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The Fossilized Stoic Way of Life: Nietzsche on Stoicism (Episode 18)
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“Is our life really so painful and burdensome that it would be advantageous for us to trade it for a fossilized Stoic way of life? Things are not bad enough for us that they have to be bad for us in the Stoic style!”
Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay talk about how Nietzsche challenges Stoics. The Stoics and Nietzsche agree on the idea that we are self-sufficient and on embracing fate, amor fati. However, Nietzsche thought that the idea of living in accordance with Nature was silly “self-tyranny.” What does that mean?
Caleb also confesses to reading Nietzsche too early in his life.
(01:52) Introduction
(06:50) Nietzsche's Philosophy
(14:15) Amor Fati
(18:52) Self-Sufficiency
(28:15) Nietzsche on Suffering
(39:16) Nietzsche on Nature
•••
Stoa Conversations is Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay’s podcast on Stoic theory and practice.
Caleb and Michael work together on the Stoa app. Stoa is designed to help you build resilience and focus on what matters. It combines the practical philosophy of Stoicism with modern techniques and meditation.
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Caleb Ontiveros has a background in academic philosophy (MA) and startups. His favorite Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/calebmontiveros
Michael Tremblay also has a background in academic philosophy (PhD) where he focused on Epictetus. He is also a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His favorite Stoic is Epictetus. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay
Thank you to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Nietzsche on Stoicism: Criticism and Exploration
00:00:00
Speaker
For all your love of truth, you force yourself so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity, to have a false, namely stoic, view of nature, that you can no longer see it in any other way. And some abysmal piece of arrogance finally gives you the madhouse hope that because you know how to tyrannize yourself, stoicism is self-tyranny. Nature lets itself be tyrannized as well. So, you know, classic Nietzsche, that's all over the place, and it's always aggressive.
00:00:28
Speaker
But he does have some interesting challenges here. Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
Nietzsche vs. Stoicism: Philosophical Comparisons
00:00:49
Speaker
In this conversation, Michael and I talk about the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. We talk about some key similarities between his philosophy and stoicism, and we discuss two challenges he has for the philosophy.
00:01:08
Speaker
It was a fun conversation. I always enjoy reading or talking about Nietzsche because he is a philosopher who forces you to clarify what you believe and what you value. Before we jump into the conversation, I should say that we just launched a newsletter.
00:01:25
Speaker
Sign up at stoaletter.com. If you reply to the welcome email with the words podcast or stoa conversations within the next week, we will share a PDF of an unreleased course that Michael and I have put together on managing negative emotions.
00:01:46
Speaker
And without any other words of introduction, here is our conversation on Nietzsche. Welcome to another stoa conversation.
Nietzsche's Background and Influences
00:01:55
Speaker
My name is Caleb Antiveros. And I'm Michael Trombley. And we are going to be talking about Frederick Nietzsche, the German philosopher, and some of his disagreements, challenges to stoicism, as well as some of the similarities with his philosophy.
00:02:15
Speaker
Yeah, it's an exciting topic. He's definitely a controversial figure. Some people really like Nietzsche. Some people don't like Nietzsche. Some people bring in kind of the story of his life into his philosophy. Some people look at his life, his philosophy on its own. So interested for this talk and to learn a bit about what he thinks about the Stoics.
00:02:32
Speaker
Yeah, so I'll start by just saying a little bit about who Nietzsche is, why he's important, and then we can hop into some of the basics of his philosophy and then jump into the meat of the conversation, if you will, which is going to be the
00:02:50
Speaker
two initial similarities to challenges that Nietzsche poses to stoicism. And I should also say that we have two Nietzsche experts coming on. We have Nate Anderson, who is writing about Nietzsche and how Nietzschean views can improve our relationship with technology, social media, the internet in particular. And then we also have
00:03:12
Speaker
a fellow by the name of Dave Jung, entrepreneur and investor type who wrote a book called The Entrepreneur's Nietzsche, which takes thoughts from Nietzsche and of course applies it to business.
00:03:24
Speaker
So I thought it'd be useful to, before we release those conversations, give a little bit more background on Nietzsche and also have you all hear some of what we think about some of his challenges to socialism. But first, you know, who was Nietzsche? At the very basics, he was a classicist, a philosopher in the 19th century, mid-19th century.
00:03:45
Speaker
A German fellow, he was well-read in the ancient Greek texts. He was a classicist after all, what they called a philologist. Back in those days, he was a big fan of Plutarch, the ancient biographer. I spoke with Alex Petkos on Plutarch, and he thought that Plutarch's characters were exceptionally admirable in some ways.
00:04:07
Speaker
And then he also knew Epictetus quite well. He had a very heavily marked up copy of some of Epictetus's works. So that's who he was. And, you know, why is he important? Well, he's influenced many different thinkers. He has a very noteworthy aphoristic style. So you've probably heard a few of his lines, things like, without music, life would be a mistake. What does not kill you makes you stronger. Beware that when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.
00:04:37
Speaker
or when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. So like the Stoics, he also has a talent with aphoristic, almost laconic writing at times.
00:04:50
Speaker
But I think he's most interesting because he is a challenging thinker. He's someone who is very good at challenging a variety of different schools of philosophy, a variety of different ways of life and forces you to think seriously about your assumptions and is someone who is not a systematic thinker. So you need to do some work to think with him as it is.
00:05:18
Speaker
So that's a quick intro. Do you want to say anything by way of intro to Nietzsche, Michael?
00:05:24
Speaker
I don't know much about Nietzsche. I was going to say what comes with being a good aphoristic writer is you probably also get misquoted a lot or you probably also get people taking you out of context a lot. So in that case, it's kind of worthwhile to dig into it a bit deeper. You know, another one that you didn't mention that I was thinking is the idea that God is dead. It's God is dead and we killed him or something like that that Nietzsche says. So all of these great, you know, these great lines, great ideas, but I'm interested in kind of understanding the thinking that
00:05:53
Speaker
that goes behind those and builds those up. When I think of Nietzsche as a thinker, I think of him as, I don't know if reactionary is the right word, but I would say brave. So I think it's, I think I didn't know that he was a classicist that you mentioned. So I think it's kind of funny because when I think of him, I think of him as, as kind of rejecting.
00:06:11
Speaker
classics, kind of rejecting what's come before and moving to something new. So that's kind of ironic that that was built on this foundation of actually like being respecting and well-read in what came before. But that's all I have to say. I'm interested to hear more from you.
00:06:26
Speaker
I should say that I'm not a Nietzsche expert either, but I've read a significant number of his works. And I think I first read a book called Twilight of the Idols when I was in high school. And since then, I've kept up my interest in Nietzsche, which I think that's actually too early of a time to read Nietzsche on reflection in high school. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend that high schoolers read Nietzsche in general. We all make mistakes in high school. Yeah, that's right. It was reading Nietzsche. Yeah, that wasn't my only mistake.
00:06:52
Speaker
Yeah, so very briefly we'll cover some of the main lines in his philosophy or these some things that I'll pick out and talk about some similarities and differences. And of course we won't be able to say too much about what Nietzsche's philosophy
Nietzsche's Analytical Method
00:07:05
Speaker
is. And there's always the issue that there are different Nietzsche's. I think with many thinkers they change their mind over time.
00:07:12
Speaker
and their writing might not be entirely clear, and it's certainly the case that Nietzsche fits both of those criteria. His writing is provocative, not especially crisp, and he changed his mind significantly throughout his life. So there are different Nietzsche's, but several themes that I would pick out is, first, he's not religious by any means. He didn't like
00:07:36
Speaker
Christianity thought Christianity was net negative for the world. And that's part of this rejection of what came before that Michael touched on. And he thought that what needed to happen was a revaluation of all values.
00:07:53
Speaker
That's one big thing, not religious. He also didn't believe in say any overarching purpose to the world. So he wasn't like the ancient Stoics who thought that the logos impermeated the universe and sort of gave everything a essential nature.
00:08:11
Speaker
A second big theme from Nietzsche is that he is an early psychologist. So one of his methodologies is not so much to look at the arguments for and against different beliefs, but come up with accounts that explain why we believe the things we do and sort of undercut our beliefs in a way that influenced a lot of later thinkers. So a quick example of this is
00:08:39
Speaker
We are much more egalitarian than we used to be in the past. Many people in Nietzsche's time were more egalitarian as well. And one line on that is that people came to some amount of moral progress. We learned over time that people were equal and had these basic set of political rights or equally deserving of respect and so on.
00:09:01
Speaker
But Nietzsche, he looks at this belief and he says, you know, what explains this? And instead of thinking about this from the terms of arguments, he has a story about how people come to believe this sort of thing because of the rise of Christianity. And in particular, although this is a bit crude, Christianity was a way for the weak to bully the strong. And part of that involves a creed of egalitarianism.
00:09:28
Speaker
I think that's a very common method that Nietzsche uses in his writing is explaining both why specific individuals believe things, as we'll see later in the Stoics, but also general cultural trends as well.
00:09:43
Speaker
A third thing I want to shout out is that Nietzsche is certainly an elitist. He thinks the best forms of life are only going to be realized by a few people. And in a real sense, those people are superior to others. So he's not an egalitarian by any means. He thought that a handful of artists, statesmen were truly great people and the vast majority of other people were weak and envious of them.
00:10:12
Speaker
So that's certainly a theme that can't be avoided in Nietzsche's thought, although it can be certainly misused and has been misused throughout history. And then the last thing I wanted to shout out is that there's an approach to enthusiastically say yes to life. So although Nietzsche was an elitist, he thought that the best
00:10:35
Speaker
people are the sorts of people who are able to not just tolerate whatever happens but be the kind of person who loves either their decisions or what happens that is outside of their control. They're the sort of person who would be happy to repeat their life really many times because they are happy with the decisions they made and not just at peace but sort of willingly accept whatever else occurred.
00:11:05
Speaker
So those are, those are four things I want to say about Nietzsche. One, not religious. It's very important to reject, rejects God. He has a sort of psychologizing type approach. He's an elitist. And then finally, there's a sort of enthusiasm that he thinks is important to the life that is best, best lived. What do you have to say about that, Michael?
00:11:25
Speaker
You know, I thought that was really well put. A good summary. I mean, the part that appeals to me or I always find interesting is this, when you refer to it as psychologizing, but this way of kind of, you can almost see this also in like evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology in this common context where people in today's society and also in folk psychology, so people who are perhaps not professional psychologists but are trying to explain behavior,
00:11:51
Speaker
there can be this attempt to kind of well let's tell a story about the way that evolution or biology might inform this kind of interaction or this kind of this kind of behavior you know maybe you know dating works a certain way attraction works a certain way or emotions work a certain way and there's always this kind of grounding
00:12:11
Speaker
in evolution or social rules work a certain way. And I kind of, I see that Nietzsche kind of doing the same thing, but with the morality aspect, right? So you did that, you were referencing, I think this is from Beyond Good and Evil, the idea that, you know, Christians celebrate charity.
00:12:31
Speaker
or they celebrate compassion towards the weak, or they celebrate, you know, the humility or the capacity, humility, or this kind of end. And Nietzsche's argument being that instead of these things being, you know,
00:12:46
Speaker
objective goods that they've inferred from God, these serve a kind of function to the group, which is that a bunch of weak people, and I think his way of talking about it, get together and then celebrate the kinds of behaviors or traits that benefit weak people. And I'm not sure I believe that, but I think it's kind of a thing way to approach morality. I know Hume does the same thing, and I've always been a fan of Hume when he's done that. I think it's like a
00:13:11
Speaker
a worthwhile alternative direction to come at these moral judgments from that can make us question our ethical beliefs. The fancy word for this is genealogy. So Nietzsche has quite often a genealogical method.
Amor Fati and Stoic Parallels
00:13:26
Speaker
So in his works like the genealogy of morals, he basically is coming up with a psychology of
00:13:35
Speaker
why we believe what we do. But the two similarities I want to shout out are more fatty and self-sufficiency. So those are two similarities with Stoicism. And then the two differences that we can chat about today are Nietzsche's views on suffering and his views about nature. And that's nature with capital N.
00:13:55
Speaker
And there is, of course, a very large difference between Nietzsche's account of morality and the Stoics. That's probably a conversation, that's a whole podcast-length episode, so we can come to that later, probably. Let us know if you're interested in that conversation, we'll bump it up in the queue. But these are the four I want to cover here.
00:14:15
Speaker
So let's do a more fatty first. So more fatty, that's Latin for loving fate. And I'll just read out a quick line from Nietzsche, which is the following.
00:14:28
Speaker
My formula for what is great in mankind is a more fatty, not to wish for anything other than that which is, whether behind, ahead, or for all eternity, not just to put up with the inevitable, much less to hide it from oneself, for all idealism is lying to oneself in the face of the necessary, but to love it.
00:14:49
Speaker
So this is this idea, I think, which is similar to ideas like the dichotomy of control in Stoicism, similar to even ancient ideas of providence, and involves not just tolerating what happens, but embracing whatever happens, and that includes both what is in your control and what is.
00:15:11
Speaker
outside. So I think that's a real similarity that many people have noticed between Nietzsche and the Stoics and his framing on this is useful and I think inspiring. I like his picture of the kind of person who could happily live their life over and over again because they are happy in a deep sense with the way things are and the way they are as an ideal.
00:15:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's the idea of, that's called eternal recurrence, right? Is that how Nietzsche refers to that? Coming back and living it again and again. It makes me think when you were talking about that, about the dichotomy of control so often gets framed even by myself as this idea of, well, focus what's on your control, focus what's up to you, value what's up to you. And this Amorphati, which is an important part of Stoicism, but Nietzsche is really bringing it out here.
00:16:01
Speaker
It's not just like focus on yourself and ignore the rest. It is this focus on yourself and love the rest. Move to this kind of, not just this acceptance or this endurance or this capacity to persevere through the things that aren't up to you, but this actual embrace and love of it. And I think that's a pretty powerful way to approach the dichotomy of control, which I think is probably a bit more of an advanced technique. What do you find inspiring about it? Why does that passage connect with you?
00:16:31
Speaker
Well, I think there's the idea of eternal recurrence that is use motivating just as an ideal to achieve, to live the life that you'd be happy to live over and over again. I find that both a daunting prospect, but also an inspiring one. And I think also this shift from not just acceptance to willing acceptance,
00:16:53
Speaker
is a powerful one and a useful reframing on things. So the StoX were always big on as a psychological technique as reframing whatever happens. And one way to do that is to imagine yourself
00:17:11
Speaker
not just accepting things in the sense of tolerating them but willingly accepting them. So an example of that in practice is there is a technique where people try to hold their breath, a meditative technique. You hold your breath for some amount of period of time and you
00:17:29
Speaker
watch what happens and of course it becomes quite uncomfortable and at that stage you can just sort of observe those uncomfortable feelings or you could imagine yourself generating those uncomfortable feelings that are emerging and Willing them into existence in a way and I think that's a useful reframing for many different kinds of experiences is this idea that
00:17:55
Speaker
Look, you chose to take this path. You're not just willing the act of trying to hold your breath initially, but also these results, whatever else occurs. So I love that. I love that
Self-Sufficiency and Suffering: Diverging Views
00:18:09
Speaker
reframing. And what was not to, not to put you on the spot as the Nietzsche expert, but what was his argument for Christosism? This loving of fate is grounded in this idea of loving nature. What is kind of Nietzsche's play here? Is he just that?
00:18:25
Speaker
He finds these people that do this very impressive. Or does he have some sort of argument for this or like, yeah, I'm trying to think what's what's cause cause then if you ask a normal person, the person will say, well, some things about Nate, some things are good. Some things are bad. I hate when bad things happen and I like when good things happen and I love the good stuff and I don't like the bad stuff. And he's kind of, he's kind of rejecting that common sense view. And I'm just wondering what the argument for that could be if you don't have this stoic picture.
00:18:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think we can sort of get to that answer with another similarity, which is both Stoics and Nietzsche agree on this idea of self-sufficiency. And we'll also get to it when we chat about suffering a little bit, but that's a great question. So another similarity with Stoicism and Nietzsche is
00:19:11
Speaker
that we have the capacity to be an inner citadel, to use the French philosopher Pierre Hadeau's words, where the stoic sage, they are someone who is solely responsible for what is up to them. They act perfectly virtuous, and so long as they do those things,
00:19:35
Speaker
they are self-sufficient. They can be put in any situation and live well. So that's the stoic idea of self-sufficiency is that the individual does not depend on anything external for living well.
00:19:54
Speaker
The Stoic phrase, I think it was Aristotle brought this up first, was happy on the rack, meaning literally happy on the torture rack. That's just an example of the capacity for self-sufficiency. The Stoics believed that. They believed the sage was happy even while being tortured. They were willing to bite the bullet on that.
00:20:11
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think what Nietzsche agrees is that one can live well through overcoming suffering and that one doesn't need to depend on living a comfortable existence or even a secure existence in order to live well. And he positively looks down on people who are not able to
00:20:38
Speaker
handle the lot they've been given, even if the lot is quite bad. So he at least agrees with the Stoics that we don't need a lot to live well and things like how much suffering we experience in a life can, if approached correctly, add to life well-lived, not merely detract from it.
00:21:04
Speaker
Though he does take, of course, he has a much more sort of, how would you say it? I think the Stoics, they're a little bit more concerned about the life of the sage living virtuously, and he is more concerned with someone overcoming their suffering and doing something
00:21:22
Speaker
excellence, whether that is the artist or the statesman or what have you, that people who can live well are in a serious sense self-sufficient and they don't need anyone to help them live well. We're not dependent on others.
00:21:38
Speaker
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00:21:58
Speaker
Yeah, so I really like the idea of self-sufficiency. I think that's a great similarity. I think it's also one of the main appeals of stoicism to me. But at the start, you were mentioning how Nietzsche is not egalitarian. Some people are better than others. But self-sufficiency to me, at least I associate with the key concept of stoic egalitarianism, which is the idea that we
00:22:21
Speaker
all have the capacity of good life because a good life is a self-sufficient thing. It's a thing we can internally generate. Is Nietzsche's view here that some, the good life is self-sufficient, but some people just can't ever get there because they're not excellent enough. They're not born excellent. Where does this lack of egalitarianism, where is this some people are better than others come from if the good life is self-sufficient and it doesn't require you to be born into wealth or something like this.
00:22:49
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So I think that I'm not sure if Nietzsche is an egalitarian in the sense that he thinks anyone can achieve the good life or not. It could be that some people just come into the world and for whatever reason they don't have the psychological capability to live well. Maybe Nietzsche thinks that. I don't know. The Stoics certainly do not think that. Or he probably thinks that people at least have shaped themselves into people who cannot live well by a certain age. He probably thinks something like that.
00:23:18
Speaker
I do have one passage where it basically says that I hope people suffer because then that will give them an opportunity to endure and to basically as a necessary condition for them living well. So it says, I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistress, the wretchedness of the vanquished. I have no pity for them because
00:23:40
Speaker
I wish them the only thing that can prove today, whether one is worth anything or not, that one endures. Nietzsche has a much more aggressive, harsher way of wording things, but experiencing bad things is a necessary condition for living well, will prompt people to endure in his words.
00:24:07
Speaker
That's his view, and he has the view that arguably the Stoics have.
Rejection of Pity in Nietzsche and Stoicism
00:24:12
Speaker
Some people have argued that both Stoics and Nietzsche are similar because they think pity is not an attitude that is justified, where pity is realizing that something seriously bad happened to another person, and it wasn't their fault, and also realizing that it could have happened
00:24:30
Speaker
To me, Martha Nussbaum, the class assistant philosopher, argues that both Nietzsche and the Stoics are similar in this respect because the advanced stoic will see, say, someone loses their house and they feel like they're in a terrible position. The advanced stoic would say something like,
00:24:49
Speaker
What really matters is the internals for this person. So they would want to treat the other person well and console them if they can. But in a real sense, they would not think that that person has been seriously harmed by them losing their house. So in that sense, Martha Nussbaum argues that the Stoics don't have pity on people. And Nietzsche also agrees. And both Nietzsche and the Stoics
00:25:19
Speaker
also have this view that pity is one of the sort of key ingredients to anger and seeking revenge. You know, often we see people, we think something terrible has happened to them, and that prompts some desire for vengeance or seeking to punish some other party. And both, you know, both Seneca and Nietzsche are skeptical from pity, not just from the sense that they think
00:25:44
Speaker
It involves false beliefs about suffering, but also because these false beliefs will lead to acts of revenge or seeking to punish whoever may or may not be responsible. Yeah, pity for the person that was harmed, but then anger for the person who did the harming. They're tied up together. That example with the house made me think of Epictetus's line about how
00:26:15
Speaker
the beginner will blame other people, the intermediate will blame themselves and the advanced stoic will blame nobody. But it kind of made me think of that where, you know, maybe the, maybe in the stoic view, the beginner is like, you know, somebody's house is destroyed and they're destroyed. And you think, well, you know, you should have prepared better or you should have controlled externals better. They wouldn't use that term, but that's how they would think. And they blame the person. And then, you know, maybe the intermediate stoic is like, ah, the, the, the.
00:26:42
Speaker
The problem here was not the house. You couldn't control that. The problem was your response, your reaction to the house. And then the advanced stoic is just kind of doesn't pity either of these situations. Just kind of accepts the situation as is and maybe attempts to help the other person. But again, not pity.
00:26:59
Speaker
in a sense that there was a kind of a substantial harm here that could have happened to them. Really interesting way of thinking about it. I've never thought about that connection between pity and anger before. And so the idea of loving fate and the idea of happiness being self-sufficient, it is quite a stoic view if you take those two in isolation.
00:27:19
Speaker
I think the one difference that comes out here with that quote, and again, taking the quote out of context, maybe there's something in here that passes, but the quote about, you know, I want someone to suffer so they can have the opportunity to demonstrate their greatness. It does make me think that there is
00:27:35
Speaker
There are at least in the snow a few there are other opportunities to demonstrate greatness that don't involve hardship hardship is one opportunity to demonstrate greatness you can demonstrate your courage, your temperance, your, your wisdom and things like this but, you know, just through kindness, just through generosity.
00:27:53
Speaker
There's ways you can demonstrate the greatness of your character, even in times of abundance and success on the stoic view. The stoic view is that hardship can be a tool and the tool, like use it, turn it to your advantage, but it's not, it's not masochistic. It's not thinking we have to suffer. Otherwise we won't move forward. We can still move forward, even if things are going well.
00:28:16
Speaker
Right. Yeah. I think that, so those are two similarities with shouting out or yeah, those are two similarities that I wanted to mention, but I think as one goes deeper into why Nietzsche thinks what he does, some of the disagreements are going to come out. And I think what you're touching on is this first one I had in mind, which is.
00:28:33
Speaker
Nietzsche's view on suffering. So on the first pass, both Nietzsche and the Stoics agree suffering does not mean it's not necessarily bad. It's not something that prevents one from living well, but the reasons they ultimately think that are somewhat different. So I think on Nietzsche's view,
00:28:57
Speaker
What it is to manage suffering well is to overcome it. And overcoming sort of requires this obstacle. It requires essentially sort of incorporating the pain. So one line that I have from the will to power is in order for the creator to be, suffering is needed and much transformation. And also, you know, one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.
00:29:26
Speaker
So this is sort of the view that gave rise to this image of a tortured artist almost. And I think it is a popular notion that there are certain kinds of lives, whether it's being an activist or an artist that are driven by a kind of suffering and integrating that suffering into your life in order to create something that's very valuable.
00:29:53
Speaker
Whereas, I think what the stoic view is that suffering is negative emotions in particular are the result or are identical to false beliefs. And by living well, one can avoid these negative emotions by avoiding false beliefs.
00:30:15
Speaker
that in that way that the stoic addresses suffering and that they live tranquilly. They're not like the tortured artist who sort of deeply integrates, you know, they're creating their art with some amount of extreme self-contempt, self-criticism, exceptional physical
00:30:35
Speaker
travails or something like this instead they're trying to see things truly which involves understanding what really matters and part of the pictures that suffering does not really matter so that's that's how I put that difference the tortured artist is always an interesting example I remember when I was in
00:30:53
Speaker
university first learning about the Nicomachean ethics we were talking about, because Aristotle argues that everybody wants happiness. Happiness is the ultimate ends for everybody. If you ask anybody what they want, they're gonna, or if you ask anybody why they're doing something, and you say, well, for something else, and if you ask long enough, you keep asking why like a five-year-old, you're gonna get back to this bad rock that's just, well, because I think that's what a great life is like. I think that's what happiness is like. And one of the counter examples the professor raised was this example of the torture artist, which is to say,
00:31:24
Speaker
Are there some kind of lives that we consider to be great lives or lives worth living, or are there some kind of lives that people are aiming for that seem to be entirely disconnected from this concept of happiness? Maybe not disconnected from this concept of greatness, but disconnected from the concept of happiness. And the torture artist is an example of this person who suffers, not only suffers to produce great work, but sees this connection between the suffering and the great work, sees the suffering as necessary for the great work.
00:31:49
Speaker
And I think you're dead on that today, that's still a view we have in terms of people that are creating art, creating music or writing. It's the idea that I kind of have to have some sort of trauma to be processing or some sort of terrible experience to say something about. And if I don't, I don't have anything interesting to say. So I think one point is that that's both preserved from each other's time. I think that's still part of the kind of ethos and the way that we think about art.
00:32:16
Speaker
or great artists, but I, I, I. I'm probably just so biased towards those isn't that I also agree with the stoic point that I don't think that that's like a necessary thing, right? I don't think that's a.
00:32:27
Speaker
I don't think that's the right way of looking at it. And I would say the Nietzsche take is almost like you're bouncing off it, right? You're like, you're using it as a foil to become something better. And the stoic view is almost this kind of the obstacle becomes the way it's almost this consumption of it, this kind of meta acceptance of it as part of the world.
00:32:49
Speaker
not as a, not as the monster to fight as the quote was before, but as the something to be, to be kind of accepted, to be, to be let in into your conception of the way things are and ultimately loved in that sense. I got a bit abstract there, but, but I think you did a good job explaining it and that's, that's kind of my thinking on it.
00:33:09
Speaker
Yeah, that
Suffering: Transformation vs. False Beliefs
00:33:10
Speaker
makes sense. So I suppose that I think both Nietzsche and the Stokes agree that in the sense of pleasure, you know, we don't strive for happiness and it could be that the best lives are not the most.
00:33:24
Speaker
pleasurable ones. So they certainly agree on that front, but there is almost a glorification or a valorization of suffering, both not in Nietzsche, but as you mentioned that certain cultural trends, I think, point to that as well, where I think on
00:33:45
Speaker
And this is something that would be connected to some other thought from Nietzsche, but probably a number of years ago, it wouldn't be so interesting to state whatever traumas you had or mental health issues you had or were working through.
00:34:01
Speaker
now in a more friendly, more compassionate age, those sorts of things are almost, in some cases, not always, of course, worn as a kind of badge or those sorts of things that one would talk about with abandon as opposed to thinking of it as something that is not supposed to be in any way glorified or thought well of.
00:34:26
Speaker
Yeah, I'm thinking also about, I mean, that's the key. And like, obviously not to say, I mean, I don't think you're saying this, but obviously not to stigmatize discussions of mental illness or anything like this or trauma or hardship, but also, as you're saying, just to recognize that there is a kind of, there in one sense can be a social capital in some settings, but there can also be not just the social capital externally, but also kind of an internal meaning, right? Which is to say, you know, not only like the,
00:34:55
Speaker
this struggle, this difficulty has now given me meaning, it is something that I can kind of construct my sense of purpose around in response to in fighting against. And I guess that would be kind of Nietzsche's point, maybe it would be at the point, that's a good thing that, you know, to overcome that demonstrates your metal, demonstrates your ability to live with the harshness of reality and overcome it.
00:35:21
Speaker
and do well in the face of that. And I think there's something, I think there's both harms to that have taken the wrong way, but also something inspiring to that have taken properly. But yes, different than the stoic position. Yeah. In some ways it, I think Epictetus and the discourses, I think it's discourses three, there's this short dialogue on, you know, someone once said this other person went to jail and what does
00:35:43
Speaker
what should you say it went to jail and it was bad no all you need to say is that he went to jail and that's the stoic view this additional story and it was bad comes from you whereas the Nietzschean approach might be that they went to jail and
00:35:59
Speaker
through that experience, they incorporated that experience into their life story, into their identity. They were someone who went to jail and it transformed them or they were able to integrate that experience into that whole life.
00:36:16
Speaker
And in that way, the stories can come out to be quite different. But I think the stoic would also be fine with reframing bad experiences in certain ways, as long as I was trying to think about, like, what's the deep, deep difference here? And it might be that I think the tortured artist is made dependent on their suffering, where they feel like they cannot be an artist unless there's some amount of
00:36:44
Speaker
tragedy that they are working through, some amount of darkness, what have you. But the stoic view is that you can reframe, you can transform these experiences, but you are never dependent on them. And I think that is a much more compelling picture of how to relate to suffering than this idea that overcoming is needed. But by saying overcoming is needed, you make yourself dependent on the suffering in a subtle way.
00:37:13
Speaker
I mean, you made this point about self-sufficiency and it's exactly what I was thinking was that the Nietzschean point is almost one that's like not self-sufficient, not in a stoic sense. And to be fair, the stoics kind of stretch these ideas to their limits, right? But it's not self-sufficient. Nietzsche's thing is self-sufficient that you don't need other people's help because you on your own can stand on this island of this thing. That's you can be this incredible, you know, Uber men with all this power on your own, but in a way you're dependent on a foil, an enemy, something
00:37:43
Speaker
to craft yourself a trauma to overcome, a difficulty to overcome that you look great in response to. And the stoic view is this really transcendental kind of self-sufficiency, which is, you know, you could be happy on the torture rack and you could be happy, you know, hanging out with your family. And both people are the same. They're the same amount of happy and they're the same amount of virtuous if they are that. And so the stoic self-sufficiency point is that, is that like, yeah, I mean, just to repeat what you said,
00:38:12
Speaker
There's a way to be happy on the rack. There's a way to be happy when, when, wow, the stoic can say, wow, that person that's enduring torture is a great person and is having a great life because of how they're able to do that well. But we do, but the stoics don't only say that about those people. They also say that about the more normal sages, the more normal, you know, good people.
00:38:32
Speaker
Right, right. You don't need to let yourself go into some kind of artistic frenzy or some subconscious type frenzy in order to live well or experience some traumatic event that one needs to overcome. So do you have anything else to add on the suffering bit? No, let's hear the next one.
00:38:50
Speaker
Hi all, it's Caleb just interrupting to remind you that we've just launched a new newsletter, a new newsletter, and it's called the Stoa Letter. Find it at StoaLetter.com, and if you sign up within the next week and follow up to the welcome email with the words podcast or Stoa conversations, we'll send you a free PDF of an unreleased course that Michael and I have put together. Cheers.
00:39:16
Speaker
So the next difference between Nietzsche and the Stoics that I thought it would be interesting to talk about is that Nietzsche does not believe in nature in any sense. So the Stoics think it's important to live according to nature. That means live according to our human nature as one social beings.
00:39:39
Speaker
And the deeper sense live according to the cosmos, the way things are structured. But Nietzsche thinks this is nonsense. So he has a substantive passage from Beyond Good and Evil.
Challenging the Stoic Ideal: Nature and Rationality
00:39:50
Speaker
I'm going to just pick out a few different bits from it. So he has some lines to the effect of, so you want to live according to nature.
00:39:57
Speaker
Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud is in this phrase. Living isn't that wanting specifically to be something other than this nature. Isn't living assessing, preferring, being unfair, being limited, wanting to be different. And assuming you're imperative, live according to nature, basically amounts to live according to life. Well, how could you not? But in some fact, something quite different is going on. While pretending with delight to read the canon of your law,
00:40:26
Speaker
In nature, you want the opposite. Your pride wants to dictate and annex your morals and ideals onto nature. You demand that it be nature according to the stoa." And then he goes on. For all your love of truth, you have forced yourself so long, so persistently and with such hypnotic rigidity to have a false, namely stoic, view of nature that you can no longer see it in any other way.
00:40:49
Speaker
And some abysmal piece of arrogance finally gives you the madhouse hope that because you know how to tyrannize yourself, Stoicism is self-tyranny. Nature lets itself be tyrannized as well. So, you know, classic Nietzsche. Lots of, yeah, it's all over the place and it's always aggressive.
00:41:07
Speaker
But he does have some interesting challenges here, which is why is it important to live according to nature? You can't do anything else. That's one bit that comes out of this passage. The other bit is that he's doing some amount of psychologizing. What you mean when you say live according to nature, you mean live according to these ideals that you've already decided on. You mean live according to the stoa, which is always a
00:41:32
Speaker
serious risk. And then the last one sort of goes a little bit deeper into the psychology, which is, you know, stoicism is almost a version of self tyranny of self rule. And when we say live according to nature, we're also doing this, making the same kind of tyrannical move, not just to ourselves, but to nature as well. So those are three bits that I picked out from that
00:41:58
Speaker
of that passage. Does anything else stand out to you, Michael?
00:42:10
Speaker
But I don't think that, I don't think the criticism really works. I don't think it's charitable to the stoic argument or really meet the stoic argument at the face of it. But I think whenever we claim something, talking about this genealogy at the start, I think we should always be kind of plugged into our emotional, you know, it is this way of thinking about things self-serving in some sense. And if it is self-serving, we can, we can blind ourselves to that and we can be kind of arrogant about it. So this, this idea of the stoics are saying.
00:42:40
Speaker
Well, yes, all of these great qualities, like the sage, that is the most natural person in the world, right? That is the person who has assumed their nature.
00:42:50
Speaker
There is a kind of irony to that when the reality seems that most people are not that, or they're naturally not that. I think the idea here comes down to really understanding what we mean by nature and getting confused between nature in a descriptive sense, nature in a teleological sense, and then nature in a natural sense, as in nature versus nurture.
00:43:20
Speaker
that, those kinds of senses. And I think if we pull as apart the argument, we can save the stoics from this argument, but at the face of it, it's a, it's a thing, it's a thing worth asking. And I'm, I'm, I'm glad that Nietzsche presses us on that.
00:43:36
Speaker
Yeah. So the first bit is, you know, you want to live according to nature or you can't do anything else. So that's great for you because, you know, you're going to be guaranteed the good life. Mission accomplished. But it does seem that living according to nature in the descriptive sense is determined, right? You're going to do whatever is necessitated by past states of the universe. If you're a determinist, that's that. There's nothing else.
00:44:06
Speaker
to say about it, but that doesn't mean that you don't need to make decisions in the normative sense, decisions that align with how things ought to be. And that seems like the first move to make to this criticism.
00:44:21
Speaker
I agree. I think when Stoics, and this confuses people a lot with this idea of living in accordance with nature, there is a Stoic sense of which something can be more or less according to their nature. And I always think of this example with like animals, for example, right? Like you can kind of
00:44:39
Speaker
You know, if you go to aquarium or something and you see, you know, maybe a dolphin that's confined in like a very small space, it doesn't get to go around in the ocean. There's this sense of this kind of, you can almost, you can almost see this kind of teleological sense of nature there where it's like, well, this is not really.
00:44:56
Speaker
This is not really the way you were designed to live, or this is not really the way you were designed to flourish. And there's opportunities to do well in that, but there's kind of a break here. And that's the kind of same thing that's being applied to humans. There's some contexts that are made for us to flourish and there's some contexts that aren't. But because we think of humans primarily in terms of our rational capacity, flourishing doesn't become situationally constrained. Flourishing becomes about the way that we relate to things
00:45:22
Speaker
Intellectually, the way we relate to things rationally or not, but still that kind of, that kind of teleological view to me is, is, is a very compelling way of thinking about flourishing or living well. Certainly more compelling than whatever conception of living well, Nietzsche would come up with, which might just be, you know.
00:45:38
Speaker
bravely following your desires or being willing to authentically get what you want. That doesn't seem to me to get you any closer to flourishing. That seems to me like your desires can be misplaced. Your desires can be foolish. Your wants can be ultimately harmful in the way Plato talks about. You can end up tyrannizing yourself with your desires. It's ironic to me that Nietzsche talked about tyrannizing nature when I think that there's kind of a humbleness. And he also talks about arrogance.
00:46:05
Speaker
But Stos isn't to me is this kind of humbleness to say, well, I'm not, I'm not greater than human, than humanity. I'm not greater than the world. I'm a piece of this. I need to humbly understand my place in this, both at a human level and at a greater level. And that's kind of, that's, that's, that's why I think about the Stos isn't thing. And I think Nietzsche was being uncharitable there or, or perhaps misunderstanding.
00:46:32
Speaker
Yeah, that seems right. I would say there's more of a challenge for the, you could say, the paleostoic view, which held that everything follows some law of providence. And if you think that, then it is harder to make sense of this idea of, well, if everything happens for
00:46:55
Speaker
a reason or, you know, everything flows according to this arching teleology. On what grounds should we say that something is better than another? And the Stoics, of course, did have answers to that kind of challenge, but there is, I think, something quite substantive there and you always come up with, you know, issues of, well,
00:47:18
Speaker
If nature has this teleology, how come so many things, you know, if you can explain why they're bad, if they're not natural in the important sense, how come there are so many things like that? It's this classical problem of evil that then gets applied to the stoic accounts of God, or of course also more should theistic accounts of God were familiar with from the monotheistic religions.
00:47:47
Speaker
Yeah, the problem with evil for those not familiar is this idea where if God is all good, all knowing, all powerful, why are, why is there bad things? Why are people evil? Why are people harmed? Why do people suffer? And so this, this, there's almost the problem of unnatural, which is that.
00:48:04
Speaker
You know, if we're living in nature and it's good to be natural, why are there so many bad things on the stoke? And why is there, why, why are so many people this vicious and unnatural? Yeah. So you kind of, you kind of turning it that way, which I hadn't thought of before, but it's, it's, it's a compelling, it's a compelling problem.
00:48:21
Speaker
that he's playing to. Yeah, yeah. So I think many modern Stoics just do not agree that there's this overarching providence or purpose in that sort of their solution. Well, there's no problem with evil because we actually don't think that there's this sort of overarching providence to things, even though things do have as individuals say specific natures or something like that. And then, you know, one can also
00:48:47
Speaker
limit the power of things. So maybe unlike the monotheistic God, the Stoic God isn't in any real sense all powerful. It's just that there is this purpose, the things that's deeply ingrained in the nature of the world. But of course there's the question for the beliefs and providence, you know, in which way, how does providence actually get achieved where providence is? And really, coarsely, everything happens for a reason.
00:49:14
Speaker
So yeah, there's that challenge. I think that's a good one. That's worth thinking about, especially if you take these ideas of God, a stoic God, seriously, which I do, which I think they're worth taking seriously. I don't take, like, some stoics we've talked to, like, Massimo we've talked to in stoic conversations a number of times. He just says, with confidence, there's no stoic God. So, not a problem.
00:49:37
Speaker
moving on, whereas I'm particularly more agnostic about that question. The other bit that I think is interesting from this passage is this aspect of self-tyranny. So some background on this is that Nietzsche thinks that, you know, really roughly in other parts in his early work, he sort of divided up what he called the Apollonian man and the Dionysian man or Dionysian natures.
00:50:03
Speaker
I'll say that again. He divided up the Apollonian nature and the Dionysian nature, and Apollo refers to the Greek god Apollo, who in this context is the god of reason, and Dionysus is the god of passion, of ecstasy, of wine. So you have this classic.
00:50:22
Speaker
clash between reason and the sort of uncontrolled artistic frenzy, if you will. So the Stoics are firmly on the side of Apollo where reasoning creatures, we want to see things as they are, though the Stoics will not make as strong as a division between these two just to life.
00:50:43
Speaker
they think that reason and emotion are very tightly bound together. So I think that's important to say and it's a fact that a lot of people overlook. But Nietzsche thinks these are quite distinct and will put the Stoics on the side of the Apollonian and thinks that when the Stoic is living out their rational life
00:51:01
Speaker
they're sort of tyrannizing other aspects of their life and solely putting up this reasoning faculty as what determines how to live and through that they are downplaying in a real sense other aspects of themselves or forcing other parts of themselves to do what they ought to do or do what they think is true even when they are going again perhaps what would be better for them to do.
00:51:30
Speaker
Does that account of how the Stoics might be involved in self-tyranny make sense? Yeah, totally. I mean, I see so much Plato in this. I almost think we should do a conversation on Plato's Republic.
00:51:43
Speaker
because Plato thinks there's this divided soul between a rational part, a spirited part, and then like a repetitive part or part that has a lot of desires. And Plato in the Republic makes the argument that the way to be a good person is to make sure that each part of those souls is in their correct with, the rational one ruling over the other ones, but the other ones doing their thing to a healthy amount. We don't want to remove them or ignore them.
00:52:09
Speaker
And Plato also talks about how you can have a tyrannical soul, which is when one of these parts gets too strong and kind of overpowers the other. So it's really easy when you think of the example of the person with desire, you know, the tyrannical soul there in that case looked like someone, you know.
00:52:25
Speaker
who has some sort of addiction or pursue some sort of pleasure, even at the expense of their reputation or their family or their other long-term plans. And I kind of see, when I hear this Nietzsche's argument here, I imagine almost the tyranny of the rational part of the soul.
00:52:42
Speaker
So the rational part of the soul denying desire or denying the spirits and saying, Oh, you know, even though you want to get revenge because someone insulted you, that's, I'm not going to listen to that part of my soul. I'm going to shut it down and say, it's not rational.
00:52:57
Speaker
or even though I might desire these goods of these kind of physical pleasures, the rational soul says, well, those don't really matter. Those are kind of indifference. And so on his view, I instantly kind of put it through that platonic lens and that idea of that rational part is now bullying those other parts and not giving them their fair due. Yeah, and I mean, I think that's a compelling picture from the outside. I think that's a compelling picture from someone on the outside looking in.
00:53:26
Speaker
And it is if you don't accept other arguments, right? You don't accept the arguments about, you know, what virtue looks like. You don't accept the arguments about the nature of emotion, things like this.
00:53:35
Speaker
Yeah. I think if, if, if socialism was going to be wrong or, or you didn't accept those other ones, that that's, that would be what was wrong with it is that you're giving too much importance to one part of yourself and not enough to the other parts. But that requires this view that these parts are divided and separate, which is something that the still don't think they just conceptualize it differently. Right.
00:53:59
Speaker
Yeah, right. The sex belief, the mind is unified. It's not a matter of different parts of the mind being involved in some war against all.
00:54:10
Speaker
as it were. So this issue of self-tyranny, this issue of reason versus emotion doesn't really arise as much, which is a stoic answer. And you want to hear more about this view in particular, how it applies to emotion. Our very first episode was on stoicism and the emotions. So if you haven't listened to that, you can go check that out and we'll
00:54:35
Speaker
We talk about why I just think that and what that view really amounts to in more detail.
Reflections and Learnings from Nietzsche
00:54:41
Speaker
So yeah, that was, that was Nietzsche. That was, I hope people thought that was interesting. I hope there was a good argument for why Nietzsche is a challenging character and why it is worth thinking with some of the challenges that he raises and how he gets in my view, some things right, some things wrong. And it's, it's an exercise to figure out exactly what, what those things are.
00:55:07
Speaker
Yeah, really interesting discussion. And I think even if you're a fan of stoicism, it's all. Contrasting always gives you a better picture of what you're talking about. So even if you're, even if you're interested in just stoicism, understanding how it's different to other philosophies helps kind of really define what the stoic position is. And that was, that was what I enjoyed about that exercise. I really welcomed those kinds of counter-arguments because they had, they helped me think more about, you know,
00:55:37
Speaker
what I believe about stoicism and what kind of I need to learn more about so I can be either secure in those beliefs or change my mind. Excellent. Yeah. Well put. Well, that's another conversation.
00:55:50
Speaker
Awesome. Thanks, Caleb. Cool. Chat soon. Thanks for listening to Story Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
00:56:09
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.