, well, we have this, you know, there's the kind of meme of like, you know, well, we have, we have moral philosophy at home. And then you go back and moral philosophy at home is something different. So the idea is that ancient Greek philosophy is actually doing something different.
00:07:30
Speaker
And if you want to undertake that process, you have to go back in time to the time when people were doing that. And then you learn from them because they're, that is the most advanced, this type of thinking got before people started doing something different.
Holistic Approach of Ancient Philosophy
00:07:44
Speaker
And the argument I would make for that is that.
00:07:47
Speaker
When we look at ancient Greek philosophy, it's holistic. It's a picture of an entire way to live that incorporates physics, that incorporates epistemology, psychology. It incorporates all these disciplines, ethics, philosophy, that are now separate or siloed in contemporary, and it tries to amalgamate them into a complete system. And there's a benefit to siloing things. But I also think contemporary philosophy, contemporary academics,
00:08:16
Speaker
actually reward siloing, it rewards expertise in a small frame and there's in contemporary thinking, there's less attempt at this holistic picture. And then another thing about ancient Greek philosophy is that
00:08:31
Speaker
It is also focused on these questions of meaning and taking these questions of meaning very seriously. So when it looks at the holistic picture, it focuses on these questions of meaning. And it's also reason-based, it's evidence-based. It is argumentative and it stands behind arguments for its positions. So that's a unique thing, I think, to find something that's holistic, something that is meaning-based, and something that is argumentative or reason, instead of something that may be faith-based, for example.
00:09:01
Speaker
I'm not sure if that's being done today. I'm not sure if that's being done certainly not by as many smart people as it was being taken seriously and done back in ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So maybe you see some of that in existentialist philosophy, maybe some of that is being done in art in a different way.
00:09:24
Speaker
But there's some sort of unique combination of these factors in ancient philosophy that I just don't see a contemporary equivalent of. So it's not like I'm shaming the contemporary equivalent. I feel like there's something that's being missed that was done back then that's not being done today. So that's my first argument. Yeah, I think there's something to that. So one way to put this argument is that
00:09:47
Speaker
If you're in a field that's knowledge-based and cumulative, you should expect after decades, centuries, whatever, to be able to look at your contemporaries, learn from the knowledge
00:10:07
Speaker
of the day and not need to look back and just basically take advantage of the fact that you're in a field that's pursuing knowledge. It's not like fashion or something that might be less knowledge-based, more about trends and it's a cumulative field. So you can take advantage of the progress. So one way to attack that argument is just to say that
00:10:30
Speaker
when people are doing philosophy today, they're not doing that same kind of thing. They're not pursuing knowledge, the kind that we care about. And I think to some extent that certainly is true. I mean, I think
00:10:46
Speaker
In the ancients, you have this picture of philosophy as a way of life. And the promise of philosophy is that, if you wanted to put it bluntly, it promises salvation. You have an idea of what the best kind of life is and then some means to attain it.
00:11:02
Speaker
And a lot of academics I think are just not involved in that project, maybe just trying to pick off a piece of it or some indirect footnote from that project, which could be worthwhile, but it's not the same kind of thing. So to some extent, I think that is
00:11:20
Speaker
But it is interesting, you made the claim that the number of people alive today doing philosophy of life is less than it was in the past, but that's probably not true, I would expect. Just given that there are so many people in the world today, and you can go online and find lots of people doing philosophy of life, find communities offline. So I wonder if this counter argument is sufficient to knock down this, this scheme argument. Yeah, I mean, that's a fair point.
Philosophy as Art vs. Knowledge
00:11:49
Speaker
I mean, so the other point would be something like this, then would be something like, and this is that philosophy, which I'm, I guess I'm cautious against but it could be another way to do this would be to say philosophy is left less like a knowledge based.
00:12:06
Speaker
cumulative craft like ski like science you know or skiing is kind of in the middle as this kind of expression but also performance based and it's more like an art and that art as you said like fashion is something that has trends and it's something that has kind of motifs or themes or phases you know it's not clear to me i don't know a lot of music it's not clear to me that contemporary music is better than
00:12:33
Speaker
you know, what Bach or Beethoven were doing. And so if you look at, if you then say, well, it's just not analogous to skiing because it's more like an art, in which case you might say, well, contemporary painters are worse than Renaissance painters. Contemporary sculptors are missing something that ancient sculptors had and that analogy becomes stronger. I'm hesitant to do that because I would like my philosophy to be maybe a bit of science and not just all art. But what do you think about that argument?
00:13:02
Speaker
Well, I think there's an issue. Is it knowledge based?
00:13:06
Speaker
where are you attempting to come to true beliefs, things that accurately describe the world, which I think you are doing in philosophy when it's done well and in science when it's done well, but perhaps not the same kind of thing you're doing when it comes to fashion or say humor or something like that. But although humor is an interesting case. So there's that, and I don't want to give that up, but I think that's different from whether a field's
00:13:34
Speaker
cumulative or progressive because even in science or if you take skills like we have just as a civilization forgotten how to do things that we once were able to do and you can think of thought experiments about
00:13:53
Speaker
imagine we lost all our technology. Would we be able to fare better in our environment than some primitive, illiterate human from thousands of years ago? Maybe not. There's an interesting book on this by a fellow named Joseph Henrich called The Secrets of Our Success. And he essentially, he has a nice experiment, which is called Lost European Explorers and involves
00:14:22
Speaker
Europeans who are at the time in the, you know, whether it's the 18th, 19th century, the most technologically scientifically advanced civilization getting lost somewhere in Australia or the Americas and noticing that these people fared much worse than the people who
00:14:47
Speaker
grew up in those areas obviously and also likely fared much worse than many of their ancestors would have just because they've learned many new skills and forgotten others so that's maybe a long-winded way of saying that
00:15:01
Speaker
We can have knowledge-based fields, but that doesn't mean that we don't forget things. That doesn't guarantee that progress is linear. And perhaps there are some features of philosophy that make it more likely that we forget things that past humans have learned in the past. Perhaps there are some things about philosophy that makes it harder for it to be linear. I think that's an interesting line of thought.
00:15:30
Speaker
Yeah, cool. I like that. I like this idea of you can think of it as a craft that maybe we've forgotten how to do well or maybe, maybe the same kind of thing. Maybe there's, you know.
00:15:42
Speaker
plenty of people today that are good fishers, just because like, just know how to fish and know how to do agriculture, for example, because there's just so many people on the earth. But as a whole, culturally, we can have certain things that become less emphasized or something that the average person is kind of worse at doing or not able to think about. And, you know, I don't want to speak for the averages in ancient Greece and
00:16:05
Speaker
ancient Rome because I don't know how much Stoicism the average person would be doing, but certainly as a whole, we're worse at these crafts than the people we're reading about, than the Epictetus and the Marcus Aureliuses that we're reading from, the average person today, and they have something to learn in that respect.
Ancient Philosophy as Mental Models
00:16:25
Speaker
Moving on to the next one, another argument I had is that one reason that we might study ancient philosophy is just this view that we might even agree that it's dated.
00:16:33
Speaker
but then still think we have something to learn from it. So this idea of like, well, if I'm a skier today, I might have something to learn from an ancient ski, an old skier, an ancient, but, you know, a hundred years ago, there might be something I have to learn from watching an athlete from a period before mine, even if we're better today. And I've called this philosophy professor of mine called this, you know, the kind of mining for diamonds argument. Nadia is like, there's going to be a lot of dirt.
00:16:57
Speaker
But every once in a while when you're going to find a diamond and then it's okay digging through a lot of dirt to find a diamond. So if you read something by the Stoics and you're like, well, clearly this is not how... I think about this a lot when I think of maybe if you read some ancient science, for example, you're like, well, these people are clearly misunderstanding some things that we get now, the physical biology in particular, these kind of particular things.
00:17:25
Speaker
But every once in a while there's kind of an approach or an insight or some sort of perspective that's worthwhile. One of those diamonds, I want to say that I think ancient philosophy provides even if it's wrong.
00:17:36
Speaker
And even if you're the kind of person who's like, I'm just going to read contemporary psychology of happiness, or I'm just going to do like study contemporary ethics. I don't need anything for this. Even if there's that a diamond that I think angel philosophy provides is that they often use stories or metaphors or these kinds of analogies that create mental models. Bear with me, but this is, this is, I think the diamond in a thought that I just had.
00:18:02
Speaker
a couple of weeks ago. But in my job now, I do a lot of design thinking. Design thinking is about creating objects or services for people. And when you're creating a service or an app or a piece of technology, you think about a mental model that that person is going to interact with that object with. And what a mental model is, is it's how the user thinks about what they're interacting with.
00:18:29
Speaker
It doesn't actually matter if the mental model is accurate. Let's say I'm on my iPhone and I am using my finger to scroll through. The mental model that it's providing me is that the phone is kind of like a book or a page. I'm scrolling from one page to another as I scroll through.
00:18:47
Speaker
And I'm able to navigate that really easily and successfully because I understand how pages work. It's a helpful mental model. It doesn't matter the actual bits and bytes or the electricity of how that, you know, the information architecture of how that is happening. What matters is that I have a mental model of how my phone works. I scroll through my phone because I want to achieve something and that thing is achieved.
00:19:12
Speaker
So there's me as the user, there's the end state, and then there's this black box in the middle, which is mediated by how I think about it. And it doesn't really matter if the mental model is accurate to that middle. What matters is that it's an effective way of going from what I want to get to getting it. And I think about that ancient philosophy provides these really
00:19:33
Speaker
Beautiful mental models for the philosophy of mind or how how we think about action how we think about consciousness I think I've even like stoicism this idea of you know impression ascends impulse whether or not whether or not
00:19:50
Speaker
complex contemporary neuroscience agrees with this model or not. It is a model that tends to make, that helps me conceptualize the way I interact with the world and helps me interact with that world better. I think about Plato's idea of the soul is being divided into parts. One is reason, one is this like spirited part and one is this kind of appetite, this desire part and how reason has to control the spirit and the appetite.
00:20:15
Speaker
And again, that's just a way to kind of conceptualize or frame my own experience when I'm feeling split between two paths, when I'm feeling really conflicted about something. It's a mental model to put my own conscious experience in. And that is, I think those are beautiful, creative things that we want to preserve and helpful creative tools. They're diamonds that are valuable regardless of if they're
00:20:43
Speaker
Accurate the scientific level. So there there was a lot to that. But yeah, what do you think? Oh, I think something like that's definitely right I mean another way to say this that philosophy is harder to make sustained progress in than some Scientific field. So if you're a scientist having flogist on as a mental model is probably not helpful But if you're coming to the project of how does one live
00:21:12
Speaker
understanding a variety of different approaches to that question, thinking through how people debated that in the past and taking advantage of traditions that have sort of internalized those debates is something that is going to be more useful. I think in a part that just suggests
00:21:36
Speaker
It's more useful because it's harder to make those certified advances than in some other fields. So what you mean is like in science, there could be this giant paradigm shift and then the previous paradigm doesn't yield any benefit. Well, you're not really getting that paradigm shift and that's what you mean?
00:22:00
Speaker
I suppose if you wanted to push this argument, the obvious counter argument is, well, why don't more skiers mine for diamonds? Why don't more scientists mine for diamonds? And I think one answer for that is just that those fields, it's easier to judge when you've made progress. And in some sense, it might be easier to actually make progress.
00:22:26
Speaker
Yeah, this idea that, I mean, why is, I never thought of that, that's a great point, this idea, why is philosophy the kind of thing that you would mind for diamonds in, where you don't have philosophy, you don't have scientists going over and reading old science, you know, ancient scientists hoping, wow, I just, I'm just looking for that little spark of inspiration I need to make this breakthrough in quantum mechanics.
00:22:48
Speaker
Although maybe they could be doing that a little bit more than they are. Yeah, I think you see that you do see it in sciences and you see it in sciences that are more difficult. So I think, or I shouldn't say more difficult. That's not exactly what I mean. Maybe it's something like harder to get real world feedback. So more theoretical sciences, like many people doing building evolutionary models, my sense is that a non-trivial amount of them do in fact read Darwin.
00:23:18
Speaker
Cool. Okay. And part of that is just because maybe they're not like the physicists who can run a test and quickly determine whether the hypothesis is correct and that there is some value in thinking about how Darwin thought about its natural selection. And, you know, he still weighs in on contemporary debates in the same sense that many ancient philosophers are going to weigh in contemporary debates about how best to live.
00:23:42
Speaker
Yeah, great. Interesting. Yeah. So there's that real, I feel like that there's that real, that kind of type delineation that we keep hitting up against, which is like, there is this difference. And one of those differences you made is that kind of re real world correspondence. Like, like a scientist is just saying, not just saying something a scientist might do is I wonder what happens when I combine this drug with this other drug, or I do it in this kind of use case.
00:24:09
Speaker
And that's not the thing where you need to go back and think about the philosophy of science. It's something where you need to just go and run the physical experiment out in the world. And so with these kind of more theoretical pursuits, it is harder for
00:24:26
Speaker
something to be definitively useless or definitively for, for even an old perspective to be definitively kind of version one. And we have version three now, so we don't need version one.
Inspirational Value of Ancient Philosophy
00:24:42
Speaker
The last argument I made, so first argument is, you know, well, we should do this because we should study ancient philosophy because people aren't really doing that kind of thing anymore, or we have this great resource. Another is, look, even if, even if it's wrong, there's some value here that can be found. And the third thing that I, the third argument I had is that, you know, if we think about the skiing metaphor,
00:25:05
Speaker
You know, when, when you grow up wanting to be an athlete, I know in my own, maybe, you know, maybe growing up in Canada, maybe hockey players don't copy Wayne Gretzky when they get good. They might still, that might not be enough of a jump, but they certainly know who Wayne Gretzky is when they're kids. They certainly watch old people, boxers, certainly know who Muhammad Ali is and things like this. And there's this kind of inspirational reason, this, what I would call the protracted argument.
00:25:32
Speaker
Protraptic is that was the ancient Greek term for turning somebody towards somebody something inspiring them to take up philosophy and so there's this idea that If we think of the project of living well that project of philosophy as a way of life Well, maybe I could learn from more from contemporary people. I I don't necessarily agree with that but even if you could there is this value of
00:25:55
Speaker
being inspired by whether it was the innovation that the ancient philosophers made coming up with some of these positions. We have no evidence that anybody had before, just this pure kind of
00:26:12
Speaker
inspiration, this creative act that was occurring, whether it's the kind of biographical features that excite people of Marcus Aurelius. A lot of people love Marcus Aurelius because of his pivotal role in the Roman Empire, learning about the fact that Epictetus was a slave or something like this, this kind of inspirational biographical aspect, or if it's just the way that it's written. I remember having this
00:26:37
Speaker
discussing with Massimo Pigliucci who's saying, you know, the reason people don't read Aristotle is just because he wrote like a textbook, right? People read the Stoics because these are, they're written in aphorisms or, you know, Seneca is just an amazing, amazing writer, for example.
00:26:54
Speaker
And so when you read it, even if it's a little bit worse, if it's presented or even if it's dated, even if it's old, and even if this contemporary stuff was better, even presuming that's right, there can still be this inspirational aspect to really well-written philosophy or really interesting historical context. And that inspires you to take up the project, how to live well. That inspires you to go then and read contemporary philosophers. Well, then that's a great reason.
00:27:20
Speaker
to study ancient philosophy, even if it's wrong, and even if there's no diamonds to find, if it can inspire you to take up the craft of living well, to live the examined life, well then there's a reason right there regardless. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the
00:27:39
Speaker
key reasons I return to ancient philosophies is that I do find it protracted. It has that motivating force and has had that force for people.
00:27:52
Speaker
throughout time. You could say a petraptic. You could also just say, I say a petraptic, but you know, normal people wouldn't, none ancient Greek philosophy nerds would be like, what are you talking about? But it just, it just pumps you up. That's what I mean. It's just like, you just, you just feel inspired and that's okay. Like, that's, that's like a legitimate reason to like something because it inspires you, right?
00:28:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think so, absolutely. There's a nice passage from Machiavelli, which touches on this, which I'll just read now. When evening comes, I go back home and go to my study. On the threshold, I take off my work clothes, covered in mud and filth, and put on the clothes an ambassador would wear. Decently dressed, I enter the ancient courts of rulers who have long since died. There I am warmly welcomed,
00:28:43
Speaker
and I feed on the only food I find nourishing and was born to save her. I am not ashamed to talk to them and to ask them to explain their actions. And they, out of kindness, answer me. For hours go by without my feeling any anxiety. I forget every worry. I am no longer afraid of poverty or frightened of death. I live entirely through them.
00:29:07
Speaker
And I love that passage because it captures almost a kind of communion you can have with these old people, these old sages, examples of the past, their thoughts, interact with them.
00:29:25
Speaker
That's, I think, both the fact that not only were they great artists, great examples, but there's a real sense in which you can commune with them and that experience is intrinsically worthwhile.
00:29:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's kind of a third, I mean, first of all, it's a beautiful passage. I haven't heard that before. I love that. I think anybody who's studied ancient philosophy or any history more generally will relate to the joy of that, this idea of, you know, you come home and I get to have conversation with really smart people.
00:29:57
Speaker
I think there's this third point or this fourth point emerging here which I'm kind of I realized I didn't write down which is this idea that sometimes it's just fun like sometimes it's just its own kind of joy right like I framed the conversation as well if you want to live great
00:30:15
Speaker
Why look to ancient people to do that, right? If you want to be a great skier, why would you look to the past, not to the future? And there's this other point here, which I guess you, in that, I tried to make some arguments of why it can be effective to live well. You know, whether that's you find a diamond in the rough there, whether it is the, it is, you know, better than you might expect, even though it's old.
00:30:40
Speaker
or that it can inspire you to work towards this. But there's just the fourth position of just like, well, what if you just want to enjoy yourself? What if you just want to partake in something that is in a way a really beautiful historical accident?
00:30:56
Speaker
It's not an accident because it was done on purpose. People preserve these works. But we're really lucky we have them. In some cases, we don't have them. We don't have the writings of a lot of people. So the people that we do have is kind of like, again, a historical luxury. And there's a kind of joy. I mean, you put that as communion. I really like that, a sense of community through time, a sense of community through time with other people who are exploring these really meaningful questions of how to live. That's kind of cool.
00:31:26
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. There's, yeah, I guess there's just a line, you know, I study ancient philosophy just cause I love it. That's all. And you gotta say so much else. Yeah. Okay. Conversation conversation over. And I think, I think you actually do see that just to go back to the skis analogy and a lot of performers, they will look to the ancient masters, top people from their field. Often they have a rich knowledge of the history of their field.
00:31:57
Speaker
maybe it doesn't even influence their play that much. It's just that they love whatever it is. And there's certainly something to that. Yeah, great. And then so what about you, Caleb? Any arguments for why to study ancient philosophy that we haven't hit on? Well, as we were talking, I feel like there's sort of a picture that's emerging for me, which is that
00:32:25
Speaker
Ancient philosophy is useful to study because although the study of a philosophy of life is knowledge-based, it is difficult to identify progress and difficult to render that progress cumulative over time.
00:32:53
Speaker
So I suppose one way to always argue against arguments from analogy is to point out differences. So I think in skiing, it's relatively easy to identify, at least compared with philosophy, easy to identify what makes a skier good, whether they are good at all. But perhaps that's just not so with philosophies of life.
00:33:20
Speaker
Moreover, when it comes to studying philosophy, there are so many other factors that can derail our individual lives, derail institutions, schools of philosophy, from considerations about politics, religion, personal advancement, that each of those, if we're thinking fundamentally about the project of being better people, are going to both make
00:33:50
Speaker
pushing up that linear line, if you will, difficult, but also make it much more likely that there are going to be periods where the opposite of progress occurs, which I do think you see in philosophy to some extent.
Balancing Ancient and Modern Insights
00:34:07
Speaker
So when we go back to
00:34:09
Speaker
the many ancient works. Well, you know, one of the things that you and I think is missing from a lot of academic philosophy is that focus on, say, philosophy of life. And so I think that's one picture that's sort of coming more into focus as we have this conversation.
00:34:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's, I think that's well put. I think that's compelling. Yeah, because you want to hold on to it being knowledge based, right? We don't want to fall into some sort of relativism, some sort of like pure art of like, well, I prefer this one to this other one. You know, I use those is I'm just I just kind of like it. And that's why I live my life like that. Or, you know, well, if you're utilitarian, you just kind of like that floats your boat. That's cool, too. We want to reject this. There needs to be wrong answers. There should be
00:34:58
Speaker
If there's a plurality of right answers, maybe, maybe not, but there needs to be wrong answers. There needs to be mistakes, false starts, bad moves here. But then we also, if it is knowledge-based, why is it the kind of thing that we can, why is it not the kind of thing that is like science where
00:35:19
Speaker
We just say, well, you don't need to read anything that wasn't, hasn't come out since the nineties, for example. And I think you've, you've provided some compelling picture. We're able to preserve. I think this is what I was trying to get at. We're able to preserve the knowledge base nature of it because we want to be committed to that. That's, that's one of the appeals to it. And it's also matters when you're living your life based on something, but then also justify why something that's knowledge based could be valuable, could have such value for something.
00:35:45
Speaker
originating 2,000 years ago. I think you've done a decent job of making an argument there. All right, decent. I'll take it. I don't want to go too strong. Another analogy that comes to mind is there's a book by a philosopher named Matthew Crawford called Living Outside of Your Head. That sounds wrong.
00:36:06
Speaker
It's very close to living outside of your head. The world outside your head. That's what it's called. Called the world outside of your head. And I didn't need to look that up, it just came to me. He has a chapter, although it took a while.
00:36:21
Speaker
chapter in that book on the art of creating organs, the musical instrument. And that's an interesting case here because when people create organs there, there are standards around what makes a good or bad organ.
00:36:36
Speaker
that might be clear to experts, but not the typical person. Much of the knowledge is tacit. It's communicated through organ makers, their apprentices, those apprentices' apprentices and so on. And because it's such a long-term artistic endeavor, you're making an organ to last for hundreds of years, it's the kind of thing that
00:37:02
Speaker
doesn't progress in a linear fashion. So, you know, he talks to organ makers who do study past masters who argue persuasively that some more recent example of organs tried to innovate and made mistakes that the past masters wouldn't have by using the wrong materials and so on. But also the fact that this is a progressive
00:37:27
Speaker
field, although they look at the past examples of successful organs, they also need to renovate those organs. They also can improve their craft. So I think that's an interesting example just because it's very practical hands-on craft that nonetheless
00:37:51
Speaker
that forces its practitioners to look into the past, to learn from the tradition, while also pushing that tradition forward. Yeah, and I mean, and to pull that back into philosophy, maybe this would be something like, all the kind of things I've been providing have been pretty binary, right? Either like,
00:38:10
Speaker
Angel philosophy is the best thing ever and nobody's been doing it since then. Or Angel philosophy is dirt, but if you look at it, you can find some diamonds. It's kind of extremes. And maybe it's the kind of thing where it's like, well, Angel philosophy has some problems that, but it did some kind of things right. And in the attempt to innovate, we've lost some of the things that it did right. And we've gained some of the gains, some other wrong things.
00:38:33
Speaker
And the right Oregon, the right set of skis or whatever metaphor you want is going to be the right combination of both of those. And people like us are kind of.
00:38:44
Speaker
with podcasts like this, trying to pull things in the other direction a little bit. One of those things might be that orientation towards philosophy as a way of life. One of those things might be, I think, a familiarity or a comfortableness with using arts. We haven't lost that in all philosophy, but certainly in analytic Western philosophy.
Conclusion and Invitation for Feedback
00:39:04
Speaker
And something maybe we've gained in contemporary philosophy is something like
00:39:09
Speaker
building on the knowledge of others explicitly so it becomes more of a project that people can build from. We see some of that in Age of Philosophy, but there was obviously not this way of writing. There's this intense focus on accuracy by breaking into silos. There is kind of a hyper specialization that allows more nuance than somebody who was expected to understand all of philosophy at the same time.
00:39:33
Speaker
I don't know, I'm trying to think of some benefits to the contemporary philosophy. But I really think that Oregon example is right. What makes it right is this kind of reverence for the certain things that the old masters, if you will, got right while also recognizing that there's progression and recognizing that they did get some things wrong instead of just being deferential to, oh, well, it can't ever get any better than
00:40:02
Speaker
you know, these 1700 organs which would seem to just be wrong. Right, right. So yeah, I think you can recognize that there's value, significant value in returning to these ancient orcs while also taking advantage of the best aspects of philosophy today or even more broadly, like, you know, modern culture today since
00:40:30
Speaker
that is going to positively and negatively influence, I think, how we construct our life philosophies, just as ancient culture did the same to, you know, the past examples. Yeah, cool. Excellent. Cool. Anything else?
00:40:49
Speaker
No, that's it for me. I mean, even just in this 45 minutes, I feel more inspired and secure in the value of angel philosophy that I did before. So I hope those listening feel the same way because it worked for me. Oh, maybe I'm not wasting my time. This makes sense.
00:41:07
Speaker
There is something valuable here, even if it's old. I always knew that, but again, based on that ancient philosophy value of being like, well, it has to be argument based. It has to, you have to kind of be able to reason to it. That's a paradigm of ancient philosophy that I really respect. And I feel like we got here, we got there and did a lot of more shaping of the kind of thing ancient philosophy is or the kind of thing philosophy is as a craft.
00:41:34
Speaker
as a kind of a knowledge-based, but maybe not externally validated craft that makes it a bit messier than some of the hard sciences. I thought that was a fun discussion killed. Yeah, absolutely. As always, if you want to help us out, feel free to share these conversations with a friend.
00:41:56
Speaker
or send us a message. Now we're just at stoa at stoameditation.com. We got a very nice and thoughtful email this morning. And we read all of those. So if you have any additional thoughts on this topic, future guests, future discussion topics, as always, send us a note. Awesome. Thanks, Michael. Great.
00:42:20
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to get two meditations from me on stoic theory and practice a week, just two short emails on whatever I've been thinking about, as well as some of the best resources we found for practicing stoicism, check out stowletcher.com. It's completely free. You can sign up for it and then unsubscribe at any time as you wish.
00:42:50
Speaker
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 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
00:43:17
Speaker
stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback questions or recommendations. Until next time.