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2023 Wrapped (Episode 109)
572 Plays11 months ago
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Happy new year! Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations.
In this one, Caleb and Michael discuss their highlights from 2023 – one year of podcasting in public. Relive your favorite philosophical moments with them as they share the key insights from the year and shoutout guests.
And let us know what you think at stoameditation.com/survey.
(01:31) Stoic Psychology
(06:20) Stoicism Is Deep
(09:08) Thinking, Fast And Slow
(13:45) Voluntary Suffering
(22:17) Anger Sucks
(27:26) The Stoic God
(32:01) Randolph Nesse
(36:04) Julia Galef
(40:22) Chris Gill
(45:25) Greg Sadler
(48:09) Dana Gioia
(51:06) What's Next For Stoa Conversations
***
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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Yearly Review
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. And I'm Michael Trombley. And today for this episode, we're going to be doing a yearly review, calling out some of the lessons we've learned during hosting this podcast for essentially the first year. This podcast was just launched at the very end of last year. So it's been about a year now.
00:00:27
Speaker
And so we'll be focusing on some of those lessons and then thinking about what's going to be different, what sorts of things are going to experiment with next year and just have a general reflection on how these these conversations are going.
00:00:40
Speaker
Yes, the first annual reflection. I mean, this has been great to be, I know we both had a lot of fun doing this over
Reflections and Key Lessons
00:00:47
Speaker
the last year. So looking back on some of our favorite conversations, some of the key ideas that have come up, things that we've learned, really kind of recapping, I guess what we've gotten out of a year of chatting about stoicism, both with each other and with our guests.
00:01:03
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. This has been, is one of the highlights of working on Stowe as I get to chat with Michael regularly. And then also chat with guests who are interested in Stowe's related topics and learn from them, learn from Michael. And so there's, I think there's, I wrote down a number of things and I expect I won't be able to hit them all in terms of lessons and ideas for, for next year. Yeah. Let's jump into it.
Stoic Psychology and Episode 23
00:01:31
Speaker
Cool. Well, let's start with some general lessons or framings. I can kick it off with our episode 23 on Stoic psychology. And I think that was one of the best explanations of the sort of Epictetus's four step.
00:01:53
Speaker
process for thinking about what does it mean when the Stoics are talking about impressions? What does it assent this faculty of assent or faculty of judgment? What does that really amount to? And I think if you go back to that episode and understand it deeply, a number of
00:02:12
Speaker
Other ideas in stoicism are unlocked, you know, like what does it mean when the stoic say to focus on what's under your control? Well, if you have this picture of Ascent and then you get you know, you get some sensation you reflect on it you bring to bear your past experience past judgments and then you Decide to agree with it or not. That's that step of ascent and then finally move to impulse
00:02:35
Speaker
the motivation for action. You know, if you have those four steps in mind, then you can ensure that, well, what's up to me? It's those last three steps, especially thinking about what I'm bringing to bear when I reflect on an impression and then making that decision to accept or reject an impression. And I think that's
00:02:56
Speaker
that picture highlights what are you essentially for Epictetus in a way that I think is really useful and probably something I'm going to keep on using as, I think, a useful way to explain some of these questions. Instead of thinking about, well, you've got control, you've got things you can influence,
00:03:16
Speaker
Now the focus is really on, you know, what's going on in your mind fundamentally? What are you? And thinking about these, that your ability to reflect, to make judgments and so on, I think is one of the best ways to, at least I've seen, to explain some of these issues.
00:03:37
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. And I love that
Ethics in Epictetus's Teachings
00:03:39
Speaker
Bictetus for that. I think he's so good at turning the focus onto that. And one of the cool things about stoicism is that constant connection between the psychological and the ethical. So you might say, well, what is this four-step process? What does this matter in light of contemporary psychology? Or what do I care about this descriptive process if probably it's going to look a little bit different?
00:04:04
Speaker
Because it has these ethical implications, right? When Epictetus says things like, you know, somebody else cannot harm you. That's because he's talking about yourself as this, this part of your brain, this part of your mind, your soul, whatever you want to call it that reflects and that makes judgments and makes decisions about, about, or really just the sense to certain impressions is true or not after reflection.
00:04:27
Speaker
And when you think of yourself like that, there's a whole host of ethical implications and a lot of the other stoic claims make a lot more sense. And so I think, I think really clarifying what the stoics thought in that psychological sense, as you said, force that process impression.
00:04:44
Speaker
reflecting on the impression, ascending to it, and then feeling motivation after that, your impulse, and recognizing that those last three are the things that are up to you, the things that we need to cultivate the ultimate goal of stoicism. When Epictetus says, you know, stoicism is about making good use of your impressions, what he means is perfecting that three-part process. And I think that's just to say that there's
00:05:11
Speaker
clarifying the psychology is important because the psychology is really tightly connected to the ethics. It has a lot of practical implications for how we should live. So I think that's worth doing and I'm glad that was something that has been really helpful for me. So I'm glad you also got to kind of on a bit of the Epictetus bandwagon, at least in the way that he focuses his, that's not a new thing to Epictetus, but he definitely brings the emphasis in that area.
00:05:35
Speaker
Right, right, yeah. And another thing, Epictetus is so good at, and of course, the other Roman Stoics are keeping these stoic principles in mind. And there's always a question, what ones are you going to keep top of mind? Where's that focus going to be? And for Epictetus, it's always, what is your own?
00:05:53
Speaker
what's ultimately up to you and then thinking about how can you manage impressions well. And I think that moving those up in their salience or in making the principles that are closer, more nearby for me has been useful. Oh, that's great. That makes me really happy to hear. Yeah, absolutely. Well, what you got, let's see, we can ping pong some of these.
00:06:20
Speaker
Yeah, we're gonna go back and forth. I mean, I think for me, one of the big things that I took out of this...
Continuous Learning in Stoicism
00:06:24
Speaker
I mean, I'm gonna start with just a broader reflection on how deep stoicism is. And I know this sounds obvious, but...
00:06:34
Speaker
For those that are listening, maybe do or do not know, I have my PhD in philosophy and I focused on stoicism. I did 11 years of university on philosophy and seven of those were focused on stoicism and I still learned just so much doing this podcast.
00:06:52
Speaker
If you can't explain something clearly, then you don't understand it. And I think the requirement to have these concise episodes on different topics really pushed my understanding. And that's great for me, but I think the takeaway for people listening is this idea of just like any other craft, the amount of depth there is. I also do Brazilian jitsu, I'm a black belt in that, and I've learned a lot since getting my black belt. And I think it's the same thing here in
00:07:15
Speaker
stoicism which is I don't mean that to sound intimidating but I mean there's a kind of a joy of continual improvement and there really isn't a kind of ceiling you bump up against especially when you're trying to practice it instead of just trying to memorize it or recite the stoic principles when you're trying to practice them so
00:07:33
Speaker
I think just that, an appreciation for how much depth there is, even in stoicism, that's not even, you know, we've chatted about Buddhism, existentialism, contemporary psychology, without even breaking into these other areas, there's just so much depth here. And that's cool, I kind of reignited my passion for stoicism in a way, and like, at least my intellectual passion for how much there is to understand.
00:07:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's such a great point. You know, reality is astonishingly complex or reality has an incredible amount of detail that just seems true and is especially true or maybe not especially true, but it's certainly true when it comes to philosophies like.
00:08:12
Speaker
stoicism, thinking about, okay, we have these broad picture ideas, we have these different systems. Now, how do you apply them? How do you think about applying these ideas to procrastination? And that requires thinking about some of these concrete details, but also going back to the ancient texts and thinking about how can you
00:08:33
Speaker
think through those in a clear, simple way. And I think that brings to mind Musonius Rufus' first lecture in his discourses, which is all about making arguments especially simple, clear, taking what's essential from them, putting it in your own words to ensure that you've internalized it and understood it, which is a large part of what you do in these conversations. So to some extent, I think listeners are getting the results of a process.
00:08:59
Speaker
that we've all benefited from by having to do that work, clarify our thoughts, decide what we're going to be talking about and so on. Yeah, totally. Nice. Well, one other one conversation I enjoyed a specific one that I want to call out here too, is Episode 79, which is on the book thinking fast and slow.
Intuition and Decision-Making
00:09:19
Speaker
And I think so I want
00:09:21
Speaker
I think generally that's a useful framework. It's a good connection to some ideas in contemporary psychology, behavioral economics, and a useful framing. But for me, one of my main takeaways from that conversation is that you have this question, how do you manage impressions well?
00:09:44
Speaker
And that thinking fast versus slow framework highlights the issue of when are you sort of training your intuition, your automatic responses, and sort of trusting some of these more, you can almost think of them as almost like more basic processes.
00:10:05
Speaker
versus when do you want to deliberate about decisions? When do you want to pause and really take that time to think through in a rational and calm manner? And I think we gave some heuristics, some ideas about when you can distinguish between those different circumstances in that conversation.
00:10:30
Speaker
For instance, if you're learning a physical sport or something like that, then in a sense, you're training your intuition. You definitely want to step back and deliberate about your training, but when you're in the moment, you're making movements, getting quick feedback, and it's less of a matter of verbal or symbolic thoughts. And of course, there are other fields where you just don't have that kind of
00:10:50
Speaker
feedback, you don't have that kind of connection with the environment and that's where you're going to need to step back and deliberate. And I think it is an interesting question, you know, how do you manage that? When is deliberation useful? When should you realize your intuitions have become totally warped and how do you work through that? So I think that's maybe an example of still at the abstract level, but when you get into concrete decisions, like a specific relationship, intuitions about a relationship, or thinking about business decisions,
00:11:17
Speaker
Then you can see, okay, we have this general framework for managing impressions well. Now, how do I do that? How do I think about the processes that I have for handling impressions? So that conversation was a good spark for those general questions for me.
00:11:38
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, I agree. It's also an interesting conversation for those that haven't listened to it yet, or those that have. Because as you said, it's crowded in contemporary psychology. And there's a lot of similarities there with stoicism, a lot of ways that thinking about stoicism deeply has made the contemporary psychology pretty intuitive, actually. They're both trying to describe the same thing, essentially, as this experience of being human.
00:12:06
Speaker
And yeah, that, that question of, well, I guess the way I was thinking, what you were saying, Kelly, was that.
00:12:12
Speaker
We have a process for thinking fast well, and we have a process for thinking slow well, and you probably want to separate those two things. Often when we think about thinking well, it's always this thinking slow, like what do you do when you're sitting down, you have a piece of paper, you're making pros and cons list, you're chatting with your friend about it or you're deliberating. But as you said, what kind of processes or systems can you have for thinking fast well? I like how Epictetus talks about,
00:12:41
Speaker
Even using, relying on externals to support this. Like Epictetus says, if you're having trouble being angry, don't put yourself in the kind of situations that make you angry, right? If you're having trouble with temptation, remove the kinds of things that you're tempted towards. And so it's not like we just do these, it's not like we can think fast.
00:13:02
Speaker
Well, in a vacuum from the start, it's like sometimes progress means constructing an environment that supports us to do that. So if I'm the kind of person that's quick to anger, maybe I don't get into so many debates with people or so many arguments with people. I remove myself from those kinds of situations when I notice I start to get angry. And that's just to give myself whatever step up I can as I try to practice this thinking fast and this kind of, I guess, these knee jerk responses to situations.
00:13:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's what I'll put. The example of using externals, whether it's thinking about your environment or maybe even reward structuring your habits in a particular way is a good one. All right. What do you got?
Voluntary Suffering and Character
00:13:45
Speaker
Cool. Another episode I want to call attention to, well, one that I really enjoyed and learned a lot from was our discussion on voluntary suffering. This is episode 37.
00:13:55
Speaker
I think it's important to make stoicism and body, especially when you're practicing it. It's important to recognize the relationship between your body and your character. And so voluntary suffering, that's the question of, you know, should I undergo physical hardship to improve my character? Is that necessary? Is it even helpful or is it actively harmful? The silly example is something like, you know, cold showers. I don't have a silly example. What's the stereotypical example?
00:14:25
Speaker
Do cold showers have something to teach me about self-control and courage and discipline, or am I confusing something that's not helpful as a way to avoid doing the real hard work? What we came to in that episode, we came to a middle ground example, this idea of, look, there's a lot that physical hardship can teach you quite a bit.
00:14:50
Speaker
It's not necessary. You can improve yourself without physical hardships. And it can actually be harmful if you do confuse it with progress. But Missonius Rufus talks about this. Seneca talks about this. People who are used to physical hardship, there's a way that you can
00:15:08
Speaker
train that, use that to your advantage. And they seem to be more inclined to a stoic life, probably just because they've learned a couple lessons about what they do and don't need to be happy already. People have lived difficult lives. Well, and my difficulty, I mean, in terms of like physical, be that labor or having to go without external goods, you know, sleep and live in uncomfortable situations, you learn quite a bit about what, what you need to be happy and what you don't.
00:15:36
Speaker
And I like that, that lesson for me there was just the kind of intelligent middle ground here where you don't want to slip into this asceticism where you kind of fetishize or put physical suffering on a pedestal, but you also don't want to act like the body is irrelevant and the body isn't a way to learn about the world and learn about what it means to be in the world.
00:15:55
Speaker
Um, and so that's just that encouragement towards a healthy middle ground, uh, was I think the right answer. And it was nice to see that the Stoics had landed there and had thought carefully about it. When I think the, at least the, the non-reflective answer is they get the, or the, you know, the, I don't want to say maybe broicism answer to this is something like.
00:16:19
Speaker
You know, I'm just, I'm a stoic, I take cold showers and I, um, I don't know, I sleep on the floor or something, which people don't tend to do. It's mostly just the cold showers. So happy to see that middle ground. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I think it's also sometimes the traditional stoics and debates with other schools, it seems like they are.
00:16:41
Speaker
one takeaway from those debates is they make the philosophy seem more almost disembodied. It's more focused just on these rational parts of us and less on the material. It's all about thinking perhaps as a reaction to other schools like the Epicureans who just focus on pleasure and overrate the body. And you can even see some amount of
00:17:06
Speaker
uh, negative attitudes about the body and Marcus Aurelius, you know, it's just a little corpse walking around those sorts of lines. But that, that picture that, you know, I think, you know, we are embodied minds and we can use that to, to our advantage as a, as a good one. And that's means we need to ensure that one doesn't make the mistake of valuing one's body, bodily experiences, pleasure, whatever too highly, nonetheless,
00:17:34
Speaker
It's a reality one needs to deal with, right? Socialism is all about embracing reality things as they are, and we are embodied beings. We have bodies. That's how we interact with the world in this number of opportunities that opens up. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there, Caleb. As someone who's an athlete, it makes me uncomfortable. I don't say uncomfortable.
00:18:01
Speaker
But just this focus on the rational, the focus on, you know, often in stoicism, you can feel like it's like a brain in a vat, you know, and the sox would describe it like that, right? Like you're this, you're a piece of God in a body, but you're not your body.
00:18:16
Speaker
But even though you're not your body, you're still embodied, as you said, and there's still important things to learn about that and your relationship with your body and pleasure and pain, you know, suffering and excess and the pleasure that comes with that as well. There's things to learn about the world from being embodied. We should not remove ourselves from that.
00:18:42
Speaker
even though we keep in mind that at the end of the day what matters is that perfecting that character or working on that character more than achieving pleasure at the expense of that character.
00:18:52
Speaker
Right, right. I think this point also brings to mind what you mentioned is there's so much depth to stoicism. And I think one way to see that is when you're trying to get a grasp on a philosophy, initially you'll take on some of its most controversial aspects or those aspects that differentiate it from others. So now we're talking about, you know, this sort of brain in a vat type idea. You just get impressions, you handle them, send them on their way out. That's it. That's all you got to do.
00:19:18
Speaker
Then that is an essential aspect of Stoicism, of course, but once you get into these ideas about how do you think of managing indifference well, what's the nature of indifference, or perhaps even ideas about
00:19:33
Speaker
You know, you have a fragment of God in you. What does that mean? You know, how can you make sense of that in the modern sense? So you have these ideas of order, pro-sociality. Well, you know, how's that reflected in the body you happen to have and the environments you happen to have? And, you know, I think those questions open up.
00:19:49
Speaker
whole different ways of interacting with the world and sort of continuing pushing on that, you know, understanding of stoic theory, of course, but also how you think about making your decisions, how you think about things from voluntary suffering, to exercise, to interacting with others.
00:20:11
Speaker
Yeah, and I mean, I want to call out the listeners now. If you're listening to this episode, it's probably not your first episode. If it is, I recommend stopping here, going to listening to some and then coming back. But people who've been with us for a while, I appreciate you coming on that journey to get some of that depth.
00:20:31
Speaker
or increase that depth. I've tried to teach stoicism in university before, you know, you drop in and do like a guest lecture on it, and you get basically half the room. You lean with the controversial claims you said because you're trying to summarize it. Half the room goes, it almost feels like it bounces off their intuition. Half the room goes, well, that sounds really cool. I want to learn more about that. And then half is like, that sounds really stupid. That is not a good way to live. The stoics are dumb. How does that make any sense?
00:21:00
Speaker
And it almost feels like it bounces, it just bounces off their intuition. But the people, you know, the people that think it's cool, they go and they learn about it more and they get this depth. But the people that don't think it's for them or they don't think it's appealing, I wish there was some way. I know there is something appealing in that depth. There is something charitable in that depth, but it's really hard to get to if you bounce off it at the start. You know, this idea of someone would say like, well, I love my, I love passionate experience, right? Or I love
00:21:29
Speaker
The things I love most of my life are like the sadness I felt with my family or the connections I felt to others and to say, you know, to offer me a philosophy where I kiss my child on the forehead and remind myself that they're going to die before I go to bed. Like that's gross. And there's that immediate, there's that immediate knee jerk reaction, that immediate rejection. Although I think real stoicism has something more nuanced to say than that.
00:21:53
Speaker
I don't know. I think the point there is, I mean, as you said, there's some nuance there, and I'm grateful to get to that point, and I think that it would appeal to a lot more people if there was some way to skip that step. I guess there was some way to just give it straight as it really is instead of those talking points, instead of those controversial claims. That would be great, but that's not the world we live in, right? Yeah, absolutely.
00:22:19
Speaker
Nice. Well, one other lesson I wanted to bring out is we have several episodes on anger and related topics.
Stoicism's View on Anger
00:22:27
Speaker
The central one is why anger is always bad, episode 53. And then we have some later topics on ideas that are connected to anger, like forgiveness and even one on punishment. And I have a conversation with Jeremy Reed on anger and forgiveness as well.
00:22:45
Speaker
And I think one of the central themes of this year has just been that reminder of one of the Stoics radical views, which is that anger is always bad. It's that desire that others suffer. That desire for vengeance for others' unhappiness is a twisted one. And it's one of those cases where socialism gives a relatively simple
00:23:14
Speaker
target to aim for. You know, as Epictetus says, try to go a whole day without experiencing anger, then two days, then three, and so on. And if you can make it to 30, then make a sacrifice to the gods and Thanksgiving. And I think that is one of Stoicism's central themes. It's one that essentially has to do with being a social animal.
00:23:41
Speaker
And perhaps it's one that's underrated by a lot of people interested in Stoics. You know, a lot of people come to Stoicism because it's useful in managing anxiety, else build resilience. But we've seen a number of people come to Stoicism because of anger issues, but certainly lower on the list.
00:23:59
Speaker
But if you look at how we interact with others, if you look at a lot of personal problems, then I think anger is one of the central issues of our age, indeed, perhaps of all ages. So that's a place that I think was a good theme, good reminder to keep these ideas to principles of how anger top of mind.
00:24:23
Speaker
Yeah, that is great. That is a theme we had. We chatted a lot about anger this year. I was thinking about what you're talking about, what makes anger, I guess, interesting as an emotion or unique as an emotion. I think one thing is that it's rather motivating. So you can create a kind of, you know, this kind of cold-blooded vengeance. It can be a kind of thing that can motivate action long after the precipitating event. And you can kind of construct the life built around anger.
00:24:49
Speaker
I also think it can feel quite good. I think it's probably the most destructive emotion that can feel the most righteous in terms of like an intoxicating, empowering, but also morally correct. You know, this person deserves this. I am enacting cosmic justice or just personal justice upon them. And then I think it's also one of the most nuanced ones in terms of
00:25:16
Speaker
We just talked about shallow stoicism, controversial claims, and deeper stoicism. If you said you should never be angry, half of people would agree and half of people would say, that's ridiculous. I should be angry about things that deserve anger.
00:25:34
Speaker
And so you have to kind of get over it. You have to go deep, which we did about what deserves anger and what doesn't, but we also, you also want to not skip that step. And because most people feel angry because they value themselves or others and they think somebody is harmed themselves or others. And what you don't want to do is not value yourself or others, right? You don't want to say,
00:25:55
Speaker
Someone who harms me, it's not a big deal. It doesn't matter. Somebody who insults my friends, who my friends don't deserve to get stood up for. You don't want to do that. You don't want to make that play where you just become apathetic about the people you care about.
00:26:12
Speaker
or you become, I don't know, you lose your confidence or you lose your self-esteem. Instead, you need to make the play where you really interrogate the cause of anger, which as you said is the sense that somebody has been harmed and that somebody deserves punishment for that. Those are the claims you want to interrogate is that something's been harmed, something bad has happened, and somebody deserves punishment, not this claim that
00:26:36
Speaker
you or the people you care about have value and matter because that's one way to get around anger is a kind of I guess a nihilistic defeatism and we don't want that either, right?
00:26:48
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, there's, if you think of anger, that response that you've been wronged, that wrong has resulted in a harm and that harm requires some form of vengeance. And it's essential to tease apart the idea that you may or may not have been wronged from this idea of harm. And you can think that other people have wronged you, that requires a response.
00:27:14
Speaker
But that's not a response that's done out of anger, right? It's not a response that is infused with the desire for vindictiveness. Well, what else you got? So last lesson for me this year, we had
00:27:33
Speaker
So what I've learned is that I want to think more deeply about a stoic God.
Spirituality in Stoic Ethics
00:27:38
Speaker
That's pretty much my takeaway. I think we had some some discussions on stoic religion. And I think calling out my own bias. I am not a religious person. I've never been a religious person. I think I came to stoicism as a.
00:27:58
Speaker
Um, I would say either an atheist or agnostic. I've never really thought too carefully about it. Um, and I viewed stoic, stoic ethics as being entirely detached from religion. And I think in ways it is, I think that stoicism is not a.
00:28:13
Speaker
monotheists or it's not a Judeo-Christian religion. The goddess does not resemble a Christian god and what attracted me to stoicism is many ways in which it's different than religion and that it encourages questioning and encourages counter-argument and debate. I'm sure some aspects of religion or some people who are religious do that and that's great but in religion there always seem to be this component of faith
00:28:42
Speaker
when you got down to the root of it, there was always faith instead of just an argument, right? And so I understood the Stoic God in theory, but it never made up part of my practice. It never made up a part of my relationship with Stoic ethic, my personal relationship with Stoic ethics. And I think in some of our conversations, the Stoic God came up, particular conversations, Chris Fisher from Stoicism on Fire stands out to me.
00:29:07
Speaker
And it makes me, it made me question my, basically my way of ignoring the Stoic God in my practice and then making me feel that either, look, I either need to incorporate this and really think about what the Stoics mean by God here because they don't mean what
00:29:23
Speaker
most of us grew up thinking of when we thought of God. They mean something different, although something maybe superior to humans and higher, and then either reconcile that into my ethics, my practice, and take on some sort of, I guess, spiritual dimension, or
00:29:39
Speaker
figure out how i can comfortably ground it without the need for that but view it as a maybe a bigger problem to have stoic ethics without without the god than i might have thought before and that's still just a floating question for me but that's um i mean what a great thing is like getting getting pushed further in the way that i think about these things right yeah that's that's a good topic it's it's one night we've spoken about doing longer episodes on and just want to make sure we do it do it properly when we when you have one i was thinking
00:30:07
Speaker
We'll jump into this a little bit more, but we've also been thinking about doing shorter episodes, but maybe if we do a discussion on Stoic God, as the Stoic issue of the Stoic God, it should be a proper, you know, proper three-hour stomper or something like that. I hope you got a long car ride ahead of you. Yeah, it's such a big issue, but maybe not, no promises. But yeah, I think that's a...
00:30:29
Speaker
Certainly an important issue. I think if I think about those issues myself, I don't think one needs a Stoic god to make sense of Stoic ethics. I don't think there are any compelling arguments for that idea. But there still is this question.
00:30:49
Speaker
Is there some sense in which you can't speak about a stoic god even if it's not needed for the ethics? Because of course, maybe there's still a compelling reason to think there is this other dimension to the world.
00:31:04
Speaker
or all this thought of thinking about God, nature with a capital N, logos, order, is reflected in the way reality is. So I think that's a question that I'm still agnostic about and certainly want me to talk about more. Yeah, and a lot of this conversation has come back to this idea of depth.
00:31:28
Speaker
I don't expect us to get to the answer of it right away, or at least myself. You seem reasonably confident, which is encouraging, but just something I want to pay more attention to. I want to change my focus to include that question as more front and center than as before, where I think my focus was more on that kind of Epictetus psychology aspect.
00:31:48
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'd say, you know, that's, I think that's a great point to clarify. I think I'm competent about the questions about ethics and God, but have less confidence about some of those general questions about the stoic God to begin with. Well, I also want to say some, give some shout outs for some of these guests conversations.
00:32:06
Speaker
Uh, we had, um, so some of the most useful ones I'll just think, I think of three, uh, we can ping pong them again is I had a conversation with Randolph Nessie and he's a evolutionary psychiatrist, evolutionary psychologist. And I think he has a deep understanding, uh, powerful grasp on like the nature of emotions, especially when you're thinking about.
00:32:36
Speaker
What is the role of emotions in organisms like the ones we are to begin with? And some of these fundamental questions about why would we evolve as creatures that experience emotions? What's their role? And then with that understanding, what can we say about
00:32:55
Speaker
of the nature of bad emotions, good emotions, so called. And what purposes do some of these things that feel bad have? His book is titled Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. And that gives you some sense that
00:33:12
Speaker
these experiences like anxiety and so on, you know, they evolved for a reason or at least in tandem with systems that evolved for a reason. And that's something to keep in mind when you're thinking about, you know, adjusting your
00:33:30
Speaker
your emotional makeup or reducing anxiety, perhaps, you know, there's always that question, feelings of anxiety, are they serving towards the experience of anxiety as a full overwhelming emotion or can they be channeled into experiences of caution? You know, a cool caution that promotes prudence.
00:33:55
Speaker
And I think that conversation can help, or at least I hope, and at least Nessie's work in general is certainly useful for thinking about the nature of emotion and wading through some of those questions. Yeah, that's great. I mean, it makes me think of, you know, there's this tendency to, oh, bear with me through this clumsy metaphor.
00:34:19
Speaker
But I'm imagining almost a sort of radar system that you've programmed to pick up something. So maybe the radar system picks up if something flies overhead. And so that radar picking it up, that's the anxiety. You've programmed your core beliefs of the programming.
00:34:36
Speaker
You know, if someone judges me or thinks I'm silly, then I should be anxious about that. And then I think what can happen if you are averse to the negative feeling of being anxious is you can kind of turn off the radar system. You can ignore the signal. And that is like a, I think kind of a harmful experience because it numbs you to your emotions and it also
00:35:00
Speaker
as you said like doesn't doesn't give you access to the good reasons for bad feelings which is that you want this radar system to warn you to help you navigate the world right and what the stoic ask instead is for us to reprogram what pops up on the screen you know what asks us to reprogram what is in our radar so maybe not you know
00:35:19
Speaker
the mockery of others, maybe that doesn't pop up and cause anxiety, or maybe it pops up something else, kind of a gentle caution or something like this. But it asks us to reprogram the machine rather than to ignore the machine, I would say.
00:35:35
Speaker
at least that's the way that I think about it. And I think that that's a really helpful question to ask rather than this kind of numbing of, well, because a lot of people come to stoicism for that reason is I don't like to feel bad. How can I not feel bad? Well, don't feel anything about anything that doesn't have to do with what's in your control. Okay, thanks stoicism. And then that's not really, that's not really a healthy answer, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Nice. Who do you want to mention?
00:36:04
Speaker
I mean, connecting to the same theme, I had a great conversation with Julia Galef on the Scout mindset. And I think one thing that you hit in your conversation with Nessie was this idea of evolutionary reasons for bad feelings. And the conversation with Julia Galef was about two different ways of thinking, what she called the soldier mindset and the Scout mindset. The Scout mindset I think is roughly a stoic one as you try to understand the world as it is.
00:36:33
Speaker
And the soldier mindset is about attempting to, I guess, create the worldview that is the most motivating for your Cole. Right? So if you want to.
00:36:48
Speaker
know, if you want to win the Olympics, the soldier mindset is to say, well, I'm the best there was nobody can stop me. Nobody can defeat me. And that you did the view there is that while that's kind of motivating you, it's pumping you up, it's stopping you from feeling anxiety, like we just talked about. And the scout mindset is to say, well, you know, if I if I do my best, I probably have a shot to come top eight. As long as you know, I don't get injured beforehand. It's kind of an accurate assessment. And
00:37:15
Speaker
There's obviously these, what I like about this is this recognition that people are not Stoics for a reason, right? At least what they think is a good reason. They're not Stoics
00:37:27
Speaker
And when I say not still, I mean this idea of why don't you live in accordance with nature? Why doesn't everybody just try to see the world the way it really is? And the answer is that because they think it's better not to. They think there's benefits to seeing the world maybe with rose-colored glasses, maybe seeing the world with a bit of overconfidence.
00:37:49
Speaker
maybe seeing a world where you don't set yourself up for disappointment because you don't entertain the fact that maybe you could try this thing, you could make this change. There's a lot of protective mechanisms that go into the soldier mindset. I think A, there's some sympathy when you understand why you're not living in accordance with nature. It can help you understand why you fail to do that, to have a scout mindset sometimes.
00:38:15
Speaker
And then B, Julia just makes a lot of arguments for why, you know, that's all legitimate, but at the end of the day, the soldier mindset is just a lot less effective than most people think it to be. It doesn't achieve the goals you think it achieves. And at the end of the day, right, going back to that, you know, win the Olympics example, if you want to win the Olympics, the scout mindset is a lot more helpful than the soldier mindset. So the soldier mindset doesn't achieve the goal you want it to, or you claim that it will.
00:38:46
Speaker
So A, I mean, an interesting, an interesting argument, but B, I think importantly calling out, as I said before, the fact that people, people have reasons for not living in accordance with nature or not seeing things the way they are. And you have to kind of acknowledge those reasons, I guess, ultimately to counter them or to move past them.
00:39:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good point. I think you also have the sort of, you know, what's the, some nice people talk about the proximate cause for people holding their beliefs and others might talk about what's a distal cause, which are basically fancy words for, you know, what's the immediate cause versus what's that larger term structural cause for a given thing. And Julia Galef is good at
00:39:31
Speaker
pointing out, you know, a lot of people, they have the immediate cause for them having this soldier mindset is just what you say, this judgment, that it's a good thing for them. But you can also think about ourselves as these evolved beings who have
00:39:47
Speaker
reasoning faculties that aren't perfect. And maybe in certain situations, the kind of person who has that soldier mindset is going to be more evolutionary to the fit or whatever, or there are certain kinds of cognitive biases are going to be favored and having that, that perspective, that larger perspective about how might our
00:40:08
Speaker
reasoning systems tend to be completely messed up because of our social background, or in this case, our deeper biological evolutionary background is always a useful frame. Yeah, exactly.
00:40:22
Speaker
Nice. Well, one other person I wanted to shout out was my conversations with Chris Gill. We've spoken with Chris Gill before. He's excellent, really one of the best modern Stoic academics. I'd say he's captured Stoicism both in a accurate way. He's done excellent work tracing, you know, what the ancient Stoicism looked like.
00:40:47
Speaker
but also explaining it in a defensible version that works for, or is understandable, is comprehensible for many modern philosophers and listeners as well.
Stoic Ethics vs. Aristotelian Ethics
00:41:00
Speaker
So we have a conversation, I think that was episode 78 on some of the key concepts of Stoic ethics, especially, you know, these questions about indifference, what grounds virtue and how to think about the connections between the virtues and nature.
00:41:17
Speaker
So, you know, always, always an honor to get to speak with Professor Gill. Any key takeaways from that one? Well, I think his discussion of in his book, Learning to Live Naturally, which is an academic book, but if you like academic philosophy books, I'd recommend it. But otherwise I'd wait for he's working on a introduction to stoic ethics that should be out hopefully next year. I'd wait for that if you don't want to wade through learning to live naturally, which is also unfortunately somewhat expensive if you went through.
00:41:45
Speaker
an academic publisher. But at any rate, learning to live naturally, you've got a really nice argument for why stoic ethics is philosophically superior to Aristotelian virtue ethics. And Aristotelian virtue ethics is generally the modern form of virtue ethics in philosophy. People think about
00:42:03
Speaker
I usually think about it from the Aristotelian mindset, which doesn't have to do with thinking about indifference, preferred indifference, virtue, which are some of the central ideas for stoicism. And one argument for thinking stoicism makes more sense than virtue ethics, in addition to the ideas about virtue always being a benefit, no indifference ever always being, no indifference of that property.
00:42:33
Speaker
They're never always a benefit. Sometimes pleasure is good. Sometimes it's bad. It depends on the circumstances.
00:42:39
Speaker
But the reason you need preferred indifference is to ground what makes a given choice virtuous or not. And indifference are the materials of virtue. You're selecting between difference and difference, essentially, when you're making a decision. Do I decide to work at this career or another? You're selecting between wealth or the actual social meaning of those careers.
00:43:07
Speaker
and so on, and what can make one decision better or not is essentially the balance of preferred indifference. You know, how does this impact the community? Does this make enough money for me to support my family? And so on. And that idea of some indifference being preferred, others being dispreferred, others being neutral is, I think, an idea a lot of people have had a hard time making sense of in stoicism.
00:43:33
Speaker
Uh, cause it seems somewhat oddly, you know, like these things are preferred, but they're not ultimately good in some sense. Uh, you know, how does that work when it was, you can think about them as.
00:43:43
Speaker
being the materials or virtue being the sort of thing you're always selecting between and their status is preferred or dispreferred as sort of really deciding, you know, what makes a given choice, the one that a virtuous person would take, I think, as a useful frame. And it's something that Orisa's Healing Ethics doesn't have.
00:44:05
Speaker
So to that extent, you can think of it almost as an argument for stoicism, almost like a sketching out. There could have been an alternative history where more virtue ethicists were having to have a stoic frame instead of an Aristotelian one, which is an interesting thought. Yeah. That idea of the nuance of indifference, right? Like we need a better English word is what we need because we don't need to have that word.
00:44:30
Speaker
But this idea that sometimes indifference make the difference, I guess. And how our navigation of them plays into whether or not we're exercising virtues effectively or whether or not we're making the right kind of choice or the choice a good person would make and figuring out how to juggle those. That's something I still wrestle with. I think we talked a lot this year about
00:44:57
Speaker
Role ethics as well as a way to help ground that. That's not something we've hit on the at this episode, but we talked a lot about role ethics too. Um, and so, yeah, it's a, it's an interesting question, especially in this podcast where we're, you know, we want the theory to be as accurate as possible. We always want it to be grounded in the practical and the practical at the end of the day is going to come down to selecting between a difference. Right. Um, so yeah, cool, cool argument. I love that direct engagement with, with Aristotle too. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah.
00:45:26
Speaker
Um, so last one for me that I'll call out, um, I had a conversation a couple months ago with, uh, Greg Sadler. Um, and that was on criticisms to stoicism over history, basically over the course from ancient Greek philosophy up until, um, a couple of hundred years ago. And what I really enjoyed about that conversation, other than, you know, it's it, I think that criticism is such a fun way to engage in philosophy because
00:45:56
Speaker
When I started philosophy, the reason I fell in love with philosophy in university was the first time I can remember somebody raised their hand in class and said to the professor, I think utilitarianism is dumb or I think Kant's wrong. That doesn't make any sense. The professor got excited. The professor was like, that's great. Tell me more. I always thought philosophy was this place that welcomes criticism and criticism is
00:46:25
Speaker
a really good way of refining your own positions. I mean, it's kind of a skeptic argument, right? If you want to see if you understand stoicism, try to make the strongest possible criticism against it and then try to defend it as a stoic, right? And so I love criticisms of stoicism. I think there are ways that really help flesh out the messy parts of stoicism you don't often look at. So that's just a lot of fun. And then the other thing I liked about that episode was that reminds me that
00:46:54
Speaker
You know, the Stoics didn't exist in a vacuum, and then they thought their things, then there was 2,000 years of Christianity, and now here there is us on a podcast. It wasn't like that.
00:47:09
Speaker
debate, conversation, the Stoics existed in more or less prominence, but they always existed in philosophical fod and philosophical history, resting around, bouncing against others, and that kind of relationship is both just an interesting one if you're into Stoicism, but also helpful to clarify your understanding of Stoicism.
German Philosophers on Stoicism
00:47:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think looking at how other thinkers interacted with Stoicism outside of the Greco-Roman context is
00:47:37
Speaker
Yeah, always, always interesting. I mean, some John Stuart Mill lately, he's very familiar with the Stoics. Of course, you have several American founding fathers who have read Epictetus. And I think that's, and then in your conversation with Greg Sadler, you cover some of the German philosophers and how they how they used Stoicism, interacted with the Stoics, rejected it took some ideas from Stoicism.
00:47:59
Speaker
I think both both Hegel and Nietzsche admire the Stoics in some respects but also thought of them as inferior in some respects so I think that's always interesting One last person I do want to shout out is Dana Joya so that was conversation 74 our episode number 74 and Dana Joya has a background as a He's a director of marketing for Jello essentially and then
00:48:28
Speaker
He just wanted to be a poet. He says he went to Stanford Business School with the express idea of becoming a poet. And I visited him in person. We have some video of the event. He did a recent translation of the madness of Hercules. And that conversation itself is very interesting, but I think one of my favorite parts of that
00:48:52
Speaker
experience was being able to meet with someone who has an exceptional amount of crystallized intelligence. He just knows so much more literature and poetry than I do. I feel like such a Philistine when talking to Jana. Even movies, history of movies was very good.
00:49:17
Speaker
But he's also humble. He is a complete pleasure to talk to and was an excellent host. So I think in some ways that the non philosophical elements of that conversation, that meeting, which perhaps in some sense are the real philosophical elements were really stood out to me. Meeting Dana was a real pleasure and I felt lucky to do so.
00:49:45
Speaker
maybe one way of framing that is yeah that wasn't really what i was thinking from that was there there wasn't so much to take away so much as there's
00:49:54
Speaker
I mean, you wouldn't want to call it contemplation of a sage, but you, or maybe you would, but there's something to say for meeting a person that says, and say, well, these persons qualities that I admire, and this person has things I want to aspire towards. For me, I really look up to that ability to mix kind of business and art, you know, that ability to be well read, knowledgeable about
00:50:17
Speaker
the humanities, but also practically successful in the world of business. That kind of combination I think is something that's difficult in terms of at least being uncommon. And so I think seeing somebody who's able to balance that is pretty motivating at least and inspiring at best.
00:50:35
Speaker
Yeah, yep, yep. Dana Joy has a conversation with Tyler Cowan. So if you're interested in learning more about him, and I sort of seen him at his best, I think that's, though there's no stoicism, unfortunately. In that conversation, it's a good example of, you know, listening to someone who's thought a lot about poetry has firm views on a number of esoteric matters in art and literature that I think can
00:50:59
Speaker
Well, it was like rekindle the ones interested in those things so I'll give a Tyler Cowan a free shout out as well
00:51:07
Speaker
But as we're wrapping this up, we thought we should talk a little bit more about how we're thinking about this conversation, these stoic conversations for next year.
Listener Feedback and Future Plans
00:51:17
Speaker
If you've listened this far, perhaps you have some thoughts yourself. So I'm going to be making a little survey. I'll put it on stoicmeditation.com slash survey. I haven't created it yet, but it'll be there by the time this podcast
00:51:31
Speaker
comes out. We like to build the plane as it flies here, as they say. But I think that's a good idea. If you're listening this far, you'll certainly have some good ideas, thoughts that we'd be interested in hearing. But what are you thinking for next year, Michael?
00:51:49
Speaker
So something we already hit on, I want to learn more about the Stoic God. I think that's a big part of Stoicism that I'd love to have awesome conversations on in this podcast. I want to learn a bit more about history. That's another thing too, I think coming from a philosophy background, that's a bit of a weakness of mine. And so I would love to learn a bit more about Greco-Roman history and build that into our conversations.
00:52:15
Speaker
I also want to continue our habit of having conversations with non-stoics who could offer a paradigm shift, something like religious thinkers, the Eastern philosophies, including Buddhism, but also extending outside of Buddhism.
00:52:29
Speaker
Those are three things that I think will round out my knowledge, which is ultimately part of this is us having these conversations because we think it's helpful to other people, but I think the conversations are always best when they're motivated by personal interest. Those are the things that I think personally interest me the most and we round out my understanding of stoicism in my practice.
00:52:58
Speaker
So that's it content-wise. Another thing, I mean, you mentioned the survey, but I would love to connect with listeners more. We've been lucky to have a couple of our episodes were based on specific listener requests. We're very responsive and receptive to emails.
00:53:15
Speaker
So I'm really, we're going to get to get it in the survey, but as we go, you know, provide your feedback. Hey, that was a good conversation. Do more of that. Or hey, why don't you guys talk about this? We're pretty responsive to that stuff. And that's something that I would love to do more of is, you know, as we go tailor the content to what's most helpful to people and most interesting to people.
00:53:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's always good to hear people when they reach out to us directly or even pick up on discussions on Reddit, different Discord channels or Facebook. So it's good to see those as well. But I would emphasize or re-emphasize that suggestion to get in touch. We always appreciate when people do that. I think doing something on doing some more episodes on the stoic god makes a lot of sense to me. Learning about, you know, going over some of these
00:54:04
Speaker
biographies, giving people a sense of role models could be interesting. I always love the history stuff. So yeah, we should definitely, definitely do that. I think I also, I think I'd like to hear, have more conversation in terms of guests, you know, bring on people who are practicing Stoics who don't have that explicit background in philosophy and may not even call themselves Stoics, but have enough overlap.
00:54:29
Speaker
that it would be fun to talk to them and learn how they think about life, how they think about some of these questions of theory and practice as something I'd like to do more as well. Yeah, one thing I was just thinking, Caleb, I would love to do.
00:54:45
Speaker
I agree with all that, but I would love to do also, I really enjoyed our conversation on Gladiator, and I think we should do some more discussions of art. One thing that I put here was like, I want to have some more practical conversations, but I think something that can ground practical conversations is always examples.
00:55:01
Speaker
And I think movies, books, maybe pop culture, these things, they can serve as me catalysts for conversations or these case studies that ground the philosophy behind them. So interested in some more, maybe some more movie reviews. Let me see that coming. When Glad Eater 2 comes out. Yeah, yeah.
00:55:25
Speaker
Um, no, I think our conversation on gladiator was awesome. So we should definitely do some more of this. I think there's, you know, you've mentioned, um, that guy, Richie film before revolver. I still haven't seen that. I think that'd be a good one to do. There's all these, you know, sword and sandal type movies that might be fun going, going over 300 or, uh, Troy, 300 is good one or new, new, new ones like that. Yeah.
00:55:53
Speaker
So I think that'd be fun as well. And I was also thinking maybe we will experiment with some shorter episodes doing the book reviews. Another episode I liked that we did this year was our review of the lives of the Stoics. And I think that hits on some of these ideas of biographies, thinking about role models, and also going through what other modern Stoics said, how they interacted with the ancient Stoics, what they'd taken from them. Cool, great. Looking forward to it.
00:56:23
Speaker
Yeah, that's gonna be a great year. You know, fate willing. Do get in touch with us listeners if you want to help shape that at all. Otherwise, until next time.