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Leonidas Konstantakos on Stoic Justice (Episode 64)
746 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this discussion, Caleb speaks with Leo Konstantakos. Leo a veteran, professor of international relations and co-author of Being Better: Stoicism for a World Worth Living In.
We cover how Leo came to see Socrates in a different light, Stoicism in ancient Sparta, and how the ancients viewed justice differently. We also lightly spar over whether someone can or should call themselves Stoic today.
Leo has a unique cut on many of these issues and a clear love for the Stoic tradition, check it out.
(02:03) Introduction
(02:48) Seeing Socrates in a New Light
(05:26) Rediscovering Stoicism
(10:01) Stoicism in Sparta
(16:18) Justice in the Ancient World
(25:11) Can You Be Stoic Today?
(41:53) Opposing Heroes
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoic Conversations
00:00:00
Speaker
The Stoics understood that the excellent person does what the normal people, the calm person does naturally. They just do it excellent, right? So sometimes there is something to be said about the Stoics admiring and their view of living according to nature is exactly that. Doing what people tend to do, they're on the right track, but the Stoic is one who aspires to do it excellently.
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic 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 we'll be an in-depth conversation with and experts.
00:00:41
Speaker
And in this conversation, I speak with Leo Costantikos. Leo is a veteran professor of international relations and co-author of Being Better, Stoicism for a World Worth Living In. And that's written with past Stoa guest, Kai Whiting.
Leo's Philosophical Journey
00:01:00
Speaker
Leo and I cover how he came to see Socrates in a different light, how Stoics influenced ancient Sparta, how they viewed justice differently, and what we can take from that today.
00:01:15
Speaker
We also lightly spar over whether someone can or should call themselves Stoic today. Leo takes a different cut on several of these issues, but he has a very strong background in ancient works and a clear love of the Stoic tradition. So I'm very happy with how this conversation turned out. Enjoy.
00:01:36
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. Today I'm speaking with Leonidas Costantikos. Leo teaches in the International Relations Department at Florida International University, along with Kai Whiting. He's the co-author of Being Better, Stoicism for a World Worth Living in. Thanks for joining. Pleasure to be here. Let's start with this broad question. What's your story?
00:02:06
Speaker
I read philosophy as a kid and I loved it even though I didn't understand any of it. And I found philosophy again and stoicism in particular once I got out of the war. And yeah, I was in the Iraq war for two tours. And when I came home, I started seeing my hero Socrates in a different light, has this disgruntled combat veteran that's asking people why they're going to send soldiers and young men to die for justice that they can't even define.
00:02:34
Speaker
And that led me to probably to the Stoics who were probably some of the toughest philosophers on the history of philosophy who decided that if you try hard enough, you can make your mind the most resilient thing in the universe and fell in love with them. Never looked back.
00:02:48
Speaker
I wonder if you could say a little bit more how you saw Socrates in a new light. I think a lot of people overlook that he was a veteran. Right. I grew up watching Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure where they show Socrates as this bumbling old man. We forget that Socrates served in a 27-year war against the toughest people on the face of the planet, the Spartans, a war in which his city-state Athens lost.
00:03:16
Speaker
So during that time, and afterwards, he's asking people what is wrong with the things that we value? What is wrong with our definitions of justice and courage? And why did we lose with our great empire and our mighty navy and our top-right military? Why did we lose against these half-hick stiffs, the Spartans? So he's asking people questions, things like what is justice? What is courage?
00:03:46
Speaker
What is self-control? What is the right way to live?
Socrates and Stoic Values
00:03:49
Speaker
And keep realizing that people don't know the answer, and they're making political decisions. They're making decisions for their entire community, and they're deciding
00:04:02
Speaker
that they know what justice is when really they don't. And at least Socrates knew that he didn't know, right? So he was this much wiser than everybody else in that at the beginning of the conversation, he knew that he didn't know. And at the end of the conversation, he still understood he didn't know, but the other person learned something new. They didn't know what they were talking about.
00:04:21
Speaker
And I love that about Socrates and we seem to forget that he was also super tough. Like he got the, he got the medal for, for bravery, right? What the equivalent of the medal for bravery, the award for bravery and in the Peloponnesian war, he served in at Padadea, at Delium and Amphipolis in the war against the Spartans.
00:04:40
Speaker
So there's this whole other side of Socrates where we can imagine how tough he really was. And I think that's what the cynic philosophers and later the stoic philosophers, some of the things that they valued about him was his, his courage, his tenacity, his kateria, which is basically a type of endurance that he had. He was known, Socrates could stand up all night in a philosophical trance with just about like bare feet and one old cloak in the snow while he's thinking about some philosophical problem.
00:05:08
Speaker
So he was extremely tough and I always admired that about Socrates, especially after my time in the, in the army. Right. Yeah. He was renowned for his endurance. He could go to some symposium and then, well, everyone else is nodding off. He's like, let's go back to the Agora. Right. Exactly. Go work out. Yeah.
00:05:26
Speaker
How'd you move from, you know, or discover, rediscover Socrates and then end up studying the Stoics and thinking more about the Stoics? Sure. So especially reading again about Socrates and I, the more I started, the more I started reading about him and the more I saw the Stoics as basically his intellectual descendants, right? That understood or thought they understood that virtue is the only good, that the good is equal to the honorable.
00:05:52
Speaker
and Socrates had that same view, at least Socrates that we know of from early Plato or Middle Plato has Socrates stating that the good is equated with the honorable and that virtue is a type of knowledge. And the Stoics took that and they took that conception and followed Socrates to his logical conclusion that everything else is an indifferent, right? Now it doesn't mean things aren't to be selected or rejected.
00:06:18
Speaker
but they're indifferent to happiness. And there is some debate about this in the stoa, but when you look at what is the good, the moral good, the stoic thought, were basically things that can contribute to your happiness. There are other goods, right? There are things to be selected, health, wealth, reputation.
00:06:38
Speaker
for the Stoics in general, the moral good was only that which is honorable. And I think that they are the intellectual descendants of Socrates, them in the cynics, but the cynics abandoned epistemology and metaphysics, and the Stoics were just smarter.
00:06:57
Speaker
Right. Yeah, they had a crucifix. The cynics had crucifix to systematize their work. Exactly. Yeah. And I suppose unlike the cynics, they allowed for this idea of indifference that something might be preferable or dis preferable, as opposed to focusing solely on virtue as the only thing worth pursuing.
Evolution of Stoicism
00:07:21
Speaker
Sure. I, it's also like, it's for me, it was important to remember that the Stoics themselves came from all walks of life, right? All the early Stoics were immigrants, right? The early, the early heads of the Stoics were immigrants. You don't have an Athenian, you don't have an Athenian Stoic or a Stoic head of the school until like the late middle Stoic, I think.
00:07:39
Speaker
And, you know, you had Zeno who was a merchant, a failed merchant, right? You had Chrysippus who had been a long distance runner, Cleanthes had been a boxer who carried water at night. So you had all these guys, all these immigrants from, from all walks of life, having to, having to view their world as something other than centered on the city-state and as something other than being autochthonous born citizens. So they found, they founded a philosophy that would work for everyone in a certain way, right? Just by virtue of being rational human beings, right?
00:08:08
Speaker
Of course, and then that sort of tradition, I suppose, it continued when you get to the Roman Stoics, where you have Epictetus, the slave, a famous, one of the most famous Stoics in the Eudocetica, the Biser to the emperor, and then, of course, eventually you have emperors adopting psoasism themselves.
00:08:27
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And you also had Stoics who, especially the early Stoics, who were political reformers, right? I mean, as myself, I get my trade, you know, my trade is international relations theory, right? So I look at the political aspect of the Stoics and so many of them had been reformers. There's a whole aspect of the early Stoics, which we only talk about, like Zeno, for example, one of his friends, possibly lovers, was this guy, Craymonides.
00:08:53
Speaker
And Chamonides, there was a whole war named after him where the Athenians rebelled against the Macedonians, right? So the Chamonidean war was this admirer or lover or friend of Zeno who had started a war against the Macedonians, right? You had on the other side, you had Perseus who actually went to a lecture, went to teach and be in the court of what the modern Macedonian kings. You had Spharis, who was probably staunchly anti-Macedonian. He went to go teach the king of Sparta.
00:09:21
Speaker
and went to the court of Ptolemies, in some of the places that were the most anti-Macedonian as possible, right? So, and they probably, in so many of these places, and you had also in the early, almost Milso, but really early, so Blasius, for example, he leaves Rome to become an enemy of Rome, to Pergamum, where he tries to found this Heliopolis, right? This city full of runaway slaves.
00:09:46
Speaker
So they were political reformers in the early stoa. It's not until the middle stoa, you get more of these guys are according to the status quo, right? Like a panitius, right? But the early stoa, they were, they were quite radical in some sense. Let's dive into one of those characters. So do you want to talk more about Sveris and how he influenced the political makeup of Sparta, I suppose, both internally and externally?
Stoicism's Impact on Politics
00:10:11
Speaker
Sure. So first I want to give a disclaimer that I, I'm not an, I'm not an historian and I'm not a classicist, right? I'm an international relations theorist. So it's, it's the job of somebody else to understand how, how accurate people like Plutarch and Polybius are. Right. That's not my job. My job is to look at these themes and try to say, okay, which, what are the Stoics saying here? And what does this say about politics? Right.
00:10:35
Speaker
So just as long as we can agree that that's what I'm looking at, then I could tell you about Spheres. He's living in this world where Zeno had already written a republic of what a city or a world of sages would look like.
00:10:54
Speaker
and Chrysippus follows after. So what's happening in the early stoa is you have people like Spharis, who leaves Athens, goes and he lectures when he becomes a tutor to Cleomenes, who later on will become a king of Sparta.
00:11:09
Speaker
Now what happens here is as he's lecturing, he's becoming a philosophical tutor to Cleomenes who eventually becomes king and decides to reform Sparta. Now he wasn't the first reformer. There was a guy before him named Agis who was a great guy and tried to make Sparta great again and got himself killed for his trouble along with his mother and his grandmother.
00:11:30
Speaker
So Clemenes, and incidentally, he's highly admired by Machiavelli, right? For, for reasons that would become obvious. Clemenes has no such compunctions. He's, he's trained under the Stoic philosophy by Spares. And when he takes power, he's, he has a couple of mentors. So he, one is Spares, which is a Stoic philosopher that is in the early Stowe and the Stowe is new and dynamic and trying to reform society, right? That is seeing social status and reputation and all these things as indifferent.
00:11:57
Speaker
And his other, Cleomenes' other mentor is his wife, who's a bit older. She was already the widow of the last king that got killed for trying the same thing. And under these two very dynamic people, Cleomenes makes, well, to use this term, makes Sparta great again for about a decade. And by reforming the education system, by reforming the political, social and economic system.
00:12:19
Speaker
and eventually even making hellish peasants into warriors. Now, I'm glossing over the political realities. He had to kill quite a bit of people to do this. He had to destroy the constitution to do this. He became a despot. But if you're going to have a despot, you want somebody like Cleomenes, who was a Stoic philosopher. We didn't have to wait for Marcus Aurelius to have a Stoic ruler. We had Cleomenes.
00:12:44
Speaker
And it worked for a long time until it didn't, until it just wasn't a world for city-states anymore and eventually got crushed by Macedon.
00:12:52
Speaker
But for a while, Sparta was poised to take over Greece again. And this is due, at least in part, to the dynamism of somebody like Spares, who's able to go and put these stoic principles in a way that Zeno applied it to a utopia, and using the nationalism and the history of Sparta, apply these stoic principles to a Sparta in order to make it a place that was worth living in.
00:13:19
Speaker
So what are the lessons we can pull from that, that story today? There's a few different types of lessons, depending on the level of analysis, right? One is that of the individual and Spares was able to persuade someone like King Clemenes to say that like, look, being a natural born Spartan doesn't really matter, right? Yeah, we would rather have a good foreigner than a bad Spartan. And he was able to make his mercenaries, his peasants, his, his
00:13:49
Speaker
the people that lived around Sparta into Spartan citizens and was able to educate them and train them in a way like you would a native-born Spartan. So as far as this went, it was cosmopolitan in this sense. That is one lesson I think at the one level of analysis that of the individual.
00:14:07
Speaker
At another level, we could look at what is the, what are the dynamics of Sparta? Well, of, of some qualified equality, if you will, right? Like basically that this guy, Cleomenes, under the historic principles and sprained through the Spartan worldview, he lived simply, he was, he tried to equate the good and the honorable like the Stoics did, right? So it was, for him, it wasn't about, he could have, he could have been a, just one of these typical Kings of Sparta as this of the Hellenistic era, who was basically.
00:14:37
Speaker
content to live in luxury, content to have, sit on his throne and, and play this game of this king that was glory days or, of a city with glory days or behind her. And it's not, that's exactly not what he did. He gave his entire property, all of his land and the land of his relatives to Sparta in order to, in order to take care of and wear this role of Stoic and Spartan, right? So he was a Spartan king by his, by
00:15:02
Speaker
by his social role, but he was a stoic by his philosophy. And that combination led to him taking care of the people around him, the people of his city, and even people all over the Peloponnese who were like, wow, this is something revolutionary.
00:15:20
Speaker
And if things had been slightly different, Plutarch tells us, who knows they might've been able to go to be as great as Sparta was 202 centuries before that. But I mean, fortune being what it is, it's not the way it worked out in the long run, but who knows.
00:15:35
Speaker
Who knows where this would have went if Spares hadn't been at the right place at the right time in order to do this. And we're told some of his reforms survived long after Spares and Clemenes were dead and gone. Sparda and the world would have been a worse place without stoicism and without someone like Spares in particular.
00:15:53
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, the context that at this point in time, Sparta has basically been in a state of managed decline where its kings are, we would probably say today, grifting off of something that's going downhill is crucial. Cleomenes could have done that, but he did not. Right, exactly.
00:16:16
Speaker
This is sort of an interesting issue there, right? The issue of when do you bring new individuals into the polis, into the city. The one that comes up again and again for the Spartans in particular who had a very hard line on membership, but of course across other Greek states and of course today as well.
00:16:39
Speaker
It's a very broad question, but how do you tend to think about that question in the ancient context? They're thinking about who should be a citizen or who should at least have some degree of citizenship. What are the important political principles or moral principles that come into play?
00:17:02
Speaker
What seems obvious to me is that we can't just gloss over some of the things that were obvious at the time.
Universal Stoic Ideals
00:17:13
Speaker
The Stoics were people of their time, and it was a very interesting time to be a philosopher.
00:17:21
Speaker
And the reason I'm saying this, Caleb, is because I think this leads us to a broader question of who can be a Stoic today. And I got to tell you, this probably isn't very good for my career, but it's, to me, it seems like to say that someone is a Stoic today is like trying to, is like saying that they're trying to be a Roman legionary, right? Yes, they can be super tough. Yes. They can be great soldiers. Yes. They can be, they can march 20 miles a day, but you're not a Roman legionary.
00:17:45
Speaker
For me, stoicism is in some sense the same way. Like these are people of their time in the sense that they had a completely different metaphysical view. They had a completely different view of human anatomy than the way the human beings fit in their cosmos. So they were also, they were also looking at the way human beings are fitting in, in the international system. This is a, this is a world in which the city state is becoming more and more irrelevant and people have to define themselves as something other than just a citizen of their local.
00:18:15
Speaker
as a local city-state, which some of these aren't city-states anymore. They're being carved up into different empires. So Stoics are some of these people that are saying, okay, in what sense are we citizens and citizens of what? And I think the Stoics are seeing like, okay, well, if we are citizens, what makes us citizens? And these men are saying that
00:18:38
Speaker
What makes a citizen is this common bond of rationality. Now, it didn't start with the Stoics, right? We see this with the cynics as well, right? With Diogenes in particular, we see this with Socrates in the dialogue, something like in the, in the Mino, where he gets even a slave boy to say like, okay, this, this slave boy has the same type of soul that you do Mino and that I do. Right. And by virtue of us, of him having a soul, he fits into this community of rational beings.
00:19:04
Speaker
the cynics as well, or at least on their best behavior, they were cosmopolitans. That in the negative sense, like you can't tell me what to do. I'm not a citizen of your city-state. I'm a citizen of the entire world. By the time you get to the Stoics, especially in the late Stoics, they're defining themselves not just as members of their community, which they are, but also members of this
00:19:25
Speaker
universal community that we all share a share part of. And if you look at someone like a stoic Heracles much, much later than, than some of these early stoics, but what Heracles is saying is that the excellent person does what the average person does naturally. Right. So we all have these circles, but like we, the way, the way I, I, I describe it sometimes is like, who would you give a kidney to?
00:19:51
Speaker
Yeah, your closest relatives, by the time you ask your distant cousins, would you give a king to them? And you see how your obligations decrease, right? And that's understandable. But the Stoics, like Hercules, are basically describing explicitly that the excellent person, and the word in Greek here is the entetamenon, right? And even though there's some controversy about this word.
00:20:11
Speaker
Basically, the excellent person is this well-tuned person that can bring someone from the furthest circles into these inner circles. So it kind of transcends this boundary. Someone who can treat even the furthest foreigner like a fellow citizen. And so you can, you can understand your role.
00:20:26
Speaker
Like Cleomenes did as this, as this king of this particular city, but also this more universal role as like human being. And this is something that will be made explicit even more later on by Marcus Aurelius, but we get a taste of it, even in the early stoa under spares, right? Yeah. So the stoics were.
00:20:46
Speaker
pioneers in the sense that they started coming with these initial systems to bring in new people into the body politic, but not just as a body politic, also in interpersonal dealings, which
00:21:01
Speaker
as empire started growing bigger became much more important issue for the Greeks and then of course leader, the Romans to manage how would you deal with all these different people? What's the right way to treat them? And yeah, the Stoics were, if not complete, egalitarian, moving in that direction. I think that's right, Caleb. And I think one of the things that's interesting is that
00:21:27
Speaker
We often forget, especially in the common usage of the word justice, we tend to see justice as something external, right? Something that happens out there. Well, that's not the way the ancients saw justice. For them, justice is a character trait. So justice is something that you can be, you can be just, you can have just actions.
00:21:50
Speaker
But you have to act from somewhere because the world isn't just in the sense of the word that we call justice, right? So you have someone like Cleomenes that has to be just or has to try to be just, has to perform his cate canta, his appropriate actions, in a world that they didn't consider to be just or unjust necessarily. It's just the way things were. You can be just.
00:22:14
Speaker
But you can't have a just world in the sense that laws can be just or things like that. We can interpret laws and make them just by our actions. Or I say we can act justly, but you have to act from somewhere. And we see this, I think more pronounced in the life of someone like Marcus Aurelius, who understands he's a Roman emperor and has to act from somewhere.
00:22:38
Speaker
So it's not like he can, even if he wanted to, which is unclear that he would have ever wanted to, but even if he wanted to, he couldn't outlaw slavery necessarily. The entire system would collapse, right? But what he could do is in his law courts, if there was any doubt about whether the slave should be released on the death of the master, he made it happen.
00:22:56
Speaker
Right. So to the extent that he was able to, I mean, he, he purportedly banned sharp weapons in the cult, in the, in the arena. Right. Because just to move it in a more humane direction. So you can be just even a world that we would not consider just. So I think that's what we can learn from the Stoics in the sense, in the sense of politics and international politics is justice is not something that happens out there. Like if you, if you can study international politics and understand political realism, that every unit
00:23:25
Speaker
Either the individual or the empire or the state or the nation state is going to act according to its interests. Well, still justice has to act, has to come from individuals. Still individuals have to say, well, yes, I am a ruler or I am playing my little role or I'm a soldier and I can act justly, at least theoretically, I can act justly in a world that I cannot consider just. Right.
00:23:47
Speaker
There's a parallel there just in the stoic idea of the dichotomy of control, the fundamental divide. There are some things that are up to us and others that are not. And if you were to transport yourself back into ancient Greece or Rome, what you could hope for in terms of change is going to be arguably much less just along some dimensions in what you're calling the external sense, in the social sense.
00:24:16
Speaker
right? You can't just outright ban slavery. That's just not even on the table. And you're in a situation where that institution came in for a reason, and there's a whole history, not a justifying reason, but a whole history of people's interests bound up in the institution, in addition to the fact that many slaves, when they are freed, didn't tend to look down on slavery as an unjust.
Modern Stoicism: A Parallel or Departure?
00:24:39
Speaker
Yeah, they get slaves themselves. So I think, you know, I suppose that's always a useful reminder
00:24:46
Speaker
thinking about what's up to you like what's are the fact that decisions you're making was reflected and your character and then thinking about the situations we happen to find ourselves in situation others have to find themselves and be informed by all of these factors that are out of anyone individuals control yeah so
00:25:12
Speaker
I want to pick up on one thing you mentioned earlier, this thought that being a Stoic today is sort of like being Roman legionary in the sense that things are just so different, that people who were Stoics are radically different just because people in the ancient world had a completely different worldview, completely different material circumstance, to the extent that calling oneself a Stoic today is
00:25:42
Speaker
perhaps somewhat misleading. Do you want to say more about that? Yeah. Well, first let me say that I'm a huge fan of the Stoics, right? I mean, I've dedicated my life to reading and writing and learning about the Stoics, right? I'm a huge, and I'm a much, I can consider myself anything. I'd be a student of Stoic philosophy. I will never call myself a Stoic. Okay. That's my own personal decision for a few different reasons.
00:26:07
Speaker
Okay, one, I think one of the most important reasons for me that I will not call myself a stoic, even though that might be not conducive to a career in writing about stoicism, but if I'm being honest, it's because someone like Socrates and even Epictetus did not consider themselves philosophers, right? So Socrates, when someone asked him, like, hey, do you know any philosopher, Socrates would take them to someone else. Hey, this guy wants to meet you because he's looking for a philosopher.
00:26:33
Speaker
Epictetus himself, he says in many, in some occasions, when someone's, when he says like, you know, a beer does not make a philosopher. And he says, if I were a philosopher, would you be required to be lame as well? Right? Would you be required to have a, have a bum leg as well? So even though Epictetus is obviously a philosopher, he's saying that he's not saying he's a philosopher. He's like saying, if I were a philosopher. So one reason, and this is probably the most ironic reason is just that if these guys didn't consider themselves philosophers, like what chance do I have? Right?
00:27:03
Speaker
So that's one, personally. Two, Caleb, is that I feel personally that if I see myself as being worthy to sit on the steps of the stoa with Zeno and Cleanthes, I consider myself part of this team. I'm already limiting my thinking. I'm already becoming
00:27:23
Speaker
I'm already less objective. I'm already trying to defend some theory that I, some, some of them are not defendable, defensible, right? So, I mean, for the most part, and we have, again, there are like, there are different writers who wrote differently about what Stokes believed or didn't believe, but for the most part, they thought that the soul was air, a type of nair, a penauma type of air, right? That this, this penauma was all over the, you know, this was the, the, the part of the universe that infiltrated everything that it was rationality.
00:27:52
Speaker
So we just, I mean, this was the physics they had at the time, right? They thought that this was the same penioma that is in the human being is also the thing all over the cosmos. And this, we just, we, we just can't accept this. No one can accept this physically anymore.
00:28:08
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't look it doesn't mean we can't learn anything from the stoics. We certainly can. Okay. But the stoic metaphysics is so quaint, right? Compared to what we just know now about the, about physics, about metaphysics, about chemistry.
00:28:23
Speaker
Okay. About anatomy, right? About cosmology, about astronomy. I mean, they thought the planets were gods, right? So again, it doesn't mean we can't learn anything from them, but we have to be suspicious of anyone saying, yes, I am a stoic too. And I, you know, I believe everything about stoic philosophy. No, you don't. You really don't, first of all, right? No one does. No one does who's not being ironic or self-deceiving.
00:28:48
Speaker
So I, and I've made the choice not to ever call myself a stoic. When I die, I've already said, you know, put it on my tomb. If I've ever done anything worthy of stoicism, put it on my tombstone.
00:28:57
Speaker
Okay. But as a living man, I don't deserve nor do I desire to this label because it limits our thinking. I want to also see them in their historical context, which I think is important for understanding who these men were and understanding basically their belief system and understanding their flaws. I mean, Chrysippus, even when we were learning that
00:29:19
Speaker
And by we, I mean in the ancient world, when they were learning that what it is that the heart and the brain actually closer to what they actually did, Chrysippus was still kind of going back to the debunked metaphysics of the time and anatomy of the time. So they weren't always even up to the latest science, even though they thought that they were sometimes, the science even passed them.
00:29:39
Speaker
So look, the way I see it is for your listeners, still study everything there is to know about stoicism, but I think it will even help them as it helps me to have some cognitive and philosophical distance from these people. If we really, if we're really fair to them, then we should understand that, look, this is a philosophy that lasted for 700 years until, you know, some Roman emperor banned all the schools and then, and then Christianity came and started preaching that there's a life after death and go with this, right?
00:30:10
Speaker
that we can learn a lot from them, but we have to understand also their limitations. And I think that helps us learn about them and also it helps us take from them what we can and understand some of their shortsightedness, if that's what it was.
00:30:28
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. So one reason is being a Stoic or being a philosopher is sort of like an achievement, something you get because of the value of your thought or your actions and not something one can just claim. That's how I understood one of your reasons. It reminds me sort of of the traditional view of happiness, this idea that you can only ascribe happiness to someone once their life has ended.
00:30:54
Speaker
Right, otherwise you don't know what's going to happen. So call me a stoic once my full story is played out, is that for you or not, which is respectable. Sure.
00:31:04
Speaker
The other view, so that there's this view about different beliefs, and to push back on that, it seems like at least if I think about calling someone a Christian, there are a smorgasbord, a whole range of different beliefs that Christianity has been associated with. It has the advantage of
00:31:24
Speaker
of there being specific councils that decreed, you know, what the realm of dogmas are. There's a God that has this triune nature and so forth. But nonetheless, there are going to be many beliefs that are commonly held by some Christians but not others, and then some that which have basically just dropped out, like beliefs about angels and so on. So, I mean, I would say that like on the stoic side, it seems like
00:31:51
Speaker
There are some beliefs we can identify as core in a somewhat similar manner, these beliefs about virtue and I think no one disagrees on that front. And then there's some controversy among modern stoics, how important are beliefs around the physics and so on. But at least you have that sort of line of plausibly core beliefs. What do you think about that line of response?
00:32:15
Speaker
I think it, I think it brings me to another point about why I don't think that there are any modern stoics. Because it, to me, it seems like, okay, who would he put up there as the next head of the proverbial school? Massimo, right? Donald Robertson. Who is this? That is now the next Chrysippus or the next Pinatius, right? To me, I don't think I need to make the cut. Not because they're not great guys. They certainly are. All right. But I just, to me, it seems a little like, okay, this is now the head of the school or are there many heads of school or are we doing away with that?
00:32:44
Speaker
And I'm trying to find some common thread that is trying to go from Zeno to us. And can you have Stoic philosophy that abandons divine providence?
00:33:02
Speaker
I don't think so. I have not read anything about Stoic philosophy in my understanding of it, at least from what we call Orthodox Stoicism. I mean, you have the Aristones up there that kind of sometimes like maybe, but it seems like you, that I think there's one difference between Christianity and Stoicism. Like, yeah, we can have different types of Christians, but that's the point, right? Is that this is a faith.
00:33:26
Speaker
in Stoicism, I would like to know how much of the ancient Stoics thought they were doing something on faith, as opposed to things that were reasoned arguments. And look, maybe it is. Maybe we have no arguments about divine providence. They kind of just accepted it. And they had arguments as to why, how they would defend that view.
00:33:50
Speaker
But if we're being fair, maybe, maybe that was based on faith. I don't know. But can we have someone like Massimo today? And I know that his perspective has changed in the last couple of years or whatever, but who can, who can, who can jettison divine providence as being an aspect of Stoic philosophy. And I don't think you can. This is for me, one reason why I wouldn't put anybody up there next to Cleanthes or Chrysipus, not because of not wonderful guys that are writing excellent things about Stoicism. I think they should, and they, I hope they make a million dollars doing it.
00:34:19
Speaker
But if I'm being fair to the Stoics, I would say I, I don't know who, I don't know if anybody can today can honestly, can honestly lie down at night and really think to themselves and say, yup, I'm a Stoic philosopher and this is more than just a job for me. Without saying, maybe I'm, maybe this is really a little silly, believing that I can believe these things that the ancient Stoics did with their
00:34:47
Speaker
A third grader knows more about the cosmos than the ancient Stoics did, right? So to say that we're going to go back to this in some fundamental sense of the word, to me it's like, okay, let's learn as much as we can about the Stoics. Let's take on what life throws at us like the Stoics did.
00:35:06
Speaker
But there's a difference between that and saying that we are the same philosophical school as these people that lived 2,300 years ago that had to contend with Roman emperors and Hellenistic kings and getting a cut on their hand on Friday and being dead by Monday. The world is just different now, right? And I think that saying these so-called Stoics or self-professed Stoics, I think the irony of it
00:35:34
Speaker
The deepest irony, Caleb, is that so often, they only deal with Stoic ethics. The Stoics had tremendous logicians, epistemologists. There were Stoic physicians. I think that to say, oh, I'm a Stoic because I follow Stoic ethics and I have improved my life. Nice. Awesome that you improved your life with Stoic philosophy. So did I.
00:36:02
Speaker
But so many stoic books that were lost were written just about stoic epistemology. And we should spend more time on stoic epistemology because I think it's fascinating.
00:36:14
Speaker
They were some of the inventors or at least some of the earliest proponents of propositional logic. But how many Stoics today are saying, hey, let me tell you about Stoic epistemology. There's the impression, there's the essential impression. And how many people are doing this? The classicists and classicists, guess what? People who've researched Stoics the most don't call them Stoics. Who's calling them Stoics, Caleb?
00:36:37
Speaker
People that found stoic philosophy, they help use it to improve their lives, hopefully make something better on themselves, hopefully treat their families better. Hopefully they're growing all the time. Hopefully they're applying stoicism to other parts of their life. Like me, I've spent 10 years, more than, you know, a decade just reading about stoic philosophy. And I thought I had it recovered. And then I.
00:36:56
Speaker
Then I got married and I have to realize that some days I'm thinking, do I know stoicism? I feel like I've never read it before because now it's a whole new aspect of my life that now I'm angry, now I'm pissed off, now I'm sad. Now I have to apply stoicism to a whole new branch of my life.
00:37:13
Speaker
so much of stoicism gets lost, so much of their epistemology is gone, so much of their logic is gone, so much of their metaphysics is gone. Sometimes, thankfully so. And so much of what's left is just the writings of some of the later stoics about ethics, which I think is very important, of course. And yet it's only one branch of ethics, but if I'm being fair to them and to the stoics, I would be
00:37:39
Speaker
I would qualify who was a Stoic more. I would be a little more stingy with the word than some modern interpreters of Stoicism are. This is just one man's opinion, Caleb. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My Ticondis is probably more liberal in the sense that I'm happy to call him or two people, Stoics. There are many different forms of epistemology. I don't take the Stoic epistemology side.
00:38:02
Speaker
an essential ingredient, although it is important, you know, they were ahead on the game of things like direct realism or, you know, there's quite their account of what later becomes called like, you know, intention and extension and philosophy of language is interesting and plausibly pioneering, but perhaps not an essential part of the philosophy.
00:38:28
Speaker
I think there are two things that stand out to me in what you said that are more serious concerns, which is this idea about providence. How central is that to the philosophy? Can you get rid of that at all? And then this other institutional idea of how central is something being a living institution, a school with heads of the school that move through time to a tradition?
Stoicism's Relevance Today
00:38:52
Speaker
And to what sense can that be revived? And if it can't be revived, should it just become a different thing?
00:38:59
Speaker
which perhaps it has become a different thing already or it's a different thing already. Do you have anything else to add on to that? Just to put a point on it, I may be being harder on modern day self-profestoics than I mean to be. And I don't want to do that because I think Stosun does have a lot to offer. Obviously, I think Stosun has a lot to offer our lives.
00:39:22
Speaker
I've written about it, I still write about it. I'm in love with the Stoics. But I will say that I would call for some cognitive distance.
00:39:32
Speaker
at least just to be able to read them in their own, read them a little more objectively to the extent possible. And then when someone says something or write something, like someone, someone big in the stoic, someone big in the stoic movement recently said something about war and whether or not war, whether or not a stoic could, could, could a war, whether or not war can be virtuous, things like this. And it's very important. I think that if.
00:39:59
Speaker
to note that if we call this person the leading stoic or a stoic and then say, yes, this is what the stoics think. And then we compare this to what the ancient stoic thought on. So with someone like Cleomenes, the stoic Spartan king thought on the matter, this would be vastly different. So who do we go with? The ancient stoic inspired ruler or this academic that is saying something that I consider a bit
00:40:29
Speaker
a bit unstoic. Wrong. Or yes, at least wrong in terms of stoic. Maybe saying something intelligent, like just because a stoic says something doesn't mean they're right, is what I also want to say. Maybe the stoics are wrong, right? Maybe there is no divine providence. But to say you can be an atheist and a stoic to me seems unstoic, right? At least there's one international theorist's point of view, right?
00:40:57
Speaker
Yeah, the question about distance I think is useful almost in two ways. Like first, the distance when coming into the Stoics may be useful because their beliefs are mistaken. But there's also the distance we should have for our own beliefs and thinking about them in comparison to the Stoics. And perhaps if you think about the Stoic tradition, some of their traditions may be more correct, more useful.
00:41:23
Speaker
more conducive to flourishing lives than our immediate beliefs, the usual consensus beliefs about how to live today. So I think the point about distance is well taken. And it's interesting that it can go both in the traditional sense or revisionary sense. But we need to have more of those debates once we see things in the proper light, I suppose. Point taken.
00:41:51
Speaker
So one thing I wanted to ask about was in your book, you have this example of two models who are initially in opposition. You have the model of Pat Tillman and then Catherine Gunn, one person who joins the Iraq war, seen as a just war and
00:42:17
Speaker
fights in it, loses his life in it. And then another person who sees it as an unjust war, I believe she's in a British, either intelligence agency or journalist agency, perhaps you can correct me or not, but ends up leaking information with the explicit goal to prevent it. And you highlight both of those people despite their apparent opposition as models. Can you say more about why you do that? What we try to emphasize here is that
00:42:48
Speaker
There, there is such an importance of social roles for the Stoics, right? So by the time you get to Pinatius and Cicero interpreting the, the works of Pinatius and Placidonius and so on, you find, you find four roles, right? So we all have to act according to common nature or a common human nature, right? Then we all have individual roles about what we are like.
Balancing Roles in Stoicism
00:43:15
Speaker
Okay. On top of that, there's a roles of circumstance.
00:43:18
Speaker
What are our circumstances? What are our social standing? And then what career goals do we have? Who do we want to be? So, importantly, these roles cannot conflict with – well, I should say they ought not conflict with each other. And if done correctly, they will not conflict with each other.
00:43:36
Speaker
my social role. I don't have a career goal as a serial killer. That's going to conflict with my human role. So they will not conflict if you're doing it correctly.
00:43:50
Speaker
To find out what your role is, different stoic philosophies have different things to say about it. But we ought to act, to the extent that we're acting appropriately, to the extent that we're acting according to what is kate kon, this appropriate action, is the extent that we're acting according to social roles. And there are different social roles for different people. What I admired about someone like Pat
00:44:12
Speaker
Tillman is that he could have just played football, right? He could have been a national sports icon and he gave that up to go act according to what he thought his social role was as a very fit individual serving his country to the extent that he thought the war was just at all, right?
00:44:31
Speaker
I can imagine having disagreements with Pat knowing what we know now about how just this war is, about whether or not a war can be just at all in a stoic sense, or whether or not we can be just in war, which is a virtue ethics approach to war. We see wars now. Is this a just war? Is this an unjust war? The stoics wouldn't have seen it that way. They would have seen like, am I being just in the war? Am I starting a war for just reasons? Things like this. Am I acting justly? Am I acting according to human nature?
00:44:59
Speaker
But we have people on different sides of a war, and I could easily imagine in the ancient world stoics on different sides of wars, of a war, right? So you have these people, we juxtapose someone, especially in that chapter, about how even acting seemingly at odds, we're still acting according to the information they had at the time and according to what they interpreted their social role to be.
00:45:22
Speaker
And we can juxtapose this with someone like, for example, Marcus Aurelius, like we said before, who understands, according to the social rule, sometimes he has to kill a lot of Germans, right? But once he defeats them, he can also be the type of person that's like, okay, your foreign policy is gone. Now your foreign policy is my foreign policy. That being stated, come be Romans. And I'm simplifying here, right? For the sake of the story, but I mean,
00:45:52
Speaker
I'm trying to simplify by much to say that Marcus Aurelius is able to defeat the Yazidis or the Sarmatians and these Germanic tribesmen and then say, okay, now you're Romans, now your foreign policy is gone, but now you're one of us and come pay your taxes and come be Romans.
00:46:10
Speaker
Now, it doesn't mean that he can't ever declare war on them again. Sometimes he kicks them out, all of them out, for starting a siege somewhere, right? But to the extent possible, according to social rule, he was able to act appropriately. And if he were just, he's able to act justly, right? Only the wise person can act justly. That's why.
00:46:29
Speaker
Okay, let's be clear. Was Pat Tillman a Stoic Sage? No. But they could have been acting appropriately. And if they were sages, they'd have been acting just. Right? We can hope to be appropriately. And at least the Stoics tell us that one day if our soul is in that kind of tension, then one day we can be just. And all our appropriate actions will also be just actions.
00:46:54
Speaker
And we try to, in the book, try to look at an ancient person and a modern person that even though the world is radically different now, their worldview is radically different, we can find something about them that is similar in this sense. And I think what's similar in this chapter between these two modern people, Catherine and Pat, is that they both thought that their social role requires them to act this way.
00:47:18
Speaker
and they could have done the opposite, they could have neglected this, but we admired this about them. Even if we had misgivings about what they ought to be doing, from the subjective point of view in their social role, in their circumstances, we can say that we admired them about this and that's why they made it into the book.
00:47:40
Speaker
It shows that you can be in a given position and your role isn't to step back and try to get into some view from nowhere and think about what is the ultimately just thing to do in the society. That's right, Caitlin. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for Nerpy, but I will tell you that that's right. And I got to tell you that so often,
00:48:05
Speaker
We have something similar to this, I think, in some of like the difference in the Stoics of the, in the, the days of Nero. So you have someone like Seneca and you have someone like, right. And they have different social roles, certainly, but they're both aristocrats. They're both in, they're both the elite of Roman society. But you have someone like Thrace, who's saying like, yeah, I'm not, I'm not clapping for Nero. This is ridiculous. I'm not, I don't want any part of this dumpster fire. And he walks out while Nero's talking and he's like, F you F everyone, right? Do what you're going to do. I don't care.
00:48:35
Speaker
But what does he do, really? He gets himself killed. This person who is virtue itself is what's attached to him in the histories. This person was virtue himself. Basically, all he does is really get himself killed without changing anybody's mind. Yeah, I get it. Like Epictetus says, he's showing us what a human being can become. He's the proverbial purple stripe in the toga that we should aspire to, even though we can't be that ourselves necessarily.
00:49:02
Speaker
But if I'm defending Seneca, which leaves a bad taste in my mouth to do so, what could I say? I say, yeah, look, when Nero had his little plays, I clapped. When Nero did his little song and dance, I was there. Yes. But when Nero, when I was there, before I had my fallen out with Nero, the empire was well run.
00:49:24
Speaker
Okay. The empire was well run and all you stoic, the stoic opposition there in the Senate arguing for your aristocratic rights. What did you guys ever do? Nothing. Meanwhile, I'm the one running. I'm the one power behind the throne. Keep a Nero busy so we can run the empire. Okay. Put me on a cross for that if you want to, but at least things got done. Okay. Now I'm not, I'm not trying to.
00:49:45
Speaker
Say Seneca is not to be blamed for anything. He might've started a war with Britain over him collecting his debts, right? If the rumors about him are true. But at least when he was there, he was keeping Nero busy enough and keeping Nero on his best behavior so the empire could be well-run. Guys like Tracia who were so worried about being stoic enough,
00:50:10
Speaker
And certainly they were, but all they did was get themselves killed. And these guys were on opposite sides, right? And yet, both of them were, at least if I'm being charitable, I can say both of these guys are acting according to their social role, their social role and the way, the information they had at the time. And from the point of view of someone that has to wear the uniform of a Roman statesman. And even if those were opposite ends,
00:50:37
Speaker
They still did their duty in a stoic, in stoic light, kind of like Pat and Catherine who were on opposite ends and still according, still acted according to their social rules, right? Right, right. Yeah.
00:50:49
Speaker
Yeah, you can see, you see this tension quite often in Rome between different senators taking principled stands. You can contrast Cato the Younger and Cicero, for example. Cato the Younger principled an inspiration to Thracia, as opposed to Cicero, who, if you wanted to describe him well, was a realistic, aiming to improve things if you wanted to describe him poorly, was an opportunist looking to cut deals.
00:51:19
Speaker
It's a, it's a messy, messy world and plausibly, both of them were doing the best given what they, given what they knew. Sure. And I will just, if I can, if I can add one more thing, Caleb to this. Sometimes stoicism is found in interesting places or what we might call stoic behavior is found in interesting places.
Conclusion and Reflections
00:51:39
Speaker
Like look at this, this conspiracy against Nero. When Nero finds out about it, he's having old Stoics beaten with, you know, tortured, beaten with an inch of their life and eventually executed, right? You have Stoics like,
00:51:50
Speaker
Seneca's nephew, who's ratting out even his own mother, right? So his torture will stop. Okay, this is someone who's trained in Stoic philosophy, and yet he's ratting out his own mother. Now, meanwhile, this one freed, freed woman at Picares, she is probably never had a day of Stoic training in her life. And she's getting, she's getting the snot beat out of her, tortured, and she decides to not rat anybody out, and she hangs herself with her own bra.
00:52:18
Speaker
So this is a very stoic way, stoic depth, a very stoic approach to suffering, a very stoic approach to death. Meanwhile, the guys that are writing stoic poetry and stoic books are writing out their own moms. So sometimes we find stoicism in interesting places. And I think that there's...
00:52:36
Speaker
And I don't want to make too much of this, but I think there's some kind of analogy here where we can, like the Stoics understood that the excellent person does what the normal people, the calm person does naturally. They just do it excellent, right? So sometimes there is something to be said about people who have this, about the Stoics.
00:52:55
Speaker
admiring and their view of living according to nature is exactly that. Doing what people tend to do, they're on the right track, but the stoic is one who aspires to do it excellently, and a sage is a person who does it excellently every time, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's not sufficient to call on self-stoic or indeed know about stoicism, and perhaps there are even dangers that come with it, as well as benefits.
00:53:22
Speaker
I don't think there's a stoic version of this yet, but Christians are fond of saying, you know, even Satan goes to church on Sunday. But I don't know what the stoic version of that is, but there is some wisdom in that statement. Excellent. Well, is there anything else you want to add?
00:53:41
Speaker
Let me, let me, if I could add anything Caleb, it's that if, if you, this, the stoic, the stoic view of living according to nature, I wish that we could have podcasts like yours, which, which I admire that this is actually one of the most intellectual podcasts I've been on. And that I do appreciate very much because usually, and I do go on podcasts, but.
00:54:05
Speaker
I like being able to kind of delve into these topics and nuanced topics. I don't often get to, I mean, there's only so many times I can talk about like, you know, self-improvement, right? With Stoic philosophy. There's so much more to Stoic philosophy.
00:54:21
Speaker
I would like also your listeners to be able to actually, instead of reading so much, and again, this is probably detrimental to my career, but there's something about being able to go back and read the ancients before you read the moderns.
00:54:38
Speaker
Right. So I actually, for better or worse, I read very little of modern stoicism. Right. I'm not, for my part, I'm not very interested in this right now. What I, there's something Heidegger supposedly said about Nietzsche. He's like, he said, you should go back and read Aristotle for 10 years before you read Nietzsche. Right. And I think I'd like to like paraphrase this or update this and say.
00:54:59
Speaker
We need to go back and read Diogenes Laertius about the early Stoics. And I picked at us for 10 years before we start coming back and reading about, Hey, let me tell you how stoicism can help me, you know, help you in your job or help you, you know, with your, with feeling sad after work. Right. I, I would call if I could for your listeners to.
00:55:22
Speaker
literally go back and read the lives of the Stoics in Diage of Laertius, in Clutarch. Stoics they'd never heard of before, like Cleomenes, because there's so much to learn from them. So the Stoics themselves discussed very often the moral exemplar. And that's exactly what Diage of Laertius and Plutarch are doing, right? Just put a point on it. There's like this, this, this, this time that Cleanthes was brought into the courts because they couldn't figure out how he was so buff, so diesel, if he's doing, he's in philosophy class all day long.
00:55:51
Speaker
And then he's showing like, look, I lift water at night. I carry water on my back to people's gardens at night. And I used to be a boxer. And this is what I'm doing. And they're like, wow, that's amazing. Take some money. Here's a grant. And Zeno didn't let him keep it.
00:56:08
Speaker
Right? Zeno had made him give back the money. And now there's, now we have to ask ourselves why. Is it because money comes with strings attached? Is it because Cleanthes in his former boxer life, this would have been like giving an alcoholic, you know, access to the bar, right? Who knows why he let him keep it? But I think this is so often when you pull these stories.
00:56:30
Speaker
And if we understand what the ancients are saying in their own words, or some of the diogies Laertes was talking about these, this ancients themselves, we can pull so many interesting concepts about stoaism that we just don't ever talk about. And I wish that we could talk more about it in places like, like this that you have. Right. Yeah. Well, yeah. Over time, let's do it. Bring back the stoa. Bring back the stoa. I like that. All right. I'll end it there then. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me.
00:57:02
Speaker
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00:57:32
Speaker
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00:57:55
Speaker
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