Stoicism at the End of the World // 236

The history of Stoicism is long and complicated, and we didn't want to end with AI alpha male YouTube channels, so here is a rundown focused on Greek Stoicism, some comparisons to Buddhism, and whether or not this philosophy could help in 2026. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This isn't weakness, This is strategy. This is what high
value men do. Masculine men don't chase, They disappear. Welcome
to stoic blessing. Today we strip away the lies that
keep you emotionally caged. The modern world wants men to
be needy, to be available, to always explain themselves. But

(00:20):
real strength, real masculine energy. It doesn't chase validation, It
doesn't plead for attention. It becomes the storm and then
it disappears into the horizon.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Ah, as you will have already seen from the title listener,
we're doing real philosophy.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
Yeah, it's I mean, I'm kind of glad, to be honest,
it's funny. This is I feel like I've hit my
limit of just like controversies to care about what.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Do you mean, Oh, you mean in terms of the news, Yeah,
going to say, let's be stoic with regards to the news.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
I'm just hit my limit of like forming an opinion.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
It's been a hell of a year these last It's weird.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
I guess I feel like I would say I always
felt like I had an uncommonly high appetite for like
discussing the controversy of the day, and I would say that, like,
I feel like I've hit my limit. I don't know
if I'm getting older, but I'm just like, I don't
I don't want to watch the video. I don't want
to form an opinion about what the ICE did about
like oh was it? Like I just I don't want
to look at it. I don't. I don't care. I
mean I care, I just don't want to. I don't.

(01:31):
I choose not to participate.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Aren't you happy that you're a little bit safer that
a terrorist mom has been her schemes have been put
to an end.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
I don't even know what you're talking about because I
refuse to watch the video or learn anything about it.
I know someone was shot by ICE, but I don't,
I don't care. I choose not to form an opinion.
I just saw some tweets about like, you know, Tim Pooles,
just like oh, like he was trying to defend himself,
and then like all the lefty people are like this
is like a deliberate killing, and I'm just like, I
don't want to watch the video. I don't want to know.

Speaker 4 (02:00):
Good well sounds like an appropriate topic.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
So you haven't formed an opinion on Maduro either, well.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
That was like the last one where I feel like, uh,
I mean, I think it's.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
The last opinion. Neule Forum was on that one.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
The last opinion will form at least for a little bit.
I want to I'm on an opinion moratorium for now.

Speaker 4 (02:17):
The latest Greenland speculation, I.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
Mean Maduro was was fascinating only because Trump was so
honest about his motivations, which I kind of appreciated.

Speaker 4 (02:28):
I'm getting jokes over here being like, hey, you're going
to go back to Canada after if if it's still Canadas,
if it's not part of the United States. So when
you get back, Yeah, I like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Well, who's next. I think it's I think it's Cuba
and Mexico that are next, and then US after that,
us on Greenland after that. But you know what I
appreciate about the whole week is it's we're finally living
in reality. We have been living in fake world our
whole lives until this point, where there's the ruling class,

(03:01):
which is the money people and the power people, and
for some reason that they don't understand and we don't understand,
they just abide and pay lip service to liberal democratic
principles in rhetoric in what they're allowed to do, but
then of course behind the scenes broken every single rule
and then acted like they were like it's like porn
star acting, And then the New York Times will cover

(03:24):
their their porn acting film and say, this was the greatest,
most heart felt performance we have ever seen. But now, no,
we're doing a freedom war this time. Oh and we
love democracy and freedom and the war on drugs. We're
doing this for you. It's just really a breath of
fresh air for them to just say we want control
of the oil and we don't care if the cops

(03:47):
kill you, because we have contempt for you that we
have to do all this pretending that we care about
your rights and democracy and this country or that country.
It's like they're not. Every lib is fucking shocked right
now that they're destroying democracy. This is unseemly behavior. Look,
you dipshits. This is the ninetieth the ninetieth head of

(04:10):
state change in South America, and it's the first time
that they've been honest about it. So the illusory piece
has been broken and we can just say, look, guys,
we have the biggest army. We have a bigger army
than the next twenty armies, and we might as well
use it because we're just leaving money on the table and.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
We have the best technology and we can do whatever
we want.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
And if you don't like that, you can go protest
in the street and we'll send the essay to kill
you on camera and nothing will ever happen to us
because Libs until now, we're allowed to think that the play,
the theater play was real for the last eighty years,
and now they have to pick a side for real.
I think it's a it's a development. The end of

(04:54):
history is over.

Speaker 3 (04:55):
Yeah, there's something refreshing about the honesty, and I think
it's also I've been thinking about like international relations realists,
and I feel like this is their time to shine.
They're just like see like in the world, international order
doesn't matter, Like it's actually the state of nature between states,
and the only reason they don't do stuff to dominate
others is because they choose not to. And they have

(05:15):
just like Hobbes described in the state of nature. You know,
people can have compacts, people can have like agreements, but
the problem is they're just not very durable because there's
no there's nothing above that to ensure just as between states.
It's like, sure, the UN can send a sternly worded
letter to the US and be like, we don't like

(05:36):
what you did, but ultimately that doesn't matter.

Speaker 4 (05:39):
You can all get together and condemn things.

Speaker 3 (05:42):
We can send a strongly worded letter. And that's about
the effect of it.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah, people are shocked that it's fallen, but we students
of history, we're shocked that it lasted this long.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
Well, you also think about it, like I kind of
understand it, like like setting any morals aside from it's
like you think like you're just thinking from a purely
self interest or like strategic perspective in the US is
like Venezuela has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia and
we're just letting them be run by an anti American guy.
Like why we're why are we allowing this? Why are

(06:15):
we allowing this to happen?

Speaker 2 (06:17):
Decora, Well, decorum prevented them from doing anything too fast.
They've been they've been doing economic war on Venezuela for
thirty years.

Speaker 3 (06:26):
Yeah, they're like, we could just go in and remove him,
Like why what are we Like, why do we care
about this? Like they're they're literally have more oil than
Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 4 (06:32):
Oh that that seems to have happened now, but it's
being condemned by the because it's against international law to
do something like that.

Speaker 3 (06:40):
Which has no which has no coursive power behind it, it.

Speaker 4 (06:43):
Has it has no teeth. That's the problem.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
The thing is it never did. It's like everyone acted
like it did. So so Baudriard has predicted exactly the
twenty first century to a tea, but he predicted it
in the seventies. This is the Bodriardian century that started
with art, which committed suicide. Now our liberal myth, it's
committing suicide. The world we think exists does not actually exist,

(07:08):
but everyone has to pretend to believe in it for
now until the real comes back and the real will
have the last last.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
Yeah. Well, I was just going to say, but exactly, like,
there's no like, it's never really been a thing. It's
just an agreement. But that's why I think, you know,
if we were due to an episode about this, which
I don't recommend doing, it would have been like we
should read Hobbes because it is just striking to me.
How like, because a lot of people I think sometimes
underemphasize the extent which Hobbes was like, look in the

(07:37):
state of nature, like, people can make all kinds of agreements,
and you might have peace for a while, you might
have stability for a while. The problem is that at
any second that could just end, Right, at any second,
the stronger could just be like, I feel like I'm
not going to follow this agreement anymore, and there's nothing
anyone can do about it. Right, that's the problem with
the state of nature.

Speaker 4 (07:56):
I've always felt like the state of nature was like
a hypothetical background that he's sort of proposed to explain
the social contract.

Speaker 3 (08:05):
Well, it's an analogy, it's not exactly. It's not like,
it's not supposed to be like a historic.

Speaker 4 (08:09):
Not a literal historical. It's not something we can like
go back to.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
No, No, it's an analogy. But I'm just saying, like,
but that's why, like, in a way, the conditions that
he describes are many ir realists argue, is basically what
exists between nation states. Right, it's basically the state of.

Speaker 4 (08:26):
Nasure, Machiavellian politics versus more like like friendly politics, right,
like League of Nations politics.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
Or even before Bacchiavelli, Thucidides, and a Melian dialogue. I
have heard at least at least half a dozen diletants
reference the Million Dialogue this week as if it's morally approbriates.

Speaker 3 (08:50):
But I would say, but Hobbes again, that's the reason
why I always kind of I mean, I'm not I
wouldn't say I want to defend him, but like he
likes nice politics, like he wants nice politics. He's just
that you just have no guarantee that you can keep
it nice if there's no.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Sovereign Yeah, And this climate of intellectuals has been tricked
or duped into thinking, no, this is like, this is
reality that we're dealing with. This isn't useful fiction that
we've all agreed upon. But then with a snap of
a fingers, someone who is very unvirtuous in the stoic sense,
is able to just undo it all.

Speaker 4 (09:24):
Hobbs is thinking of also like the whole Oliver Cromwell affair,
right of course regicide. And I don't know how he'd
be And he wrote that like kind of an exile
or I guess he returned to England when he wrote it.

Speaker 2 (09:37):
I'm not sure.

Speaker 4 (09:38):
I can't remember, but I wonder what he would think
about one sovereign deposing another sovereign, Like I guess, I
guess that would be because international law is not guaranteed
by any sovereign. It's just a kind of a fabric
of agreements.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
But that he has to have considered it, surely, don't
you think because he wrote Leviathan came out during the
wars of religion and monarchs trying to depose other monarchs
wouldn't have been at all a foreign consideration or an
impossibility exactly.

Speaker 4 (10:12):
Like, it's a fabric of agreements by a number of
different sovereigns. And I have no idea what Hobbes thought
of inter sovereign arrangements.

Speaker 3 (10:23):
Yeah, I don't know if he ever actually wrote anything
about it. I just know that a lot of ir
people kind of take his argument and just just kind
of map it onto like the world. Right.

Speaker 4 (10:32):
It's like, in a way, this is unexplored territory. I'm sure.
I'm sure for me it is. But I'm sure there's
a lot some historical precedent for it.

Speaker 3 (10:41):
There might be something I know that like, for example,
in like when my colleagues in political science who are
worth concentrating on ir. I know that in the core course,
like they all read Hobbes, they all read I think
they read Machiavelli, they read they read like a bit
of Kant. I think like On like World Perpetual Peace
is like some of their theoretical grounding. And then I

(11:03):
think they might even read rolls on like the Law
of the Peoples, which is about like world government, potentially
a world government or global justice. They are actually the
most theoretical sub discipline of political signs after political theories.
I are they like read the most theory after theory theorists.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
Turning from the world news that we are ambivalent about
in Stoic too, uh if philosophy news. Oh yeah Plato.
I'm in favor of this decision personally, but Plato has
been censured from an intro to philosophy course at Texas
A and M University.

Speaker 4 (11:40):
You're in favor of censorship of Plato?

Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yeah, just Plato, but.

Speaker 4 (11:44):
I just from the Socratic symposium do.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
Its obviously being like sarcastic here.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
No, Plato sucks. This is what we read that we're
reading the Stoics today, And I can show you why
Plato sucks but the reasons. But the reason that they
gave for bad Plato from a philosophy class is actually
more retarded than just banning Plato from a philosophy.

Speaker 3 (12:06):
Well, what's the reason? I forget? Actually another story that
I kind of only vaguely paid attention to and decided
not to have an opinion about.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
No, I think I think you should jump off the bench.
You should. You should have an opinion about this. The
reason that Plato was they told, they told the prof
to take it off the syllabus, the reading off the syllabus,
And the reason that they gave was because it included
gender ideology. Yes, this is a two millennia old text

(12:35):
that has gender ideology in it. Now I think you
know what it is. Can you rack your brain and
tell me what you think is the gender ideology text
from Plato? That it might be the only time he's
ever even mentioned women at all.

Speaker 3 (12:47):
Is it like men and women exercising naked together as guardium?

Speaker 2 (12:52):
It's in the symposium.

Speaker 3 (12:54):
Oh yeah, I love the Symposium.

Speaker 2 (12:56):
And it's the funniest one too. It's Aristophanes. Because Aristophane
is depicted as like a comedian, he's a clown, and
he tells the story about how how men and women
used to be the same uh, in the same body,
and they were just balls that rolled around, and.

Speaker 3 (13:12):
They had four arms and four legs, right or something, didn't.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
They balls that rolled around. That's why they did they
desire each other is because Zeus out he was punishing humans,
so he split the balls in half. So you got
men on one side and women on the other side, but.

Speaker 3 (13:28):
Our other half.

Speaker 4 (13:29):
No, they were yeah, they were the the male females,
the male males, the female females, and then yeah, they
were separated.

Speaker 2 (13:39):
I guess, oh yeah, I guess it might be banned
because they did have a male male ball, which was
just how you get gays, and a female female ball,
which is how you get lesbians.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
Is that in the symposium? I don't remember that. That's
so funny.

Speaker 4 (13:50):
It's really it's like our other half, right, You're you're
left desiring your other half, and that's like that's saying,
you know, when you talk about your partners your other half,
that's like, uh, Aristophan. I don't know if that's an
Aristophanes reference, but that's like, that's it.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
The point is they're censoring the inclusion of this in
a philosophy course, when the context is a joke. It's
Aristophanes telling a stupid story because he's drunk.

Speaker 3 (14:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (14:16):
Yeah, that's the symposium, which is Yeah, when people get together,
eat and drink and talk about shit.

Speaker 3 (14:23):
It's actually amazing how much more like I realized, like
I feel like very few people actually care about free speech,
like like I don't like genuinely like I know, I
think that there's a very Like I would bet that
of the American population, maybe ten percent actually care about
it like what it means. The rest say they do,
but only invoke it when it's against their side. So

(14:46):
few people call out their own side like on it.
And it's like when we're seeing it with the conservatives now,
who who are so calling out like cancel culture and stuff,
But now that it's their side, so many of them
are silent, and it's kind of incredible.

Speaker 1 (14:57):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (14:58):
Free free speech definitely works so much better when when
people don't get upset at what is said with the
license of free speech, which is which is where stoicism
can come into play. But free free speech, you know,
if you don't get upset at what is being said

(15:20):
or what is being discussed, like what is it the
passages from the Socratic dialog Symposium that discussed patriarchy, masculinity,
gender identity, and the human condition. For example, the myth
of Androgyny by Aristophanes.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yeah, there was.

Speaker 4 (15:41):
Three kinds of human beings at first.

Speaker 2 (15:45):
Balls rolling around? How do they how did they even
get up the mountain?

Speaker 3 (15:49):
Well?

Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah, that that origin story.

Speaker 4 (15:51):
That's the origin of love, right if you you can,
I think there's a cool clip you can watch but
by Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and there's a song
called the Origin of Love and they turn the myth
of Androgyny into a song and it's and it's kind
of a nice it's it's a nice clip. I think
it's on YouTube. You can find it. But anyway, yeah,

(16:11):
if that makes you upset, then free speech is doomed
because that's not such a bad story. But here we
are in the age of intolerance.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
And they do this when there's good reasons to band
play though, Like he's a metaphysical idealist and despite being
the worst philosophy school to come out of Athens, it
just happened to blow up because of the historical accident
of Christianity. And I'm not alone in saying that Mietzsche
agreed with me. Well, Howdiger hated all the Athenians. But anyway,

(16:43):
we are today on stoicism, which is the most popular
philosophy on on YouTube, and uh, it's it's not it's
not as far off as you might think. But most
of we looked at a few videos and they're like
an AI statue with an AI voice talking about if

(17:04):
women reject you should just walk away because that it's
going to hurt them more than if you wind and
cry about it.

Speaker 4 (17:10):
I looked at the description and it had a reference
to this dark psychology thing, so I kicked that in
and it comes out as a book. There's a book
called dark Psychology. But then I eventually found a Conversation
article about dark empaths. How how dangerous are psychopaths and

(17:31):
narcissists with empathy? It's basically like a manipulation system. People
who think they can manipulate other people using things like
what was it? Love bombing, gas lighting, guilt tripping. Oh,
it teaches you how to do that? Yeah, like it's
a it's a form. I mean this channel, this Stoic channel,

(17:54):
is basically like yeah, the subtitle of their video now
the title is dark Psychology one O one, and that's
a reference back to this psychological manipulation tactic stuff like
if you're a crazy psycho narcissist who thinks you can
manipulate other people and you want to write a book

(18:14):
about for other people how to do it, you might
write a book like this. He might make videos like
that about how to get back at your ex in
the most efficient and effective way possible.

Speaker 1 (18:27):
Stoicism is all about alignment, not reacting out of emotion,
but acting out of principle. If she's off balance, you
don't steady her. You let her feel it, and if
she comes back, it's because she felt the void, not
because you beg to fill it. If you're done being
loyal to dysfunction, if you're ready to reflect, not chase,

(18:48):
hit that like button, subscribe, turn on notifications, and comment below.
I match energy, not emotion.

Speaker 2 (18:56):
They're using AI to generate a statue of Marcus Ray.
Why don't you just have the statue or generate like
the person Marcus Aurelius. I don't. I don't understand the
esthetic theory behind here, But anyway, if you are stoic,
the women are are. They're not going to be able
to hold themselves back. They're gonna be they're gonna be

(19:17):
clawing at you to fulfill their other half in the
androgynine original human.

Speaker 4 (19:23):
They're they're doing this under the name of Stoicism and
portraying it as some kind of hyper masculine code, which
which is not I guess it's not like inaccurate, but
I mean, it's just has nothing to do with Stoicism.

Speaker 3 (19:39):
Also, but.

Speaker 2 (19:43):
Stoicism is kind of cast in our contemporary environment as
just being is being useful for self help. But it's
kind of like, actually it is self help, Like that's
the closest thing to it. It's not as it's it's
it's far from what we call philosophy insofar as a
philosopher as a professor at a university publishing two papers

(20:08):
per year.

Speaker 4 (20:09):
It's been extraordinarily influential since about three hundred BCE when
it was founded, and it was a whole movement for
the next five hundred years. I'm pretty sure it had
a big influence on Christianity. Like I'm pretty sure like

(20:29):
Saint Augustine was hugely influenced by Stoicism and incorporated some
of their ideas into his explanation of like free will
and things like that, and then it was hugely influential
from the Renaissance onward, during the kind of rediscovery of
ancient learning, alongside the other big ones like epicureanism and cynicism.

(20:57):
But it's been hugely influential all the way down to
the present day when it becomes self help, weird, weird
masculine manipulation tactics done under its name, and all sorts
of things in that way. But yeah, it is a
serious philosophy. It is systematic. It's at least in its

(21:22):
ancient form, it presented an entire worldview. It was primarily though,
a practical method of living your life and living your
life virtuously and free of external influences, really virtue despite
whatever is going on, separating the things that you have

(21:43):
control over versus what you do not have control over,
and those sorts of things.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
And this gives you a different picture of a few things.
But the first one is we read Buddhism at about
this time last year.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
I was thinking about that too.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
There's a lot this. This feels a lot more like
Buddhism in different words than it does like on like Plato,
because it's practical. It's life advice to make your life better,
not let's argue about the thing that's right, although you
end up are also arguing about.

Speaker 3 (22:20):
But it's also like based on a metaphysics too, like
of the world, kind of interrelated about like a claim
about the way the universe works that then governs action.

Speaker 4 (22:32):
Yeah, there's a theoretical side. And it is surprisingly scientific,
not in the sense that I mean like it's completely
opposed to modern science, like what we believe in now,
but it's surprisingly scientific in like the spirit of open
inquiry that was preserved over its five hundred years of

(22:53):
ancient its ancient existence, and in the internal debates, and
in the willingness to revise positions, and in the focus
on empirical observation to derive its sort of physical cosmological
explanations from which it would derive its practical lessons from

(23:16):
surprisingly open in that sense, surprisingly I call it scientific,
like they're willing to observe and learn from observation and
revise like it's it's it's the furthest thing. They make
strange claims, but like I think, if you look at
how it develops, it's like far from dogmatic in the
sense that to become a stoic, you're following in the

(23:39):
pathways of you know, the people who came before you,
but you're not sticking to them dogmatically. I like this
one of Seneca's letters on ethics. He said, the people
who took these positions before us are not our masters,
merely our guides. The truth is available to everyone and
hasn't yet been seen by others. There is a lot

(24:02):
of it left for those who will come along in
the future. Just he's just gesturing at what we don't know.
And I mean, the difference between what we know now
what we can know now if we're willing to go
and read our biology and physics and chemistry textbooks and whatnot,

(24:23):
is hugely increased over the past obviously two thousand years.
So it's a surprisingly open philosophy in that way.

Speaker 3 (24:33):
But it has high expectations. I would call it perfectionistic.

Speaker 4 (24:36):
Yes that there are some drawbacks. Yeah, like the sage.

Speaker 3 (24:40):
Figure, stoicism is it's really you're really missing a lot
of it if you just think it's about how to
live your life, like that is what it's about. But
it's also about so much more. Like I said, it's
about an interconnected claim about the way the universe functions.
And I think the way the Stoics talked about it
is like there's a ethics, logic, and physics, right, I

(25:02):
don't know, and they're all interrelated, so like the account
of and maybe we can talk about what each of
those means. The Stokes is they're different than what they
would mean to like modern ears of people who are
even educated in philosophy. Like logic isn't just formal logic,
it's also about like language and speaking. And I think,

(25:23):
and I don't know, I don't have that list in
front of me. And then physics includes things like ontology,
metaphysics kind of like an account of reality, how reality works.
And then like ethics obviously flows from that in terms
of like practical philosophy, like how you should act, And
all of those things are like deeply interrelated to the

(25:44):
point where I think a lot of people back in
the day, back in the you know, Roman times and
Greek times who would attack Stoicism, would attack its kind
of physics or metaphysics, and that would end up being
like kind of fatal, like not in the sense like
in the sense that if you take one piece out
the whole thing collapses. And that's kind of one of

(26:06):
the maybe weaknesses of Stoicism that like it's it's also
interdependent on its claims about the way the world works,
about the way language works. That like, you know, it's
kind of a house of cards where if you remove
one thing kind of like the whole thing, it needs
all of it to survive.

Speaker 4 (26:26):
Kind of Yeah, that's what I found so fascinating about
it is, Yeah, is also the source of its fragility,
is it's systematic. It's I thought it was such amongst
all the ancient systems I know about, which like is
not deeply a lot, but like, yeah, I found Stoicism

(26:46):
to be the most serviceable of all the world views
because it seems like a lot of the ancient philosophies
what has survived from them is very specific, like Epicurus
and the pursuing a life of pleasure is the most
important thing, and the Clinimen and the swerve and his

(27:07):
kind of like non deterministic materialism, or even Aristotle and Plato. Right,
you have the theories of forms and all of the
areas Plato open up Aristotle, you know, whatever is important
to you from Aristotle you can kind of take that
the poetics, his metaphysics and physics, which we're kind of

(27:30):
superseded by Galileo and the scientific Revolution. But like the
Stoics have this full worldview system and everything is interdependent,
and yeah, it makes it kind of fragile in that
way because you kind of have to take it as
a whole and you can't really just dismember it into
this sort of But what the popular image of Stoicism

(27:54):
gets right is that, yes, it is above all an
attitude or what of life. But what tends to get
left out is that they proposed a materialist ontology in
which God permeates the entire cosmos as a material force.
That's interesting, God is material. It is an extreme materialist,

(28:18):
deterministic philosophy. And then a quote They claim that virtue
alone is sufficient for happiness and that external goods and
circumstances are far less important than most people tend to assume.
They argued that negative emotions are merely the product of
mistaken judgments that can be eradicated by a form of

(28:39):
cognitive psychotherapy. They brought these various doctrines together in the
image of the ideal Stoic sage who would be perfectly rational, calm,
and undisturbed by the vicissitudes of life. So that's how
Sellers describes the parts of Stoicism that are usually left

(29:00):
out of the popular image. Some of that's obviously weird.
It's extraordinarily materialist, Like it does not accept Aristotle's theory
of forms, it does not accept Plato's sort of separate
realm of ideas. It doesn't think of the soul as immaterial.

(29:22):
It thinks of the soul as material. In fact, it
thinks of the soul as that part of God that
we share in or that part of God that is
in us. This sort of numa, this sort of divine
airy fire, which is a material thing. It's almost like
a tension, like a like when you, I don't know,

(29:45):
when you speak and you're like making tension in the
air kind of to make vibrations in your lungs and
like that kind of tension. Like that's what it's like.
It's like a material force in the universe, and we
share that part our soul is just that like part
of God in us, and God is also like a
material force and it's like driving the universe. And so

(30:07):
it's this purposive material, overarching cosmos. That's benevolent because it's good.
It's something we need to find out about. It's something
that's why there's physics in their theoretical system. We need
to find out about the universe. We need to shape
our actions to nature. We need to imitate nature in

(30:28):
this way. And we also physics need to study the
human being because we need to know, you know, what
hurts us, what's good for us, poisons and foods and things,
things we should avoid, vices, things we shouldn't do. Like
I'm guessing Stoics wouldn't be smoking, but I'm guessing they'd

(30:49):
be exercising a lot, like those sorts of things like.

Speaker 3 (30:52):
Not too much in body, but not too much. I
was also going to say, oh no over doing. Maybe
maybe another way of thinking about it too is you know,
trying to figure out a way of life. And then
it's like, so ethics would require physics because the ethical
way of living in accordance to nature presupposes knowing what
nature is. Right, So you have to understand nature if
you're going to live according to it. So therefore the

(31:15):
Stokes have to give an account of physics, meaning like
the physical world, nature, how it works, how you interact
with it, and like how those things work at an
optimal level of functioning. And then ethics also requires logic
in the sense that, like their stoics are very concerned
with like emotional disturbances or like mistaken judgments I think

(31:36):
is something that comes up a lot. So those things
belong to epistemology and logic, and logic in the stoic
sense includes those things. So you need to be able
to understand how to evaluate. So, like your ability to
evaluate when something is mistaken and express it is like
a logical function on the stoic view, and that's indispensable

(31:57):
for being able to act in accordance with stoic ethics. Right,
you need to understand, you need to have an evaluate
of apparatus to be able to tell that you're not
actually living according to nature, and that's ethic or that's logic. Right,
So that's how kind of like they're interdependent.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
This made me feel some of some of Nietzsche's pain
because you know what we say or I don't know
who said it. Whitehead all the philosophy is a footnote
to Plato mm hmm. And then white Head, yeah, and
then Eric's they're struggling to say, well, it's God, but
it's not material, so it's weird. But we have like
five schools in Athens at this time. We got the

(32:35):
Academy Plato's students, we got the Lyceum aristotle students, and
then the Epicureans, the Cynics, the Parapatetics, the Stoics, and
we got the worst one. We got the We got
Plato out of here with this crazy dualism of here's
the mind of ideas, the mind behind everything that thinks

(32:57):
it's over here, and then we have matter matters, nothing
but copies, just copies of this great demiurge that's thinking
out here, the forms. This is a crazy extremist view.
This is the anti anti holistic view. And if that's
not bad enough, then Christianity gets a part of it

(33:18):
and says, oh, yeah, everything Plato talked about, that stuff's
all the mind of God. The God's gonna come burn
all this dirty matter up someday and we can all
live in the world of the forms. This is extremist.
So like of all the schools of Athens that we
could have got, we got this one. Now. From here

(33:38):
on everything we do is footnotes to this guy, which
is the most intellectualized, And I mean that not in
a good way, but intellectualized in the way of just
being completely divorced from everyday life. Why would you want
what would you want everyday life for? If everyday life
is just a copy of the good thing that no
one can see? Right this these philosophies epicureanism, stoicism, they're

(34:04):
actually like, okay, we're not as soon as we get
too far away from the questions that matter, then we're
gonna stop. So you guys said, you know, if you
if you pick apart the cosmology, the whole theory, the
whole theory bit falls apart. And I had a different
reading of that than you. Inspired by what I just said,
it seemed much more to me like they begrudgingly said, Okay,

(34:27):
we're going to do cosmology, but the only reason that
we're going to do cosmology is because we need to
understand cause and effect. And we need to under understand
cause and effect because we need to know why our
body is alive and why we can think inside of it.
So that's what's really important, because we want to know
how we think, because thinking a lot of the time
seems to make us unhappy, and we got to figure

(34:48):
that part out, so we have to understand causality. Yeah,
so I didn't think of it as like if you
take if you take their cosmology down, that the rest
of it falls apart, because it seems to me this
is incredibly focused on how do we live a good life,
how do we treat our life like art, which is
something they said, Philosophy is technie. Philosophy is making your

(35:13):
life like an expert molds clay and someone who's very
good at technie. They will not drink too much, they'll
not blow up at people, they'll not have too many emotions,
They'll not they're not going to be depressed, they're not
going to be anxious because they're going to know, like causally,
the only thing that can cause you is yourself, which

(35:35):
is you know that it sounds very self help, but
this is the version that we didn't get. We got
we got no. The real you is in the formal
world that has no connection to your body, and I.

Speaker 3 (35:47):
Guess the reason, but the reason it collapses is because
they're so attached to having an accurate account of like
you living in accordance and in harmony with nature. So
if they're wrong about what nature is, then they're wrong
about how to live, right.

Speaker 4 (36:06):
I think they're open to revising what their view of
nature is. Like that's like essentially they say happiness is
living according to nature. And because this sort of Stoic
sage thing is so difficult to live up to and
part of the problem with Stoicism and what like a

(36:28):
lot of its opponents would use against it is like, well,
you can't even produce like an example of a Stoic sage,
Like maybe what was it? Cato the Younger was like
maybe one of the examples, and like maybe they're pointing
back to Socrates, being like, yes, Socrates was like an
example of a Stoic sage. Like these people who are

(36:50):
like never wrong, they're the perfect judgment, Like this is
the chief sickness, the chief Like like if there's there's
a lot of helpful analogies here, and if you know
medicine is designed to make like cures for sicknesses of
the body, then then the philosophy as an art, the

(37:12):
art of living is also meant like a medicine for
the soul. It's it's designed to cure sicknesses of the soul,
Like we can have soul sicknesses, and what what the
soul sicknesses are. The symptoms of those things are the passions,
like unruly passions, right, But those are just the symptoms.

(37:36):
And the underlying cause of unruly passions is holding incorrect beliefs,
like you're saying, like like, if we don't understand nature correctly,
then we're going to hold on, you know, We're going
to hold incorrect beliefs, and we're going to expect things
that are actually truly not reasonable to expect, you know,

(37:59):
like one of the example, I mean, there's lots of
everyday examples, not just to do with nature, Like if
a friend says something to you, you know, and you
interpret it as like an intentional insult when it wasn't
really an intentional insult, but it makes you angry anyway,
Like you've weakly attributed a cause to that, You've weakly

(38:20):
attributed something like falsely to the world, and you've gotten angry,
and it's based on a false belief. And if you
just correct these underlying false beliefs, then the anger should
go away, the passions should be you know, taken care of, right,
So it's it's it is a therapeutic philosophy is also

(38:42):
just an art of living, but it's also has a
therapeutic quality.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
Actually, it goes a little bit further than that. It's
it's not. If your friend didn't mean to insult you
and you get mad, then yes, that's your fault. But
if your friend did mean to insult you and then
you get mad, then it's still your fault. You shouldn't
at all, because then you're you're then you're believing that
his ability to insult you actually affects you, which it

(39:08):
it need not. That's true.

Speaker 4 (39:10):
I guess. I guess if your friend didn't mean to
insult you, or if your friend does. If if your
friend who, I guess, maybe they wouldn't be your friend
if they're why would you understand why they were trying
to insult you, Like, oh, I must have done something
to make them upset, you know, or like they must
be upset for some other reason and now they're kind

(39:31):
of taking it on me, and I understand right, Like
you can see why, Like if I have correct beliefs
about the reason that my friend is trying to insult me,
or if I mistakenly believe that my friend is trying
to insult me, and it like annoys me, like all
of those. You know, I could control my passions. If

(39:52):
my friend is trying to insult me, I know they are,
and I know why, and I know that they're upset
for some other reason and they're just taking out on me,
and I don't blame them for it. Right, Like you
can see why you can sort of reason that incorrect
beliefs are always going to be the cause of like
unrestrained emotions in these situations, and that if you can

(40:14):
just sort of reason it out, then it won't bother you.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
Normal in our normal language, the word stoic means like
what unaffected, And that part's true, but there's I guess
there's a lot more to it than that. The stoic
is realizing that virtue, which is something you can only
cause in yourself, nothing else can cause. Nothing can cause

(40:38):
you to be virtuous, and nothing can cause you to
be unvirtuous. So in that sense, everything that's external is
a distraction from the one thing that can make you happy,
which is being virtuous. And in our in our in
our TikTok speak, that means living your best life. Yeah,
and it's not even different. Okay, that's why I know

(40:59):
I make fun of TikTok self help girlies, but this
is actually they're right on this one.

Speaker 3 (41:06):
Yes, I mean, I actually, I actually I actually disagree
with the Stokes about that, all right. I mean, I
don't know if we want to talk. I mean, I
think maybe we should get on on on the table,
like their account of like moral training, because I think
that's that's important for why I potentially disagree with them,

(41:28):
Like I I agree with the ideal, and I think
it's true that there are many things that cause us
discomfort that have to do with false beliefs. But I
but I actually I think maybe my disagreement is a
disagreement about what the Stokes would call physics. Uh, you know,

(41:49):
I think they're wrong. Maybe one way of putting it
is they are under emphasizing the brute fact of how
important relationality is to others, that you can't be solitary
and figure things out just with your mind. I think
I think maybe a way of putting it, I think
vulnerability is a fact, is a brute fact of the

(42:12):
human condition, and to pretend otherwise is stupid and wrong.

Speaker 4 (42:20):
Right, Yeah, because your relationships with other people should be Yeah, yeah,
they would just.

Speaker 3 (42:27):
It's just wrong. And I would actually say that the important,
the strongest, I think, the healthiest people in my opinion,
which is somewhat uh, you know, I don't want to
say vindicated by modern psychology, but I would certainly say
seems to be pointing strongly in this direction. Are the

(42:49):
kinds of people who face their vulnerabilities and notice them
and are in touch with them and kind of kind
of embrace vulnerability, embrace like things that cause them pain,
because I think the effort to pretend them away is
I think a huge cause of pain.

Speaker 2 (43:08):
Are this is certainly not pretending them away.

Speaker 3 (43:13):
But but I think, but I think the achievement is incorrect,
like the idea that you can achieve what they say
is is incorrect.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
Let's slay a few things first on the table. But
what there's there's three types of people. We never got
to that yet, but there's three types of people. All
the majority of people are slaves. And slaves they don't
they don't know why they're not in control of themselves,
so they never are. They They are slaves to their desire,

(43:41):
they are slaves to their emotion. They just they do
whatever they feel like at all times. They have no
capacity for self reflection. And then there's the there's a
Greek word for it, but working on it people, And
that's the students on the pass. The students of soicism
are the world. They're working on it. But working on
it people. He says, it doesn't matter if you're if

(44:03):
you're two inches from the surface of the water or
five hundred kilometers under the water, you're still drowning. It
doesn't matter if you're almost working on it. And then
to come out of the water is to be a sage.
This is to become a Buddha. You're you're enlightened. But
what I like about it, I like other people have
criticized the the Stoics for not having an actual sage.

(44:24):
But this is actually better, isn't it than having like
a guy, Oh, that guy actually figured everything out. But
to be a sage is to be so practiced in
the way of life that you never ever make mistakes,
which is obviously impossible. But it's like saying it's like saying,
there's a perfect guitar player, a guitar player who no
longer ever makes any mistakes, even when he or she

(44:48):
is really tired or you know, like that's impossible, but
that's what that's what the purpose of a travelers. None
of us are the sage is like an ideal, and
we're all just kind of like fellow travelers. You can
be on the path or you could be someone who's
like absolutely not interested at all, and you can just
be someone who's like short tempered and petty.

Speaker 3 (45:10):
And you did put your thumb on a on an
interesting tension though, because like for classical stoics, at least
as far as I understood it, well, you just said
the quote right that it doesn't matter if you're like
two inches from the top from like the water or
you know, fifty kilometers down in the ocean, they're the same.
You're drowning no matter what. So that does like create

(45:32):
a bit of a tension where, you know where it
seems like they don't actually value the people that are
on the path.

Speaker 2 (45:40):
Well value, value wouldn't really matter because what's at steak
is your happiness. It just means no one, no one's happy.

Speaker 4 (45:48):
Yeah, like none of them, even the people who are
making these theory Epictitis Seneca, like they recognize that they're
not sage is either that they are all on the
path and that the sage, you know, it's like that
state of enlightenment or nirvana. It's like like we've seen
this before, this like achieving this sort of nearly unattainable

(46:10):
Jesus like kind of like lifestyle right, living truly living
the philosophy to fully without any shortcoming. Like, I think
none of them are, none of them acknowledged to be
that way. There's no criticism of the people who are
on the way.

Speaker 3 (46:29):
I agree, I agree with all that. What I'm saying
is it's it's it's it's not it's not so much.
I mean, I think that's right. Like, I think there
is a difference between someone who's on the path. It's
just interesting to me that it seems like the way
that the Stoics talk about it, it suggests that there's
not that much of a difference. That they're not really
giving credit to those on the path because you're still drowning.

Speaker 2 (46:52):
Yeah, because no one's no one's happy all the time.
Why would like, why would you have an objection to that?

Speaker 3 (46:57):
I mean I think that, uh yeah, I mean I
have a few objections. I mean, one of my objections
is with the ideal of the of the sage. I
think it's a bit ridiculous. I like, if it, what's
the point of an ideal that's unachievable? I think, why
not just have an ideal of like a healthy person
who still feels things, feels their vulnerability, but is able

(47:17):
to react to it in a more healthy way, Like
I don't understand what the purpose of this thing. I
think wisdom comes from being aware of things that irk you,
things that you're that you're vulnerable about. I think like
that's the source of wisdom. So it seems like a
strangely to me, a kind of almost an even unappealing ideal,
like a kind of any human ideal, Like it's it's

(47:40):
like it's like being it's like the ideal of the
kantient perfectly rational person. It's just like, what, like that
ideal is meaningless, Like it's it's inhuman. It doesn't actually
tell us anything that important, I think, But.

Speaker 2 (47:54):
An ideal is like if you're setting out to be
good at something. They use the art examples all the
time because they're great. So it's technic, you're you're practicing
the art of living. You're are you going for mediocre.
Are you thinking I'm want to work my ass off
at at this? I want to be a I want
to work my ass off at guitar so I can
be mediocre. I want to be I want to middle

(48:15):
I want to middle out. Is that? Why is that
why you work on that?

Speaker 4 (48:18):
They clearly have better and worse distinctions as well. There's
it's not absolute, right, there's better and worse. Would you
rather have a doctor who's competent and but like not
very articulate, or would you rather have a doctor that
can like fully discourse on the theories of medicine, but
like has never actually performed in operation.

Speaker 3 (48:37):
My claim, which I think would be to question that
analogy is I think they're mistaken about what a good
human life is. A good human life is not not
feeling something.

Speaker 2 (48:49):
Wait, not not feeling is not the goal. Happiness is
the goal.

Speaker 3 (48:54):
Well in terms of in terms of like emotional like
not like for example, like to not be affected by
other people if they try to insult you. That's just
that's not being human.

Speaker 2 (49:05):
I think also, can I can we can we get
clear on what that is?

Speaker 3 (49:08):
Yeah, yeah, let's let's let's let's unpack it.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
Let's it's not it's not it's not not feeling emotions
or not expressing emotions. It's about not being overtaken by them.
And the reason that we have this, and the reason
that metaphysics is important here, is because you have to
realize that you anything that has control over your virtue

(49:32):
is illusory. And I don't know, I would like to
hear an argument about why that's not true, Like why
are you there's there's nothing that can prevent you from
being virtuous except you, Because external causation cannot make you
do anything. You you choose to let it make you
do things. You choose to blame your behavior on your circumstances.

(49:56):
But that's a wrong belief.

Speaker 4 (49:58):
No, I think it's interesting to contrast what virtue is, like,
virtue is the key to happiness. And this is the
thing about youd ammonia, right, Like for the Epicureans, it's pleasure,
you de ammonia happiness living, yeah, living life in accordance

(50:19):
with virtue, right, that's what it kind of means. So
being virtuous is the key to happiness. And this is
the same for Aristotle too. Don't forget the parapatetics, right,
The Parapatetic philosophers of Aristotle's school also hold virtue to
be the key to happiness, right, but for them it

(50:39):
requires favorable Here's what's favorable. External circumstances like things like
wealth and good health are important, whereas for the Stoics,
the difference, the major difference here is virtue is the
key to happiness, regardless of external circumstances like wealth and health. Right, Like,

(51:01):
those are goods, but we should be when it comes
to our personal happiness or indifferent towards those things. Like
if you can be if you can be virtuous and
wealthy at the same time, then go for it. But
if being wealthy means that you're going to do something
that goes against virtue, then you shouldn't do it. Same

(51:22):
with health, which sounds strange, right, if you need to
sacrifice your health for some reason to be virtuous, then yeah,
you have to sacrifice your health. Like it's not a
key part. But I think for the parapatetics they would say,
you know, like if your health is compromised, then yet
just too bad, You're not going to be happy. But like,

(51:44):
you know, to what Victor was saying, Yeah, I think
there is value in thinking about democratizing these sorts of
things because we have seen you know, when virtue ethics
gets resurrected in modern philosophy. Well, they also find that
aristotelia virtue ethics is also very exacting and demanding and

(52:07):
very very difficult to live up to, and we have
to sort of take it as an ethical model that
obviously not everybody can live up to. And it's the
same with the Stoics, like, obviously not everyone even excluding
even the figure of the sage. It would be difficult

(52:28):
to just do like half of what the Stoics say
is necessary to do, and we do have to sort
of water it down and say, well, you know, you
can achieve happiness regardless of external circumstances, but like, yeah,
it's going to be hard to do, as the Stoics say,
like if your baby dies, Yes, it's going to be

(52:48):
hard not to have an emotional reaction to that, even
though the Stoics like ideally would say like that shouldn't
interfere with your happiness, right, like your attachments to other people.

Speaker 3 (53:01):
Yeah, maybe it comes down to like what that means,
like how do you have it not effect because there
might be a more generous reading that I might be
okay with as an ideal, But then there's other there's
another version that I was getting from the text, which
is almost like the sage is almost invulnerable to like

(53:22):
to being disturbed, to being offended in a way that
sort of threatens their ability to live a good life,
and that seems just like a not helpful ideal.

Speaker 2 (53:33):
I think you're an epicurean victor, and I agree with
you because I'm I think I'm an epicurean too, which
is me. I think you don't are You need a
little bit of you need a little bit of treats
and to be happy, and that's good enough. But what
I think I'm a stoic.

Speaker 3 (53:49):
I don't know if that's like I do. I do
find there's something in it, like there's a there's a
grain of there's a there's a there's a grain of usefulness.
It's just I think my objection is more to the
sage as the ideal than in the process that they
seem interested in in trying to unpack why things bother you, right, Like,

(54:11):
I think that's like a good process, But it's just
that the like holding up the ideal as if you
can get to a point where oh wow, like my
wife can tell me anything, and it's just like never
going to bother me again because I know that, like
my virtue is secured internally. It's too anti relational, it's
too individualistic, and it's too strong of an ideal. I
think that that's I think my my problem.

Speaker 2 (54:33):
But the difference between the stoic is the Stoic says,
you can be happy with absolutely nothing. This is why
Epictetus a slave.

Speaker 3 (54:41):
Oh I see, I see, you can be.

Speaker 2 (54:43):
Happy with absolutely nothing. It's not necessarily like not reacting.
It's saying the causation, the causal chain of my being
happy is only mine unless I choose to give it
to the world, through it to the world. Then I
can be pressed about it, that I could be anxious
about it, but ultimately those are decisions to give my

(55:05):
causality over to something else. Now I don't agree with that,
but I don't know. I wonder where you're pointing, poking
the hole in the logic.

Speaker 3 (55:15):
Well, I definitely, I definitely agree with you that seems
clearly wrong. But I think there's like a grain of
truth to the stoic process of trying to figure out
where these things are coming from why you're feeling and
you know, trying to take a bit more control. You know,
you were mentioning it reminds you of Buddhism. I you know,

(55:35):
there's even aspects of it that feel existential to me
a little bit, and in the sense of, you know,
the choice right, the choice aspect, like sartry and existentialism,
it does. It does feel like it's it's putting a
certain kind of choice, individualistic choice in the driver's seat.

Speaker 4 (55:54):
That is absolutely the core of it. Moral choice is
the core of this. Right I forget, I forget the
Greek term here like, and let's move away from the
sage thing, because yes, that was a major source of criticism,

(56:14):
even from contemporary.

Speaker 3 (56:15):
I know, even from people back then. I know, But
I can I just say one more thing about that
though it's not about the sage specifically, but I think
if we're comp like I was thinking about Sartry and existentialism,
because to me, it almost feels like there're the question
about what can affect you is maybe a question about
facticity in the Sarchryan sense, meaning like, yes, you have

(56:36):
this choice, but there's a whole bunch of other things
that you don't have control over like where you were born,
the conditions. And I guess maybe there's a disagreement about
how far the facticity goes, because I suppose it feels
like for the Stoics, your emotions are almost entirely subject
to choice, whereas I think that maybe some of that

(56:56):
is just facticity, Like what you do.

Speaker 4 (57:01):
Have choice, choice is completely free, like this is like
it is almost Sartrey in here, like your moral choice,
your capacity to make moral choices is completely free. Right.
But the problem is, Okay, here's here's an epictetous quote,
Like he says, what is education. It's learning to apply

(57:22):
our natural preconceptions to particular things in a manner that
accords with nature. And furthermore, to make the distinction that
some things are up to us and some things are
not up to us. The things up to us are
moral choice and all of its functions, right, and the

(57:46):
things not up to us are the body, the parts
of the body, possessions, parents, brothers, children, fatherland, and in
a word, all of our associates. Okay, So he's saying
moral choice is the heart of this Stoic ethical system, right,

(58:06):
like as much as what feeds into it. From logic
and physics. You know, the heart of Stoic ethics is
moral choice. Moral choice is completely free, It is not
constrained by any external circumstances. The only thing that can
set it wrong is things you have control over, which is,
if you're not exercising your virtue in accordance with nature,

(58:30):
which is which is the pathway to happiness, then you're
not utilizing your moral choice correctly. Like if you're interested
in Stoicism and applying their teachings to improving your life,
which is what the point of it is. That's it's
a practical philosophy. It takes life as the material, right,

(58:55):
so you are developing your capacity to exercise more choice,
which is completely free, which is which is a lot
like Sartrean, you know, his his sort of primordial freedom
of choice. Yeah, there's there's echoes there for sure. But yeah,
yeah that that that like what is education question, and

(59:18):
that learning to apply our natural preconceptions to particular things
is then the pathway into talking about Okay, so besides
it being this practical philosophy and like these concrete and
having to produce these concrete examples of people's called sages
who have somehow like been through this and mastered the system. Okay,

(59:41):
what is the education process? There's it's those three parts.
It's it's first of all learning about logic and then
learning physics, and then learning ethics. And there's all those
sorts of analogies, right, Like it's like an egg. Logic
is the shell, is it? Like physics is the white

(01:00:02):
and no, logic is the.

Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
Ethics is the light. Logic is the shell, and the
yolk is physics.

Speaker 3 (01:00:10):
Yeah, it was weird. I found them counterintuitive a little bit.

Speaker 4 (01:00:14):
Logic is somehow this like outer guard, right, and then
you have this intermediate part, the fleshy part or the
egg white or the sort of fruit. It's kind of nicer.
I guess the fruit is ethics, and then physics. Physics
seems to be actually in the soul part, which is strange. Okay, yeah,

(01:00:38):
but that's that's your education system. You got to learn
about these three things, and they're useful to separate for
the purpose of theory, but in practice they're all kind
of intertwined.

Speaker 2 (01:00:50):
Yeah. So the effect on this for the the YouTube
channel the Stoic Essentials, which is how to how to
not be sad when your girlfriend breaks up with you
is to realize that physically in the realm of physics,
I guess it would be metaphysics. Here, your girlfriend has
no causal efficacy over your virtue, so you can choose

(01:01:16):
to acknowledge the correct belief that there is no causal
chain from her to your virtue, and then you can
be happy despite the fact that she'd done to you.

Speaker 4 (01:01:25):
I guess the point would be that like breakups and
girl stuff and relationship stuff, whatever, shouldn't be affecting you
in the way that it is.

Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Or you're letting it. I think you can let it,
but if you let it, then you're a slave.

Speaker 4 (01:01:45):
And certainly this like very vindictive, manipulative ethos of this
YouTube channel is not in accordance with stoicism at all,
because you shouldn't be motivated by revenge or hate or
anything like that. Like if two people need to go
their separate ways, then according I don't know what, according

(01:02:08):
to stoic physics and the deterministic view of the universe,
that is fate and you should just accept that as
something you don't have control over. Like if you don't
get along with your partner and you guys need to
separate or divorce or whatever, go your separate ways, like
that is fate and you should not be I mean,

(01:02:30):
that's not even the worst thing stoics would say, like
if your child dies, like stoics would try to convince
you that that was fate and you shouldn't let it
bother you too much, like that's a heartache to swallow.
But with the relationship stuff, yeah, okay, you shouldn't let
it bother you to the point where you're digging through
obscure YouTube channels and looking for psychological manipulation tactics to

(01:02:54):
get back at her. That's for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:02:57):
Totally off topic. But is that a Welsh saying it's
a hard egg to swallow or did that just.

Speaker 4 (01:03:05):
I think that just because we were talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:03:07):
Okay, okay, I was wondering if you're being influenced by
the culture the local cups over there. There's one connection,
because we've made a lot of connections to the Buddha
as the enlightened one that leaves leaves stuff behind, and
you should emulate him as best you can. But there
is a difference in that the core problem that causes

(01:03:28):
you displeasure and makes you not at peace with the
world in stoicism is actually epistemic. It's to have a
bad belief about the world, whereas in Buddha, I mean,
the outcomes are similar. But in Buddhism the problem is
that you desire, which seems to be less epistemic because

(01:03:50):
the disconnection and seeking peace and not letting things affect you,
that's downstream. But the cause of the two things is different.
Buddhism has more and with like a twentieth century psychoanalysis.
Maybe do you.

Speaker 4 (01:04:05):
Think Buddhism is like anti intellectualists, Like do they think.

Speaker 2 (01:04:10):
Anti Probably not anti intellectual, but I think the Greeks
are kind of unique in their assertion that the crown,
the chief point in the human being is the rational mind.
That seems particular, historically particular. So Buddhism doesn't necessarily have

(01:04:33):
that as the center.

Speaker 4 (01:04:34):
Yeah, because like I'm looking here at like the three topoi.
These are these are epictetises, like three things to focus
on desires and aversions, appropriate behavior, and judgment and assent
or like what we should withhold assent when we should

(01:04:56):
judge something true or false. Basically, so like those are
all kind of involve logic, physics, and ethics, but they
sort of loosely like we need to train our desires
and aversions. We need to study and try to shape

(01:05:16):
our behavior so that it's appropriate, and we need to
be free from deceptive or hasty judgment and be careful
with what we give a cent to and what we
agree upon. If you're in Epictetis's classroom, those are that's
going to be part of the syllabus, and they're all

(01:05:36):
dependent in various ways on logic and logic. There is
a formal aspect of the logic. You're going to be
learning about hypotheticals and syllogisms and all of that, But
then you're going to be learning about discourse and dialectics
and how to speak and articulate yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:05:53):
Well, I want to re emphasize the theory stuff they
create a cosmos of, but really it's supposed to be
practical wisdom, which is something we don't really associate with
Western philosophy anymore, and it's a big it's a big
shame that we do. But how do they learn? I

(01:06:13):
wanted to draw attention to this. How do you go
into the classroom to learn how to be good? And
the examples there's plenty of examples like would you rather
would you rather listen to a musician who knows a
bunch of music theory or a musician who has played
a lot of music obviously the second, and they give
the same example with a doctor. Do you want a
doctor who has read all the books or one who

(01:06:36):
has performed one hundred surgeries already? You know, So the
practical part of this, I thought this was fascinating from
like a a written culture versus an oral culture, because
they're kind of on the boundary of that. We see
Phadris from from Plato around this time where Socrates says,

(01:06:56):
I don't I don't even want writing, Orcrates tells a
parable saying we shouldn't even learn to write. We should
learn to practice virtue, because if we write, it'll be
like we think we're doing the virtue when we haven't
actually practiced it. We haven't learned the practice. So what
they would do in this school, the ancient Athenian school

(01:07:20):
of Stoicism is write down. Basically, they're writing lines. They
write the lines over and over and over again. We
don't know what the lines were, but they write it
in order to store it in their memory, so it's
never far from them, and he says you should, like
you should write out the causal principles of the universe

(01:07:40):
every morning, like before you before you even do anything
else which you know, and then after at the end
of the day. This seems like a hell of a
lot of work. But at the end of the day,
the stoic thing to do is to replay all the
events of the day in your mind, step by step
and analyze whether you acted in accordance with virtue or not,
whether you are overcome, whether you were too hate, whether

(01:08:00):
you did this, and then you can buy this fix
your habits. And this is like the purpose of stoicism
is ultimately fixing your your habits.

Speaker 3 (01:08:10):
Yeah, I mean that's I think maybe they are. They
are too making too tight of a connection between logic
and habit, like in their sense of logic that like
by writing things down, by remembering, that's going to change
your body. I think that's.

Speaker 4 (01:08:28):
You're reflecting. You're also reflecting each day. Like one of
one of the recommendations is to here it is Seneca
proposes a different strategy. Actually, Epictetis is the one who
advises writing out the key doctrines every day. Seneca on
the other hand, advises us to at the end of

(01:08:51):
each day, we should take time to call ourselves to
account and go over the events of the day and
cross examine ourselves and ask whether we have remained faithful
to the philosophical principles that we consciously hold, or whether
we have overcome any bad habits, or whether we have
resisted any unwelcome desires. And basically it's an exercise of

(01:09:17):
reflection upon ourselves. It's it's intense philosophical self reflection of
how each day went, which wouldn't be much different than say,
like direct like I remember reading about this sort of
stuff like in the Reformation and the counter Reformation stuff

(01:09:38):
like say like Ignatius Loyola and the spiritual exercises from
the counter Reformation stuff like. It's deeply reflective. It presupposes, yes,
a knowledge of the basic principles of your and doctrines,
and it involves intensive self reflection. And on top of that,

(01:10:00):
it's about yeah, overcoming bad habits and developing good habits,
like did we you know we have this bad habit
whatever it is, like smoking, I don't know, or this
habit of thought like I have a habit of reacting
in this way to this thing, and I'm trying to
break that habit, like did I do that today? Or

(01:10:23):
did I give in and do that thing?

Speaker 3 (01:10:26):
Right?

Speaker 4 (01:10:26):
So, like it's it's intensely reflective as well.

Speaker 2 (01:10:30):
I spent I spent eight hours gooning should I have
done that? Yeah? I don't know that.

Speaker 4 (01:10:37):
Maybe you're too far gone at that point, but like, yeah,
developing habits is like I think even Aristotle Hexes I
think is habit in the Nico Makian ethics, and it's
about being. I mean, it's not just a passive thing, right,
It's it's an active kind of holding yourself actively towards

(01:11:03):
certain virtues, right, And yeah, like developing that is really difficult.
I think, Yeah, there's this practical habituation element that you're
going to act these things out in your daily life
and not just be a socratic intellectualist where you're contemplating

(01:11:26):
the highest good and that's the end of it, right,
that's the good thing. Right. And even Aristotle kind of
goes this way near the name, near the if you
look near the end of the Nico Maggian ethics, Aristotle
even goes this way, like yeah, practical wisdom, Okay, practical
wisdom phronesis the Greek word for that, phronesis, like.

Speaker 2 (01:11:49):
Is good.

Speaker 4 (01:11:50):
Great, he's talking about that the whole time. But maybe
actually the intellectual lifestyle and not the active lifestyle is
like better, and you should be an intellectualist. But this,
this totally does not go that direction. It says, this is.

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
Where all of philosophy has gone. We took it. We
took it all this way, like we consider philosophy to
be what just writing, writing and reading other writing. This
philosophy it says, you don't even like you should introduce
writing very carefully, if at all.

Speaker 4 (01:12:22):
Because they instrumentalize that.

Speaker 2 (01:12:25):
Yeah, exactly, so we took we took the worst, least
helpful version of it and said, this is the only
thing it is because it the example that I thought
of when I was reading this is like we we constantly,
all of us do it, or at least Victor and
I do it. No, Heidegger's great, it doesn't matter that
he was a Nazi. This had nothing to do with
his philosophy. This kind of argument would be absurd to

(01:12:48):
the Stoics, because the Stoics, you're you're what you believe
is the things that you do if you know, if
you read every book on doing surgery, no one's going
to trust you to do your first surgery on them.
And we consider we consider writing like, oh, you teach

(01:13:09):
nine to five, you go to your university job, that's
your entire life. But no, since you wrote this super
Schiitzo speculative thesis on radical democracy, no, now you're a
radical democratic thinker. I hate this stuff. And this is
exactly what the stoics are like in three hundred PC,
saying no, no, no, we don't want to go there,

(01:13:31):
and then Aristotle down the street is going, oh no, actually,
we do want to do this. Like speculative speculative knowledge,
it's the highest form of knowledge because it's the least
likely to be affected by the vicissitudes of change and chance.
But we went the completely wrong way. And this seems
this is why this feels like Eastern philosophy because they
never they never went off that direction compared to what

(01:13:53):
we call philosophy. Yeah, we have a deep conflict here.
I think between written callulture taking over oral culture. And
I don't want to be all nostalgic and say all
the oral culture was better, But when you're so thoroughly
into written culture. Then philosophy turns into what we have
turned it into. It's like a technical skill rather than

(01:14:14):
what it looks like here, which is like therapy or
life advice or how to be happy. Yeah, well, in
a way it is.

Speaker 4 (01:14:21):
It is a technical skill, but in the old sense
of techne. Because this is going full circle back to
how did the Stoics even conceive philosophy? And we have
this quote here here. Epictetis presents Stoic philosophy as an
art techne an art concerned with transforming one's way of life,

(01:14:42):
and elsewhere in the in the in the dialogues he
wrote or his student wrote, he suggests that the best
indicator of a person's philosophy is not what they say,
but how they behave. Right, So that's what you were saying, right,
It's not it's not about contemplating the highest good, which
which I think that is another way. That's the way

(01:15:05):
philosophy has gone. I contemplating the highest good, living the
contemplative life. I mean there is, I mean there is
that tension throughout Christianity of the active life versus the
kind of withdrawn hermetic life, and like there's a lot
of that and does being active and doing charitable good

(01:15:29):
works you know, demonstrate that you're a good person or
is just you know, believing enough, right, like sola fide
the kind of Protestant movement, well the Lutherans anyway, sola
fide is belief enough. And even then like if you believe,
will good actions follow? Do you have to do good actions?

(01:15:52):
Is just believing enough? Or should you do belief and
good actions like like all that sort of stuff good works,
But here it's like, yeah, judge a person based on
how they behave what people say is not enough.

Speaker 2 (01:16:08):
And judge yourself doesn't epictet to say you might you
might be walking in here and you don't know what
your philosophy is. Well, think about what you did. Write
down everything you did in the day. That's for you,
that's your philosophy, and most of you are going to
be Epicureans. I think, he says too.

Speaker 4 (01:16:25):
Yeah, yeah, he says, yeah. He has these really like
kind of scathing I was reading some of the like
this other text I have of his, of his like
translations of his writings, and yeah, he says stuff like that.
He says, like what are you doing here? Like what's
wrong with you go to.

Speaker 2 (01:16:43):
The other school, go down the streets. Ereans are over there.

Speaker 4 (01:16:47):
Like, you come here, you're this sort of you come
here with your problems and you're you're just here because
you're not like not like feeling great or you're upset
that you're vindictive and short tempered and emotional.

Speaker 3 (01:16:59):
He's like, what are you?

Speaker 4 (01:17:01):
Are you? Are you an? Are you do you want?
Are you seeking pleasure? Go study with Epicurus outside the
city walls there he's got a school, Like you don't
belong here, right, Like are you willing to commit yourself?
And it's like, yeah, it's a it's an active and
they do. They have the separation between like the active
principle and the passive principle, And the active principle is

(01:17:25):
like the mind God, the fire, the eternal fire that
everything is constantly sort of falling back into. You have
the conflagration and recreation of the universe where everything is
sort of goes back pallenging is consumed. Yeah, and then

(01:17:46):
it's like reborn.

Speaker 2 (01:17:48):
This is this is the message then to those bitch
manisphere guys who are like you O make your girl
cry by ignoring her, You're you're you're an epicurean. You're
an epicurean.

Speaker 3 (01:18:01):
Well, I still I still feel that there's ammunition in here,
the and the I think the part of it that
I don't like, I really like most of it, to
be honest, I think there's a lot of cool stuff
in it, and but I feel like the again, I
can't really get past. You know, even if we think

(01:18:21):
about like harm, like what is harm for the stoic,
so much of it for them is the result of
like our perception of harm is a result of false
beliefs for them, right so even if something horrible happens,
like a loved one dies, of course they're not denying
that that's a bad thing, but your reaction to it,
right like, for example, to feel it as like devastating.

(01:18:45):
I think for them they do seem to think, is
you know, that's a false value judgment, right, Like you
didn't actually need to be devastated by it, you know,
you're letting it control you. And I think that that
is that attitude is like a bit too radical for me.
So it's not so much that I although I think
I probably am some kind of an epicurean, but it's

(01:19:08):
not so much that I'm concerned with pleasure, but about
the relationship to pain and insecurity and vulnerability that I
have the most issue with because I guess I almost
sense in this kind of stoic argument a deep insecurity.
And what I mean by that is this intensive, intensive

(01:19:28):
denial or like fear of feeling horrible things that the
ideal is to kind of excize that and to be like, no,
these things don't need to affect me. And that's what
I meant when I said I felt like it was inhuman,
because I think there's a lot of moral courage in
facing when something is devastating. Of course, there's a sense
in which that can go too far if someone who

(01:19:49):
like never gets over anything, that's obviously like bad. But
I think like my model of like a harmonious human
soul is U someone who can face devastation vulnerability and
acknowledge the way that it affects them but not be
defined by it. And I think that's how you learn
and this like it, but the and then trying to

(01:20:12):
idealize no, that doesn't need to affect me, like my
moral virtue is unaffected by those things. I think is
deeply inhuman, and like I said, almost feels like like
it's coming from a place of deep insecurity.

Speaker 2 (01:20:24):
The thing that you just said, though, is what Epictetus said,
what say to face it and to not let the
thing define you. That is what stoicism is.

Speaker 3 (01:20:34):
Yeah, but they also say that like that, like feeling
devastated by something is based on an incorrect belief.

Speaker 2 (01:20:42):
Like if you say, I drink every day and the
reason I drink every day is because my wife died,
that's a false belief because it's not true. You're drinking
every day because you choose to, and you're blaming it
on an external event.

Speaker 3 (01:20:54):
Yeah, but what I'm saying is it still feels like
That's what I mean by there's parts of it that
I like. I think there's like way in which there
is a kind of account of facing things but in
the ideal of not feeling it, of like being like
that doesn't need to affect me. That goes too far
from me.

Speaker 4 (01:21:11):
Oh yeah, I think I think you're right. There's like
you wouldn't if you had the correct beliefs, you wouldn't
be having the emotions in the first place. I think
maybe there's an issue with that.

Speaker 2 (01:21:24):
You know.

Speaker 4 (01:21:24):
When I was when I was reading around, I did see,
you know, the theory of the soul stuff, right, Like,
I think the earlier Stoics had a monistic kind of
theory of the soul where it's all rational, like there's
and and the irrational is almost like the Platonic conception,
where the irrational is kind of at war with the

(01:21:46):
rational parts. And I think the later Stoics didn't like
that so much, and they want to conceive the soul
as having rational and irrational parts. And there's a metaphor
where it's like reason is like a rider on a horse,
and what happens is the horse, well representing like the

(01:22:09):
irrational part, can get like upset and carry you off.
And really what you have to do is just wait
for the horse to sort of tire itself out.

Speaker 3 (01:22:18):
And get control of it.

Speaker 2 (01:22:20):
And and then.

Speaker 4 (01:22:21):
I think, like reason with the horse aligned with it
can be very powerful. But if you can never really
like break that horse and get it under your control,
then you're always going to be at cross purposes with
this other part of your soul that is irrational and
prone to flights of fancy and temper and going into

(01:22:41):
like hysterics, right, And so when your emotions get carried
off in this way. Yeah, like a horse that gets spooked, right,
you kind of just have to wait for it to
tire itself out and then you can bring it back.
But yeah, yeah, they have this sort of internal debate

(01:23:01):
within the Stoics about like, okay, we have to accept
that part of the soul. There's an actual irrational part
of the soul, not like the Platonic philosopher's thought, where
like you know, there's this eternal warfare between the rational
soul and the irrational parts.

Speaker 2 (01:23:20):
Okay, let me just say I don't agree with stoicism
because I think virtue is a semantic construct, so virtue
doesn't exist. But I don't think based on what you
said that you disagree with stoicism yet, Victor, because you
say don't let it affect you or don't have the feelings.
They don't say anything about feelings. They say things about

(01:23:42):
emotions and emotions. They don't want you to let it
into the causal chain. So when we say A, this
is why physics comes first. So if we say A
leads to B, they're not saying you can't have feelings.
They're saying, don't let your feeling be the cause of
your next action. Don't let don't let the don't let
your sadness cause what you do, because I don't think

(01:24:07):
there's anything about like the devastation. It's about like I said,
don't just because your wife died doesn't give you license
to drink all day. I mean it does, but that's
your it's your choice to drink all day, not your
wife's dying that has caused that.

Speaker 4 (01:24:22):
What do you mean between the difference between feelings and emotions.

Speaker 2 (01:24:26):
There because you can feel very sad, but then what
you do with being sad is what counts as an action.
If you lay you can lay around all day, you
can drink your feelings away, you can punch a hole
in the wall. So all of those things are effects
possible effects of feeling sad. But they're saying that whatever

(01:24:52):
whatever the effect is, that is your choice. The sadness
cannot cause it.

Speaker 4 (01:24:58):
Like, there are good emotions to feel like. It's not
it's not an.

Speaker 3 (01:25:03):
I know, I know that, I get I get all that.

Speaker 4 (01:25:05):
There's path there's eupathia, and they're called they're called they're
good emotions which are part of a fully rational life,
which is another way of saying the stoic ideal is
to live a fully rational life.

Speaker 2 (01:25:19):
Right and then and the.

Speaker 4 (01:25:20):
Full the good emotions youpathia are joy, caution, and wishing,
and those are the counterparts of the bad emotions.

Speaker 3 (01:25:30):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:25:30):
Joy is the counterpart of joy. The counterpart of pleasure
is rational elation caution. The counterpart of fear is rational
avoidance and uh. For for the sage will never feel fear,
he will still use caution and uh. And then the

(01:25:53):
counterpart of desire or lust is a rational appetency or wishing.

Speaker 2 (01:26:01):
But what you need is the rational part to decide.
You can't be cautious in every scenario because you will
never do anything, so you need that.

Speaker 4 (01:26:09):
Horse needs to be broken.

Speaker 2 (01:26:10):
I agree itasan to be the causal agent here, not cautious,
And same with joy. It's fine to feel joy, but
you can't make decisions based on joy because they won't
be rational or virtuous.

Speaker 3 (01:26:21):
I mean, I agree with that. I'm just not convinced
that this stoic sage ideal isn't one that doesn't actually
even because they becomes so habituated to their rational part
deciding on actions that their the ideal does seem to
me to prescribe. It's not clear to me that there's

(01:26:45):
as much room for emotion for like bad emotion in
the sage ideal as you seem to be suggesting.

Speaker 2 (01:26:53):
But it has nothing to do with whether the emotion exists.
It has to do with whether you based your actions decision.

Speaker 3 (01:27:03):
Yeah, so would the would the would the stoic be
okay with someone who lost their wife to maybe like
take two weeks off and just like be sad for
a while, Would that be.

Speaker 4 (01:27:10):
Like A, I'm that's a good question. I have no
idea I would think so.

Speaker 2 (01:27:17):
Maybe I don't know, like the sage wouldn't need take
time off, but anyone who's working their way up to stage,
I'm sure that would be fine.

Speaker 3 (01:27:26):
Okay, But that's what that's my point. I guess it's like,
why do we have this an ideal of something like
that that's like clearly ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (01:27:33):
Well, it's like, why do we have an example like
Christ who never did anything selfish in his life? Because
we all want to know we could do better. Yeah,
because like, no one's going to be Jimmy Hendrix.

Speaker 4 (01:27:44):
Developing those beliefs and developing habitual ways of acting upon
those beliefs involve distinguishing the good from the bad.

Speaker 3 (01:27:57):
I guess I don't think it's good. I guess I
don't think it's a good ideal, like to not be
a fect, Like I don't know that that's good.

Speaker 4 (01:28:06):
Yeah, Like, we know there are evils and there are
good things, and there are things that we should just
be like indifferent to, like neutral things, and we just
sort of have to habitually prefer the good and habitually
not be affected by the neutral things. And yeah, like

(01:28:26):
I don't really understand. I think what you're saying is, yeah,
like how does stoics sort of deal with like like
evil or well, if caught up in evil situations or
if like something really horrible happens to a Stoic, how
do they deal with it or how do they know

(01:28:47):
how to act in that situation?

Speaker 3 (01:28:50):
That's definitely a concern. But I think my I think
like maybe my broader like where this is coming from
is also the place of like intersubjective relationality place is
because I think this ideal of it's my individual choice,
like what it almost feels like other like, yeah, I

(01:29:14):
think maybe maybe it is like a claim about physics
in their sense, because I think so much of what
we are is relational it's like rooted in relationality. Uh.
And I feel like their emphasis on individual choice is
seems to me to possibly deny some basic truths that

(01:29:38):
I see about, Like the role that how affected we
are by others is just to me a brute fact.
All right.

Speaker 2 (01:29:47):
It seems to be individualistic for sure. Yeah, it's individualistic
in the way that existentialism is. But it's also just
to say, the individual is the thing that you have
the choices about, and that's it.

Speaker 4 (01:30:01):
I think it is. I see no reason why, you know,
like like Aristotle's discussion of friendship and how indispensable it
is to yeah, happiness, Like I see no trace of
that kind of thing in Stoicism.

Speaker 2 (01:30:18):
But friendship doesn't allow you to make choices for your friends.

Speaker 4 (01:30:23):
Yeah, but he presents it as indispensable, like having true
friends is, yeah, exactly is indispensable to like living the
good life and happiness and like not you know, like
non instrumental relationships with other people who are kind of
like minded. I don't think the Stoics have that sort

(01:30:44):
of thing, Like you're supposed to even like your friend,
your wife, your child if they die or something terrible happens. Yeah,
like that's an external thing.

Speaker 3 (01:30:55):
Yeah, exactly. They externalize so much, so many things about
like what the core of your life being is, and
I just think that's wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:31:04):
I think the way to argue against this would be
to say, the concept of virtue is not individual, so
you got that from somewhere else, So the very center
of your system is not inside your system.

Speaker 3 (01:31:16):
Right, that's that's a good point. Yeah, cool, But anyway,
I mean, I like it. I think it's cool stuff
to read, and I remember really liking it when I
was reading Marcus early as an undergrad. I remember really
enjoying that.

Speaker 2 (01:31:32):
Yeah, it's one of the most universal Like an emperor
and a slave at the same time are both like
the number one and two stoics or former former slave,
so former slave Epithets was freed. Anyway, that's good. Maybe
we'll continue, we'll have to discuss it behind. But if

(01:31:52):
you if you have a way to tell us your opinions,
whether you want some more stoicism, Yeah, I'd like to cover.

Speaker 3 (01:31:59):
Powers or maybe we can read the Epicureans.

Speaker 2 (01:32:02):
All right, thanks everyone, cheers, Audios.