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David Fideler on Seneca and Deep Stoicism (Episode 42)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this conversation, Michael Tremblay speaks to David Fideler about Seneca. They cover how the Stoic philosopher provided valuable guidance for how to live today. David’s book Breakfast with Seneca serves as the launching point for the discussion.
(03:04) Facing the Mob
(09:06) Cosmopolitanism
(20:03) Authenticity
(24:42) Confronting Death
(29:21) Experiencing Grief
(34:25) Cosmic Gratitude
(41:28) Deep vs Shallow Stoicism
***
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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Deep Stoicism
00:00:00
Speaker
How do I survive and get by in an uncertain world? And well, there's nothing wrong with that because we all need to get by. The whole point of deep stoicism was about making a contribution to the world and helping others because we're connected with everything else in the universe. And that's a universe that in my view is not flat or reductionistic or boring, but it's a world that's actually infinitely deep.
00:00:27
Speaker
so that we can keep exploring and learning new things forever.
Podcast Overview with Michael Trombley
00:00:32
Speaker
Welcome to StoA Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with and experts.
David Fidler on Seneca and Philosophy
00:00:49
Speaker
And in this conversation, Michael Trombley speaks with David Fidler. This is a conversation from the Stoa app. The app includes a number of conversations, like the one you are about to hear, many of which we have not yet released on the public feed. So if you'd like to hear more of those, download Stoa in the app store or play store. And here is an introduction from Michael.
00:01:17
Speaker
In this conversation, David Fidler returns as a guest on STOA, and we talk about the thinking of Santa Claus and how it applies to our modern world. David has worked as a college professor, editor and publisher, educational consultant, and as the director of a humanities center. He studied ancient Greek philosophy and Mediterranean religions at the University of Pennsylvania, holds a PhD in philosophy, and is the editor of the STOIC Insights website.
Seneca on Psychology and Influence
00:01:43
Speaker
David is the author of the book Breakfast with Seneca, A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living, and he's also the editor of a new website, The Living Ideas Journal, which explores how the humanities can contribute to the world and deepen our experience of being alive. We discuss Seneca on crowd psychology, grief, and death. We also explore the notion of deep and flat stoicism,
00:02:04
Speaker
Black Stoicism being a shallow or superficial view of Stoicism and sort of making us feel better, and Deep Stoicism being a comprehensive life philosophy that involves both being happy and having our obligation to help others. Anyone interested in learning more about Semica's approach to Stoicism will find value in this episode. Hi, David. Thanks so much for coming on. How are you? Good. It's so great speaking with you again.
00:02:28
Speaker
Yeah, I really enjoyed our last conversation and wanted to have you on again because, you know, there's so much, so much stuff you're doing on Seneca right now, so much meaty work in your book, Breakfast with Seneca. And I thought it'd be great to jump back in, talk more about that. Jumping right into it, one of the parts I like most about your book is that you, you kind of wrestle with Seneca as a contemporary thinker and you branch and you both respect the context and history of the time that he was in, but then also kind of consider his thought and ideas.
00:02:58
Speaker
in relation to contemporary life and our contemporary kind of technological, psychological problems. So one thing that you talk about in the book is mob psychology and how Seneca was concerned about the influence of being around people, the influence these people could have on your behavior, your virtue.
00:03:18
Speaker
And so my first question would be what insights on mob psychology can Seneca give us that can help us prepare for internet culture in this kind of contemporary internet age?
00:03:29
Speaker
Okay, well, Luca did write about this and actually it's one of his most memorable letters, number seven. And he talks about going to the gladiatorial games in Rome. He was thinking it might be a bit of fun, but once he got there, he found it to be horrifying instead. And at one point the games turned into people killing each other while the crowd screamed with approval and they were screaming things like,
00:03:53
Speaker
kill him, whip him, burn him, and so on. And then at the intermission, the moderator of ceremonies announced, now it's time for a bit of a throat-slitting to keep the action going. So there was essentially this frenzied crowd screaming for the death of other human beings as a form of entertainment. And I discussed this in a chapter in the book called Vicious Crowds and the Ties that Bind.
00:04:19
Speaker
And there's a famous quote from Seneca. He wrote this letter to his friend, Lucilius, and he said, do you ask what you should avoid most of all? And then he said, a crowd.
00:04:30
Speaker
But when Seneca wrote that, he wasn't just referring to large groups of people in general. He was talking about mobs or vicious crowds because it's easy to get swept away in the emotions of a crowd. And as I looked into this more closely, it became obvious to me that Seneca was probably the first person in history whose writings we have at least
00:04:52
Speaker
to write about what we now call crowd psychology. And modern psychologists only started studying that in the 1800s in France.
00:05:02
Speaker
The other thing that was really astonishing to discover across several writings is that Seneca was talking about how emotions and bad character traits are unconsciously and virally transmitted and in the same way that someone can become infected by the plague just by being breathed on by another person.
00:05:24
Speaker
And so he's talking about these viral transmissions. It was really uncanny because I was writing this during the pandemic, so everyone had viruses on the mind as well. And there's several really great quotations from Seneca about this. And in one of them, he says that we pick up habits from those around us, and just as some diseases are spread through physical contact, the mind also transmits its ills to those nearby.
00:05:51
Speaker
The good thing about this is that if we spend our time around good people with good characters, we'll also pick up or absorb their good character traits, which is one reason that friendship was so important for Seneca. But to go back to your original question, nothing has changed in human psychology since the time of Seneca. And one of the places where we see this kind of viral mob behavior today is on the internet.
00:06:20
Speaker
And we've all heard the modern saying about how things go viral online, but this is just a rediscovery of what Seneca was actually writing about 2000 years ago.
00:06:30
Speaker
One difference is that there are a lot of people and a lot of media sites which are trying to make things go viral on the internet, which probably isn't a very good idea because that can be psychologically manipulative. But the thing that disturbs me the most about this is when there's like a short video clip online and people get very upset about it. It goes viral and people like a mob start denouncing it and how horrible it is.
00:06:58
Speaker
But people oftentimes have no idea what they're actually seeing because the full context of the video clip isn't shown. And then later the whole thing turns out to be a total misinterpretation. And Seneca would have been quite against this kind of behavior. He also believed that you shouldn't make a judgment about something until all the facts are in. And if he was alive today, I think he'd say, don't be antisocial, but do take a step back from anything that resembles crowd psychology.
00:07:28
Speaker
It sort of keep, I mean, I think it's so interesting how we, we keep these, these metaphors through time with virality. Yeah, exactly. So I guess his advice would be something like, you know, if you're, if you're pushing this, this, this virus metaphor is like, well, don't get infected. Like don't be, don't be around a bunch of sick people.
00:07:45
Speaker
But I like how you also point out, we don't have a good virus. We don't have that opposite in that metaphor. But in terms of virtue and character, you can kind of, that is contagious in the same kind of way. So both avoid the sick people and spend as much time as you can with the people you want to be like.
00:08:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's really interesting how much people imitate other people. And when I was researching that chapter, you know, I was also taking into consideration like imitation, things like hypnosis and things like that. And one of the interesting things I stumbled across
00:08:21
Speaker
was the fact that if you're in a group of people and you yawn, then other people will start yawning around you. And they've discovered that you can actually transmit yawns to cats and monkeys as well. So it must be something very deeply wired.
00:08:38
Speaker
I always thought the yawn was interesting because the yawn of all things, of all the things to be deeply, deeply wired, the ones that I don't understand the function of. Yeah, that's really, that's really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really,
00:08:53
Speaker
kind of modern problems. One thing you talk about in the book is, you know, the importance of the idea of cosmopolitanism and oichiosis. And I'll let, I'll let you, you know, do a better job than me of explaining those in Seneca's thought. But I was, I was wondering if we could talk about how those ideas can help us prepare for a world that's increasingly globalized. So as our community becomes the entire world, what can stoic notions of cosmopolitanism and oichiosis teach us about that?
00:09:21
Speaker
Sure. Well, later in this conversation, we're going to speak a little bit about deep stoicism, which is a concept I stumbled upon. And one of the deepest, most profound ideas in stoicism is that of the cosmopolis and cosmopolitanism. And what cosmopolis means in Greek is world city or city of the world, or even city of the cosmos, actually.
00:09:45
Speaker
But the Stoic idea is that all human beings contain a spark of logos or reason within, which makes us rational creatures. And in addition, that spark of reason binds us all together as human beings. It's the principle of reason that makes us human.
00:10:04
Speaker
And because of the spark of reason we all possess, all human beings are brothers and sisters of one another.
Stoicism and Human Equality
00:10:11
Speaker
And because of the spark of reason, all human beings possess. The Stoics were the first philosophical school to say that all human beings are equal because of that. And so regardless of race, gender, national origin, or whatever, all human beings form one giant community, which is a cosmopolis.
00:10:30
Speaker
And this is a vision of human nature that was shared by Gandhi and by Martin Luther King Jr. also. A very closely related Stoic idea, which isn't discussed very often, is their belief that the primary human emotion is love and affection, which they had a special term for, philostorgia, which can be translated as family love. And that's another aspect of what I call deep Stoicism.
00:10:56
Speaker
The Stoic said that even non-human animals have love for their offspring, which impels animals to care for and protect their young. And Cicero has this really great line about this, which I really love. He wrote that when we see the great efforts that animals spend on caring for their young, the quote is, we seem to be hearing the voice of nature itself, which is really amazing.
00:11:21
Speaker
And today, of course, we'd call this an instinct. But what the Stoic said is that this kind of love or affection gives rise to human kinship. And it's this sense of human kinship that inspires us to form cities, societies, and states. So based on our common humanity, we feel kinship with one another.
00:11:45
Speaker
And then also related to this is the idea of oikiosis, which is from the Greek word oikos, which means house. But more importantly, in this context, oikos also means family. And the stoic goal was to see all human beings as being kindred so that we could see the entire human race as an extended family.
00:12:08
Speaker
And oikiosis is a process by which you come to see all human beings as kindred and related and as part of a giant family. So many people listening to this have probably seen that diagram of the circles of human concern, which illustrates an idea from the historic philosopher Hierocles. And he lived around the time of Marcus Aurelius. And in this diagram, the central circle is you, an individual self.
00:12:35
Speaker
And the next circle is your immediate family members. The next circle is your fellow citizens. The next circle is everyone who lives in your own country. And the outermost circle is all of humanity, the entire human race. And hierarchy says that it's easiest to feel kinship with those who are closest to us, say our immediate family members.
00:12:59
Speaker
But by applying our reason, we can come to feel kinship with the entire human race. And that process is called oikiosus, coming to see all of humanity as a common family. And as Marcus Aurelius said, all rational creatures by which human beings are born for the sake of one another.
00:13:18
Speaker
And Seneca has some great lines about human brotherhood. One of my favorites is when he says, if you remove fellowship, you will tear apart the unity of the human race upon which our life depends. So in this way, I think the Stoics were hundreds and hundreds of years ahead of other thinkers, you know, in the same time period. And as you suggested, Michael, this is an essential way of looking at the world and other human beings in a time of
00:13:47
Speaker
increasing globalization. And I think one of the reasons the Stoics took these ideas so seriously is that the Greek Stoics were living in the very first global civilization, the Hellenistic Empire, created by Alexander the Great, which stretched all the way to India.
00:14:04
Speaker
And in Alexandria, in Egypt, that was the center of international trade. And it was almost like a physical embodiment of this idea of the cosmopolis, because people would stream in there from all over the world. And at a certain point, even Buddhist missionaries were living there.
00:14:21
Speaker
So with international air travel today, our entire world is like a multicultural Alexandria. So there's a very strong parallel between the Hellenistic and Roman worlds of the Stoics in our world today.
00:14:37
Speaker
Yeah, I hadn't considered that before about the drastic increase in globalization right around that time. And that exposure to, you know, what would have been not only some, you know, these, these Buddhists or, you know, Asian culture, not only would have been very different, but it would have been much harder to reach or go to than in today's time. So in a sense, you had access to something that was even further away.
00:15:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's really interesting. And so I love this notion of this love is a core emotion, this support for all of humanity, and this idea that we should extend that consideration out to that furthest of those four circles being, you know, all people.
00:15:20
Speaker
And so I guess what I want to ask next is about, there seems to be to me a bit of a tension here. So in one sense, we don't want to be influenced by the mob. We don't want to be negatively influenced by the bad people have, their sickness, their virality. But on the other hand, we want to love and support them. As you say in your book, we don't want to retreat to an Epicurean garden. So how does Seneca or the Stoics overcome that kind of tension between wanting to help others, but recognizing the harm others can bring?
00:15:50
Speaker
Well, if you want to compare the Stoics with the Picureans, this takes us back to the idea of the cosmopolis today, because if we're part of a universal brotherhood united by reason, we have a responsibility to help our fellow human beings.
00:16:07
Speaker
It's like Marcus Aurelius said, if we're rational creatures, or think about this, the term homo sapiens. Homo sapiens literally means wise human. Sapiens is the word for the stoic sage. But if we're rational creatures or homo sapiens, we're born for the sake of one another, then we have an obligation to help our fellow human beings. And of course, Seneca believed this
00:16:31
Speaker
as well. And it's why the Greek Stoics said that a Stoic should become involved in politics unless there was something prohibiting him or her from doing so, because they saw being involved in politics as being in a position to help others. Now, ironically, perhaps the Greek Stoics never followed their own advice on this, but Seneca did.
00:16:53
Speaker
And he was a Roman senator, but he had very bad luck, bad timing, to be involved in politics under Caligula, who wanted to put Seneca to death, and under Claudius, who exiled Seneca on trumped-up charges. And then he also had the very bad luck of becoming the tutor of Nero when Nero was 11, and later going on to become his advisor when Nero was older.
00:17:17
Speaker
Now, the Epicureans, on the other hand, were basically social dropouts who were primarily looking for peace of mind. And this led them to avoid political involvement at all costs, as well as marrying and having children, because those kinds of things would disturb their peace of mind. And instead, they hung out in the garden of Epicurus.
00:17:41
Speaker
which is kind of hard not to compare to a hippie commune, just because the comparison is so funny at least. And in one of his talks, Epictetus, the stoic philosopher Epictetus, who had a pretty wicked sense of humor, poked fun at the Epicureans, and Epictetus said to his students, he asked them,
00:17:59
Speaker
Can you imagine a city of Epicureans? One of them would say, I won't marry. And another would say, I won't either because one shouldn't marry. And another would say, no children either. And also, we're not going to perform any civic duties. So in terms of civic responsibility, that didn't really work out very well.
00:18:17
Speaker
But even Seneca realized that there were certain conditions in which a stoic sage would not engage in politics if the situation was too unfavorable. And things were so bad at the end of Seneca's life during the last days of Nero that he basically tried to avoid Nero.
00:18:34
Speaker
He told his friend, Lucilius, I'm writing for future generations. So Seneca hoped that his writings could benefit people in the future because it had become so hard to benefit people in his own time.
Authenticity and Society in Seneca's Philosophy
00:18:48
Speaker
But to benefit others, Seneca believed that a person had to be authentic, which involved understanding your own nature.
00:18:56
Speaker
And another point I made in the book is that we are living in very different times now, and there are many, many ways we can benefit others today. If the political system is broken, going into politics might actually be one of the worst possible ways to help other people. I mean, I love the way you explain that. The way you explain that, Nick, that it seemed that there isn't really attention. There's kind of a virality of helping other people
00:19:22
Speaker
can be viral and can harm you in this sense, but you have an obligation to help others to be involved. You have kind of your civic communal duties. So to retreat to the garden is kind of almost self-centered in a sense. Maybe it's the easiest way for you to achieve kind of a smooth flow. You're, you're kind of disregarding your responsibilities to other people. So is that, is that right?
00:19:43
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, if you're an Epicurean and you can drop out and you don't have any responsibilities to society and you have a steady stream of income, I suppose it's good work if you can get it, but it doesn't fulfill one aspect of what it means to be a human being, which is to contribute to the common good.
00:20:03
Speaker
Yeah. And one thing you mentioned there was that one of the best ways to contribute to the common good is to be authentic and to be consistent to yourself. And this is something that I find in Seneca's writing, probably my favorite part of Seneca's writing is this discussion of authenticity and consistency. And the thing that gets me in the heart and makes me go, wow, I really, I really want to really want to strive for what then it was talking about. So did you dig into those notions of authenticity and consistency and a bit about why they matter?
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's another place where he was ahead of his time. And what Seneca said is, because everyone's concerned about being authentic today, but what Seneca said is that to be authentic and consistent, you need to understand yourself and your inner nature and even your own personality traits.
00:20:54
Speaker
for Seneca and some of the other stories. There's a deep level where all human beings are the same just because we're human beings, but on a more individual level, we're all different. We have different personality types, different physical strengths. Some people are stronger than others. We have different skills, different abilities.
00:21:14
Speaker
And that's really why not everyone should go into politics. I mean, similarly, not everyone should own a business. I mean, for some people, it could be a great way to improve the world. But there's no one thing that everyone should try to do because we're all different.
00:21:32
Speaker
But on the other hand, if you understand yourself, you can find some way to contribute to society when you really know what your strengths and your interests are. Now, as far as consistency goes, once you do understand yourself and understand who you truly are, you should act consistently.
00:21:52
Speaker
in your behavior, so you should act as one person. And for Seneca, a person with a solid character will be one person instead of many and have some kind of, you know, destination in life that, you know, they're moving towards. But Seneca says that's actually quite rare and he was also a satirist.
00:22:11
Speaker
And he has this very funny satirical passage where he talks about this. I'm just going to read a couple lines from it because it's so funny because he's describing what we would call neurotic people today and how they're constantly driven by changing impulses. And so this is just a small portion of it, but it's totally hilarious. He says, there isn't anyone who doesn't change his plans and desires every day.
00:22:39
Speaker
One minute he wants a wife, the next moment only a girlfriend. One minute he wants to rule like a king, and then he acts more obliging than the lowest servant. One minute he acts so grandly that he attracts envy, then he acts more humble than the most self-effacing. At one moment he scatters money grandly, and the next moment he steals it.
00:23:06
Speaker
This is the clearest sign of a mind that lacks awareness. It constantly changes its identity. And he goes on and on about this. It's totally hilarious. It's very well worth reading. And he just, I mean, his whole idea is that once you reach a certain level of maturity, you'll discover the importance of being one person rather than changing your identity every day or two.
00:23:33
Speaker
I love that. I mean, one of the parts of Epictetus that really inspired me the most when I began reading him was that there's that famous line with the chamber pot where the person says, you know, should I work this, this job where I have to, you know, hold a chamber pot? And Epictetus is like, you know, either do it or don't, but don't do it and complain about it, right? Like don't have that inconsistency of, you know, as you say, like, like the person in Seneca's example, right?
00:23:59
Speaker
having a wife and wanting the stability that comes with that, but then pining after a girlfriend or something like this, this kind of having it both ways just doesn't cut it. And it's just this kind of sign of immaturity. I find that really impactful. Yeah. And so, so changing topics here, switching to one of the other chapters of your books, there's a chapter about death. And this is something that the Stoics talk about a lot and then, you know, is quite a famous part of stoic philosophy, but I really liked, you know, kind of how personal your approach was with it.
00:24:28
Speaker
and your kind of approach to confronting death intentionally. And so one of the things you talked about was, you know, discussing death with your son. And I thought that was a very moving passage and a very clear kind of practical way of putting the Stoic work into action. But could you talk a bit about some of the benefits of confronting death intentionally and applying Seneca's teachings here?
00:24:49
Speaker
Sure. Well, when I was working on the book, I mean, I've been reading, you know, Seneca and Stoicism for decades now, Seneca for probably like 13 years, and Marcus Aurelius when I was back in my twenties. But when I was working on the book, I thought, well, I really need to try every stoic technique in the book, you know, so that I could be a guinea pig to see how all of this is really working in real life.
00:25:15
Speaker
and the idea of memento mori or remembering that you'll die. It wasn't an invention of the Stoics like many of their so-called spiritual exercises that came from earlier philosophers. The first case of this really goes back to Socrates, who said that philosophy is a preparation for death.
00:25:35
Speaker
And the idea that you'll die as a philosophical meditation is a case of the preparation for adversity, which was a Stoic practice, or mentally preparing for future adversity. So the Stoics essentially embraced that across the board. That also came from earlier philosophers.
00:25:55
Speaker
with the earliest Greek Stoics, they adopted that idea. And the whole idea of preparing for future adversities is that if you rehearse a potentially negative event in your mind first and it actually arrives, then you'll be prepared for it, which will diminish the shock of the event.
00:26:14
Speaker
And the Stoics believe that you should even contemplate the death of your family members because that's certainly going to happen someday. It's just being realistic. But if you think about it in advance, the shock will be less and it will be easier to accept when that happens.
00:26:30
Speaker
So during the pandemic, I was writing this book and trying out all these short practices and found them to be extremely helpful. And one unexpected side effect of the premeditation of adversity is that if you imagine a family member dying, you'll be so much grateful for his or her presence every day while you're still together.
00:26:51
Speaker
And so I took this on and I made it a point to ask my little seven-year-old son at the time. First of all, I'd ask him every day, do you know that I love you? So that he would know that I did in case I happen to die that day, you know, which, you know, probably wouldn't happen then, but it will surely happen at some point.
00:27:09
Speaker
And there's also this funny story in the book you mentioned about how I told my son that not only will I die, but he will too. And at that moment we were driving home from a fast food restaurant and I told him that he could die at any moment also, which is true. And I said to him, I said, Benjamin, we could be in an automobile accident. And he was somewhat skeptical that he would actually die before me.
00:27:36
Speaker
even though we could have been in a car crash before reaching home. But I think the reason I brought this up with him is that the trouble with young children is that they live in this kind of golden age in which all of their needs are met every day. And they haven't yet experienced the death of a loved one or any real adversity in life. So I was trying to teach my son that death was inevitable.
00:28:01
Speaker
and that he should be prepared for it and he should be prepared for, you know, other people dying as well. And whether or not I was really successful with that, I have no idea, but at least I gave it a try.
00:28:14
Speaker
Yeah, I thought it was a lovely passage because it's something that's true. It's something that's very important, but we have such an aversion, I think, to talking about these kind of topics with children in particular. But in a way, if you take a step back, what a great role for a parent to have to kind of prepare
00:28:35
Speaker
their child to understand the kind of upsetting topic in kind of a safe space and kind of a way that's progressive or transitioning. You know, it's not like, it's not like somebody has passed away. And when that does happen, at least your son will have kind of wrestled with this, this notion of death a little bit.
00:28:51
Speaker
Yeah, I hope so. I mean, his grandparents are quite old, actually, and they could, you know, die at any moment. And so I was just experimenting with that. I was trying to see whether it might be possible to, you know, teach a young child about the premeditation of adversity, you know, concerning death. Whether I was successful or not, I don't know. It's not something I'd want to really bring up every day. But it is something to think about.
00:29:20
Speaker
Yeah. And related to this concept, Seneca talks about appropriate grief, and this is something you talk about in your book, which is interesting because in one sense, we were just talking about prepare yourself for death.
Grief in Stoic Thought
00:29:34
Speaker
People might think that involves numbing to it, but then Seneca is also kind of very liberal or very allowing of grief in its appropriate context. So can we talk a bit about what appropriate grief looks like?
00:29:46
Speaker
Well, Seneca wrote a lot about grief, and it's something that he experienced himself because just before he was exiled to the island of Corsica, 20 days before that, his only son died when he was a baby.
00:30:01
Speaker
And so Seneca had his own share of grief, and he was critical of the earlier Greek Stoics who believed that a Stoic sage would not experience grief at the death of a friend or loved one, and Seneca found that to be a very harsh and inhumane view.
00:30:19
Speaker
And he even wrote that historic sages, not like some kind of rock with no feelings at all. And in fact, Seneca wrote five different writings for his friends about grief and how to manage it. And all of these writings have come down to us today so people can read them.
00:30:35
Speaker
The conflict between Seneca and the earlier Greek Stoics is actually very easy to understand when you understand the four types of emotion in Stoicism. So first, the first kind of emotion, there's love and affection, which obviously that's a very positive emotion. And then for the Stoics, you have propathai.
00:30:57
Speaker
which I translate in the book as natural human feelings. Now, today we might call these instinctual feelings that you don't have any control over, and the story saw these as being unavoidable and also like morally neutral, so they were neither good or bad because you had no control over them.
00:31:14
Speaker
So this would be a case where, you know, if you see a snake and you jump back from it, it's just like an instinctual response. The third group of emotions are pathé or passions, like anger. And the Stoics believed that these were based on false beliefs and damaging to our character. And then the final group of emotions are upathé or good emotions, which originate from correct judgments.
00:31:44
Speaker
you know, so these are good emotions, you know, like stoic joy and things like that. But of all of these different kinds of emotions, there's only one group that was bad for the stories and that was passions or negative emotions based on false opinions.
00:32:01
Speaker
And so when the Greek Stoics said that a Stoic sage wouldn't experience grief, they obviously were classifying grief as a passion, a negative emotion based on a bad judgment. But later Stoics, like Seneca, didn't see grief that way. They saw it as just being instinctual, as a normal human feeling that's unavoidable. And after all, if we're human beings who are deeply bonded with the people that we love,
00:32:31
Speaker
It's only natural that we'll feel grief and shed some tears when we lose a loved one. So if you do lose a loved one, you're going to experience grief. And the question then is, what are you going to do with that grief?
00:32:46
Speaker
What Seneca said, this is what you're getting at in your question, is that there's kind of moderation in grieving. So if you lose a loved one, you shouldn't let your eyes be dry, he says. And while it's fine to weep, you shouldn't wail or act as though you've lost your mind. So his idea
00:33:05
Speaker
was to experience grief. The phrase I use in the book is, give grief, it's due, but don't overdo it. At the same time, he would say, let your sorrow be totally genuine, but don't cling on to it or amplify it, and then it will pass eventually. But my favorite personal advice from Seneca is how a person can turn grief into gratitude.
00:33:27
Speaker
And he told one of his friends, he said, don't complain about what was taken away, but give thanks for what you were given. So when you lose a loved one, as everyone will, think about all the happy times that you had with that person. And in that way, over time, you can replace your grief with happy memories and with gratitude for the time you had together.
00:33:51
Speaker
I know personally this can work very well because my dad died when I was 27 and it was quite sad. I experienced a lot of grief at the time, but when I look back on my dad now, I just don't feel any grief at all. I just have happy memories of our time together, which I'm very grateful for. So it is possible to replace grief with happy memories and gratitude.
00:34:14
Speaker
I think that's beautifully said. And building on that idea of gratitude, I know that you have another chapter on this in the book, and I thought it was a great one. And you distinguish between different types of gratitude, one of those being cosmic gratitude. And so could you explain that to the audience?
00:34:34
Speaker
I had a lot of fun with this chapter and people don't write about it very often, but love and gratitude were very important for the Stoics. And it's strange actually how the idea of gratitude has been almost totally overlooked by modern Stoics because Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius wrote about gratitude repeatedly. So I wanted to take a really close look at gratitude in the book and I spent about a month researching ancient and modern ideas about gratitude and
00:35:04
Speaker
What I discovered or concluded is that there are basically three main types of gratitude based on who exactly the gratitude is directed at. So say that another person does something nice or helpful to you, then you feel grateful to that person. So that's like the most common idea of gratitude. And I call that like personal or civic gratitude because
00:35:28
Speaker
you're being grateful to someone else. Now, in the religious sphere, people often talk about being grateful to God or the gods if you're a polytheist. So I call that theistic gratitude. And in theism and the Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic traditions, God is actually seen as being a person
00:35:50
Speaker
So when someone says that they're grateful to God, it's very close to personal gratitude. It's just God instead of a human being. But the third type of gratitude, which I find to be actually the most interesting, is when people are not grateful to another person or to God.
00:36:09
Speaker
but they're just grateful to nature, the cosmos, or existence itself. In other words, they're experiencing a kind of free-floating gratitude, but it's not directed at any person. I call this cosmic existential or non-personal gratitude.
00:36:27
Speaker
And this is a kind of gratitude that you often find in the ancient Stoic writers, and it's not directed at any person. And as I explored these three types of gratitude, it helped me to understand the ancient Stoics much more deeply because the Stoics really were not theists. The Stoics, they often use the term God.
00:36:48
Speaker
But they didn't mean that term in the way that theists do today, because today theists, like Christians for example, believe that God is a person who created the universe, who designed the universe, and it's a person that you can have a personal relationship with.
00:37:07
Speaker
By this definition, the Stoics were not theists, and actually none of the other ancient Greek philosophers were either. Now, on the other hand, the Stoics were not atheists either, and what the Stoics were pantheists, which means that they believed that the universe itself
00:37:25
Speaker
was God. It wasn't that God isn't something that stands outside the universe. And Asanaka pointed out, the words God and nature, or God and the universe, can be used interchangeably. So pantheists don't believe that God is a person, but what they do believe is that
00:37:44
Speaker
the universe is divine or worthy of, you know, deep admiration and that it's permeated by a deep unifying force, which is the source of nature's order and beauty. And so God, as nature, permeates human beings too. But unlike the Christian God, it's not something personal. It's not a being that you could pray to, really.
00:38:08
Speaker
And I'd personally like this deep kind of impersonal gratitude of the Stoics, and I had a bit of fun with it because there are some Christian theologians who only believe that you can be grateful to a person or to God.
Gratitude in Stoicism and Beyond
00:38:22
Speaker
So in the research, I found a couple of fantastic quotations from famous atheists like Nietzsche and Richard Dawkins.
00:38:31
Speaker
in which they express their profound gratitude for being alive and for being able to contemplate the wonders of nature. But since they were atheists and they weren't being grateful to God, they weren't being grateful actually to anyone. So it's a kind of non-personal or cosmic gratitude, like when Seneca says, that we should be deeply grateful to nature for all the gifts that nature gives us. And nature isn't a person, but
00:39:00
Speaker
For Seneca and the Stoics, that shouldn't limit our sense of gratitude. And this is the thing that I love the most about the Stoic idea of gratitude is that Seneca says that someone on their deathbed who has made progress in Stoicism will feel gratitude for the life and all the experiences the universe has given to them.
00:39:22
Speaker
And you find this idea in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius too, and they say that when you're dying, you shouldn't feel regret, but have a profound sense of gratitude for everything you've been given, for the great opportunity that you had to participate in the Festival of Life.
00:39:41
Speaker
and the opportunity that you've had to be a philosopher and a citizen of the cosmos. And I find that to be fantastic because that ties in so well with the Stoic idea of what the goal of life really is, eudaimonia, which for the Stoics really meant.
00:40:00
Speaker
having a life that's truly worth living. So if you have a life that's truly worth living when you reach the end of your life, you shouldn't regret the fact that you're dying. You should be grateful that you've had this incredible experience and been able to do all of the wonderful things that you did.
00:40:17
Speaker
For me, that connects with the things we were talking about previously about death and grief and that you can only really get to this gratitude if you're willing to look those things in the face and willing to look at nature as it is and accept those parts of nature by confronting them and understanding them. Whereas if you kind of get hung up and you don't want to look at nature as it is, it's going to be difficult to kind of reach that cosmic existential gratitude for what you do have. At least that's the way I take it.
00:40:47
Speaker
I think that's true because this may have been one of the things that the Stoics meant by providence. I mean, that's sort of a difficult idea to decode sometimes, but the fact that we'll die is part of the providential
00:41:04
Speaker
order of nature. So we should accept it. I mean, there would be nothing, you know, more crazy to think that, you know, somehow this is like unfair. I mean, as Seneca said, it's death is a great equalizing influence because everyone is going to, you know, experience it someday. So that makes us all equal. And it's just part of the cosmic order. So it's just part of being alive.
00:41:28
Speaker
Yeah, great. And one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is a notion you've been developing, a kind of an interesting idea about the difference between deep and flat stoicism. So could you introduce those ideas and explain why they're important and why this is a good way to think about stoicism?
00:41:49
Speaker
Well, I've been thinking about this some time and I've always been obsessed really with the idea of taking a deeper look at the world now. So long before I started studying stoicism, I always believed that there was a difference between sort of just looking at something and actually seeing it in a deeper way. So there's a difference between just looking and seeing something in a deeper way.
00:42:13
Speaker
And I've always felt that it was like the function of philosophy, science, and the educational system to deepen our view of the world, even if they frequently fail at this. Actually, so I've been thinking and actually even writing about this since I was in my 20s, which was quite a long time ago.
00:42:31
Speaker
And one of the things I've always been concerned about is how people often look at the world in very reductionistic ways, which has a tendency to flatten our view of the world. And having said that, I fully support the use of reductionism in science because reductionism in science is just supposed to be a tool that scientists use.
00:42:53
Speaker
And so, for example, like a form of reductionism would be saying, well, you know, the heart, you know, it's like a pump or something like that, you know, that kind of metaphor. Now, in reality, I mean, maybe you could learn something from that or, you know, express the idea of a heart, you know, to a child.
00:43:13
Speaker
But the heart is actually quite a bit more than just a pump, it's quite a bit more. I mean, it's actually a pretty poor metaphor. But anyways, scientists come up with these metaphors and oftentimes they take their tools and models to be reality instead, rather than just seeing them as tools. And the philosopher Alfred North White had called this the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
00:43:39
Speaker
When that happens, we're left with scientism and not science, in which the model is taken to be reality itself and not just a useful tool. And when that happens, the world becomes flat and two-dimensional. So I once wrote that then we're left stranded in flat land. So I'm just trying to give you a little background as to
00:44:01
Speaker
why this distinction is significant to me. And when I studied the history of science, when I was working on my PhD, I was really astonished to discover that actually false scientific models can work very well. And you can see that like in the history of astronomy.
00:44:20
Speaker
And it's very shocking to realize that you can have a false scientific model that works because that implies you can have really good working models that might not, in fact, be actually true. And to make things even worse, you have no way of knowing if that's the case. And in my view, philosophy should help us see the world more deeply.
00:44:43
Speaker
which would then deepen our lives as human beings. And I'm convinced that stoicism can do this, because if I didn't believe that, I probably wouldn't care about stoicism. But I do care about it. I find the stoic writers to be amazing. So we've talked about some of the deeper aspects of stoicism, including the cosmopolis, love, and gratitude.
00:45:06
Speaker
And this is what I call deep stoicism. And in my book on Seneca, you know, I discussed all of these in some depth. And I also concluded that love and gratitude are pretty closely connected because they're different aspects of appreciation.
00:45:22
Speaker
So when you love someone, you appreciate them. When you're grateful, you're also feeling appreciation and appreciating the world we live in. And our loved ones is extremely important, you know, to us as human beings.
00:45:38
Speaker
And in addition to that, another aspect of Deep Stoicism is being able to see the deep connection between all the things and processes that exist in the universe, which was like one of the goals of ancient philosophy. And there's this fantastic quote from Marcus Aurelius in which he's
00:45:58
Speaker
describing not just an idea, but actually something I believe he could actually see. And what he said is this. He said, all things are interwoven with one another. A sacred bond unites them. There's scarcely one thing that is isolated from
00:46:16
Speaker
one another. Everything is coordinated. Everything works together in giving form to the one universe. That's meditation 7.9. And there are actually scientific insights into the way that nature works that are very, very close to that. It's also very close to a line from the modern environmentalist John Muir. And he said that when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. So
00:46:45
Speaker
everything really is interconnected and in the biosphere and all living forms are related to one another and they're related to the co-evolving environment and their symbiotic relationships and all those things that we've discovered from more modern findings of evolution
00:47:07
Speaker
And I think personally that if we could really see what Marcus Aurelius and John Mearsaw that would be much less likely to be in the kind of ecological crisis that we find ourselves in. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we're just looking at nature and our relationship to nature in
00:47:25
Speaker
the wrong way, but in our world of modern Stoicism, hardly anyone writes about these ideas, which are really the living core of Stoic thought, and so that lack of attention concerns me. I guess, so to start, there's this the thing show between deep and flat and deep is to
00:47:49
Speaker
strive to really understand the thing as it is, not as it appears. And you can apply that to stoicism. And deep stoicism, as you talked about, is wrestling with these notions of love, gratitude, cosmic connectedness, providence, these kind of things we've been talking about today. And so what might flat stoicism look like then? What does that mean?
00:48:12
Speaker
By flat stoicism, I mean the way in which many people who read books on stoicism look at stoicism today basically as a collection of life hacks that they can use.
Critique of Flat Stoicism
00:48:22
Speaker
And I'm going to be the first to say there's nothing wrong with that. As William Irvine pointed out, the reason we have these things is because stoicism is easily hackable. And the Stoics gave us all of these wonderful psychological techniques to become more psychologically
00:48:41
Speaker
resilient. But as one example of this, if you go to Google and Google the phrase, like stoic flowchart, and then click on the images that come up, you'll see what I mean. Because what you'll see is basically all these flowcharts illustrating why you shouldn't worry about something. And that, of course, can be helpful now. If I was having a bad day, I might find, you know, looking at one of these charts to be calming too. But the thing is, is that these and other stoic techniques are not really
00:49:10
Speaker
philosophy as you and I understand it to be. They might be incredibly helpful but they're not philosophy and in my view real philosophy it can't be reduced to like a chart an algorithm or some kind of operating system.
00:49:25
Speaker
And the one problem with these flow charts, this is kind of meant to be funny, is that they resemble a maze in which a mouse is traveling through to like reach a piece of cheese at the end. But the goal of stoicism should not be, you know, to reach a piece of cheese. I mean, that's a very two-dimensional approach, you know, like a maze going through a maze and lacking in depth.
00:49:49
Speaker
It certainly is true that we shouldn't worry about things. I mean, the stories are right about that. But even if we eliminate worry, we should still be rationally concerned about what is happening to us in the world. It's the difference between being emotionally swept away by something and being able to look at it in a rational and somewhat disinterested way. And that's really the last thing I'll comment on because I could discuss this for hours. But in the end, I think that
00:50:18
Speaker
One of the problems with flat stoicism is that it's really all basically about the individual self. How do I survive and get by in an uncertain world? And while there's nothing wrong with that because we all need to get by, the whole point of deep stoicism was about making a contribution to the world and helping others because we're connected with everyone else. And we're also connected with everything else in the universe and
00:50:47
Speaker
That's a universe that, in my view, is not flat or reductionistic or boring, but it's a world that's actually infinitely deep.
00:50:56
Speaker
so that we can keep exploring and learning new things forever. And so I think that this idea of flat stoicism, this idea of how do I survive and get by in an uncertain world, it's something that everyone should consider because we all have to do that. But at the same time, it's a very utilitarian way of looking at the world. And if you just think about the world in those terms, you're likely to overlook other things like
00:51:24
Speaker
the beauty of the world, the beauty of being alive, the sense of wonder that inspires philosophy, and all of those other things that are really at the core of ancient philosophy.
00:51:35
Speaker
Yeah, as I hear you talk about that distinction, I guess the goal would be to do deep philosophy in a way that's accessible and easily understood. And I think that your book does a good job of that. And I think that's part of why the stoic have remained is because there's a depth to that thought, but also in accessibility.
00:51:56
Speaker
Right. And like I'm saying, there's absolutely nothing wrong with these stoic techniques that people are so enamored with, and they are genuinely helpful. So I totally endorse them. But for example, if you read a lot of popular treatments on stoicism, or for example, like a newspaper article, even in a very good publication, they're just going to give you a list of these techniques.
00:52:25
Speaker
And they're not going to give you a sense that there's actually something really profound and much deeper to Stoicism that will not just help us get by in the world, but really enrich our lives more deeply as human beings.
00:52:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's great. David, it's been a pleasure talking to you. I really enjoyed this. I enjoyed your book and I think everybody interested in Seneca and kind of Seneca from a deep stoicism perspective should pick it up and read it. Before we finish up, is there anything else you'd want to talk about, any kind of projects you have coming up where you want our listeners to know about?
00:53:03
Speaker
So I have a website, Stoic Insights, but I'm also working on a project that involves the Renaissance. And I have a website related to the humanities as well. It's called Living Ideas Journal. So if you Google that, that will come up.
00:53:19
Speaker
And I also have something else called the Renaissance program. And it's about the ideas behind the Renaissance and how the Renaissance came into being. And I'm putting on a five-day course in Florence, Italy next May. So if you look, the Renaissance program.
00:53:36
Speaker
Or you can find it through the Living Ideas Journal, but that actually relates to Stoicism too, because the first Renaissance humanists were very, very deeply influenced by Stoicism. But one thing that I found to be very interesting about the Renaissance is that they actually take sort of stoic philosophical ideas quite a bit further in some ways.
00:53:58
Speaker
because they were really obsessed with this idea of achievement and transforming the world rather than just adapting to the world. And the Renaissance itself was the outgrowth of this new kind of educational program. And Stoic philosophy was part of it because moral philosophy from the ancient world, they were trying to revive that.
00:54:21
Speaker
But it was really amazing what they were able to accomplish. They had this incredibly optimistic view of human nature, and I think in our own times we could use a big dose of that because they felt that their civilization had basically collapsed, and so they were looking back at
00:54:41
Speaker
the philosophy of ancient times as well as Greek and Roman culture, and trying to find the best aspects of that to revive as a way to create a better civilization because the political system was corrupt, the church was corrupt, the legal system was corrupt, Latin had become corrupt and everything like that, so they wanted to do a reset.
00:55:02
Speaker
of civilization. And it's very hard for me to read some of these ideas and writings about the decline of civilization and how it could be improved by studying these ideas from the past, just like we're doing right now with the Stoics. And it seems very timely and sort of uncanny because I think our own time in some ways reflects that kind of cultural decline that they were trying to combat with the Renaissance.
00:55:31
Speaker
Well, I mean, that's something that I would love to talk to. We get a chance to talk about again, discussion of Renaissance stoicism and kind of that context would be really interesting for me. Sure. That'd be great. Yeah. As always, thanks so much. Great. It was wonderful speaking with you.
00:55:46
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Store 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.
00:56:02
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.