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The Stoic Heretic: Aristo of Chios (Episode 41)
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One of the best ways to understand what Stoicism is and contemporary Stoic debates is learning about Aristo of Chios.
Today, we’re having debates over the place of physics and logic in Stoicism and the place of Stoic advice today. Well, Aristo challenged the Stoics on these issues hundred of years ago.
In this episode, Michael and Caleb talk about what he had to say, how the orthodox Stoics responded, and what they have to say about the issues themselves.
(02:12) Introduction
(09:17) The Rejection of Logic and Physics
(18:50) Rejecting Preferred Indifferents
(32:20) Rejecting Precepts
Related episodes
Conversation on Traditional Stoicism with Chris Fisher
Conversation with Massimo Pigliucci
Conversation on Six Stoicisms
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Transcript
Introduction: Cynicism vs. Stoicism
00:00:00
Speaker
People should already be getting the sense here, there are pretty hardcore skirting that line between cynic and stoic, really focused on ethics, really focused on practical living. 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.
Aristo of Chaos: Challenging Stoicism
00:00:28
Speaker
In this conversation, Michael and I talk about the stoic heretic aristo of chaos. He's an important figure to know because understanding his disagreements with the orthodox stoics, the philosophers who would become the orthodox stoics, is an excellent way to understand stoicism itself.
00:00:51
Speaker
and also a way to engage in debates that are happening today. So, Aristo challenged the place of physics and logic in the Stoic system, and he also disputed the role of presets.
00:01:10
Speaker
These are two debates, two issues that are discussed today by modern practitioners. There's this question, is stoicism a system which parts of the ancient philosophy need to be updated and so on? And there's also debates over the role of heuristics, life hacks, life advice in the stoic community. Well, these are things that Aristo challenged hundreds of years ago.
00:01:40
Speaker
And in this conversation, you'll understand why he did that, what the orthodox responses were to his challenges, and how Michael and I think about these issues today. Here is our conversation. And here is our conversation. Welcome to Stowe Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. And I'm Michael Trombe.
00:02:04
Speaker
And today we're going to be talking about the ancient stoic, Aristo. Do you want to take it away, Michael?
00:02:12
Speaker
Yeah, so this is the second part of a sub-series we're doing on lesser-known Stoics. So there's obviously Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, they're very famous, but the school of Stoic philosophy existed 300, 350 years before Marcus Aurelius. So there's a lot of interesting people that developed this school of philosophy, pushed the ideas along,
00:02:41
Speaker
we're digging into some of those characters, some of those real-life thinkers, and some unique or distinct parts of their thinking.
Lesser-Known Stoics: Contributions and Impact
00:02:50
Speaker
Last time we did we did an episode on Missonius Rufus, Epictetus' teacher, and this one's about Aristotle. So for those that are less familiar with who that is, let's take it all the way back to the beginning, to when Stoicism was founded, and he's a bit of a bad boy in Stoic philosophy, I would say, kind of a
00:03:10
Speaker
an interesting character because he's an outsider, but he's not an opposite school. So it's very common in ancient philosophy to have these opposing forces. So the Stoics would argue against the Epicureans, or they would argue against the Cynics, or maybe they would argue against the Skeptics or Aristotelians, the Peripatetics. But Aristotle was somebody who considered himself a Stoic, believed
00:03:39
Speaker
you know, depending on what parts of stoicism you think are most important, 90% of the things that are important about stoicism, but really pushed back against other parts that the ancients took to be fundamental to what stoicism was. So Zeno was the founder of stoicism around 300 BC in Athens, and Aristotle was a student of Zeno's. So they are right from the very beginning.
00:04:04
Speaker
And as I said, he was somebody who, right when stoicism started, pushed back and said, no, you know, these parts are right, but I disagree with these other parts. And if stoicism is going to work, we have to throw these parts out and we have to keep these parts or push these parts further and change them. And I think historically it's interesting because it was really this moment, this divide in stoicism.
00:04:30
Speaker
And the next founder of the school was Clanthes after Zeno, and then after Clanthes was Chrysippus. And you really have that line of Stoicism winning, but it could have been this other line of Aristotle's line and his approach to Stoicism, which is one, as we'll get into, which focused a lot more on ethics.
00:04:48
Speaker
it really rejected or downplayed physics and logic, and it made some controversial claims and ethics, which stoicism itself is full of controversial claims. So it was saying things that the stoics disagreed with while still claiming to be a stoic. So interesting picture. In terms of Aristotle's beliefs that I wanted to get into, we're going to talk about three things in this episode, three things that were unique about his conception of stoicism.
00:05:17
Speaker
The first, as I already mentioned, was a rejection of logic and physics. So the ancient Stoic view
00:05:26
Speaker
I should really say the, I guess the Orthodox stoic view now, right? Because we're not just talking about Aristotle was also an ancient stoic, but the Orthodox view is that stoicism has three parts.
The Stoic System: Physics, Logic, and Ethics
00:05:36
Speaker
All the parts are interconnected and all the parts are necessary. And that's the physics, which is the conception of the way the universe is, which includes the arguments about God, arguments about Providence, arguments about the divine, rational nature of all matter. That's physics. Then there's logic.
00:05:56
Speaker
which is how we come to know things. So this kind of epistemology, but also the Stoics were innovators and formal logic. The actual study, when you think of logic in university sitting down, there's these looks like mathematical equations on the page and you're solving, you're deducing proofs. That was part of the stoic curriculum. And then only the third part was ethics. The part that really gets emphasized today and the part I would say I'm most interested
00:06:24
Speaker
That was, that was the third part. And Aristotle rejected physics and logic as being unnecessary and focused just on ethics. So that was the first one, the rejection of two parts of the three parts of stoic philosophy and the focus just on ethics. Another change or innovation in Aristotle's thought was that he rejected preferred indifference or the idea of preferred or disperferred indifference. So in Stoicism, there's virtue is the, is the only good vice is the only bad. But then when we get out into action, we get out into things when we navigate the world.
00:06:54
Speaker
There are some things that are preferred or dispreferred. It's better all things being equal to have health. It's better all things equal not to be sick or injured. And Aristotle thought this didn't make any sense. This was a ridiculous theory, ridiculous part of stoic ethics, and it should be thrown out.
00:07:11
Speaker
The third part is that he rejected precepts. And what precepts are specific pieces of advice about, you know, if you're a stoic and you find yourself in a situation where, you know, your boss is treating you this way, you should do this. Or, you know, we were just talking about Missonius Rufus in a previous episode. Missonius Rufus has loved these precepts. He gets into really particular advice. You know, how should a stoic dress?
00:07:37
Speaker
How should a stoic cut their beard? What should a stoic do in marriage? What should a stoic do if they're insulted? Should they bring that person to court? If they're wrong, should they sue people who have harmed them? These are these really particular pieces of advice. They also thought this was ridiculous and rejected this. This was not the right way to think about ethics. This was an unhelpful and unproductive way to think about ethics.
00:08:03
Speaker
Really framing a lot of these things negatively, because we don't have remaining writings by Aristotle. We just know what he said that was controversial, that people are still arguing against hundreds of years later, being like, oh, this guy said this. Wow, that was very different. We disagree with it for these reasons. But we still have his thinking in that sense. But a lot of it will emphasize the way that he broke from stoicism, because that's what the Stoics will talk about, or orthodox stoicism, I should say. Anything you want to add, Kael, before I jump into those?
00:08:33
Speaker
Yeah, so we've got this early Stoic figure. I think it's worth emphasizing that there's some amount of contingency and the history of Stoicism where you did have these two competing elements of Aristo, one student of Zeno and another student of Zeno, Cleanthes.
00:08:51
Speaker
And they wrote works arguing with each other, which we no longer have, unfortunately. And it turns out that the client side of the Cleanthes and later Chrysippus were the dominant sides in ancient Greece at any rate. So I think that's worth emphasizing. And then, yeah, let's hop into some of these ancient Stoic heresies, as it were. So let's do the first one.
00:09:16
Speaker
I know I'm upset just talking about these. How dare he? So yeah, it's some cool history, right? You think about this battle and it's gone one way but could have gone the other. So the first one I want to talk about was the rejection of logic and physics. So as I already talked about, three parts of the Stokes School of Thought.
00:09:35
Speaker
logic, physics, and ethics.
Aristo's Focus on Ethics Alone
00:09:38
Speaker
And one of the things, we could probably do an episode on this, but the Stoics were famous for professing that philosophy was a system. And what they meant by it as a system was that it kind of locked into place all of these truths built on each other, and they were all required. If one piece of Stoic philosophy was removed or untrue, the entire system would fall apart.
00:10:04
Speaker
So the Orthodox Stokes really believed, look, we need these arguments we make about God. We need these arguments we make about the nature of the universe to be true. If they're not true, we've lost all the ethics. Or we at least don't have the arguments for the ethics that we would have. So they saw ethics and logic as being interconnected and necessary.
00:10:27
Speaker
And Dogenes Lyertus, who's a famous biographer of philosophers, wrote about Aristotle, quote, that he abolished the topics of physics and logic, saying that the former is beyond us and the latter none of our concern. Ethics is the only topic which concerns us. He compared dialectical arguments to spider's webs. Although they seem to displace on expertise, they're completely useless.
00:10:52
Speaker
So a couple of interesting things. One is this rejection of, I guess, the intellectualization or the more theoretical parts of philosophy.
00:11:06
Speaker
a skeptical argument about God and about the nature of the world. So he rejected physics and with it this conception of the Stoic God as being beyond us. And what he meant by that was that it was not something that we had access to. It was not something that we could make a claim about.
00:11:27
Speaker
And I think this is really, I think it's really interesting. You know, we just talked to Chris Fisher, who is the host of the Stoicism on Fire podcast. And you listened to that episode as well. And he is a proponent of what he calls traditional stoicism, which is this view that.
00:11:45
Speaker
this orthodox position that you require the physics to make sense of the ethics. You require the stoic God to make sense of the ethics. And here was Aristotle 300 BC saying, look, I don't think I can even make, I can't even talk about God. Like that's not something that I have access to. That's not something I can make arguments about. It's this very agnostic argument. And because of that, because we don't know about it and because logic and these complex theoretical debates aren't helpful, we should just focus on ethics.
00:12:13
Speaker
So for him, it was this a hundred percent ethics toss out the rest. And I wouldn't say in terms of logic, I should clarify it's not a thought anti reasoning. It's not anti logic in terms of, you know, wanting to come to truth and wanting to understand the way, the way the world works as well as you can. I think it's, it's, it's anti.
00:12:35
Speaker
being too theoretical, so things you also see in Epictetus, when the logic starts to take away from the action or the theoretical debates begin to take away from character development.
00:12:47
Speaker
Right. I think he's talking about logic in a sense that there's Aristotelian logic or later the Stoics develop their own kind of logic and here logic means symbolic formal system, which is a way of making sense out of different claims and how they relate to each other. So that's the sort of thing that it's almost scientific, more deeply philosophical that he is resistant to. I don't think he's
00:13:13
Speaker
by any means sort of abandoning reasoning as a tool or the way we might say logical reasoning today in a ordinary conversation. Yeah. So what's your view on his rejection of those first two parts of Stoic philosophy?
00:13:30
Speaker
Yes, it's interesting because we chatted with Chris Fisher, as you mentioned, and in some respects it does seem like on the logic side there's less of an issue. Stoics today don't pay that much attention to formal logic.
00:13:47
Speaker
And sure, maybe there was a warning that stoic shouldn't spend so much time purely during theory, but I think most people agree with that. It's always good to have a reminder now and again, not to get lost in your books, get lost in different dorm room type sessions. But I think most people agree with that. So that perhaps that's less controversial or actionable today.
00:14:12
Speaker
On the other hand, the rejection of physics is something that people still debate. So I think that's worth thinking about more. And I think it's also worth just spending a bit more time highlighting why that would matter, why that would be so controversial. So on the stoic view, what it is to live well is to live according to nature. And that means aligning yourself, aligning your character with nature, which is
00:14:39
Speaker
the Stoic God. It's not just allying yourself with some inert sort of scientific laws, but there's some picture of value, of providence, what we would call teleology, of purpose that you're allying yourself with. And Aristotle is saying, I don't know about that. We don't need that. Maybe there is such a thing at the foundation of the universe, but how could I know about that as a one individual?
00:15:06
Speaker
And that is, I think, a substantive thing that many people, Stoics and non-Stoics, of course, disagree about. So, just highlighting, I think that's... Would you agree with that? That that's probably the main controversial point here, is his point about physics. And most people are probably largely on board with the thought on logic.
00:15:27
Speaker
Yeah. The few, a few people listening who are really, really into formal logic are like, this is, that is just as important. We can't, we can't lose that. But no, I would agree that the, the, the physics claim is more controversial. I would say both historically and in a contemporary context, as you said, and you know, the idea of living in accordance with nature as living in accordance with our nature is part of it. But also as you said, living in accordance with the whole of nature.
00:15:54
Speaker
the universe, which is divine, which is imbued with rationality, and which is ultimately providential or ultimately unfolding in a good way, would be the orthodox or the ancient stoic claim. And, you know, Epictetus has this line about, if the foot knew that it was part of the body, the foot would wish to be muddy.
00:16:18
Speaker
And that was the way that he viewed how you got over hard things that happened to you. If something bad happened to you, if you view yourself as just a foot, well, this is my, I'm all muddy, you know, this is terrible. But if you understood yourself as part of a larger thing, a larger, you know, a larger entity, part of a larger universe, playing a role within that universe, that was how you understood, you know, you're getting muddy to be serving some greater purpose.
00:16:43
Speaker
And so as you pointed to, but inch two claims here, one, we can't know that, but, and that's what a skeptic would
Ethics Without Physics or Logic
00:16:49
Speaker
say, right? Ancient skeptic would say that, but the interesting part I guess is too, we can't know that, but it doesn't matter. We can still have the ethics. We can still move forward with the ethics of stoicism, which is something that an ancient skeptic wouldn't say.
00:17:03
Speaker
Right. And I don't know to what extent we know how Aristo answers the follow-up questions to that, which the obvious follow-up question is, okay, well then why? What grounds virtue? What grounds your ethical picture? If you're a traditional Stoic on the side of Zeno, then you have at least the beginning of an answer. Nature grounds our virtue, both human nature and nature as a whole.
00:17:30
Speaker
But I don't know to what extent Aristo believed in a human nature. I guess he did, but maybe not. Do you know? No, I don't actually know. There might be a fragment on it. I haven't been exhausted in my research in terms of reading.
00:17:49
Speaker
Literally everything we have from Aristotle before this, but I, I would have read most of it at some point and I can't recall any sort of argument here or any sort of backup. I do know that Cicero makes a counter argument that basically that says that at least Cicero didn't have something satisfying as a backup or Cicero basically says, you know, Aristotle, Aristotle's position is nonsense. It's nonsensical. We have no way of making sense.
00:18:14
Speaker
of how to navigate indifference. We have no way of making sense of what is virtuous versus not without this, without this physics. So I don't, I don't have access or I haven't read it. And I can, I guess I can say that at least Cicero didn't either. If he had one that was compelling. And maybe if you have one of that was compelling, he wouldn't have lost out to the Clancy's at Christmas.
00:18:37
Speaker
Yeah, that might be too optimistic, but there's a, I think my, my position is probably pretty, my considered position is probably pretty close to Aristos, but I am, it's a pity we don't have as much by way of nine or he would actually say to these objections.
00:18:51
Speaker
Great, so moving on to the second part. So first part was the rejection of physics and logic, this focus on ethics, leaving maybe this question open because we have a couple fragments of how we grounded that ethics, but still didn't think we needed the stoic god to do so, which is a pretty controversial claim for the time. And then we'll move on to ethics itself. So even in the domain of ethics, he said some controversial things. He was, you know,
00:19:18
Speaker
pushing back against the stoic view, which I love. I think stoicism gains a lot from battling against other schools, but it gains a lot when people are pushing it from the inside too. So I think this stuff is very fun. So the second piece is that he rejected the idea of preferred or dispreferred indifference.
00:19:35
Speaker
So as I hit on quickly at the start of the episode, really important stoic argument for ethics is this idea around preferred indifference or their opposite is preferred indifference. This is the view that, you know, outside of virtue and vice, which are really good and really bad, all things being equal, some things are better than others and some things are worse than others. So all things being equal.
00:19:56
Speaker
As the example I gave, it's better to have money, health, probably company of other people, pleasure. All things being equal, these are the kind of things that are beneficial. And the way the stoics grounded this argument was we have different roles. We talked about this in terms of our role ethics. Ultimately, our highest role is that of rational beings, and those are the beings that
00:20:19
Speaker
decision makers, minds, and those are the things that are connected to virtual advice, acting well, doing well. But then we're also embodied minds. We're also like animals and things like food, pleasure, health, money to spend it with, company. These are the things that kind of benefit that lower, I guess that animal side of ourselves. And so we should never choose wealth or money
00:20:46
Speaker
or fame or anything like this in a way that would compromise our virtue. But if we can have those things without compromising our virtue, we should take them. And not only should we take them, it's actually weird if we don't take them. If we choose to just, if a stoic says, well, I'm just going to not eat food because it's not virtue.
00:21:02
Speaker
That's kind of a weird thing to do. It's not only a weird thing to do, it's harmful. You're making a mistake about not selecting a preferred indifferent when nothing was at stake. If nothing's at stake, you should select the preferred indifference. You shouldn't mutilate your body. You shouldn't run away, like exclude, like abandon your family or go live by yourself and reject social interaction. All things being equal, you should select these if your character is not at stake.
00:21:30
Speaker
Aristotle rejected this division as meaningless. He thought this was a silly division to make, and in practice, it made no sense when you try to apply it in your ethics. And the argument for this, I have an excerpt from Sextus Empiricus, who's a famous Greek skeptic who wrote about Aristotle. And he said, Aristotle denied that health and everything similar to it is a preferred indifferent. For to call it a preferred indifferent is equivalent to judging it a good and different practically in name alone. But we don't prefer anything unless the situation calls for it.
00:22:00
Speaker
For if healthy men had to serve a tyrant and be destroyed for this reason, while the sick had to be released from service, the wise man would choose sickness in this circumstance than health." And so the argument here, breaking that down, breaking down that quote, is that
00:22:19
Speaker
In practice, whether or not I select something, whether or not I choose health, there never is health in the abstract. There only is ever health in the particular moment. And whether I choose health in the particular moment is going to depend on whether or not it is the virtuous thing to do, whether or not it is the correct selection in that particular circumstance,
00:22:44
Speaker
So the knowledge that health is good in the abstract, it either A, makes no sense, or B, that other objection here, you're calling it good, you're giving it some sort of other quality, but that other quality doesn't get brought into the particular circumstance where you have to make a choice. Because when you have to make a choice, sometimes it's good to be healthy, and sometimes it's bad, like if you're having to serve a tyrant, for example.
00:23:08
Speaker
I think it's also worth situating this in the common way you divide up some of the ancient philosophical schools is you have the cynics who believe that virtue is the only good, and then you have the Aristotelians who believe that virtue is good, but there are a handful of other things that were good as well and that were important to have in a life well-lived, even things that you don't have direct control over.
00:23:31
Speaker
And usually the stoics are portrayed as being in between those two positions. So you have the view that virtue is the only fundamentally good thing. It's necessary and sufficient for living a good life. But there are also these things that you might naturally prefer such as health, riches, and status and what have you. So that is a picture that's
00:23:56
Speaker
or so is at least putting a question mark next to and he's at least theoretically a lot closer to the cynic view that virtue is the only good when he makes this objection.
00:24:08
Speaker
Yeah. And I think historically it's worth noting, right? So Zeno was a student of cynicism. And so we're a lot closer to cynicism here in Aristotle's time. So you say it's closer to cynicism philosophically, but it's closer to cynicism historically from someone like Epictetus, 300, 400 years later. These are people who, you know.
00:24:32
Speaker
I don't have the exact dates of Permian possibly knew Diogenes, the cynic, and if not, then at least Zeno did. And so, so there is that kind of direct content and I guess that historical battle between, as you said, finding that middle way or well, does all of this just kind of get reduced into cynicism anyway, right? Like, is there anything?
00:24:52
Speaker
The cynics, as you said, I was giving a bunch of examples about how it's weird to throw away social norms, all things being equal. It's weird to go against these preferred indifference, but at least in social settings, the cynics were very willing to do this, very willing to push back against
00:25:15
Speaker
social norms because they thought, Hey, everything's, it's all about virtual advice. And if it's neither of those, then you know, what do I care if you think I'm being weird or if I'm sleeping in a barrel or if I'm urinating in public, what is that? That doesn't have anything to do with virtue and vice. So who cares? Right. Yeah.
00:25:34
Speaker
And I think that's where the debate can matter practically, where I think as a Stoic, if you're someone like Seneca, Seneca is of course excessively wealthy and he goes to great lengths justifying his wealth in the face of his Stoic philosophy. And of course, there are a number of other examples where you might say be planning out a life and think one of those things that would be preferable would be that I have a successful career. And you could define that in a material sense, in a social sense.
00:26:05
Speaker
And you could say, look, I'm just being a good stoic. I think that's preferable. It wouldn't necessarily make my life worse, but it's a good rule of thumb to hold that having a good career matters for. All things considered, I'll make decisions based off of the rule, unless of course it conflicts with virtue. And what Arista is saying is, nah, that's not even, that's not what you want to be doing. When you're planning out a life, all you're focused on is
00:26:30
Speaker
what is virtuous. There's nothing else coming into the picture about preferred indifference or not. You know, the stoic might say, oh, I prefer chocolate ice cream, but if that's not available, then whatever, I'll have some other flavor. But Aristo's position is closer to, why are we talking about ice cream? It's all about virtue, right? So maybe that's how you'd want to put it, to make it this philosophical disagreement. It's a practical one as well.
00:26:57
Speaker
Yeah. And then to pull, sort of pull it back out of the practical, back into the philosophical. There's, there's an important point here. So I really love the way you framed it. Cynics virtue is the only good. You know, someone like, like Aristotle virtue is a good, but there's other good things to have. Stoics in the middle.
00:27:14
Speaker
virtue is the greatest good or really the only good, but there's these other things we would prefer sometimes to have if all things being equal. And I'm being a bit uncharitable to Stokes here, because Aristotle's point would be, you're trying to have it both ways, right? You're trying to double debt. You're trying to take that cynic position and you're trying to keep, you're trying to kind of, I guess,
00:27:34
Speaker
maybe appeal to intuition, maybe you're just making a mistake of reasoning when you say, ah, you're preferred to have a job. What does that even mean it's preferred to have a job? That doesn't make any sense. You're either saying it's a good, like Aristotle is.
00:27:47
Speaker
and then you're going against stoic values, that virtue is the only good, or it's not a good, and then it's just an indifferent. And we can't evaluate it unless we're in a situation where, unless we're in a particular circumstance and you can evaluate a particular circumstance, but to call it good outside of that circumstance, you're just becoming Aristotelian then. And I find that a pretty compelling argument, all things considered. Maybe that's because I lean towards the sinecure or
00:28:20
Speaker
It's a pretty, it's a pretty, it's an interesting question to ask if you haven't really interrogated preferred indifference because so normally we're so used to defending stoicism against externals. It's interesting to kind of defend stoicism against somebody who, you know, considers themselves a stoic or wants to kind of push some of those, some of those internal arguments a bit further.
Preferred Indifferents: Stoic Values
00:28:43
Speaker
The stoic response to this is that.
00:28:48
Speaker
preferred indifference are preferred in virtue of the kind of beings we are and that's something like we naturally prefer to be healthy. And it's not in the sense that we prefer it because it's going to get us some other thing down the line. It's not really like having more numbers in a bank account, which is valuable because
00:29:11
Speaker
then you can purchase more things that you think are good. It's that health, all things equal is or it's that health is preferable intrinsically. You don't want to be healthy for some other reasons. It's because given the kind of beings we are as human organisms, health is desirable. And I think that's what the stoics would want to say. And they'd probably want to say the same thing about things, other things that they labeled indifference. Well, I guess the push a bit further on that one, Caleb.
00:29:42
Speaker
Doesn't that make it good if it's intrinsically valuable? Yeah, it's something like it's maybe not intrinsically valuable. There's always this difference between something being good and intrinsically preferable. And I guess the view is something like, well, it's naturally preferable or something like this. And then the next move is, well, why don't you just say it's preferable?
00:30:08
Speaker
Are you adding and is a stoic adding anything else other than yeah, we prefer to be healthy and I think they're trying to say well we prefer to be healthy because of what health is and there's something distinct about Health being a fit organism Where if we are kind of another different a different kind of creature we wouldn't we wouldn't care about it so much Yeah, that's fair. It's a tough one. I mean I'm not I'm not
00:30:37
Speaker
I guess it's not clear to me why Aristotle's wrong here and I'll have to do some more thinking about it. I think that's where I land. I think it's a good counter argument that I'll have to spend some more time chewing on as I was doing this reading for this. I was like, oh, I'm maybe not persuaded, but I'm at least stuck on this one. It's a good one.
00:30:56
Speaker
Yeah, another kind of, I think just to lay out the philosophical terrain, as it were, another move someone could make, which is not the traditional move, is to say that, yeah, these other things are
00:31:09
Speaker
valuable, but compared to virtue, they're not valuable at all. Whenever there's a conflict, virtue wins. Or you could even say virtue is infinitely valuable. All these things like health, wealth, what have you, they're just a little bit, you know, a little bit valuable. They're always going to lose out, which is not the Zeno's view by any means, but is another way to sort of solve this philosophical problem.
00:31:36
Speaker
Yeah, so I compete in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I'm going to bring it back to jiu-jitsu somehow. And when you compete in jiu-jitsu, you have points. When you score points, and then there's these things called advantages, which are tiebreakers. And you could have 99 advantages, and if the other person has one point, they win. Because advantages are valuable, because if it's tied, whoever has more wins, they're tiebreakers. But none of them will ever beat one point.
00:32:04
Speaker
And so this view is something like that, which is that they're preferred, but all the riches in the world wouldn't be worth being a vicious person for one day or something like this. Absolutely. So moving on to the last one, people should already be getting the sense here, there's those pretty hardcore, again,
00:32:28
Speaker
skirting that line between cynic and stoic, really focused on ethics, really focused on practical living. But then there's this third way, this third major
Precepts vs. Philosophy: Aristo vs. Seneca
00:32:37
Speaker
deviation. So the first was he rejects stoic logic and physics as being necessary, putting this emphasis on ethic. The second part is he has problems with the idea of preferred indifference. And everything's, it's just an indifferent. You can't talk about preferred or dispreferred indifference without cheating. And the third major difference is that he rejects precepts.
00:32:56
Speaker
So as I mentioned at the start of the episode, precepts are this type of moral education, this type of advice giving that says, you know, in situation X, you should do Y. So I gave some examples from Sonya Srouvis about what should you do and how would a stoic act in a marriage? How would a stoic dress? And in a modern context, we see this all the time, right? In a modern context, there could almost be an argument that there is too much, too much of a movement towards precepts, which is this idea of like,
00:33:25
Speaker
the stoic way to trade stocks or the stoic way. I do this myself, the stoic way to be an athlete or the stoic way to this kind of placing this stoic view on everything. Now, sometimes we criticize that for a different reason. We criticize that because.
00:33:41
Speaker
it can be kind of those those discussions can get a bit shallow but that's the kind of stuff where we're talking about is this very kind of particular advice which I guess risks being shallow but the the pro-stoic argument would be well it's very valuable from the sonus rufus is giving it it's very valuable if Epictetus, Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius are giving it it's just dangerous when somebody's doing it in a way where they don't understand stoicism
00:34:05
Speaker
Now, Aristotle rejected this type of advice as useless, and he had an interesting argument for it. And I'm going to go to Seneca here. So this is in Seneca's Letters on Ethics, Letter 94. He says, Aristotle regards giving specific precepts to people as trivial. What is most effective, he says, are the actual doctrines of philosophy and the constitution of the highest good.
00:34:27
Speaker
One who has understood and learned this well prescribes to himself what he should do in every matter. And if someone does not have the right doctrines, how will injunctions, how will precepts help him when he is chained down by vicious ones? So to go over this argument, Eraso's argument is this.
00:34:45
Speaker
Particular advice doesn't help vicious people because they'll not listen to it or they'll follow that advice for the wrong reasons. They won't really understand or get it because if they understood it or they got it, they wouldn't need your advice. The second point is that it doesn't help the wise because the wise already knows what to do. The wise generates rules for themselves when the wise encounters difficult situations.
00:35:13
Speaker
They already, they say, OK, well, I don't need Missoni's rufus to tell me what to do. I'll just do it myself. And the third point is that, or a third argument I take from this is that each situation is particular. And this comes back to that idea about indifference, is this real focus on particular situations that Aristotle has. And the only way to know what to do is to understand stoicism deeply, is to understand these core ideas thoroughly, and then reason through the situation yourself.
00:35:41
Speaker
So you're not going to be benefited by something Seneca said that you read about how to navigate the situation. That's not because that's not going to apply to this particular situation. You have to be the kind of person that can generate the correct stoic way to navigate in the situation yourself. So I have a counter argument from Seneca here that he talks about in the same letter, but interested to get your view first, Gil.
00:36:07
Speaker
Well, I want to see if I understand the arguments correctly first. So first there's sort of this line that either the person understands stoicism or they don't. And if they do understand it in the deep sense, they don't need precepts because what the correct action is, what the correct judgment is, is going to be easily obtainable by them because they're essentially wise.
00:36:34
Speaker
And on the other side, if they don't understand Stoicism, then either they've just taken the philosophy on board, in which case that means they're vicious in some way and there's no guarantee that the precept will be applied appropriately, or even worse, they just won't understand what the precept is saying at all.
00:36:55
Speaker
And that's how I understand one of the arguments. And the other argument has to do with detail, where a given precept, they're just at too high level of abstraction. It's something like, you should be more confident when speaking in public. Well, sometimes that's true, but we wouldn't want to give that advice to everyone. Some people are far too confident when they speak in public. Are those are the two strands that you're describing or am I missing one or blurring some together?
00:37:23
Speaker
No, I think that's charitable. I think that's charitable of my way of understanding it. Got it. Practice stoicism with stoa. Stoa combines the ancient philosophy of stoicism with meditation in a practical meditation app. It includes hundreds of hours of exercises, lessons and conversations to help you live a happier life. Here's what our users are saying.
00:37:48
Speaker
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00:38:15
Speaker
I think there, I think there's a third point, which is that someone will, like someone will listen to you. You can say this with kids, right? You tell the kids don't, you know, go apologize to your, you know, go apologize to your sibling and they'll apologize. And they're doing what you said. They're following your precept on how to act well.
00:38:32
Speaker
but they're doing it for the wrong reasons. And so it's kind of a subclass of that vicious point, which is it's not always that they won't listen to it. It's that maybe they'll do it, but if they don't understand stoicism, they're doing it for the wrong reasons. It's kind of like a following through the motions, but they didn't actually act well in that situation.
00:38:50
Speaker
Right. So virtue is a matter of acting at the right time for the right reasons, and of course, doing the right thing. And there's always the precept. There's no guarantee that someone will understand that the precept entails that they act in this situation at this time in this way. At any point, someone can be confused in their application.
00:39:13
Speaker
Or I would say to go even further, if you were the kind of person that understood the precept, you wouldn't need the precept. Right, right. So it's not that there's a chance that you want to understand it, but I think an even stronger claim that if it was helpful to you, if you were the kind of person that a precept could be helpful to, it's not going to help you because you're not going to get it. Because if you would have got it, you would have understood what was right to do in the situation in the first place.
00:39:40
Speaker
Right, right. It's sort of, it's similar to the situation where the Epictetus talks about, where I think it's this fellow named Flavus who has just been invited to partake in one of Nero's spectacles, one of his parties, one of his absurd plays. And he goes up to the Stoic Agrippinus and says, I'm going to go, I'm thinking about whether I should go down to this and sort of debase myself for this tyrant.
00:40:05
Speaker
And what do you think? Do you think I should go?" And Agropianus says, sure. And then Phlogus says, well, are you going to go down? And he said, no. And then Phlogus says, why not? And Agropianus says, I didn't even deliberate about the matter. I knew what to do. And that he's an instance, a perfect instance of
00:40:24
Speaker
what it is to be wise and he didn't need to really even reason or use some precept to come to the right judgment, which is I don't debase myself in front of tyrants and I don't need to ask others for advice or apply some sort of rule. I already know what to do. Whereas if you're in the other situation, sure you can go down and go to one of Nero's parties.
00:40:45
Speaker
Hi all, this is Caleb just jumping in to make a quick correction. The person talking to Agrippinus, his name is Flores, not Flavus. You can find this in the first book of Epictetus's discourses in the section of the things which are and the things which are not in our own power. All right, back to the conversation.
00:41:12
Speaker
Yeah, as you, I think there's a perfect example and the, I try to be as charitable to Aristotle as possible. I think the claim would be something like, and even if, even if Davis was told, don't go to the party and he didn't go, it's not like he did a good thing there. He just kind of followed instructions, which is like, what do you do? You followed instructions. That doesn't make you a good person. The good person is the one who, as it didn't even, doesn't even deliberate because they understand that it's not the right thing to do.
00:41:41
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, absolutely. Well, what do you think about this one? Well, I want to get into the counter argument, which is just the counter, which I just agree with. I think I think Seneca hits the nail on the head here. And so Seneca pushes back in this in the same letter, and he says to quote, We care. Characters need someone to lead the way. This you will avoid. This you will do.
00:42:03
Speaker
If, moreover, someone waits for the time when he will know through himself what is best to do, he will go astray in the interim and thus be prevented from reaching the point where he can be content with himself. Therefore, he needs to be ruled while he is beginning to be able to rule himself. And Seneca's point is just a really, I think, a really moderate, reasonable point, which is to say,
00:42:27
Speaker
When somebody's developing stoicism, when someone's improving their character, they can improve their character in better or worse ways. The entire point of going to Epictetus as a teacher, the point of Marcus Aurelius writing his journal is that there's ways to cultivate your character effectively. These people aren't sages. They're close, or they might be people we admire, but they're not perfect. But there's better or worse ways of developing your character. And having someone tell you what to do
00:42:56
Speaker
is a good way to develop your character if that person is a person worth listening to. It's somebody who can lead you in these moments of being unsure. And as Seneca says, you know, Seneca acknowledges, look, it's good if you know through yourself what's the best thing to do. That's fine. But you're never going to get there. You're going to get pulled astray in the interim, in that time and between, in that progress. So in that progress, it's best to have people you trust who can guide you, who can give you advice.
00:43:23
Speaker
Really really kind of just a reasonable picture by Seneca here and one that I one that I agree with Yeah, that seems right to me. I would say that this There's the version of this Argument that's more hardcore from Risto. It's not that persuasive for this reason. I think I agree with that 100% but I suppose that the other version you mentioned is that
00:43:47
Speaker
Advice can be misleading because it's too low detail. Everything's so context-specific. And I wouldn't say this is a reason to never heed advice or never give advice, but it is a reason to keep in mind that there's some law of equal and opposite advice, which you should always keep in mind, which is that
00:44:07
Speaker
if you're in one situation a precept would be exceptionally helpful but you could find yourself in a different situation where the exact opposite of that precept is what you need to hear. So one should always be skeptical and that I think is a plausible concern.
00:44:24
Speaker
Especially when people talk about things like mental models, I think most mental models are basically useless because they're so low detail. And to be more precise, if someone doesn't know what I mean, someone might argue something like, you need to know these concepts in game theory in order to understand how to invest your finances well.
00:44:45
Speaker
At that level of sort of abstraction where you're using presets from game theory to apply to your investment decisions, it's probably just much better to be direct. Go be direct with whatever context you're in. Think about investment more generally and not some abstract laws about how investment might somehow be like game theory or something more abstract.
00:45:15
Speaker
Yeah, so there's something worth pulling out here, Caleb, because the opposite of precepts is kind of high level theory, right? The opposite of a precept in the way Seneca talks about it. And this, again, was letter 94 of his letters to Achilles or letters on FX, depending on the translation you're reading.
00:45:34
Speaker
The opposite of precepts is frame-based theory. So it's frame-based going even higher level. So what I was hearing you just say is like, look, precepts are not detailed enough, so be careful. But it's kind of interesting because the solution to that is to go really, really high levels, the solution they recommend. So I guess the word that differently, I would say,
00:45:56
Speaker
The issue with precepts is not that they're not specific enough. The issue with precepts is that they can make you lazy or it can make you feel like you don't need to evaluate this particular situation you're in. So the issue is the issue, and that's when going to this high level can be helpful because at least when you're at this high theoretical level, you say, okay, well, virtue is the only good, vice is the only evil.
00:46:23
Speaker
You're not confused that you have the particulars, you know, you didn't say, well, the Sonia's Rufus told me to dress this way today. So that's what I'm going to do. Or Epictetus told me, I can't cut my beard. You're not confused about having these particulars. So you, you spend it, then you will go down and evaluate the circumstance. So I guess they can kind of lull you into this sense of false confidence or the sense of just kind of, as I talked about earlier, just following instructions without really understanding why the instructions are there in the first place.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose there's this ladder of abstraction. There's theoretical pictures at the very top, and that's something like, virtue is the only good. And then there's this level of maybe advice that's something closer to be more confident in public. Or Seneca has a few as well. Fortune favors the brave, but the coward is foiled by his faint heart.
00:47:17
Speaker
And that's sort of at this moderate level where you're not really targeting a specific life circumstance, but you are talking in terms of heuristics. And then even lower, there's more detailed things, such as if you want to do this in your fashion,
00:47:38
Speaker
sense or something like this, you know, if you want to do something very specific in your style, then this is what you ought to do. So in each level, I suppose, was what Risto is saying is that it's the highest level of abstraction that matters. Whereas I think what I was saying earlier was something like, in general, you want to be as detailed as possible.
00:48:04
Speaker
Or maybe, well, maybe also understanding theory, but it's probably like the mid-level is where you maybe want to avoid your thinking, if that makes sense. Yeah. I guess I don't have any issue with the mid-level. I don't have an issue with any of these, as long as they're methods for directing people and you're still like Epictetus stopping every impression, evaluating each other to search the circumstance on its own. I guess I don't see the, I don't see an issue because when you mentioned, Oh, game theory.
00:48:34
Speaker
You have to understand these ideas of game theory like if I was new to game theory, I would like to read that I would think that's interesting and that's helpful But it would be a terrible stopping point and it would be a terrible thing to only apply in the circumstance So I go back to Epictetus here, which is like stop the impression test it evaluate it. So so
00:48:54
Speaker
And that's one of the big takeaways of stoicism, right? Is this ability to slow things down. So you have more space to evaluate individual circumstances, to evaluate when somebody insults you or something happens that seems incredibly harmful or bad to stop and evaluate that and say, do I really want to think that way? Do I, do I really think this kind of deserves a passionate response from me? Cause it is really a true evil or true good. And so.
00:49:19
Speaker
taking the time to do that is what I think matters. And I don't think you're doing that if you're just following stock advice. And so that's, that's, I guess my point is you're losing kind of a skill, kind of critical thinking skill, which I don't think is the point Arista is making here, but is the one that I would say is the worry about precepts. But I think as we both agree on, and most people would agree, listening, I assume,
00:49:44
Speaker
is that you need some help when you're making, when you're on your way, right? Like obviously the best thing to do is you're just born, you're born a saint, you're born a perfect person and you generate the truth from yourself in each situation you encounter and you just, but that's just not the way people
Virtue in Stoicism: Absolute or Gradual?
00:50:01
Speaker
work, right? It's a really, it's a really kind of hardcore position. The one other point I wanted to make on this is that it's kind of the moral development. So the Stoics have this claim that all people are equally vicious.
00:50:14
Speaker
or equally good. And their claim was that you're either perfect, you're either virtuous, you're either a sage, or you're vicious. And all people that are vicious are equally vicious. And they give some metaphors for this. They would talk about a line. You know, a line is either straight or it's bent. It's not kind of straight. It's not really close to being straight. It's either straight or it's bent. Or someone who's underwater, they're either drowning or they have air. Doesn't matter if they're at the bottom of the ocean or they're just below the water.
00:50:43
Speaker
You know, they're, they're, they're still drowning. And I see Aristotle is kind of the, the, the moral argument. Like if you took that argument as literal as possible and you applied it to self-improvement.
00:50:58
Speaker
You would say, well, you know, there's no point of this self. There's no point of these precepts. We're kind of trying to, this might be unshareable, but trying to teach with precepts, these vicious people, cause it's not going to help them. They're not going to understand it. They take it for the wrong reasons. The only thing to do is to become virtuous and navigate the situations yourself as a virtuous person. I almost see.
00:51:17
Speaker
The way I read into this is that he's taking that argument to its natural or most extreme conclusion, where someone like Seneca, Epictetus, they're much more grounded in trying to help out fellow people, their roles as teachers, their experience with the complexities of moral progress. So they take a much more practical, lenient view.
00:51:38
Speaker
Yep. It's similar to, I think Marcus Aurelius has a line that something like all you need to worry about is doing the right thing at some point. One of these fragments that you wrote down, wrote down to himself. And that's sort of the, the Risto view as well. Anything else you want to add? I think that's it. Awesome. Cool. Great. Thanks real fun. Fun chatty about these, the lesser known Stoics. And for those listening, let us know if you like these topics or there's anybody else you want us to cover.
00:52:26
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.
00:52:32
Speaker
Definitely. Thanks for listening, all.